Bette Midler Read online

  Bette was afraid of falling flat on her face and afraid of not being taken seriously as a singer. She had to invent another personality to house her wild side. She had to come up with a character who wasn’t afraid to be brazen, tacky, bawdy, and completely off-the-wall. This character became known as the Divine Miss M, the ultimate over-the-top fearless diva.

  Bette later analyzed the birth of Miss M: “At the Continental Baths I was playing to people who are always on the outside looking in. To create the semblance of someone like that can be wonderful. And so, I created the character of the Divine Miss M. She’s just a fantasy, but she’s useful at showing people what that outsider’s perspective is” (4).

  “I was dying to make it big,” she later admitted. “You know why? Because I wanted to be somebody else. I didn’t know who. . . . Edith Piaf perhaps” (4).

  Her transformation started out slowly, and once begun, it all just seemed to mushroom. First her attitude changed, then her material, and then her recognition from the audience at the Continental Baths. She began to say outrageous things on stage—about herself, the bathhouse, the audience—and to relate her own crazy experiences.

  Her appearance started to change as well. Turbans, halter tops, and 1940s gowns she had found at thrift shops were among her favorite clothing choices on stage. At some point during this era, her hair color went from brown to bright red. Her new flame-colored mane made her seem even bigger-than-life than she already was.

  Bette and Ben continued their exploration into the music of the bygone eras, and Bill wrote her some gag lines to use onstage. It wasn’t long before Bette began adding rock & roll and pop tunes to set off her slower blues numbers. Steve Ostrow was quite vocal about pointing out that her act had too many depressing “dirges” in it. Soon, songs like “Honky Tonk Woman,” “Lady Madonna,” and “Sha-Boom Sha-Boom” loosened her up on stage and gave her show more balance.

  After the end of her first eight-week engagement at the Continental Baths, her run was extended for another eight weeks. The only change was that the Friday night shows were eliminated. Considering that the same men came to the baths week after week, she ended up playing to many repeat customers. With once-a-week performances she was able to learn new songs, try out different material, and eliminate weak numbers.

  “Whose idea was it to play this dump?” she would sarcastically quip onstage (4). “Oh! Oh! You’re all mad. M-aa-d I say! Gawd, it’s steamier than usual tonight. Wait till Marlo Thomas and her sister Terry play this room. Way-i-t!” (33).

  Before long, she developed a wildly campy sense of onstage humor that became as important as her singing. Trashy, silly girl-group songs from the fifties and the sixties became a staple of her act even before she had a background group to sing with. “Remember the bouffant BMT subway hairdo of the 1950s?” she would shout to her audience. “Remember AM radio? Oh, my dears, AM. That’s where it was all at. You didn’t have to think, just listen. What fabulous trash! Remember girl groups? The Shirelles, Gladys Knight & the Pips? Okay. I’ll be the leader and you be the Dixie Cups” (33). With that, she would swing into “Chapel of Love.”

  Something wonderful was beginning to happen on the tiny makeshift stage at the Continental Baths. That shy, insecure, homely little girl from Hawaii, with big dreams, was transforming herself into someone who was attractive because of the genuine “fun” image that she was creating before her unconventional, liberated audience. The sheer outrageousness of the whole atmosphere encouraged her to be much freer and more controversial than any other crowd would allow.

  She referred to the Continental Baths as “the tubs” and described its ambiance as “the pits.” Her frizzy mass of henna-red hair she accredited to her gay hairdresser, whom she claimed had created her coiffure with an eggbeater. She pranced around the stage in platform shoes, with a towel wrapped turban-like around her head, pretending she was Carmen Miranda on speed. Bette Midler was discovering herself, and her audience was discovering her ability to make them laugh at her crazy behavior and eclectic choice of songs. Just as she had done years before in grammar school, Bette was learning to bury her feelings of insecurity and unattractiveness in the laughter of others.

  As she explained her amazing metamorphosis: “I was an ugly, fat, little Jewish girl who had problems, I was miserable. I kept trying to be like everyone else, but on me nothing worked. One day I just decided to be myself. So I became this freak who sings in the tubs” (33).

