The Trashy Trials Of “Miss M”
Hello Out There
Timothy White


I like a happy ending; I really do. But I would only insist on one if it was dramatically correct.
- Bette Midler, 1977 

At the church door stood an old soldier with a crutch and a funny long beard that was more red than white. He bowed right down to the ground and asked the old lady if he might dust her shoes. Karen also put out her little feat. "My! What beautiful dancing shoes!" said the soldier.  "Stick on tightly when you dance" and he slapped the soles with his hand. The old lady gave the soldier a penny and went into the church with Karen.  

Everyone stared at Karen's red shoes.  When Karen knelt at the altar and put her lips to the gold chalice, she thought only of the red shoes - it seemed to her as if they were floating before her eyes.  She forgot to sing the hymn and she forgot to say the Lord's Prayer.   

Then everyone left the church and the old lady got into her carriage.  Karen was about to step in after her when the old soldier said, "Look at the pretty dancing shoes!" Karen could not keep her feet still, she just could not resist dancing a few steps. And when she had begun, her feet continued to dance - it was as if the shoes had gained control over them. The coachman had to run after her ... and lift her into the carriage, but her dancing feet kicked the old lady violently. Finally she took her shoes off and her legs were still. 

Soon after this, the old lady lay ill and they said she could not live. But a big ball was to be given in town and Karen was invited. She looked at the old lady, who in any case could not live, and she looked at the red shoes. She put on the red shoes, for she thought there could be no sin in doing that, either. Then she went away to by the ball and started dancing.  Dance she did, and dance she must - straight out into the dark forest. 

Filled with terror, she tried to kick off the red shoes, but they stuck to her feet; she tore off her stockings, but the shoes had grown fast to her feet; and so dance she did, and dance she must, over field and meadow, in rain and sunshine, by day and by night. The shoes carried her over stump and thorn; she was scratched till she bled; she danced across the heath to a lonely little house. She knew that the executioner lived there, and she tapped with her finger on the  window-pane and cried, "Come out! Come out!" And the executioner said,  "You don't seem to know who l am... ." 

"Don't chop off my head, " said Karen, "for then I can never repent of my sin, but chop off my feet with the red shoes on!" 

Then she confessed her sin, and the executioner chopped off her feet ... and the shoes danced away with the little feet in them, over the fields into the depths of the forest: She kissed the hand which had wielded the ax ... then she went to the Rectory and begged to be taken into service there. 

The following Sunday when they went to church, they asked her to go with them, but with tears in her eyes she looked sadly at her crutches. Left alone, she went into her tiny room. It was just big enough for a bed and chair; she sat down with her hymnbook, and while she was reading it devoutly the wind carried the organ notes from the church straight into her room. She raised her face, all wet with tears, and said, "Lord, help me""

-Hans Christian Andersen
 

"There are my red shoes," says Bette Midler, pointing hesitantly at her image on the nearby jacket of her critically and commercially disastrous third album, Songs for the New Depression.  The cover photo, taken by Vogue fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville, depicts Bette as an urban Pierrette ragamuffin, shuffling off with an insolent smirk after having defaced a bosomy poster of 1973's shooting star, The Divine Miss M.  Trailing in the wake of this vagrant's Pyrrhic victory are the laces of her roseate ballet slippers. 

But for the photograph's dreamy quality, it would seem a statement of near-terminal self-doubt. When presented last year with such a dismally bemused Image - by the singer herself - many professional observers inevitably raised a question probably nagging at  every fading Bette Midler fan from Malibu to Manhattan: Does this young woman really know what she's doing? 

'That photo was my 'Red Shoes' statement," Midler explains with a pensive grin as she slumps back in her chair.  "Have you ever seen The Red Shoes? It'd change your life. It's based on the fairytale; it's a ballet movie that's a mixture of fantasy and reality, and it's about the ballet master who's trying to mold the young dancer. The film is all Shcrm and Drang, really boring, and then the ballet parts come and it's the most amazing thing you've ever seen!  But the ballerina can't take the red shoes off - she has to dance forever." 

There are two versions of The Red Shoes: Michael Powell's own sublimely surreal 1948 film tragedy of a beautiful prima ballerina (Moira Shearer) bewitched by her ambition and her pantofie; and the original fable created in the mid1800s by an ugly, conceited Danish writer, its storyline so Gothic it is often excluded from those collections of his work intended for pre-adolescent readers.   

