Bette Midler (2 page)

In 1972, when I was in college at Central Michigan University, a friend of mine played an album for me that he had just purchased, called
The Divine Miss M
. It was by a new singer I had never heard of: Bette Midler. I couldn’t believe how much I loved it. She seemed to hit every musical emotion on it, from rock to camp to swing, and back again. After I had heard it only once, I got in my car and went to the local record shop and bought my own copy, I loved it so much.

Since that day, I have also owned the 8-track tape of
The Divine Miss M
, the cassette, and finally the compact disc. Every time I thought of compiling my all-time Top 10 list of albums, this particular disc is always on it.

The following year, I was thrilled to discover that Bette Midler was going to be appearing in Detroit at the Masonic Auditorium. I couldn’t wait to see her in concert. I had seen a lot of concerts, but I had never seen anyone quite like Bette Midler. She was flashy, she was trashy, and she expended so much energy on stage, neither my friends nor I had ever witnessed a performer quite like Miss Midler. What I saw that night in Detroit made me a lifelong fan of Bette’s.

The first time I ever wrote about her was in my college newspaper—
Central Michigan Life
—when I reviewed her 1973 album
Bette Midler
. By 1975 I had moved to New York City to pursue my writing career. In the spring of that year I was one of the rabid fans who stood in line in the freezing rain to buy tickets to her amazing
Clams on the Half Shell
show on Broadway.

In the fall of 1975 I was doing freelance writing for a short-lived Manhattan newspaper called
51 Newsmagazine
. I was interviewing celebrities for the publication, and one of the people I interviewed was Barry Manilow. I spent over an hour in his apartment on East 27th Street, talking to him about his newly established solo recording career and about his relationship with Bette Midler. In fact, I have remained
friendly with Barry, and on occasion I have run into him at different music industry events. When I wrote my first two books—which were published in 1977—they were
The Captain & Tennille
and
Barry Manilow
.

I continued to follow both Bette’s and Barry’s careers through the years. By the 1980s, my writing career blossomed when I wrote three million-selling books in a row and became a
New York Times
best-selling author. Suddenly, I had a new platform in which to write about all of my favorite media stars.

In 1987 New American Library published my paperback biography
Bette Midler: Outrageously Divine
. It was one of my favorite books, and since I was in New York City, I had access to many of Bette’s friends and co-workers. Much of the interview information from my 1987 book is included in this book. That same year, I ran into Barry Manilow at the annual ABA (American Book Association) Convention, where I was promoting one of my books, and he was promoting his own memoir,
Sweet Life
.

We chatted for a few minutes, and during our conversation he paid me a great compliment by telling me, “I loved the book you wrote about Bette.” I was highly flattered and happy to hear that, since I rarely get feedback from the subjects of my books—even though I presently have well over forty books in print.

I was always a little disappointed that 1987’s
Bette Midler: Outrageously Divine
didn’t have a longer run in bookstores, as I had so much fun writing it. However, I had a fabulous party to celebrate its publication, and it was excerpted in
Cosmopolitan
magazine.

In the fifteen years since it was published, so much had happened in Bette’s life and career, and I avidly followed every move, bought every record, watched every movie, and became friendly with so many more of the key people in Midler’s life. I met Harlette Sharon Redd at a benefit at the Palladium in 1989, having been introduced to her by my close friend Glenn Hughes of the Village People. I hosted and sang (yes—sang!) on a nightclub show along with Ula Hedwig of the Harlettes. I met Midler musical director Marc Shaiman in New York City and in Los Angeles. And the list goes on and on.

When I was approached by Cooper Square Press in the year 2000 about doing this new book on the life and career of Bette Midler, I was ecstatic to have the opportunity to turn all of this material into a brand new book about her. Her story had grown so much, and her body of
work had more than doubled since 1987. Furthermore, I was able to look at her early years with a new perspective and add several pages of new material and new interviews to the years that I had previously written about. Among the new material in this book are fresh interviews with Midler record producers Moogy Klingman and Brooks Arthur.

Bette Midler is wonderful, talented, dazzling, shocking, outrageous, exciting, entertaining, touching, and so is this book!

Not only is Miss M “still divine”—to paraphrase her own words: She’s beautiful, damn it!

—M
ARK
B
EGO
, 2002

She stands only five-foot one-and-a-half-inches tall, but in the black high heel shoes she wears, she looks much taller as she struts across the stage. She is wearing a fashionable black designer pant suit, with a rhinestone-studded top. Her hair is exquisitely coiffed into a mass of champagne blonde curls atop her head. She looks glamorous, and she is more svelte than audiences are used to seeing lately. She is on stage at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, in a concert performance called
Diva Las Vegas
. Known for her chameleon-like quality for singing songs from many different genres, she launches into a number sung to the tune of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” from the Broadway show
Gypsy
. However, instead of singing the familiar opening line of “I had a dream,” she sings new lyrics to the song to signify her present stature in the show business world: “I’m in a hit! A big
FUCKING
hit, BABY!” The crowd roars with delight, but before the song is over, she lyrically commands people to “blow some smoke up my ass!” Are they insulted? Hell no—they love it! Is there any doubt who the diva in question might be? Only one person can carry on in such a way and have the crowd begging for more. It could only be Bette Midler.

