Bette Midler (17 page)

She was beginning to accept stardom without getting caught up in it. “I did it all for my own satisfaction,” she continued, “to see if I could do it. To see if anyone could understand it if I put it in front of them, to see if there was anyone else out there who was dreaming the same dreams I was dreaming. I’m very lucky to have found my thing. I cannot fathom people doing for years what they hate. I think if you look hard enough, you’re going to find something you like to do. I work like a dog, but I’m lucky to be able to. My first tour was so-o-o tiring, but it was fascinating. I could do anything I feel like doing if I put my mind to it. So now I’m trying to figure out what is the whole thing about? What is life about? And why is it people do certain things to each other and treat each other in certain ways?” (
8
).

By the end of 1974 it was time to quit asking questions and to discover some of the answers. The one question that everyone was asking as the year came to an end was: “Whatever happened to Bette Midler?”

The reemergence of Bette Midler began in February of 1975 with an appearance on a highly rated television special, a gala press conference in Grand Central Station, and the announcement of a return to Broadway that spring. She was about to end her self-imposed exile on Barrow Street in the only way that she knew how to do anything: dramatically.

The television show that brought Bette back into living rooms across America was Cher’s extravaganza, entitled simply
Cher
. It was something of a comeback for Cher, as well as for Bette. The two ladies had become friends when Cher showed up at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles during Midler’s 1973 tour. Cher had split up with her husband, Sonny Bono, the year before filming this special. The two of them had starred in their own highly successful variety series,
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
, from 1970 to 1974, but their headline-grabbing divorce had split up the decade-long act the previous spring. Sonny’s own fall 1974 TV series on ABC-TV was a huge bomb—critically, as well as in the ratings—and it had already been canceled. Now it was Cher’s turn at starring in her own solo series.

The
Cher
show, the pop diva’s own weekly Sunday night series, was due to debut on February 16, 1975. To kick off her return to TV-land, CBS broadcast an hour-long special the previous Wednesday evening. Cher wanted to make a big splash, so her high-profile guests were Elton John, Flip Wilson, and Bette Midler. Although Wilson was famous for
his own early 1970s TV series, Elton and Bette were rarely seen on network television, and the show was a highly rated, delicious treat.

According to Cher at the time, “Everybody I’m having on the show are people I like to see. I’m tired of seeing the same old guest stars who show up on every show. I think it’s important on a variety show to see people you don’t ordinarily see” (
56
).

Bette’s rationale for appearing on the special was a bit different from Cher’s. Said Midler, “I wanted to do Cher’s show because we’re good friends. I thought I’d go out there and learn how to get my nails done and we’d call it a night. But then I looked so hot on the show! Ah, but that was later. Ya see, when I first arrived and went into rehearsal, I had just had a permanent. I looked like death. For the whole two weeks of rehearsals my hair was frizzed out and I wore no make-up. Well, they all looked at me like, ‘Oh holy shit, what did Cher drag in from the East Coast?’ Then when I showed up on the set for the taping looking like a human being, I swear there was an audible gasp from the control room. They were so relieved!” (
38
).

Most amusing at that time were Bette’s views on California. “Hollywood! It’s a very strange atmosphere,” she commented after taping the Cher special that winter. “I find it very amusing. It doesn’t have the soul New York has. I couldn’t live out there. I couldn’t deal with the fierce competition of the lifestyle—not just the work, but who you’re seen with and what you’re seen wearing. That environment depresses me. Also, it seems that every asshole in the U.S. lives in Los Angeles. . . . They have these little antennae that draw them to the West Coast” (
38
).

In retrospect, these comments are very ironic indeed, since Bette was destined to move to Los Angeles years later, when she became a movie star. However, for the time-being, she considered herself a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, through and through. Yet a career in the movies was already clearly fixed in her sights.

While in Los Angeles, Bette and Aaron met with several film producers to discuss her inevitable movie debut. According to Bette, “The one we really wanted was the film version of
Little Me
. Now we lost that one under very unusual circumstances. It all goes back to when [producer] Ross Hunter’s
Lost Her Reason
[
Lost Horizon
] came out. Well, my dear, they threw us out of the theater, we were laughing so hard. . . . I never miss a Liv Ullmann musical! Well, anyway, Ross Hunter was very insulted. Aaron is not one to mince words, and when he met with Ross Hunter about another project, Aaron said something to him about
questioning his judgment because he thought
Lost Horizon
was abominable. Well, word got out that we were after
Little Me
, and wouldn’t ya know it, Hunter went out and bought it for Goldie Hawn!” (
38
).

Another bungled movie opportunity came when Bette was under consideration for the female lead in Mike Nichols’s production of
The Fortune
, which would have found her opposite Jack Nicholson. Bette ended up provoking Nichols by asking him who he was and what his credentials were.

“I would have loved to work with Nicholson,” she later explained, “but when I met Mike Nichols, I ended up insulting him because I had just been molested in the steam room [at] the Beverly Wilshire [Hotel]. I was staying there, and that the time, the masseur was the kind of guy who, if you wanted, would jump on your bones. I did not want, but I guess he thought I needed to have my bones jumped on, because this guy came on to me and wouldn’t let go. He threw me into the shower and started soaping me up. I was very frightened because I’d never had that happen to me before. I was terrified he was going to whip ‘it’ on me any minute. And I couldn’t get away. The guy kept me there past my hour, making me twenty minutes late for my meeting with Nichols” (
30
).

