"They're going to say I had a great ride"

Not that Rivers is bothered by anyone staring. She takes an almost fetishistic delight in telling war stories about her face, particularly the auditions she holds for doctors. She questions the anaesthetist the closest: “Who are you and when did you last have a glass of wine?” she says.

Are they often drunk?

“I ask everything,” she barks.

But even as I write, she has somehow managed to dramatically slip into a coma in hospital after an operation on her vocal chords. The first thing I thought when I heard was: oh God, she’ll be absolutely furious. She’s got a book to promote and tons of tat to flog and a massive tour — ironically called Quick… Before They Close the Lid (Seriously, This One Could Be... IT!) — over here next month. As she herself honks, she “doesn’t allow herself to get ill”. But right now, it seems possible that this could be her last interview.

Perhaps the biggest surprise about any of this is the fact that Rivers wasn’t having yet more plastic surgery. She says the only thing she really worries about is “losing my voice”: I can only assume she went in for a tune-up ahead of the tour. As it is, she has practically no voice when we meet: just a tiny, scratchy, drawl.

She is also surprisingly polite and reserved — bizarrely, no F-words — and followed at all times by two startlingly obsequious assistants who whisper things like “Can I speak to you for one moment, Madam?” and “May I?” One of them gives her a list of questions she expects interviewers to ask. The top one reads: What is your earliest memory? Someone has typed out the answer: “I distinctly remember coming out of my mother’s vagina and looking back over my shoulder and thinking, ‘Lesbians like this?’ ”

Rivers says the only thing she worries about is "losing my voice"... as it is, she has practically no voice when we meet: just a tiny, scratchy, drawl

At home in New York she has filing cabinets full of jokes, with labels such as “no self-worth” and “my sex life” and (her daughter) “Melissa’s dates”. There is also a housekeeper (Debbie) and a butler (Kevin), who keeps up a steady stream of finger bowls. She lives in a “ballroom”, according to Barry Humphries, filled with gold and crystal and six types of scented soap in each bathroom, as well as paintings that were picked out by the actor Vincent Price. She always says that the ballroom “is where Marie Antoinette would have lived, if she had money”. But looking at pictures of the epic plastic grotto, it’s more where Donald Trump might have lived, if he didn’t.

Today she is staying at Melissa’s house in Los Angeles: a glittering hobbit hole built into the side of a hill, high above the ocean. Melissa is the only living reminder of what Joan Rivers might have looked like without surgery. She is dark and timid with small eyes, unlike her mother, who looks like something hard that’s crashed out of a cracker. The house is filled with surfboards and presentation china and anything a depressed tourist might buy (snow globes), as well as dog hairs, and two moth-eaten dogs, including a limping old alsatian that has recently had its leg sawn off. “Cancer!” rasps Rivers. She loves animals. This is because “they have no self-pity”. They just get up in the morning and don’t do anything she might do, which is look in the mirror and feel immense pain, as she has done every day since she realised she was “fat” and “ugly” at the age of seven.

This has become her life’s narrative: why she failed as an actress, why she failed on her TV show, why she lost her husband to suicide and why she has furiously clawed her career back, and why, for the past five years, she has suddenly and remarkably been back at the centre of things, screaming: “I’ve had so much plastic surgery, when I die they’ll donate my body to Tupperware.” Even at 81 she is so rude on Fashion Police, a show devoted to ritually horror-shaming people on the red carpet, that Kelly Osbourne, her co-presenter, gave her some rings engraved with her favourite words, which are “f***” and “piss” and “shit”.

“I wear them a lot,” she says.

“The big question with Rivers has always been: where does the energy come from? Never mind this interview: she always gives every interview as if it’s her last. She is hoarse from yelling at journalists down at Los Angeles’s LAX airport already this morning, where she came off a flight and someone asked her why she had said that the Palestinians were “stupid people who don’t even own a pencil” who “deserved to die” as a result of the bombing in Gaza.

“For God’s sake, for God’s sake,” she whoops now, jewels rattling. “I probably said, ‘If you don’t listen and if you don’t get out when they warn you, then you’re going to die.’ You deserve to die,” she bellows, “if you’re that stupid.” She says she is “apolitical”, but I would go further than that — she simply doesn’t have a clue.

Sealed with a kiss: Rivers with her late husband, Edgar Rosenberg, a film and television producer. He committed suicide in 1987

She later corrects her statement on Gaza, saying she got “Hamas” and “Palestinian” mixed up, after someone started a petition asking people to boycott her performances in London during next month’s planned tour. Eventually she snaps: “But I don’t want to get into it. This article is not coming out for months and nobody will care. They will only care about Beyoncé and Jay-Z.”

But at least the debacle has given her an opportunity to bring up her favourite topic of conversation — the royal family. Rivers feels sorry for “Prince Charles and the Queen”, who get misquoted “the whole time” (actually, they don’t get quoted at all). “Prince Charles is so funny. So, so funny!” she breezes. He sends her presents every Christmas, mostly tea cups, and she writes him elaborate thank-you notes that he never acknowledges. Rivers is exactly the sort of person Prince Charles might like — in her own words, vulgar and tasteless — so he invited her to his wedding, where the Queen “did a very witty speech about how happy she was about his marriage to Camilla,” she says. “She was not funny; she was witty with dignity.” She loves the “formality” of bowing and scraping. “It’s lovely,” she trills. “It’s back to my mother.”

