Bette Midler Read online

  Joe Layton admitted that the teaming of Bette and Lionel was a way of stretching Miss M into some new areas, especially since in that second act she would be sharing the stage with someone of whom she was in awe. “Take Hampton,” said Layton. “Now that’s a nice meeting of the minds. Bette does nostalgic stuff, music of the thirties and forties as well as the sixties and seventies. We’re extending her, putting her with an all-time great who lived those years before she was born. They both love jazz, and he’s reaching forward, and she’s reaching back. They’re stretching.” Said Bette of Lionel, “We wanted someone of his strength to work with me. He was willing, and he was available. He wants to open a new door, and here he is seventy years old, opening new doors. He has more chops, more interest, more enthusiasm than most guys I know half his age. He just loves to work, and so do I. This is a revue, a salute to Lionel and a salute to me. It’s not just me anymore standing out there busting my butt. My girls are working: The Harlettes. And we have the Powell gospel group. We have a new dimension” (58).

  Hampton had just recently come out of the hospital, where he had been suffering from an intestinal infection. “After my illness, I wanted to come back with a big bang,” he said prior to the opening. He was also enjoying working with Midler. “Bette does everything from the blues to rock. It’s always the beat, has been since we were making it with ‘Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar.’ There’s nothing wrong with rock, nothing. So together we’ll do it all. And I’m likely to teach her some authentic jive talk!” (58).

  Bette promised to give her all for her audience this time around. “Suffice it to say there will be lots of tits and ass. The sets are beautiful. The costumes are gorgeous. Tony Walton, who did [the film] Murder on the Orient Express, created them. The sets are extremely gaudy and real expensive-looking in a sleazy sort of way. People want color. They want explosion. It’s pretty gray out there, so I gave them an evening of color. The show is staged within an inch. There isn’t a moment that’s not choreographed!” (59).

  The show wasn’t without anxieties for Bette, who proclaimed of her production company, “We are now taste-free.” In fact, she admitted right before the opening, “It’s extremely frightening. I was relatively calm until last week and then I think I psyched myself into a fit. I had two or three days that I literally hit people and called them horrendous names. I also started dreaming. Strange dreams. I had a nightmare that David Bowie opened up across the street from me and he had the same sets and he was wearing my costumes!” (38).

  Bette was also nervous about working onstage for the first time in years without Barry Manilow to play piano and fight with her on and off stage. “Yeah, I’d have to admit that Barry’s unavailability delayed my getting back to work,” she said. “My new accompanist, Don York, is brilliant. He’s not as volatile as Barry, but he’s wonderful” (38). She was at least reassured by the fact that York had been broken in by Manilow personally.

  Prior to her opening on Broadway, Bette made a highly memorable appearance on the 1975 Grammy Awards telecast, live from New York City. She presented an award to Stevie Wonder. What she wore was a riot. She was dressed in a tasteful low-cut gown, and atop her head was a 45 r.p.m. single. The record was angled slightly to one side and bobby-pinned to her hair. “It’s ‘Come Go with Me’ by the Del Vikings.” She explained in typical Miss M fashion. “A great record, but a better hat!” She was the highlight of the entire show.

  Her Clams on the Half-Shell Revue opened on April 14, 1975, and it was such a huge success that its original four-week run was extended to ten weeks to meet the demand for tickets. Bette was back, and Broadway had her.

  The show was totally outrageous from start to finish. The opening number was a showstopper to end them all. Meant as a parody of every great Broadway musical of the past thirty years, Bette’s Clams on the Half Shell Revue began with the title song from Oklahoma! and segued directly into a number from Showboat. The Showboat routine had all of the supporting players and extras “down by the levee,” supposedly pulling on ropes that might have been the bow lines to the docking riverboat, the Robert E. Lee. What they were hoisting in from the wings, however, was a giant scalloped clamshell from the deep blue sea. As the shell was brought center-stage, the music shifted to a melody from South Pacific, and who else should appear within the shell as its halves opened up, but everyone’s favorite pearl of the Pacific—Bette Midler—looking dazzling! The cheering and screaming from the astonished audience seemed to go on for several minutes.

