Bette Midler (28 page)

One of the strangest things about being in a movie is seeing yourself up on the screen for the very first time. You have a mental picture of what you think you looked like doing it, what you were supposed to be doing while the cameras were rolling, but it is rarely the same as what appears in the final cut of the film. Bette had a very negative reaction to her first look at herself as the Rose.

“There was a cast and crew screening of
The Rose
at a huge theater at Fox,” she explained, “and I was so upset that I was gasping for air in the last row. People were turning around and looking at me, and they couldn’t watch the picture because I was so frantic” (
18
).

According to her, “I had a strong mental picture of myself. You know, someone sort of very glamorous and exquisite, I mean, in this body is a thin white duchess. And imagine my surprise when I saw a sort of ratty, broken-down, exhausted, split-ended, bleached blond creature on the screen. I mean, I know I made her up and I did my hair myself, but when I finally saw the rough cut, the mental picture I had been carrying all these years crumbled. It was a big shock. The second time I saw it, though, I really enjoyed it” (
86
).

The critics all agreed that the Rose was a character that only Bette Midler could successfully portray. No other singers-turned-actresses could or would tackle such a part and let themselves be seen as so self-debased. There was also a scene that depicted explicit lesbianism. According to Bette, the scene was more graphic before editing. “That was a nightmare,” she said. “I’m real straight, but we were really trying to be sympathetic. I jumped into it, hugging and kissing this girl. When my [former] manager Aaron Russo saw the dailies, he about jumped out of his drawers. He said, ‘How could you do that? I told you, “No
tongue!’ ” I thought it was nice, though they cut it all out in the film” (
71
).

This film gave Bette the chance to be totally over-the-top with frankness, whether she was dealing with sex, foul language, or the excesses of rock & roll. The very first scene with Midler in
The Rose
, she is shown descending an airplane staircase, obviously stoned out of her mind. Halfway down the staircase toward the tarmac, she stumbles and falls. Once she gets up on her feet, she accidentally drops a fifth of booze she had been clutching among her possessions. This scene sets the tone for the downward slide of the singer who calls herself the Rose.

In one of the first concert sequences, her manager, Rudge (Alan Bates), warns her that several VIPs and camera crews are in the audience, and he implores her, “Please don’t say ‘motherfucker.’ ” Naturally, the first words out of her mouth once she hits the stage are “Hiya, motherfuckers!”

Mid-movie, after a night of lovemaking, the Rose confesses to her new boyfriend Houston (Frederic Forrest) that she once took on the whole high school football team—sexually—and woke up on the fifty-yard line. When this revelation fails to shock him, she feels that she has met her match—a man who can accept her on her own terms. Another sexually charged scene is the one where the Rose introduces Houston—her current male lover—to Sarah (Sandra McCabe), her female ex-lover.

Bette was able to weave so many aspects of her own life into
The Rose
. After a wild ride together in a limousine, the Rose takes Dallas to a drag bar in Greenwich Village. As they walk in, the performer on stage is impersonating her real-life namesake—Bette Davis. When another drag queen impersonates “The Rose,” it as a sequence that pokes fun at, and simultaneously spotlights, who she was, who she is, and who she wanted to be—a legendary movie star.

In another tongue-in-cheek self-parodying scene, she chases Houston into the all-male Luxor Baths, where they have a heated discussion. The sequence emerges as a strange sort of tribute to her past at the Continental Baths.

There is also a fascinating postconcert sequence, in which Rose and Rudge are seen having a dialogue before getting aboard a waiting helicopter. They are standing on top of what was then the Pan Am building, on East 42nd Street. Directly behind the actors are the lights of the World Trade Center, looming in the background. Now, with the World
Trade Center a tragic piece of American history, it is haunting to see Bette as the Rose, standing in front of it.

It seems that every scene between the Rose and her manager directly echoed Bette’s real-life relationship with Aaron Russo. In the film, the Rose escapes him by dying; in reality, Midler escaped Russo’s clutches by firing him right before the film opened.

