Can we talk? Joan Rivers

THE PALACE of Versailles has nothing on Joan Rivers's sumptuous Manhattan penthouse. Indeed, as the elevator glides silently to the ground floor, I murmur to Wayne, the concierge, that I feel as if I've just explored the inside of an enormous Fabergé egg.

Opulent does not begin to describe the elegant surroundings in which I meet the ribald stand-up comedian, who is also a successful businesswoman thanks to the jewellery she designs, and a determined charity fundraiser.

Her spectacular home was designed by the legendary banker John Pierpoint Morgan for one of his daughters. It was a derelict, pigeon-inhabited wreck when Rivers first saw it more than ten years ago, she tells me as we stand in her vast gilded reception room, which was once the ballroom. She has the top two floors of the house on this Upper East Side block, which includes eight apartments and which she bought when she got bored with decorating her Park Avenue apartment. It's quite a pad.

We are sitting in Rivers's flower-filled library which doubles as a parlour. She is perched on a pouffe whispering sweet nothings to her new puppy, Sam, while Max the pekinese she rescued from a shelter and who is wearing designer black incontinence pants since he's marking out his territory, being inordinately jealous of the new arrival, looks on furiously.

While we talk, her staff go about their business – Rivers has two PAs – and Kevin the butler glides around as if on castors, serving La Rivers milky iced tea, fetching spring water for me in a crystal goblet and fruit on cocktail sticks, all presented with a flourish on silver trays with crisply starched napkins. Even the M&Ms come in a gorgeous silver dish.

Rivers may have grown old disgracefully, but she certainly knows all about elegant living. "I love the gracious life," she says.

She is, after all, a friend of Prince Charles and Camilla and was one of only four Americans to be invited to their wedding. Most summers she joins Prince Charles's painting school in the south of France, but she won't be there this year. She'll be in Edinburgh.

About to return to the Fringe for the first time since she took the city by storm in 2001 with her one-woman show, Broke and Alone, which went on to become a West End hit, she's staging the European premiere of her new autobiographical play, Work in Progress by A Life in Progress. After 19 performances at the Fringe the four-hander will transfer to the West End.

In Edinburgh, she'll also be doing four stand-up gigs and guesting a couple of times on the live talk show, Creation Nation, hosted by one of her protégés, New York actor Billy Eichner.

The play, set in Rivers's dressing room at the Oscars, was written by her after she and her daughter Melissa, 38, were let go from their red carpet slot for a US TV channel a couple of years ago. Specifically, she started writing after suffering a cruel comment that cut her to the quick.

Hold on, someone was cruel to her? Hasn't she made millions out of being cruel to others?

"Sure, I dish it out, but if you do that you have to take it, too. I was very cut up that evening in Hollywood by the mean-as-hell thing this sonofabitch said to me. It made me think about my life and adventures and how I'm now the hardest-working woman in the world, if you don't count the hooker on the corner," she says, scooping up a handful of M&Ms and handing them to me.

"I can't wait to get back to Edinburgh and do some antiquing," she says, surveying her lavish Louis XIV furniture, leopard-print carpets and fabulous artworks, a glittering setting for a wise-cracking, glam broad.

She's had a recurring role in high-class soap Nip/Tuck, although she's just made a new TV series,

Z Rock, about a rock n roll band, in which she plays their manager's aunt and there's another TV pilot on the stocks.

"Everyone should do Botox," she declares. But isn't it scary? A kind of poisonous injection? "Botulism is everywhere – in the air we breathe. I always say a little botulism never hurt anyone," she replies dismissively with a wave of a perfectly manicured hand on which there is not so much as a freckle or a liver spot.

Incredibly, this perfectly groomed, chemically enhanced blonde, with the artfully windblown Meg Ryan-style bob, was 75 last month. In black-and-white heels, black trousers and a chic, crisp white linen jacket, she doesn't look it.

Actually, she doesn't look any age. On TV and in photographs she may seem artificial and over made-up, but up close she's rather lovely, with porcelain skin, bright eyes and a flawless face that has been sculpted by the surgeon's knife, but which nonetheless remains as mobile as her mind.

Currently, she's working on her next book, about plastic surgery. Despite being called Men Are

Stupid and Like Big Boobs she says it takes a serious look at the process. "I'm writing a practical guide to it, about all the things that can go wrong.

"You must never forget that when you go under the knife it's a major operation. Take a good look around as you go under, you may not come round. So I look at the downsides and the upsides. But you feel soo-oo-oo good afterwards. I certainly do! And anyway, who the hell gets up in the morning thinking, 'Today, I want to look and feel ugly?' "

She's had three facelifts, a neck lift and several tummy tucks, but when she laughs and cries – she does both as we talk about her long life and troubled times – her face does move and she has no problems arching an immaculate eyebrow.

In person, she's charming and thoughtful. Minus the scorching one-liners, she speaks eloquently and emotionally about the many betrayals she's suffered over the years. Her husband Edgar Rosenberg's suicide, for instance, may be a rich source of jokes, as is her predeliction for "procedures" and cosmetic surgery – appropriately enough, she heard of his death while having liposuction – but when she speaks privately about him she does so with profound sadness, displaying an unexpected vulnerability.

They were married for 22 "most happy" years. He looked after her career, a sort of Svengali. "But he became the star's husband, which is tough for a guy and something I talk about in the

show. I mean, look at Prince Philip, that man must be made of steel. But Ed changed, we all change, of course. He underwent open-heart surgery and it completely altered his personality. He became very depressed, on all sorts of drugs. But suicide's stupid.

"I can't forgive him. It made me so angry. Suicide wrecks families.

"Melissa was only 16 and she refused to speak to me for a while. She blamed me at first. And it's left her unable to trust men. Suicides leave behind an intolerable burden of guilt."

