Bette Midler Page 3

  To solve the riddle of Miss M, one must go back into her turbulent and colorful past. Back to the days where she used to sit in school and daydream of becoming a sarong-clad movie star like Debra Paget in Bird of Paradise. It began in Honolulu, the land of hibiscus leis, grass skirts, and bright floral shirts. The real-life saga of the divine Miss Midler all started with a little girl who had an unhappy childhood and who dared to dream that one day she would become a truly divine star. . . .

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  ALOHA, HONOLULU

  World War II had been over for only four months when Fred and Ruth Midler’s third child was born on December 1, 1945, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Like her two sisters before her, she was named after one of her mother’s favorite movie stars. Judy’s name had been chosen for Judy Garland, and Susan’s namesake was Susan Hayward. When it came time to pick the new baby’s name, Ruth decide on Bette, in honor of Bette Davis. Ruth, however, believed the actress pronounced her name “bet,” and the name stuck.

  Years later, when she was questioned about her name, Bette Midler laughingly explained, “That’s my real name. You don’t think I’d pick that out of a hat? My dear, if I were looking for a name . . .” (11).

  The Midlers were one of the few Caucasian families living in the area of Honolulu known as Aiea. Fred worked as a house painter for the United States Navy at the base in Honolulu. The muscular body he had developed working out with weights at the local YMCA in his hometown of Patterson, New Jersey, earned him the nickname “Chesty.” He met and married a girl named Ruth Schindel from nearby Passaic, New Jersey, and together they emigrated to Hawaii in the early 1940s in search of a tropical paradise.

  Ruth and Fred’s first home in Hawaii was a converted military barracks near a vast expanse of sugar-cane fields. While Fred worked at naval house painting and other civilian jobs with the navy’s ordinance detail, Ruth passed her time reading movie fan magazines and sewing. After their three daughters, a son named Danny was born.

  “We lived in a fabulous place called Halauua Housing—poor people’s housing,” recalls Bette disdainfully (12). One of her first memories is of the sweet scent of oleander blossoms from the bushes that surrounded their apartment building and wafted through the warm tropical air like perfume.

  In time the Midlers moved into their own home. Bette explains, “We lived in a really funky house, just like the one in that play The Effect of Gamma Rays. My father had machinery all over the place—he had twenty-seven lawn mowers—and my mother always had a stack of sewing up to the ceiling” (4).

  According to Bette, “Eventually, she and my father bought a couple of houses and fixed them up and had tenants. They were small-time landlords. My mother was extremely talented at it and got a real kick out of that, yet she did it all from her own house. She never had the nerve to go out and get a job; she was TOTALLY house-bound. She wanted to be in the world the way other people were in the world. She was just a housewife, but she wanted to take part” (13).

  Bette never remembers the atmosphere at home as being happy, in any sense of the word. She describes her dad as “a major tyrant, he would scream and carry on. He thrived on it” (13).

  She also recalls, “My father was a bellower. To get a word in, you had to bellow back. He loved a good argument, he loved the adrenaline rush” (14).

  Fred Midler later said of Bette, “The only times she talked back were when I jumped on her. Like most parents, I tended to yell a lot and regret it afterwards. . . . She was rather bossy. She liked to take charge of things and she was always talking. Our Bette, she was always a yenta” (15).

  According to Bette, “My mother was the most negative woman. Hypertense. I saw this misery, this incredible misery that she could not force her way out of, this loneliness and bitterness. But I adored her because I saw in her this somebody who was trying to get out, who had a dream that unfortunately never came true” (16).

  As a result of a postnatal illness, Bette’s younger brother Danny was left mentally handicapped. This became a source of aggravation for Fred Midler; he was mad that he couldn’t do anything to change his son’s condition, and he found his attempts to teach the boy extremely frustrating.