  It wasn’t long before the word-of-mouth reviews on Bette spread through the gay community in New York City. It wasn’t long before men who would never have dreamed of venturing to the baths were showing up at the Continental just to see this short Jewish red-headed singer everyone was talking about. With justification, one of the happiest people in town was Steve Ostrow, who was packing people into his bathhouse on Saturday nights. “It was just something I felt, something live happening on that stage,” he later said of the magic little lady who referred to herself as the Divine Miss M (4).

  During this same time period, her new manager, Bud Friedman, began to book Bette’s initial national television appearances on The David Frost Show and Merv Griffin. In the early summer of 1970 she made her debut on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. This was back in the days when the show was still being broadcast from New York City. Her appearance on the show resulted from her work at the Improvisation, when a talent scout was looking for up-and-coming entertainers to appear on The Tonight Show. She auditioned for the show’s producers, and they ended up loving her. True to comedy-of-errors form, on her way to the audition Midler caught her dress in a taxi-cab door and ripped it all the way up to her rear end. In classic “the show must go on” tradition, she fastened the torn garment together with a paper clip and went ahead with the audition. Torn dress or not, they loved her and booked her for an appearance on the program.

  On that first Tonight Show performance, Bette sang two songs, but was not invited to be interviewed on the set by Carson. The songs that she sang that night were “Am I Blue?” and the vampy Mae West number “Come Up and See Me Sometime.” Her appearance on the show was quite a success, and it was unique because there were few young performers at that time who were breathing new life into songs of the 1930s and 1940s.

  Johnny Carson recalls, “When I first saw her on the show, I saw a quality that reminded me very much of Streisand. Bette really grabbed the audience. There was an empathy, a rapport that was hard to equal” (4).

  From 1970 to 1972 Bette made seven guest appearances on The Tonight Show. She became one of Carson’s favorite guests, and the more outrageous she became during those developmental years, the more her popularity grew on a national level.

  Her second visit to The Tonight Show came in October of 1970, while she was busy steaming up the Continental Baths. Bette sang the Depression-era Joan Blondell production number “My Forgotten Man,” from the film Gold Diggers of 1933. In the interview segment that followed, she revealed, “I’m probably the only female singer in America who sings in a Turkish bath. It’s a health club. . . . it’s called the Continental Baths and it’s a HAPPY place,” she said, discreetly substituting the word happy for gay. Amid the laughter that ensued, she said of the baths’ audience, “They all sit in front of me, and when they love me, they throw their towels at me!” (34).

  The fact that Bette Midler’s phenomenal initial success came at the Continental Baths—and gave her an exclusively gay following—later proved to be both a blessing and a curse. It was the surreal and totally liberated atmosphere of the Baths that allowed her to be outrageous and to emerge from her own shell of insecurity. What was it that made her attractive to the gay crowd and unattractive to the Broadway producers whom she had once longed to impress? “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe the gays see something in me. Maybe they see that poor schlump from Radford High School just trying to make it through. You know that’s a very hard row to hoe, being gay. That’s a tough one” (21).

  “I’m
a strong lady—I think they like that. I think they like to see independence. Who knows? Maybe they like the clothes I wear? I mean, it’s more than that, though. It’s People—PEOPLE! Everybody has a little bit of everyone else in them . . . a little bit of man, a little bit of woman in them” (21).

  She later explained, “The Baths is a male health club in New York. It’s sort of kitschy, decorated to death. And on Friday and Saturday nights, they have the distinction of being one of the only health clubs in the world that has entertainment. It’s like a lounge. They pack these guys in, on the floor, in chairs, in their bathrobes or towels or whatever, and they just watch the show and enjoy themselves. Working at the Baths allowed me a chance to really stretch out and grow in a way I had not been able to before. I was able to work with a piano player and drummer every week and I didn’t have to pay for it. And I had a big, built-in captive audience. I mean, where were they going to go? They were practically naked!” (19).

  Each time she went back to the Baths, her repertoire grew. “I used to throw in a couple of odd numbers like ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’ and ‘Marahuana,’ which is a 1930s song, and ‘Love Potion No. 9’ and ‘Great Balls of Fire.’ Songs that make people laugh” (19).

