Why Bette Midler? 
Various Writers


The unlikely facts: born about 30 years ago (she won't give her age) to a New Jersey housepainter who wanted to live in Hawaii and a housewife whose heroine was Bette Davis, this red-haired child grew up on movie musicals - the only films her mother would allow her to see.  Having reached adulthood and the startling height of 5 feet 1 inch, she went to work in a pineapple factory: her father had moved the family to his dream place, Hawaii, where they discovered themselves to be nearly the only Jews.  After playing a bit part as a Christian missionary in the film, “Hawaii,” she had enough money to escape to New York - and more subsistence work as typist and sales woman.  Her acting career was limited to brief Off-Broadway jobs and parts in Jewish musical reviews in the Catskills during the summer months.  It was a long wait before she got a chorus job in the Broadway musical, "Fiddler on the Roof"; then she moved up to featured roles in the same play.  Three years later, she left "Fiddler" for rock operas; then she left all roles for her own nightclub act.  Visible as herself and able to develop her own outrageous personal style at last, she soon attracted an underground following.  More and bigger nightclubs.  Television.   Records. Finally, one-woman concerts at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.  Her underground following went national and international.  She became a star: her fans dubbed her the Divine Miss M.   

But who is she?  What does she mean? Why should her unconventional, funky, female-impersonating, almost obsessed singing style be making it now? 

Meet Bette Midler in her own image; her own words. And meet her in the reflections of others.

"I think women are taught from the time they are born to fear certain things - to fear not being married, to fear not being beautiful in the way society tells them that they should be.  That's the way it was with me.  Identity is a peculiar thing. Sometimes I don't know any more who I am. I used to be Bette Midler and now I am the Divine Miss M.  When people don't know the Divine Miss M., when they only meet Bette Midler and they don't know what she does for a living or what books she reads or programs she watches or food she eats or friends she has - when they don't know who I am, all they see is this person, this face.  Like one writer said that I looked like the kind of girl who wouldn't be asked out on a Saturday night. And that's very, very funny. I was amused by it, but I was also taken aback by it because I suppose it's very true. When people meet me for the first time, especially if I'm not dressed up or don't have any goo on my face, they're not interested in knowing me. 

Most people in our country aren't interested in knowing you if you're not one of those beautiful people, or if you don't have money.  I suppose when I first started with this whole thing it was so that I would be asked out on Saturday night – now I’m too tired to go.  I don't really care. I am content to be with people who don't care that I don't have any makeup on, and that's what you have to get to in your life.  I think that's where women have to get to.  I think they have to accept themselves for exactly what they are and what they look like and not try to keep up.  Not try to run ahead.  Every two minutes you turn around, there is something else that will tell you that this is what you have to buy, this is the deodorant you have to use in order to be accepted and presentable and loved.  Some women spend their whole lives doing nothing but trying to keep up with that. I was hoodwinked into it myself, but somewhere along the line it took a perverse turn.  Somewhere along the line the perspective changed. 

"I became more sure of myself as a person when I took the antiadvertising stand and decided I wouldn't let them tell me what personality to have.  When I decided that I didn't want to look the way they wanted me to look and decided that I would look exactly the opposite way and do it just the opposite of the way they were telling me to do it.  That's when I took control of my own destiny and that's when the success started happening.  

"I was trying to get jobs in the theater, and I just didn't fit into the mold.  I can show you reams of pictures of myself I used to have in my portfolio.  All these girls do it, come from far and near, truss themselves up, push themselves out, get their hair cut, get their hair dyed - thousands of dollars spent trying to push themselves into the mold.  I spent a lot of money, time, and energy and I made myself so sad because I couldn't fit into the mold. 

“Anyway, I used to look at those pictures of myself and no matter what angle they shot, I still couldn't get my foot in the door.  I just decided I had to let that little dream go because it was destroying me.  I knew that there was a nice person there, a whole person, an individual, and it was unnecessarily cruel and unusual punishment to go through to compete in that realm.  I just had no business there.  

