Bette Midler Page 7

  Linhart’s working relationship with Luther and friendship with Bette were both long-lived. However, his gig at the Baths was not. It was just Buzzy and his guitar and a bunch of gay boys in towels, making eyes at each other. According to Linhart, “It was fun, but it just wasn’t me. Somebody could have done showtunes, it would have been perfect for someone else. I did two weeks. They were all in towels, and I’ve grown up in the theater, which is a very special place to be. I got the gig because she got me a job ‘cuz I needed some money. For the right audition pianist, it would have been heaven, for someone who knew every showtune ever written. So, we decided after a couple of weeks that it wasn’t for me” (37).

  In a very real sense, Bette’s initial gigs at the Continental Baths were limiting. She was making only $50 a week herself, and Steve Ostrow was paying Manilow. Not convinced that she was going to find the end of the rainbow at the Baths, she continued to attend theater auditions, and, thanks to Bud Friedman, she was beginning to get some legitimate nightclub work outside of New York City.

  The first of her major gigs outside of Manhattan came in October of 1970, in Chicago, at a club called Mr. Kelly’s. The engagement was as the opening act for Borscht Belt comedian Jackie Vernon. She was paid so little, there was no way that she could bring along her own piano player, only her musical arrangements. However, this was her big chance to see if she could hold her own onstage with a “straight” crowd. She had to delete her Carmen Miranda camping, her Mae West routines, and her Fire Island/gay hairdresser jokes, but she managed to garner laughs by spontaneously reeling out a whole routine about her lifelong fascination with Frederick’s of Hollywood’s sleazy lingerie.

  For her Mr. Kelly’s gig, Bette wore a bright purple dress—without a bra. There was Bette, shaking her ample breasts on stage to her raucous opening number, the ever-tasteful “Sha-Boom Sha-Boom.” Her two opening act shows a night at Mr. Kelly’s were a successful mix of 1950s rock and several blues numbers. Jackie Vernon came across like a corpse after Bette’s energetic set.

  After she returned to New York City, Bette continued to do research for her act. She began singing a mix of new material, including rockers like “C. C. Rider,” theatrical pieces like Kurt Weil’s “Surabaya Johnny,” and the lewd and bawdy “Long John Blues,” which is about a dentist who satisfies his female patients by filling their “cavities” with his big, long “drill.” Only Midler would go out of her way to unearth such material—and have the nerve to perform it.

  Bette was beginning to feel much more comfortable with her new role in show business—as an interpreter of classic songs. “That’s really my thing,” she admitted, “I watch things, then I twist it around to get another view, then give it back to them and make them see it in another way that they never saw before ‘cause they were so busy taking it seriously. I can’t take any of it seriously. You work as hard as you can, but no matter how brilliant you think it is, there is always going to be someone that’s going to look at it cockeyed and turn it around for you. That’s what I get from the Theater of the Ridiculous—the sardonic side of it. What good is it if you can’t giggle at it? ‘Cause in the long run that’s all it is” (6). Finally, Bette was beginning to step outside of herself and laugh at the paradoxes in her life.

  Her next stint at the Continental Baths in late 1970 took her through to the following year. The past year had proved quite successful for her and was most notable for the entrance of the Divine Miss M. Her arrival on the scene represented a liberation from her past anxieties and insecurities.

  Says Midler of Miss M: “She was a tortured torch singer on the foggy waterfront, wrapped up in her sorrow and a fur neckpiece.” As Midler grew, so did Miss M: “My natural tendency to poke fun at myself and others came out, and the bedraggled torch singer became a little broader, a little funnier.” Miss M allowed Bette to separate her personal life from her stage act: “I never remember her until she shows up. She has a life all her own, and that’s very nice—as long as she doesn’t mix in when I’m talking to the grocer or the taxi driver. I don’t let her into my regular life” (24).

