Bette Midler (13 page)

Next is the song “Superstar,” which was originally written by Bonnie Bramlett, Leon Russell, and (uncredited) Rita Coolidge. Most people don’t realize that it was actually written about Bonnie’s and Rita’s separate backstage crushes on guitar superstar Eric Clapton. The original studio version of the song was recorded by Bramlett, and the original “live” version of it was sung by Rita on the famed 1970 Joe Cocker all-star concert album
Mad Dogs & Englishmen
. Ironically, it was Bette’s
nemesis, the ever-tasteful Karen—and Richard—Carpenter who had turned it into a million-selling Top 10 chart hit in 1971. However, it was Midler who here really milked this song for all of its bittersweet passion and pain.

Then the mood swings again—this time into the totally slutty “Daytime Hustler,” which is overtly sexual in content—then back again to touching emotion on “Am I Blue?” Back and forth the pendulum swings until every base is covered, song after song.

On John Prine’s touching “Hello in There,” Bette’s performance takes the listener into the eyes of a sad old woman who is wearily looking back at her life. With “Delta Dawn,” Miss M dramatically tells the story of a disillusioned girl in love—in a song extravaganza that perpetually builds like a five-minute-and-sixteen-second mini-drama. And on the anthem “Friends”—penned by her friends Buzzy Linhart and Moogy Klingman—Midler received the true signature song of her career. It is on that song—which is presented twice on this album—that the contrast between the Joel Dorn recording approach and the Barry Manilow approach is best illustrated. The Dorn-produced version is centered and evenly plotted, while the Manilow version is wild and festive and sounds more like a raucous party in the studio than a formal recording session. Both styles are valid and satisfying, for different reasons. Between the two approaches, different shadings of Midler’s personality are highlighted to maximum effect.

It is also interesting to note that in the background was a fascinating “who’s who” of top-notch singers and musicians. The voice of Melissa Manchester can clearly be heard in the background of “Chapel of Love.” And it is Whitney Houston’s mother, Cissy, who leads the choir on “Do You Want to Dance?” Fittingly, Manilow handles the piano parts on all of the songs he produced, which also featured Midler’s touring band—Dickie Frank on guitar, Michael Federal on bass, and Kevin Ellman on drums. Also, percussion wizard Ralph MacDonald (
Saturday Night Fever
) is heard on several of the cuts, as is noted jazz bass player Ron Carter. Yet, amid it all, the star here is clearly Miss M herself.

The end result was a brilliant fusion of style, substance, nostalgia, sleaze, heartbreak, joy, and celebration. Regardless of the production credits and the behind-the-scenes story, the finished product, Bette Midler’s
The Divine Miss M
album, is brilliant, and she sounds great in every song. Somehow, every side of her multipersonality musicality
comes through. In theory, an album consisting of so many divergent styles shouldn’t have worked and should have failed to find an audience. But the LP was an instant smash, and over 100,000 copies were sold in the first month of its release, when it hit the stores in November of 1972. From the poignant “Hello in There,” to the trashy “Leader of the Pack,” to the rocking “Daytime Hustler,” every cut stands out. Like a jigsaw puzzle, each song represents another equally valid piece of Midler’s singing talent. Each song is like a vignette or a one-act play. She convinces you that she
IS
that dejected senior citizen in “Hello in There,” that she
IS
that gum-chewing motorcycle slut in “Leader of the Pack,” and that she
IS
all three of the Andrews Sisters—Patty, Maxine, and LaVerne—on “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Talk about an incredible album!

After a year in the making, finally, this album was the ideal debut album for Bette. She showed off her ability to really connect with a sensitive and heartfelt ballad. Joel Dorn was the perfect producer to bring out this side of her vocal talent on songs like “Do You Want to Dance?” and “Hello in There,” while Barry Manilow was perfect for showing off her bawdy, trashy, retro-loving side on “Chapel of Love,” “Leader of the Pack,” and “Daytime Hustler,” which were fittingly ragged and wild. This became the mass public’s introduction to the rock & roll side of Bette Midler’s career.

At the time of the release of
The Divine Miss M
, Mike Jan of
Cue
magazine wrote, “Considering the spectacularly funny nature of her career thus far, she would have been forgiven for seizing the opportunity to goof off on the record, to present ten or twelve puffy parodies of old rock songs and popular songs from the thirties and forties, and that would be it. Few probably expected more. Yet Miss Midler has provided much more. Half the album’s ten songs are ballads. Nobody opens her recording career with five ballads without shooting for vocal respectability. Miss Midler clearly is and for it she richly deserves praise” (
44
).

“Do You Want to Dance?” became a smash hit when it was released as a single in December of 1972. The song made it to Number 17 on the
Billboard
charts. When it came time to release a second single, Barry Manilow and Bette went back into the recording studio and completely rerecorded “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” with a punchier and much more modern arrangement. For this one single song, it was Manilow—alone—producing Miss M. Like the original Dorn-produced LP version, it featured Bette singing all three of the vocal parts. On the
Manilow-produced version there is a brief section without instruments, where three different Midler voices—in slightly different keys—can distinctly be heard harmonizing together. The Manilow-produced single version of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” became Bette’s first Top 10 hit, peaking in
Billboard
magazine at Number 8.

To further illustrate the contrast between Dorn’s approach and Manilow’s style, one need only listen to the two versions of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” back-to-back. Joel’s version is on
The Divine Miss M
, while Barry’s is featured on Midler’s 1993 greatest hits album,
Experience the Divine
. The Dorn one is more faithfully 1940s-sounding, while the Manilow version is snappier and has more sassy bounce to it.