In
The Rose
, the concert footage—especially on “When a Man Loves a Woman,” is very intense and lovingly filmed. Bette’s portrayal of the Rose is complex, emotionally multilayered, raw, frank, and quite tragically magical. She charges every one of her scenes with drama and crackle.

Rose’s final conversation with her parents—from a phone booth—is a devastating reflection of her awkward relationship with her own father. It mirrored the fact that her dad refused to see her in concert—even when she was a star, headlining a stadium full of screaming fans in her own hometown.

There are also some interesting cameo appearances in the film. Doris Roberts, who in the 2000s is known as one of the stars of the hit TV series
Everybody Loves Raymond
, appears briefly as the mother of the Rose. And late disco star Sylvester is seen in the drag bar sequence as a male Diana Ross impersonator.

In the Rose’s final self-destructive hour, cranked up on a fatal dose of heroin, she is led to the stage like a fragile rag doll. However, she is able to come alive long enough to sing an impassioned version of “Stay with Me, Baby.” Over twenty years later,
The Rose
is still one of the best movies about the excesses of rock & roll ever made.

When the film came out, Bette was very verbal about pointing out that drugs were the crutch of the Rose, and not with Bette. With regard to the drugs, she proclaimed at the time, “I don’t do drugs. I have a devil. I don’t like to get stoned because then it comes out and I can’t control it and it’s very sick. In the early days, I used to smoke dope and drink stingers before I worked. I had a lot of fun, but I used to lose my voice all the time. At least I think I lost my voice. I was so stoned, I was never sure” (
30
).

According to Frank Rich in
Time
magazine, “Midler is not a great singer or a subtle actress or an exquisite beauty; yet she just may be a movie star. . . . For Bette Midler, self-styled queen of ‘trash with flash,’
The Rose
is an ideal throne!” (
93
). David Denby, in
New York
magazine, raved, “What a storm of acting!” Jack Kroll, in
Newsweek
, said, “Bette
Midler’s performance is an event to be experienced—a fevered, fearless portrait of a tormented, gifted, sexy child-woman who sang her heart out until it exploded,” while in the
New York Daily News
, Rex Reed exclaimed, “Remember this day. It’s the same one that will go down in history as the day Bette Midler made her movie debut” (
16
).

Even more gratifying were the phenomenal figures at the box offices across America. Twentieth Century-Fox reported that in its first three-day weekend,
The Rose
grossed a spectacular $793,063. In its first five days of release at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City alone, $91,111 was taken in; and in four days at the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles, the total came to $60,189.
The Rose
was a huge hit in less than a week, and Bette Midler became the year’s hottest new film star.

The soundtrack album from
The Rose
was unlike any of Bette’s previous albums, as it is recorded in the character of the Rose, a woman who—like Joplin—holds back nothing to pump emotion into every song, no matter how raspy or dragged out her voice sounds. This was in complete contrast to the controlled, heavily orchestrated sound on Bette’s
Broken Blossom
album. The tone is set by the opening cut, the rocking guitar and horn-driven “Whose Side Are You On?” The Southern rocker “Midnight in Memphis” and the rock anthems “Sold My Soul to Rock ’n’ Roll” and “Keep on Rockin’ ” showed her off in a hard-rocking light that she had never dredged up before in her concerts. Tracing the physical downfall of the character of the Rose, by the time Bette gets to the song “Stay with Me,” her voice is low down, raspy, and filled with gutsy emotion. Finally, the album ends with the bittersweet ballad of “The Rose,” which is more clearly sung by a recognizable Bette Midler, as opposed to the Southern Comfort–laced character of the Rose. For the most part, Bette clearly poured out her heart and soul on the recording of these songs, like never before.

The first single that was released from
The Rose
album was Bette’s raw and conviction-filled version of the soulful “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Originally, it was a Number 1 hit for Percy Sledge in 1966. Midler’s hard-edged version, sung from a female perspective, became the album’s first Top 40 hit, peaking at Number 35 on the
Billboard
singles chart.

