Joan Rivers Dies At 81

After being taken to a hospital in cardiac arrest last

week, Emmy-winning comedienne Joan Rivers died

today in New York. She was 81. “It is with great sadness

that I announce the death of my mother, Joan Rivers,”

Melissa Rivers said moments ago in a statement. “She

passed peacefully at 1:17 PM surrounded by family and

close friends. My son and I would like to thank the

doctors, nurses, and staff of Mount Sinai Hospital for

the amazing care they provided for my mother. Cooper

and I have found ourselves humbled by the outpouring

of love, support, and prayers we have received from

around the world. They have been heard and

appreciated. My mother’s greatest joy in life was to

make people laugh. Although that is difficult to do right

now, I know her final wish would be that we return to

laughing soon.During a minor endoscopic procedure last Thursday to
check her vocal chords at an Upper East Side clinic,
Rivers stopped breathing and was rushed to Mount
Sinai, where she was put into a medically induced
coma. Yesterday she was moved from intensive care to
a private room at the hospital.
The entertainer logged a
half-century in show
business and gave rise
to red carpet
commentary — and the
snarky criticism that
often accompanies it.
Her signature red carpet
query: “Who are you
wearing?” During the
latter part of her career,
she provided red carpet
coverage for awards
show on E! and also
was the host of Fashion
Police. Recently, she also hosted an online talk show, In
Bed With Joan , and co-stars with her daughter on the
WE tv reality show Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best.
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10 mins
Rest In Peace Joan and thank you for entertaining
us and helping us forget our problems for...
Rivers had been scheduled to perform August 29 at the
Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, NJ, which postponed
the performance Thursday, telling fans to hang on to
their tickets. According to Ticketmaster, she had seven
shows scheduled for November. On
Wednesday, Rivers promoted her new book, Diary Of A
Mad Diva, at the Time & Life Building in Manhattan.
Her employer E! reported she was “lively” and “sharp as
she’s ever been” at that event. Wednesday night, she
performed at New York’s Beechman Theater Wednesday
night, at which she joked about death, according to an
attendee interviewed by CNN.
“She said, ‘You know I’m 81 years old, and I could drop
dead at any moment — and you would be so lucky
because you will have a story to tell your friends for the
rest of your life,'” the attendee told CNN.
Born Joan Alexandra Molinksy in Brookyn, to Russian
Jewish immigrants, Beatrice and Meyer C. Molinsky, she
changed her name early on during her showbiz career
to Rivers per the suggestion of then-agent Tony Rivers.
Prior to establishing herself with a quick-witted,
fiercely pungent stand-up, Rivers worked as Rockefeller
Center tour guide, an ad agency writer-proofreader and
a fashion consultant at Bond Clothing Stores. Rivers
graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard College in 1954
with a bachelor’s in English literature and
anthropology.
The New York native originally entered show business
with the intention of pursuing a theatrical career. But
when “somebody said, ‘You can make six dollars
standing up in a club,’ … I said, ‘Here I go!’ It was
better than typing all day,” she told the Associated Press
in 2013. During the late 1950s, Rivers played a lesbian
in a short play Driftwood opposite Barbra Streisand,
before she hit her stride, which ran for six weeks. She
cut her teeth as a stand-up during the 1960s Greenwich
Village scene, and was a 1961 Second City stage alumni
in Chicago, in which she was known for her shy and
insecure characters, i.e. the dental assistant who shares
an after-hours drink out of the rinse cups with her
married boss. She also starred in the popular Second
City repertoire blackout sketch “Our Children” and
starred in the company’s show My Friend Art Is Dead
opposite late improv-guru Del Close.
But it was on NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Johnny
Carson that Rivers got her big break when she first
appeared in 1965. “God, you’re funny,” host Carson told
her. She called Carson her mentor and became his first
