Bette Midler
Little Orphan Annie Without the Sanctimony
Rick Mitz


BETTE MIDLER has more projects going these days than she has fingers on which to count them. Let's see, she thinks: I've got two albums coming out any minute now – a live-in-concert one and a studio one. Then there's the ballet project for next season; Balanchine wants me to sing the lead in the New York City Ballet's production of The Seven Deadly Sins, and I've already started studying up for it. Got that March Bing Crosby TV special over with, and then there's my own special that will be on the tube in the fall. Yeah. then I just signed this three-movie contract  with Columbia Pictures.  Then there are the concerts and. . . “ 

Bette Midler is torn. What is she these days, anyway? She's a star, that's for sure, but what kind? A movie star? A recording star? A concert star? A ballet star? 

"Al, al, al, al, al, I don't know," she wails in a voice that could cut glass. "It's another thing. Is it gonna be fun? Who knows? What's gonna happen to me now? What'll I do?" She lifts a hand to her brow in a gesture half Olivier  (Laurence) and half Olive (Oyl). "But I'll do it. I'Il do it all. 'Cause you have to." 

People who are torn can also find themselves ripped. So Bette Midler is ripped: ripped into by critics who thought her latest bit of bad taste wasn't up to last year's bit of B.T.; ripped into by her fans who worry that she'll move to Hollywood and forget them; ripped into by stargazers who have focused their telescopes in numerous directions and expect her to shine equally everywhere.  But mostly it's Bette who rips into Bette - she sets sky-high standards and expects to measure up to each one. She has somehow leapt from dingdong to diva, from  supernumerary to superatar in the course of a swiftly rising career that's had quite a few pitfalls as well as pratfalls. 

From the Tubs to the clubs, from gold lame to gold records, from the Carnegie Delicatessen to Carnegie Hall, Bette Midler is the star of the Seventies, an exuberant entertainer who is both tuned into and turned on by what she's doing. She is the Emily Post of the camp crowd, having brought such terms as trash, flash, and tacky to our everyday vocabulary as she transported us to and from a magical place she calls the pits. Along with her three gum-chewing harlettes, Midler is beauty and the beast in the on-stage persona of The Divine Miss M.  She wears raunchy Forties gowns or too-tight gold lame toreador pants or maybe just her silky slip.  On stage, she'll do anything to entertain.  She pants and rants and rages outrageously, singing in and out of loony-tune. She is so high-energy that it would be only a minor surprise to see her go into orbit over the audience.  Her humor is self-mocking-as though she were making fun of herself before anyone else got a chance to. She is at once an absurd cross between Helen Morgan and Helen Kane, Mary Hartman and Mary Worth, and she is oddly affecting as all of them. 

"I am living out my fantasy life," she declares. "I've gotten everything I wanted. Yup. Yup. What do you think of that? Isn't that wonderful? So far, so good.'' 

THE public Bette Midler is a larger-than-life blowup of the real woman, so it's a surprise when you meet her in private. She's smaller and prettier than expected, and the loud, raucous stage voice is surprisingly soft in normal conversation.  She's full of contradictions as she speaks gently about herself, taking careful aim to shoot down a few misconceptions. Midler doesn't talk much these days - at least not for publication. She doesn't need to and she doesn't want to.  Members of the media haven't always treated Miss M so divinely, and she's wary of their questions. 

"I am very dedicated to my work," she says. "I really love my work. I look at pictures and films and other performers - anything to get ideas. I try constantly to keep my mind going.  As soon as my mind has stopped working, I feel as though I've died.  My mind has to be in a constant state of agitation. I'm always thinking, what can I do? What is going to surprise? What will I enjoy doing? What will uplift, instruct? I know it sounds corny, but it's the kind of training I got when I was a student, and I never got over it. I never got over the serious nature of work and, I think oooh.  I'm not making any sense, am I?  I'm just running on and on and ... you know, everything I say dribbles away after the first idea.  Let's just say I'm very serious about it. Not the dribbles. About my work.  I'm not saying this right, am I?" 

The indecision, the vulnerable insecurity, is a large part of Midler's appeal. Her sad songs have a raw, hurt edge to them, and even her funny songs have a sort of pathetic, Daffy-duck diffidence about them. On stage, she's all over the place, physically and spiritually. And anything that comes into her head is very likely to come out of her mouth. "I like to think I am an artiste," Midler says.   

