Bette Midler (12 page)

In the 1970s, Schaffer Beer Company sponsored an annual summer music festival in Central Park in the Wollman Skating Rink. And the opening act that night was her friend Moogy Klingman. As he explains it, “She did the Carson show, and she became really big really fast. It was like mostly a gay following in New York City. The thing that happened was that I had my first album come out, I guess around the same time as hers. It was called
Mark “Moogy” Klingman
, I was on Capitol Records, she was on Atlantic. Anyway, somehow I got to open for her, at the Schaffer Music Festival. No one really knew that I was the guy that wrote songs. I was playing with my band, and we were playing some heavy instrumental stuff, some jazz, some blues, some rock. It was like almost like a cross between Chick Corea and the Meters. I was singing like bluesy songs, and everyone was there to hear the biggest phenomenon in America—Bette Midler. They couldn’t have cared less: we were totally bombing with this audience! This was like the climax of our tour to play with Bette Midler at the Schaffer Music Festival. People wouldn’t even applaud after the end of our songs. Then during one of our climactic songs, a guy in like a jockstrap with clothespins on his nipples, and stuff in his hair—ran down the aisles. He started at the front row, and he ran down the aisle to the back and it was still light out. So he was really weird looking, and everybody in the audience got up and turned around to look at the guy. So we’re doing the climax to our song, and the whole audience stands up and turns their backs to us” (
36
).

“We went backstage, and it was the end of the tour, and the album hadn’t sold and Bette Midler went on stage and it was like the biggest celebration of a superstar. People were just going insane. That was the end of my band right there. I couldn’t hold it together. I said, ‘Look at how great she is doing, and how lousy we went over, let’s break this thing up.’ It was a bad circumstance. Like, my manager shouldn’t have booked us with her. We had nothing to do with her music, even though I co-wrote her theme song. I mean, she went out and she opened with ‘Friends,’ and they went insane. Now here I was, the co-writer of ‘Friends,’ and they didn’t even know who the fuck I was, and didn’t
even applaud for me” (
36
). With that, Klingman decided to disband his group and go back to the drawing board.

However, for Midler, it was a night of total triumph. According to Bette, the Schaffer Music Festival outdoor concert that night—August 16, 1972—was one of her finest hours. “I thought I was in a newsreel. It was like the Marilyn Monroe newsreel, you know, when she was in Korea; it was just exactly what I thought I was. It was the happiest I’ve ever been in my whole life. I was wonderful!” she added modestly (
11
).

With her first set of Harlettes, Bette began her tradition of making them the butt of her bitingly sarcastic onstage humor. “I guess you’re wondering, ‘Who are those cocktail waitresses up there with Miss M anyway?’ ” she would ask. “They’re my girl singing group, the Harlettes . . . they’re real sluts!” (
25
).

In September, Bette played at Mr. Kelly’s in Chicago for the fourth time. This was a two-week engagement. For the first week it was her and the band, but for the second week she brought in Melissa, Gail, and Merle—who were also fondly referred to as “MGM.”

At this point in her career, Bette was being “managed” and booked by a company called Artists Entertainment Complex (AEC). She had signed with AEC after her one-year contract with Bud Friedman lapsed and Friedman had exhausted all of his big contacts to assist her career. However, by the summer of 1972 AEC was trying to talk her into signing a deal as a lounge act at one of the big Las Vegas hotels for a large amount of money. With that plan afoot, Bette realized that AEC had no concept of what she was all about. Unbeknownst to her—at first—one of her biggest followers over the past years was a very aggressive promoter/manager named Aaron Russo. Russo was madly infatuated with Bette, and he approached her and told her that he could turn her into a hot property. Bette toyed with the idea, but informed him that she didn’t want to be just another singing star. She looked him squarely in the eyes and told him that he could manage her if he accomplished the task she most desired: “Make me a legend!” (
42
).

Not only was Russo a man who loved a challenge, many felt he was also one of the most universally disliked people in the business. Ahmet Ertegun was among the most vocal in his opposition to the installment of Russo as Bette’s manager. But she was determined to become “a legend,” and she believed in Russo’s devotion to her. She dumped AEC and hired Aaron.

