Joan Rivers in Critical Condition- Not Conscious

[Guest zipperzone]

I was always amazed at the number of people she managed to connect with.

For example: For years she made fun of the British royal family, Princess Anne (who she compared to a horse) and the Queen.

But when Charles married Camilla (who she had also made ugly jokes about), she was invited to their wedding.

Go figure..... how did she make that connection?

I like her and wish her well but let's face it, the prognosis is not good.

[Theolover]

This is a wonderful thread and reading all this has brought back many memories. I hope she will come out of this and come back to us as she truly is one of a kind...

[Guest Cranky]

Just announced...Joan Rivers has died.

http://www.tmz.com/2014/09/04/joan-rivers-dead-dies-throat-surgery/?flv=1

RIP Joan.

[Lucky]

That'll make me cranky for days. What a loss.

[AdamSmith]

Sad. RIP.

[RA1]

Of course, I do not know, but, I have to think she preferred to go rather than be uncomfortable or a burden. Just my take.

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

Tributes from other performers:

http://m.tmz.com/index.html#Article/2014/09/04/joan-rivers-death-hollywood-reacts/

[AdamSmith]

Highlight clips from across her career:

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/sep/04/joan-rivers-best-of-career-in-comedy

[Guest EXPAT]

Loved her humor. . .

[AdamSmith]

Another appreciation:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/comedy/comedy-news/11076323/Joan-Rivers-the-world-will-be-a-duller-place-without-her.html

[AdamSmith]

On Nancy Reagan's hairdo: "Bulletproof. If they ever combed it, they'd find Jimmy Hoffa."

On Charlton Heston: "He told us, I got Alzheimers. Surprise! He's been wearing his wig sideways for 19 years."

On Donatella Versace: "That skin! She looks like something you'd hang off your door in Africa."

On Sandra Bullock's Bottega Veneta gown at the Golden Globes: "It looked like Prince's old prom dress." (And Tina Fey's Zac Posen: "A decorative toilet seat cover.")

On Queen Elizabeth II: "Gowns by Helen Keller. Nice looking. Not at all like her stamp. Wears her watch over the glove, though -- tacky."

On herself, desperate for a man: "My parents had a sign, 'Last girl before thruway.' I'd get an obscene phone call. I'd say, 'Hold on a minute, let me get a cigarette.'"

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/09/05/arts/television/joan-rivers-dies.html?_r=0

[Guest EXPAT]

[BigK]

RIP Joan. Adam Smith...thanks for the highlight clips. She was a very young 81 and it is too soon to have lost her.

[Guest EXPAT]

[Guest EXPAT]

Her first Fox late night broadcast with Cher, PeeWee Herman and Elton John

[Guest EXPAT]

Part 2

[Guest EXPAT]

Joan Rivers with Bette Davis. . .

[AdamSmith]

OK, enough sentimental slop. Joan wouldn't have it.

[AdamSmith]

"Does this tampon make me look fat?"

[Lucky]

I sure will miss her. Thanks for posting those clips, guys.

[Guest lurkerspeaks]

Heaven is a little bit more funny, while the world is a little less so.... First Robin and now Joan... May they both rest in peace

[Guest hitoallusa]

Rest in peace..

[Guest callipygian]

I knew I was an unwanted baby when I saw that my bath toys were a toaster and a radio.

Don't tell your kids you had an easy birth or they won't respect you. For years I used to wake up my daughter and say, 'Melissa you ripped me to shreds. Now go back to sleep.

I told my mother-in-law that my house was her house, and she said, 'Get the hell off my property.'

I was smart enough to go through any door that opened.

Boy George is all England needs - another queen who can't dress.

I've never done Jay Leno, but I'm sort of glad about that. He wouldn't know what to do with someone funny.

The people voting for the Oscars are so old. I haven't seen one Academy Award voter with a tampon in her purse.

I enjoy life when things are happening. I don't care if it's good things or bad things. That means you're alive. Things are happening.

-Joan Rivers

[MsGuy]

Appropriate that we have a thread for her.

Joan loved the Gays.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2014/09/04/why-the-gays-loved-joan-rivers-hint-she-loved-us-back/

[AdamSmith]

Joan Rivers: My loyal, mad, generous, galactic friend

Joan Rivers, who has died at the age of 81, made the world laugh for six decades. Kit Hesketh-Harvey, due to perform with the comedienne at the Royal Albert Hall next month, isn't ready to say goodbye

By Kit Hesketh-Harvey

1:00PM BST 05 Sep 2014

telegraph.co.uk

Poor old girl. We honestly thought she’d pull through. She’d been fighting battles all her life, and won most of them. Now she’s lost the battle for hers. For more than a week, her exhausted daughter Melissa and her loyal PA Jocelyn Pickett had maintained a quiet courage and steadfast dignity, refusing to articulate the unthinkable.

