Bette Midler Read online

  Bette and Barry auditioned over seventy potential Harlettes for this tour and finally hired a petite black girl named Sharon Redd and a tall white girl named Robin Grean, to join statuesque black diva Charlotte Crossley. By this point, a comedy writer named Bruce Vilanch had also joined Midler’s inner circle. So much of Bette’s stage act was howlingly funny because of her snide and witty comments delivered mid-act. Vilanch established his comedy writing career based largely on the bitchy one-liners he penned for Bette.

  According to Bruce Vilanch, he had met Bette in Chicago, during one of her engagements at Mr. Kelly’s. He was writing a column for one of the local newspapers at the time. Openly gay, Vilanch brought his own bitchy/witty sense of humor to Miss M’s act. They have been working together ever since.

  The 1973 tour began in August and encompassed thirty-five cities over a period of four months. It was a roaring success. During the tour, both Bette’s and Barry’s albums were released: Bette Midler and Barry Manilow I. All six of the Harlettes—to date—contributed background vocals to either or both albums.

  One of the first stops on the tour was Honolulu, Hawaii—Bette’s hometown. She was a nervous wreck during her whole stay there. On one hand, she was fulfilling a lifelong dream of showing off as an unprecedented success in front of her former classmates, who never thought she’d amount to anything.. And on the other hand, her mom and dad still lived there, and she had to deal with her decidedly risqué act and her onstage antics falling under the scrutiny of her parents.

  Both nights that she played Honolulu, there in Row C was her mother, Ruth Midler; her sister Susan; and her brother Danny. Her father out-and-out refused to attend. Bette said that she was relieved, but in actuality she couldn’t help but be a bit upset and hurt that he wasn’t there to share in her glory.

  “One parent was there,” she explained of that night. “My mother came, but my father, oh, he just said, ‘Oh, I just can’t.’ He’s read some things about me, you know, and he’s very conservative. He likes Lawrence Welk! He doesn’t like too much cleavage. In fact, every time I went over there for dinner, he made me safety-pin my dress together. I was glad my father didn’t come to see me perform. I would have been afraid to be dirty or gross, afraid that he would walk out or start yelling at me. He’s a good, old-fashioned man. He doesn’t want anyone to think that anyone from his family is cheap. I don’t know why I love to parody all that cheap music stuff. It’s so dumb. But I have so much fun doing it” (4).

  Ruth Midler loved seeing her daughter blossom on stage. Said Bette, “Oh God, my mother got a charge, though. She kept screaming, ‘Faaaa-bulous! Faaaabulous!’ ” A thrilled Ruth explained after the concert, “We always knew she was witty, but we didn’t know she was THAT witty. I’m so proud of her because she makes so many people happy!” (4).

  The second night in Honolulu, Radford High’s class of 1963 held a reunion. That night on stage Bette announced, “Well, I’m going to a reunion of all the people who couldn’t stand me!” Naturally, by the end of the class reunion that evening her face was wet with nostalgic tears: “I don’t want to leave so early. I didn’t get a chance to say ‘good-bye’ to Judy and Jane and . . . Oh, I just wish I could stay” (4).

  The tour continued on to Los Angeles where she played at the Universal Amphitheater. At that engagement, there were several Hollywood stars in the audience, including the two surviving Andrews Sisters, Patty and Maxine. Patty Andrews was heard to exclaim, “She’s certainly different!” after meeting Bette (6). Oddly enough, Bette’s version of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” was such a smash that it revived interest in the Andrews Sisters, and the following spring Patty and Maxine opened on Broadway in their own hit show, Over Here.

  Wherever she went on this tour, audiences and critics were astounded by the amount of energy that she expended on stage, pacing from one side of it to the other in her chunky platform shoes and sequined gowns slit up to her crotch. Explained Bette, “When I’m out here I work. If people are paying money, they’re entitled to see an artist work his buns off. I want to do something beautiful that will last forever. Maybe I’ll never do it, and maybe everyone will laugh at me and say, ‘She’s just a fool,’ but I don’t think I am” (4). Neither did her growing legion of fans. In mid-October, when the tickets went on sale for her dates at Broadway’s Palace Theater, Bette set a record for one-day box-office ticket sales of $148,000!

