Bette Midler Had To Kill The Divine Miss M
She Was On The Unnatural Side
Patrick and Barbara Slavo

Special thanks to Ronni Jensen for sharing this article 


Meet Bette Midler, a sweet, petite dynamo with a lot of love for everybody. She makes hit records. She makes covers of national magazines. She makes scenes. She makes people smile and often dresses funny. But she is not too proud to greet a reporter like an old friend and curl up in a comfy chair to tell what a "kick" it all is.

"Oh, it's bizarre, so bee-zzzarrre, especially on the Johnny Carson Show," she bubbles. "A few years ago they would sneer at me when I came to his show dragging my wedgies over my shoulder. Now it's nice. It's like they brought me a glass of wine when I was having my make-up on. I couldn't get a glass of water from those people last year."

She is "the Divine Miss M," the five-foot-one-inch red-haired disaster area. But she is shaking that sobriquet, she says, as she exposes the real Bette Midler: not larger than life, but nevertheless lively. Last year she warned audiences "Don't leave me a year from now just because I'm not what you want me to be." Perhaps that means wearing plain slacks and shirts and no make-up. Perhaps that means all the warmth without the glitter. Perhaps that means giving a listen to some of the fast-talking dudes who swarm around with motion picture and TV specials offered up in a flick of their manicured fingertips. Changes. From now on when the curtain goes up there will he no more............

............FLASH! It was a Tonight Show gig and Bette, in an appearance greatly toned down and condensed - but still too explosive for America's little video tubes to handle - pranced, leaped, squatted, strutted onstage, eyes a popping, with her back-up trio, the Harlettes, clad in tuxedos with low-slung halter tops, singing the staccato lines from the Wizard of Oz:

You're our of the woods, 
You're out of the dark, 
You're out of the night,
Step into the sun, 
Step into the light. 

Entering stage left is a purple, glittering vamp with foxtails dangling around her precious throat. It is ... HER! ... exploding into "Da-ooo, da-ooo, da-ooo! Come on along and listen to the lullaby of Broadway.... " She sails, cajoles, and swoons through the brief nostalgic medley, then socks Middle America right between the eyes with Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, the tune that made the Divine One thoroughly, profitably palatable for the Heartland.

Midler in Carsonland. Slum goddess meets the Plasto-chic Prince. ("If you're going to a rock concert, wear anything," his commercial says. "But if you mean business, wear Johnny Carson suits ...")

Huffing her way to Carson's right side, Bette bubbles, "For your show, John, I always tone down. They even made my girls put some rosettes in their tuxedos."

Carson has been known to say of Bette: "When Emmett Kelly dies, that girl is going to inherit a fabulous wardrobe."

Quick cut to . . . the Grammy Awards show. Karen and Richard Carpenter, darlings that they are, announce Bette Midler has just been named winner for her fab cover single of the Andrews Sisters' old Bugle Boy hit. Bette glides across the stage flashing her 75-pound grin at the big network's glass eyes, yanks the big prize, tucks it deep into her assets, and broadcasts to America "Isn't that a kick? Me getting the award from Karen Carpenter? It's a wonder she didn't hit me over the head with it!" and runs off ...

You know Bette Midler. You vaguely remember her as what they used to call a wallflower. You figured she would wind up as a librarian or maybe a truck driver's housewife.

Bette went to high school in Honolulu and graduated in 1963. Her father, a house painter, had moved there with his wife from Paterson, N. J., to work for the Navy. Bette was a working-class Jewish girl born and reared in a working-class Eurasian neighborhood, quite removed from the island's touristy frolic spots.

"The school I went to was just like any high school anywhere. Like a high school in Brooklyn or Cleveland. We had rock 'n' roll, sock hops, American Bandstand, the same as anywhere else. The only thing different was that all the kids were Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Samoan, and all the girls hated me because I had such big boobs. I was very shy, stayed by myself, read a lot, lived very much in my head, in my daydreams."