The tour’s off. It was due to start next month: a dozen vast theatres, all the major cities of the UK, culminating, as usual, at the Royal Albert Hall. It had sold out quicker than you can say Kate Bush. It was to have been the sixth I’ve done with Joan Rivers, here and internationally, in the 15 years I’ve known her. She would introduce us as 'The Best Opening Act In Their Price Range’. Our first number? 'Good Heavens, I’d Assumed That She Was Dead...’ ("The woman must be in her upper 80s/The only Rivers older are the Nile and the Euphrates"). They were going to call this one 'Before They Close The Lid’, with a strap-line: 'Seriously, this could be it’.

She’s jumped the gun. This last week, while she lay unconscious on the life-support system, ABC and CNN were giving twice-daily bulletins. The internet was ablaze. I was praying. Hell, even Sharon Osborne was praying. Things went wrong when an operation to her vocal cords went awry. (And that brought to mind one of her funniest routines: answering the phone to a growling basso voice saying “Hello, Joan”. “Hi, Julie? Julie Andrews?” “How could you tell it was me?”) Not so funny now.

She’d joked with us about the "routine surgical procedure", mock-confessing that it was actually yet another pre-tour face-lift. For all her savaging of celebrity, she turned her most merciless barbs upon herself.

I did my first gig of hundreds with her at the Haymarket Theatre, London. It was in 2001, a few weeks after 9/11. I watched astounded from the wings as a ranting grandmother, half a century older than the smuggest "alternative" comedian, reduced the house to puddles with volley after volley of furious, jugular wit. Seventy-five minutes, non-stop. And then it did stop. She became quiet.

"No, it’s good that we can laugh," she murmured. "After what America has just been through."

The audience froze, obediently. She carried on. "I was there in New York that day. The day the Twin Towers came down. Three thousand people died." The silence was absolute. "That’s three thousand widows." A shake of her head. Angels passed.

"Each of whom got three million dollars..."

You could hear the knuckles whitening. Christ, I thought, she’s not going to go there, surely?

"And do you know, maybe two, maybe three of those widows weren’t so very unhappy?"

^{Rivers in 1966, and at the height of her fame in 2004 (Images by Getty/WireImage/REX)}

Like a bomb it came: the biggest laugh of the evening, the biggest laugh I’ve ever heard. As she came offstage I passed her a towel. "Bloody hell, Joan, that was brave. No other comedian would dare go there."

Dripping with sweat, shaking with excitement and rage, she held my face. "But we have to, don’t you see? You do see that? I live in Manhattan, I’m Jewish, I’m a woman against all these stupid men. I’ve got to do it. Because unless somebody does, America will go mad. Unless we laugh, they’ve won!"

News raced around the world that Rivers was "doing 9/11 jokes". For a couple of years, work for her in her home country proved harder to come by. She was quite right: America did go mad. The same thing happened again recently, on this side of the Atlantic. Her remarks on Gaza, taken out of their blackly comedic context, threatened the tour. Demonstrations, we were warned, had been planned outside every theatre we were booked to play. A notably sententious Newcastle City Council threatened to pull the venue.

I was working on a new opener: 'She’s Old And She’s Confused’. But Joan knows what governments, terrorised by posturing baboons, have forgotten: that against fear, ridicule is the most powerful weapon we have.

Touring with Rivers was like travelling with Graham Greene’s ever more demented Aunt. Just half a dozen of us, in a bus built for 40, weeping with hilarity as we zig-zagged across the counties. Joan, swathed in glamour, trolley-dollied, or re-dubbed the ever-more-convoluted plotlines of Downton Abbey which played permanently on the video.

Her energy was galactic. Every day had to have its memorable treat. In Melbourne it meant getting up at 4am to go and look at penguins on St Philip’s Island. She loved penguins, but even the penguins were asleep. Stonehenge was opened up especially for her. ("Nice," she remarked to the stones, "having something of my own generation to talk to.") In Manhattan, when we did our own modest season at Michael Feinstein’s cabaret club, she opened for us.

^{Joan Rivers performing on stage in one of her sold-out shows}

To her inner circle she was kind to a fault, and loyal as a limpet. She was after all a Jewish Mom. She picked up the tab for every meal. One didn’t dare admire an object in a shop window: if one did, it would be delivered to one’s room.

