|
 I've
Got All These Characters Living Inside Me
David
Shaw
Special thanks to Paul Alleruzzo for sharing this article
Perino's. The establishment restaurant in
Los Angeles - the place where Old Money meets, eats and makes more decisions
on the future of the city than in City Hall, the mayor's mansion and all the
smoke-filled rooms in town combined. Here the enormous menu is filled with
such exquisite delicacies as fritto piccata and escargots
bourguignonne and the wines sell for up to $2000 a bottle and the decor
is all plush velvet banquettes, thick carpeting, damask drapes,
floor-to-ceiling mirrors and cut-crystal chandeliers that glisten like stars
on a desert night.
Into this elegance - into this den of haughty
respectability - strides the self-proclaimed "last of the tacky
ladies," Bette Midler. Bette Midler? The singer who first became
famous in the gay baths of New York and subsequently made vulgarity and
profanity as integral a part of her act as costumes and comedy? The woman
who once planned to have a marijuana cigarette taped beneath each of her
audience's 3000 seats on New Year's Eve (and - when her lawyers advised
against it - settled on another surprise present for her fans: at the stroke
of midnight, still on stage, she dropped the top of her dress [all she was
wearing, and said "Happy New Year")? The woman who broke her voice
coach's living-room window in a fit of rage - and slapped a radio-network
executive in the face when he said he didn't care for her new record? Bette
Midler? In Perino's? Yes. Twenty minutes late. Red hair frizzy. Peasant
blouse slit on both sides, from armpit to rib cage.
Yes. Bette Midler. In Perino's. For dinner.
In between recording sessions on her new album and taping sessions on her
first television special - to be shown this Wednesday, Dec. 7, on NBC - it
is a time for travail for Bette: she's just had to postpone taping the last
segment of the TV show because guest star Dustin Hoffman wasn't available.
Negotiations for her first movie have collapsed with all the abruptness of
the SALT II talks. A prowler broke into her Hollywood-hills home and had to
be forcibly ejected. A friend was injured in an automobile accident. Another
friend drowned. But into Perino's Bette flounces and down upon the dusty
rose banquette she sits, a radiant smile setting her hazel eyes a-twinkle.
At 31, with a face that might charitable be described
as having "great character," Bette Midler is not every man's idea
of a ravishing sex symbol. But neither is she any longer the homely, ugly
duckling she has so often appeared to be on stage and in photographs. The
reason for the transformation is, in part, a new diet. "Tonight,"
Bette says, "will be my first drink and just about my first real food
in six weeks." It seems she's been carrying a plastic bottle of
predigested liquid protein around in her purse all that time, swilling it
whenever hunger calls.
"Lost 20 pounds," she says, and on her 5-foot, 1½-inch frame,
the remaining 100 pounds look pleasant indeed. But the real reason for her
big smile and happy good looks is the gentleman at her elbow - actor Peter
Riegert, with whom she's been living for a year now.
"Peter is, "Bette says, "the first man
I've really felt this way about - been able to be myself with. I've got all
these crazy characters living inside me" - her concert sketches of
"Vickie Eydie," "Nanette" and Sophie Tucker are but a
few of her many personae - "and I always have to act them out. Most
people think I'm nuts. Not Peter. He has his own set of characters. We give
each other a show every night till we collapse at about 4 in the morning. It's
great."
But mightn't Bette OD on happiness - or, at least,
lose the fragility, the vulnerability, the frantic, desperate craving for
attention and affection that lies at the very heart of her act?
"Not a chance," says a close friend.
"Bette's too insecure to ever let herself her that happy. She'll
always find some reason to be unhappy."
Bette's theme song is "Friends" ("You
gotta have friends"), and whenever and wherever she has sung it,
throughout her career, she has seemed to be pleading with the audience -
individually and collectively - to be not just her friends but her lovers
and her sisters. It's almost as if, one critic suggested, "She's
saying, 'Love me, love me'."
Bette's own description of her performance-cum-plea
is, "In the beginning, I was trying to get the attention, to get
someone to ask me out Saturday night" - metaphorically, anyway. She
laughs. "Now I'm too busy and too happy to care if they want to take me
out."
But Bette doesn't expect her newfound happiness to
change the tone of her act that much; Bette Midler on stage and Bette Midler
off stage are
two entirely different people - "Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," her manager, Aaron Russo, says; "Once she
gets on to that stage, the energy starts flowing and you can almost see the
hair start growing on her face." Anyone who might have recognized Bette
that night at Perino's and cupped an ear, hoping to overhear a burst of
profanity or an outrageous comment or two would have been sorely disappointed.
She was as much a proper lady as the dowagers who sat nearby, sipping their
Chateau Lafite-Rothschild.
 Bette Midler has probably been
gratuitously psychoanalyzed by the critics more than almost any other
performer of her generation, and the attention - if not necessarily the
resultant theories - obviously delights her.
It has been said that she enjoys
playing the gay audiences because she sees herself, like them, as being on
the outside, looking in. It has been said that she projects so many
different personae because that is how she protects her real self from a
hostile society - and that she has a haunted, driven look about her because
that real self is struggling to get out. It has been said that -
"Look," Bette says,
"it's really a lot simpler than all that. People come to see me because
they want to be entertained. I just happen to be very loose about myself . .