  Here was the unpredictable Miss M, emerging from a seashell like the goddess of Botticelli’s masterpiece of a painting The Birth of Venus. Bette had shed several pounds and revealed a sleek new figure with plenty of curves.

  The show was the revue to end them all, combining the best of Bette’s recorded signature songs, plus several new numbers that she was never to capture on record: David Bowie’s “Young Americans,” Elton John’s “The Bitch Is Back,” and several songs that Billie Holiday made famous, including “We’ll Be Together Again,” “If Love Were All,” and “Sentimental Journey.” Bette also sang Paul Simon’s new composition “Gone at Last,” announcing that she had just recorded the song as a duet with him for his upcoming new album.

  Act One concluded with one of the most ingenious and hilariously insane pieces ever staged in a Broadway theater. While Bette made a grand exit, the Harlettes were left onstage singing “Optimistic Voices” from The Wizard of Oz and the opening lines of “Lullaby of Broadway.” As the upstage curtains parted, a downward-rolling backdrop gave the audience the illusion that they were ascending the most famous of Manhattan skyscrapers, the Empire State Building. Who else should be atop the famed building but a huge, fuzzy, purple King Kong! Through a clever use of stage mechanics, Kong’s huge left arm swung outward toward the audience—with Bette Midler passed out in his outstretched hand. Here was a supine Miss M in a nightgown, with her feet dangling stageward in a pair of marabou-feather-covered high-heeled slippers, awakening from what she thought was a dream. Opening her eyes and sitting upright, she looked at King Kong, looked out at the audience, and dead-panned ala Streisand, “Nicky Arnstein, Nicky Arnstein!” The audience members all but wet their pants. Slam, bang, and Bette and her tart-like Harlettes swung into a rousing rendition of “Lullaby of Broadway.”

  Act Two opened with a backdrop of a jukebox and stacks of classic swing-era 78 r.p.m. records, and there atop the stack was the classy Lionel Hampton in a cream-colored suit with his famous vibraphone (a melodic variety of xylophone). After a couple of solo jazz numbers, out popped Bette, to join the swing legend in some of the tunes that had become the hottest hits of the 1940s: “In the Mood,” “How High the Moon,” “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” and Hampton’s own composition, “Flying Home.” Bette took over from that point and followed Hampton’s exit with more of her famed song stylings and trashy pop-camp excursions.

  In her Clams on the Half-Shell Revue, Bette Midler hit every mood, era, and sound that had made her the toast of the rock, pop, and nostalgia worlds. The show ended with Bette and the choral-singing Michael Powell Ensemble launching into the gospel-tinged “Gone at Last.”

  Critics went crazy, and her fans went berserk. Bette even ended up gracing the cover of People magazine, the publication that she had once referred to in her act as “Peep Hole magazine.”

  “It’s raunchy, it’s riveting, it’s regally welcome!” raved Rex Reed in the New York Daily News (60). Even though tough-to-please Clive Barnes in the New York Times found her buried in gimmicks, he had to admit that she was a unique talent and that the audience loved her.

  Barnes, in his review, pointed out that “Bette Midler, the tackiest girl in town, has come home to roost. . . . She is a modern phenomenon, the low priestess of her own juke-box subculture, an explosion of energy and minutely calculated bad taste, a drizzle of dazzle, a lady both brash and vulnerable, a grinning waif singing with a strident plaintiveness of friendship and love. . . . She uses the theater a
s if it were a nightclub, and plays with the audience as if it were a shoal of fish. Her rapport is extraordinary, and she can laugh and insult, and laugh again. But what has happened to Miss Midler in this show! Oh, of course enough of her comes through to keep the fans whirring, but something has happened. The vulgarity has become glossy rather than tatty. . . . For all this, when everything is said and done, by heck, New York is still her town, and she is still its best Bette!” (61).

  Portland Opera magazine glowed, “The revue is indeed a devastating delight: a play without a plot, a concert without the gaps. Director Joe Layton has taken each of the elements that makes Midler magnanimous, and has structured a lush, non-stop show around her, equipped with sets, costumes and best of all, has left plenty of leeway for spontaneously unabashed Bette to spread her wings. . . . Clad in what looks like a combination of Liberace leftovers and a basement sale at Frederick’s of Hollywood, Bette Midler and her Clams are cracking Broadway wide open with Ziegfeldian zest in THE stage extravaganza of the year” (62).