"The only Jewish girl in an otherwise Samoan neighborhood," Bette grew up in Honolulu, her daily diet consisting of pineapples and old movies. A bit part in the film epic Hawaii gave her enough courage (and money) to move to Manhattan. After a while she landed a part in Fiddler on the Roof (as the eldest daughter Tzeitl) and began to sing after hours in several of New York's small showcase night spots.  Soon she landed her now-legendary job singing for towel-clad men at Manhattan's Continental Baths.  It may have been the ultimate fulfillment of many a singer's fantasy – getting paid for singing in the shower – but it didn't  last.  Following several successful appearances on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show as her self-created alter ego The Divine Miss M ("trash with flash, sleaze with ease," as she would describe it), Bette Midler freed herself from the steamy but limiting embrace of The Boys in the Baths and bolted to stardom. 

"I think I am a little bit of a schizophrenic, because I have a lot of little characters who live inside me and they all have different voices and they all pop out at strange times. It's as much a surprise to me as it is to anybody else.  But it's very entertaining. You see, I try never to – not ever - be bored. Oh, yes, dahling, one must nevah, nevah, nevuh be bored.'' 

As a child in Hawaii, she kept herself from getting bored by looking out her window at a real-life movie screen.  "When I was young," says Bette (who is not  so old - about thirty-two, although she's not telling for sure), 'I used to look out the window and watch the girls - you know, the cheap girls, the bad girls in the night. I'd watch them flirt with the sailors. I thought those girls were the best. I thought they were great. I never got over them, I never did, I never did. Many of them were redheaded like me, you know. And they all wore real tight skirts with flounces on the bottom, pointy shoes and pointed bras and sweaters but-toned down the back. And they all had filthy, filthy mouths. Sometimes I would follow them and listen to their conversations. They would talk about their boy friends and who was doing what to whom - and it always made me laugh. Because I was a very good girl, you know. I was! I mean, I was very, very good."  She was raised "very strictly, very rigidly," she asserts. 

"I still talk to my family in Hawaii every week. My mother is a great show-business mother.  She really carries on. My father still hasn't seen me work. I don't mind. It's better that way. Oh, yeah, he's seen a couple of my things on television. He didn't care for them. He likes Lawrence Welk, you see. And organ music. He's a nice man." She changes the subject. 

"I first realized I was funny in fifth grade.  Me and this girl, Barbara Nagy – I remember everybody - we decided to put on a skit for the class. I don't know why. Anyway, she was the man, I was the woman Uerman and Oysterbee (I don't know where the hell that name came from). But when we got up to give the sketch, we couldn't remember any of the stuff we rehearsed, so we wound up improvising the whole thing. She was wearing her father's shoes and one of them had a hole - and it brought down the class room! It was so strange. It was strange! People were laughing at something I did ... it was a real nice feeling, though. I never forgot it and I never got over it either.'' 

Obviously not. Today the only thing Bette Midler takes seriously is humor. "I think there's a real dearth of humorous, novelty-type songs on the scene today. Even my stuff. My last single wasn't meant to be funny, though it was probably a real howl! Anyway, after Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, I got away from humor, and I just recently realized that humor is one of my strongest suits. I'm very slow about myself. It takes me a long time to figure out what's right and what's wrong for me. But finally I figured it out: people really love funny, strange stuff. People love to be amused, to smile. The Beatles were very, very funny; they could really turn a phrase. And I can do it too. I mean, I know I'm not the Beatles, but I know that I can do it, even in my own little way; I can do it and - God, do I ramble on!''

Her newest album, "Live at Last," which she describes as "fairly whimsical," contains a number of funny songs; including one she wrote, a single called You're Moving Out Today. She glows. "I have never been prouder of anything I did in my whole life than I am of that single. It's scary and exciting, and it's all the nicest things you hope will happen. You ring up the record company and ask, 'Oh, how's my little record doing?' And you look at the charts, and it's really  great. I tell ya, it's like the pros." 

