Bette Midler Page 10

  That particular night was another turning point in Bette’s career, and she herself knew it. She was going to become the major music-industry sensation that she had hoped to become, but she knew that it was time for some changes. She looked out into the audience that evening and announced to her cheering fans who had fallen in love with her when she was the wild woman of the Baths, “I hope you stay with me, even when I don’t always do what you want me to. Next year you won’t even recognize me” (26).

  Was she going to abandon the gay crowd who discovered her first? This was the big question that particular statement posed to many members of the audience that night.

  “Me and those boys, we just went somewhere else. It was so much fun. I had the best time. It was something I just had to do, and I did it for them, and I did it all. And I must say, they probably saw the most inspired of it. It was really abandon. I did some crap, I did some good stuff, and I learned a lot,” she explained of her emergence from the Continental Baths (8). “Essentially, they gave me a big push and we had some good times, but they are all there, and I’m constantly moving” (11). Indeed she was.

  The year 1973 saw changes in her act as well. Melissa Manchester left the troupe right after New Year’s, and she was replaced by Charlotte Crossley. Charlotte recalled having seen Bette’s act at Mr. Kelly’s in Chicago: “I checked them out, you know, and they were real cool. They were like very bland white girls, in a way, but kind of great. Bette kept screamin’ at them to get an attitude. I thought they were really slick, but bland. I mean, blander than the Ronettes. It was nice, because they all had dark hair, and they all looked alike, and they were real cute, but they were real quiet. They sounded great, of course—they had all been studio singers, and they sounded great” (48).

  According to Charlotte, Melissa was her favorite Harlette, “I noticed her because she had the most personality.” When Crossley was asked to become her replacement, Melissa got together with her to teach her the singing and the choreography. “We just got right down and started singing songs together. Melissa left me with great feelings and really taught me a lot about the music. I got to know her pretty well. It’s funny, because a lot of people say that she’s a lot like Bette. Vocally, they go to the same voice teacher, and they do have little things in their voices that are similar, I think. But they’re not at all alike. Personality-wise, Melissa is a very cooled-out calm person” (48).

  In Bette’s personal life, her affair with Michael Federal had cooled down, but he remained her bass player. According to Midler at the time, “I’m good when I’m in love. I’m hot on stage, too. I just enjoy it. I try to be in love all the time, I keep my eyes open” (8).

  According to Buzzy Linhart, Bette was still in love with drummer Luther Rix at the time, and she resumed her affair with him. Buzzy explains that around this time, “Bette got so sick of being separated all of the time, ‘cuz she was touring by this time, and I was touring with Luther, that we actually, like a baseball team, traded Luther Rix to Bette Midler, and I got this young genius named Kevin Ellman—twenty-two years old at the time—who became the first drummer in the great band Utopia, that Moogy, my co-author of ‘Friends,’ was also a co-founder of. We traded Luther and Kevin straight-away so that they could finally be in love and on the road together” (37).

  Now that her dreams of stardom were coming true, Bette was becoming more realistic about show business. “I used to want to be Bette Davis in one of those great thirties movies where everyone’s wearing furs and drinking martinis. I used to believe that,” she explained. “I don’t think I’m rabid to be a star. Now that I’ve met a few, I realize it’s all the same, we’re all the same. There’s no difference. I met Bob Dylan, after looking for him for seven years, and I was in shock. I had worshiped him. But he lives, he has flesh, has these shirts, sometimes he plays good, sometimes he plays bad, sometimes he sings good, he writes a good song, he writes a bad song, he’s a human being” (4).

  “I’m all my fantasies!” she was quick to admit. No matter how realistic she attempted to become, she was addicted to performing: “Every time I get up there, it’s ‘magic time.’ I have a little event. It’s getting more and more theatrical, too; when we work on a stage that actually has a proscenium, it’s fabulous, it takes on a whole other dimension, it really is like a little show. What I have is the ability to make people look at me. It just comes on like a light bulb. And it feels like a light bulb. It feels warm inside” (8). Bette Midler was in the perfect position to become a major superstar as 1973 began, and she was about ready to really turn the wattage on—full blast.

