Is Joan Rivers going gay?
The relentless entertainer pulls out all the stops on the third-season premiere of “Joan and Melissa: Joan Knows Best?” tomorrow night on WE, when she kisses a woman on the mouth.
Rivers and her daughter Melissa are camped out in Joan’s ornate apartment off Central Park on a rainy Tuesday afternoon to discuss their lives as reality-TV fixtures. One of the tradeoffs that comes with this job and their other joint venture, “Fashion Police,” is that the elder Rivers, who turns 80 in June, spends half her life on a plane.
When in LA, she stays with Melissa and her 12-year-old grandson, Cooper, at Melissa’s Malibu home, but doesn’t have her own set of friends. Melissa has been trying to get her to go out more — not to come out.
In the show, Rivers meets Shirl at a dinner party thrown by Lily Tomlin, whom Rivers has known since their days as stand-up comics in Greenwich Village. They hit it off, and an art gallery date is suggested.
“And I hadn’t been to an art gallery in, I can’t tell you how long,” says Rivers, seated in her library, where a maid serves her two Milk Duds in a silver dish on a silver tray.
That date goes so well that a second one is soon proposed — at one of those do-it-yourself pottery places where Rivers gets her hands wet and makes herself a pot. She and Shirl hug and clown around for the camera.
“Shirl was looking to make a friend,” says Melissa, dressed casually and seated adjacent to her mother on a sofa that seems to have a mink draped across the back.
After a second dinner, where Shirl and Joan meet a lesbian couple who’ve been together a long time, Joan gets up her nerve. About to go to their separate cars, Rivers turns a friendly goodnight kiss into something more intimate. She’s so stunned she confesses everything to Melissa the next morning.
What made her do it?
“Two glasses of wine,” Rivers says. “Three glasses and she’s stripping on the bar,” says Melissa, 45.
“Shirl’s a lovely woman. And we had dinner that night with those two women. And they have this stable relationship,” Rivers says. “And I thought, ‘Maybe.’ Who knows anymore? And all my friends are so crossed over this way and crossed over that way that you don’t even deal with it, if you know what I’m saying. If I had walked in with Shirl as my girlfriend, I think my friends would have said, ‘Isn’t that interesting?’ ”
Marriage and divorce are two topics the Rivers women address on the new season of their show. Both are single and have been so for years, and neither thinks they will remarry — Melissa because she’s too independent and guys her age are looking for girls half their age, and Joan because she’s too old and too rich. “I would have liked to have been married again because I think it looks so great on a tombstone to say that you were married three times” says the twice-married Rivers, laughing. “It means you were hot. I think it’s very important.”