Bette Midler (36 page)

In this film, Bette not only had to portray an obnoxious moneyed matron, but she was padded to show off the character’s weight problem.
The film is something of a twist on the classic O. Henry short story “The Ransom of Red Chief.” In that story, a little boy is kidnapped, and he is such a spoiled little beast that the kidnappers offer to pay the parents to take him back. In the film
Ruthless People
, on the day that Sam Stone (DeVito) plans to kill his wife, he returns to their overdecorated home to discover that she has been kidnapped. Not only has he no intention of paying the kidnappers what they demand, he actually encourages them to make good their threats to murder her.

As Barbara Stone, the kidnap victim, Bette Midler is at her zany, fire-breathing best. She ends up locked in a basement with nothing to do all day but watch exercise tapes and make dietary demands of her kidnappers. In the course of the film she ends up losing weight and conspires with her captors to get even with her husband. One of the funniest moments in the movie comes when Midler discovers that her husband has not paid for her freedom, even though the kidnappers have continually reduced their demands. “I’ve been kidnapped by K-Mart!” she wails in disgust (
110
).

Barbara Stone’s mid-film self-improvement was one of the things that appealed most to Midler. “Once again, I had my nails done,” she says with reference to her
Down and Out
role. “This time I got long, but very wide acrylic nails painted dark purple. They make me feel like a caged animal, which is how I believe my character felt” (
8
).

In her first scenes, Bette does look like a demonically possessed creature from hell. She was even startled when she first saw herself on the screen in
Ruthless People
and explained, “I was pretty shaken when I saw the movie. I didn’t realize just how terrible I was going to look. I wouldn’t have done the role five years ago. I would have thought it was too small a part, that it was beneath me, because this was when I was going to be a great dramatic actress. And yes, I cared too much to look like that” (
111
).

Speaking of the fact that her character has an onscreen metamorphosis, Midler claimed, “I love the fact that she changes from horrible to wonderful in the course of the picture. And, the screenplay was as funny as anything I’ve read” (
112
).

To make the transformation of Barbara Stone even more dramatic, Bette lost additional weight and worked out with trainers Jake Steinfeld and Bob Carrricro. She had put on twenty pounds in recent years. “Oh, I’ve gained a lot of weight since I’ve been married,” she admitted. “My husband loves restaurants, and I’ve never gone about eating with the
gusto he’s taught me. I’ve been eating food from countries you didn’t even know had food!” (
101
).

“Ten pounds is like blimp city for me, so I made a resolution to lose the weight. I went on a juice fast, and I started working out. Jake worked me over. That was good, because I have a whole exercise scene where I have to do push-ups and sit-ups,” Bette explained (
18
).

During the filming of
Ruthless People
, on February 6, 1986, Bette became the 1,821st celebrity to have her name emblazoned on a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. “I hope you’ll come and walk all over it!” she told the crowd that gathered on Hollywood Boulevard. She gushed with astonishment at the ceremony, “It really does have my name on it, but I really feel this star is the work of the fans. I am really overwhelmed and I am flabbergasted, and I think this is probably the greatest thrill of my whole life” (
8
).

In March 1986, it was announced that Bette was expecting her first child in the fall. She was still working on
Ruthless People
at the time. The press had a field day heralding the arrival of Bette’s own “Baby Divine.” Midler had her own ideas about bringing up baby. “Well, I’m going to put my baby in boarding school as soon as possible, in a far corner of England—no, Scotland, near the heather and the highlands—so my baby will never hear any of this!” she laughed (
10
). On a more serious note, she added, “I’m going to have to keep doing something, because that’s my livelihood. Joan River’s child [Melissa] seems to be developing okay, hasn’t turned into a serial killer or anything. And Joan’s much more abrasive that I” (
97
).

Things were suddenly going beautifully for Bette. She had one hit movie in the theaters, one in the can, and another one in production. She had a husband who was wild over her, and she was expecting a baby. She had even come to an understanding with her father. “My dad was very ill last year,” she said, “he had two bypasses. I thought I was too much of a wimp to look after him and pull him through, but I wasn’t. He didn’t want to go on, he really wanted to lie down and die. And I said, ‘No, what’s the point of doing that?’ And I got him through it. I rose to an occasion I didn’t think I could rise to—and I feel that a lot of that was because I had Harry in back of me saying, ‘Yes, you can do it’ ” (
8
).

“My father needed me, and I think he was very, very happy that I came through. I think he felt that he didn’t deserve any support because, when he was raising me, he didn’t really pay much attention. But
I just went ahead and gave him all the help I could. I guess he thought I wasn’t so bad after all, even thought I do stand up and tell dirty jokes” (
8
).

