Bette Midler
The Girl Inside The Rose
Stephen M Silverman

Special thanks to BabyDivine for sharing this article


Something more than a polite spring shower was falling outside the New York Hilton the evening Twentieth Century-Fox took over the penthouse to honor both Bette Midler and the start of shooting on The Rose. In fact, it was a downpour. Yet those on the carefully screened guest list – some of whom had followed Midler from her long-ago nights of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” in a West Side club - arrived in droves. 

The star recently had won over the town again in a series of performances at the Copacabana. And now here she was, up close, and, curiously, causing whispers for the wrong reasons. 

No one was repeating any of the outrageous bons mots that she might have been throwing about as she mingled through the crowd. Indeed, it appeared she had none to say; nearly everyone received a cordial hello. Something was different, certainly in appearance. Peroxide and liquid protein had taken care of that. Gone were the electric red hair and sense of, well, ampleness. But gone, too, was her electric stage presence, and that was disappointing. 

“Wait a minute,” someone said. “Is that Bette Midler?” 

“This is me,” said 32 year-old Midler, tugging at a long blonde curl. “And this is how I’m going to stay. Blonde. Maybe.” She smiled, which turned her eyes into narrow slits. Then she puckered her lips, as if protecting herself from the next question.  Would she be doing another New York concert? 

“For the movie? No. We were going to, but there wasn’t time. Now we’re going to do that out there.” Out there? California?  

“Yeeeeeeeesssss,” she said, batting her eyelashes in a parody of a movie star. Was she nervous about making her first film?

“Oh this isn’t my first film,” she gasped. “I’ve never told anybody this. I never thought I’d have any reason to. But once I was an extra. I was an extra in The Detective with Frank Sinatra. And then I was an extra in – are you ready? - Goodbye, Columbus. Thirty-two fifty a day and two hours on the train to watch Ali MacGraw snap at the straps of her bathing costume.” Bette Midler made imaginary motions to snap at the tiny waist of her jeans. “She wanted to be skinny for her movie,” offered Aaron Russo, her manager, shrugging his shoulders. “You want to know how she lost weight? She stopped eating. She’s also tired and a little nervous right now.”

So was Russo. Filming was to begin the next day in the penthouse, which would serve as the office of Rose’s manager. Cast and crew would remain in the city an additional 14 days and then would return to California for nine more weeks of shooting. Locations on the West Coast would simulate Florida, where most of the movie’s action is set. “I don’t know what to think of first,” said Russo, who is producing his first film.

Bette Midler stands preening before a microphone. Behind her is her backup trio, the Harlettes - “three examples of strictly non-kosher meat,” she tells her audience. The witty stage patter is just beginning. The year is 1968, and the place is the Continental Baths, the now defunct gay haunt on Manhattan’s West Side.  

From there to the New York Hilton is a long trip, but Bette Midler has made it. She is big time, and her audience has grown from New York’s gay set to a national following. But singing is only part of a Midler concert. She is a deft monologist, with a breath taking range of cultural references, from Fifties high school slang to Samuel Johnson. Between songs she zings in every direction one-liners, bawdy jokes, four letter words, Long Island nasal accents (“Harry, did she really say that?), and wilting insults (“It’s very 1971 of you to come out in that dress”). 

Even as Midler parodies - in songs or jokes - she evokes. She can draw from several second-rate to do one number, and yet make it uniquely her own. She can take trashy pop songs and transform them into something brimming with emotion and power. The gifts of Bette Midler - who has been called part Edith Piaf and part Sophie Tucker, once even prompted a critic to say, “It is Midler’s special appeal and inimitable strength of personality, that she can let herself satirise and be moved by what most of us want only to leave behind.” Midler has turned out five albums, though her first - with such tracks as “Am I Blue”, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”, and “Delta Dawn”, - remains the most popular. The Midler audience tends to be urban and young, and yet as varied as her material. 