Miss M. is both a drawback and an asset.  When I started and was doing Miss M, I was hiding.  I still hide to a certain degree because it's real painful to get up and expose yourself to people.  It killed Janis Joplin.  I have found recently that I don't have to hide anymore.  Last summer's Schaefer Concert in Central Park was a real knockout for me.  I mean I had some makeup on, but I wasn't dressed very peculiarly at all.  I was dressed very normally.  That was really the happiest night of my life because I found out that I didn't have to hide, that they would take me for what I was, that I had succeeded and that I had achieved what I had started out to achieve, which was to come to myself, to come back to Bette Midler. 

"I know now that I can take people on a theatrical adventure or I can take them on a musical adventure or I can take them on an encounter group.  Once you eliminate the fear that you can't do it, then you are free. And I'm very nearly free.” 

Bette Midler, as interviewed by Loraine Alterman.
Record World - May 19, 1973

Bette Midler reminds me of my mother if my mother could sing.  She is an intelligent freak show. A triumph of brilliance over homeliness.  I like her vigor - she's a hard worker.  She's given camp back to women.

Rosalyn Drexler, artist, novelist, and playwright.

The flashy gold lame' dress falls away. Beneath it is a black lace-up corset and a pair of black satin pedal pushers.  "I'm D, the corset's B," jokes the walloping voice. The hips pivot.  The head jerks back.  The elbows begin to dig at thin air.  The voice bolts out: "Oh, ya got to have frieeeeeeseeeeeeeeeends / The feelings oh so strong..."  

Somewhere, underneath the wig and eyelashes, the Divine Miss M - the woman who's going to do for the seventies what Mick Jagger did for the sixties - is trapped and can't get out.   

That was Bette Midler singing at the Continental Baths, a West Side Manhattan last stop on the sexual subway. She could sing 'em all-forties, fifties, sixties.  Sad, she sounded like Judy. Up, she sounded like Barbra.  The guys liked her.  She put them down. She could be risky and fierce.   

Sometime, back before the club dates, she had started digging into the closet.

"Sleazy," she called her look.  The improbable platforms and the dresses coming apart at the seams were throwaway. You know, throwaway chic.  Or, just throwaway.   

She took on the Andrews Sisters. And Carmen Miranda.  And a Lot of other dumb blonde types from bad forties musicals.  Bette was an eclectic rip-off artist.  Her ear was uncanny. It could pick up on most anyone. Like some freaky priestess, she summoned up the past and recharged it with libido and with real suffering.  Camp she was and camp she wasn't. 

Bette's pull is her vulnerability.  The arms plead. The crotch thrusts.  She fills the stage with her uneasy lust.  Underneath the growl is a whimper. What everyone else calls "cool," she calls "hot."  She is bawdy, obscene, and self-betraying. 

But Bette Midler has more riding on her than that. Her hunger is almost as big as the audience’s. 

What Bette Midler expresses about our shared-in-common sexuality is dangerous news.  She is straining the image of the woman-whore to bursting.  The ravening masochism of "I Shall Be Released," for instance, is double-edged-feminine and self-exploiting in the worst way and yet full of hatred for it.  Remember me, she growls in the sappy mask of old songs, I am the broken world of love that never worked for anyone .

As Mick Jagger and what he represents of the unsatisfied male fantasy life of the sixties fades, Bette Midler's importance as an expression of our sexual unconsciousness gathers.  She is a final self-enclosing embrace of the Perseus-Andromeda myth that so intrigued the tortured sexuality of the 19th century and formed our own: the knight who saves the damsel from the dragon.  The fiction of salvation discolors the popular idea of love from Pygmalion to Gigi to Miss Sadie Thompson to "The Blue Angel."  The power of the man to make over the woman diminishes as the myth moves forward in time.  Except in that magical realm exempted by our dreams-and show biz. 

