BETTE MIDLER
Claire Safran

Special thanks to Ronni Jensen for sharing this article 


She's the Divine Miss M with the sequins and the frizzy hair, the razzle-dazzle queen of off-color jokes and I've been-around songs. But inside, Bette Midler is really a venerable little person. "I hate it when they call me ugly . . . I can't have plastic surgery on my heart."

"I'M NOT the best singer there is. Or the best actress. What I do have is the ability to make people look at me. I have presence on the stage. And I have the best presence. It's something that just comes on, like a light bulb. And it feels like a light bulb. It feels warm inside."

Off stage the warmth is still there, but it is as if the incandescence is turned down low. The real Bette Midler is five feet one (154cm) - surprising indeed when you think of the larger-than-life performer who skitters across the stage in sleazy satins and improbable sequins, who can sing like an angel and swear like a sailor.

"People think I'm tough," she says, "but I never even said damn until I was almost out of school. I wasn't tough until I came to this burg." A sweep of the arm indicates the city of New York, outside her apartment windows. "I have a hide," she concedes, "but inside there's a vulnerable little person."

Bette Midler is an original, and her campy appeal as a brassy, gutsy entertainer has brought her increasingly bigger audiences. She rose in show business from bit parts and appearances in obscure nightclubs to cross-country concert tours and the making of best-selling record albums - and finally, this year, to her essentially one-woman show, Clams on the Half Shell Revue, which opened on Broadway and now is on tour. She was never just another pretty-faced, pretty-voiced ingénue, but audiences loved her uniqueness and bought the total package: the husky, clap-hands songs, the frizzy hair, the plastic flower tucked into the D-cup cleavage, the sexy waif, the woman-child.

She tends to speak in italics, in a voice that is now street-strident, now soft and whispery. She is friendly but guarded; she smiles a lot and offers coffee, but our interview doesn't begin until her own tape recorder is placed next to mine on top of a coffee table. Worried about being misquoted? "No, it's not that," she hedges. "I just want to have a record too." She suggests that she is recording her life - Andy Warhol, the pop-artist filmmaker, told her to do that. Yet she admits that she has "a few scars" from interviews.

Two years ago, when she burst into national prominence, she made the cover of such diverse magazines as Newsweek and Ms. But the things that wounded were not taken off anybody's tape recorder. "I hate it when they call me ugly, when they say I'm homely." She stabs an angry finger in the vague direction of her heart. "I'm the one who's in the body. I'm the one who has the face. "

The size of her nose is often reported, and she has thought of having it bobbed. "But what's the diff? It's only the shell," she says, mocking herself. "I can't have plastic surgery on my heart. "

Long ago she gave up trying to look like everybody else. "I didn't have too much success with that," she recalls, "so I figured maybe I didn't have to do it." Instead she haunted the second-hand clothing shops, putting together a ragbag look to suit her style.

"It wasn't sleaze; not yet. I was into sensuous things then." Fondly she remembers a red velvet dress that she pinned at the back because it dragged along the floor. "I'd go to the subway in that. People stared and called me names, but they didn't attack me, so I was grateful."

Bette thought of herself as "fairly anonymous-looking" and she used the bizarre clothing to attract attention. "Oh, I used to get 'em. I'm not a traffic stopper, but I dressed so that everything showed. So I got 'em. But," she says with a sigh, "not like Ursula Andress would get 'em." But she has changed. Now, says Bette, "I'd just as soon fade right into the woodwork as have people inspect me, look at me, judge me when I'm not performing." Recently she attended a Broadway opening in blue jeans, her orange hair combed over one eye. "Hardly anyone guessed who the other eye belonged to," she reports, highly pleased. And she insists, "I wouldn't be caught dead with a sequin on my body when I'm not working. How tasteless!"

She is just back from California and a visit with pal Cher Bono. "We get along great. We come from exactly the same place," she says, referring to the pinched childhood's and "immortal longings" both of them experienced. They have arrived, though at very different points.

Cher's route as singer and entertainer has taken her to a 45-room Beverly Hills mansion. "You have to roller-skate to the bedroom," says Bette. "After two days I had to leave that house. The spaces were too large. Cher's a tall person and she commands a lot of space. I'm a small person and I like to have it all closed in." Her budget-size Greenwich Village apartment is crammed with ad-lib furniture and plants. "I like to burrow," she says. "I'm the kind who pulls the covers over her head."

What, though, of the stage - that big, naked space?

"Ahh," she says, "that's not space. That's time in space. That's my real home."

And these days she is "back home," back at work, after a year of silence. The voice is limbered up to sing it all. Blues. Driving rock. Ballads. Nostalgic showstoppers.