  “I got a lot of inspiration from Mae West. When I first started working, a friend brought one of her records over. It was in the early pot days, you know, when we were all smoking [marijuana], and everyone was seeing their fantasies come to life,” recalled Bette (21).

  For Midler, her own dreams and fantasies were beginning to come true. In the short span of four months, from June to October of 1970, she had grown from a hopeful unknown actress who sang on the side to an up-and-coming singing sensation with national television appearances and a strong legion of gay fans in New York City. But she wanted more. She wanted to be something more than a “freak who sings in the tubs” (8). She wanted to grow and to reach a much larger audience. However, as with everything else in the world, with growth comes change.

  5

  ENTER: THE DIVINE MISS M

  Bette Midler’s past is populated with dozens and dozens of friends, acquaintances, musicians, employees, background singers, and assistants. A few of the key people in her life have remained loyal to her, with mutually beneficial results. There are several more who crossed paths with Bette, worked with her for a time, contributed to her success, and afterward went off on their own.

  Pianist Billy Cunningham was the first to make his exit. Playing piano at the Continental Baths wasn’t paying him very much money, so when a higher-paying gig came along, he moved on. Before he left, he suggested a replacement. According to one of Bette’s former employees, Cunningham was friends with another unknown piano player who had found some degree of success writing jingles for television commercials. At the time, the other pianist had hit it big with a jingle for MacDonald’s hamburgers and was doing some vocal coaching on the side. The other pianist’s name was Barry Manilow.

  “He [Billy] had to give up the gig,” says the former Midler employee, “so he asked Barry if he’d be interested in filling in for him. So Barry said, ‘Do I have to take my clothes off?’ And Billy said, ‘No, no!’ Barry said, ‘All right,’ and Billy said, ‘You’ll be hearing from Bette Midler, this singer.’ So, Bette calls up and the first thing she says is that she wants two rehearsals, which no one had ever done. So Barry said, ‘Well, all right, fine.’ She comes to see him in his apartment, which was on Twenty-Seventh Street on the East Side at that time. Barry said, ‘It was hate at first sight,’ and he said that she ‘walked through the rehearsals.’ But he did the gig. He said, when she did ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo,’ he suddenly couldn’t restrain himself from laughing, and he completely went mad for her—she brought down the house” (35).

  “Afterwards Bette said to Barry, ‘Do you want to be my musical director?’ And he said, ‘No, but I’ll work with you until you can find a musical director.’ Of course, she never found a musical director, at that time, so their relationship developed as it went along” (35).

  According to Barry, he had his doubts about their chemistry onstage. However, the first time they performed together at the Continental Baths, somehow magic was created. “I played and she sang. But then we did it in front of an audience. She came downstairs in this turban and an outfit that could have come from my grandmother’s closet. She was a tornado of energy and talent. I was six feet away, and this vision was one of the thunderbolts in my life” (20).

  Manilow later recounted, “Somehow it seemed like Bette and I were not going to get along. We could not understand what the other was into. But of course, later we worked together on the stage act and in the studio, and we connected beautifully. She chose the tunes, I arranged them” (25).

  It was during this same era that Bette met a lifelong friend, Buzzy Linhart—and not long afterward, his writing partner, Moogy Klingman. Through them, she was given one of the most significant songs of her career: “Friends.” Linhart was known as a folk and rock singer, and Klingman had worked with Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. On Carly Simon’s successful debut album, Linhart contributed his song “The Love’s Still Growing,” and Klingman contributed “Just a Sinner.”

  “I co-wrote ‘Friends’ with Buzzy Linhart in 1970,” recalls Klingman. “When we brought it to my publisher, he wanted to get Tiny Tim to do it. He was all excited about Tiny Tim using it as his follow-up to ‘Tip-Toe through the Tulips.’ We thought Tiny Tim was going to do it” (36).

  That was before Buzzy met Bette. By a twist of fate, Buzzy Linhart and Bette Midler were both asked to portray the lead characters at the backer’s audition for a new Broadway-hopeful show called Uprise.

