Bette Midler Read online

  Judy’s death had a profound effect on Bette’s life. She realized how short life can be, and she felt that hers was passing by, and she was not moving quickly enough. She realized that it was time to get out of the Broadway show she felt stuck in and to move on to new experiences.

  She explains, “See, by that time, Fiddler wasn’t where it was at; it was the Beatles and marijuana, and Hair and Janis Joplin. All of a sudden people my age were happening, and I just wanted to see where, and IF, I could fit in” (13).

  When her sister Judy was killed, Bette took off only a week and a half and then returned to the show to ponder her future. During her time away from Fiddler, the role of Tzeitel was played by her understudy, Marta Heflin.

  Heflin recalled lending her support to Bette when Judy died. “It was a terrible, terrible thing. I was there at her house for sitting shiva. I was very impressed with her then. Because it was a terrible tragedy. But she is very strong. You could tell that she was very upset, but she was very strong. She’s a very strong lady, you know. You saw those guts coming through. I’ll never forget that. There was no self-pity, no breast beating. I did the role for a week and a half, and then she was back” (5). It was Marta who threw a much-needed life preserver to a creatively drowning Bette.

  In Greenwich Village there were several small “showcase” nightclubs where an aspiring singer could arrive on specified nights with sheet music in hand and perform. Marta was already going down to a club called Hilly’s and trying out her own material in front of the audiences on “open mike” nights. Marta invited Bette to go down to Hilly’s on one such night, to try her hand at cabaret singing.

  “She wasn’t making [any] money at it,” Bette recalls of Marta’s ventures to Hilly’s, “but she was having a good time. So, the next time she went down there, I went along” (19).

  Bette will never forget her first night of performing at Hilly’s. Up until this point, she had never considered becoming a singer—apart from the musical theater stage. “I always sang, but never seriously,” she remembers. “I got up in front of this little audience and just sang. The first two songs weren’t anything special, but the third—something just happened to me—something happened to my head and my body and it was just the most wonderful sensation I’d ever been through. It was not like me singing. It was like something else!” (25).

  “I sang” ‘God Bless the Child,’ which I don’t sing. I never sang it. I sang it once and that was all, because it frightened me so. It really freaked me out. I was screaming at the end of it. The song had a life of its own that imposed itself on me and I don’t even know what happened. I was just this instrument for what was going on. Bizzzzzarre . . . so I decided that was a nice change. I decided to just do it for a while, and I did” (25).

  Bette suddenly found herself wrapped up in discovering all sorts of old songs that she had not previously been aware of, and she would test them on audiences at Hilly’s and other small nightclubs and cabarets in the city. She spent several hours each week at the Lincoln Center Library, listening to old albums and getting turned on to the music of Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and the Harry Warren tunes from the famous 1930s Busby Berkeley musicals. Suddenly, a whole new world of music and performing opened up to her. She had been so obsessed with the idea of being a Broadway actress that she didn’t even consider that every song could become an act, a mood, an emotion, and a characterization all its own. She fell in love with singing and with breathing a unique life into each song she sang.

  According to her, “I love Bessie Smith. I love Aretha Franklin. Gospel is some of the most wonderful music around. You get up and you can’t stop. I makes you vibrate. I like torch songs and torch singers that make you cry. Ethel Waters used to kill me when I first started listening” (25).

  “I heard the stories these women were telling, they were laying incredible stuff down, their lives were fabulous lives, and it was in their voices and their songs, and I was fascinated by that. And there were some things I had to say about where I’ve been and who I’ve been with, and the pain I know” (3). She was especially enamored of torch songs, and all of a sudden she was singing all sorts of classic blues numbers like “What a Difference a Day Makes,” “My Forgotten Man,” “Ten Cents a Dance,” and “Am I Blue?”