According to her during this era, “We met, and it was instant love
and devotion. Ours is a long and interesting tale . . . ah, Aaron and Bette. There’s a great deal of love and terrible rows. He’s a lot like my father. He’s a bellower and in that way he intimidates people, but he’s a real softie underneath. But that’s what my mother says about my father, and I don’t believe it” (
14
).

One of the most discussed myths about their relationship during their six and a half years together as manager and client was that they were lovers throughout this time period. Aaron repeatedly spoke of their intense personal relationship. In 1979, when she had fired him, Bette reported bitterly in
Rolling Stone
magazine: “What do you think he’s going to say? That I
schtupped
him once and threw him out because he wasn’t good enough? That wasn’t the way it was, of course, but he has his pride” (
13
).

With regard to the “Make me a legend” statement, Bette admits, “I said exactly that. I was half joking and half desperate. And what I meant was that I didn’t want to be just another chick singer. I don’t want to go to Vegas and wind up singing other people’s stuff. That was like throwing down the gauntlet, dearie. His eyes just lit up!” (
13
).

In a very real sense, Russo did make Bette a legend in the business. He also alienated just about all of her friends. Insiders allege that when Aaron Russo came onto the scene, he systematically got rid of everyone who had been with Bette before, because he wanted exclusive control of her career.

Meanwhile, during all of this activity, and between various other club dates across the country (including two weeks at the Princess Hotel in Bermuda), Bette was recording her first album. By June of 1972 it was clear to several people that the recording sessions with Joel Dorn weren’t going as excitingly as expected. Bette had recorded well over a dozen songs with Dorn, and several of them were totally rejected for release by Atlantic Records. Everyone was beginning to panic.

Manilow recalls that the songs that Dorn cut with Bette were stiff and lifeless. Speaking of Dorn’s recordings with Roberta Flack, Barry claimed, “Roberta Flack’s records were sooo tasteful, they really were. Delicate as crystal, cool as a cucumber, controlled, serious—everything Bette wasn’t. It made no sense to me that she’d picked him” (
43
).

Manilow was secretly hurt and disappointed that—other than surrendering a couple of musical arrangements to Dorn—he hadn’t been asked to contribute his talents to Bette’s recording career. However, he was about to seize the opportunity to change that. According to Barry,
“Just at that time, we did a concert at Carnegie Hall. I managed to get a bootleg tape of it and played it for Bette” (
38
).

As Barry later explained, he talked to Bette on the phone, and she was depressed. When he asked what was wrong, she informed him that she was upset over the way her recordings were going. Ahmet Ertegun was especially unhappy with everything that Joel Dorn had recorded with her. And she had to confess that she didn’t like what she heard either. Barry invited her over to his apartment, because he had something that he wanted her to hear. When she arrived, he sat her down in a comfortable recliner chair and handed her a marijuana joint and a glass of wine. Then he put a pair of headphones on her, and let her experience what the audience had heard that magical evening at Carnegie Hall. She had the same reaction: This was the kind of energy that was missing from the tracks that Joel Dorn had recorded with her.

“She just freaked out,” Manilow claims. Bette instructed Barry to phone Ahmet and to set up a meeting for him to listen to the concert tape. Barry went over to Ertegun’s office in Columbus Circle and played him the tape. According to him, “Then Ahmet Ertegun heard it and said, ‘Yes. That’s what’s missing from the album. Can you fix it?’ And I said I’d try. We went back to the recording studio and ended up redoing nine songs. The album came out: half produced by me and half by Joel Dorn” (
38
).

One of Bette’s close business associates tells of the confusion: “The first album, which she had labored on for over a year—she made them go back and redo it. And she forced Atlantic to let Barry produce a few of the cuts, and Ahmet went with it. The stuff that she left on that [album] from him [Joel Dorn] is superb, but the rest of it she wasn’t ready to release, and most of it she never did. She did subsequently release ‘Old Cape Cod,’ on the
Songs for the New Depression
album, and ‘Marahuana.’ After they remixed it with [male singing trio], Gotham doing the backups—which was much better in the original Joel Dorn version, because the way he had it, it sounded like an old seventy-eight being played with all that scratchiness and everything. It was fabulous. Those tapes are amazing. She also did Joni Mitchell’s ‘For Free,’ which she has never released, and a few other songs. But she wanted other stuff on the album. She had an idea, and Aaron did help her to convince them that she shouldn’t be able to do this and run over budget and over schedule” (
35
).