Now that she has become one of the pros herself, she realizes what a vulnerable position it is. "People have said nice things about me and incredibly nasty things about me, it's hard for me - I won't say it isn't. But in this business, you can't play it safe. You have to take a lot of risks. You have to take your lumps. You do your best.  Some people are gonna love it, some people are gonna hate it, you know? That's the game." She has become a little too serious and so she changes tones  as she often does when she finds herself getting too earnest – from straight-ahead  to  campy-corn.  She switches to her Sophie Tucker voice: "If you play with the Big Boys, you have to be prepared to Pay the Price. I tell ya, playing with the Big Boys is rough-rough-rough, 'cause the Big Boys, they don't care, just so they don't lose their own jobs. They don't care about your job. Who? Who do I mean? A-ha, I name no names. That's part of the way you play with the Big Boys. You never mention their names!'' 

But now that Bette's become one of the Big Boys herself, "the little people" have been pursuing her. "Yeah. I don't like 'em knockin' on the door, but everyone seems to know where my door is. Occasionally someone will knack on my door when I'm wearing my fuzzies and my bathrobe. It's not my fault. I live in  Greenwich Village and one of the newspapers printed my address once. I had to put bars on the windows. It's too bad. I had a nice little view, but I don't any more.'' 

One of her Columbia movies will be about such things. It's called Autographs, the story of a girl autograph hunter. "It's about finding out that the things you want don't have to mean all that much to you. Getting free is the message." Her first movie, she says, will probably be a musical comedy called The Tour, about a rock superstar. "I hope it's in the tradition of extravaganzas," she says. "You know, with feathers and elephants and production numbers." 

It’s a lot for a girl who, just a few years back, was canning pineapples on a Hawaiian assembly line. But she says she constantly reaches back to her roots and she doesn't mean the ones under her "dyed to death" red hair. In her case, her roots are her instincts. 

"I pick all my own songs. A song has to strike me - either the melody has to catch my ear, or the message and the lyric have to catch my attention. I try to relate a song to my own experience.  Do I understand this song? If I sing it, what do I want to communicate to the audience that is relative to me? It all happens in a flash, but it's all there. 

"All of my records have atmosphere. When you put one on, you know it's me. Because there ain't nobody else in the world who's gonna make records like that - nobody makes them. They're either not interested or they don't know how. It hasn't been easy for me, actually. It's been hard to get myself together. I like to record a whole range of possibilities, then pick.  Unfortunately, it's an expensive, time consuming process. You can wind up spending a lot of money doing an album and you have to pay for it out of the old royalties. Then you look at your little royalty check - $2.55, Hey! Where did all the money go? 

"I'm well off, though. Oh, I ain't no Elton John, but I'm very comfortable.  But I don't do a lot with my money. It just sort of dribbles away. I buy books and records and go to the movies – and shoes! I have thousands of pairs of shoes. I don't know why. I guess because I only had one pair when I was growin' up." 

Back in 1974, when Bette was still growing up, she took a big chunk of time off from her career. It was a controversial thing to do. Many of her detractors (and former fans) thought it was a mistake to abandon her career, even temporarily, at such a crucial time. 

"Yeah, I know all about what people said. They talk about the builds and crescendos and peaks and leveling off and plateaus and all that crap in a career - how you're supposed to make an album at a certain time and tour at a certain time, which I haven't been too good about. But I don't regret it. I don't think of anything as a mistake. You're gonna learn something from it - if you survive. 

"I don't think the year off set me back. It was something I had to do. I was beat. I was at my whit's end. I was very, very irritable and desolate, mostly from exhaustion. I became pretty nasty. I had a lot of energy, but it wasn't joyful energy. It was very negative sometimes. 

"Once I was in St. Louis and I was on stage for three and one-half hours.  And I was bombed, just bombed. I was angry and unhappy and I took it out on this poor audience in St. Louis. I was discombobulated. The longer I would ramble on, the worse it got. At one point, I jumped into the audience, ran up the aisle, went to the candy counter in the lobby and bought a candy bar. I walked back into the audience, had a dialogue with some shoe salesman, and then I started talking to the crowd in my whiney, wasted little voice. Oh, God! They had to pull me back on stage. One guy was pushing me by my buns and the stage manager was pulling me up and I was just like this [she strikes a zombie pose] and you know, no one laughed because they couldn't believe what they were seeing. When it was over, everyone, everyone, called everyone else and it was a Crisis.  But I thought it was a ball. I liked it." 