  At the time, Bette was dating one of the other cast members from Fiddler on the Roof, Ben Gillespie. She would go over to Ben’s apartment, and the two of them would listen to old records. It was Gillespie who introduced her to Aretha Franklin’s early recordings from the era when Aretha was a young blues singer, years before she was dubbed “Lady Soul.” Bette still recalls the night he put on Aretha’s Unforgettable album, and she sang at the top of her lungs to the album. “A real awakening” is what she called the music on that particular Aretha Franklin album, which was recorded as a tribute to Franklin’s singing idol, Dinah Washington. One of the performances on that classic Aretha album was a torch number that would later become one of Midler’s earliest signature songs: “Drinking Again.” According to her, “It was like I had no idea what music was all about until I heard her sing. It opened up the whole world” (5).

  “My mentor was a man named Ben Gillespie,” Bette later recalled. “Ben was a dancer I met when I was doing Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway. He opened up the world for me. . . . I was crazy for him. He really opened up my eyes. He taught me about music and dance and drama and poetry and light and color and sound and movement. He was an artist with great vision of what the stage could provide. He taught me a grandeur I had never known before. He inspired me not to be afraid and to understand what the [music of the] past had to offer me. I never lost the lessons he taught me” (30).

  William Hennessey was another of her friends from that same era. She had met him when he was one of the hairdressers who worked on Fiddler. Hennessey remembered, “She had another friend then, a dancer named Ben Gillespie, who was a thirties and forties freak, and the three of us used to hang around all the old movie houses in New York. Afterward Bette would do takeoffs of Charlotte Greenwood, Martha Raye, and Joan Davis” (4). Bette’s “Divine Miss M” persona was born from her interpretation of these famous Hollywood crazy ladies of the 1940s.

  Bette and Marta began to go regularly to Hilly’s on West Ninth Street and to a club on West Forty-Fourth Street called the Improvisation. Also singing at Hilly’s during this same period was an aspiring blues and rock singer with a powerful voice, named Baby Jane Dexter. “There were a lot of us back then,” Dexter recalls. “We were just kids, and we were trying our hands at singing in front of an audience, and trying out new material. There was a woman who ran the showcase, and she made a big deal out of Bette coming in from Fiddler on the Roof” (31).

  “Bette sang ‘Am I Blue?’ and she sang ‘Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe,’ ” explains Baby Jane. “She sang only slow songs—nothing fast—all slow ballads, and she would fondle her tits while she was singing and emoting. I gave her the worst advice that there ever was—which was to put a bra on!” she laughs (31).

  “She used to wear this red velvet dress, and a guy named John Foster played the piano. She wore this red velvet dress until it wore into air—disintegrated. She was into old antique clothing, and she wanted to be a Helen Morgan type. She had dark brown hair, which she pulled back real tight, and made a thing that looked like Jane Eyre, on the side of her head—a snood. It was not that flattering, but I only know that it was not that flattering because later she got a more flattering look” (31).

  According to Dexter, “People used to look at her rubbing her tits and not know what to think. She was always doing this stuff, and she was never boring. I thought her voice was strong then. Her voice hadn’t been rock & roll-ized—it hadn’t been harmed. I thought she sounded good, and I liked listening to her singing these songs. She was very emotional. It wasn’t that she was doing something so incredible, but there was something about her—she was totally driven!” (31).

  Of her days at the Improv, Midler re
members, “Originally, in my velvet dress with my hair pulled back and my eyelashes waxed, I was convinced I was a torch singer. Because the Improv was a comedy club, you had to be a little bit funny, so I added chatter between songs. There I was, singing my ballads and crying the mascara off my eyes, and in the next breath telling whatever lame joke I’d just heard” (20).

  While Bette was still in her third year of Fiddler, both she and Marta began to venture into other theater projects. Bette played the Red Queen in a children’s production of Alice through the Looking Glass, and Marta left Fiddler to appear in a rock musical Off-Broadway, called Salvation. In the play, Marta played the part of a comic nymphomaniac. When she was offered the opportunity to play the same part in the Los Angeles company of Salvation, she recommended Bette as her replacement in New York. Bette landed the part of Betty Lou and joined the cast of Salvation in 1969.

  Meanwhile, Bette’s performances at the Improvisation brought her to still another level. It was there that she met the owner of the club, Bud Friedman, who was to become her first manager.