Her first important success came with the largely homosexual audience that heard her sing at the Continental Baths, a Turkish-bath-cum-night-club in New York City, where they named her "Divine." But in any performance by Bette Midler there is enough warmth for everybody: the teenagers who recognize her as the outrageous female counter-part of a Mick Jagger or David Bowie; the suburban couples who've sewed sequins on their blue jeans too - and even all the older men and women who gasp at some of her risqué comments and her street language.

Bette Midler is her father's daughter, a Jewish girl raised in Hawaii on the Protestant work ethic. But last year - with her record albums selling in the millions, with a standing-room-only national tour that ended at New York's fabled Palace Theatre, with the biggest one-day ticket sale in Broadway's history - Bette turned and ran like a rabbit.

"I was tired," she says, remembering the wrung-out feeling of a nine-year climb to "overnight success." "And I was scared to death, afraid of having to puff myself up into something I'm not. I can pretend to be a star. I can be as grand as the next lady. Listen - I've been grand since sixth grade. But to have to do it every day - that isolates you. I was afraid all the things that make me a human being would be completely lost."

She had created the Divine Miss M as something to have fun with and hide behind - a gaudy stage creature who is part earth mother and part drag queen, part hooker and part yenta (that perfect Yiddish word for a vulgar, shrewish busybody). With success there was less need to hide, but also the possibility that the creature might swallow its creator. "All my life I've been taught to be quiet and well-bred, but I've always been fascinated by the other side - the people who slapped each other around, the bad girls who swore on the street. I used to go to the red-light district in Honolulu and hang around the corners, looking at the hookers, listening to the way they talked. It all seemed dangerous and romantic." The Divine is part of that, but Bette says, "She's an exaggeration of all the things I never thought I wanted to be. Though I'll tell you, since I've started doing her I've become much more like her than I ever thought was possible."

So for most of 1974 Bette Midler slept a lot and drifted. "I wasted time. That's the greatest luxury."

She was experimenting with how to have a good time - "I never learned that as a kid" - and how to relax - "when I work I go insane. I can't sleep. I snap at my friends." Mostly, at the age of 28 - or thereabouts - she was trying to grow up. "I don't know if I have the capacity to do that," she says wistfully. "To me, being grown up means not being so frightened, so paranoid. Being satisfied with who you are. Not being a stranger on this earth."

Yet for most of her life Bette has been that stranger. Her father was a house painter who migrated from New Jersey to Hawaii, where he tried to teach his four children to work hard, have good manners and be calm. Her mother was a movie buff who named her third daughter after Bette Davis and was always running nobody-knew-where. "She was the fastest thing on two feet," says Bette. "I can remember trying to hang on to her skirt, her purse - anything - so I wouldn't be left behind."

Growing up in a country town outside Honolulu, she felt shy, lonely and left out. "I was not the hip color. I was white in an all-Oriental school. Forget the fact that I was Jewish. They didn't know what that was. Neither did I. I thought it had something to do with boys."

If it wasn't a golden childhood, there were shining moments when she stood up to perform. In first grade she won a prize for singing Silent Night, something she never told her mother ("I was afraid to say I'd sung a Christmas carol"). Later on she worked up a version of Lullaby of Broadway and carried that song around with her to talent shows and parties. She was planning it for a Class Day when she overheard someone say, "Oh, no, she's gonna sing that song again." The hurt stayed with her and years later, when she was recording her first album, Bette put "Lullaby of Broadway" on it. "I wanted to sing it one more time. I thought, this one's for you, Mary Jane!"

All those isolated moments fell into place when she was 12. A friendly librarian - "Mrs. Seto. I'll never forget her. She believed in fairies" - gave Bette her first ticket to a live theatre performance. "I looked up at the stage and there were all those shining people. They had rosy cheeks and rosy mouths. They were dancing, singing, looking so happy. It was the most wonderful thing I'd ever seen, and I just thought, I want to do that. I want to be one of those rosy, rosy people."

Eventually she became more gold lame than rosy, but the dream got her through adolescence and a year of college. Then she dropped out, to sort good pineapples from bad in a canning factory and to work as an extra in the 1965 movie Hawaii, saving every penny she could for a plane ticket to New York.

"I knew I would make it," she insists. "I knew I was hot. I had to be - I wanted it so bad." One sniff of New York's grey air and she was reassured. It was like coming home, not leaving it. And like a homing pigeon she headed for Greenwich Village, found an apartment, found friends, even found a job in the chorus of Fiddler on the Roof, later moving up in the show to play one of Tevye's daughters.

Yet if she had found a place to belong to, the search for one person to belong with still continues. As a performer she used to quote Charlie Chaplin: "Confidence gives off a glow that is irresistible." The stage confidence seldom wanes; the sense of herself as a woman often does.