Her eyes fill up again when she talks about the late Orin Lehman, a New York banker and former Commissioner for Parks, "the love of my life," with whom she shared a nine-year long relationship until he cheated on her, "with a couple of Eurotrash girls". She dumped him, but it broke her heart, despite the fact he called her every day for a year begging her to take him back, even though he was with another woman. "I refused to speak to him. I was really stupid and silly about it. I regret that now he's dead," she sighs.

Meanwhile, her business manager sold her name and absconded with all the profits from her costume jewellery business, which was turning over more than 25m a year.

"You wake up at 65-years-old and realise you owe 38m. At that age you can't turn tricks. I had to work hard to pay off the shareholders. It was terrible. But I've a great lawyer and he got me through it, thank God," she says. She flogs her jewellery designs on the American shopping channel QVC and has branched into beauty and skincare.

She says she just picked herself up, dusted herself down and "paid, paid, paid, paid ... and paid some more".

"Humour has saved my life," she continues. "I was this fat, plain child but I could always make myself and other people laugh. It's hereditary, it's in the DNA. My father was a very funny man, so is my sister, she's a lawyer, very witty, very smart. And I'm funny. My adorable seven-year-old grandson Cooper, Melissa's son, is hysterically funny.

"When I was at high school, no one ever asked me and my friend Joanie to dance. I would make her laugh by pretending that it was because we both had polio. How we laughed! Laughter's the best medicine there is. My father – a doctor – used to say that when you laugh all your internal organs tickle each other. Have fun with your liver, that's what I say."

She's the happiest and most contented that she's been for years. She and Melissa will be back on the red carpet next year for AOL and they are going to be on opposing teams in the US celebrity version of The Apprentice. She says: "I have my health, my career's great, my family's great, I have a million friends and this lovely home," she says, gesturing at the glitter and glitz all around us. "And there's a Greek billionaire who is still around to date on occasions.

"But honestly, I don't like growing old. Old age sucks. There's nothing to recommend it. However, I always try to remember something my wonderful mother once said to me, 'Growing old is terrible – you just have to get through it with dignity'. So I'm trying hard, and often failing, to be dignified about it.

"Sure, I get lonely sometimes. When you've played a 3,000-seat gig and you go back to your hotel room by yourself, that's no fun. Sundays are hard – they are the days you want to have someone to do nothing with, someone to make a sandwich for. But, hey, when I slip into the stretch limo they always send for me, I often pinch myself and think, 'This isn't bad'. I've come a long way, baby.

"All I wish for is for Melissa to be settled. She went through a terrible divorce and now she's gun-shy of men. I so want her to be happy. But, you know, I'm always smiling," she says. After all, laughter lines can always be blasted with Botox and she's decided to spend, spend, spend. "Why not? I'm in my old age and I've stopped saving. You wake up and you're gone. Buy that handbag, buy those shoes, buy that painting."

LATER that evening it's almost as if Joan Molinsky – she's the daughter of Russian immigrants – has morphed into Barbie in pink sequins, but Barbie with the mouth of a very rude Bratz doll. Rivers is in full flow doing her stand-up schitck for two charities at the Cutting Room, the New York bar co-owned by Mr Big in Sex & the City, actor Chris Noth. She begins by saying she's so old that nowadays she gets a pedicure and a mammogram at the same time since her breasts have sagged somewhere around her toes.

She's not so old as her last date, though. He took her to meet his parents – "in the cemetery". He was so old, when he farted, "dust came out".

"I'm just a little, old Jewish lady," she screams at the crowd, pointing to the hole in the stool they have provided for her to sit on on stage.

"They obviously know how old I am." Then she yells: "What a s***ty venue!"

The Cutting Room is in fact a music venue of some note, frequented by Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sheryl Crow, and Stills and Nash. Chelsea Clinton comes here. Or rather "Celery" as Rivers has nicknamed her. "Why don't her parents buy her a chin?" she asks to howls of laughter. Russell Crowe, whom Rivers can't abide, is also a regular.

Famously, she was physically removed last month from the live ITV Loose Women chat show when she launched into a rant against the Gladiator Oscar-winner, whom she called "a f***ing piece of s***". She tells me that he's "so arrogant, why would he want to go to bed with anyone but himself".

Then she tells me the background to her dislike of him but asks me not to print the details. Well, I tell her, if he were chocolate he would obviously eat himself. Rivers roars with laughter at this unoriginal remark, slaps her thigh and says: "Oh, that's a good one. I've not heard that before; I'm gonna use it."

She may be in her eighth decade but she positively shimmers with energy.

Aggressively haranguing her audience, she doesn't so much overstep the mark as seem blissfully unaware that the mark even exists. Lesbians, immigrants, fat people, the "f***ing filthy Chinese", Jennifer ("potato nose") Aniston, 9/11 widows, Brangelina and brood, Anne Frank ("if she'd had her nose fixed, she'd have sold more books"), Hillary Clinton et al receive a tongue lashing.

When we meet afterwards in her grotty basement dressing-room, she's still glowing. "Honey, I had such a good time with you this afternoon," she says warmly. "You're such a smart woman." Well, I tell her, it takes one to know one.

However, I don't tell her that the gift she gave me of a long necklace of sparkly black-and-white beads from the Joan Rivers Classics Collection snapped while I was going home on the Fifth Avenue bus. When she gets to Edinburgh, perhaps I'll ask her for the name of the Queen's jeweller who always re-strings Rivers's pearls. But then again, perhaps her pearls of wisdom are worth far more. sm

Joan Rivers: Work in Progress By a Life in Progress is at the Udderbelly's Pasture, Bristo Square, August 7-25. Tickets cost £15-£25, tel: [phone].