Melissa Rivers Shares What Saved Her After Mom Joan Rivers' Death

The mom to 22-year-old son Cooper Endicott quipped that she dubbed her own household “Camp Run Amok” years ago, but the through line since her own childhood has been a family-first approach to parenting. Her mother and father Edgar Rosenberg, who died in 1987, provided “a clear definition of work life and home life,” Melissa said, “or as I like to call it the separation of church and state.”

And even though they were such famous personalities, she added, “who we were on TV or in the public eye was vastly different, and is still vastly different, than who we are in what I call our real lives.”

But chatting all the time about everything was their norm—if her mom was here, she said, they’d be bingeing Succession and The Great and Joan would still be “giving Amal a run for George‘s heart” and fangirling over Ryans Gosling and Reynolds—and Melissa is thankful that what turned out to be their final talk was so routine.

“It was such a mother-daughter conversation,” she recalled of the late-night phone call that, too tired to have a big discussion, she considered not picking up. And as “horrible” as the ensuing week was once Joan was hospitalized, “I am so fortunate for that moment where I can look back and say we had a completely normal—touched on work, touched on Cooper, touched on gossip—conversation. Typical, the trifecta.”

Losing and subsequently mourning her mother, however, was what anyone who’s been through a similar experience might recognize.

“Everyone expects celebrity grief to be different,” Melissa observed. “And it’s not. That’s something I learned. Maybe there’s more of an invasion of privacy, but that doesn’t make the emotions any different for anyone, ever.” 

And yet Melissa didn’t consider following in her mother’s footsteps when it came to a career in comedy.

“No one in their right mind would ever try and live up to her,” explained the author and host of Melissa Rivers’ Group Text Podcast. “Everyone’s like, ‘Don’t you want to do stand-up? You’re so funny.’ I’m like, ‘No!’ I wouldn’t want to put myself in that situation.”

Even without trying to go down that road, “there’s enough comparisons,” Melissa continued. And it bothered her mother that “I never got credit. She got all the credit and I rarely got any, and that was very frustrating to her, because we were such a team.” 

Joan was headlining the Lucille Ball Comedy Festival (the I Love Lucy star was born in Jamestown) in 2011 when the creation of the multimedia center honoring the most important contributors to the comedic arts was announced, and Melissa was there for the groundbreaking in 2015. And now, timed to her mom’s 90th, she will be delivering that treasure trove of, yes, hilarity, but also the evidence of the exacting effort that went into Joan’s six-decade career.

“It’s so exciting,” Melissa said, and the eventual exhibit is “really going to be a true salute to her life.” Multiple places inquired about her mother’s papers, she noted, but “this, for me, felt like the right home” alongside the works of George Carlin, Carl Reiner and so many more icons.