Maybe it was something of a catharsis, for in her mind's memory book it was a good time. Another good time was the night she recorded Bob Dylan's Buckets of Rain with Dylan himself. "He is the greatest," Bette attests. "He has a wicked sense of humor and loves a good joke. I wanted him to like me because I've always liked him. He was a prime mover in my life. You know," she says in a considerate aside, perhaps not realizing that the same thing applies to herself as well, "It must be hard for people like Dylan to find out that they're prime movers in other people's lives. It must astonish them. Anyway, I came to New York because I wanted to meet Bob Dylan. I spent a lot of time lookin' for him too. He didn't let me down at all." 

Paul Simon is another mover she's worked with, although the world may never hear the musical result. Simon originally wrote Gone at Last for Midler, but for some reason Phoebe Snow ended up in the final version, even though Midler had also recorded it with him. She is miffed. "I was pretty sure it was gonna go," she says, "but it didn't. Is he hard to work with? You didn't hear that from my mouth, remember that. But if he doesn't hear what he wants to, he'll go somewhere else to find it. He's very particular about what he does, and nothing gets past him. I never really did find out what happened. 

ANOTHER disappointment was the cancellation of the Bertolt Brecht / Kurt Weill theater piece The Seven Deadly Sins because of the New York City Ballet's orchestra strike. It had been scheduled for a late January premier.  "Maybe we'll do it next year. I learned the score, which was not easy. We had just started staging it. At first, I was a little timid about it.  But the more I learned it - well, it's just terrific ! Atlantic records wants me to record it. I'm not sure about that.   I don't think it's in the popular taste. If, by some chance, it doesn't work out, Jerry Robbins said he'd put me in something like The Concert, which is a comic ballet.  I looooooove comic ballet, comic dance, comic anything.'' 

All this activity has been a lot for her to keep track of, and she's had to make some changes in her business affairs.  "I've had to become professionally organized and together. It was something I had to learn. Everything started out as a lark for me, but when push comes to shove, you have to get organized. I still work at it. I take the learning part of this business very seriously. Every day I try to learn something: a little bit of business or a delivery of a line of a song. Today, for example, I learned how to get up Fifth Avenue. Not bad."  [Fifth Avenue is one-way down.] 

She sits quietly for a moment and then with a twitch announces: "I am insecure." Silence. "Oh, I don't mean that as a joke. I am insecure," she says, secure in the fact that she's insecure. "But I have my good days and I have my bad days. Like ... these days, I like the way I look - sometimes. I mean, right now, I'm all right. I've got my little hat on so you can't see my hair. Oh, I've thought about changing it all, but I don't really know. If I make any changes in my appearance for the movies, it won't be because of vanity. I have been known, you know, to sacrifice beauty for my art!" And then suddenly she's serious again. "Part of my problem is sometimes I have it more than others - is that people tend to give me their opinions. Almost anybody at all feels it's okay to tell you what to do.  If you have courage and trust in yourself and your instincts, then you can tell them all to go to hell. If, on the other hand, they come down on you very, very hard, then the game gets a little rougher." 

She lights a cigarette and announces that it will be her last. Pretty soon she has to rediscover the way to go down Fifth Avenue and back to her Greenwich Village apartment to pack for a morning flight to L.A. ("the home of absolutely nothing," she would later call it on the televised Grammy Awards), where she'll tape her first network TV special.  She sits back and exhales a cloud of smoke. Then she exhales a few more words, quietly, almost to herself. 

"The saga of Bette Midler. You know, it really is a saga. Oh," she mugs, "I haven't changed really. I am very much the same. This hat is the same hat, although this is a new sweater. Do you like it?" she asks, perhaps remembering when she appeared on the Worst Dressed list. Her style, they said, was 'potluck in a Laundromat.'' 

"You know, I like people to make me laugh. It's the only way to survive.  The whole thing, after all, is one big joke. So, whatever anyone wants to think about me is fine. That's what I'm here for, that's my role. I can be an object of love, hate, it doesn't matter. As long as I like myself." A smirk. "Although I do want people to know that I have red hair ... well," she shrugs, "the intention is all there." 

She puts the cigarette out and pockets the rest of the pack. "What do I think of me? Oh, gee, I don't know. I can't make any sense out of it. I'm trying, though. But, you know, I think it's kind of ... wonderful." She puts on her coat and walks toward the door. "Kind of wonderful."