Bette Midler (30 page)

On May 1, in New York City, Bette autographed 750 copies of
A View from a Broad
for fans who lined up around the block to get a look at, and get a personal signature from, the literary Miss M. In Los Angeles three weeks later, Bette set a new record for the most autographed books in one session. From 7:30
P.M
. to 1:30
A.M
. she signed 1,500 books. For that little feat she was entered into
The Guinness Book of World Records
.

One of the most riotous aspects of her autograph sessions were her millinery works of art. In New York City, Bette wore a hat with a veil and a typewriter on top of it. In Los Angeles she wore a hat that featured a globe of the world and a jet plane.

Soon afterward, a lawsuit regarding Bette’s outrageous costuming was filed. Dorothy Baca of Baca Designs Unlimited, the designer of
Midler’s famous mermaid costume, as well as certain “pineapple headpieces,” sued the diva for $425,000, claiming that the mermaid outfit appeared on the cover of the
Divine Madness
album and
A View from a Broad
and that Baca didn’t receive proper credit. It was beginning to seem as if each of Bette’s accomplishments was directly followed by some new dilemma.

During this same year, Carly Simon’s sister Lucy, together with David Levine, produced an LP for
Sesame Street
, a children’s album entitled
In Harmony
. Lucy Simon assembled songs and used several well-known artists. Linda Ronstadt and Wendy Waldman sang a song called “I Want a Horse.” The Doobie Brothers harmonized the story of “Wynken, Blynken and Nod.” James Taylor wrote and sang a song called “Jelly Man Kelly.” Also on the album was a song sung by Bette Midler called “Blueberry Pie.” It’s a cute little ditty about a “flaky” blueberry pie who is shy and won’t come out of his “shell.” It was written by Bette, Bruce Roberts, and Carole Bayer Sager.

The album was given a notable advertising campaign and sold quite well for a children’s record. The next year it was nominated for and won a Grammy Award as the Best Recording for Children. Grammys went to Bette, the Doobie Brothers, James Taylor, Carly Simon, the Muppets, Al Jarreau, Linda Ronstadt, Wendy Waldman, Libby Titus, Dr. John, Livingston Taylor, George Benson, Pauline Wilson, Lucy Simon, and David Levine. This brought Bette’s Grammy Award total to three.

By this point in her life, Bette had truly become bicoastal. She had moved out of her small apartment on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village and had purchased a spacious loft in the southern area of Manhattan known as Tribeca. The building itself is a landmark, erected in 1891. Bette passed her Village apartment on to her sister Susan, and she was kept busy jetting from coast to coast.

Bette had always said that she wanted to do a perfect screwball comedy. Now that it was time to select her next film project, she settled for a humorous black comedy that was originally called
Hot Streak
. It ultimately went through several rewrites, was called
It’s All in the Game
, then
Three of a Kind
, and then
Jackpot
. By the time the film was released, it was given its final and most apt title:
Jinxed
. The title changes alone should have been a clue that this project was desperately in need of a direction.

Divine Madness
was simply written off as a fluke or a failure, but again on
Jinxed
, Bette was given almost total creative control. Ever since
she had fired Aaron Russo, she had begun to realize what being a manager was all about. Still, she insisted that she could do it better than anyone else, especially when it came to making decisions about her career.

“I’m doing fine without a manager,” she proclaimed of her freedom from Russo. “I have a lawyer and lots of help. If I ever get a new one, I’m going to get one that’s oh, blind to my sexual charms. [A manager] has very little to do with creativity. A good one makes sure that the artist survives, is compensated properly for his services, and the moves he makes in a career—build it rather than lay it to waste” (
85
). Bette had full script, co-star, and director approval, and she was determined to make up for the disappointment of
Divine Madness
. Unfortunately, this was not to be.

After Bette chose the script, she next picked the director. Her selection was Don Siegel, whose forté was adventure films. His credentials included
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956),
Dirty Harry
(1972),
The Shootist
(1976), and
Escape from Alcatraz
(1976). He had been in the movie business since 1934, and he seemed like the kind of seasoned professional that Bette longed to work with.

