IS THE BEST BETTE STILL TO COME?
Our Best Bette
Gloria Stienem

Special thanks to Steve Weiner & Ronni Jensen for sharing this article 


Bette Midler's bawdy, joyous style originated in a gay male nightclub in New York. It was the only place she could escape from the anonymity of a Broadway show and do an act that was all her own. As she writes in her autobiography, A View from A Broad (Simon & Schuster): "I was able to take chances on that stage I could never have taken anywhere else. Ironically, I was freed from fear by people who, at the time, were ruled by fear."

She made fun of the various varieties of feminine roles by exaggerating them, and by demonstrating that women, too, are trained to be female impersonators. But this time, there was a big difference: a woman was in control. From inside the craziness of garter belts and mermaid tails, of gold lame and thrift shop funk, Bette's tiny, zaftig body took on a mythic, raucous, irresistible power that filled the stage with a new freedom. As novelist Rosalyn Drexler wrote, "She's given camp back to women."

The Bette Midler success meant hit records, magazine covers, and a one woman concert-length show that brought a funky truth and record breaking crowds to prestigious stages from New York to London. It also won her a starring role in "The Rose," a movie that told the story of a gifted, doomed rock singer with many resemblances to the life of Janis Joplin, and that earned her an Oscar nomination.

But inside this public success, there was a private chain of painful events.  Aaron Russo, her early lover and longtime manager, was protecting her from the burden of business and producing decisions, but also controlling her personal life with, she says, "theatrical but wearing tantrums, and guilt producing protestations that 'You and my gold are all I have left." Even her own energy and flamboyance was only skin deep. It covered a childhood full of the insecurity that comes from feeling constantly an outsider, as the only Jewish family in their poor neighborhood in Hawaii, as a rebel even within that family, and as a young girl who wasn't conventionally pretty and who suffered the vulnerability of many big-breasted women, especially those who, like Bette, develop early and attract cruel teenage attention. "I always felt apart," Bette explained. "I never felt like I belonged. That's why I went so far to make people laugh  -to find some comfort, to be part of the group, and to be accepted."

In 1979, she finally took the major step of firing Russo, and taking control of her own professional and business life. It was a stunning burden of new facts and skills to be learned. That same year, her mother died after a long battle with cancer, leaving Bette with many unresolved feelings of love and guilt. In 1981, she made a movie prophetically called "Jinxed," a decision she made partly because the script was a slangy, interesting combination of comedy and thriller, but largely because she needed the money.

It turned out to be a daily nightmare of work with a producer who pronounced her "quite an unpleasant young lady," and a co-star who, she says, earlier warned that he couldn't stand blacks and gays and followed that with public denouncements of her looks. He was widely quoted as saying that he only got through love scenes with her by thinking of his dog. Bette began to wake up at night with panic and had difficulty breathing. She got through the movie, a box-office bomb, but was left feeling "completely alone and worthless."

After months of self-doubt, rest, and some visits for psychological therapy she had previously disdained as being "only for the weak," Bette's energy and native optimism began to return. But her latest show contains hints of new depths and directions. Along with the bouncy parody/tributes to the Andrews Sisters, for instance, there are flashes of the poignance of Edith Piaf or the dignity of Ella Fitzgerald. Next to a number that offers giant balloons that look like breasts (a lively, lethal parody of every "tits and ass' number known to man), there may be the elegance of Bette clothed in Martha Graham - like tubes of purple cloth that move like an abstract painting. There is still the zany pleasure of mermaid tails and costumes that are celestial versions of Frederick's of Hollywood, but the bawdy, life-loving jokes Bette tells as "Soph" are now likely to give women power over sex and explore such forbidden female territory as "having your period." The result is a more varied tapestry in which the humor and outrage are all the more pleasurable for their contrast with occasional sadness and elegance. Even her love songs focus not only on romance, but also call up thoughts of a mother or a friend.

It's as if the armor of defiance and outrageousness has been pierced and parts of a new Bette are being set free -but the balance is still fragile. There is a tiredness and worry that comes along with her enormous producing responsibilities, plus a new pride and willingness to take credit for the jokes and ideas she used to credit to others. Even the Divine Miss M. has now been given a childhood in The Saga of Baby Divine that ranks her with Eloise ("but not as bratty," as Bette explains) and has good-humored echoes of the Christmas story itself ("entirely accidental," she says of the Three Wise Men parallel).

But a new Bette is being born.

Between the nightly, exhausting one-woman concerts of a nationwide tour, she stopped in New York to talk. All the miraculous energy that fills rooms the size of Radio City Music Hall turns out to be packaged in a small, porcelain body. Glasses frame eyes that are direct and serious, but all her characters peer out from time to time, from the bawdy Soph to the Divine Miss M. herself.

IN HER OWN WORDS ...
When I go out in the street, I don't put on a disguise, I just go out and mosey around. I'm very curious. I look at everybody. I'm hardly ever recognized, and it lets me cruise. It's important to stand in line for a hot dog - to just let ordinary things happen to you. I don't like the white bread, uptown neighborhoods. Madison Avenue is almost as bad and superficial as Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, but here I am staying in an uptown hotel in New York City. I made some money so I wanted to try it - could I crack uptown? Butt artists and people with souls live downtown. I'm going back. My whole life is in the streets.

If I put on my disguise, it's because I don't want to look like a Beverly Hills matron -which is the way I look. But also there's a certain kind of shock value I'm interested in that comes from being outrageous.

