Mommy Dearest! Joan Rivers & Daughter Melissa's Secret Feud Exposed In New Tell-All
Nov. 2 2016, Updated 1:02 p.m. ET
Joan Rivers and her constant red carpet companion, daughter Melissa, seemed more like sisters before the superstar's shocking death in 2014. But according to a shocking new tell-all obtained by RadarOnline.com, the comedienne battled with her only child from the time the younger Rivers was a girl.
The bitterness began after the suicide death of Joan's husband and Melissa's father, Edgar Rosenberg, in 1987, when the current Fashion Police cohost was just a teenager.
"Melissa blamed Joan for her father's suicide," Joan's confidante Sue Cameron told author Leslie Bennetts in Last Girl Before Freeway: The Life, Lives, Losses and Liberation Of Joan Rivers.
"They did discuss divorce before Edgar's suicide, and that's why Melissa got so angry with her mother. She felt her mother was just throwing her father away completely…He couldn't think of a way out."
After recovering from Edgar's painful, tragic death, the mother/daughter bond was again tested when Joan allegedly forced Melissa, now 48, to undergo plastic surgery.
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"She made her have her nose done," Cameron told Bennetts in the book. (Of course, Joan wasn't shy about her own nips and tucks during her lifetime.)
But by Joan's sudden death at 81 from a throat surgery complication, any animosity had melted away.
Melissa and her son Cooper were at the legend's bedside when she took her last breath.
"After a few hours, she was finally gone. I didn't have to tell her I loved her. She knew. She didn't have to tell me she loved me. I knew," Melissa wrote in The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation.
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