  During her beginnings as a performer at the Continental Baths, Bette lived right around the corner, on West Seventy-Fifth Street. Eventually, she took up residence in a brownstone apartment in Greenwich Village, on Barrow Street, which was to remain her home for the next several years.

  “The place likes me,” explained Bette at the time of her move to her new Village residence. “I knew as soon as I walked in the door, it was glad to have someone here. The guy before me didn’t do a thing, it was filthy and ugly and hadn’t been painted in twenty-five years. But I’m trying to make it comfortable, like a home. I’ve never really had a home. I lived in one place for five years, but I had no furniture. I had a rug on the floor and I had some mattresses” (3).

  Still uncertain about cabaret singing as a lifelong career choice, in May of 1971 Bette did her final theatrical engagement before stardom found her. She went to the state of Washington to appear in the Seattle Opera Company’s production of the rock opera Tommy. Bette played two parts in the show: Mrs. Walker and the Acid Queen. Naturally, the part of the Acid Queen was the one that she had the most fun with. Singing the song “The Acid Queen” was like playing an even more liberated version of the Divine Miss M.

  “I really loved that number,” said Bette after the run of the show. “As we visualized it, it had nothing to do with drugs but was about the pervasiveness of female sexuality in American life. This Acid Queen was like the negative forces of female sexuality, all the things that drive boys to be homosexuals and to frighten men and make them run away. Larger-than-life female sexuality: suffocating” (19).

  “She jumps out of a box, out of a carnival wagon, and has a G-string on with fringe and this little brassiere with little red rubies on it. And it looks like I have nothing on from where you’re sitting. I’d never done anything like that before. I wanted to know what it felt like, and it didn’t hurt me. Except I got bruised a lot jumping out of that box. I had to put makeup all over my legs because I was black and blue for three weeks. Anyway, I jumped out and started shrieking, ‘I’m the gypsy, the Acid Queen, pay before you start. The Gypsy, I’m guaranteed to tear your soul apart.’ And of course, all she does is just freak poor Tommy out” (19).

  July of 1971 found Bette back in Chicago, for her return engagement at Mr. Kelly’s. After playing the Acid Queen, she was loosened up, revved up, and ready for anything. This time around, she was the opening act for another comedian, Mort Sahl.

  Bette was moving up the ladder, and she felt that she could begin to ask club owners for favors. For this stint at Mr. Kelly’s she was being paid $750 a week, for two weeks. Before she arrived in Chicago, Bette telephoned the club’s owner, Norman Kean, and informed him that she wanted to bring her new pianist, Barry Manilow, with her. She explained that she didn’t mind paying Manilow out of her wages, but she couldn’t afford the airfare. Would Norman pay for Barry’s ticket to Chicago?

  Kean complied with the request, sensing that Bette would give a better show if she felt comfortable with her own accompanist. As Barry explained it, “We knew we were good for each other, I guess. What she didn’t have were arrangements and pacing. I tried to give her a musical stamp all her own” (38). When Midler and Manilow arrived in town, Norman Kean found that was exactly what Barry gave her act. It had improved vastly since her last appearance at Mr. Kelly’s.

  However, at first sight, Manilow also asked Kean a favor. He inquired if he could have three copies of the Chicago phone book. Startled, Kean asked Barry what he wanted three phone books for? Did he have friends in the Windy City he wanted to look up? No, answered Manilow: he wanted to sit on them while playing the piano!

  Nowadays, Midler is famous for her devotion to cleaning up America. However, this is not a new passion of hers. According to Barry, she first demonstrated her civic duty when they were together in the Windy City. “Once we were walking on a Chicago beach, deep in con
versation. She kept picking up bottles and caps, all this crap in the middle of our heavy talk, dumping it into the garbage pail,” he recalls (20).

  The show at Mr. Kelly’s went fabulously. With Manilow’s restructuring of Bette’s show to get the most out of her material, Bette was a big hit. Many felt that poor Mort Sahl had a real problem trying to follow an opening act that totally eclipsed his own.