Actually, I'm getting more disguises - and I'm proud of that. Basically, I'm an actor who's looking for characters to assume. I'm proud of the fact that I have new voices, new accents, new tricks, new characters. I've been looking for other people to play besides Delores de Lago and another older woman besides Soph who loves sex.

My own looks - well, I never looked conventional, but I always had an internal picture of myself. I always thought I was absolutely ravishing - I didn't know any better. I don't know where it came from - but actually, once I got myself up, I did look sexy and terrific. I believed that internal picture. It was only when they started calling me names that I had to stop and say, "Gosh, I wonder if they're right." Then my internal picture started to change, and I started having problems. Unfortunately, you can't go around with a sign that says, 'I have the most fabulous personality and the most wonderful soul!' It was when I started to read that I wasn't as ravishingly beautiful as I thought I was - indeed, not even close to it - it really took me down a peg. I guess the next step is to realize that reality is beautiful.

I missed my mother's death by one day. I was working. I was going around the world and I'd just come bark from Australia. I called and they said she had already died. My sister had cared for her for two years. I felt that I should have been there too. But I wasn't. I was working.

My mother worked. She sold lingerie before I was born. My father was a housepainter in New Jersey who wanted to live in Hawaii. I think my mother was happy there until we moved into a poor neighborhood where we were the only white family. Then she just sort of shrank; she didn't want her old friends to see her. In the fifties, she got interested in real estate and she was good at it because it was anonymous. She could talk to brokers and tenants on the phone  -and she was good on the phone. She bought property, and in a small way, she became a landlady. She always told her three girls to get out there and make something of themselves.

I wasn't outrageous then, but I was a smartass, and Daddy didn't like it when I gave him lip. I think my mom was happy when I started to entertain and be different, but my father wasn't. I remember being very impressed with a friend of my mother's who was single and lived by herself in downtown Honolulu. She was divorced and a copyreader. I guess you could say she was a role model. She wasn't crazy about me - she said I was a terrible show-off and should be locked in a room - but I was very impressed with her. On the other hand, she died completely alone and her body wasn't discovered for a week and a half. Maybe we should rethink this living alone stuff.

I wish I had understood what was going on between my mother and my father. It would have answered a lot of questions, but I never understood. There was a lot of bitterness, a lot of animosity. You could never get a straight answer out of either one of them - arid I'm a big one for straight answers.

I guess it was money. They had worked very hard all their lives. They finally accumulated what was for them, for their situation in life, quite a lot, but they never spent it. Whatever pleasure there was in the world, they denied themselves, except for the occasional television set.

Toward the end, it got very ugly. There were a lot of accusations flying through the air because he couldn't deal with her illness. He just pretended like she wasn't sick.

Now my father and I can talk, but he's a tough bird. I still can't ask him what happened with my mother because he has an embarrassment with that kind of honesty. He doesn't want to pry into those emotional realms.

In front of his friends, he's very proud of me. In front of me, he's very down his nose. Not so much as he used I to be, but now it's more "Why do you work so hard?" And I must say, he's right. Why do I have to work so hard? What do I have to prove any more?

I don't want to stop working, but I would like to have my mind engaged with something besides jokes and music and costumes.

I fainted on stage in Detroit because I was working too hard, and because I just couldn't stop thinking about my mother. I was racked with guilt - and really terrified. When you're in a weakened condition, all the guilt of your life floods back to you.

I think this last show is the best show I've ever done. It had a big hole in the middle of the first act that I couldn't crack because I didn't have the time to do it on the road. We finally fixed it, and it's very cohesive now. It actually hangs together like a real show. We decided: "Spend the money, here we go! Everybody do what it is you want to do!" Everybody did, and it came out beautiful. My friends and I [in the show] have been together for a minimum of seven years and some of us have been together for ten. It's the best work we've ever done and we are pooped!

This act is getting easier. It used to be so nerve-racking. I used to get sick before I went onstage - vomiting, cold sweats. Not any more. I still whine about going on and starting the show. But I go. And sometimes I have a lot of fun, which I didn't used to let myself have. I appeared to be having fun, but it was a lot more work than it looked like. Physically, this is the hardest show I've done but emotionally it's the easiest.

I had always contributed comedy material to my shows, but not to the extent that I did this time. I had written A View from A Broad. It was a very, very funny book, but I didn't have a lot of confidence in my ability to write stand-up. Then I met a comedy writer in Los Angeles named Lenny Ripps - a very nice man who came and sat and talked with me. He actually took me by the hand and said, "You have lived. You have been through funny things. Don't be afraid to take the truth, speak on it, elaborate on it " It really did give me a great sense of freedom. I had always relied heavily on other writers for my stand-up material. Always. I guess because some colleague, one I respected, told me I could, I suddenly gained confidence. But I'm not so afraid to explore those avenues any more. I used to think it was tacky to talk about your period. I still really basically think it's tacky to talk about crabs.

To take a tacky subject ... an especially tacky subject ... and elaborate on it and suddenly get a whole other perspective of the world and people just from this one tacky little subject, that is a feat! And that is something to be proud of.

I wouldn't mind being a commentator, a stand-up comic like Richie Pryor. He moves people socially. It's a challenge because it's a field that people are entering with higher hopes than ever before. It's sort of like music was twenty years ago. There are no black women who do that. But there are black women who can - they just don't have the opportunity or the impetus.

Maybe I could be a stand-up comic. And there's so much more that I want to do. I read Emma Goldman's autobiography and I think about a movie of her life. But do you have any idea how much trouble it would be to raise money for a movie about Emma Goldman? Can you imagine?

It would be outrageous!