  Richard Goldstein in the Village Voice glowed of the juxtapositioning of the styles found in the show, “[Director Joe] Layton’s touch is barely visible in the staging and the choreography, which are spare enough to allow Bette the dominance she needs to work effectively. Still, it is strange at first to see the good ol’ Harlettes backed by Tony Walton’s lavish deco sets, just as it is strange to hear Lionel Hampton on a swing version of ‘A Day in the Life.’ . . . A samba rendition of ‘Strangers in the Night’ is backed by a mock-rumba about the clap. An exquisite sequence of harmonies blends the Andrews Sisters and the Dixiecups. And the aforementioned Hampton medley segues ‘Day in the Life’ with [David] Bowie’s ‘(I Want a) Young American.’ . . . But it is precisely these jarring moments which make Bette’s revue the intelligent and provocative entertainment which it is” (63).

  According to several sources, there was always a backstage rivalry between Bette’s three main comedy writers, Vilanch, Hennessey, and Blatt, over who wrote what and to whom credits for the laughs belonged. One of the Clams’ production assistants remembers Bill Hennessey presenting everyone with opening-night gag gifts. Said the assistant, “Bruce Vilanch is one of those people who takes credit for everything. And the present [Hennessey] gave Bruce was a T-shirt with the Virgin Mary and the Christ child in her arms on the front of it. And on the back of the T-shirt it read: ‘I Wrote Their Act!’ ” (35).

  Bill Hennessey wasn’t the only person to give out presents on opening night. Aaron Russo presented Bette with an expensive ring that was meant to be an engagement ring. Bette, however, said, “No!” to his proposal. And she and Aaron proceeded to have one of their famous fights. Bette’s mother, Ruth, had come to town for the opening, so she and her mom left a hurt and steaming Russo in the backstage area of the Minskoff Theater and zoomed across Forty-Fourth Street to Sardi’s restaurant to await her glowing reviews in the next morning’s newspapers.

  Bette had no intention of marrying Aaron. At that moment she was already happily married—to her legion of cheering fans.

  9

  THE NEW DEPRESSION

  One of the biggest questions raised by the success of the Clams on the Half Shell Revue was why there was no new album to promote while Bette was setting box-office records at the Minskoff? She had certainly learned enough new songs for the show—couldn’t she have selected some of those tunes?

  The fact of the matter was that Bette was recording during this period—song after unreleased song—and still she wasn’t satisfied with the finished product. Originally, her third album was going to be a “Miss M Goes Motown”-type of soul extravaganza. She went into the studio with one of the key Motown producers, Hal Davis, who was responsible for many Jackson Five and solo Michael Jackson hits. These four or five songs that Hal Davis and Bette did record are, to this day, on the shelf somewhere, unreleased. Davis went on during the next year to produce the Number 1 hits “Love Hangover” for Diana Ross and “Don’t Leave Me This Way” for Thelma Houston, but Bette didn’t like the songs that she and Hal did together. People from Atlantic Records who did get a chance to listen to the Hal Davis/Bette Midler recordings still rave about them as being among her best.

  Midler also went into the recording studio with another pair of Motown hitmakers, Nicholas Ashford and Valerie Simpson. She recorded a composition of theirs written especially for her, entitled, “Bang, You’re Dead.” While Bette was in Nick and Valerie’s own personal recording studio, working on the song, a disc jockey friend of Ashford and Simpson’s dropped in to say “hello.”

  “She threw a fit!” recalls the DJ of that afternoon. “ ‘Who is he?’ she demanded when she saw me looking in from the control room. She insisted that I be thrown out before she would sing one more word. Nick and Valerie just looked at each other, and I knew that I had to leave that second” (35). A studio version of “Bang, You’re Dead” was eventually released as the B side of Bette’s “Married Men” single in 1979.

  After the Broadway run of Clams, several more people left the Midler camp. One of the Harlettes, Robin Grean, announced her departure, and Bette’s longtime press agent Candy Leigh also quit. Bette had gotten to the point of hating to grant interviews because she was sick of being asked about the Continental Baths, Barry Manilow, and Melissa Manchester. Candy found it an impossible situation. When Aaron Russo asked Candy what he was going to do for a press agent for Midler, Candy suggested that he place a want-ad in one of the local newspapers—under the heading “Masochist Wanted!”