At this point in his career, Barry Manilow had never produced an
album cut before in his life. His work on TV jingles and a couple of failed singles with a group calling itself Featherbed were his two main forays into the complicated world of the recording studio. However, he told Ahmet Ertegun that he could produce a record, and he insisted that he knew how to record Bette the way she needed to be recorded. Figuring he had nothing to lose, Ertegun gave Manilow his lucky break. With Ertegun in the control booth, Manilow was about to get the best on-the-job training available. Barry figured that if he could produce the sound that everyone was looking for onstage, why couldn’t he simply reproduce it in a recording studio? He knew that Bette’s real energy came from performing in front of a live audience, as opposed to standing in a glass booth recording her vocals to an engineer and a producer.

In order to get the magical sound that Bette had during the Carnegie Hall concerts, Barry’s first order of business was to change the mood of the session—from a cold glass-encased sound booth—and to have her record live with musicians and background singers in the studio with her. Manilow later recalled, “I would create an atmosphere as close to a live performance as I possibly could. I hired Bette’s band instead of the veteran studio musicians Joel had hired. Bette’s band was fresh, enthusiastic, and excited to be there. Then I rented some theatrical lighting and had it hung in the recording studio. I invited an audience of about twenty close friends of Bette’s and the band’s. I set up the Harlettes and the band as if we were doing a live performance. I had some drinks and food brought in for the audience and kept Bette busy outside in the hallway while Ahmet and the engineer got the levels set on the band” (
43
).

The first song they tackled was “Superstar,” which is about a woman deeply in love with a guitar player. According to Manilow, “From the outset, we knew it was going to work. As soon as Bette could feel and react and play to a live audience, the previously missing energy was there. Ahmet, who was in the control booth, kept giving me the thumbs-up sign. Even Bette was having a good time” (
43
).

Over the thirty years since its original release, Bette Midler’s
The Divine Miss M
still holds up as one of the best, most varied, most exciting, and most perfect debut albums ever released. Cut for cut, it still represents one of the highwater marks of her entire recording career. The other Midler albums that are up to this same dramatic mood-swinging peak are
Bette Midler
(1973),
Thighs and Whispers
(1979), and
Bathhouse Betty
(1998).

The secret to the success of
The Divine Miss M
album is that it is so incredibly diverse in mood, song selection, and style—there is pop, rock, blues, ballads, and swing, and somehow it all holds together as a unified album. On one song Bette is the forsaken lover (“Am I Blue?”), then she is the trashy biker chick (“Leader of the Pack”), then she’s brought to tearful sentimentality (“Hello in There”), then she is all three of the Andrews Sisters (“Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”). There isn’t a mood or a mode that she misses. This album was perfect in 1972, and it remains timelessly perfect over three decades later.

Part of the reason for this is that half (actually, five) of the songs were finely crafted and very tastefully produced by Joel Dorn, and half (actually, six) of the songs were produced and arranged in an exciting and lively fashion by Barry Manilow. The juxtapositioning of these two production styles made this album breathtakingly successful. (Although those six cuts are credited on the album’s liner notes to Manilow, recording engineer Geoffrey Haslam, and Atlantic Records president Ahmet Ertegun, clearly 90 percent of the credit belongs to Barry, who understood Bette’s voice, appeal, and energy better than anyone else).

Dorn’s production on the opening cut, “Do You Want to Dance?,” is stripped down, slowed down, and made into an achingly pleading invitation to dance. The original 1958 Bobby Freeman single had been a catchy, sock-hop-worthy, medium-tempo pop/rocker. Bette’s slower, more sensual rendition transformed the song into a dramatic, sexual come-on. It still holds up as one of her best and most emotionally electrifying recorded performances.

Then, in complete contrast, it is directly followed by Barry’s production of Midler’s speeded-up, trashier, and flashier take on the Dixie Cups’ 1964 classic “Chapel of Love.” It is frantic and rocking, and nearly out of control with energy. Ending with Bette’s cackling laugh and the comment, “This is the ‘pits’ ending for a really terrific song,” it shows off just enough of the bawdy Miss M persona to poke fun at the whole affair—making it suitably campy and very tongue-in-cheek.