Joan Rivers Makes Her Final Appearance on Celebrity Apprentice Tonight

Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice boardroom gets frosty this week when the remaining stars are tasked with writing and performing a jingle for Bud Light Lime-A-Rita beverages. For the assignment, TV personality Leeza Gibbons steps up for her second stint as project manager and attempts to control her unruly teammates–including Geraldo Rivera–in order to raise money for her charity, Leeza’s Care Connection. “I thought we had a shot at doing well because I’ve been in the radio business for decades and figured that we could come up with the creative elements to sell the brand,” says the 57-year-old Gibbons. “It’s a strong team, but they get distracted by their own narcissism, dramatics, and histrionics.”

Gibbons singles out Rivera as particularly hard to work with, especially during the presentation of their jingle to the judges. “Geraldo had lines, but I was not really ever intending for Geraldo to sing, so I made sure the engineer cut his microphone. We never heard the audio,” Gibbons says with a laugh. “The world needs to be spared. I thought that was being a good project manager.”

The episode also features the final network television appearance for boardroom adviser and previous Celebrity Apprentice winner Joan Rivers, who died in September at 81 from complications during a minor medical procedure. “She’s no-nonsense, but she’s also very much like a big sister with a very nurturing side to her,” says Gibbons, who first met Rivers when she was a young reporter at Entertainment Tonight. “Joan has always been an important figure for women in business because she created her own rules and redefined what it meant to be successful. She blazed trails.”

The Celebrity Apprentice, Mondays, 8/7c, NBC