Midler Grabs More Gusto
Is Bette Midler A Changed Woman?  Yes . . . and No
Michele Kort


When Bette Midler came on stage for the "Night for Gay Rights" benefit at the Hollywood Bowl two years ago, she had to face a restless, angry crowd. Richard Pryor's earlier routine - which ended with a request to "kiss my rich black ass" -- had touched off raw nerves among the predominately gay male audience. 

"Well,' vamped Midler when her turn came, "you can kiss my rich white ass.” 

Since she burst on the mass public consciousness in the early 1970s, Midler has had the knack for making fun of pretension - her own and others – in shows that are part humor, part nostalgia (for the Twenties through the Sixties), part show-business parody, and part straightforward pop/rock. She has a good time with the whole idea of roles, Ellen Willis observed in a 1973 review, by sharing with audiences "what it meant to be a performer, what it meant to be a fan, why all of us were a little of both." 

Midler recalled that evening at the Bowl when we met recently in her rented house high about Beverly Hills: “What a nightmare! I had no idea what was going on." I reminded her that she had spent much of her set wiping blood off her knees, and she revealed that it wasn't an infrequent occurrence at the time.   

''I used to drink a lot when I worked," she said, "There was one tour I did that I was drunk the whole tour. I used to do 20-foot knee slides with no kneepads.  After two weeks of this I woke up with knees that were so swollen I had to be taken to the hospital and wear ice pocks.  Yet I still kept doing those knee slides.” 

She also threw up before shows and cried a lot.  “I was terrible," she said, “I would get so fuzzy-headed I couldn't remember my lines. Once I did a show that was four hours long because I was so drunk I couldn't get off the stage. 

"Finally last year I had enough,” she said, "I didn't want to do it that way any more." 

Midler's made other big changes in her professional life in the past year, like firing her longtime manager, Aaron Russo. Managing herself, she recorded and released an album, Thighs And Whispers, which she calls the best she's made in a "long long long time," she finished a week of sold out shows at L.A’s Greek Theatre, and she's about to tour Europe.  On the personal side, she's maintained a 3-year steady relationship with actor Peter Riegert. And she's about to become a movie star. 

The film is The Rose, which was "loosely inspired" by the lives of Janis Joplin and those male performers now in rock and roll heaven who ''were on sort of a cutaway railroad car, just living too fast,” as Midler described them. The Rose premieres in early November, but more on that later. 

The ambitious starring role as ''the Rose" is a far cry from Midler's first film work as an extra in Hawaii, which was shot in the state of the same name, where Midler grew up.  The money she earned from Hawaii paid her way to New York, where she climbed from department store clerk to chorus girl in Fiddler on the Roof, to a principal role in Fiddler, to Village clubs, to the gay male Continental Baths, to Johnny Carson, and to stardom as 'The Divine Miss M.’  Around the time or her triumphant three-week engagement New York’s Palace Theater in the fall of 1973 she was called "the latest show business phenomenon" and was nearly everybody’s cover girl.  Newsweek, in its cover story, was moved to remark, “It’s safe to say that even Garland’s legendary appearances in the great old house never aroused so much anticipation as Bette Midler’s Palace debut.” 

It's also safe to say that Bette Midler has never reached quite so high a plane since.  She's hardly been inactive or unsuccessful, recording six albums, taping two TV specials, and putting together a grandiose Broadway show “Clams On The Half Shell.”  On the other hand, after her second album her record sales were only modest, and she tended at times to sort of disappear from public view. "I didn't do that much." she admitted, "I did 'Clams,’ I did little interviews, but I really wasn't doing anything. I was sort of in a period of transition. Growing up, I guess.” 

