Bette Midler (15 page)

Milking her 1940s nostalgia trip for maximum joy, next comes Bette’s jubilantly swinging rebirth of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” It is followed by the ultimate trashy girl group medley: “Uptown” (The Crystals), “Don’t Say Nothing Bad (about My Baby)” (The Cookies), and “Da Doo Ron Ron” (The Crystals). Then on “Twisted,” Bette takes the silly Annie Ross (of Lambert, Hendricks, & Ross) mental therapy classic and transforms it into a wacky two-faced conversation with herself—making it truly twisted with self-mocking humor. Finally, she interprets the Jackie Wilson classic “Higher and Higher,” which she sings faster and faster, turning it into an exhaustive smash. The
Bette Midler
album is a worthy successor to
The Divine Miss M
—in many ways, surpassing it in style and excitement. With it, she had recorded and released a pair of successive hit albums—which created a hard act for even her to follow.

On this disc, Manilow distilled the two sides of Bette’s musical personality and devoted one half of the album to each distinctly different
persona. The
Bette Midler
LP, which was released in late 1973, was to become a huge success. It peaked at Number 6 on the
Billboard
magazine album charts, surpassing
The Divine Miss M
’s peak position of Number 9.

There was only one single released off the
Bette Midler
album. It was the nostalgic Glenn Miller song “In the Mood,” which made it to Number 51 in America on the pop chart.

During the recording of the album, Aaron Russo had been busily planning a grand tour of large auditoriums across America for the fall of 1973. The tour was to provide the final push toward Bette’s dramatically growing stardom. Her mainstream popularity had begun in the spring of 1973 with a small college-town tour. With the
Bette Midler
album in the can, it was time to hit the road and catapult Midler to solid superstardom. The four-month-long road show was to end up back in New York City, with Bette starring in her own Broadway revue version of the same show at the Palace Theater. The planning was brilliant, and the strategy was going to work to a tee. By the end of the tour, Bette
would
a legend.

But real conflicts were about to occur along the way. When Bette came to Barry with the final details for the upcoming tour and handed him the itinerary, he announced that he had just recorded his own album and his contract called for him to perform live in concert to promote his record. If Bette wanted him as her musical director and piano player on this tour, she would have to give him his own spot in her show. She was mad, pissed, frightened, scared, furious, and shocked . . . all at once. What was she going to do? No one could do what Barry could with her music. She didn’t have time to train a new musical director, and she knew that she couldn’t be confident with anyone else behind her on this crucial tour.

This was professional blackmail, and she had only one choice. Bette’s show was to be divided into two acts, with an intermission in-between. She would do the first act, the curtains would come down, and an intermission would begin. Then Barry would be introduced at the end of the intermission, he would play three of his own songs, and Bette would make her own second-act entrance. While he was onstage, Barry would continue as her piano player. And that is exactly what happened.

It was perfect for Manilow, because he was scared to death of performing alone onstage at this point in his career. He could overcome his stage fright with his first-act piano playing, and even if no one paid any
attention to his three second-act numbers, Bette would soon make her entrance and save him. By the end of the show the crowd would be on its feet in thunderous applause for the evening’s entertainment, and Barry would share in the glory.

Stage-frightened Manilow knew that he had played his cards just perfectly, and this tour was going to get his own solo singing career off to a brilliant start. As he explained it several months afterward, “I was thrown from behind the piano! Because at that time [Arista] was Bell Records, and they wouldn’t give me an album deal unless I promised I would go out and perform. I didn’t really want to go out and perform, but I did want to make records, because I really loved being in the studio. So I put an act together, you know, I think I know how to do that: I’ve been doing that for about ten years and coaching people. So it was easy enough to put that together. I made sure that part was solid, because I had never performed, and I figured if I fainted on the stage, nobody should know it. The act would be so good, so strong, that nobody would realize that I was just dying up there. So we put it together, and it came out real strong, and it gave me a foundation to be able to make mistakes as a performer” (
50
).