Predictably, Bette Midler prefers the wide-screen adaptation.  Interestingly enough, only Andersen's tale has a happy ending - the remorseful little girl ascends tranquilly into heaven; the unrepentant Moira is crushed beneath the wheels of a train. 

"I'm not ashamed of New Depression," Bette continues, flicking from her forehead an errant corkscrew of her multibleached (orange, blonde, brown) Orphan Annie thatch. "I thought 1974 and '75 were a Depression; desolate.  Nixon had quit, all those awful 'snuff' porn murder films came out and the Anvil [a Chelsea butch / S&M bar] was getting a lot of press and I thought, 'People are going to start killing each other.  I have to make some kind of a statement!” which was to pull back. 

'The dress I'm wearing [on the album cover] isn't really a dress; it's made up of fourteen skirts, a pair of painter's pants, tights, odds-and-ends - the effect being a 'bag lady' or rather the ghost of one. She's all in white, you see, so it's my fantasy.  At the time, I thought it was the end of the world, so I was making a very whimsical, reactionary album. 

"I love fantasy. I think there's not a whole lot of it any more - everything's pretty hard and cold. But you know fantasy's a stumbling block sometimes. You get too deep into that fantasy shit and people don't follow it. Little did I know there was no market for whimsy that year. I thought the record was really gonna go somewhere but I made a miscalculation. 

"So there I am in my red shoes – and now I have to clump about in them for the rest of my life."   

Clump she has and clump she must, at least for the time being.  Bette was to have danced and sung this past winter in the New York City Ballet's production of The Seven Deadly Sins, the venerable light opera with choreography, composed by Kurt Weill with libretto by Bertolt Brecht.  There was a splashy press reception for the official announcement; Midler and grandfatherly George Balanchine, director of the ballet company, threw Broadway buddyarms around each other and the flashbulbs of Gotham's paparaui popped almost as intensely as they had two years ago, when Miss M and manager Aaron Russo unveiled her Clams on the Half-shell Revue at the Palace Theater. 

These cool white fireworks must have been a karmic boost to Midler's battered ego, but the spots had scarcely faded from her eyes when the ballet's musicians union called a crippling strike. Despite the job action, she rehearsed in earnest for a projected January 23 opening. But as negotiations dragged on, the slim prospects for a settlement placed in jeopardy the upcoming Los Angeles taping of a television special slated to air next fall. It seemed the NBC-TV writers were also planning to strike - on March 1. At the last minute, The Seven Deadly Sins was scrapped and Bette would leave for the coast with no guests yet contracted for her all-important debut network variety bash. 

“I was just getting my moves down," she would later lament. "George Balanchine is such a sweet old man and I loved the opportunity to return to the New York stage. We may try it again for the spring . . . " But she knew there was little or no chance of resurrecting the project.  In her best Dorothy Parker pout she said: "There are movers who sing, singers who dance, and dancers who move while they sing - and trashy people who get away with everything.  Honey, all I wanted to do was just open my mouth and circulate...."  But where, and with whom!  The sad truth was that Sins was just the latest in a series of spotlights that had prematurely burned out, once again leaving the Mortal Miss M stranded in the dark. 

The expansive, 19th-floor offices of the Rogers & Cowan agency, East Coast engine room for the public relations might behind Steve McQueen, the Beach Boys, Tony Bennett and Chicago, are mostly dark, and empty of any life. As 31-year-old Bette Midler rises from her padded swivel chair to pour herself another gulp of white wine, the New York skyline looming over her shoulder seems to blink in disbelief at her subcelestial profile. Makeup-less (she wears very little offstage) and dressed in second-skin jeans, high boots with spike heels and a frumpy waist-fitted white sweater with billowy sleeves.  Bette resembles some late '50s gin mill wallflower done up to exalt the Woman Left Lonely - a vaguely pock-faced bundle of brass and flooze who never took home more than  a case of the dry heaves. 

Then she cracks one of the self-deprecating jibes ("Aww, I'm just a punk") that have lately replaced her fabled audience-aimed pastiche and smiles hugely. The goofy crescent toothorama fills the place with the raw charm of a minx who loves making faces at a world of Elmer Fudds.  Instantly, it's easy to see why Johnny Carson put aside his Midwestern wariness one evening in 1972 to assure his addlepated guest that she was destined to be "a very big star in this business." 

You've gotta laugh along, it's so so ridiculous; why isn't this adorable nut the biggest thing since sliced bread? But in the sterile silence the smile soon wilts; her bloomed complexion returns to its fluorescent pallor and it's time for another belt of wine. There's really nothing to do but retrace some of the epic misfortunes that accompanied one person's Rockslide.   