Originally released in 1972,
The Divine Miss M
album made it to Number 9 on the LP chart in America, and it was quickly certified Gold, signifying sales of over half a million copies in America. A single version of “Friends,” with “Chapel of Love” on the “B” side, was released in 1973 and made it to Number 40. Very quickly, because of the unprecedented success of
The Divine Miss M
LP, Bette Midler wasn’t just a New York City cult performer anymore; she was suddenly an overnight national sensation.

With the release of Bette’s
The Divine Miss M
album, the obvious course of action was to go out on the road and promote the hell out of it. That’s when Aaron Russo really swung into action.

Russo had come from a New York City garment-district family. The family business was women’s undergarments—and Aaron had no interest in that line of work whatsoever. Instead he opted to get involved in the rock & roll scene. He worked for a nightclub called the Electric Circus in New York City, and in the late 1960s he moved to Chicago, where he managed a group that never made it big, called the Flock. His biggest claim to fame in the Windy City was as manager of a multimedia entertainment club known as the Kinetic Playground. He was also involved in the East Town Theater in Detroit.

In the early 1970s, Russo had been following Midler’s career from afar, having seen her on
The Tonight Show
and having been in the audience with his wife, Andrea, when Bette performed at the Bitter End in New York City. His growing infatuation with Bette was said to be the reason for the demise of his marriage. When Bette had become something of a local legend in Chicago at Mr. Kelly’s, he plotted his course of action and won her allegiance.

His timing was perfect. Things were beginning to happen so fast for her that she was frightened of fouling it all up before she really hit the big time. How could she break away from the Continental Baths and the gay scene and into the mainstream without alienating anyone in the
transition? And how was she going to break into the big time without having to become some sort of “cheese bomb” Las Vegas creation? She knew that she needed help, and all of a sudden . . . there was Aaron Russo.

With her debut album busy disappearing from record-store shelves, the time was ripe for Aaron to make good his promises. In November of 1972, Bette performed again at the Continental Baths. This engagement, at long last, was her final farewell night at the steam bath that had made her a star. She joked onstage that Steve Ostrow was having a difficult time filling her spot—and her bra—at the Baths, now that she was playing there for the very last time. She announced that Josephine the Plumber (actress Jane Withers’s fictional character in 1970s kitchen-scouring cleanser TV advertisements) had been approached, but not even SHE could remove the stains from the drains at the Continental! But beneath the jokes, Bette was not at all happy about that last gig.

Steve Ostrow had obviously sensed that this was to be his last shot at exploiting his gay bathhouse with Miss Midler, and he was going to take full advantage of the situation. So many people were jammed into the place that last night that it was a true fire hazard.

Bette later recounted, “When I looked out and saw how many people that bastard Ostrow had packed into that place, I was sick!” (
45
). Although Ostrow was made out to be the villain, one of Midler’s intimate friends confided that Russo “was the one who made her go back to the Baths, because he thought he could milk them for a buck. And she was furious with him ever after for that. He packed the place. She didn’t want to do it. Ostrow has been asking her to come back, but the place was small and everything, and she at that point was very dedicated to growing. But Aaron knew that there was a buck to be made, and he packed the house. It was like sardines in there” (
35
).

Looking back on her experiences at the Continental Baths, Bette later stated in her book
A View from a Broad
, “For some reason, which will forever remain a mystery to me, the idea of a woman entertaining an audience dressed only in towels—an all-male audience, and homosexual, yet—is to every reporter I have ever met at once repulsive yet endlessly fascinating. . . . I always performed
en costume
. It’s true that occasionally I did wear a towel. But on my head, with some bananas and cashews hanging from it, as part of my tribute to Carmen Miranda and all the fruits and nuts of the world. . . . And by the way, just for the
record, I never laid my eyes on a single penis, even though I was looking real hard” (
46
).

In any case, Midler’s days at the tubs were officially over, and it was on to bigger and better gigs. Although she was a legend in New York City at this point, there was a whole country out there that didn’t know what she was all about. Right after the Baths she headlined several small rock clubs that were famous launching pads for recording artists: the Troubadour in Los Angeles, the Boarding House in San Francisco, and the Club Bijou in Philadelphia.

The real triumph came when she returned to New York City in December of 1972 to headline two sold-out concerts at Philharmonic Hall on New Year’s Eve: one early show at 8:00
P.M
. and one late show at 11:00
P.M
. Those two shows at Lincoln Center were the hottest tickets in all of Manhattan that New Year’s Eve!

Bette dazzled the crowd from her very first seconds on stage. She was carried in from the wings in a sedan chair swagged in red velvet drapes, so that only a dangling leg protruded. When the curtain was drawn, there was Bette sheathed in white satin, with a big “shit-eating grin” on her face. The crowd went wild that night, especially at the late show when she made an exit before the stroke of midnight and reappeared in a diaper and a sash with the numerals “1973” emblazoned across her chest. The audience was aglow in silver and sequins, and she made it clear for them that the new year was going to become known as “the year of Bette Midler.”

The press had a field day, lavishing her with praise for her appearances during the last two months of 1972.
The New York Times
called her “a bona fide original . . . an enormously theatrical young woman who possesses an uncanny singing talent. . . . the first white show woman of the current pop era!” (
47
).
Billboard
magazine exclaimed, “Bette Midler showed how spellbinding a true entertainer can be in this era of mediocrity hiding behind the banner of laid-back naturalness!” (
2
). And the
New York Daily News’
rock critic, Lillian Roxon, who was blown away by Bette on New Year’s Eve, declared, “It was heaven. . . . I can’t remember when I last saw a performer work so hard and give off and get so much love. . . . she does all the things no one does anymore, and I wish the rock & roll brigade would learn from her. . . . [She was] stalking and stomping around the stage like a hyena on speed!” (
49
).