Midler often compares herself and her dress to Cher, basking in the laughter when the audience catches on to such a non sequitur. Cher is a television and concert star, but television tends to cramp Midler’s style, just as she leaves the network sensors working overtime. Her role in The Rose promises a no-holds-barred Bette, a larger than life personality in a larger than life art form. She plays Rose, a rock star who prepares for her concerts by swigging aquavit and banging a two-by-four against the wall to work up a sweat. She tends to abuse men in much the same manner.  

There is Rudge, her manager, who wears faded jeans and $400 lizard-skin boots, and there’s Houston Dyer, a chauffeur she picks up one night and seduces in a suite at the Plaza. 

Rose is vibrant, temperamental, intuitive, and, above all, lovable. She has no home to speak of; she is always on the road. In the world, all she has is her music, her fans, her boyfriend, and her manager. And she thinks she has them all at her fingertips. 

“I look pretty scraggly, I’m afraid.”  Alan bates was in New York with his family, ostensibly to promote his current film An Unmarried Woman. The family, still getting over the time difference between the East Coast and London, was preparing to move on to Los Angeles, where Bates would begin filming The Rose. He apologized for his appearance. “I’m preparing for this movie,” he said, tugging at his long hair and wiping across the day’s growth of beard. “I play Bette Midler’s manager. The director, Mark Rydell, told me ‘let everything grow,’ and he’d see how I looked once I arrived in California. The movie’s about Janice Joplin, so I have to have long hair. The fashion during her era.” 

Bates had yet to meet Midler, and the stories of her being difficult to work with had yet to reach his ears. “I’ve only seen a videotape of her concert in Cleveland,” said Bates, “and I found her terrific.” Joplin, on the other hand, he admitted to not being familiar with at all. “The movie’s a tragic story, yet a good one. Otherwise, why would Bette Midler be making her film debut with it?” 

Midler’s theme song has long been ‘Friends,’ a bittersweet number in which she eschews the sanctity of loneliness in favor of some sort of companionship. From the time she first sang that tune in the early Seventies, her companion has been the burly, 35 year old Aaron Russo, always as her manager and initially as her lover. The romantic relationship is no more, although, when Midler is near, Russo’s eyes never stray from her, and when she is gone, his conversation is still filled with her. “Wait till you see her on that screen,” says Russo, holding up his hand. “There’s only one person you’ll be able to compare her to. Chaplain.” 

It was Russo (“I’m Jewish. Most people think I’m Italian”) who shaped the Midler career, guiding her – the nice Jewish girl from Honolulu - out of the Broadway chorus where, in the late Sixties, she was one of the daughters in Fiddler on the Roof, and into the Continental Baths. Very quickly, he would then take her into other clubs, on to the Johnny Carson show, and, on to making records. 

“Some of the albums I’m not too crazy about,” Russo now admits. Her third album, Songs For the New Depression, met with a hostile reaction from critics and a less than enthusiastic response from the record-buying public. “But Bette always bounces back.” 

Urgently she bounces from her house in the Hollywood Hills to her Greenwich Village apartment. She claims not to like California, except when she’s there, just as she’ll willingly ignore Manhattan until she finds herself caught up in – if not leading – the excitement. Aaron Russo lives in California. 

“In Hollywood, I don’t like it that much. There are too many walls that exist between people. I want to get back to New York and start producing Broadway plays, but Bette, Bette could live anywhere. She’s always happy so long as she’s comfortable,” he says. “Bette and I would never do anything detrimental to her career. That’s what killed Elvis, if you ask me. Had he done quality films, he’d still be alive today. “Bette and I would pack up and go to Russia if I called her one morning and just said, ‘Come on let’s go.’ This isn’t ego, but if I say ‘Jump,’ she jumps. 

“Bette and I are not interested in exploiting her career for the movies. We had plenty of opportunity to do that.” Marvin Worth who produced Lenny and Aaron Russo are co-producers of The Rose. 

The figure of Janis Joplin haunts Worth, just as it seems to haunt this project. “Bette is not playing Janis,” he says. “The character is just not her, It’s a rock star, that’s all. She’s already at the top. I’m not showing the one-two-three step rise to the top. People in the music business say this is the most honest script they’ve ever read, It’s a mirror of the times.” 