"I took a year off after The Divine Miss M and the second album," Midler begins offhandedly. "I couldn't take it. There was a lot of infighting going on between the old guard and the new guard, meaning Aaron [Russo, her personal manager since September of 1972] and the people I'd brought with me from the time I started in maybe '67: Barry (Manilow, her arranger), my old girls [Harlettes Melissa Manchester, Gail Kantor and Merle Miller] and my old manager, Marty Bregman. I was with him for seven - count them - years and he never did a thing  for me, nothing.  I paid him thousands of dollars.  I saw the way I was going and I went and got someone else." 

"So there was that," Bette proceeds, "and there was a big battle about what the percentages were going to be. You know, the money - it's always the money.   Then I was also trying to broaden my comic perspective. I was always trying to learn a new way of doing something funny. If it was physically funny, I wanted to learn it. If this writer's dialogue wasn't right, I wanted to find someone who would give me new dialogue. 

"There was a point where there was a lot of backbiting in my camp and I couldn't put my finger on it. I didn't know who was telling the stories. Gossip, gossip - it's deadly in this business. I used to get stories from one guy and then somebody else would come in and tell me the same thing with a different slant on it. I didn't know which end of the stick was up. 

"Unfortunately, I think I alienated some of my old friends because I wanted to bring new people in. There was disgruntlement because people didn't like or want to be shunted aside. And they were right. I tried to arrange it so that everyone would be happy but eventually some would always get annoyed and people would leave me." 

The first principal to bow out was Melissa Manchester, who embarked on a solo career shortly after fledgling manager Aaron Russo's initial coup: Bette's '72 New Year's Eve extravaganza at Philharmonic Hall.  Sources allege that Melissa was the "Divine Miss Fink" accorded special thanks in the credits of the Bette Midler LP but her former boss dismisses the notion. 

"There was no rift between Melissa and I," she says. "We're much too good friends for that. It was more a disagreement. She called me up two weeks before we were supposed to go on tour and she said she was leaving. Things like that upset the hell outta me." 

After five relatively successful Bell/Arista albums and a hit single ("Midnight Blue") that surpassed Midler's own "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,"  Manchester no longer likes to speak about her days as a member of the "Celestial Choir."  Husband-manager Larry Brezner is candid in detailing the reasons why. 

“Melissa's association with Barry and Bette - through no fault of theirs – has caused her a lot of pain both personally and publicly," he confides. "They're all friends, understand, but she's suffered as a result of comparisons to Bette. You put anyone up next to Bette Midler and they're gonna suffer, although Melissa and Bette are two different kinds of performers. I think Melissa would prefer that the press just forgot the past. It really has not been easy for her." 

Not so for Barry Manilow, a MOR magician who's proved a goldmine for a man who once refused to sign Bette Midler - Arista Records' President Clive Davis. Emerging as a mid-'70s amalgam of David Gates and Neil Sedaka, the much-maligned singer-songwriter has had the last hearty laugh, making millions of dollars for all concerned with his syrupy pop records: "I Write the Songs," "Mandy," "This  One's  for  You," "Weekend in New England," etc. The gravity of this turnabout is not lost on Bette, who concedes her early collaborations with Barry were "tempestuous." 

"We used to fight," she says with an embarrassed chuckle. "We did, mostly, because I would want to rehearse for hours and hours and I would never pay him! He got a salary, so I figured, 'Well, that's enough." 

Midler feels the key to Manilow's lucrative formula lies "in the arrangements more than the content of the tunes. Barry is even more middle-of-the-road than Bread is. His music doesn't offend you and you aren't crazed by it - which I like': [She rolls her eyes wildly.] This is the reaction of the 60’s; all the rough edges are gone. There are a lot of people who don't want to be shaken up. They want to be bathed in a lot of strings. And I think it's gonna get even worse before it's over.  I knew it was gonna happen. I felt it coming."

But she didn't know how to get out of the way. 

"The terrible reviews I got on my second album convinced me that I had no worth as a human being and that I might as well pack it in," Midler states unsmiling. “When I finally took a step back and a breath, I almost fell down. I almost had a breakdown from it. I didn't have a whole lot of time to think about it because I was completely wrapped up in the moment. See, I worked steadily from 1965 till the time it really burst up for me in 1973. I didn't have any time to think that I could fail. 

