Joan and Melissa Rivers are back on cable, but not on the red carpets where they stood sentinel for so long.
We’ve done it,” says Melissa, who stars with her mother on “Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best” that started this week on WE.
The fun has gone out of it, says Joan Rivers. “When we were doing it, you could say to Julia Roberts, ‘I hate your dress,’ and she would laugh. You know what I mean? It was fun.”
“Now, says Melissa, “the publicists will kill you.”
“Now the publicists say, ‘Then you’re not going to get the next six people because you didn’t like Nicole’s dress six years ago.’ So it took all the fun out. And when I found myself literally pulling Nicole Kidman’s arm away from — who’s the one with the big lips? Lisa Remini?”
“Lisa Rinna,” says Melissa.
“Rinna, whatever,” she says, committing the kind of error she used to have occasionally as Joan Rivers, red carpet reporter. “I thought: what am I doing? Take your stupid lips and take this movie star. So it’s wonderful being able to say what you think when they’re not there. I like doing a coward show.”
She appears now on “Fashion Police” on E! where she comments on celebrity attire after the fact. Her job with that show is back in New York, so the whole premise of the We show, which was already shot, is kaput: She will no longer live with her daughter in Los Angeles.
And she can’t immediately return to Connecticut, to her house in New Milford. “I’ve already rented out my country house, and that’s gone for five years,” she sais.
But Joan says she prefers the East Coast anyway. “I hate it. I’m a New Yorker. I walk everywhere. I just I love theater. I’m in the theater every single night in New York. If I’m free, I just go to the theater.”
On the West Coast, everything’s all spread out. “One appointment a day and you’re exhausted. And I also don’t like that everybody’s gorgeous.”
She’s done her part to be part of the pretty world, through her famous regimen of plastic surgery.
“I knew that I was doing a lot of plastic surgery, because Melissa, one time, called me when Cooper was four years old and they had ‘Return of the Mummy’ on, and he ran to the TV and went, ‘Grandma, Grandma.’”
BuBut plastic surgery is part of show business reality, she says.
“If you had a dollar for every stitch in the face of someone you’ve interviewed, you wouldn’t be sitting here,” she told reporters this month at press tour. “It’s part of our business.”
“Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best” runs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on WE.