Diary of a Mad Diva (3 page)

Back to the inauguration. I watched it at home and the television coverage sucked. First they’d show President Obama in front of the Capitol making a speech after taking the oath of office. And then during his speech they kept cutting to smiling black people in the audience. Then they’d go back to Obama for a minute and then cut back to three or four other smiling black people. There were over 900,000 people on the Mall watching the inauguration; what are the odds they were
all
smiling black people? If I want to see millions of smiling black people, I’ll set up a camera in the hallway outside Kim Kardashian’s bedroom.

I resent that the networks think we’re so shallow, that because the president is black they have to keep doing cutaways only to smiling black people in the audience. If Chris Christie ever becomes president, will they only cut to Kathy Bates chewing and burping?

I wish Obama would have livened the speech up a bit; given the crowd a wink, a smile, a bad-boy hip thrust. His biggest offense was that the speech was boring. How great would it have been if he said, “Good news, gang! My daughter Sasha’s expecting! She’s gonna be eating government cheese for two! And even better, Hillary’s the baby daddy!”

JANUARY 23

Dear Diary:

Just heard how my cleaning lady, Chiquita, enjoyed the inauguration. Apparently everybody in the country was invited to it except me. But I’m not upset. In my time, I’ve slept with many a president. There was Teddy Roosevelt, who was some little roughrider. I had a major, major affair with FDR, who, by the way, had a coupla fetishes. He used to say, “C’mon, Joan, you be a hot nurse and I’ll play a little cripple boy who needs a sponge bath.” And I don’t want to rehash this bit of history here, but it’s common knowledge that Abe Lincoln and I were an item. And FYI, A.L. would’ve been alive today if he had just listened to me. I begged that little fairy boy (everyone knows he was gay. C’mon—shawl, stovepipe hat, a darkened mole. Obvious!) not to go to the theater. I said, “Stay home in bed with me. We’ll decoupage and watch Lifetime TV movies.” And he said, “Nope! I want to go to the theater!
Les Miz
is playing, and Fantine, before they pull out her teeth, is quite the looker in a clever little A-line and matching open-toed shoes.” The rest is history.

JANUARY 24

Dear Diary:

I had dinner tonight with my friend Cindy Adams, and it was great. Since Cindy’s a famous gossip columnist, there’s never a check because the chefs want to be on her good side. So I get the latest dirt
and
a free meal. We’re not lesbians, but if I could mooch steak and lobster off of Cindy every night, I’d learn to build bookcases, play golf and make her my gal pal. What I like about Cindy is that in her column she tells the truth. If I had a column, I’d lie or do a lot of “blind items” so I couldn’t get sued: things like, “Which five-foot-seven Scientologist was seen standing on a box trying on a muumuu in Forgotten Woman?” Or, “Which fifty-year-old star who used to be married to Ashton K. was seen at a playground asking little boys if their testicles had dropped yet?” Or, “Which blond British singer stopped rolling in the deep long enough to break into a Dunkin’ Donuts in desperate need of a fix? And then had to spend the night in the clink because even though she was allowed one phone call, her mouth was too full to be understood?”

JANUARY 25

Dear Diary:

Flew from L.A. to New York last night and had a terrible headache until Vonda, my favorite flight attendant, gave me some good dirt. Anne Hathaway is a regular on Vonda’s flight, and Vonda said that Anne eats
everything
on board and then spends the rest of the flight in the bathroom purging and vomiting and singing, not that I could tell the difference. Vonda said Anne’s vomiting really upset Natalie Portman, who was in 2F. “This is terrible, terrible,” she kept saying. “That hag is hogging the bathroom. Now
I’m
going to have to puke in my purse!”

JANUARY 26

Dear Diary:

Still thinking about Anne Hathaway. I don’t understand how she won an Oscar for
Les Miz
; she was only in the movie for five minutes. It was a great performance, but I say again, it was only five minutes. If they’re going to give an Oscar for a great five-minute performance then they should award it posthumously to Jackie Kennedy. She wowed me in the Zapruder film. Boy oh boy, that bitch knew how to steal a scene. Forget that Anne Hathaway acted and sang, Jackie did it with no dialogue at all! JFK’s flying gray matter was incidental. The eye never left Jackie in her pink suit crawling out of that convertible.

JANUARY 27

Dear Diary:

Q: What’s sweaty, lonely and weighs ten thousand pounds?

A: The front row of a Donny Osmond concert.

I went to a Donny Osmond concert last night. Got in free, which means I had to stand up in the audience and wave and hear their happy whispers about me, like, “She looks older,” “Check out the hump,” “Why does that Jew comic have a better seat than me?” etc., etc. Anyhow, he was fantastic! I had a great time, and not just because he put on such a wonderful show, but because in my entire life I’ve never felt prettier. I felt like Marilyn on
The Munsters
. The only negative was I didn’t know whether to offer the woman sitting next to me breath mints or peanuts. I fully expected Jack Hanna to walk in, clap his hands and suddenly have the entire mezzanine start grooming themselves and hurling feces. (Donny, who is no chicken himself, did the show without an intermission; maybe he figured if he took a break they’d never come back from the snack bar.) But to be perfectly honest, there
is
something special about seeing 2,200 wildly unattractive, morbidly obese older women singing and wetting their diapers to “Puppy Love.”

This doesn’t just happen at Donny Osmond concerts. Try going to a Joni Mitchell concert these days: Fistfights no longer break out with those old dykes; they barely have the energy to push and shove when Joni sings songs from
Blue
, which these days refers to their legs. The fans are just getting older, and this includes my audiences too, some of whom think the Carson show is still on (and some are referring to Kit). Instead of hearing “Bravo,” I hear “What did she say?” followed by “I don’t get it” and “I feel damp, Lenny, let’s go.”