“I liked
Jinxed
[the script] because of its dialogue—nice and slangy,” Bette said. “It didn’t know whether it was a comedy or a thriller, but I thought a good director could find the proper tone for it. Siegel had directed
The Killers
[1964] and all those Clint Eastwood movies, which were kind of somber, so I thought, with Siegel being good at that, and me being good at comedy, we’d have a nice marriage. Many, many, many people told me I was crazy, and this is one time in my career I should have listened. I just had never encountered Mr. Siegel’s school of directing—the adversary school of directing—where everybody chooses up sides and it’s a fight to the death!” (
30
).

Her next decision involved her male co-star and love interest. She ended up with Ken Wahl, whose previous films were
The Warriors
(1979) and
Fort Apache, the Bronx
(1981). Oddly enough, Wahl was Bette’s first choice, but once she met him she realized that working with him was going to prove difficult.

“To tell you the truth, I suggested him,” she later admitted, “but after I read with him, I felt it wouldn’t work. Mr. Siegel felt the same way, but Steven Bach [the former heard of United Artists Pictures] wanted him, so we were gracious about it. However, Mr. Siegel immediately told Ken that he had not been our choice, which right away set
the guys teeth on edge. He never recovered from that particular blow to his pride” (
30
).

Filming began in Lake Tahoe on May 5, 1981. It started out bad and only got worse. “I never knew it got so ugly,” Bette later said in amazement. “I never knew it got down to such mudslinging. It was an enormously painful experience” (
30
).

The script was reportedly changed almost daily. The final plot revolved around the murder of a slimy gambler by his wife and the blackjack dealer he keeps stacking the deck against. Rip Torn played the gambler who has a formula for winning. He has his lucky cigars and his own lucky dealer (Wahl), whom he keeps breaking the bank with. Aside from gambling, his other favorite pastime involves slapping around his wife [Midler], who is an aspiring gambling-casino lounge singer. Wahl keeps getting fired from job after job because the casino owners think that he is in cahoots with Torn.

Wahl seduces Midler, and the two of them conspire to kill Torn and split his insurance money. However, Torn commits suicide after losing a bundle one night, and it is up to Midler and Wahl to make his death look like an accident. After Torn’s death, Midler discovers that she is endowed with her ex-husband’s gambling prowess, and after a falling-out with Wahl, she gets him fired from his job by setting him up at the blackjack table. At the end of the film Midler surprises Wahl by splitting her winnings with him, and off they ride into the Vegas neon sunset to live happily ever after. It was a bit off-the-wall, but as a black comedy it
could
have worked. Unfortunately, it didn’t. One of the most gigantic problems was the chemistry between Bette, Ken, and director Siegel.

Bette and Ken Wahl loathed each other upon sight. “Ken was unbelievably hateful to me. All during the shooting he was sending over these ‘mal’ vibes and wanted everybody to know it. That’s the kind of guy he is. The first time I met him, the first thing he said was, ‘I want you to know that I hate niggers and faggots.’ That was the first thing out of his mouth after ‘hello.’ I had no idea why he said that, because we had neither of those in our picture. It wasn’t as if I said to him, ‘We’re going to introduce you to a lot of gay black people who are going to do your hair and dress you every morning!’ ” (
30
).

“After that comment, he turned to an Aubrey Beardsley that was hanging on the wall and said, ‘What the fuck is that?’ Now, I had not decorated these rooms. But I felt compelled to tell him, ‘That’s an Aubrey Beardsley.’ And I told him about Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. To
which he replied, ‘Well, I don’t know nothin’ about that fuckin’ shit, and I don’t want to know nothin’ about it. I’m a baseball player.’ By that time, of course, I knew what particular terrain I had stumbled onto” (
30
).

“Originally, I felt Ken Wahl had what we used to call ‘animal magnetism,’ even though he’s a little on the chubby side. And I still feel he photographs beautifully, and that there is a place for him in show business, somewhere—although hopefully not in my pictures!” she stressed (
30
).

Changes in the script and reported demands for retakes caused Siegel and Midler to clash. According to one source in the Midler camp, Bette would get her comedy writer Jerry Blatt on the phone every night before the shooting, and they would rewrite the scene and the dialogue. Each morning, Bette would show up on the set with new pages of rewrites to be shot instead of the current script.

