Interview: Melissa Rivers Talks JOAN

No subject was off limits to the legendary comedian Joan Rivers, who unapologetically skewered celebrities and tackled taboo subjects with abandon, all in the service of making her audience laugh.

The Brooklyn-born stand-up comic, actress, writer, producer, and television host, who died on September 4, 2014, from complications following throat surgery, was often hardest on herself, though, with lines like, “I never thought I was good-looking, even when I was a little girl. My parents hated me. We lost our dog and they put my picture on the milk carton. It didn’t get easier for me as time went on, either. When I had my daughter, I had to come home from the maternity ward on the bus.”

The “daughter” mentioned in that joke is the performer’s only child, Melissa Rivers, from Joan’s marriage to the late film and television producer Edgar Rosenberg. The younger Rivers was often at her mother’s side – as a producer and sometime co-host of the long-running “Fashion Police,” co-star of the reality series “Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best,” and co-creator and co-producer of the internet talk show “In Bed with Joan.” The pair played themselves in the 1994 TV-movie “Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story,” which dealt with the aftermath of Rosenberg’s 1987 suicide.

In addition to television projects, Melissa Rivers has published three books about her mother and is now serving as executive producer of “Joan,” a new play that premiered last fall at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, in a production that went on to play Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield last month. A new mounting of the play is being presented at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis through September 20.

“At my core, I’m a producer and a storyteller, and ‘Joan’ started as this wild, experiential idea pre-COVID, before the world shut down,” explained Rivers by telephone from Southern California recently. “As Mills Entertainment and I dug in, it morphed into something else when we realized that there had to be more of a storytelling element.

“So, we brought in Daniel Goldstein to craft it into a play,” says Rivers. “We wanted to tell my mother’s story in a way that would be important to the outside world. The more we built it out, the more it naturally took shape as a full-fledged play. Danny wrote an incredible script that really captures my mother’s essence – her grit, her brilliance, and her ability to say what no one else would. The result is something that not only honors her legacy but gives audiences permission to laugh out loud at the things we’re not ‘supposed’ to say anymore. She was honestly one of the rare comedians who could pull that off. And obviously, she still is.”

The elder Rivers was best known as a trailblazing female comedian, and the first woman to host a late night talk show on a major network with Fox-TV’s short-lived “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers,” but she also had considerable additional success – as a Tony nominee for “Sally Marr…and Her Escorts,” a Grammy Award winner for Best Spoken Album for “Diary of a Mad Diva,” and a Daytime Emmy Award winner for Best Talk Show host for “The Joan Rivers Show.”  A savvy businesswoman, Rivers’ jewelry and fashion line continues to this day to be a fixture on QVC.

“With ‘Joan,’ we have to explain that my mother’s public persona was not the same as Joan Rivers at home, as wife and mother,” says Rivers. “When you see my parents together in this piece, you see that they were partners in life and in business. My father managed everything, which allowed my mother to just do her job without having to worry about anything else. When he died, she said, ‘I don’t even know where the car keys are.’”

Rosenberg’s passing left his wife and daughter to mourn him in their own, different ways, according to Rivers. “We were completely at odds over my father’s death,” she recalls. “The grief was profound, especially because it involved the unanswerable questions of suicide. My mother came to peace with it on many, many levels, but I don’t think she ever fully overcame the anger she felt at him for leaving us.”

Rosenberg’s daughter serves as co-chair of the Board of Directors of the Southern California-based Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services, the nation’s first and largest suicide prevention center, which served more than 232,000 individuals in 2024. The loss of her father informs her commitments to the organization. “Personal experience is a prerequisite to do this work,” she says.

Currently the host of "The Melissa Rivers' Group Text Podcast," Rivers’ relationship with both her parents is central to “Joan,” and she says she has found a way to immerse herself in the project and deal with the feelings and memories it conjures up for her.

“I go into full producer mode when it comes time to focus on the play. If I’m at a rehearsal or a performance, I sit in the back on an aisle with my notepad and light-up producer pen so I’m not a distraction and can step out of the house if I feel the need. And when I give notes, I write ‘JR’ or ‘MR’ so I can put us in the third person.

“I make time to give personal notes to actors playing my mother, my father, and me. When it comes to the actress playing my mother, I like to help her get the rhythms of the way my mother spoke,” says Rivers. “For example, there were at least two ways she would say ‘Can we talk?’ One was declarative, and one was a question. I’m not sure she even realized she was doing that, but it’s choosing the right rhythm that helps the joke land. I know the jokes so well that I know exactly how they should sound.”

Rivers – who has a 24-year-old son, Cooper Endicott, from her first marriage to horseman John Endicott – lost her Pacific Palisades home in the January wildfires. Just two months later, on March 15, 2025, she wed attorney Steve Mitchel in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She says she has some idea what her late mother might say about “Joan,” especially about who she would want to see in the title role.

“She’d probably want a tall blonde patrician WASP, maybe Cate Blanchett, and definitely someone with a fast metabolism so she never had to diet, which was one of my mother’s dreams,” says the executive producer with a laugh, before mentioning where she hopes future productions might take place.

“I’d like to see the play done in London’s West End. My mother had so many friends there – a real social circle. I’d love to bring this show to them,” says the proud daughter.