  “The public health authorities, the social workers wanted to put Danny away, but my parents wouldn’t hear of it,” explains Bette. “This doctor told my mom that Danny’s tongue was too long, and he would have to cut it a bit in surgery. And because the doctor cut it, Danny lost the power of movement there. In other words, the doctor severed some nerves, so Danny wasn’t able to move his tongue anymore. So now he can’t chew, he doesn’t talk quite right. At that time they didn’t have public-school classes for retarded children, so my father taught him. He used to come home from work at about four o’clock every day and sit him down in the rocking chair to teach him to talk, read, write, and add” (13).

  Bette distinctly remembers her father’s sessions with Danny. “Pa would start off quietly, but by the time four-thirty rolled around, he was screaming at the top of his lungs out of frustration, and Daniel would be crying. He’s not so retarded that he doesn’t know it. But eventually Danny did learn. It took a lot of love for my father to do that. Or some heavy guilt” (13).

  “I think there are certain things you have to pass through in life in order to come out of the other side,” she concludes (13).

  Bette recalls that her parents set an example with what they did with their lives, and they instilled a strong work ethic within her. According to her, “We were really poor, and my mother made sacrifices that I can’t even dream of making. My brother was mentally handicapped and they raised him at home. That was a real struggle. They succeeded, but they sacrificed their entire life for it. When you have that example, you never really forget it” (17).

  With the children in the area, Bette felt like an outcast from an early age. “The kids in the neighborhood were Hawaiians, part Hawaiians, Samoans, and Filipinos” (12). She describes her feelings of inadequacy: “At the time I really hated it—I was an alien, a foreigner even though I was born there” (8).

  Recalls Bette with residual pain, “I remember children being so cruel. You don’t forget these things” (18).

  She found Aiea to be “equivalent to any of the tough neighborhoods in Harlem or Brooklyn, except from a different perspective. You rarely saw blacks. What you would see were the Japanese, Chinese, Samoans, or Filipinos—heavy on the Filipinos—the Filipinos were always the toughest. The Portuguese were very tough. See, they always took me for a Portuguese because in Hawaii there’s a distinction between them and whites, even though they’re both Caucasian. The Portuguese used to work in the fields, and ‘hacles’—white people—were the overseers. I wasn’t Portuguese, but I let them think it because it was easier than anything else. Because Portuguese people were accepted, Jews were not” (11).

  “I thought of myself as a poor kid, poorer than any of them because they always seemed to spend money and I never had any to spend. It was the fashion among the kids not to speak good English—they spoke pidgin English. It was a put-on, but I didn’t realize it at the time” (12).

  Unhappy with her home life and her social life with the local kids, Bette found it easy to bury herself in her schoolwork. In the first grade she had her first real taste of show business when she sang “Silent Night” in front of her class. She won a prize for her performance, but she couldn’t even share her glory at home, “I was afraid to tell my mother, because I was Jewish and we weren’t supposed to sing Christmas carols” (19).

  According to her, “After that, you couldn’t stop me from singing. I’d sing ‘Lullaby of Broadway’ at the top of my lungs in the tin shower—it had a really good reverb. People used to gather outside to call up requests or yell that I was lousy” (20).

  “The Midlers were the only white family for blocks and blocks around . . . [and] we were Jewish, which was even weirder. We didn’t even have a Christmas tree, which would have made us normal in the eyes of the neighbors. They were all Christi
ans, and they had Christmas trees which they decorated to death. No matter how poor a family was, they would scrape together money and give their children the most wonderful Christmases” (21).

  Bette recalls that her first cinematic dreams came from watching MGM’s most famous swimming movie star and her opulent musical numbers. “I wasn’t really smitten with show business until I saw Esther Williams. Technicolor killed me. You felt like you were in paradise when you saw those pictures” (22).

  At the age of twelve, she saw a touring production of Carousel, and she went Broadway-crazy. “I couldn’t get over how beautiful it was. I fell so in love with it. Everything else in my life receded once I discovered theater, and my mother was all for my starting on the journey and going full speed ahead. When I was the lead in the junior-class play, she brought a bouquet of roses and presented them to me over the foot-lights” (20).