"When I was doing the Johnny Carson shows, I didn't think they meant bullshit!  I didn't think they meant anything. I was doing them because I was booked and I had to do them. And every time they would call me up to do another one I had to work up some amazing other thing – I didn't know any of that stuff until I was pushed up against the wall and I had to learn a new song and a new act to go around it. I was too young; too green.  That's why I think the reviews were so rough on me - because I never thought that I could do anything wrong.   

"So I took the year off and I was miserable, just miserable," she confesses, eyeing me squarely. "I went to Paris and I gained a lot of weight. I ate like a pig -like a pig.  I mean if you're gonna eat, ya might as well go to Paris. And I threw myself into some affairs. That's always good - you have a lot of material afterwards. At the end of 1974, Aaron called me up and said, 'Well, I think you should go back to work.' I didn't have an idea - no ideas. My mind was like a blank blackboard. 

"I went back to work in this Clams show, which we all threw together. Even though I was a little confused about it, it was a humongous success. And then I started to tour again, did my show in Cleveland for syndicated cable TV, and I've been working fairly steadily ever since. 

"This past summer I spent in L.A. writing my new single “You're Movin' Out Today," coauthored with Carol Sager and Bruce Roberts] and tryin' to put together some movie things. I have movie commitments now and that, when you're trying to make a record too, is the pits.   

"I mean, for a -record album it's forty minutes and you're done, but a film is two-and-a-half hours of socko-boffo and it all has to be great and you can't be satisfied with crap. I feel in this rackert - and it is a racket - that every time you do something you have to come back afterwards. You do what you can do, you lay low and you start to work again. But every time you start to work again it is a comeback." 

There have been reports that she was considering the starring role in a film biography of Helen Morgan or Sophie Tucker. 

"They didn't happen because I avoided them. That's what I do when I'm not comfortable with a situation. I just avoid it altogether. Robert Altman asked me to do Nashville; I turned 'em all down. I felt I couldn't make a contribution, although, looking back on it, I probably could have made a contribution. I thought, what if I'm not in charge here, I'm not gonna be able to do what I can do. They're gonna tell me what to do and I want to please them, but then how much leeway will I have?   I've never been in a situation where I wasn't the director. 

"In every case, I have not made the wrong decision," she declares with unconvincing finality. "In everything I've turned down, it's been fine. I have not made a mistake." 

"I think the thing with Dylan on Bette's last album was a mistake," says Aaron Russo, a round, jocund, brute of a man, as we ride up Eighth Avenue in the back of his chauffeured white limousine. "The song [a ragged remake of "Buckets of Rain"] had nothing to do with the album at all. What happened was Dylan wanted her to be in his Rolling Thunder Revue movie. They were talking about it and she said, 'Well, there's a possibility I'll do it, but I would like you to sing a song with me.' He came to the studio one night and they just went out and did this piece. I don't think it was thought out and planned. It doesn't sound like it. I fought putting it on the album. 

"Bette loves that album. I didn't care for it, didn't think it was something the public wanted to hear, and I didn't think they got the essence of Bette Midler on it.  The choice of material was not the best, the production wasn't particularly terrific and I thought it was something she was doing for her own satisfaction, as opposed to the publics. I didn't feel anything commercial on that album - and I don't mean commercial in the trite sense; I mean things people can relate to. 

"The Dylan song," he snorts disdainfully, "it was something they wanted to put in so maybe her and Dylan could have a single out of it - that to me is trite commercialism." 

The Gospel According to Aaron Russo, offered with a smile but meant to be taken with a hard swallow. Two years ago, Russo, then 31, was one of the most feared, respected and disliked men in the entertainment industry. Known as  Baron Bruiso by his enemies and more than a few of his friends, he was the guy smart / coarse enough to snag Bette Midler when she was on the brink of releasing one of the more acclaimed pop-rock Ips of the last five years and parlay performer and product in a media blitz of awesome proportions. He acted on sheer ballsy instinct, believing with all his heart that she would be the greatest star of our time; of all time. For some reason, he still does. 

"The terrific thing about Bette to my mind is that she's the consummate performer," he enthuses, looking over at me with a coercive glare. "She may make great records, she may make bad records, but when she goes on that stage you know it's gonna be a great show!  Even if she's off that night, she'll be better than anyone else! Anytime she performs live, there's no one who can touch her! No one – I don't care who it is! The way she drains your emotions, from laughter to tears, it's like that!" He snaps his stubby fingers powerfully. 'You look at Mick Jagger; he's a great singer and a wonderful stage performer but it's very much one thing!  Bette has a sense of drama about herself that most people don't have and couldn't learn! Even Janis, one of my all-time favorites, was just one thing! But Bette!  Bette is much ... broader. .. ." 