The name “Brian Blessed,” which appears in the film’s credits as screenplay writer, was actually a name that was made up by the original writer, Frank D. Gilroy, so that his name wouldn’t be associated with the film. Jerry Blatt’s name was never on the film because there was a writer’s strike, and no one was supposed to know that he was working on the film. At different points in the production, Don Siegel, Bette Midler, and Jerry Blatt each separately rewrote scenes. “At times,” according to Siegel, “the three of us worked together” (
8
).

Siegel claimed that he tried to enter the project objectively. “She was the one who picked me to direct the picture. So it became, I guess, rather strange and awkward. I can’t say that I enjoyed making the picture. I’m very glad that she took the responsibility, because the picture’s terrible!” (
8
).

It is unclear exactly at what point in the making of
Jinxed
the production became an out-and-out battlefield, but the rumblings were heard early on. Not only did Siegel dislike working with Bette, but he also had very little power over what happened on the set each day. United Artists vice president Anthea Sylbert sided with Bette time and time again in disputes and overrode Siegel’s decisions. Somehow it became a matter of squaring off into opposing sides and taking aim. It was, oddly enough, the men against the women. Bette and Anthea were on one side, and Siegel and Wahl were on the other.

“I’d never realized how men can gang up on women,” said Bette. “I mean, in the back of my head somewhere, no doubt, I had plenty of
leftover vestiges from my childhood about guys beating up on me emotionally, but I don’t dwell on that kind of thing. I don’t like to be mired in mud. And I had never really realized how men don’t like a woman to be in charge, or to have power” (
88
).

Siegel said Bette was one of the most problematic people he had ever worked with. “It was very difficult working with her. She comes on as an expert in every facet of the business. I’ve worked with many stars who are difficult, but she’s really a rough customer. . . . It shouldn’t have been anywhere near $15 million,” he said about the cost of the production. “It’s not up there on the screen, but she was constantly rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. All this from a girl who made two pictures, one a bomb” (
95
).

“In every major disagreement I had with Bette Midler, and there were hundreds, UA [United Artists] backed her. They always gave in to her and that made my life an unhappy one. If I could have my name taken off it, I would. I wish to God I hadn’t made it. There were many things I expressly wanted to do, but they were all blocked by those two women who work there [Sylbert and UA studio president Paula Weinstein]” (
95
).

At the same time, there were Bette’s battles with Ken Wahl. During the shooting of the film, Ken told the press that every time he was required to kiss Bette on camera, he had to think of kissing his dog in order to bear embracing Midler. “I just don’t get along with Bette very well,” said Wahl. “We come from two different worlds. It’s been miserable with her and took all my concentration to get up and go to work in the morning. If I knew before how this was going to be, I wouldn’t have done the movie. She doesn’t talk, she yells. I think the main problem is that she’s so insecure about everything. I enjoy being happy: Bette’s the kind of person who thrives on being miserable” (
96
).

In her own defense, Bette claimed that the rest of the production company was being sloppy and lazy about the film. “I was trying to make the best movie I could make, and I was resented for it. Listen, when people make films, their work lives forever. I’m not modest about this: it happens to be a fact. And when somebody gives you that much money to make a picture, you can’t short-changè them. But these people—there wasn’t a single one of them who wasn’t out to stiff the studio. When I’m paid that much money, I feel that I have to do what they’re paying me for and not slough off. So I did it and I got kicked for it. And that’s hard, because when you are raised with that ethic, and you believe
it, it’s debilitating to find that you’re surrounded by people who are actually just petty thieves. They’re lazy and they’re not committed, and they resent you for being so square. It was like pulling a caravan up Mt. Everest all by myself. I had a horrible time. I thought it was the worst experience of my life” (
88
).

Someone else who didn’t have his name on the production was director Sam Peckinpah. Explained Bette, “Sam Peckinpah came in and did one scene, which was a second-unit scene, a trailer-goes-over-a-cliff scene. I guess it was too much work for Mr. Siegel” (
88
).