Melissa Rivers revealed during an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that she managed to save her mother Joan Rivers‘ prized Emmy award before her house burned down in the L.A. fires (via Entertainment Weekly). Joan won the Emmy for outstanding talk show host in 1990 thanks to her work on “The Joan Rivers Show,” which helped establish the comedian as a television icon. She also posthumously won a Grammy in 2015 for best spoken work album, although Melissa only confirmed she saved the Emmy statue.
“I kind of had a mental checklist. I made sure that we got passports, birth certificates, medication, clothing,” Melissa Rivers said about evacuating from her home in the Pacific Palisades area. “I just was out shopping for clothes. It started to hit me, we literally just had what was on our backs.”
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“Luckily, my office which is in — was in — my home, [I grabbed] whatever was there,” she continued. “In my personal situation, that’s it, that’s the end of everything that belonged to my family and the history of it. To be 100% honest, I grabbed my mom’s Emmy, a photo of my dad and a drawing that my mother had done of me and my son.”
Melissa advised people in the L.A. area to have a bag ready to go full of essential items and valuable keepsakes. She explained that she decided to save a drawing Joan did over family photos “because I know I can find the photos. [But a drawing of hers] I can’t replace.
“But my heart is so broken not just for myself, but for everyone going through this,” Melissa concluded, noting that her Pacific Palisades town has been “wiped off the map” amid the devastating wildfires.
Melissa Rivers is one of many celebrities who have lost their homes in the wildfires. Others include Leighton Meester and Adam Brody, Paris Hilton, Anna Faris, Billy Crystal, James Woods and more. Over 1,000 houses, businesses and other buildings have been destroyed in the destructive fires across the Los Angeles region. A second fire broke out in the Hollywood Hills, bringing the evacuation order in L.A. to 130,000 residents.