  Bette Midler’s first mammoth cross-country 1973 tour began in Rochester, New York, in February. The press that she had received up until this point had greatly accentuated that she had really gotten her start singing in a gay bathhouse, so the audiences that she drew, even in the remotest places, were very gay. Much of her comedy patter on stage would be culled from references to whatever gay bar, gay street, gay area, or gay figures existed in any given city. Members of her entourage sought out such information, and Bill Hennessey wrote up special material to tailor Bette’s jokes to the vicinity.

  After several months of playing places like Troy, New York, and Passaic, New Jersey, the spring tour concluded in San Francisco—the gay Mecca of them all. After that, both Merle and Gail followed Melissa Manchester’s lead and resigned as Harlettes to pursue their own musical careers.

  During this period, Bette continued to make appearances on television as well. One of the TV shows during this era was a guest spot on a special called Burt Bacharach—Opus No. 3, on which she performed “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Thanks to a “split screen,” on the show Bette portrayed all three of the Andrews Sisters in 1940s outfits.

  According to her, “It was great fun. I don’t remember any of the parts ‘cause I’ve sung the melody all these months. So Barry and I redid all the parts, each part one on top of the other, and it was great. It was a great experience, ‘cause I never thought I could do that. I never thought my ears were that good, ‘cause it’s really tricky. Those harmonies are very hard. I don’t know how those girls did it—I don’t know how the Andrews Sisters did it!” (6). It was this version of the song that was ultimately released as the single version of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” because it was so much livelier than the original album version of the same song.

  Due to the fantastic job that Bette did on the Burt Bacharach special, which was produced and aired by ABC-TV, the network struck a deal with Bette to have her own special the next season. On June 19, 1973, ABC-TV issued a press release with the headline “First Starring Television Special for Singer Bette Midler Will Be ABC Television Network Attraction during 1973–1974.” Although this show was optioned, it never materialized. ABC was very reserved about the show’s potential content, and Bette and Aaron wanted to make the show as outrageous as possible. They never saw eye to eye.

  Bette explained at that time, “I really wanted to do a shabby show, a really sleazy, tacky, shabby show. But the agency and the network are a bit conservative. They wanted Johnny Mann, they want the Ding-a-Lings. I want sleaze, I want sequins” (6). It would be several years before she finally had her own TV special . . . on another network.

  At this time, Bette was still stinging from an ugly television experience she had had a couple of seasons before when she appeared on the very staid Mike Douglas Show. Also on the bill for that particular show was Lawrence Welk, the old-guard king of polka/swing.

  “He thought I was a dirty little girl,” recalled Bette of the Welk nightmare. “Welk was supposed to dance with me and he wouldn’t. . . . Maybe I wasn’t his type. We were supposed to do this little polka and he immediately went for someone who looked a lot different from the way I looked even though I certainly polka as well as Lawrence Welk, God knows! And I remember I used to talk about it in my act, because I was quite hurt by it. . . . That was the last time I did Mike Douglas, and I vowed I would never, never appear with them
again” (8).

  The joke that she used to tell in her act had to do with the fact that Lawrence Welk was afraid that she was going to give him a case of body crabs. And according to her, “He should be so lucky!” Although she poked fun at the incident, in a way it did upset her, because Lawrence Welk was one of her father’s favorite performers, and it was like making a fool of yourself in front of one of your parents’ friends.

  Although Bette was becoming quite a big star in America, her parents never came to the mainland to see their daughter perform. This was a two-edged sword. On one hand, she was relieved that her mom and dad had yet to witness their little girl telling dirty jokes and gyrating in front of thousands of totally off-the-wall people, while dressed in outfits that were suitable for any of the Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogs. Yet she was also hurt that her parents would be ashamed by her behavior in public.

  She admitted to the New York Times in early 1973 that “They’ve seen me on TV, but I would never work live in front of my parents. My father would kill himself, he would jump off the roof, he would die. My father is very, very conservative, and I wouldn’t do that to him, because he’s okay, you know, he’s a good man. He always tried real hard” (3).