It is January of 1997, and in Midleresque terms, everything truly
IS
coming up roses for her at the moment. She has just starred in the biggest box-office hit of her film career,
First Wives Club;
her greatest hits album
—Experience the Divine
—has been certified Platinum in America; and she is on a highly touted concert tour that is selling out
wherever she goes. Even the TV special that this performance is being filmed for is destined to win her both an Emmy Award and a Cable ACE Award.

During the performance, she tells filthy jokes, salutes strippers, lampoons lounge singers, sings songs about her breasts, and even heckles audience members from the stage. There is nothing she won’t do or say to titillate the audience or to get a laugh. However, when she slows down the pace of the show to sing a sentimental song, she has the audience in the palm of her hand. As the familiar opening piano notes sound, with metronome-like repetition, this tiny-but-bawdy blonde begins to sing what has become her signature song. She has the audience mesmerized and totally in her spell as she intently sings “The Rose.”

For Bette, roses have always held a special significance in her career. It seems that everything she names after the fabled flower somehow creatively blossoms. Her first film,
The Rose
, netted her an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe Award. The song “The Rose” became her first million-selling single—which won her a Grammy Award. Her soundtrack album,
The Rose
, became the first Triple Platinum disc of her career. When she tackled the role of Mama Rose in the 1993 film
Gypsy
, she won another Golden Globe and another Emmy. When she recorded a 1995 LP called
Bette of Roses
, it became her fifth million-selling album, further solidifying her reputation as one of the most highly acclaimed vocal stylists and accomplished actresses in show business.

However, the rose is also a flower with painfully sharp thorns. Like the rose, Midler’s career has had more than its share of thorns along the way. Hers has been a career filled with extreme peaks and valleys. Some of Bette’s projects are wildly successful, and others have been disappointing failures. Very often, the projects Bette really puts her heart into come up short.

The years following 1997 have brought both highs and lows to Bette. In 1998 she released a new album called
Bathhouse Betty
, which became her highly anticipated return to her
Divine Miss M
formula of combining bawdy, trashy, and humorous songs with sensitive ballads. It became a big hit and was quickly certified “Gold.” Yet her next album,
Bette
(2000), while finely crafted, failed to find an audience. After the
success of
First Wives Club
, it would have seemed that anything Midler touched would turn to box-office magic. However, her next three starring roles found her in one onscreen miscalculation after another:
That Old Feeling
(1997),
Drowning Mona
(2000), and
Isn’t She Great?
(
2000
).

Frustrated and despondent over her ability to find a successful movie project, in the year 2000 she decided that the future of her acting career was going to be in television. She had great success in the past with TV specials—why not a series? With that, she threw herself into the production of her own half-hour situation comedy, entitled
Bette
. It proved to be one of biggest mistakes of her entire career.

She knew that she was taking a risk by bringing her bigger-than-life persona to the small screen. According to her at the time, “It has been suggested to me by friends that I should be more careful about this as a career move. But I say, ‘What are you talking about? I’ve had a great career. They can’t take thirty years away from me.’ What can they do—put you in jail because you’ve done a lousy sitcom?—Maybe they should!” (
1
).

The show drew a great opening episode audience, but by midseason was performing so poorly in the ratings that the network pulled the plug on it and chose not to air all of the episodes filmed—or to put it into reruns. Midler, at the time, was crushed. She even threatened to write a tell-all exposé about her infuriating network nightmare, in a book entitled
Canceled
. Other than an unbilled one-scene role in the film
What Women Want
, for over a year she launched no new projects; her only public performances were at charity or special events.

But this is nothing new for Bette. She has been through these slow eras before, and she has always emerged stronger than ever. There have been great disappointments for her along the way—but her quiet periods never last long. Like water off a duck’s back, misfortune never keeps a good diva down. To quote a phrase often used by the bawdy and outspoken Midler herself: “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!”

For the last four decades, the self-proclaimed “Divine Miss M” has forged a unique career, peerlessly unmatched in the sheer outrageousness of it. She has the unique ability to switch from drama to comedy, from silly to sentimental, and from tasteful to raunchy, within the blink of an eye. Even her looks, her weight, and her hair color constantly vary. But whether she is a blonde, a redhead, or a brunette—and she
has been them all—she cannot disguise the incredible talent that she possesses.

There is no one quite like Bette. Singer, actress, TV star, movie star, stand-up comedian, best-selling author, media goddess, and charitable humanitarian. Her career has been one of great variety. Her songs are sometimes comically outlandish, sometimes sexually risqué, and sometimes they can bring an audience to tears. On one hand, she has scored her biggest musical successes with the sentimental ballads “The Rose,” “The Wind beneath My Wings,” and “From a Distance.” Yet on the other hand, she has simultaneously built herself a wild reputation for lewd, bawdy, and blue songs like “Doctor Long John,” “Pretty Legs and Great Big Knockers,” “My Knight in Black Leather,” “Drinking Again,” “Marahuana,” and “Empty Bed Blues.” She has proved time and time again that there are few legends quite like her in the history of the music business.