  Bette was beginning to get a reputation for being difficult to work with. “I am a bitch,” Bette explained in a Playgirl magazine interview. “I am a bitch in the sense that I like the wonderful things about being a bitch, but not the negative things. When I say ‘bitch,’ I mean being on top of it, being aware and knowing the answers. I like that part. But I don’t like doing it at the expense of other women. I don’t like to sit around and dish the dirt with the girls. . . . I think of it in terms of, ‘Do I know what I’m talking about?’ or ‘Do I not know what I’m talking about?’ If I do know, then it doesn’t matter if I’m a man or a woman. I have to know what I’m doing. If I don’t, I’m going to get shit upon, no matter what!” (21).

  During the late summer and the fall of 1975, people were bugging Bette to death. Aaron was begging her to start rehearsals for her upcoming cross-country concert tour, and Atlantic Records was bugging her for her third album. There were several scraps of things that Bette thought she would allow to be released on her third album, but on some of them she didn’t have the time to complete her vocal tracks.

  One of Bette’s biggest thrills during the recording of her third album came when she met and worked with Bob Dylan, who was one of her idols. They had recorded a song together called “Buckets of Rain,” which was one of his compositions. “He absolutely charmed the pants off of me,” she claimed, but not literally. “But close! I tried. Actually, I tried to charm the pants off him. And everyone will be disappointed to learn I was unsuccessful. But I got close. Oh, you know . . . a couple of fast feels in the front seat of his Cadillac. He used to drive this hysterically long, red Cadillac convertible, and he couldn’t drive worth a pea. He’s not a big guy, and he always drove with the seat all the way back, refusing to pull it up to the steering wheel. He was just fabulous” (30).

  Bette decided that she was going to have to concentrate on the tour and on finding a third Harlette. For the moment, the album would have to be Atlantic Records’ problem. The result was ultimately going to end up to be something of a patchwork quilt of an album.

  Bette was to find her third Harlette for the tour in Ula Hedwig, a tall Polish girl with a flair for Bette’s land of comedy. And so, Bette and her new troupe began to prepare for what was to be billed as “The Depression Tour.” The only other concert appearance that Bette had made earlier that year had been on the fundraising telethon for the United Jewish Appeal. While on the show, Bette announced that she was willing to
give more than her singing for the charity. She promised that if someone would pledge the sum of $5,000 dollars, she would throw in something extra. According to her, “You know, this cause means so much to me that I am prepared to drop my dress for Israel! Out there in television land, I know there is someone who wants to see it. Someone who wants to be responsible for allowing all of New York to see the end of my reputation, the end of my career—and my legs, which are the most beautiful in the business. Thank you, thank you, and kiss my tuchas!” Well, to make a long story short, after she sang “Hello in There,” someone pledged the five grand, and she promptly stripped down to her lace slip.

  It was later that year that things started to go awry. When Paul Simon’s album Still Crazy after All These Years did finally come out, the song “Gone at Last” was included, but Bette Midler’s vocals had been stripped off the track. Apparently, following an artistic dispute with the Midler camp, Simon rerecorded the song with Phoebe Snow. Bette never forgave him.

  Paul explained at the time, “The version with Bette had more of a Latin street feel. I changed the concept with Phoebe and tried a gospel approach because she was perfect for it” (64). However, it always seemed like there was more to the story.

  Finally, over three decades later, a close friend of hers—who refused to be identified—shed some light on the incident. Apparently, the rumors were true about Midler having a romantic flirtation with Simon. It was when this went sour that he removed her from his album. “I can’t be quoted about her sex life,” says the source, “because I know what she did to Geraldo Rivera. I am going to stay away from her sex life. But, yes, she was unhappy that he took her voice off and put on Phoebe’s. It was more personal than that—if you know what I mean. I think things started with the duet, and it progressed from there. She never actually came out and told me that. . . . she kinda hinted that it was sexual. She never came out and said it, but she sure intimated it, and hinted that their falling out was ‘highly personal,’ and that ‘Paul Simon is a total prick’ ” (65).