  “A slightly odd couple of artists, who claimed to have written a new musical, a new chapter to Hair, spiritually speaking,” says Linhart of the playwrights. “Kirk Newrock, who is famous for doing strange often avant garde improvisational group music, with audiences performing. And his partner, Jill—I think it was Jill Gorham, a lady who wore shades day and night, even though she claimed to be totally straight. They had written a musical called Uprise, and it was really quite good. In a nutshell, it was two couples: the black couple and the white couple; of course, they all stayed with their own kind. And they were activistic, and eventually they got so many kids and disenfranchised street people behind them, and everything, that it became almost its own city. And eventually what happens in the end is the government comes and builds a fence. They think it’s to separate them from the people they don’t like, and eventually they realized that they have been fenced in, and they’re in this big cage, and they’re climbing up the wall” (37).

  “Anyhow, there was a need for there to be white leads and black leads, male and female. It was kind of in the style of the old-styled musicals, but with this almost kind of horror movie twinge, [like] Rocky Horror Show. . . . Bette was performing at the Baths. I was hired to sing the two male leads at the backer’s auditions, including our big one, [which] would be for David Merrick. . . . I rehearsed in private with the two writers, learning just the male part of the song, and Kirk squeaking out the female things, while I waited to meet the female who had been picked to do the backer’s audition with me—a lady who they said was really dynamic, and would be able to do both the white female and the black female, in the backer’s audition. We actually wouldn’t get paid for anything, but David Merrick would see us singing the things first, and of course, and we would be first choice for the roles” (37).

  “After I spent quite a few weeks working on this—and personally I loved the music. . . . I was anxious to meet this great lady who had apparently played a supporting role in Fiddler on the Roof, and was some sort of a wild lady. One afternoon, when it was time to meet her, and us to sing these songs together for the first time, I came to the rehearsal and I brought my acoustic guitar, so when I met her . . . When I met a new female—I wanted to show people what I did right away” (37).

  So, he serenaded her with his song “Friends,” rig
ht then and there. Recalls Buzzy, “And she said, ‘That’s great!’ Either on that day, or very shortly thereafter, she asked me if she could sing that song at her shows at the Continental Baths; on Fridays and Saturday evenings she was doing a midnight show” (37).

  According to Moogy Klingman, “Ultimately, it became Bette’s theme song early on. Before her first album, it caught on as her opening and closing number—and just innocently became her theme song, and was just an overnight sensation” (36).

  Buzzy Linhart and Bette had an instant friendship. After she told him about her gig at the Continental Baths, Linhart said that he could sure use a paying gig. “I was so hungry, and so underpaid and starving—even though I was doing gigs—that I asked her if she could possibly get me a gig at the Baths to make some money. So she got me a gig to sing at the buffet on Sunday afternoons as a soloist” (37).

  He recalls the audition at the Continental Baths that day: “She introduced me to these people. It was a weekday afternoon, and there were people cleaning up the club around me. And I sang a couple of songs to them, and they said, ‘Oh, that’s great’ ” (37). With that, he landed the brunch job at the Baths.

  At the time, Bette was dating a drummer by the name of Luther. According to Linhart, “Luther Rix had just been in the St. Louis or Chicago Symphony, or something like that and he got out and came to New York, and was doing some session work and stuff. . . . he was the great love of her life at one point” (37).

  Recalls Buzzy, “Bette said to me, ‘You know, Luther is just such a perfect drummer for you, because he just plays every style, and he’s schooled, and he can read and can write charts, and you guys—you just gotta meet him. I know you are gonna play together.’ And I got on the subway to go home, and I went one stop, and the door opened on this subway going down to the Village from up at the Baths, which is 74th and Broadway. And the door opens and here comes this dude wearing a cape, with a cane, with a serpent’s head on it, and some kind of a funny hat. And he comes and sits down beside me, and he says, ‘Oh man, I see you got a guitar case. You know, the greatest guitarist in the world is playing tonight in the Village, you really should catch him.’ THIS was Luther, her boyfriend, and we didn’t separate for a year and a half after that” (37).