Aaron Russo is one big, beefy drink o’ water, and when he gets wound up and starts throwing those fencepost forearms around, there's no subduing - or disbelieving him. How, you might ask, does one develop such an ingratiating arrogance; so threateningly persuasive a carnival spiel? 

First of all, you've gotta be young and hungry; if not physically then spiritually.  Secondly, you must be bored beyond mere words, a top-drawer, upper-middleclass daydreamer. To advance to this level one needs a wide berth and the means to move faster than anybody else around you, so special equipment is required: a large house in a wealthy Jewish community on Long Island; a ready wad; a black Corvette; a steady source of full-tilt blotter acid and one reasonably good idea a year.

Finally: You must "hate the fucking underwear business." 

In this way, the God that made tight shoes, frigid places to shit and little rotten apples blessed Aaron Russo with permanent agitation and the kind of sweaty dockyard stealth that snaps necks. This nimble entrepreneur's accomplishments over the last ten years belie these oily credentials: he once owned and operated two long-defunct rock palaces – the Kinetic Playground in Chicago and the Easttown Theater in Detroit  ("It was 1968. Bill Graham was Hertz with his Fillmores and I was Avis"); signed a dimly remembered group called the Flock to two major companies (Atlantic and Columbia) on the same day; had his own record label - Kinetic  Records  (Clive Davis used it as barter to acquire the Flock); shepherded to tentative prominence the Manhattan Transfer (they're presently suing him), and supposedly, while a salesman with the Russo Bros. Underwear Company, designed the first ladies bikini panties manufactured in this country. ("I did it because women's underwear used to come up over their hip-huggers - know what I mean") 

All of these feats pale, of course, when compared to his foresight in the Bette Midler sweepstakes. 

“The first time I saw Bette was on the Carson show," says Russo, gazing out the lime window. "The first time I met her I still had the unsuccessful record label as part of Columbia Records. I wanted to sign her, the same way I wanted to sign Don McLean - but Columbia said 'American Pie' was 'too long.'  Anyhow, Clive wasn't into it. Two years later, I met her again through an old friend and we became friends. Her career was doing zero; she'd been signed to Atlantic for about seven months but still hadn't put out her first album. She asked me to manage her and some lawsuits started with her old manager but we settled them. Then I walked in on the album and started having trouble with Barry Manilow and Joel Dorn, who were producing the album with Ahmet Ertegun, but we worked that out too for the most part . 

"Ahmet was always pissed off at me because I gave the Flock to Columbia.  When he heard I was managing Bette, all sorts of strange things started happening.  She got a call in the middle of the night from somebody saying I was part of the Mafia, a hired killer, and it scared the shit out of her. She called me and said, 'Look, I don't think you can manage me. I'm afraid.  People have told me all these things about you." 

Russo massages his gray, bearded face as if reliving the anguish. 

"I said, 'Bette, if you're really afraid, I understand.  Do what you gotta do. Don't worry; I'll let' you go.' Twenty minutes later, she tells me, 'Fuck them all! I want you to manage me!'   

"When she did that," says Russo, his basement baritone wavering ever-so-lightly, "when she showed that faith in me, there's nothing in the world I wouldn't do for her. How could I not repay that kind of belief in full? I think I would die for her," 

Midler's fortunes may be faltering somewhat but it hasn't quite come to that yet. In the meantime, Russo is concentrating on making his property "bigger in Hollywood than Streisand."

"Listen to this," he pleads, drying his huge, shiny palms on the sleeves of his lumberjack shirt. "The most amazing thing about her movie career is that she is, I think, the first woman performer in history coming from another area who has been able to go into a major studio – Columbia - and rather than be an actress for hire, have the studio invest time and money in tailoring scripts for her! In her own production company [Divine Pictures]!  That's something that Barbra or Steve McQueen or Dustin could do today but not anyone who's never done it before! We firmed the deal up last June." 

Have they settled on any scripts? 

"George Furth and Joan Rivers [the comedienne] are writing one, which is an all-out musical comedy. But not where everybody sings to each other on the streets a la Howard Keel and Julie Andrews; the script is tailored to her style.  It's about a superstar who's on tour and the relationship between her and her manager and the things that go on. 