official fill-in host, but when she agreed to host a rival
show on Fox in 1986, Carson severed their relationship.
Her banning from the show was carried on by Carson’s
Tonight successors Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien; Rivers’
next appearance on Tonight wasn’t until this year — the
night Jimmy Fallon debuted as host. Rivers was part of a
comedy bit in which a stream of Fallon pals who bet
him $100 he’d never host the show paid off the bet — a
stream that also included Robert De Niro, Sarah Jessica
Parker, Kim Kardashian, Tina Fey, Rudy Giuliani, Lady
Gaga, Mike Tyson, Tracy Morgan, Joe Namath, and
Stephen Colbert, among others. In March she returned
for an interview on the show.
When her Fox late-night show sputtered, Rivers next
hosted a daytime talk show called The Joan Rivers Show .
It earned her a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Talk
Show Host in 1989 and ended its run in 1993. Rivers
directed one film in her career, the wacky 1978 comedy
Rabbit Test . It was the big-screen debut of Billy Crystal,
who starred as the world’s first pregnant man.
In 2009, Rivers won NBC’s The Celebrity Apprentice. A
documentary, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, premiered
in theaters in 2010. Diary Of A Mad Diva was released
this summer.
Rivers’ biting humor was not everyone’s cup of tea –
though she got points in some quarters for making jokes
at her own expense. A big fan of cosmetic surgery,
Rivers once quipped, “I’ve had so much plastic surgery,
when I die they will donate my body to Tupperware.”
Last month she stormed out of an interview with CNN‘s
Fredricka Whitfield after Whitfield called Rivers’
trademark fashion blasts “mean,” and asked Rivers if
she was concerned the fur she was wearing on the
cover of her new book might offend animal rights
activists. “You’re not the person to interview someone
who does humor,” Rivers snapped as she left. Three
days later she stopped by David Letterman‘s CBS late-
night show, where she began to poke fun at June
Allyson — America’s Sweetheart circa 1940 — and Dave
walked out in protest , leaving Joan to interview herself.
Until the end, Rivers was no stranger to controversy,
which became continual fodder for headlines. In
November, Rivers called striking WGA East scribes on
Fashion Police “schmuck writers” before issuing a
statement in support of them . Prior to her on-air feud
with CNN’s Whitfield, she officiated a gay wedding at a
book signing, and soon after called President Obama
gay and Michelle Obama a transgender in an interview
with a street reporter. Rivers claimed actress Kristen
Stewart was trying to sue her over jokes in Mad
Diva regarding the Twilight actress’ relationships with
directors. Rivers responded to Stewart in an interview
with TMZ, warning, “Be glad you’re not a Kardashian
because they’re mentioned a lot more in the book.”
Rivers made headlines again in August when she
responded to a reporter’s query at LAX about
Palestinians killed in Israel’s response to Hamas rocket
attacks. Rivers said Palestinian civilians “deserve to be
dead” and that “they are terrorists … re-elected by
stupid people who don’t own a pencil.” She later walked
her words back: “What I said and stand behind is war
is hell, and unfortunately civilians are victims of
political conflicts. We, the United States, certainly know
this as 69 years later we still feel the guilt of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. … Along with every other sane person in
this world, I am praying for peace.”
Rivers took pleasure in mocking herself, as well, as
evident when she played herself in the Season 2 episode
of FX’s Louie titled “Joan,” which caps off with Louis
C.K. making a pass at her. After he bombs onstage
during a casino performance and is fired for his jokes
about the Trump establishment, Rivers parlays the
following advice to him about show business: “I wish I
could tell you it gets better, it doesn’t get better. You get
better . You think it’s been easy? I’ve gone up, I’ve gone
down, I’ve been bankrupt, I’ve been broke, but you do
it. And you do it because … because we love it more
than anything else, that’s why you do it. You want a
real job, honey? There’s millions of things you can do.
But what we do is not a job. It’s sounds so stupid: What
we do is a calling . We make people happy. It’s a
calling .”