Bette and Barry auditioned over seventy potential Harlettes for this tour and finally hired a petite black girl named Sharon Redd and a tall white girl named Robin Grean, to join statuesque black diva Charlotte Crossley. By this point, a comedy writer named Bruce Vilanch had also joined Midler’s inner circle. So much of Bette’s stage act was howlingly funny because of her snide and witty comments delivered mid-act. Vilanch established his comedy writing career based largely on the bitchy one-liners he penned for Bette.

According to Bruce Vilanch, he had met Bette in Chicago, during one of her engagements at Mr. Kelly’s. He was writing a column for one of the local newspapers at the time. Openly gay, Vilanch brought his own bitchy/witty sense of humor to Miss M’s act. They have been working together ever since.

The 1973 tour began in August and encompassed thirty-five cities over a period of four months. It was a roaring success. During the tour, both Bette’s and Barry’s albums were released:
Bette Midler
and
Barry Manilow I
. All six of the Harlettes—to date—contributed background vocals to either or both albums.

One of the first stops on the tour was Honolulu, Hawaii—Bette’s hometown. She was a nervous wreck during her whole stay there. On
one hand, she was fulfilling a lifelong dream of showing off as an unprecedented success in front of her former classmates, who never thought she’d amount to anything.. And on the other hand, her mom and dad still lived there, and she had to deal with her decidedly risqué act and her onstage antics falling under the scrutiny of her parents.

Both nights that she played Honolulu, there in Row C was her mother, Ruth Midler; her sister Susan; and her brother Danny. Her father out-and-out refused to attend. Bette said that she was relieved, but in actuality she couldn’t help but be a bit upset and hurt that he wasn’t there to share in her glory.

“One parent was there,” she explained of that night. “My mother came, but my father, oh, he just said, ‘Oh, I just can’t.’ He’s read some things about me, you know, and he’s very conservative. He likes Lawrence Welk! He doesn’t like too much cleavage. In fact, every time I went over there for dinner, he made me safety-pin my dress together. I was glad my father didn’t come to see me perform. I would have been afraid to be dirty or gross, afraid that he would walk out or start yelling at me. He’s a good, old-fashioned man. He doesn’t want anyone to think that anyone from his family is cheap. I don’t know why I love to parody all that cheap music stuff. It’s so dumb. But I have so much fun doing it” (
4
).

Ruth Midler loved seeing her daughter blossom on stage. Said Bette, “Oh God, my mother got a charge, though. She kept screaming, ‘Faaaa-bulous! Faaaabulous!’ ” A thrilled Ruth explained after the concert, “We always knew she was witty, but we didn’t know she was THAT witty. I’m so proud of her because she makes so many people happy!” (
4
).

The second night in Honolulu, Radford High’s class of 1963 held a reunion. That night on stage Bette announced, “Well, I’m going to a reunion of all the people who couldn’t stand me!” Naturally, by the end of the class reunion that evening her face was wet with nostalgic tears: “I don’t want to leave so early. I didn’t get a chance to say ‘good-bye’ to Judy and Jane and . . . Oh, I just wish I could stay” (
4
).

The tour continued on to Los Angeles where she played at the Universal Amphitheater. At that engagement, there were several Hollywood stars in the audience, including the two surviving Andrews Sisters, Patty and Maxine. Patty Andrews was heard to exclaim, “She’s certainly different!” after meeting Bette (
6
). Oddly enough, Bette’s version of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” was such a smash that it revived
interest in the Andrews Sisters, and the following spring Patty and Maxine opened on Broadway in their own hit show,
Over Here
.

Wherever she went on this tour, audiences and critics were astounded by the amount of energy that she expended on stage, pacing from one side of it to the other in her chunky platform shoes and sequined gowns slit up to her crotch. Explained Bette, “When I’m out here I work. If people are paying money, they’re entitled to see an artist work his buns off. I want to do something beautiful that will last forever. Maybe I’ll never do it, and maybe everyone will laugh at me and say, ‘She’s just a fool,’ but I don’t think I am” (
4
). Neither did her growing legion of fans. In mid-October, when the tickets went on sale for her dates at Broadway’s Palace Theater, Bette set a record for one-day box-office ticket sales of $148,000!

“Well, are you ready for low-rent retro rock & roll?” she would shout on stage from San Francisco, California, to Austin, Texas. And the answer was always a resounding “Yes!” Shaking her breasts and her rear end, she would announce, “I want you aaaall to know from the outset that we really busted our buns on this next one.”