  “Well, are you ready for low-rent retro rock & roll?” she would shout on stage from San Francisco, California, to Austin, Texas. And the answer was always a resounding “Yes!” Shaking her breasts and her rear end, she would announce, “I want you aaaall to know from the outset that we really busted our buns on this next one.”

  Although she was a singing superwoman on stage, every once in a while she had self-doubts. Was the world really in love with homely little Bette Midler from Honolulu, or was it the fictitious Miss M who was the real star? “I had a real trauma on this tour in Denver,” she later admitted. “We were playing out in the middle of God-made country in the Red Rocks Amphitheater, and I felt so helpless against the elements that I thought I had to do this big show-biz thing, you know, where I was giving the people only what they expected of the Divine Miss M—but nothing of myself. During the break I sat there and figured it out, and for the next set I took off my makeup, put on my pants and shirt and tried to harmonize with Red Rocks just by being little old me. Miss M is a show—much larger than life. Bette Midler is just a person with a few things to say and a few songs to sing. From now on, I’m going to be Bette Midler” (4).

  From October 18 to 20, Bette played in Detroit at Masonic Auditorium. It was the hottest ticket in town since the Motown Revue had disbanded and the original Supremes went their separate ways. By the time Bette took the stage, the regally decorated hall reeked of marijuana smoke. After her opening number Midler glanced overhead to the two huge crystal chandeliers that hung down from the ceiling and announced, “If this place ever goes bankrupt, they could sell those two chandeliers to Diana Ross for earrings!”

  The tour was a roaring smash, but there was a lot of pressure on the road as well. Barry and Bette loved to fight with each other. Manilow is a perfectionist, and he wanted things to go exactly the way he had planned them. Bette was forever changing the order of the songs midshow. “Oh, Mr. Music,” she would say, looking across the stage to him. “Let’s not do ‘Surabaya Johnny’ tonight, let’s do ‘Superstar’ instead” (38). Barry would give her a look that could kill, grit his teeth, and comply with her request. Backstage after the show, he threatened to strangle her with his bare hands if she ever did that again. They threw tantrums, and sometimes ashtrays, at each other backstage in anger.

  “I like fighting,” explains Bette. “I always thought that a woman fighting was very sexy. My sister and I would always fight night and day. I think I have a strange sense of humor” (38).

  But her fights with Barry were great for releasing tension. “Barry and I worked so fast. It was two ambitious Jews in one room, such bitchiness!” she remembers. “We would bitch at each other all the time. He very rarely did an arrangement I didn’t like. He’s a much better musician than I. We would mostly bicker about which song should go where and how the show should be paced . . . and whether he was going to wear white tails or not. . . . and would he pleeeeeeeeeeeeeas stop waving his head . . . and would he not sit on phone books, if he didn’t mind . . . and could he get the bass player to stop tossing his blond locks around. He would always want to know how come I was always half a note under and why I didn’t come in on time. And it’s true that sometimes he would insist on something that I would take to heart and get real spiteful about” (38).

  By the time Bette rolled back into New York City, she was ready to take the world by storm, and the fights with Aaron Russo reached a peak. She had commanded him to make her a legend, and he was doing it. For her engagement at the Palace Theater, the portrait of Judy Garland was removed from the lobby and one of Bette h
ung in its place.

  To most of the people in Bette’s entourage, Russo represented a very driven and talented person who was able to get things done. He was also someone who was used to getting his own way.

  At the time that Bette was about to open at the Palace Theater, Russo was already looking ahead to bigger and better gigs for her. His attitude alienated several people, however. “We’re open to all offers, but we’re in no hurry,” he proclaimed, prior to the Broadway opening. “I believe in taking things one at a time, and right now it’s just the Palace and probably another album after she gets some rest. She has no financial worries—I’ve invested all of her earnings in gold—and I’m trying to keep her from getting too grand. At heart, you know, Bette Midler’s just a ‘schlepper’—a good Jewish girl who happens to have a lot of ability” (4).