  As a little girl Bette took hula-dancing lessons, and when she turned twelve, her mother taught her how to sew. “On Saturdays,” she remembers, “from the time I was six years old to the time I was eighteen, my father would take me and my sister to town and go to the library. My parents would go off shopping at the local John’s Bargain Store, and my sister and I would either stay in the library or walk around town. When I was young, I would rush in and read about French courtesans till it was all rushing out of my ears. Later, when I got very brave, I’d go out to the red-light district and walk around. All the sailors and people in the armed forces would go there to see a dirty movie or a bawdy show or pick up a girl. It was a REAL red-light district and it was so wonderful!” It wasn’t bullshit Forty-Second Street or bullshit Eighth Avenue [New York City]. It was for real—opium dens and lots of Orientals” (21).

  According to Bette, her parents never knew what she was up to when she was supposedly perusing books at the library. “They never knew. They went out shopping. I never had any misadventures except for one at this movie house when I was thirteen. This guy put the make on me and that was scary. Usually, it was a great thrill for a child to walk around in that environment. You must remember that even though I was in Hawaii, I had a very, very strict lower-middle-class Jewish upbringing, so it was quite mind-boggling to be in the midst of all this Orientalia, and still be in New Jersey at the same time” (21).

  Her parents clearly would have flipped out if they’d had any inkling of what their daughter was up to. “My mother was always trying to make sure I wasn’t exposed to any of the seamier aspects of life. Consequently, I was always fascinated by the seamier aspects of life. That was the biggest influence in my life. She was trying to keep me away from the seamy type of life and I just thought it was the best, I wanted to be with seamy people and be in seamy places,” she explains (23). And so began the bawdy side of Bette Midler, even though at the time she had no outlet to express herself.

  When Bette and her sisters were in their teens, they began experimenting with makeup and hair coloring. According to her, her first foray into hair dye was a total disaster. “I’ve been dyeing my hair religiously since I was thirteen. I started out with what I thought was going to be ash-blonde, but which turned out green!” (24).

  Bette’s sister Susan remembers how violent their father would get at the idea that they were becoming painted women. “He didn’t like us wearing makeup and we had a curfew: some ridiculous hour like ten o’clock, and if you weren’t in the house, you usually got locked out. Us sisters were always sticking up for each other, and sneaking each other in the window at night” (13).

  “My sister Susan and Pa, they’d have terrible riles. She used to call the cops on him! He used to piss her off,” says Bette. “My father was always right, never wrong. It was simple: he was the loudest and the oldest, and the heaviest. It was usually him against us. My mother tried to be a soothing influence, but she wasn’t very successful at it. There was that kind of passion” (13).

  When she was in the fifth grade, Bette teamed up with a classmate and presented a skit in front of the class. “Me and this girl, Barbara Nagy—I remember everybody—we decided to put on a skit for the class. She was the man, I was the woman: Herman and Oysterbee. I don’t know where the hell that name came from” (16). They both forgot the script that they had worked out and ended up improvising the dialogue. When the class laughed at the skit, Bette discovered a whole new kind of love that comes to a performer on stage when the audience laughs and applauds.

  In the sixth grade Bette entered a school talent show and won first prize for her rendition of “Lullaby of Broadway.” She convinced herself that what she wanted to be when she grew up was an actress. “As I grew older, all the best times in my life were when I was standing in front of an audience performing,” she remembers (24). “I learned that I could be popular by making people laugh. I became a clown to win people’s acceptance, and I think that’s when I decided that I wanted to be in show business” (25).

  “I was an ugly, fat little Jewish girl with problems. I kept trying to be like everybody else, but on me nothing worked,” says Bette of her years at Radford High School (26). “The school I went to was just like any high school anywhere, like a high school in Brooklyn or Cleveland. We had rock & roll, sock hops, American Bandstand, the same as anywhere else. The only thing different was that all the kids were Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Samoan, and all the girls hated me because I had such big boobs” (25).

  Bette was titillated by the audacity of street-wise girls in Honolulu. According to her, “I was always fascinated by the local bad girls. And we were surrounded by these JDs—juvenile delinquents—and listen, I LOVED them! I used to follow them even though they wouldn’t take me with them or anything. I’d go after them on their adventures like shoplifting. I always liked that other side of life, you see” (21).

