Joan Rivers

HER first thought was, did she look good? Could ashes look good? Well, try hers: they had bits of a Valentino gown in them, and enough diamonds to make a giant sparkling ring to sit on the finger she would give to anyone weeping over her, if they could find a finger.

She cut a better figure than Death anyway, because Death looked shit. To reprise her red-carpet question from “Fashion Police”, who was he wearing? Black was slimming, but this was ridiculous. And as for accessorising, that scythe was just a giant version of something her gynaecologist, Dr Schwartz, showed her once when she told him her vagina was about to fall on the floor.

Thank God that old body had gone. Never pretty enough. It contained so much plastic she’d been going to donate it to Tupperware, and so many nips, tucks, fillers, brow-lifts and chin jobs that she was sometimes afraid she’d have to eat through her ears. Good riddance to saggy boobs and varicose-veiny legs so red, white and blue that she could wave them on the Fourth of July. Goodbye to dampness and maxiDepends! Hello freedom!

But sudden panic—where the fuck was her purse? Had they burned that too? She needed it! Funerals were where she met new men. (Never mind that it was her own.) She kept a tampon in her bag to impress them, because men liked women to have periods. It showed they were up for it. If the idiots didn’t spot it, she would swing it around. “Joan,” Johnny Carson said to her once—her greatest friend and mentor until, in 1986, she left NBC’s “The Tonight Show” for Fox and got her own show that exactly clashed with his—“don’t men like you for your mind?” It was true she had a degree and read history books and liked T.S. Eliot, but as she told him then, “No man ever put his hand up a woman’s dress looking for her library card.”

Death looked as if he might not be impressed with the tampon.

Her purse also had money in it, though. Her greatest fear was not to have it. It came from her Russian-Jewish parents, an immigrant thing, that one day you might lose everything again and end up not being hired even to sell hats in Macy’s. Her mother hoped she would marry a lawyer—a doctor—then any rich schmuck who could find the doorbell—but she wanted to be a performer, so had to work like crazy to prove there was a living in it.

She would do anything for money; just ask. Have sex with a centenarian? Fine. She might even move! Constipation commercial? Bring it on—she’d got all day. Write scripts for Hitler, why not? She’d written scripts for Topo Gigio in her lean years, and he was a fucking puppet mouse. In her 20s she’d played every Mafia-owned club in Greenwich Village and Chicago, and in her 70s she was still touring the heartland and doing the TV reality shows, the variety shows, the web shows (“In Bed With Joan”). She ran her own business through the shopping channel QVC, selling gorgeous clothes and jewellery and making millions of dollars. She wrote seven books, though none did as well as Anne Frank’s, which didn’t even have a proper ending.

“Oh Joan,” her friends would say, “you have $290m, why don’t you retire? You could live OK.” What? Did “OK” get you a red-and-gold penthouse just off Central Park, with its own ballroom and butler and Pingpong, the live-in Filipina maid? Grow up! In any case she loved her work, and always had. Making people happy with a cheque at the end was the perfect life, and she would never, never stop until the voice gave out. She’d just been having her vocal cords done when fucking Death barged in.

So was this hell, then? Her second husband Edgar, who’d killed himself in 1987 when her career was briefly in the toilet, wasn’t there—but then she remembered she’d had his ashes scattered round Neiman Marcus, so she could visit him five times a week. Sharon Stone, George Michael and Bill Clinton weren’t there, and nor was Oprah’s ass, which could be seen from space, though any decent hell would surely have them in it. It would also have everyone else she had offended: the handicapped, the blind, small children, old men with their balls on the ground, ugly Mexicans, Haitians, Russians and Croatians, and uptight Jews who didn’t like a Jewish woman talking about ovens. In fact anyone she hadn’t pissed off, raise a hand now.

What line?

Her sad-ass critics said she kept crossing the line, and all the more as she got older. She’d say, What line? She’d made a career out of loudly mentioning really unmentionable things—right from the 1960s, when you couldn’t say “abortion” on TV, especially if you were female, and so she said “She had 14 appendectomies.” No one else dared even squeak about these things. But by talking about them you could take control and laugh at life, even when it truly hurt. “Lighten the fuck up!” she would shout to her audiences. “These are jokes.”

Heaven, then. Was this heaven? Perhaps not to anyone with a house in the Hamptons. But the lighting was good, with a fabulous chorus of winged gay men. And she felt alive, so alive! Bring on music! Welcome people, welcome! Welcome even that old dude in the Walmart bathrobe with Cialis in the pocket—who should also iron his face, like Mick Jagger.

God, can we talk?