Bette Midler Returns In Tacky Triumph.
People Magazine - June 30, 1975
Patricia
Burstein
In a blue-and-white smock with red sandals coordinating her Bicentennial
look, the star shimmied along New York's 42nd Street on a recent
afternoon. Some of the drifters and drunks recognized and swooped down
on her, and she fluttered her fingers in selfdefense. She slunk past a
peep show window, then nipped into an alley. A second later her bright red head
popped out - the hand clutching the throat is her own, in the classic
strangulation bit of vaudeville. "I wouldn't say I invented
tack," Bette Midler observed, nasally, "but I definitely
brought it to its present high popularity." Though meant as a self-effacing
remark, it is true. Her virtual one-woman Broadway show this season has
been the biggest hit by a solo artist since she herself last brightened
the Great White Way in 1973.
It was getting late, and Bette sped three blocks to the Minskoff
Theatre. In just a few hours she and The Divine Miss M, her adopted
alter ego, were due on stage. After a 15-month separation, which allowed
Bette time to sort out her personal life, the two personas had come
together again in the blockbuster Clams
on the Half Shell Revue. The Lilliputian (5'1") lady of song
describes herself: "Bette Midler is a nice girl, but The Divine
Miss M is hell-on-wheels. She runs around the room, breathes heavy and
puffs me up. She changed me from a pauper to a princess. Yet
I was glad not to see her, to be quiet for awhile."
When
Miss M was first and last on Broadway, at the Palace in 1973, she set
that theater's box-office record for advance ticket sales in a single
day - $160,000. Before that her national concert tour grossed over $3
million. Her full-throttle delivery of nostalgia cum schlock and her
raunchy campy flair for parody were catapulting her toward massive
stardom. Two albums had gone gold to confirm it. When Bette abruptly
dropped out for more than a year, show business minds boggled. Was she
going to blow it all - the record deals, the TV specials, Las Vegas, the
movies?
At 29, Midler has confounded the industry again, coming back to triumph.
Clams' run was extended from four to 10 weeks. The Minskoff's box
office set a new one-day record of over $200,000: the show overall will
have grossed some $1.8 million. Most critics hurrahed. Packed audiences
rolled over and begged. In the past Midler's devotees were largely the
gaily liberated; this time they were as broad as her repertoire,
spanning four decades.
Directed by Joe Layton in vast goofy sets by Tony Walton, she was a showpiece
of exhausting versatility, singing, dancing, bringing an SRO house to
its feet night after night. She tackled Elton John's The
Bitch Is Back in trampish rapport with The Harlettes, her backup
group; tenderized When a Man
Loves a Woman; and belted out favorites from her albums like Friends
and Delta Dawn.
The act, which she styles
"trash with flash" and "sleaze with ease," included
adlibbed asides - "I digress" - a rekindling of risqué Sophie
Tucker jokes and a collection of shrewd impersonations. In the second
act she was joined by big-band vibraphonist Lionel Hampton in a guest
spot, inspiring nostalgiacs as much as Bette's Boogie
Woogie Bugle Boy.
Hurrying into the Minskoff that afternoon, Bette changed into pink
cushioned slippers and clambered into the orchestra pit to shine up her
act. At the piano, her musical director, Don York, banged out frantic
chords as she deliberately gasped her way through "here it comes. .
. here it comes. . . here it comes. . . my 19th nervous breakdown."
York started to hum along, and she eyed him curiously. "Don't sing,
honey," she jabbed. "You play. I'll sing." York chain-smoked
cigarettes, Bette nibbled on sliced steak from Sardi's. The rehearsal
ended at 6 p.m.
York, who signed on with Midler last December, says, "Bette knows
how to put a ballad over. The first time she did If
Love Were All in rehearsal, she broke down and couldn't get through
it. She is open to a lot of pain as well as a lot of joy."
One
factor in Midler's taking her sabbatical, York says, was the decision by
her previous musical director, Barry Manilow, to strike out on a solo
performing career (PEOPLE, Aug. 26, 1974). "They had a strong
communication worked out," York explains. "It was hard for
Bette to accept someone else's presence." (Manilow broke in York as
his successor.)
Betty and Barry met five years ago at Manhattan's Continental Baths,
where she performed for $50 a night for 16 weeks before an all-male and
heavily homosexual audience. Overnight she became a cult figure. Manilow
co-produced Bette's first album, The
Divine Miss M, and its successful follow-up, Bette
Midler. He says of her simply, "She is the best entertainer
I've seen in my life."
Bette Midler was born in Honolulu. She does not speak of her childhood
there with affection. "My father was a bellower," she recalls.