Although she was a singing superwoman on stage, every once in a while she had self-doubts. Was the world really in love with homely little Bette Midler from Honolulu, or was it the fictitious Miss M who was the real star? “I had a real trauma on this tour in Denver,” she later admitted. “We were playing out in the middle of God-made country in the Red Rocks Amphitheater, and I felt so helpless against the elements that I thought I had to do this big show-biz thing, you know, where I was giving the people only what they expected of the Divine Miss M—but nothing of myself. During the break I sat there and figured it out, and for the next set I took off my makeup, put on my pants and shirt and tried to harmonize with Red Rocks just by being little old me. Miss M is a show—much larger than life. Bette Midler is just a person with a few things to say and a few songs to sing. From now on, I’m going to be Bette Midler” (
4
).

From October 18 to 20, Bette played in Detroit at Masonic Auditorium. It was the hottest ticket in town since the Motown Revue had disbanded and the original Supremes went their separate ways. By the time Bette took the stage, the regally decorated hall reeked of marijuana smoke. After her opening number Midler glanced overhead to the two huge crystal chandeliers that hung down from the ceiling and
announced, “If this place ever goes bankrupt, they could sell those two chandeliers to Diana Ross for earrings!”

The tour was a roaring smash, but there was a lot of pressure on the road as well. Barry and Bette loved to fight with each other. Manilow is a perfectionist, and he wanted things to go exactly the way he had planned them. Bette was forever changing the order of the songs midshow. “Oh, Mr. Music,” she would say, looking across the stage to him. “Let’s not do ‘Surabaya Johnny’ tonight, let’s do ‘Superstar’ instead” (
38
). Barry would give her a look that could kill, grit his teeth, and comply with her request. Backstage after the show, he threatened to strangle her with his bare hands if she ever did that again. They threw tantrums, and sometimes ashtrays, at each other backstage in anger.

“I like fighting,” explains Bette. “I always thought that a woman fighting was very sexy. My sister and I would always fight night and day. I think I have a strange sense of humor” (
38
).

But her fights with Barry were great for releasing tension. “Barry and I worked so fast. It was two ambitious Jews in one room, such bitchiness!” she remembers. “We would bitch at each other all the time. He very rarely did an arrangement I didn’t like. He’s a much better musician than I. We would mostly bicker about which song should go where and how the show should be paced . . . and whether he was going to wear white tails or not. . . . and would he pleeeeeeeeeeeeeas stop waving his head . . . and would he not sit on phone books, if he didn’t mind . . . and could he get the bass player to stop tossing his blond locks around. He would always want to know how come I was always half a note under and why I didn’t come in on time. And it’s true that sometimes he would insist on something that I would take to heart and get real spiteful about” (
38
).

By the time Bette rolled back into New York City, she was ready to take the world by storm, and the fights with Aaron Russo reached a peak. She had commanded him to make her a legend, and he was doing it. For her engagement at the Palace Theater, the portrait of Judy Garland was removed from the lobby and one of Bette hung in its place.

To most of the people in Bette’s entourage, Russo represented a very driven and talented person who was able to get things done. He was also someone who was used to getting his own way.

At the time that Bette was about to open at the Palace Theater, Russo was already looking ahead to bigger and better gigs for her. His attitude alienated several people, however. “We’re open to all offers, but we’re
in no hurry,” he proclaimed, prior to the Broadway opening. “I believe in taking things one at a time, and right now it’s just the Palace and probably another album after she gets some rest. She has no financial worries—I’ve invested all of her earnings in gold—and I’m trying to keep her from getting too grand. At heart, you know, Bette Midler’s just a ‘schlepper’—a good Jewish girl who happens to have a lot of ability” (
4
).

Typical Aaron Russo. Building up Bette Midler, while putting her down at the same time. One night during the Palace engagement, which ran for three weeks, Bette and Aaron had a knock-down drag-out fight backstage before the curtain for Act One went up, and just to infuriate her, Aaron dumped a full glass of Coca-Cola on top of her head. Bette was so humiliated and mad at him for having done that to her that the incident was later repeated in the film
The Rose
.