"I loved to go to the movies and watch the big stars," she recalls. "I was in love with all the men and learned femininity from all the women. After all, my mother named me Bette after Bette Davis. Although I pronounce it 'bet.' I loved to walk through the red-light district because it seemed to be so romantic and passionate - the only really alive part of town.

"I always liked music, loved music. Even before rock 'n' roll came to Hawaii I was into lots of different kinds of music. I couldn't get into science or mathematics. I just cut myself off from anything else but music and the-ay-ter.

"Then one day I learned that I could be popular by making people laugh. I became a clown to win people's acceptance, and I think that's when I decided that I wanted to be in show business. It was my senior year of high school. I made up my mind that I eventually would come to New York."

She eventually did. But first she had to, yes, "pay some dues." She attended the University of Hawaii for a year and worked in a pineapple cannery until she landed a stand-in role in the movie Hawaii.

Earning $350 a week on the set, she saved enough to fly to New York City, where she bedded down in the Broadway Central Hotel with visions of stardom dancing in her head. She worked a filing and typing gig at Columbia University. She sold gloves in Stern's Department Store until she had a fight with a customer one day, cried, and quit. She joined Ellen Stewart's La Mama repertoire group and also made the rounds at audition calls, finally landing the part of Tevye's daughter Tzeitel in Fiddler on the Roof after first working in the chorus.

"I read plays a lot," she says. "There were a lot of people doing exciting things then. I got a great deal of my early inspiration from Charles Ludlam. The first thing I ever saw him do was Turds in Hell, which blew me away. It was the most incredible piece of theater I had ever seen. And there was this chick in the show who was really terrific. Her name was Black-Eyed Susan. She really inspired me.

"Eventually, I got into Fiddler as a chorus girl after about a whole year of auditioning on and off. They let me go and then called me back for the part of one of the daughters, which I stayed with for three years. That led to a heavy bout of disenchantment. A very heavy bout. Ohhhh, I wrestled with the angel of disenchantment. I grew up. I just grew up.

"I was really good in Fiddler for the first two years. But in the third year I came to a screeching halt. There I was in the third year working for the same money I made in the first, breaking my ass, and feeling miserable because I couldn't get into agents' offices. And when they would send me out for auditions the people wouldn't like the way I looked or the way I sounded. I couldn't make them understand that there was really something there."

In Bette's third year she would go down to Hilly's, a late-nighter, every evening after the show and sing out her soul to the masses - with results that startled no one more than herself.

"I got up in front of this little audience and just sang. The first two songs weren't anything special but the third, something just happened to me - something happened to my head and my body and it was just the most wonderful sensation I'd ever been through. It was not like me singing. It was like something else!

"I sang God Bless the Child, which I don't sing. I never sing it. I sang it once and that was all, because it frightened me so. It really freaked me out. I was screaming at the end of it. The song had a life of its own that imposed itself on me and I don't even know what happened. I was just this instrument for what was going on. Beezzzzzaarre ... so I decided that was a nice change. I decided to just do it for a while, and I did."

Bette spent a lot of time in the New York Public Library, she says, where she studied music from historical and technical perspectives.

"I love Bessie Smith. I love Aretha Franklin. Gospel is some of the most wonderful music around. You get up and you can't stop. It makes you vibrate. I like torch songs and torch singers that can make you cry. Ethel Waters used to kill me. When I first started listening I heard the stories those women were telling. Incredible stuff. I was fascinated by it."

Bette showed up in 1971 in a plush palace of gaily liberated self-indulgence called the Continental Baths, a multileveled Turkish bath that books various acts on weekends to enhance its "tacky" atmosphere. The Baths include a small, clubby room where Bette auditioned. Playing piano there was a baby faced boy from Brooklyn named Barry Manilow, who had been making his fortune writing TV commercials. You've seen them, MacDonald's, Pepsi, Tylenol, all the heavies.