. free . . . I feel I can do anything. And I do. People have given me the
liberty and I make use of that . . . On stage, you have to take chances . .
. You have to find new life for yourself. I'll do anything that keeps me
alive, that keeps my face alive, that keeps my heart beating - fast.
"That's what people pay money
for. They pay money to see people do things they can't do or would
not do."
So Bette, the self-styled "Divine
Miss M," swears and tells risqué jokes and races breathlessly back and
forth across the stage and decks herself out in the most outlandish costumes
- multicolored petticoats and pantaloon, sequin-studded bikinis, red
platform shoes, garnish tax-dancer dresses, miscrossed suspenders . . . And
her entrances: she's carried on stage on a throne or in a hospital bed or in
a large cutout, as the Statue of Liberty. In one show, she appeared in King
Kong's clutches, high atop a mock Empire State Building, looking the big
gorilla in the eye and saying - in a parody of Barbra Streisand's
"Funny Girl" love scene - "Nicky Arnstein, Nicky Arnstien."
Says Bette: "I'm having fun. I'm
playing hostess for the audience, giving them all the parties I never had a
chance to give as a kid."
Bette grew up in a Hawaiian slum,
where her father was a house painter - a man so rigid in his sense of propriety
that he has yet to see one of her shows, for fear of being offended. Bette
and a sister were the only all-white kids in a school near Pearl Harbor, but
she says that caused them no particular problems, then or later.
How about their being the only Jewish
girls in the area?
"I didn't even know what being
Jewish meant," she says. "I thought it has something to do with
boys."
Encouraged by a local librarian and a
teen-age friend, Bette developed an early interest in the stage, majored in
drama for a year at the University of Hawaii and landed a job as an extra in
the movie "Hawaii." ("I was a missionary wife who did a good
deal of heaving over the side of the boat.") All the while, she was
saving her money to go to New York. When she arrived, she caught on in the
chorus of "Fiddler On The Roof," was promoted to the role of one
of Tevy's daughters, then moved on to small nightclubs, the Continental
Baths and several guest shots with Johnny Carson.
Enter Aaron Russo. He became her friend, her lover and her manager.
Now - after some stormy times and bitter
fights (he once poured a soft drink over her head backstage because she
wouldn't heed his advice) - he's just friend and manager.
"She's got the best of both
worlds now," Russo says. "She's got Peter at home, who cares for
her and is dedicated to her, and me at the office, who cares for her and is
dedicated to her."
When Russo first met Bette, he told
her, "I'm like a navigator. You tell me where you want to go, what your objectives are, and I'll do everything I can to get you there. What
do you want?"
Responded Bette: "I want to be a
legend."
That was six years ago. Bette has been
Russo's all-consuming, full-time job ever since, all while she is not yet a
legend, she has had several hit records (including "Do You Wanna
Dance?" and "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy"), two gold albums, a
hit show on Broadway (the biggest one-day advance sale in history -
$140,000) and superstar treatment in the Las Vegas showrooms. Her contract
with NBC calls for another TV special, and her first movie will begin
filming next year.
Bette's record producer, Brooks
Arthur, thinks her next album, to be released later this year, could be the
"pivotal event in her career" - an attempt to capture on record
the sensuality and sexuality of her live performances. One problem: Bette is
difficult to pin a musical label on, and without that label, the AM radio
stations so critical to the commercial success of any artist aren't likely
to give her much air time. Bette's singing evokes so many different periods
and styles - material as divergent as 1920's blues ("Am I Blue?")
and 1950's rock ("Da Do Run Run"), as well as jazz, folk, torch,
contemporary pop and country - that Ms. magazine once dismissed her as
"an electric rip-off artist."
She has been compared, in fact, with virtually everyone from Lenny Bruce to
Fannie Brice, from Tiny Tim to Tina Turner and from Mick Jagger to Janis
Joplin - not to mention Judy Garland, Bessie Smith, Helen Morgan, Carmen
Miranda, the Andrew Sisters, Dorothy Parker in drag . . .
Television viewers almost missed their
opportunity to see a full hour of this eclecticism; originally, Bette was
negotiating with ABC, but the deal fizzled when ABC insisted she use a big
TV name or two as guests on the show. They didn't think Middle America knew
Bette well enough to tune in unless she had support from someone like, oh,
say, John Wayne . . . or John Travolta.
Aaron Russo wouldn't hear of it.
He won't discuss specifically which
stars ABC wanted, other then to say, "We wanted to pick them ourselves,
and we wanted them to be intellectually and artistically compatible with Bette."
So, Russo - and Bette - went to NBC,
where their guests will be Dustin Hoffman (playing piano for Bette on
several songs, including one we wrote himself) and Emmett Kelly, the clown
(whose sad-eye presence adds a special poignancy to the best lyrics on the
show, John Prine's "Hello In There".)
How about Bette's penchant for
skirting the edge of good taste? Surely, the NBC standards-and-practices
people - the network censors - must have had something to say about that?
 "Not
really," Russo says. "Bette needs a certain latitude to work, but
we realize there are certain things you can't do on TV."
There are some racy moments in the
special - costumes, gestures, lyrics and double entendres - but Bette
is actually rather restrained by her own stage standards. No profanity. No
nudity. No bumps or grinds.
Even her dad ought to be able to watch
her perform this time.
|