Joan’s mother was a Jewish princess, brought up in great riches as the daughter of a beef baron in Odessa, Ukraine. Her father supplied the tsar with beef and bricks, but when the tsar was murdered the family fled, sewing jewels into the inside of their fur coats. They arrived in New York, where her mother had nothing left of her old life except a scar on her forehead where a peacock had once pecked her at a banquet. She spent the rest of her life self-medicating with fish knives and napkins, passing on this obsession to her daughter, whose dinner parties are infamously stiff. Joan requires guests to speak to the person on the right “and include the person on the left,” she says. “I don’t want it to be gobble, gobble, gobble. When Melissa was growing up I always used to say, when the Queen comes to dinner” — I think this is something Rivers genuinely fantasises about — “I don’t want to be ashamed. She was 7½ and she said, ‘But you don’t know the Queen.’ ”

She sweeps on: everyone nowadays is SUCH A PIG. “Men don’t stand up when you come into the room. I go onto a plane and no one helps me to put my bags overhead. I’m an old woman! Plus a CE-LEBRIDDAAAY!”

There are “no rules, no consequences. I think it’s a pity girls live with men in the hope that one day they’ll marry them.” Anyone who lives with a man before she is married is an unpaid prostitute, she nods, and “a fool”.

Rivers herself did not leave home until she was 31. She grew up in Brooklyn, where her father was a doctor and her mother spent money. Her father was so obsessed with cash he would sit on the beach on holiday, freaking out and muttering “this is costing me a fortune”. He was furious when she decided to go into theatre, partly because she had a good degree from Barnard, and partly because prostitutes in the dock would always give their profession as “show business” when he used to visit court as a young doctor.

But Joan wanted to be famous. She created her first alter ego, J Sondra Meredith, at the age of eight. She appeared in her first film at 18. She hired an agent called Hamilton Katz. He had a picture of his most successful act, Myra and Her Trained Cockatoos, on his wall with the note “Thank you for taking me to the top”. But he did not take Rivers to the top. She failed, in fact, to get any parts at all, losing even small roles like “prostitute” and “man in black”. She did play a “woman in black” — a lesbian who was in love with a girl played by Barbra Streisand: they kissed, “and then we kissed again,” she says.

But she has never had any real crushes on women; she has always been obsessed with men. She has been in love with a Greek shipping tycoon and a man called Bernard who was worth $150m but so mean he “carried ketchup back and forth to the Hamptons”.

She once nearly married a fully gay man who painted corpses for a living (now dead himself). Her most enduring crush is Winston Churchill — “I should have slept with him. I love him. He was chubby, but perfect” — so I suppose it is no surprise that she eventually went for an Englishman in the shape of Edgar Rosenberg. Or at least, Edgar was born in Germany and grew up in South Africa, but as Rivers mentions repeatedly, he went to Rugby and Cambridge and had “a proper accent”.

By the time he met Joan, Edgar was a successful film producer in New York, with friends like Laurence Olivier and Joan Collins’s then-husband, Anthony Newley. Rivers never fails to describe Collins as a “tramp”. Even now, she bellows that Collins should be grateful that “people still think of her as sexual”. But according to her autobiography, it was slagging off Elizabeth Taylor that really put Rivers on the map.

In the early 1980s, Rivers was headlining in Vegas and doing regular appearances on Tonight with Johnny Carson. But then one day she said that Taylor had become “a blimp” and suddenly she was a megastar. Rupert Murdoch lured her to Fox, where she became the first female comedian to have her own late-night show. The show was produced by Edgar, only Edgar failed to charm anyone. Seven months into the run, Rivers was given an ultimatum: sack him or leave. She chose her husband; Fox cancelled the show; Edgar killed himself at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia three months later.

Rivers in full flow: in the early days, as a guest of the Tonight Show host Johnny Carson (alpha-globe photos)

At the time, she blamed herself for his death. But was she really that heartbroken? He sounds awful — prissy and “closed off”, a man who lived with his mother until he was 40 — and I suspect one of the only reasons she is kind about him now is Melissa. I don’t think Joan can have cared. Not only had she already split from him, but the night he died she was in hospital having liposuction: what you did in Hollywood “when you’ve been fired”. And then the first thing she did after that was get up on stage and start telling jokes about him: “Thank God my husband said that I should scatter his ashes in [luxury department store] Neiman Marcus. That way he knew he would see me five times a week.”

She also had several affairs, including one with the actor Robert Mitchum (“very fast”). And she describes a one-legged banker from the Lehman family she dated for nine years in her sixties as “the love of my life”. She even suggested they marry, and he said “fine,” she says, “and then both of our lawyers said no”. But she was devastated when she found out he was cheating on her. “I was so hurt. So hurt and betrayed.” She didn’t speak to him from that moment until he was dying, then she went to see him and he didn’t recognise her. “That was sad,” she says. He was “amazing, but don’t put that down because it might hurt Melissa”.