  Typical Aaron Russo. Building up Bette Midler, while putting her down at the same time. One night during the Palace engagement, which ran for three weeks, Bette and Aaron had a knock-down drag-out fight backstage before the curtain for Act One went up, and just to infuriate her, Aaron dumped a full glass of Coca-Cola on top of her head. Bette was so humiliated and mad at him for having done that to her that the incident was later repeated in the film The Rose.

  For Bette Midler, 1973 had been one hell of a year, and she was really turning into the legend she had hoped to become. However, with the prize within her grasp, superstardom began to seem as terrifying as it was exciting. “Now that it’s beginning to happen,” she explained at the time, “I really don’t think a lot about the theater or movie offers or about the money. I have a small four-room apartment in the Village in New York with a little garden, and I still ride the subway all the time. Marriage? I’m not going to get married. Who’s going to marry me?” (8).

  7

  INSTANT STARDOM / INSTANT BREAKDOWN

  By the end of the year, the whole country was talking about the divine Bette Midler. When Newsweek magazine put her on the cover of its December 17, 1973, issue, not even conservative Middle America could miss the arrival of the outrageous Miss M.

  In the Newsweek piece, writer Charles Michener raved about Midler’s appeal. “In this age of pseudo-phenomena, Bette Midler is the genuine article—and a surprising one at that,” he proclaimed. “Few performers since the Beatles have been so heralded as the harbinger of a ‘new era’—or analyzed so seriously by the media. In March [1973], the normally sober National Observer called her, in a feature that top-headlined the front page, ‘Probably the brightest, hottest superstar to rise above the pop music horizon in the ’70s” (4).

  In a decade remembered for its hedonistic excesses, Bette Midler was the wise-cracking new multimedia goddess of the 1970s. Her blend of old and new fashion and musical styles, her onstage excitement, and her bawdy persona made Miss M a breath of outrageously fresh air. In a world that craved the “next big thing,” Bette had suddenly become “it.”

  When her fall 1973 tour came to an end on Broadway, the box-office grosses for the thirty-five-city extravaganza came to a dramatic $3 million. Variety, the weekly show-business Bible of a newspaper, described the Palace debut: “Klieg lights (despite the energy crisis), celebs, drag queens, and the Broadway opening night establishment were out in force for the event.” Although her fans were going berserk with sheer delight, several critics took pause. The same piece in Variety noted that she was “less than fresh from an exhausting national tour” and that her “voice was strained, unable to sustain higher registers and sometimes breaking mid-note. She still lacks the sustained confidence and/or guidance to just stand there and sing, but when she manages it, as she did briefly on opening, she is a knockout. . . . Developing a wider range and protecting that tough vulnerability that is her own should ensure Midler the kind of lasting career her raw talent deserves” (51).

  The New York Daily News proclaimed that she was “not divine . . . but Miss M is very special. . . . when the current is on and that oh-so-clever patter is off, she is very special, for her voice goes deep and her voice gets throaty, her voice goes folksy, and her voice goes bluesy and just about every which way you might choose a lyric to be caressed.” The same review also noted, “Her showstoppers came after she descended a stairway molded like a glass slipper silhouetted against a New York skyline backdrop . . . when she walked out on the Palace stage . . . the boys who worshiped Judy Garland, Bette Davis, and Tallulah Bankhead started cheering” (52). If the newly established 1970s “gay liberation” movement needed a prom queen diva to call its own, Bette Midler was assuredly this—hands down.

  This tour de force of a tour had indeed left Bette Midler exhausted and exhilarated. But according to several insiders, her behind-the-scenes battles with Aaron Russo left her wanting to chuck the whole thing, to run away and hide. For the most part, that is exactly what she did in 1974. After working her butt off for the entirety of 1973, the next year she made only two or three major public appearances and then disappeared from sight.