  Remarking about her short-lived life of crime, Bette later explained, “Once my friend and I were shoplifting at a Woolworth’s or Piggly-Wiggly’s; we were carrying those great big purses women were using then and we were loaded with stuff we’d taken. As we were leaving the store it was pouring rain, approaching a hurricane. My girlfriend had a cold, and she got down on her knees in the middle of this deserted road and repented. She cried, ‘Oh God, if I don’t catch pneumonia, I swear I’ll never shoplift again!’ And she didn’t, so after that I had to shoplift by myself—I didn’t get down on my knees, see. Never!” (16).

  “I was a little chubbier than I am now. I had gigantic tits, and I was very plain. I wore harlequin glasses—you know, those hideous glasses that ruined a lot of people’s lives. I was fairly bright. I had a terrific sense of humor,” she recalls (21).

  The fact that she developed a bust early in puberty was one issue that bedeviled her, and the fact that she developed such a big bust so early in life compounded the problem. “I’ll never forget eighth grade,” she recalled. “My mother wouldn’t buy me a bra. I used to get teased, and I remember coming home weeping, so she broke down and got me one for my birthday. Oh, I was so relieved. Oh my dear, sooooo relieved” (16).

  Of her painful years as a teenager, says Bette, “I had to go to phys ed class with all these Oriental girls who had brassieres that were holding up nothing. It was horrible. They teased me incessantly because I would, like, bobble on my way home” (27).

  One of her classmates, Penny Sellers, later commented, “When I first met Bette—she spelled her name Betti and we pronounced it ‘Betty’—she was a quiet and serious student. She wore harlequin-shaped glasses, thin shirt-waist dresses, and had sandy blonde hair that frizzed in the Honolulu humidity. In our junior year, although she made the requirement of the National Honor Society, she seemed less studious. Her raucous laugh made us all giggle, and her witty remarks were—well—bawdy” (16).

  During her junior year in high school, Bette became best friends with a girl named Beth Ellen Childers. She remembers Beth as “hysterically loud and loved noise and a good time. I fell in love with her. She was the most adorable thing. She made me feel okay to be who I was, enjoy
able, good to have around. My family never made me feel this way. She drew me out of myself” (14).

  According to Bette, her life started to change for the better. “I came into glory in high school. I bullossomed. I blossomed into a D-cup and there were finally white kids in my school. I was even popular. It was a real surprise. . . . in high school I became a person. That was when I began to realize I wasn’t as bad as I thought” (16).

  “I never had boyfriends until high school, and then I found myself mainly with military kids, because a lot of them were nice and smart. But I never really fit it—even though I was elected senior-class president. I won that by default: you should have seen the other candidate! The truth is that I was just about the only white in an all-Oriental school, and most of those kids never said two words to me. So I got buried in studying. I was always the best in English. I had to be the best, because it was all I had” (4).

  Bette graduated from high school in 1963. The school newspaper’s graduation edition exuded the kind of confidence in her that her previous seventeen years didn’t substantiate. According to the newspaper, “Bette Midler, who is considered to be one of Radford’s greatest dramatists, is the president. Unknown to many is her scrawny soprano warble, which can be heard while taking her Saturday night bath. . . . Her ambition is to join the Peace Corps and, perhaps, someday become another Bette Davis” (28).

  Her theatrical experience at that time was limited to her appearance in the school’s production of When Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, yet she felt that she had found her calling in life . . . as a thespian. Being declared class valedictorian didn’t mean half as much to her as the prospect of pursuing a life in the theater. “I was always perfectly sure. I couldn’t think of anything else to be,” remembers Bette (24). By the end of her senior year in high school Bette was crazy to be an actress: “I had entrenched myself into performing very heavily—a lot of speech festivals; they have a huge speech problem in that state—and I was always working on a show or some kind of presentation. . . . I really liked the theater better than anything else” (11).