“By the time I got back to the suite, I was a nervous wreck. I sat down and didn’t know where I was or who this guy was. I looked at Nichols, and all I thought was, ‘Who is he?’ I wanted to talk about his work, but I couldn’t remember any of it. I couldn’t even remember his name. . . . He ended up storming out of our meeting, absolutely furious. He told everybody what a
cooz
I was and how I had no business in the [movie] business” (
30
).

“Don’t worry, we’ll get around to doing a film,” Aaron explained to the press. “For right now, though, I want Bette to come back to Broadway. She was offered
Mack and Mabel
and lots of other shows this year. That’s not the kind of thing I want for her. I want to bring theatricality to rock and I want to make Bette the Queen of Broadway” (
38
).

Bette’s career got a real shot in the arm when she was asked to appear on the TV special that kicked off Cher’s post-Sonny TV series. The TV special made a huge splash, with a small fortune spent on costumes alone. The elaborate wardrobe for
The Cher Show
was as much a key element of the show as its star was. According to designer Bob Mackie at the time, “Depending on the number of costumes, Cher’s clothes bill for her weekly show runs between $3,000 and $10,000. And for the
special she did with Elton John and Bette Midler, the bill hit $30,000.1 understand Cher’s wardrobe is the biggest ever for a weekly TV show. But then, of course, her gowns are very much a part of the show—and since she owns the production company, she also owns all the clothes” (
57
).

Cher was very excited about her new special and weekly television show . . . at first. “The look is really hot!” she exclaimed before either of her shows aired. “It’s not quiet. It doesn’t lay back. It’s just hot. It comes out and punches your brains out” (
56
). And that was just the set and costumes she was talking about.

During the 1970s, Bette Midler and Cher were best buddies. Later in the decade it was known that Cher also had a close friendship with Diana Ross. Cher liked these diva buddies so much that in the late ’70s she included drag performers in her own act to impersonate Midler and Ross. Also from this era, Cher presented Bette with one of Midler’s most prized possessions—a pair of multicolored rhinestone platform shoes. The shoes were later immortalized on the cover of the 1999 disco remix single of Bette’s “I’m Beautiful.” In 1999
Ladies Home Journal
magazine ran a photo of the shoes, with Midler proudly explaining, “Those are my favorite platform shoes from 1972—Cher gave them to me” (
17
).

By 1975 Bette had elevated to a new level of media fame, and she began hanging with the superstar crowd. According to her at that time, “I don’t think of myself as a star, I wish I could. I had fantasies about getting there, but I never had any about what I would do when I got there. I’m sort of in the lurch about how to behave. Actually, after expenses I made some good money. I ain’t no Elton John, though. I’m not in that league. Elton showed me a check he’d just gotten for eight million bucks. But he did that just to be spiteful” (
38
).

In an interview that Bette had given Andy Warhol’s
Interview
magazine before her year-long creative exile, she was asked what was next on her schedule. At a loss for an answer, she jokingly replied that she was going to star in
Dolores Jalapeno’s Clams on the Half-Shell Revue
. Much to her surprise, when she returned from France in the autumn of 1974, Aaron informed her that the Minskoff Theater was booked and gave her a list of rehearsal and opening dates for her return to Broadway.

Exactly one week after the highly successful
Cher
special was broadcast, Bette hopped into a limousine in front of her Barrow Street apartment building and schlepped her way up to Grand Central Station
to the underground restaurant the Oyster Bar, to discuss mollusks and music—and what one had to do with the other.

Over lunch with the press, she announced that she was to star in
Bette Midler’s Clams on the Half-Shell Revue
, which would open on Broadway in April. She posed with the chef at the Oyster Bar, while munching on the raw seafood delicacies. The following Sunday, there was a full-page ad in the
New York Times
for the show, announcing that tickets would be going on sale the following day at the theater box-office. That was the only announcement that was made.

The very next day was a freezing cold rainy Monday in February, and people waited in line all day to get to the Minskoff ticket window. With a total gross of $200,000 that one day, Bette again broke the existing Broadway record—the one that she had set at the Palace a year and a half before.

Bette Midler’s Clams on the Half Shell Revue
was to be the extravaganza to end them all, the one-woman show that even Cecil B. DeMille would be proud to have produced. It was to be Bette, her new musical director Don York, the Harlettes, Lionel Hampton, and the Michael Powell Ensemble, with sets by Tony Walton, directed by Joe Layton, and comedy material written by Bill Hennessey, Bruce Vilanch, and Jerry Blatt.

As Bette herself described it, “I never imagined it would turn into this epic of death. . . . the most mind-boggling, stupendous production ever conceived and built around one poor small five-foot-one-and-a-half-inch Jewish girl from Honolulu. All of a sudden I’m a whole industry. People run, they fetch, they carry, they nail, they paint, they sew. I had always dressed my girls from stock, and now there they are in real costumes. . . . they’re pinning here and tucking here and pushing tits up to the neck and showing calves. Do you know what this is? It’s a celebration of the sexual rites of a New Yorker!” (
38
).

The first and most important part of the production was to find a director who was used to variety revues. That was where Joe Layton came in. He had won an Emmy for his direction of Barbra Streisand and in fact had directed four of her TV specials.

The idea behind this extravaganza was to show off as many sides of Bette’s talent as possible, while leaving enough room for Midler to be the semispontaneous Miss M persona she had created and nurtured. “She basically sings and talks a lot, but she is guided,” is how Layton described the show’s concept. “She’s framed and cushioned so that she
doesn’t have to do two hours of killing herself. What I like about working with Bette is that she wears her whole presence on the outside. If she’s mad at you, she comes at you with a knife. If she loves you, she gives you a smile. You never have to worry what she’s thinking. It makes it much easier to deal with and gets the work done with great efficiency” (
38
).