Divine Midler
Bette Midler in Toronto for a revealing interview.
Colin Dangaard

Special thanks to Ronni Jensen for sharing this article


Bette Midler sinks her fangs into a hunk of salami, wiggles her nose the way she does, swings her leg impishly off her knee, and announces that the taste reminds her of when she was poor.  Bette has a very good memory.  That was back when movie producers laughed her out of their officers, and music publishers regarded her as a colourful singing parrot.  Not until she introduced “The Divine Miss M,” catching the eye of Atlantic Records President Ahmet Ertegun at a hairdressers’ convention did somebody put a pen in her hand and sign her to big bucks.

That was a decade ago.  “The Divine Miss M” mushroomed into a high-powered, multi-national, multi-leveled creative corporation, carrying Bette in hit movies like The Rose and, her latest, Divine Madness, where the lady gets to play with the fat under her arms, make fun of British Royalty, tell dirty jokes, shout four-letter words and pour her little heart out all over the stage.  Divinely delightful.

Back to the salami, then.  Bette has missed dinner, having already skipped lunch, and she is making promotional appearances at the Toronto Film Festival, flitting from microphone to microphone, depositing words, a kind of newsman’s honeybee.

“I think,” she says, grapping at her throat, “that this salami is going to kill me,” which brings her to the subject of death, and the admission it’s her “one big fear.”

She says: “It really bothers me, that one day it’s going to happen.  I mean, I’ve had no experience of death!  It’s the unknown, you know.  It happens to everybody, but I just don’t want it to happen to me.  I’ve got too much to do.”

She puts aside the salami, glaring at it accusingly, as if it has indeed moved her closer to death.

“When you first start off down the road, you imagine everything is going to clear up by the time you get to the end of it; that your dream will come true, that everything will be hunky dory.  But it doesn’t always turn out that way.  My dream was to be famous.  I wanted that more than anything else.  To die leaving something behind, a mark that would save me from being anonymous.  Now I want more.  I want to be a heroine, a person others can model themselves on.  I don’t think this is outrageous.  When you see you can be something other than ordinary, you tend to want to be that.  I want to be an inspiration.”

Bette Midler feels qualified for this lofty role.  She’s ready when the people are. 

“I really do make an effort,” she insists. “People tend to put artists in positions of power, yet they want them to reflect their own lives.  When you don’t reflect the lives of people who buy your work, they’re no longer interested in what you have to say.  You’re no longer talking about them. You’re talking about yourself.”

Success, says Bette, has not amputated her from the streets.

“I don’t avoid people because they don’t have as much money as I do, or they’re not as successful as I am.”

Still single after various romances, the last one with actor Peter Riegert, Bette says fame and fortune haven’t touched her love life either.

“What happens,” she says, “is you’re the same person you were when you started, so if you had any problems in that area before, they will probably be magnified, once you’re under scrutiny.”

Of her romance with Peter, she says: “He’s a nice guy, but it just didn’t work out, in the end.  Anyhow, nobody falls in love and gets married anymore.”

Meanwhile, Bette Midler is taking much satisfaction from winning wide acclaim as an actress, and looks back with glee over a “hit list” of producers who never gave her a break.

“I’ll take their names to the grave with me,” she says, “I’ve since had to deal with some of them, and this time THEY were uncomfortable.  A ‘hit list’ is necessary for your own health in Hollywood. You can take only so much, before you get angry – and anger is a very useful emotion.  Good thing I don’t own guns.”

Bette Midler at 34 is much quieter than the lady who once ran off a stage in St. Louis, bought a candy bar in the lobby, and jumped back up before the microphone; or the one who leant down during a song, took the glasses from a man’s face, and chewed them.

While she’s still awfully quick with the mouth, Bette admits: “I don’t have the same kind of drive I once had.  When you get successful, things leave you, great hunks of your personality fall by the wayside.”


REVIEW

Divine Madness is a straightforward film version of a Bette Midler concert – and all that it entails. Now whether Bette’s concerts are acquired taste, or more simply have no taste at all, is open to debate.

She sings like a jumbo jet on full throttle, and struts around the stage dressed in varying arrays of sequined gaudiness, telling coarse stories and treating the rest of the world with a sort of vulgar contempt (including our own dear Royal Family).  But behind all that lies a warmth and self-mockery that makes the very worst of her jokes seem hysterically funny, and the best of her songs unbeatable.

This film captures all that perfectly – she calls it her “time capsule” performance – with the highest quality sound, none of that gimmicky camerawork, and slick, unfussy editing.

It isn’t as good as the real, live show, but it’s good enough, and to miss it would be a pity.