  Bette Midler’s collection of accolades, honors, and awards had begun in April of 1973 when gay-slanted After Dark magazine had awarded her its Entertainer of the Year prize, the Ruby Award. But it was in 1974 that she was to garner two of the biggest awards in the business: the Grammy and the Tony.

  The Grammy Awards show was telecast in the beginning of March 1974. In her act Bette always poked fun at performers she didn’t like or whose public personas were diametrically opposed to her own flamboyantly liberal self-image. And conservative Karen Carpenter was one of the ones she had the most fun ridiculing. Bette used to say onstage: “Karen Carpenter is so clean, you could run your finger down her and she would squeak!” When Bette Midler won the “Best New Artist” Grammy Award, who should present her with the statuette on national television but Karen and Richard Carpenter! Smiling for the cameras that night, Bette stood between the brother-and-sister singing team and announced, “Isn’t that a kick? Me getting the award from Karen Carpenter. It’s a wonder she didn’t hit me over the head with it!” (25).

  That spring, Bette was given a special Tony Award for her one-woman show at the Palace Theater. This time around, the award was presented to her by someone who had been very instrumental in creating the legend of Bette Midler: Johnny Carson. That evening was one of the happiest events of her career.

  Whenever people suddenly hit it big, their past seems to come back to haunt them. This also happened to Bette Midler, in the form of a low-budget film she had participated in at a time when she was broke and desperately needed the cash. Filmed in 16mm in 1971, the project, a religious satire about the birth of Christ, was originally entitled The Greatest Story Overtold. Bette was paid $250 to appear for twelve minutes of screen time as . . . are you ready for this? . . . the Virgin Mary! Talk about casting against type!

  When Bette suddenly hit it big, the film’s director and producer, Peter Alexander (McWilliams), sensed a quick cash-in. After Alexander invested an additional $40,000 to transfer the film to projection-standard 35mm film stock, it was announced that Bette Midler’s film debut was going to open at the Festival Theater in New York City under the advertised title “Bette Midler in The Divine Mr. J.” Aaron Russo did what he could to stop the film from opening, but failed. Since the advertising announced that the film starred Bette, Russo had people outside the theater handing out leaflets that carried a statement from Midler disavowing the project. The leaflets read: “In my opinion the movie is dreadful. However, I did it and there’s nothing I can do about it except advise you of the true facts. If you still wish to see me in the film, c’est la vie.”

  Although its critics felt that the film was a cheaply produced experiment, it was not without a sense of humor. Just before the Immaculate Conception, Bette is seen singing “I’ve Got a Date with an Angel.” In another scene, looking obviously pregnant with the Christ child, Bette swings into “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.” Although Russo was unable to stop the screening of the film, he succeeded in having the theat
er marquee title simply changed to The Divine Mr. J., to further distance the project from Bette.

  During 1974, two of Bette’s former associates were busily attempting to launch their own careers, apart from Midler. Their association with her was so strong that both Melissa Manchester and Barry Manilow had to work twice as hard to establish their own identities.

  According to Melissa, “When I first went solo, there was a tremendous amount of comparison, and interviews were mainly about Bette, which was very difficult to handle on any level. I don’t like that. But that was just in the beginning, and it was understandable. It’s always easier for people to compare you to someone else than to try to find something authentic or original. I am quite sure that there were lots of traits left over—it’s difficult not to have them—but then, hopefully, after the years you come into your own” (53).

  Manilow, however, took the momentum from his work with Bette in 1973 and used it to launch his own very successful career. In fact, when he began his first solo tour in 1974, he brought the Harlettes along with him as his backup singers. “I had them for my first tour,” he explained. “They were out of work, and I knew them and they still knew my material. So I took them along with me. But when I came back from my first six months on the road, I decided I would get my own girls, because it was Bette’s Harlettes. It’s Bette’s girls, it’s not my girls. You know, even though I had them doing different things, it was still Bette’s Harlettes. So I figured as long as I had decided on that type of group for Bette, I decided on the same type of group for me. So I hired three different girls” (50).