The Rose, screenplay by Bo Goldman and Michael Cimino is set in 1969. Russo also insists that it’s not about Janis Joplin. “Rose is a composite: Janis, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison – and Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. Characters who get too caught up in the momentum of their lives to know when to stop.” Nor is The Rose about Midler. “I’ll tell her when to stop,” he says. “She’s emotional but not reckless.” 

To solidify the sound of the picture, Worth and Russo have hired Paul Rothschild, the former music producer for The Doors and yes, Janis Joplin. The music for The Rose will not be middle-of-the-road “or even the stuff from Bette’s albums. It’s going to be out-and-out rock,” Russo says. 

Bette Midler is seated in a black limousine in the middle of Forty-sixth Street, immediately in front of the Luxor Baths. The scene about to be shot calls for Midler to have an argument with Dyer, who is played by Frederic Forrest. He is supposed to hop out from behind the wheel and dash into the males-only haunt. Midler will pursue him. 

Earlier in the day, the interior sequences were filmed, with Midler racing past a crowd of elderly naked men lounging beside the pool. Between takes, her mobile home dressing room was parked in front of the School for Performing Arts, and the students came out in droves and shouted, “We want Bette! We want Bette!” 

“No!” roared Russo. “You want The Rose!”  Out came Bette. 

By the time filming was set for the street, it was 10.30 pm, and the theatre crowds were dispersing through the murky waters around Times Square. Many chanced to pass by The Rose set, and they stayed until they realized how long it takes to set up a shot. Midler waited patiently inside her limousine, being made up, making certain her rose-coloured gown was not wrinkling, and periodically rolling her eyes towards heaven. 

Director Mark Rydell says, “Bette’s performance is shattering. She has a very raw sense of the truth. This film is savage. The music is severe. And the look is brutal.” 

Forrest slams on the brakes – really a wooden pole lowers the car so it jolts as if it had just stopped – and the cameras roll. In character, he and Midler are yelling at one another while the drivers in the cars behind them begin loud honking. Forrest jumps pot and slams the door. “Oh, no,” he shouts at her, fuming inside the car. “I didn’t come back for some hootchy-kootchy dancer to start blowing my mind.” He loosens his tie and darts into the bathhouse. “I ain’t no hootchy-kootchy dancer!” Midler says, sticking her head out the window. She opens the door, jumps out, has a confrontation with a cabby, then walks – Donald Duck fashion – straight after Forrest. Her strut sparks laughter, and the exit brings enthusiastic applause. 

By one o’clock in the morning Bette Midler is back inside her mobile home, crouching on the divan. “What a day, what a day, what a day,” she sings, her voice going lower with each repetition. Then it shoots up again, “Why didn’t someone tell me that making movies was so much funnnnnnnnnn?” Again her eyes roll skyward.  

Her hair is not as blonde as it had been at the Hilton, returning more to a shade of red. Then the realization struck. Her hair was the lightest shade of rose. She smiles. By now Midler is a bit hoarse, but there is an excitement in her eyes. She is not the performer one envisages as strutting across a nightclub stage telling saucy stories. All one could imagine doing to this skinny, little thing, who clearly could pass for 10 years younger, is embracing her. 

“You know, I was ready to start making movies five years ago, but Aaron said no, not yet. I never would have made a movie if I knew I was going to have to wait five more years. But here I am. And it’s like a party. Every night. Can you imagine being invited to a party every night, where you’re the guest of honor? I don’t know how I got so lucky. And I’m being paid for it, too!” 

Is Rose a legend? “I’m not interested in playing legends. Of course I’ve met legends. And the people I would consider legends – I’m telling you – you could fit on the head of a very smallllllllllll pin. What’s a legend anyway? They last for about a minute. I want to present this woman as a person, not as a legend.” Then she rolls back on the divan, this time her entire head facing heaven. “I just want her to be honest,” she says firmly. “She has such a good heart and soul.”