JANUARY 28

Dear Diary:

I was thinking about the Donny Osmond show again. Nobody in the audience was dressed up. I understand that Spandex can only do so much, but make an effort when you’re at a show. Just because you’re watching
War Horse
doesn’t mean you should smell like one. The only people who can get away with not dressing up for a concert are Andrea Bocelli fans. But if, God forbid, his sight comes back while he’s onstage, he might take one look and pull an Oedipus.

Speaking of dressing up, I spent tonight watching a football game with Cooper. The camera swung around to the stands and showed a whole group of grown businessmen wearing uniforms with players’ names on them. Staring directly into the camera was a slovenly, bald, three-hundred-pound proctologist from Newark, New Jersey, wearing a Tom Brady jersey. I wanted to shout at the screen, “Are you Tom Brady? Because if you are you’ve really let yourself go.” Why do men do this? Do they consider it a form of homage? If so, shouldn’t Tom Brady go to his proctologist’s office wearing a plastic glove covered in Vaseline?

JANUARY 29

Dear Diary:

It’s the middle of Award Season in Hollywood, which is as important to actors as Ramadan is to Muslims. In fact, if a Dutch cartoonist ever drew a cartoon mocking the Oscar ceremony, I guarantee you there would be a violent jihad in front of Spago. And it won’t even be pretty to look at because no one is allowed to dress up anymore during Award Season. The networks have new decency guidelines which insist that no more breasts, buttocks or genitalia show. Luckily, because of celebrities like Pharrell and his stupid hat, we’ll still be able to see assholes.

JANUARY 30

Dear Diary:

Nowadays there are so many award shows: the Golden Globes, the Grammys, the SAGs, the Oscars . . . there are more awards to honor actors than there are stretch marks on Ricky Martin’s mouth. And I don’t watch to see who wins. As a matter of fact, I don’t give a shit who wins; I’m much more interested in who
loses
. I love to watch how the losers mask their reactions when their name is not announced. I can’t describe the feelings of joy I get watching narcissistic actors pretending to be happy for someone else. I tingle all over; I imagine this must be what a person in desperate need of an organ transplant feels when they hear the good news of a fatal, twelve-car pileup not three blocks from their hospice bed.

The Red Carpet is a special place to me; it’s where I spent my formative wonder years—thirty-five to sixty-seven. It’s magical; where else can an everyday, regular, simple hausfrau like me meet rich, famous superstars fresh out of rehab and grill them about their sobriety coach, their life coach and their meditation coach, or ask them if they have any idea when their tremors, teeth grinding and night sweats will stop? Where else can A-list actresses show off the $3 million necklaces they’ve borrowed or the four thousand African children they’ve bought and will love until they reach puberty and the problems start? And where else, other than on Bravo, can no-talent has-beens parade around, twirling and posing as though anyone in the audience knows or gives a shit who they are?

Working on red carpets is not new to me. My daughter Melissa and I have been on more of them than Aladdin, but what I like about them is they give me the chance to be a part of the excitement without actually having to watch the tedious shows themselves. Who needs to watch Catherine Zeta-Jones lip-sync or James Franco sleepwalk or Ben Stiller do anything? No! No! No! (I sound like I did on my wedding night.) I’m a busy woman. My time could be better spent writing jokes, designing jewelry or cruising Craigslist searching for an eighty-year-old man who has eighty million in the bank and eighty days to live.

JANUARY 31

Dear Diary:

Today is Carol Channing’s birthday. If she were alive, she’d be 192. I idolize her. Whenever she sang “Hello Dolly,” she brought the house down. Unfortunately it was the only thing she did well. But many stars only do one thing well: Ginger Rogers could dance backwards, David Copperfield can make a motorcycle disappear. And of course the best one-trick pony is Kristen Stewart, who got a whole career by being able to juggle directors’ balls. These people don’t have a broad skill set, like Ted Bundy, for example. Ted was lawyer, a student, a model; he liked baseball, football, fishing; he drove a car, he slaughtered co-eds. He was a real jack-of-all-trades. I hear that on his way to the electric chair he sang a rousing rendition of “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” à la Carol, and in an homage to Ginger, he tapped backwards the entire way to Old Sparky.

P.S. My assistant, Jocelyn, just told me that Carol Channing may still be alive. Whatever.

The Backstreet Boys have not aged well.

FEBRUARY 1

Dear Diary:

Just the other day my dearest, closest, dare I say best friend, Goldie Hall—I mean Hawn—asked me, “Joan, you battered old crone, what does ‘red-carpet style’ mean?” I told her, “Goldalah, you delusional hag, red-carpet style is like herpes: You either have it or you don’t. Or as another one of my close BFFs Lou Ann Rhymes says, ‘You have to be born with red-carpet style. You can’t steal it from someone else’—like a husband.” If you’re Aretha Franklin, “style” means looking great while sweating mayonnaise through sixty yards of organza. For most actresses, red-carpet style means expensive earrings, designer gowns and the opportunity to make fun of all the big, fat girls who have to squeeze into a size two. But never mind the gowns and the accessories, the most important thing to wear on the red carpet is kneepads. Just like basic black, every starlet knows you can never go wrong in kneepads. As the first lady of American theater once said to me (and I’m talking about Helen Hayes, not Neil Patrick Harris), “You never know when you’ll need them: You could pass out from the heat, you might collapse because you mistimed your drugs, or—talk about luck—you might suddenly find yourself alone with Steven Spielberg.”