  It was during this Chicago engagement that Bette caused her four-letter-word scandal. Talkshow host and local columnist Irv Kupcinet held an annual charity event to benefit the veterans’ hospitals, called the Purple Heart Cruise. The event was heavily covered by the press, and the entertainment on the day-long voyage in Lake Michigan was provided voluntarily by whoever was appearing in Chicago at the time. Bette gladly agreed to sing a set for the cause. However, the musicians that were provided for her were also volunteers—all of the musicians from the local musicians’ union who happened to be free that day.

  Bette had become quite a perfectionist, a quality that she borrowed from Barry. After a brief rehearsal, the band was still doing everything wrong, much to the frustration of Midler. She tried again and again to put them on the right tempo and in the right key, with no luck. When the show began, they got it all wrong again.

  Bette smiled sweetly to the audience, turned around to the musicians, who were obviously unenthusiastic and not terribly adept, and she instructed them what to do—while the crowd looked on. Song after song, they got it all wrong, but somehow she muddled through to the confused conclusion.

  At the end of the set, she again smiled sweetly to the audience of war veterans and said, “I want to thank you all for being such a patient audience. I thought you were wonderful. I’m glad you’re having such a wonderful time. And to this band, I’d only like to say one thing: ‘FUCK YOU!’ ” Needless to say, she was never invited back on that charity cruise again.

  While appearing on another television talkshow in town called The Sig Sakowitz Show, Bette was introduced to someone who was visiting the station. His name was Michael Federal, and he was immediately attracted to Bette. In fact, he asked her out on a date right then and there. He came to see her show at Mr. Kelly’s, loved what he saw, and the two of them began an affair that would last for the next two years. Coincidentally, Michael was an actor and a bass player. It was Bette’s intention, especially after the debacle of the Purple Heart Cruise, to put together her own band. So, she invited him back to New York City as her bass player, and he enthusiastically accepted.

  While she was in town, Bette had told a reporter for the Chicago Sun Times about her plan to have her own band. “I’m not worried about how good the band is,” she explained. “All I’m worried about is how good we are together. Because with [Janis] Joplin, I remember, I used to think Big Brother & the Holding Company was one of the worst bands in the world. But playing with her: ‘dynamite,’ ‘great!’ It’s all in the vibrations going with some musicians who really love me. . . . Either it’s going to be the highlight of my life, or it’s going to be a total bust. In that case, I will know what direction to go in” (19).

  Upon her return to New York City, Bette located a drummer for her newfound band and was now ready to expand. With Barry Manilow on piano, Michael Federal on bass, and Kevin Ellman on drums, she was prepared for bigger and better things. It wasn’t long before she got just that. September of 1971 found Bette and her new band back at her old stomping ground, the Continental Baths, for a short engagement. The demand for Bette Midler at this point was so overwhelming that Steve Ostrow made special concessions so that women could come to the Baths to see her show. A special area was set up, and all women had to exit immediately following Bette’s set. A sign was clearly posted that read: “Ladies Requested to Leave after the Show.” Even celebrities were coming in to catch her act. There were all of the “regulars,” in their terrycloth towels, standing next to such notables as Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, and Helen Gurley Brown!

  Entertainment writer Marie Morreale remembers being one of the first women to venture into the Continental Baths to see Bette Midler. “I had friends who used to go there,” she explains. “They had seen her show, and it was just sort of like underground talk about how hysterical and terrific she was, and they invited me to go with them one night. It was a strange scene. I guess I had envisioned some sort of a Roman orgy, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was just lots of people hanging around. No one was running around naked or anything like that, but you knew that there was sex on the premises” (39).