"To get a word in you had to bellow back. He loved a good argument;
he loved the adrenalin rush." Being Jewish in a community that had
no particular regard for Jews further chafed her. (Bette's father - a
house painter for the Navy in Honolulu - has yet
to catch her act, vaguely appalled by what he has read of it. But
she recalls her mother, who would not let her wear a bra until age 13
despite an ample cleavage, showing up at a 1973 performance and
screaming, "Fabulous... I didn't know she was so witty.")
The young Bette developed an interior life, escaping into trashy
southern novels. One day she would draw on these inner reserves to bring
a certain tenderness to her life and her art. In her junior year of high
school Bette met a friend who "was hysterically loud and loved
noise and a good time. I fell in love with her," Bette remembers.
"She was the most adorable thing. She made me feel okay to be who I
was, enjoyable, good to have around. My family never made me feel this
way. She drew me out of myself."
At the end of Bette's freshman year at the University of Hawaii, her
friend died in an auto accident; five years ago Bette's sister Judith,
to whom she dedicated her first album, was killed in a car crash in New
York's theater district. "She was studying to become a moviemaker,"
Bette says, her head drooping. "She was the most brilliant,
perceptive, sensitive..." Another sister, Susan, age 30, teaches
the mentally retarded in Honolulu; a brother, Daniel, age 24, is himself
mentally retarded.
Bette
left home for Los Angeles after a bit part in the film Hawaii
in 1965, then on to New York, supporting herself by random jobs -
file clerk at Columbia University, go-go dancer in Union City, N.J. She
became an unsalaried singer in Village coffee houses. After a few bleak
years, she landed a chorus spot in Fiddler
on the Roof, soon graduating to the role of Tevye's eldest daughter.
Then one day she learned the Continental Baths was starting entertainment.
From there she sprang, on gaudy platform heels, to both a Grammy and a
Tony in 1973, and a gold mine. This was a girl who "couldn't
imagine parents tighter than mine."
Bette met Aaron Russo, her manager, while working small clubs in
Chicago. His career was at low ebb, hers beginning to catch fire.
"We met," she says, "and it was instant love and devotion.
Ours is a long and interesting tale... ah, Aaron and Bette. There's a
great deal of love and terrible rows. He's a lot like my father. He's a
bellower and in that way he intimidates people, but he's a real softie
underneath. But that's what my mother says about my father, and I don't
believe it."
Coming off a Russo-directed four month concert tour in 1973, Bette
recalls, "I was so battered emotionally and physically that I
thought I would break down. I'd been in four or five cities a week with
the same people who would always come to me with their problems. I had
no one to talk to. Aaron and I had one of our famous battles, and he
didn't go on tour." She decided she had to split. After luxuriating
on the Caribbean island of Grenada ("I caught the first plane out
after the revolution") and visiting her family in Honolulu, Bette
toured France for several months. "I had a mad, torrid love affair
with a Frenchman," she recalls casually. "I really liked him
for about two days, and then he held me captive. I want to go back to
Paris. I loved the food. The people are awful. Next time I want to tell
'em so."
Russo - who is legally separated from his wife of seven years - remains
in firm control of Midler's career, if not her entire life any longer.
(Bette's liaisons, averaging one a year, have been mostly with musicians
and men on the staff of her shows.) Russo's present plans for his star
include cutting an album this summer, a cross-country tour this fall
and a "movie deal for a feature starring Bette Midler that is
close." A television special is scheduled for March.
Gypsy-like in jeans, a blouse tied at
the midriff and a faded scarf covering hair curlers, Bette lives
contentedly in a modest Village house. Her living room is wall-to-wall
books and records, including every album made by her idol Aretha
Franklin. A professional hair dryer decorates the small study, and there
is a single, tiny bedroom. She is attended by a male live-in secretary.
"I think I'm a millionaire," she haphazardly responds to a
question about finances. "I'm learning to have a good time with
money. You have to learn to spend it when you come from none. Or else I
give it away to Channel 13 or Ramsey Clark."
With Clams on the Half Shell now
a memory, Midler and Russo are especially intrigued by TV. Michael
Eisner, ABC vice-president for primetime series, says, "We're in
discussion right now with Bette Midler. In my opinion she has tremendous
television potential." Perhaps thinking of Bette's uninhibited
ways, he adds, "You cannot judge her performance in one situation
and automatically assume she would do the same thing in a different
medium." Recently, however, Bette, appearing on a United Jewish Appeal
telethon in New York, sang four songs and announced she would drop her
black sequin dress for a pledge of $5,000. A caller offered the sum
immediately. The Divine Miss M stripped down to a chemise slip and
shrieked "Kiss my tuches!"
Bette is happily eyeing her television prospects, "but not a
series," she told one reporter. "I couldn't cut that Mary
Tyler-Rhoda crap." What about a film autobiography of Bette Midler?
"Not me," she says, recoiling from the suggestion. The
Divine Miss M? "No. Well," says Bette Midler, "maybe
something like The Perils of the
Divine Miss M."