  At this time, Bette and Marta were regularly performing their material at the showcase clubs, and Bette was heavily into her torch-song and blues trip. Friedman distinctly remembers that Bette’s selections tended toward the maudlin—songs from Three Penny Opera and several sad blues numbers. He wasn’t particularly into her singing—and neither was the audience.

  According to Baby Jane Dexter, a man named Frankie Darrow came down to Hilly’s one night and wanted several of the performers to come uptown to West Forty-Fourth Street, to a club he was managing called the African Room. “He wanted all of these people to come up to a big showcase he had,” says Dexter. “People like David Brenner, Irene Cara—she was eleven or twelve at the time—Jimmy Walker, Bette Midler, and me. Frankie had these Monday night showcases and they picked someone out of this showcase to be the opening act for a Caribbean singer named Johnny Barracuda. It was between two girls that Frankie was going to hire. Who was going to get this big gig, and get paid fifty dollars to open for Johnny? It was between Melba Moore and Bette. He went with Bette, and this was her first paying gig as a singer” (31).

  A couple of months passed, and Bud Friedman from the Improvisation showed up at the Africa Room one night to see a girl named Roz Harris. At the time he was considering managing Harris, and who should be on stage that same evening but Bette Midler? Through all of her work in the clubs, she had really polished her singing style on all of her favorite numbers. When she sang “Am I Blue?” that night, Friedman remembers being knocked out by her performance. Bud invited her to return to the Improvisation, and this time around he was quite taken by her singing and her stage presence; he signed her to a one-year management contract.

  One of Bette’s strengths has always been her ability to see or hear something that she likes in someone else’s act and to adapt it for use in her own performances. All of her songs were taken from old recordings she’d heard, recordings she would then reinterpret. One night at the Improvisation, Bette used a funny line that she had heard a comedian at the club use. The female comedian went screaming through the club while Bette was onstage, accusing Midler of ripping off her material. Although Bette never did that again, she began to feel that she wanted to develop her own comic patter to use between songs. This marked the beginning of an important evolution in Bette’s act.

  Another trademark of her stage act came from her use of vintage clothing that visually emulated the mood of the songs she was singing. The whole idea of wearing the old velvet gowns came from a Helen Morgan album cover that she had seen. Bette decided that she needed something extra to complete her own chanteuse image. In addition to the red velvet gown, which by now was falling apart, she found a long beaded black velvet gown, for which she paid ten dollars at a secondhand clothing store.

  The dresses were more than clothes, more than costumes; they visually represented her complete transformation into her concept of a torch-singing diva. The velvet dresses helped Bette feel like something more than an aspiring actress who occasionally sang. Wearing them, she was beginning to step outside of herself onstage and become a distinctive character of her own creation.

  4

  STEAMING UP THE CONTINENTAL BATHS

  Only the “sexual revolution” climate of the 1970s could have given birth to an establishment like the Continental Baths. Never before—or, for that matter, since—has an emporium been so open about being a public meeting place for on-premises all-male sexual activities. By 1970 the changing sexual mores encouraged individuals to pursue whatever sexual expression they chose. The Continental Baths could not have existed before that time because of the moral attitude toward homosexual activity. It clearly could not continue to exist after the early 1980s because of the advent of AIDS. The bathhouse was indeed as unique as the era that gave birth to it.

  It was neither morality nor health concerns that ultimately finished off the Continental Baths. As America’s attitude toward homosexuality became more liberal, the bathhouse as a place for sexual encounters became less and less necessary. By the middle of the 1970s the Continental Baths closed, changed hands, and became the short-lived heterosexual swinging singles sex-on-the-premises club called Plato’s Retreat.

  For the brief couple of years that the Continental Baths did exist, it was, by all reports, something unique. Located in the basement of Manhattan’s Ansonia Hotel, at West Seventy-Fourth Street and Broadway, the baths’ proprietor, Steve Ostrow, set out to make it the ultimate gay bathhouse—complete with snack bar, dance floor, video screens, steam room, swimming pool, private “massage” rooms, and finally, the added attraction: live entertainment.