"Relationships are so hard," she moans. "It's difficult enough to come to grips with your own self, but to have to deal with another self, with that little spirit that's living in somebody else's body - You have to worry about them and put them above you. You have to nurse them when they're sick. My father always wanted me to be something steady, like a nurse, and sometimes I think: Daddy, I wound up a nurse after all."

For all that giving, she expects to get back very little in the way of sympathy or understanding. "I don't like to ask for that support from people I don't pay," she says.

The sentence hangs there a moment, stark and painful. "It's so draining on someone you love to have to keep lifting you up all the time," she explains. "I should be on top of the world, pleased and happy with myself. People don't understand if I say, 'I hate myself.' The thing is that I go overboard. When I am unhappy or depressed I am a tidal wave of misery. I've done it to people before and it always gets to where they say, 'I heard this song. I saw this dance. What about me?' So I say a little bit about my unhappiness, but I don't want to get into the whole thing. You pay someone to do that."

A psychiatrist? "I'm not there yet. Last year I was screaming inside but now I'm not really that unhappy."

For this year she has a new motto. "Life is real, life is earnest," she recites. "Sing polly-wolly-doodle all day." She will go a long way for a laugh ("What else is there?"), has a passion for a wicked tongue ("It's a part of the game. You take it like you give it") and is drawn to what she calls "the chatter, the laughter," of homosexuals. "You can get that from some straight people too, but the gay sensibility has a lightness, a way of not taking anyone too seriously, of cutting to the bone."

If many of her friends are gay, she insists, it's not a way of avoiding entanglements. "Don't fool yourself; there's plenty of sex with gay people. Plenty! They might look real wispy on the street, my dear, but they're not that wispy when you get them home. One guy I was very fond of for a long time was gay. Well, he was a little bit here, a little bit there. He was very sensitive and very bright. He introduced me to music. He was the first person to play Aretha Franklin for me. I learned a lot from him."

Her preference is for men she can learn from, men who are doing something of their own that they love. "I also like tall men with lots of rippling muscles, and long ponytails down their backs. I'm a sucker for a ponytail."

That's hardly a physical portrait of burly, dark-haired Aaron Russo, Bette's longest-running liaison. He describes her as "a shlepper, a good Jewish girl who happens to have a lot of ability"; friends describe him as "a man who always gets his way." His tenure as lover seems to have lapsed but he continues as her manager and, like most of Bette's men, her good friend. "There were a couple I couldn't pull that off with. I just had
to say, `Well, no, I can't even be civil to you'." In the Divine's voice she adds, "Out of the myriads of lovers I've had, that's not bad."

For the moment, Bette is more or less unattached. "I have a whole bunch of people that I love, but I just don't want to live with any of them. I don't like to pick up people's socks. And it's always me that ends up cleaning the tub."

Also for the moment, she is deeply involved in a program of personal-energy conservation. It is "too energy-consuming" to play the clothes game, "too much effort" to move to a better address and call in a decorator. And she suspects that marriage would be "too much responsibility." As for children: "That's the big one, the real killer. You are really responsible. What if it turns out to be unhappy? What if it points a finger at you and says, 'You creep'?" There is a possibility that a child could turn out well, but she sees that as a "long shot." Behind the Midler razzle-dazzle there is bleak pessimist who believes that life holds more bad times than good ones. Grimly she notes that many of the people she's known are now dead. Her first album was dedicated "To Judith," an older sister who was killed in a freak automobile accident in New York. Bette had to handle all the funeral arrangements. "She was bright, so bright," Bette says. "I'm older than her now. That's a weird feeling."

But she moves away quickly from sad memories. She speaks of her parents, whom she visited when she performed in Hawaii last year. She reports that her father now regrets having missed seeing her show. He stayed away, afraid of being embarrassed by Bette's sleazy clothes and raunchy language. Since then he's seen slides of the show and he thinks it would have been all right. He didn't say all that to Bette but he talked about it to an aunt, who passed the story along to Bette.

Out of nowhere Bette announces, "I just want to say that I love Bobby De Niro." Of the star of Mean Streets and Godfather II she sighs and says, "My hero, De Niro. Oh, I love good work. I just love it." When she first arrived in New York 10 years ago, she haunted the streets of Greenwich Village, searching for Bob Dylan. "I worshipped him. I used to listen to his records and say, `Yes! Yes!' " A few years later, when they did meet, it was a disaster. "I was very nervous. Blushing, if you can believe it. And it embarrassed him. Then I felt bad that I did that to him, that I made him uncomfortable. I wanted to hold him and tell him it was all right."

For different reasons that's a reaction you have to Bette Midler. She's brassy, outrageous, orange haired - and something aches inside her. It is a vulnerability that made audiences love people as different as Judy Garland, Fannie Brice and Marilyn Monroe - and now Bette Midler. If only someone would hold her and make it all right…