But that was just the beginning. For such a heavily rock & roll-themed movie, it would have seemed that the rock numbers would have been the best single choices. However, when the sentimental ballad of a theme song, “The Rose,” was released as the second single from the
film, it went on to became Bette’s biggest single hit (Number 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart, Number 3 on the
Billboard
Pop chart). The song spent eight weeks in the American Top 10, and it was all over the radio airwaves in the summer of 1980. Catapulted by the success of its title song, the album hit Number 13 in
Billboard
, and it was her first Platinum certification for an LP, signifying a million copies sold. Suddenly, she was the toast of the record world all over again. Whatever momentum she had lost on her last four albums was quickly dispelled by the success of the song “The Rose.” Ultimately, the soundtrack to
The Rose
and the theme song of the same name went on to become the biggest-selling records of her career—up to that point in time. She had set a new high-water mark for herself.

Regarding the song “The Rose,” Bette claimed, “It’s the kind of song singers wait for all their lives. My real fans know me as a ballad singer anyway. They don’t pay attention to the nutsy stuff. But for me to finally get some kind of mass recognition as a straight-ahead balladeer is probably the greatest thrill of my career” (
87
).

Commenting on the film, music producer Paul A. Rothchild noted that it “shows all the negative aspects of a performer’s life, and then closes with a song that’s a total positive statement. And Bette’s vocal is very melancholy and beaten, which I like as a counterpoint to the optimism of the lyric. The film opens with ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart,’ an a cappella ballad, and closes with ‘The Rose,’ which starts with single voice and piano. So it opens with her singing a girl’s plaint and closes with a grown woman’s affirmation” (
87
).

The rest of the music in the film is out-and-out screaming rock & roll, with Bette hitting some the harshest notes of her career. “I’ve always loved that kind of music,” she stated, “but I never really had the nerve to sing it. I wasn’t sure about my own credentials and people in rock & roll can get real uppity about that. I always sort of skirted the issue: I’d throw in one of those songs every now and again, but I never came out and said that’s really all I want to do” (
87
).

Rothchild decided that the soundtrack version of “The Rose” was a bit too sparse for radio airplay, so he sweetened it a bit for release as a single. “I had fought scoring all along. There’s not one note of scoring in the film: it’s all live music except for the diner scene where there’s music coming out of the juke box. I told them, ‘We haven’t used one violin in this entire movie and I want to keep it that way!’ But when it came time for the single, I didn’t dare release it to AM radio with just
piano and voice. So for the single I added strings, French horns, and some woodwinds” (
87
).

The Rose
added the frosting to a career that was already an outrageous piece of cake for Bette Midler. When it came time for industry accolades to be handed out, her name was prominently displayed. For acting, she won not one but two Golden Globe Awards, for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy and for New Female Star of the Year.
The Rose
also won a Golden Globe for Best Song from a Feature Film. The cherry on top of the icing came when Bette was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in a film. Although she ultimately lost the award to Sally Field’s performance in
Norma Rae
, Bette was now considered a bona fide “A list” movie star.

The song “The Rose” was not nominated for an Academy Award. Explained its writer, Amanda McBroom, “The Academy requires a song be written specifically for the film. They send you a form to fill out and I told them the truth. So now I have a reputation for being stupid, but honest” (
87
).

However, for Bette, the awards and accolades were just beginning. In 1981, her recording of “The Rose” was nominated for a Grammy Award as the Record of the Year and for Best Pop Performance—Female. She ended up winning the award in the latter category.

The Rose
was such a smash that the big question now was how to follow it up. Among the film possibilities discussed was a 1930s-style comedy called
The Polish Nightingale
, a bizarre domestic comedy called
Strike and Hyde
, and even the first mention of a big-screen remake of the Gypsy Rose Lee musical
Gypsy
, with Bette starring as Mama Rose. According to her at the time, she liked the idea of staying with the “rose” theme. “I’d like to spend the rest of my life doing only characters named Rose:
The Rose Kennedy Story . . . The Life of Rose Marie,”
she laughingly claimed. “I was really sorry that the Rose died. I could have gone on forever: I loved her with all my heart, she had everything, and people loved her, too. I could have done
Rose II, Rose Goes to Vietnam, Rose Shops at Dior
 . . .” (
94
). For Midler, suddenly everything seemed to be coming up roses.