This May Be the Best Bette Yet
Richard Laermer

Special thanks to Steve Weiner for sharing this article


The success of Bette Midler’s second book is a surprise to her, but she has no intention of becoming a full-time writer.  In fact, the "Divine Miss M" may turn to comedy to slow her pace and rest her voice.

Bette Midler is touting a new image. The outrageous singer who once titled her persona the "Divine Miss M" says, "I no longer consider myself a broad. I've outgrown that." Now "a tasteful entertainer," she wants to set the record straight.

Her past accomplishments consist of nine musically diverse albums, three movies, two books, and a handful of concert tours notorious for their gimmickry: whether garbed as a hot dog or a female King Kong, Midler knows how to please a crowd.

The public's conception of her, through interviews and performances, is one of a rowdy, raucous woman of leisure who knows how to handle anyone or anything. But that is not the case today.

The new Midler wants to take it easy. Riding high from the overwhelming success of her second book {The Saga of Baby Divine, Crown), Midler hopes people see her in a new light. "I'm really proud of this book," she says in the midst of a New York promotional outing. "And I think people will get something out of it." But don't get her wrong; Midler hasn't settled down to the notion of full-time writing. "I'm an entertainer," she reminds us. "I'm not just a writer or a singer. And besides, I only write to amuse myself. I am not devoured by the need to write."

Midler began Baby Divine, the poetic tale of a Midler-like toddler, on a dare. While she was promoting her first book, the travelogue A View from A Broad, someone asked her if
she would write again.

"I figured, why not? I couldn't see any reason to say no." She told the inquisitor, "Yes, I am going to write a children's book next." That information was scoffed at by most people, who thought she knew nothing about children or their books. "But I began to think about the fairy tales that enchanted me when I was a child, and I remembered how romantic and  colorful they were," Midler says,  grinning. "I didn't think there were books like that anymore, so I decided to do one.

"For many years I have been portraying the Divine Miss M, and she never had a history. If that character were truly divine, I thought, then she must've been born on a splendid night. I decided to play with that notion."

The Skies were ablaze with Disorder that Night, The Planets, aghast and aquiver;
The Delirious Moon had the Brass to be Full When it should have been only a sliver.
On that starry night.

Baby Divine came to be, born to proper parents who didn't understand her. At one point in the fable. Baby's mom and dad question whether the tyke is really theirs.  "The parents are made to seem villainous," Midler says, "because I wanted Baby Divine to be a real hero." However, the little hero is preparing for a life as a show-biz legend, as evidenced by Baby Divine's entrance into the world - "She'd arrived with High Heels on her feet and a Sprig of Red Hair on her head" – and her parents go into shock.

The scene in which the Divines question their daughter's parentage is "very real" to Midler. "Many kids hear that from their parents. Imagine how traumatic that must be," she says with a sigh. But when Baby Divine takes the hint and leaves home, she finds a world laced with many bad things. To ease the pain, Midler introduces a friendly bird who, in pure fantasy style, takes Baby for a ride.

Through Todd Schorr's magical illustrations, the reader takes flight as the child soars over highways and houses and trees. And soon Baby Divine beholds her first revelation: everything that had seemed so big is now terribly small. What had seemed largely important close-up is now trivial; it makes her happy.

All of these disclosures, which Midler calls great truths, come from the colorfully creative mind of the Divine herself, who earnestly wants to teach both children and larger folks a few of the meanings of life. "Baby Divine," Midler proudly acknowledges, "is an outsider. That's probably going to color her whole life - it certainly did mine." So in reality the tot is a small version of Midler, with the fictitious twist being the child's education, one Midler wishes she could have received.

"I didn't belong as a kid, and that always bothered me. If only I'd known that one day my differentness would be an asset, then my early life would have been much easier."

She hopes that kids who read The Saga of Baby Divine will see that it's okay to be original; that somehow their eccentricities will pay off. They certainly did in Midler's case.

Cherish Forever What Makes You Unique
Cause You're Really a Yawn If It Goes!

In The Saga of Baby Divine, the three most memorable characters - Midler's female equivalents to the Three Wise Men - are a former dancer, a former singer, and a former  joke-teller.  When Baby Divine arrives on the scene, these three hurry to instruct her in the show business arts.

"Any true show business legend has to be able to sing, dance, and tell jokes," Midler informs. So the girls show Baby the ropes. Because the child is expected to grow into a marvel, the author had it in mind to tell the tale with all the wonder of Christmas.  According to Midler, "That little girl is an angel, and I wrote her birth as an event."

The wise ladies - Lily, Joyce, and Tillie - show Baby Divine what show is all about. Lily sings an air, Joyce dresses as a pizza to go, and Tillie does a short tango. The child sees what her life is all about, but before basking in the lights, she has to face a bout with "ugly and heartless Anxiety," who shouts, "You on the Staged What astonishing, gall! You're a Nothing! A Washout! A Nerd!"

Baby Divine is caught between her stage desire and mean old Anxiety, but she gathers her wits, laughs him away, and jumps right in: A star is unleashed!  Midler explains, "It would be nice to believe that life really is perfect.  Maybe that was part of my hang-up as a child. I believed in the things in fairy tales.  I lived in a cloud, and that's probably Baby Divine's fate."

Except the baby in Midler's book is heading toward her dream with a gust of encouragement, not the discouragement and mockery Midler experienced as a child.  "I had a pretty peculiar childhood," Midler says. "I was a loud kid. I never got enough attention and would entertain anyone who'd listen. Not that anyone wanted to hear me recite fairy tales, but I did anyway."

