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Bette Midler
Returns In Tacky Triumph
June 30, 1975 - People Magazine
By 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." |