"But she's not playing Bette Midler," he emphasizes. "Right now in the script she’s being called Joy Fisher but that will probably be changed; I don't care for the name. What the music's gonna be exactly hasn't been decided yet; she's not gonna go on and do Ethel Merman. 

"Then there's another script that a fellow named Amold Schulman is writing.  Know him?  He wrote Love with a Proper Stranger, Goodbye Columbus and Funny Lady, a lot of nice movies. This one is about a girl living in New York who's just a little bit off-center. She's an autograph collector, loves the theater and still believes in the glory of Broadway. Her mother brought her up that way. Her whole goal in life is to be the queen of the autograph collectors. Basically, it's about how she meets a bus driver one day, their love affair and her search for the about 90 years old who's a former superstar. 

“It’s not a musical," Russo warns hurriedly. "It's very much La Strada, bittersweet, and will really show off her dramatic ability." 

But not before Russo demonstrates his own buskined flair. 

"A lot of people didn't understand a lot of my past moves," he mutters darkly, "and why, when Bette was soaring with Newsweek covers and the Palace shows, I all of a sudden took her away. I said to her, 'Look. You are peaking.' My feeling was that we could have taken that further and done what Elton John did, but that would tend to cut her career shorter. 

"To me, Bette is gonna be a star for the next 30-40 years. A manager's function is the navigator of a plane headed, say, for California. Right now, I feel that maybe we're over Iowa - we're well on our way. But the moves are different from how they'd be if she said, 'I want to be a famous rock singer.’

"When I first said to Bette, 'Where do you want to go?  What do you want to be?' Her answer to me was 'I want to be a legend."' 

Bold aspirations, to be sure. But as the old saying goes, "You can 'want' in one hand, and spit in the other, and see which fills up the fastest." 

Aaron Russo, the Billy Rose of pop-rock, would have us believe he's got a seamless Forty-Year Plan for Bette Midler that he's been following like a train Schedule - doubtlessly with the complete and unflagging cooperation of Miss M herself. But if what both parties tell me is true, she may be more temperamental, and her ascent to Olympus more ragtag, than they would have us perceive. 

By his own admission, Russo "wasn't terribly pleased" with the second Bette Midler Ip ("It could've been a lot better. What we did was fall back on a lot of the things she was doing live, because it was there"), and his input during the recording of Songs for the New Depression was often ignored. Although the  second Ip went gold, neither rivaled the first in sales or critical acclaim, and both now can be found in the nation's discount bins. 

It's not surprising; Bette says that until recently she exhibited so little interest in her records that Atlantic "wouldn't even call me to tell me they were putting out a single. I would be drifting along, thinking about 'What could I wear?' and What could I say?' to my live audiences. I paid a lot of attention to my live audiences and I paid zippo to my records. It was only when I started writing that I figured I had an investment in them." 

Discussing the live concert front, the medium in which her manager believes Bette Midler's drawing power to be invincible, Russo initially insisted that her extended vacation in 1974 was "a conscious decision" but later conceded that "a vacation of six, seven months turned into a year, which was too long. I wanted her to go to Europe to tour but Bette didn't want to. 

"Finally, I said, We're going back to work. I booked a Broadway theater for Clams on the Half-shell and the ads are breaking next week.' She said, 'What do you mean next week!' So she was forced, in a sense, to go back to work." 

Regarding past, present and future recording forays, Russo has taken Bette on a number of "experimental" side trips into the studio, one of the most notable being a Motown session just prior to her third album, in which four R&B-flavored sides were cut with Hal Davis producing and James Carmichael arranging. Aaron was dissatisfied with the results, believing "something was missing. None of the songs were hit singles."  He vows they'll never see the light of day. Her "You're Movin’ out Today" single, was released two months ago with no fanfare. As of this writing it's languishing in the low 100s. 

Works in progress and / or in the can include a live two-record set and another studio effort being produced by Brooks Arthur which Russo regards as a "killer."  Perhaps, but it's hard to share his confidence after being exposed to the indecisive side of the man. 

"I'm not sure if the live album should come out now or after the studio album," he mulls as we speed along, acknowledging that he's fishing for an opinion.  

"We're still considering a title, too. [Live at Last!] I don't want people misinterpreting why we're coming out with a live record. The last album was an unsuccessful one and I don't want people to think we're coming out with a live set just to have product out there; just as filler to take us off the hook. And yet, the more time goes by between the last tour and the live album, the less important I think it becomes. But it sounds so good. . ." 