  Since The Divine Miss M album had sold almost three million copies at this point, it was time to go back into the recording studio to work on her second album. After Barry Manilow had proved his talents to Atlantic Records by supervising the rerecording of several of the cuts on Bette’s first album, he was enlisted the produce the entirety of the Bette Midler album—along with Arif Mardin.

  By now, Barry Manilow was justifiably self-confident about his talents. While Bette was doing other things, Barry had busily put together his own demo tape and had negotiated his own recording contract with Bell Records. He wasn’t about to spend the rest of his days playing second fiddle to Midler. (Oddly enough, Clive Davis, the president of Columbia Records, who had not been impressed with Bette’s act at Downstairs at the Upstairs the year before, had bought Bell Records, changed the company’s name to Arista Records, and signed Manilow—and Melissa Manchester—and turned them into two of the label’s biggest stars.)

  When Midler’s self-titled second album was released, it was a matter of: If you liked The Divine Miss M, you LOVED the Bette Midler LP. It took the schizophrenic formula that made its predecessor a smash and kicked it up several notches.

  Again, it owed much of its success to the production talents of Barry Manilow. Although it is accredited as being produced by Arif Mardin and Manilow, Barry’s influence in the studio was again paramount to the finished product. This statement is in no way meant to discredit or lessen the vast talent of Atlantic Records’ house producer, Mardin—who is responsible for so many wonderful albums (by Aretha Franklin, Carly Simon, Chaka Khan, and later Midler albums). However, on the Bette Midler album, Manilow’s influence fully permeates every single cut. He is not only the coproducer, but all of the songs were completely “arranged and conducted” by him. Furthermore, he plays all of the piano parts, plays percussion, and even sings in the background. Knowing this, it is easy to understand why Bette later felt lost without Manilow, when he left her camp to pursue his own massively successful singing career. This album’s liner notes feature the prominent line “Barry Manilow appears through the courtesy of Bell Records,” so the die was clearly already cast for his own exit.

  Several of New York City’s top studio musicians were used on the Bette Midler album. Ralph Mac Donald, Will Lee, Steve Gadd, and Don Grolnick are among the professionals on the tracks. In addition, Bette’s boyfriend, Luther Rix, was utilized on the drums and on percussion.

  The original 1973 vinyl album was divided into two distinct sides—the first side was the torch and blues side, and side two was the camp and rock side. The album opens with two of the songs that Bette had heard on Aretha Franklin’s 1964 tribute LP to Dinah Washington—Unforgettable—which she had fallen in love with years before. They were Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer’s optimistically longing “Skylark” and the desolate “Drinking Again,” by Mercer and Doris Tauber. Midler had played the Unforgettable album over and over again, and she had sung those songs so many times that when it came time to record them here, she was able to milk every emotion-filled lyric for all its worth. The desperation in her voice on “Drinking Again” makes one want to just open a bottle of booze and drown one’s sorrows along with her.

  Next came her gutsy and soulful rendition of the ultra-trampy Denise LaSalle hit “Breaking Up Somebody’s Home.” On this wailing recording, there is no question that Miss M doesn’t give a damn whose marriage she ruins in her hot pursuit of love. She then exposes her theatrical roots on her interpretation of Kurt Weill’s “Surabaya Johnny.” In this song Bette switches roles—from the homewrecker in “Breaking Up” to the heartbroken lover in “Surabaya,” professing love with a lying and deceitful man. The album side then concludes with her impassioned rendition of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” which she turns into a woman’s liberation anthem. Her singing is so conviction-filled, and Manilow’s arrangement is so sweeping, that she sings the hell out of it and makes it all her own.

  Although modern compact discs run these ten album cuts back-to-back, originally you had to get up and walk over to the turntable to flip over the disc to switch to the campy and comically side of Miss M. The second half of the album kicks off with a couple of lines of the Munchkin-sung Wizard of Oz song “Optimistic Voices,” which is used as a lead-in to the Busby Berkeley camp of “Lullaby of Broadway.”

