Colorful description of a person

This week's New Yorker has a short (1000-word) profile of Phyllis Diller at age 92. I'm posting just the lead here because it's a delightfully vivid, colorful, and intense introduction to the character. (Ignore the New Yorker's fussy and old-fashioned artifice of using "a visitor" instead of the straightforward first-person "I"):

When a visitor was shown into Phyllis Diller's mansion in Brentwood the other evening, Diller rose carefully from a settee. "Have a Martini," she said. "You have to look at the art, and it helps." She was wearing one of her trademark yellow fright wigs, and her right hand sported a large yellow ring that somewhat resembled a snail. "Do you like my ring? I call it 'the golden turd.'" Her laugh is a raucous Ha!, as if an "H" and an "A" had collided in midair.

—Tad Friend