Russo is resolute and unyielding, however, where certain star-stoking maxims are concerned ... 

“You lose the mystique when you get to know someone too well," he rules. "It's important that [Bette] maintain it, so I keep her a little removed, aloof. If you see someone on the Johnny Carson show, spouting all their lifelong secrets, you lose interest." 

... until he sees fit to violate them. 

"Bette is a sweet, warm, paranoid, neurotic, wonderful human being," Russo volunteers. "She's still a scared, confused girl, who is also a woman, always saying, 'My career's going downhill! Nobody loves me anymore! Nobody cares! I don't know how to sing! I'm not a good actress!' You know, always constantly putting herself down - that's the fuel that feeds her. 

"She came from a background where she was the only white, Jewish person in a poor Samoan neighborhood [outside Honolulu, in an area called Aiea]. She grew up with her retarded brother, Daniel, and [younger] sister Susie, who's a doll.  Her older sister [Judith] died in an automobile accident [in 1968]; her mother and father, he's a retired housepainter, did not get along well most of their lives. Bette really loves her family but they've had a very profound effect on her.  I'm not even sure she knows how deeply. 

"She grew up not feeling very attractive about herself, thinking she was not very appealing to men. That has been a great motivating factor in her life - getting people to say they love her. Now she has a lot of people telling her this and she's trying to decide who means it and who doesn't.  That's the real problem she has. I think she still dislikes men for it, even though she doesn't think so." 

There is at least one man for whom Bette Midler harbors a certain amount of resentment, if not outright hostility: Paul Simon. The two met in 1975 while Simon was working on his Still Crazy After All These Years Ip and he invited her to sing along with him on a song he'd recently written called "Gone at Last." The track was cut different ways with the Tessy Dixon Singers and a group of Muscle Shoals session men but when the single hit the airwaves the finished track blaring out of a winter's worth of car radios bore no remote resemblance to the song Midler remembered working on. Why, the female lead wasn't even her but . . Phoebe Snow! 

"That was a very strange event," Bette recalls candidly, "a very strange thing, and to this day I don't exactly know what happened. I don't remember how I met Paul but we hit it off very well, became friends, went out a few times and he played me this song. He asked me to be on it with him; I said that would be fine'. 

"Then we got to the record companies and who was gonna get it; it got very ugly. Ahmet said one thing, the guy at Columbia said another thing. There was a lot of tension coming from a lot of places; from the record companies and at the session. 

"Paul didn't like the track, I think, although he was probably too polite to say that he didn't. I think it just festered. He wasn't too happy with me either, I suspect. In any event, it all came to a head. 

"I stopped hearing from him," she says with undisguised regret. "One day the record came out but I wasn't on it! And there had been a certain amount of advance publicity. I was very hurt; it took me a long time to get over it. I'm being very honest with you - no one ever asked me about this. In my inimitable fashion, I made a couple of scenes the next time I saw him; I was just awful. 

"Paul's a very private person and he doesn't like airing his dirty laundry in public. In fact, I venture to say that he doesn't like doing his laundry at all - 'Oooh! Did she really say that?' 

"He was the first person I ever met who I couldn't draw out of himself. I couldn't make it work. And like I say, I embarrassed myself and embarrassed him, once in a violent way." 

Bette leans forward  intently  and recounts her public indiscretion with an odd mixture of delight and wine-enhanced remorse. 

“I got very drunk," she says, “cause I was real hurt - I shouldn't be telling you this - in the Hamptons one night. I went to watch a movie at someone's house and I didn't know I was gonna run into Paul and I did run into him. As soon as he came in the door I said, 'Get me another gin and tonic!' I must have put about six gin and tonics into my system and the more gin, the louder I got, until it came to a point where the evening was over and he came to say hello and goodbye. I said, 'Come on and we'll have a chat.' We went into the kitchen and it wasn't a chat for very long, I did all the yelling. . ." 

Midler raises her eyes in abject mortification, but her beaming grin betrays her sense of triumph. "I haven't seen him in over a year," she allows with a catty flip of the palm. "Others have, however - ooh, hon-nee! You hang around, you learn!" 

Baron Bruiso is likewise none too fond of Simon. His account of the abortive alliance expands pointedly on some of the themes at which Miss M only hinted. 

"I think what it was, was that Bette was looking for a single and asked Paul to write something for her," he says coolly.  "He came up with the song and called her and said, 'We'll do it together and we'll split it.' Then he had to start changing the deal around.... I think Paul got a little bit greedy and decided he wanted more money for it. 