Perhaps the tremendous media hype of 1973 had been hard on her.  Not really,” she replied.  "I wasn't paying much attention. I was pretty much living my life the way I'd always lived it. I was just trying to make the music work and the stage shows interesting, and as they get bigger they get harder"   

What was especially hard, it seems, was the failure to find a formula for hit records after the popularity of her first two albums.  One easily remembers early Midler songs like “Do You Wanna Dance” or “Friends” or “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy Of Company B”.  But what can we hum from her other albums? "I liked my third record very much,” said Midler, “but it was not a big seller and it disappointed me.  My record career has been kind of checkered.  I didn't have a lot of communication with the label, didn't know them very well even though I've been with them a good long number of years now.'' 

She also lost the services of Barry Manilow after her second album as he caught a quirk flight to superstardom, and that left her without a musical director.  "I didn't have anybody just to call up in the middle of the night and sing songs with. I like to work with bands, good musicians." 

Midler's current upswing has a lot to do with how she's remedied her nagging musical direction and recording problems. Of Thighs And Whispers she said, "It has an energy to it which my last couple of records haven't had. There's a lot of stuff on it that’s very personal, accessible, and it's played real well and sung real well too, which is nice for a change.” 

Midler attributes the lack of energy to frustration in the studio and a fearful need to please critics, fans, and managers. But, "I no longer have that fear,” she said, "I don't have anyone to please but myself, I'm more willing to take e chances." 

Thighs And Whispers is slickly produced and arranged by Arif Mardin and features Midler’s typical mixture of upbeat songs and ballads, R&B and big band, parody and poignancy.  The biggest change is the disco flavor to many of the songs. I like the album but feel that her voice is rather buried, a problem with most slick pop record productions these days. She completely disagreed. "Maybe it's your pressing." she suggested. ''You should turn the treble up on your machine. On my machine my voice is really loud.” 

Our talk turned to the band that's now backing her, which includes talented 20-year-old keyboard player Randy Kerber who co-wrote with Midler the song "Hurricane" on the new album. "I like this band very much," she said. "I was always more of an entertainer type than a person who had a band. The girl performers like the Chers and the Ann Margrets, they don't have bands. They have someone who looks after them and that fellow puts the band together.  But I don't want to do it that way any more, I've gotten to the point where there are a certain kind of commercial and financial commitment you have to make if you’re going to be a musician.  You have to get that group of people around you who can express your ideas. It's taken me a long time to get to that point.”  

If Midler expresses a real "take charge" attitude toward her career now, it gibes with the fact that she is in charge.  She's been managing herself for about seven months since she fired Russo, a man who was sometimes portrayed by the media as Midler’s Svengali figure. 

“I was his Svenfali, give me a break,” she said with an edge of disdain.  "I introduced him to the world, poor thing.  Oh, I shouldn't be rude.  He was a fairly manipulative-type guy. There were certain kinds of withholding approbation-type games that went on between us that were not really healthy.  When I finally came around to realizing I didn't want to play the games any more I knew it was time to go, and so I went." 

Midler has an assistant, a lawyer, and business people to help her manage herself, but she's about ready to hire another full-charge manager.  "Managing yourself," she found out, "means you lose your sense of humor.” 

"I didn't realize:' she slid ruefully, “that once I was named as the one who had the overview, then the voices would be raised in the great hue and cry against me and my taste. In other words, anyone with any kind of a bitch would come to me. I would be so busy worrying about what side of the stage people were going to enter from and whether they were going to get per diem or not and who was going to buy road cases that I didn't remember my own name, literally.  That was what it was like in the past couple of weeks. Then I said, “Oh hell with this, you go do this, and I turned it over to the people who really should have done it in the first place.” 

Bette Midler, manager, is a role she's ready to relinquish. Bette Midler movie star, is a role she may soon have to embrace. She seemed a little embarrassed at the possibility, but obviously it's crossed her mind. 

"I've been sort of trying not to think about it.  And the day keeps getting closer and closer and it’s building up a bit.  It’s exciting just because everything else is excited.” 

