The Divine Miss M.
Midler: 'It's not what you sing that matters'
Charles Michner


Next to the likes of Lainie Kazan, Lena Horne or Dionne Warwicke, Bette Midler is an ugly duckling.  Her tiny, 5-foot frame seems absurdly inadequate for her ripe, oversize torso and her large oval face with its ski-jump nose, toothy mouth, and mop of curly red hair that is vaguely reminiscent of Rita Hayworth as Sadie Thompson.  Her movements are a spasmodic series of nervous clutching, wild arm-waving and little-girl vamping.  Her songs are a kaleidoscopic grab bag of everything - from an Andres Sisters take-off of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" to a Joni Mitchell ballad, "For Free."  Her wit is, at best, forgettable: "My next song is for the divine Dick . . . Nixon, you know," she says before launching into "Daytime Hustler." 

Yet somehow it all comes together to make her one of the freshest, most captivating of the new girl singers.  With eighteen months as a regular on the Johnny Carson show behind her, a string of recent nightclub appearances, from Mister Kelly's in Chicago to the Sahara in Las Vegas, and a debut long-playing album for Atlantic Records in the wings, Bette Midler is - to use one of her favorite expressions - "hot." 

Camp: Hot, unquestionably, was the climate at New York's Bitter End café last week where Bette opened a six-day gig before a packed house.  Decked out in gold lame pedal pushers, a frilly old-fashioned black corset, a black net neckerchief and open-toed Spring-o-lator shoes, Bette (which is pronounced "bet") seemed grotesquely unreal when she swaggered onstage.  But when she grabbed the mike, threw back her head and opened her lungs, she was intensely, infectiously real. 

Backed by an expert quartet of guitars, piano and drums, she managed a shoulder-wiggling version  of  "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" that was at once outrageous camp and pure swing.  Suddenly serious, she made Alex Harvey's haunting country song, "Delta Dawn," an unforgettable lament.  From her "favorite" period, the early '60s, she resurrected "Do You Wanna Dance?" and with astonishing virtuosity did it both as teeny bopper rock and as a slow, heartbreaking ballad.  Another "blasto from the pasto" -"Leader Of The Pack" - had her listeners leaping to their feet.  By the time she closed with a reprise of her opening number "You  Gotta  Have Friends," it was clear that on that score Bette Midler had absolutely nothing at all to worry about. 

Slum: This combination of free-wheeling eclecticism and  take-me-as-i-am self-confidence is the result of a background as remarkable as her performances. "I grew up in a slum right near Pearl Harbor in Hawaii," says Bette.  "My father was a house painter for the Navy, and my sister and I were the only all-white children in grade school.  My high school was the first one in Honolulu's history to be busted for marijuana.  ("I'm at least 20," is all she will say of her present age)  Crazy about movies as a child-"when I was in sixth grade, I called everyone 'Dahling"'--she majored in drama for a year at the University of Hawaii and landed a job as an extra in the movie version of "Hawaii.  ("I was a missionary wife who did a good deal of heaving over the side of the boat.")  That took her to Los Angeles for six months, and in the mid-'60s she came to New York, where she eventually got the small role of Tzeitel in "Fiddler on the Roof," in which she sang "all of 32 bars." 

"I considered myself mainly a comedienne," she says, "but one day I heard an early  Aretha  Franklin  record-mostly blues and torch songs.  It was dynamite.  I really felt I understood the essence of her art, and so I tempted to try it myself." 

She made several appearances on '"The David Frost Show" ("One appearance was good, the others were the pits"), but it wasn't until she was picked up by Johnny Carson that her singing career was fully launched.  "I guess my campy stuff developed there," she says.  "I didn't have much material, so I just started freaking out doing all of my fantasies of people like the McCuire sisters, Betty Boop and Helen Morgan."  About the same time, she began singing at the Continental Baths, a homosexual health spa and cabaret on  Manhattan's West Side.  It was a bizarre way to break into show business. "But I wouldn't trade a minute of it," she says. "The tubs [her term for the place] encouraged me to explore satire, and the audience there wouldn't settle for half-ass.  If I'd kept my distance, they'd have lost interest because there were too many other things going on in the building that were more fun." 

That experience, plus later successful stints at the Downstairs at the Upstairs, have made "the divine Miss M" as her most ardent fans call her - something of a cult figure among New York's underground chic.  But her audience is nearly as far-ranging as her material -a fact that doesn't surprise Bette at all.  “I just happen to like a lot of styles," she says.  "It's not what you sing that matters.  It’s the fact that you love whatever you do that makes you hot.”