  “There was a decadent feeling about it, because it was a new policy—letting women in there. It was like entering into a taboo area. You felt like you were on the cutting edge of something new—and then all of a sudden to see that sort of bosomy, crazy, campy kind of person. She was different than anyone I had ever seen before, and she had a different kind of in-the-know, sarcastic, cutting humor. At that time, the humor everyone was used to was more political rather than sexual innuendo. Her act was total fun for fun’s sake: Just enjoy everything, and don’t take anything too seriously. She was something special. The minute she came on and started singing and camping around, people were hysterical laughing. She was unbelievable. The only thing that I could think of was, here is a Sophie Tucker in the making. Here is someone who didn’t give a shit about the rules. She was breaking the rules with her material, and you were breaking the rules by being there” (39).

  In late September of 1971 came an engagement that would really advance her career. It was going to snag her the one thing that could spell tangible stardom for her: a record deal.

  The supper club known as Downstairs at the Upstairs was located on West Fifth-Sixth Street. It was a very important gig for Bette because it was her first legitimate New York City booking. Here was her big chance, and she was mortified that something would go wrong and she would blow it. Just to make certain that she looked right, in the eleventh hour she pleaded with Laura Nyro’s lighting man to come into the club and light her show; it had to be perfect. The lighting man was Peter Dallas, and he came immediately to one of her rehearsals to draw up a lighting scheme.

  Opening night was September 20, 1971—Rosh Hashanah—and to top it all off, the night of a huge hurricane in New York. Talk about the kiss of death! Bette made her grand entrance that night, only to find that the audience consisted of eight people.

  On the second night there was no improvement; and on the third night there were only five people in the audience. Here she was the hit of a gay bathhouse, and she couldn’t even get arrested by straight New Yorkers! This called for drastic measures.

  Bette hustled her buns down to West Fourteenth Street, to the tacky offices of the controversial swinging-sex-scene tabloid Screw magazine. She plunked down her own money and took out a big ad with her picture on it that carried the headline “Bette from the Baths—At the Downstairs!” and all of the details.

  Talk about amazing intuition: By the sixth night of her engagement, the place was crowded with patrons. And the following night, it was “standing room only.” The next thing Bette knew, her two-week engagement was extended to ten weeks, to accommodate the demand for reservations, and people like Johnny Carson, Karen Black, and Truman Capote were showing up to see Miss M perform.

  Peter Dallas was certain that a recording contract was what Bette needed, and he was going to help her get it. Laura Nyro was recording for Columbia Records at the time, and through working with her, he knew several people who worked for the company. He invited one of his friends from Columbia to the Downstairs, and the friend flipped out when he saw Midler’s act. Dallas urged him to get the president of Columbia Records, Clive Davis, to see the show. Davis accepted the invitation, but was totally unimpressed by the act and left the club without a word to anyone. Bette and the band were very disappointed.

  By some odd turn of fate, however, the next night Ahmet Ertegun, president of Atlantic Records, was in the audience. Ertegun recalls, “I went there after a ball at the Plaza Ho
tel. I told my wife that I had to go hear a singer I had been told about” (40).

  Strangely enough, a troupe of Bette’s biggest fans from the Baths, an outrageous contingent of hairdressers from Brooklyn, showed up that same night—in rare form. They screamed and carried on throughout the show, and when it was over, they stood on the tops of their tables and threw confetti at her. The crowd was so wild that night that Bette was literally carried off the stage by fans, like a victorious gladiator who had just slain an arena full of lions. There sat Ertegun in a tuxedo—totally unrecognized and completely knocked out by what he had just witnessed.

  “She had done the Baths and made a few Carson appearances when friends told me to catch her at the Downstairs at the Upstairs,” says Ertegun, who vividly recalls that particular evening (4).

  “She was unlike anybody I’d seen before. People of all types—grandmothers, couples, drag queens—everyone was screaming and jumping up and down on tables for this woman. She was doing everything: fifties greaseball stuff, swing era nostalgia, current ballads. You could discern a great wit there—she was trying to seem raunchy and tasteless AND exude a certain elegance, and she pulled it off. What she had was STYLE” (15).