Midler dreamed of being an actress when she was growing up, but she saw herself as the dowager type – Dame Mae Whitty, Edna Mae Oliver, and most especially Ethel Barrymore.  Those great ladies are a far cry from Janis Joplin, but Midler was quick to quash the Joplin comparison.   

"I’m always surprised when people say 'She's portraying Janis Joplin.' I'm so staggered that anyone would think I would do a thing like that.  l had seen Janis a few rimes when she was working, and I did love her. But when I took that role I made a conscious decision to cut off whatever there was in me that loved Janis, because I didn't want to bring that to the picture.  I thought it would be unfair to her memory.”   

Interestingly enough, throughout her career Midler has been compared or connected in some way with Joplin, especially in the energy and intensity of their stage performances.  Mopsy Kennedy in Ms. (August 1973) wrote, "She (Midler) fills the gap left in our hearts by the death o Janis Joplin.  She fills the need for a combination of the cynical and the sentimental. . .” 

"That sounds right,” said Midler “Absolutely.  The brave face to the world. Courage in the face of inevitable doom.  And also a raspberry in the face of inevitable doom." 

Was it well-placed raspberries that have kept Bette Midler from getting caught on that cutaway railroad car that doomed so many other star performers ?  We talked at length about the reasons that performers self-destruct – an insatiable need for audience love, a romance with booze and drugs, a lack of the kind of discipline Midler learned from the theatre.  “Everyone wants to be Elvis Presley,” she said, "but no one wants to die like that.  Everyone wants to the Elvis when he was young, but no one realizes that if you're going to be Elvis when he was young then you’re going to be Elvis when you're old too."  It seems to be Midler’s professionalism - and separation of her private self from her stage persona – that have protected her from burning out.  Janis Joplin was not all that different on and off stage, but Bette Midler, who dresses outrageously and appears big and bawdy onstage, is at home a petite, pretty woman in her 30s who usually wears jeans, a simple blouse, and glasses.  She’s humorous, but not "on," earthy and friendly but with an edge of reserve.  The great disparity in appearance and manner from stage to home made me wonder if the "Divine Miss M'' was a fantasy creation. 

"No,” said Midler, "I’m like that.  It depends on what I do with my hair." Midler explained that she really enjoys the sexy, tacky, "tart" image she portrays in performance and on the cover of her new album (where she pushes forward her famous assets rather provocatively).  “I like being overly sexy.  I like taking sex and slapping it in the face a couple of times.  I don’t really in my personal life pay that much attention to it.  I think of it like food . . .“ 

Two nights later Midler gave her last performance at the Greek, and her voice often sounded like it was coming out of speakers with bad wiring (she had already been quite hoarse during our interview, no doubt affected by L.A.’s worse smog siege in 24 years).  But that wasn’t why I was disappointed.  I was unmoved with her familiar shtick – the sex and booze and dope jokes, the overlong parody of a bad night club entertainer, the comedy monologue that would have been better sprinkled throughout the show, and the attempt at “serious” musical drama in a mime-song segment where Midler played an old woman on a park bench.  I wanted to be Bill Murray on Saturday Night Live and tell her “Come off it, Bette, drop all the fancy stuff and be you.  Now get outta here, I love ya.” 

The best part of the show at the Greek was a medley of songs from The Rose – a lovely ballad (“The Rose”), a straight-ahead rocker (“Midnight In Memphis”) and a rather histrionic cover of Lorraine Ellison’s classic “Stay With Me.”  Midler was magic on these numbers, so it’s exciting to hear that she might put together a strictly rock and roll show.  “I’d like the chance just to sing that kind of music straight through and not break it up with any other kind of music . . . see how much there is to say in the framework of that.” 

 I asked her if she thought she’s ever be able to capture her terrific stage energy on vinyl.  “I think I got closer to it on Thighs And Whispers than I ever did,” she said.  “I know you don’t think so.  But on my machine it sounds action-packed.  You must be playing it on a Victrola for Christ’s sake.  Turn up the treble!”