"I think Paul and Bette were having a little bit of-an affair," he suddenly discloses, "which didn't sit too well with me because Bette and I have had our own for long enough. I didn't care for that, I must say. But then I'm the jealous kind of man. 

"I have no use for Paul Simon," Russo says. "The man is a great talent but . . . as far as I'm concerned, if I never saw him for the rest of my life it would suit me fine. He has a chip on his shoulder that is too much for me to deal with. He has such a complex about being short and his come-on is so obnoxious, I find him difficult to want to know, or to care to know.  The lack of my enthusiasm in putting the [Simon-Midler record] deal together sort of killed it; it fell of its own weight." 

When I questioned Simon last year about the convolutions "Gone at Last" underwent prior to its release, he was a model of gentlemanly composure. Asked if Bette Midler's no-show was the result of a personal falling out, he calmly stated, "It was not. 

"I couldn't get the record companies to agree," he maintained.  "And then it became so much wrangling and haggling that it just wasn't worth it. The version with Bette had more of a Latin, street feel, if you can imagine that. I changed the concept with Phoebe and tried a gospel approach because she was perfect for it. 

"Bette and I have no plans to do any other work together." 

And so Bette Midler remains suspended somewhere between her New York nexus and the deep blue Pacific. Many of her old associations are gone at last. There are fewer demons to deride her. But you've got to have friends, and at the very least she has an adoring one in Aaron Russo. 

"I will never forget that flush of happiness," she intones fervently, but Bette isn't referring to a hot night at the Continental Baths or her '73 Grammy Award as Best New Artist. 

"It came when I sang 'Lullaby of Broadway' as the sixth grade's entry in the school talent show - all the classes voted and I got the $2 first prize!" 

Bette Midler's fairy-tale expectations have always fought with her difficult realities, but it was in that moment that she first saw an escape route. There was a way to blur her own harsh picture of herself and numb the cruelties inflicted by Hawaiians who mocked the pale outsider - a chesty, unpretty Jewish haole.  So she plunged headlong into singing, telling jokes - performing. To fill up her lonely Saturday nights she formed a Lennon Sisters-styled folk group called the Pieridine Three ("It means, 'like a butterfly"'). Flight was imperative. 

'"The position I found myself in as a girl was having to entertain the enemy," she says. "I was the only person like me in my class, in my school, in my neighborhood; that was the only way they would like and accept me." 

She's still one of a kind and her obiectives haven't changed. Ten years later, Bette is locked in a desperate dance with the same old obsessions, hoping the pained fantasies from her past will find a happier home in her future. 

"Hundreds of families lived alongside mine in Halawa," she recalls wistfully. 

"It was a public housing barracks so you had a lot of welfare people and civil servants. Like all those places, it tended to breed petty crime. There was lots of shoplifting in the Aiea area, in which I was very actively engaged during my high school years. And, oh God, I never after have had the kind of thrill I got when I was shoplifting! It was always cosmetics; lipstick, powder, hairdye - I started dyeing my hair when I was 12  and it drove my father wild.  He didn't want any of  his children turning out to be whores. 

"Once my friend and I were shoplifting al a Woolworth's or a Piggly-Wiggly's; we were carrying those great big purses women were using then and we were loaded with stuff we'd taken. As we were leaving the store it was pouring rain, approaching a hurricane. My girlfriend had a cold, and she got down on her knees in the middle of this deserted road and repented. She cried, 'Oh God, if I  don't catch pneumonia, I swear I'll never shoplift again!' And she didn't, so after that I had to go by myself - I didn't get down on my  knees, see. Never. But she did, and I was impressed at the religiousness of it all. She died not long after  that in a car crash. 

"So many of my friends met bad ends, I was relieved I guess to leave Hawaii in 1965. The day I did you should have seen us all in that car.  Everybody cried – even my father cried, which was unusual. I told my family I was gonna be a star.  We strapped the suitcase to the top of the trunk - it was one of those plaid jobs with the zipper flap - and headed for the airport. I was wearing a plaid dress and had on my first pair of nylons and a girdle with a garter belt - for a ten-hour flight! If you think I wasn't sick, you're dead wrong hon-ee. 

"But I was too excited to get comfortable, to move. I just sat there in my cramped seat, trying to imagine New York City and what a giant star I was gonna be.   Whatever happens to me, I won't regret it. I sat there like a big dope and you know I was so excited I never even took off – my God! - my red high-heeled shoes."