Her urgency builds. "Baby Divine has nothing in her vocabulary but the word 'more.'  That's the way I was. I think more is the cry of the curious person.

"The little girl is a hero because of all she survived in discovering the world. She had trauma, she had pain, and she had some awful things happen to her. That's a hero!"

The character, Baby Divine, came into view for the entertainer during an emotional crisis following the filming of Jinxed in 1982. Due to conflicts on the set, Midler suffered a "terrible nervous breakdown" and was sick for three months. She asserts she grew up a lot during her bad time, but there was a spell during which she accomplished no work and stayed in bed for weeks at a time.

"Yeah, there was a long time after Jinxed when I couldn't perform. But I did get up on my feet long enough to sit down and start this book." In a fragile state of mind, the author began to create something for children only.

"There's a lot of show business lore in it, which kids may or may not find fun. It isn't preachy," says Midler, but she is sure young people can learn from its pages. "Kids who read this are definitely going to discover a lot of new words, and they might even have a few laughs. But maybe they'll also get comfort in realizing that there is a way to deal with certain kinds of unhappiness.”
 
Midler says many people she meets in the real world worry because they're different, and kids who grow up wondering why they're not like everyone else might need her message: "If you can accept your differentness and learn to love it and encourage it, then you can be someone wonderful."

In a nutshell, that's what Baby Divine learns. 

And she thought why if it's such a job for a Mountain To stand out from all of the rest
How hard it must be for a minuscule Human!
And suddenly Baby felt blessed!

Midler feels blessed, too. In an interview after recovering from the Jinxed experience, Midler said she was "thrilled to death to be me. I know that I'm unique, and that I'm special. I'm my own person, centered in me." Midler has curtailed her self-aggrandizing since those days of glory and has found humility while still maintaining her self-esteem.

"It's best not to be too pompous about yourself," she says. "It's better not to need a limousine for your head. Although people think I'm just Divine, I have my share of worries. I worry about growing old and losing my shape, my looks, my hair. As an entertainer, that's my stock and trade. Oh, and I also worry that I don't dance as well as Michael Jackson."

Midler the author doesn't want people calling her "a writer" but is pleased to see people actually buying her latest figment of imagination. Her first literary attempt, a slight seller called A View from A Broad, contains tales from her European tour, most of which she fabricated. Today she laughs about the book.

"I wrote that to entertain, and almost everything in the book was made up," she explains. "That's the difference between the two: Baby Divine was written with love and heart, and A View was put together to show everyone how clever and snide and silly I could be. I lied through my teeth in that book, but wasn't it funny?"

As only a "woman of extreme distaste" can tell it, Midler's pontifications in her first book are those of a near-crazed singer offered the chance to entertain the Continent.  Her preparations - choosing a band, practicing  routines,  praying – are followed by a nervous opening in London - "I have one question for Her Maj: What have you got in that handbag?"- and then the tour itself.

In an easy-to-believe rendering, Midler leads us through places such as Brighton, Stockholm, Paris, and Antwerp, where we meet her eclectic assortment of characters. Along the way, Midler sideswipes the tour and concocts mini-sagas about the film director who threatens her life - "Only you can play the Swedish fish goddess" - the man who rescues her, and her substance intake in Amsterdam – “Everyone kept telling me it would relax me ... and I was nauseous beyond belief."

A View From A Broad is a burst of entertainment packaged as Midler's scrapbook. It includes photos of Midler and her entourage in various undefined moods and interesting circumstances. The book was a cult hit among her followers.

"I'm amazed at how many people bought the thing," she says, as her eyes light up. "I wrote it on a whim because I thought it would be fun to collect things on tour. When a publisher (Simon & Schuster) went for the idea, it turned into fewer pictures and more text."

In A View, Midler characterizes her rambunctious Delores DeLago character as "a woman of tremendous ambition and absolutely no pride at all; a woman of tremendous determination and absolutely no skill; a woman of the grandest notions and not the simplest hint of taste.

"The broad who can take anything in the first book," she says, "is the Divine speaking - it's not me. My story will be a three-hanky book, and no one wants to read that." The Midler smile returns. "I put up a wonderful front in A View from A Broad and I'm proud of it. Writers should embroider stories all the time. They should entertain people and make them feel good. To entertain, you have to do a certain amount of acting, on the stage as well as on the page. My first book was a lot of acting."

Midler is about to alter her life plan. Her recent singing tour and album may have been the last of each.  While performing in Detroit in August, Midler fainted. She took this as a cue to reroute herself. "I thought it was really over and that I was dying," she says. "I couldn't understand why I was killing myself. Now I am going to sit down and figure out if I want to go on in the same vein or take another road."

The route in mind is a natural for Midler: "I think I could be a stand-up comedienne. I am one already, in a sense." She says she is willing to take a chance with comedy. Midler sees the career change as "less demanding. I wouldn't have to worry about radio play, or ruining my voice. Besides, everyone knows me as a funny person. I like this business and would like to stay in it. But now I have to rest the singer in me and take a minute to decide what's important."

In the film, The Rose, Midler's self-destructive character uttered the same sentiment shortly before the onstage collapse that ended her life. "I feel like I am the Rose," she retorts, "and I don't want to end up that way." 

Midler's chances of ending up that way are slim, especially with her new stance as a writer. As The Saga of Baby Divine climbs the charts (some stores stock it as fiction, others as poetry), and her recent No Frills record gains in popularity, Midler remains steadfast in her social position.

Even if she is not the perfect lady, at least the lady has style. Even if that style has proved irregular, at least Midler has tremendous ambition and determination, not to mention an overstock of grand notions unequaled by anyone, divine or otherwise.