Everything to laugh with and cry about is in the soon-due book “Joan Rivers Confidential.” Subtitle: “The unseen scrapbooks, joke cards, personal files, and photos of a very funny woman who kept everything.”
Co-authors are daughter Melissa Rivers and Joan’s PR buddy Scott Currie. They report: “Childhood insecurities” begat 564 “Parents hated me” jokes.
Like: “I was born ugly. After the doctor slapped me, then nurses took a shot” . . . “My first birthday present was luggage” . . . “Bath toys? They gave me a toaster and a radio” . . . “My childhood memory was them loosening the wheels on my stroller” . . . “When I wet the bed, my mother bought me an electric blanket” . . . “They’d take me to the subway and throw candy bars on the tracks.”
Joan Molinsky Rosenberg threw out nothing. Kept is a 1938 Brooklyn Ethical Culture School teacher report stating her “keen desire to succeed. She enjoys recognition.” Kept is a nursery school play that formed her thinking that “fat or thin, rich or poor, a theatrical career makes you a fairy princess.”
Age 8, she stole a “Your Career in Show Business” library book. She memorized it and thus began her “tunnel vision.”
In the intro, Melissa “swimming in boxes and boxes” of Joan’s stuff, ponders the task of examining 55 boxes plus more in un-air-conditioned storage plus a separate Bubble Wrapped sealed cache labeled “ ‘Tonight Show’ 1960s to 1986.”
Says PR guy Scott: “After starting to work on this last August, I went down a whole dress size.”
We who spoke at her funeral — Deborah Norville, Howard Stern, me — plus a chorus line who knew and loved Joan enormously — cohost the launch party.
Owes his ratings to Perez
A word about CBS’s late-night big mouth S-for-Smug Colbert. On his behind, sinking in ratings, low-level nowhere until he began smacking President Trump. Easy to leak body fluid on a VIP. Smart-ass nasty is the grown version of a high-school bully. Teenagers then hung around laughing. Grown-ups now hang around laughing. He’s doing small-time stand-up sitting down. It’s old-school old-hat old-time Don Rickles stuff. Call someone a hockey puck takes no talent — just comedy writers.
Can anyone imagine any other country allowing this?
Please pay attention
Gabourey Sidibe, approached to hawk diet stuff: “Please! To lose weight just for money? No!” . . .
A Cuba Gooding burp: “People shouldn’t marry until they’re 40. Younger, they’re brain dead about what it takes to be a parent” . . .
West 57th’s Galerie St. Etienne has recent acquisitions of Gustav Klimt, Grandma Moses and Egon Schiele. Pay attention. It’s through Oct. 13 . . .
Jill Kargman of Bravo’s “Odd Mom Out” on how she does it with a husband, children and a TV show: “He and I go out only two nights a week. No matter what, that’s our limit. We’re home with the kids the other five nights.”
Odds & ends
Mike Lupica hit the Hamptons with a kiddie book. Harvey Weinstein, who has a kiddie, bought four . . .
Tiger Woods was once Nike’s big moneymaker. Still loyal, the Tiger Woods Conference Center in Beaverton, Ore., holds its stockholders meeting there Sept. 21 . . .
Steve Martin’s new comic play, “Meteor Shower,” premiered in San Diego then New Haven, and starts previews with Amy Schumer Nov. 1, the Booth Theater. It’s a couple hosting another couple and result?
A free-for-all.
Bus passenger to another: “Medical stuff is so expensive. Doctors should use cheaper equipment. Like an X-ray machine that takes four poses for a buck.”
Only in New York, kids, only in New York.