Barry later went on to become Bette's very valuable producer, arranger, and buddy. But initially, at that first audition, Manilow recalled, "It was hate at first sight. Somehow it seemed like Bette and I were not going to get along. We could not understand what the other was into. But, of course, later we worked together on the stage act and in the studio and we connected beautifully. She chose the tunes, I arranged them - but what you hear of Bette is all her. She's dynamite."

The Baths were Bette's banana. Soon, she was ... discovered!

Much to the chagrin of its regular clientele, Bette was turning the Baths into another hangout for the straights, especially on weekend nights, as the mixed couples trouped in two by two. Press locusts came around as if the Copa had been reborn right there in the steam

How did you like playing to homosexuals, she was asked.

"You mean how do I like playing to faggots? Well, they're just people really. And as for being categorized, I don't think anyone could categorize me at all. I wanted something different from Broadway and I got it. The tubs wasn't all that bad. When I played to all those gay guys at the tubs, I was like one of those entertainers from the Satyricon Fellini's, that is."

Midler-ese was catching on. Everything unlikable was "the pits." Her act was "Shabbay! Shab-bay!" Her regular followers were "my boys." The Baths became "the tubs." She was a walking billboard for the disjointed Seventies, somehow slamming fragments of American culture into perspective like a father putting together his son's Christmas bike after misplacing the illustrated instructions.

Johnny Carson was exposed to her, dug it, made her a regular on his show, and booked her as a warm-up act on his tour.

"He asked me to open his show in Vegas for him and I was pleased to do it for him because he had been very good to me," she says. "Really good. The more consistent I became the more he warmed up to me. I like working for him. He's a professional with an astonishing kind of professionalism. He's up every night. He gives the same caliber performance every night.

"But Vegas was amazing. You have to see it once before you die. It's culture shock. Not my style. Everyone wears wigs. It's a heavy wig town. I got real good reviews, but I had lots of trouble dealing with the audience. I have to have love from an audience. When I feel warmth, then I'm warm. They just didn't know what to make of me. They didn't understand what I was. They didn't understand why they had left the gambling tables. Las Vegas - puh-leeze, honey - I hated it, but it was an experience, you know."

Bette's success has spilled over to her associates - most notably Manilow, who this year cut an album and, with the borrowed Harlettes, did a highly acclaimed tour of the nation's better clubs, and Melissa Manchester, an ex-Harlette whose albums and tours seem downright relaxed in comparison to her days behind the frenetic Miss M.

Bette says she found all the Harlettes in New York. "I called up my friends who sing and I had them all down and we sang together. I wanted to pick up people who I could really get along with, so I found these three girls and they are terrific. They sing, they carry on, and they ...[a filthy wink] ."

Onstage Bette will explain: "I guess you're wondering who are those three cocktail waitresses up there with Miss M anyway. They're my girl singing group, the Harlettes ... they're real sluts."

Back to Hawaii. Bette returns, but this time as a star.

 "It was a remarkable adventure. They were so nice to me. I was doing all local material and pidgin English, digging the big Hawaiian entertainers. My mother came, but my father, he just said 'Oh, I can't.' He couldn't deal with it. He's read some things about me, and he's conservative. He likes Lawrence Welk. He doesn't like to watch cleavage. In fact, every time I went home for dinner he would safety-pin my dress together. But my mother, she couldn't sit still through the show or the whole rest of the night. She kept screaming, `Faaabuuuu-lous, faaaab-uuuu-lous, faaaaabuuuu-lous!!!"'

Divine, indeed. But lately the title has worn thin. It's not the real Bette, she confesses, and "I had to kill her."

"The Divine Miss M was on the unnatural side. Though she still comes out now and again when I'm in a really good mood, Miss M is a drawback and not just an asset. When I started doing it I was hiding. I still hide to a certain degree because it's painful to get up and expose myself to people. It killed Janis Joplin. I have found recently that I don't have to hide anymore."

Smiling, head tilted to one side: "I hope you won't get mad at me when I change, because I have to, ya know."