  Milking her 1940s nostalgia trip for maximum joy, next comes Bette’s jubilantly swinging rebirth of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” It is followed by the ultimate trashy girl group medley: “Uptown” (The Crystals), “Don’t Say Nothing Bad (about My Baby)” (The Cookies), and “Da Doo Ron Ron” (The Crystals). Then on “Twisted,” Bette takes the silly Annie Ross (of Lambert, Hendricks, & Ross) mental therapy classic and transforms it into a wacky two-faced conversation with herself—making it truly twisted with self-mocking humor. Finally, she interprets the Jackie Wilson classic “Higher and Higher,” which she sings faster and faster, turning it into an exhaustive smash. The Bette Midler album is a worthy successor to The Divine Miss M—in many ways, surpassing it in style and excitement. With it, she had recorded and released a pair of successive hit albums—which created a hard act for even her to follow.

  On this disc, Manilow distilled the two sides of Bette’s musical personality and devoted one half of the album to each distinctly different persona. The Bette Midler LP, which was released in late 1973, was to become a huge success. It peaked at Number 6 on the Billboard magazine album charts, surpassing The Divine Miss M’s peak position of Number 9.

  There was only one single released off the Bette Midler album. It was the nostalgic Glenn Miller song “In the Mood,” which made it to Number 51 in America on the pop chart.

  During the recording of the album, Aaron Russo had been busily planning a grand tour of large auditoriums across America for the fall of 1973. The tour was to provide the final push toward Bette’s dramatically growing stardom. Her mainstream popularity had begun in the spring of 1973 with a small college-town tour. With the Bette Midler album in the can, it was time to hit the road and catapult Midler to solid superstardom. The four-month-long road show was to end up back in New York City, with Bette starring in her own Broadway revue version of the same show at the Palace Theater. The planning was brilliant, and the strategy was going to work to a tee. By the end of the tour, Bette would a legend.

  But real conflicts were about to occur along the way. When Bette came to Barry with the final details for the upcoming tour and handed him the itinerary, he announced that he had just recorded his own album and his contract called for him to perform live in concert to promote his record. If Bette wanted him as her musical director and piano player on this tour, she would have to give him his own spot in her show. She was mad, pissed, frightened, scared, furious,
and shocked . . . all at once. What was she going to do? No one could do what Barry could with her music. She didn’t have time to train a new musical director, and she knew that she couldn’t be confident with anyone else behind her on this crucial tour.

  This was professional blackmail, and she had only one choice. Bette’s show was to be divided into two acts, with an intermission in-between. She would do the first act, the curtains would come down, and an intermission would begin. Then Barry would be introduced at the end of the intermission, he would play three of his own songs, and Bette would make her own second-act entrance. While he was onstage, Barry would continue as her piano player. And that is exactly what happened.

  It was perfect for Manilow, because he was scared to death of performing alone onstage at this point in his career. He could overcome his stage fright with his first-act piano playing, and even if no one paid any attention to his three second-act numbers, Bette would soon make her entrance and save him. By the end of the show the crowd would be on its feet in thunderous applause for the evening’s entertainment, and Barry would share in the glory.

  Stage-frightened Manilow knew that he had played his cards just perfectly, and this tour was going to get his own solo singing career off to a brilliant start. As he explained it several months afterward, “I was thrown from behind the piano! Because at that time [Arista] was Bell Records, and they wouldn’t give me an album deal unless I promised I would go out and perform. I didn’t really want to go out and perform, but I did want to make records, because I really loved being in the studio. So I put an act together, you know, I think I know how to do that: I’ve been doing that for about ten years and coaching people. So it was easy enough to put that together. I made sure that part was solid, because I had never performed, and I figured if I fainted on the stage, nobody should know it. The act would be so good, so strong, that nobody would realize that I was just dying up there. So we put it together, and it came out real strong, and it gave me a foundation to be able to make mistakes as a performer” (50).