We were put into the same hotels: Cliveden, the Balmoral, the Ritz, for which she, not the producer, privately paid. For this upcoming tour, the booking at one such had been thrown into doubt after its unexpected occupation by the exiled Thai royal family. Joan was planning, she told me, to growl excerpts from The King And I beneath her usurped bedroom window.

Her own enormous apartment off Park Avenue was actually a ballroom nicked by JP Morgan from a French chateau, furnished in flawless Louis Quinze and Aubusson, and festooned with photographs of the Prince of Wales. (The admiration was mutual.)

Yet she never forgot her tough early days, the dips in her own career which followed her husband’s suicide and her accountant’s embezzlement - the source of some of her fiercest humour. She retained a passion for free food. In the VIP lounge at Kuala Lumpur airport, our heads cracked together as we simultaneously lunged for the complimentary olives. Onto the plane we staggered, racked with laughter and holding bloodied handkerchiefs to our heads.

In Southend, in a futile effort to repay her generosity, we treated her to a Local Experience: fish and chips and a trip to Poundland. She adored Poundland and the Poundlanders adored her. She was never aloof, never remote from her public. Face to face with those who intercepted her getting into limousines, or with tear-stained nutcases at stage doors, she was attentive, compassionate, and considerably more patient with the selfies than Our Own Dear Queen. "Never forget," she rasped, "who is paying for all this."

On Wednesdays, when in Manhattan, she’d go to a scruffy comedy club on 23rd Street and do an hour. The door money went to charity. "Why, Joan?" I asked her. "You’re a prime-time TV star, you’re a multi-millionairess from your jewellery empire, you’re in the Hollywood Hall of Fame, you’re adored the planet over. You’re 81. Why don’t you just have a night off?" "Ah, but Kit, you know and I know, that in that hour’s stand-up, one new joke will come to you unprompted. And that’s the joke I take to Vegas. And if I don’t, it dies. And if it dies, then I die."

^{Rivers on the Graham Norton Show on BBC 1 (Image by Ian West/PA Wire)}

For all her foul-mouthed tirades, she was very much the gentlewoman offstage. She liked Country Life, dogs, old pewter. Her deep Anglophilia was inculcated by her husband, a Rugby College alumnus. Maybe that’s why she favoured us, as (her words) her Paid Escorts.

She sought out antique shops everywhere we went: even in Canberra, where, let’s face it, antiques are scarce. She loved a stately home, particularly if it was not generally open to the public.

James McConnel, my cabaret partner, is well-connected. He could telephone battalions of grandees in decaying piles. On our last tour, Joan was lapping him up, and I was getting furious. Then (Peterborough to Southampton it was) I had a brainwave. I knew the chatelaine of Highclere Castle, the equally energetic Lady Carnarvon, from charity gigs. “Fi. Big favour. Lunch, for Joan Rivers. And not just lunch. The Full Downton. State dining-room. Footmen behind each chair. Carson and Mrs Patmore a-bobbing."

The only problem was that there was a local ladies’ fundraising party going around the house at the same time. “Don’t worry,” growled Joan. “I’ll lie low. I’ll remain incognito”. Incognito? Joan had perhaps the most distinctive face in show-business. We managed to keep the two parties apart until finally they colliided at the door to the Tutenkhamen exhibition in Highclere’s cellars. There was no escape.

“Look out ladies!” I yelled in mock horror. “One of the mummies has broken loose!” There were the howls of delighted recognition and disbelief to which we had become used. Joan was adorable to them, and the charity raised a great deal more than it would otherwise have done.

^{Rivers and Kit Hesketh-Harvey at Highclere (Image by Kit Hesketh-Harvey)}

Always, always, there was laughter. Joan, seated after-show between Baz Luhrmann and Mick Jagger above Bondi, setting the table a-roar, as she nibbled her usual broccoli and Altoids. Joan, greeting a stadium full of young people howling for her as she judged a Dog Fancy Dress Competition. (The Boston Terrorist won). Joan, on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall as she was given a 10 minute standing ovation. "Old Woman Rivers/That Old Woman Rivers/She just keeps rolling along...."

She never said goodbye at the end of a tour: she couldn’t bear it. No emotion dared she display, because that warm-hearted lady felt it too much. Just a mock mwah-mwah, and then with a snap of her Manolo Blahniks, off to another airport gate, another gig.

I don’t want to say goodbye either. More than ever the world needs somebody to explode the towering vanities of Putin, of fundamentalists, and of the Kardashians.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/comedy/comedy-news/11077240/Joan-Rivers-My-loyal-mad-generous-galactic-friend.html