Joan Rivers’ Belongings Are Up for Auction: Melissa Rivers Shares Fabulous Stories of Her Famous Mom’s Collection (EXCLUSIVE)
Her daughter opens up to 'Woman’s World' about celebrating her mom’s life with a touching auction
Joan Rivers was one of the most innovative women in the male-dominated world of comedy and over the course of a nearly six-decade career, the stand-up and TV personality won a devoted following thanks to her signature mix of glamour and unapologetic sass. Since her passing at age 81 in 2014, no one has been able to replicate the Fashion Police host’s often controversial capacity for telling it like it is, and it’s no exaggeration to say that red carpet coverage just hasn’t been the same without her.
Joan is currently getting a posthumous turn in the spotlight thanks to an auction featuring over 300 items from her personal and professional life. The auction, which is hosted by Julien’s and taking place online and in-person at the Peninsula Beverly Hills on October 9, includes designer clothes and accessories, art, promotional materials and much more, and is overseen by Melissa Rivers, the comedy icon’s daughter and frequent collaborator.
During a preview of the auction, Melissa spoke to Woman’s World about how the fabulous selection of items up for bidding captures her famous mom’s singular legacy.
Inside the glamorous Joan Rivers auction at the Peninsula Beverly Hills
Ever since Joan died 11 years ago, Melissa has been dedicated to keeping her spirit alive, and being closely involved with the auction is a meaningful opportunity for her. “Whenever you lose someone, you shouldn’t make your decisions of what you want to keep and what you don’t right off the bat, because it changes through the years,” she says. “At first you want to keep everything, but over time you might say, ‘Why am I keeping this?’ I felt like the things that were most important to me on a personal level were kept, and the rest of it, I’m willing to let go of.”
“I’ve been very involved in the auction since day one,” Melissa continues. “It’s been a real process of going through what we have in our archives and storage. We decided what was going to be in the auction after the California wildfires. That made us lock it down.” Melissa tragically lost her home in the fire, and says that when it comes to her mom’s possessions, “I was in the mindset of really saving what was meaningful to me, what I would want to grab and what things spoke to me, because I had lost so much. With the rest of it, you realize that it’s good to share, and especially nowadays, when everything is so grim and my mother is remembered as someone who brought joy to people, it just feels like the right time to have this auction.”
The iconic fashion finds and art in Joan Rivers’ personal collection
In organizing her wardrobe, “There was no philosophy” for Joan, Melissa says. “Every year she got rid of some stuff, but generally, all the important archival gowns were kept. A lot of them have been given back to the designers since they were one-offs. It’s a matter of making sure certain things are preserved and in the right hands. She wasn’t one of those people who was like, ‘If I haven’t worn it in however long, I’m going to get rid of it.’ It was more like, ‘Oh, look what just made its way from the back of the closet!’”
“She was very big on repurposing her clothes before it was cool,” Melissa says. Given the fact that Melissa reported from the red carpet alongside her mom, you might think that she’d want to repurpose some of her clothes for herself, but this isn’t quite the case. “I have a couple of her sweaters, but she was so tiny, and we were built so differently that whenever I tried on something of hers, the sleeves would hit above my wrists. She had those tiny bird bones, while I have normal-sized bones, like a regular human, and her feet were so much smaller than mine. It irritated me for my entire life that I couldn’t wear her shoes,” she explains with a laugh. “People would be like, ‘Wow, you got your mom’s wardrobe,’ and I’d say, ‘I can’t fit into any of it!’ but I kept some things that had personal meaning to me,” she says.
“We also had very different fashion tastes,” Melissa says. “My mom could pull anything off and whatever she wore, she owned it. I’m not sure that I loved all of her clothes, but I understood them and knew they were fabulous. If I ever tried them on, it immediately looked like I was wearing my mother’s clothes. I still sometimes try things on and think they look more like my mother. She just had such a presence in her clothes, and that was what made her a fashion icon.”
A signature sweater
One of Melissa’s favorite items up for auction is an ’80s Amen Wardy holiday sweater that’s emblazoned with “Merry Christmas” on the front and “Happy New Year” on the back. Joan wore the gaudy sweater on Hollywood Squares and the Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special, and Melissa remembers, “After that, it got into her holiday rotation, and it got to the point where I was like, ‘Mom, I never want to see that sweater again. You need to retire it,’ because it was years of her wearing it and going, ‘Look how clever this is! And it lasts forever!’”
Today, Melissa admits she’s grown to love the ultra-’80s sweater, saying, “I thought it was time to get rid of it, but then when you go back to the archives, it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, I remember that sweater. And I remember how after the fifth year, I got so sick of looking at it,’ so that’s a deeply personal item, and now I think it’s very cute and fun.”
How Joan Rivers’ paintings and needlepoint revealed her quiet side
Joan Rivers was one of the hardest-working women in show business and famously maintained a file cabinet containing over 70,000 of her original jokes written on index cards. When she wasn’t cracking up audiences during stand-up sets or comically insulting celebrity fashions at awards shows, Joan liked to unwind with crafts, and the auction features a variety of her needlepoint pillows and paintings.
“She was so artistic, and when I was a kid, she never met a holiday that she couldn’t craft something for,” says Melissa. “While she was working on scripts with her writing partners, she would sit and needlepoint, and it became very meditative. I think when she worked on needlepointing and painting, those were the few times that her mind was quiet, and I remember that she always had a needlepoint project going.”
“People don’t realize that she was very into painting. It was how she relaxed,” Melissa continues. “In her bathroom, she had a little easel and her paints all set up, and she would come home at night and paint.” “Her paintings were very personal. She came to it later in life, in the mid-’90s,” she explains. “My mom always had doodles on her pages that were so good. She would draw all the time and then somehow, at one point she decided to try painting and fell in love with it.”
The bond between Joan and Melissa Rivers: ‘We truly had a normal mother-daughter relationship’
The auction also features memorabilia from when Joan and Melissa worked together, and looking back at their collaborations, Melissa says, “Working with a parent is challenging in the best of times, but when it’s good, it’s great. We knew each other’s rhythms and how to set each other up and where we were going. There were certain times when I’d revert back to fighting with my mom but that’s also what made us so relatable. Our relationship wasn’t so different, and that’s why people liked it. The situation was different, but we truly had a normal mother-daughter relationship, and people could see themselves in it.”
Celebrity or not, going through a deceased parent’s belongings is an emotional experience, but Melissa ultimately sees the items in the auction as a source of positivity. “There’s so much variety, so it’s a wonderful representation of someone who could never be put in a box,” she says. “I hope that these items make people remember my mom, and that remembering my mom makes them smile. I don’t care what people do with these things, as long as it makes them happy.”
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