By rattling the used-up images of woman, she knows how to get a laugh.  When to use the look-at-me, the Yiddische Mama routine. Bette is a clown. The emblems of her suffering are painted on thick.  She puts on the old masks with all the mocking humility of the hunger artist.  She is the penitent in rags.  The tramp who takes a fall.  Or drops his pants. Or gold lame' dress. What could be more comic than the lover? 

In the twilight of the clowns, women have become the Fools. The primitive power of woman has survived in a laugh! 

Dale McConathy, critic, former Literary Editor of "Harper's Bazaar,” and former editor of "Vogue."

Bette Midler's so honest, so totally herself.  When she's on stage, she's really there - to rap, to be with the audience.  You don't mind loving her because it's mutual.  She'll sing till she's hoarse, not because she's a trouper, but because she's communicating.  I don't feel that from a lot of performers.  Often you get a polished act and the feeling that a performer is doing you an honor by just showing up. But Bette Midler is real – and such a turn-on.

Marlo Thomas, actress.

Thinking of all the times I'd sat in my living room turning people on to records they never try themselves, I felt that Bette was just like me.  She was obviously open to every emotion and aspiration ever transfixed by pop music, somehow surmounting all its forms without abandoning an eye-level perspective. She didn't devalue Bessie Smith by implying that some of her images were slightly overextended; on the contrary, that was how she experienced the extremity of the blues singer's pain.  And by parodying the absurd, precise energy of the Andrews Sisters, she also celebrated the joy and playful cunning with which they responded to their dilemma in their time.  It was all show biz, just an act, we both knew that. In a way, that was the point.

Robert Christgau, rock critic of "Newsday."

When I first saw Bette Midler in 1972, she had the same impact on me as the Beatles did when I was 12 - even more, because she was a woman.  I saw her live at the Bitter End. The atmosphere was intimate, emotional, almost cathartic, Her act now is more commercial, more geared to mass appeal.  She's a family-style pop idol; even my parents like her. 

Robbie Cruger, Film Editor of "Creem" magazine.

I like her style.  In the age when there is a question as to what sex comes first, she comes from that sex which is all sex. 

Yoko Ono, artist

How can I not have an affinity for Bette Midler?  Her mother named her after Bette Davis. My mother named me after Myrma Loy. She hails from Paterson, New Jersey.  I was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey. 

Our locus is therefore outside to begin with, but that site enables us to see clearly the essential drag-queen role societally assigned to the female.  

Bette Midler puts that role on in her dressing room. Tits and ass along with the sequins and the merry-widow corset cover.  She makes the drag-queen trip as potent as the supermale (Frank Sinatra from Hoboken, New Jersey) trip. 

She is the votive offering of her own emotive ritual.  She can present and appreciate the Bette Midler persona as easily as she can present and appreciate her backup chorus - the Harlettes – as original and extended projected image.  That projected image, as opposed to the passively accepted imposed image or the earnestly implored reflected image is entirely under Bette Midler's control.  The audience is there to say "yes." It knows it. It loves it. 

"Nice ass, huh?" in Jewish New York camp location.  The audience roars its approval.  She demands more response, "Come on! What do ya think I'm up here workin' my tits off for?" 

Her little breast-burdened body is plainly her conveyance.  She rides it out and wheels on all the fabled female roles : thirties Billie Holiday, all the Andrews Sisters . .  the lonely little nobody at the radio, listening to and waiting for the superstar.  But the trick is, we never forget the superstar she is waiting for is Bette Midler! 

Those thin little arms fan into giant moth wings daring the flame of orgiastic audience response.  That wildly crooked little face is a dictator instructing the Troops.  That killpower voice hypes the female role as put-on and take-off into overwhelming takeover.   

Myrna Lamb, playwright, author of "Mod Donna."

She fills the gap left in our hearts by the death of Janis Joplin.  She fills the need for a combination of the cynical and the sentimental. S he terrifies me in many ways - I don't know which element to believe.

 Mopsy Kennedy, writer.