She looks as if she might cry — for the sixth time this interview. Nobody told me how much Joan Rivers cries. But she cries all the time. It is slightly frightening — but she waves a hand: “I cry very easily. I cry at songs,” she wails. “I cry at Broadway shows. The dog fell halfway down the stairs last night, and I cried.” The only person she doesn’t cry about is Edgar. She doesn’t cry at plastic surgery either, even though she tells me about her procedures and I shriek: “But don’t face-lifts hurt?” I look into her eyes and all I see is deep pain. “Oh, no, they don’t hurt at all,” she says. “Maybe when they take the stitches out. But if they hurt, no, no, no.” She waggles a finger. “I’m a coward.” And while she says she will never have sex again (“the hotel is clo-o-osed”), she may easily have yet another neck-lift “if it looks terrible”.

She despises women who are not honest about surgery. “They say ‘I’ve never had anything done,’ and then they go to the bathroom and shit through their ears.” But doesn’t she ever think she’s had a bit too much? She looks like the world’s oldest nine-year-old. “No,” she says, immediately. She has “no regrets”, but if you ever need any idea how addicted to plastic surgery Rivers really is, when I ask what she’d never have done, she thinks for a minute and then she says she would never have her legs broken to make them straight again, like the silent-film actress Ruth Gordon. “God,” she drawls, “that’s determination.” Christ.

One of the most puzzling things about Rivers is her own determination. When most ladies of her age are visiting Venice or painting terrible watercolours, Joan’s greatest pleasure is shrieking out filthy new jokes in dirty clubs in downtown Manhattan. She will do anything for money. “I will wear a diaper,” she says. This is presumably why she happily signed up to appear in Southend-on-Sea on tour next month. I have seen her perform once — she was 76 and playing to about 900 gays in event leatherwear and feather boas, who spontaneously prolapsed with excitement the moment she came out. When I ask her if she has some weird kind of hormone imbalance that means even at this age she is simply unable to stop, she says: “I hope so.”

“Melissa says, 'I don't want to hear about your death', but I say, it's comi-i-i-ing. It’s inevitable. It’s no longer an abstract thing. It’s like, God, I’m in my eighties”

The person who suffers the most appears to be Melissa, who buys into her mother’s career as apparently the only way of spending time with her. She is a constant source of hilarious material as a result. Rivers threw a fit when her daughter turned down Playboy, for example. “What am I thinking?” she screams, as part of her act. “The nerve of that bitch! $500,000 and she turns it down? Pull down your pants and show them your pussy.” Melissa is 46 and has a son, Cooper, who is 13.

She says she is preparing Melissa for her death. This will be a “BIG blow”. “Melissa says, ‘I don’t want to hear about it, I don’t want to talk about it’, but I say,” she adopts a sing-song voice, “it’s comi-i-i-ing! It’s inevitable. It’s no longer an abstract thing. It’s like, God, I’m in my eighties. Nobody, when I die, is going to say, “how young?” They’re going to say,” she gives an enormous cackle, “she had A GREAT RIDE.”

Suddenly she looks sad again. So many of her friends have died, she sighs: the death of her best friend tore her to shreds. Part of her loves the melodrama, of course: when I tell her one of my friends died too, she looks thrilled and screams: “It’s beginning. It’s beginning.” She always says she imagines death will be like going under for an operation: “a black velvet sleep”.

She has given Melissa strict instructions on who should not be let in to her funeral. The forbidden presumably include Michelle Obama (“a tranny”), Adele (“fat”) and the American talk-show host Chelsea Handler (“drunk” and a “whore”). Rivers loves slagging off other female comedians, such as Kathy Griffin and Sarah Silverman (“I f***ing want to strangle them.”) The only person she actually seems to like is Kelly Osbourne, although Osbourne recently made an error when she told Rivers she had worked out that morning and was 6lb down. “I wanted to kill her right there and then,” says Rivers. Rivers constantly feels “chubby”. She still wants to change “everything”. She put on 5lb when she stopped having sex.

But is she happy? “I once said to my sister, ‘When were you happiest?’ And she gave me a date,” she gasps. But she is, yes, “happy in the now”. She is happy as long as she’s got money coming in: there is a scene in a film about her where she negotiates $125,000 for appearances during a three-day cruise, “and if they bump it up I’ll do the survival lecture,” she honks. “And if they bump it up more, I’ll do the red-carpet lecture.”

I would go so far as to suggest that like her father she is only happy when money is coming in. She sets a lot of store by being able to show off. She likes swanning around New York in limousines, paying for everyone’s schooling (she supports the children of some of her staff).

One of the reasons she went into show business in the first place was to be like her Aunt Alice, who had “face-lifts” and “trips on ocean liners”. It is not enough for her simply to be a diva, she must be seen to live like one too, screeching, vain, fabulous, spraying cash. For a moment, she stands quietly, thinking about this, shining and plump, glittering like the world’s gayest toilet-roll cover.

And then she whispers: “I’m so, so lucky. I’m relevant and I’m funny. And I look OK.” And then one of the assistants comes and wheels her away.