  “The Continental Baths was a huge loft-like space, with tons of white tiles everywhere,” explains one of the regular customers. “You would walk in, and to the left there was a huge Olympic-size pool and platforms where you could sit. The feeling was one of huge space, and there was music playing. Everyone wore white towels” (32).

  “To the right they would have a small private seating area, where people would come in and see the shows, and that’s where Bette Midler performed. The steam rooms were off to the right. There was an upstairs . . . and you could see patrons going upstairs, and there were rooms where you could do whatever you wanted to do. But the atmosphere downstairs was one of a loft space. It was not someplace where you would say, ‘Let’s stop off for a drink.’ You had to be into the whole baths scene” (32).

  Ostrow initiated his live musical entertainment policy by booking a folk-singing duo to perform. They were a husband-and-wife team, Lowell and Rosalie Mark. The Marks’ contract called for them to perform one show a week, and their engagement lasted for three months. However, Ostrow wanted something a bit more “special” than the duo’s pleasant little musical set.

  Bette’s progression to the Baths was a simple case of being at the right place at exactly the right time. Between her theatrical performances and her showcase club engagements, Midler was simultaneously taking singing and acting lessons. One of her teachers was Bob Ellston, who taught at the Herbert Berghof Studio. Ellston knew Steve Ostrow and suggested that Ostrow catch Bette’s act at the Improvisation. Ostrow did, liked her singing, and, according to Bette, “There was a teacher here [Herbert Berghof Studio] named Bob Ellston, and he called me up one day and said, ‘Listen, I know this guy that owns this homosexual bath, and he needs someone to sing’ ” (3).

  Ostrow offered her $50 to do two shows each weekend—one show each Friday and Saturday night at 1:00 a.m. Salvation had closed on April 19, 1970, and Bette was looking for a regular-paying gig, so she jumped at the opportunity. Even at $50 a weekend it was an improvement, especially since she was singing for free at the Improvisation.

  Bette Midler’s first engagement at the Continental Baths began in July of 1970. She was booked for an eight-week run, which was extended off and on over the next couple of years. At first, her personal confidence level was low, and her initial reception a
t the Baths was lukewarm. Slowly and tentatively, she tried out her wings onstage, and once she began, she just kept on growing. Over the next twenty-eight months, she made the Continental Baths famous, and her appearances there shaped and molded her into the “Bette Midler” who was a star.

  As she later recalled, “My career took off when I sang at the Continental Baths in New York. Those ‘tubs’ became the showplace of the nation!” (8).

  For her debut at the bathhouse, Bette engaged the services of a piano player named Billy Cunningham, whom she had met at the Improvisation. Together, they faced the towel-clad crowd at the Continental Baths that first night, not knowing quite what to expect. That first night’s show at 1:00 a.m. could hardly be called a roaring success. She opened her set with the lamenting ballad “Am I Blue?” and continued the show in a very bluesy, “down” sort of a vein. The reception from the twenty to thirty people who comprised that first audience was very polite. Before the show, Bette had felt very nervous and insecure about the whole event—her songs, her singing, the baths, everything.

  As she sang her all-ballad set, she quickly realized that the most terrifying thing that could possibly happen was that no one was going to pay any attention to her. After all, she would have be pretty damn entertaining to ever hope to compete with the “steamy” goings-on in those private “massage” rooms. In essence, she had to be better than sex to make anyone even notice her torch song act that night.

  After the show, her friends—Bill Hennessey, Billy Cunningham, and Ben Gillespie—encouraged her to become wilder on stage. They wanted her to let out that side of her they saw when she acted silly and did impersonations of other actresses. When she did that, she was funny and flamboyant and campy. That side of her would get much more attention onstage at the Continental Baths than her serious Helen Morgan side. Bette thought back to all of those woman who played their singing and their routines strictly for laughs: Charlotte Greenwood kicking her legs up over her head and laughing wildly, Martha Raye making goofy facial expressions midsong, Joan Davis gawking and looking stunned during her double takes, and that crazy Black-Eyed Susan swathed in toilet paper while belting out “Wheel of Fortune.”