Bette had just discovered that she was pregnant when Fred Midler suddenly died. “He was very happy. I kept saying, Top, you gotta stick around to see the baby.’ And he said, ‘Oh I will, I will. . . .’ But he didn’t. He was seventy-eight. I thought he’d live longer,” she remembered (
18
).

Her strained relationship with her father was a lifelong source of pain and disappointment for Bette. “He wanted me to be a professional person and to have a stable job and not get into trouble, not make any noise, not have people look at me,” she said. One of Bette’s perpetual sources of regret was that no matter what she accomplished in life, Fred Midler would not acknowledge her achievement, or as she puts it, “He wouldn’t give me any reward” (
18
).

When
Ruthless People
opened in theaters in June 1986, it became the summer’s hit comedy film, gleaning excellent reviews. Eleanor Ringel in the
Atlanta Journal
called it “A riotous comedy that’s not only full of funny people but is also exceedingly well-written. The funniest of the funny people are Bette Midler and Danny DeVito. They play Barbara and Sam Stone, a wealthy Bel Air couple who are a kind of Bizarro World version of the prosperous pair played by Midler and Richard Dreyfus in
Down and Out in Beverly Hills”
(
113
). And, Rich Beebe, in the
Torrington, Connecticut, Register Citizen
, wrote, “
Ruthless People
is a blaring boom box of a movie comedy. It’s rude, obnoxious and crass; it’s about as subtle as a dirty joke. It’s also funny, extremely funny. . . . Bette Midler’s brutal comic portrait . . . makes her transformation in the second half of the film into a vengeful, but likable Harpy all the more amazing and fun” (
114
).

Bette Midler had wanted for years to have a hot winning streak like this, and she wasn’t about to let go of the momentum. Almost immediately, she began work on her next Touchstone comedy,
Outrageous Fortune
.

Cameras began rolling in New York, with Arthur Hiller directing. One of the first scenes was filmed at the Newark International Airport in New Jersey. The company then moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for six weeks of location filming. Bette’s co-stars this time around were Shelley Long, George Carlin, Peter Coyote, and John Schuck. Bette
referred to the plot of the film as
“Abbot & Costello Go to Santa Fe”
(
110
).

On the set of
Outrageous Fortune
, reports of Bette Midler and Shelley Long feuding with each other began to leak out. The disagreement occurred over which actress was going to receive top billing in the movie. To quell any arguments, the Disney company struck upon a settlement. Half of all of the film prints, press releases, television advertisements, and film posters used Bette’s name first, and the other half used Shelley’s first.

In the film, Bette plays the part of slobby Sandy Brozinsky. For her role in
Outrageous Fortune
, her fingernails are stubby and polished in alternate colors: yellow and green, and glittered. Bette’s fingernails were indeed becoming an important part of her characterizations. Says Bette, “Laurence Olivier changes his nose, I do it with my nails” (
111
).

Shelley Long and Bette Midler play two very different women who unwittingly have their lives entwined. Lauren (Long) is a classically trained actress, who has yet to land a paying gig. Sandy is a brash, streetwise New Yorker, whose main acting credit is for her role in
Ninja Vixens
. Not only do they end up in the same acting class, much to their horror, they also discover that they are both sleeping with the same man: Michael (Peter Coyote).

Bette’s first line on camera consists of a loud entrance into the lobby of an acting school office and the utterance, “Holy Mary, isn’t there one fucking phone in this whole town that works?”

After Michael fakes his death, Lauren and Shelley run into each other at the morgue, where they go—separately—to identify the body. They know it’s not Michael, after a look at the corpse—below the belt. “It’s a fucking pencil!” exclaims Bette as Shelley, in typical Divine Miss M fashion. Complaining of a body mix-up, she asks a guard, “Does the phrase ‘needle dick, the bug fucker’ mean anything to you?”

Both wanting to track Michael down, to find out which one of them he truly loves, the pair ends up in a series of harrowing misadventures together. While surviving together on their wits, they eventually discover that their bond as friends is stronger than they could have imagined.

What the two battling women don’t realize is that Michael is a crook, and one who would kill to succeed. It seems that he possesses a serum that could defoliate the planet, and he is holding it for ransom. As a pair of sleuths, Shelley and Lauren each get to show off their best “method”
acting, by throwing themselves into situations that require new identities.

Chasing Michael out to Santa Fe, New Mexico, the girls end up chasing their prey into the mountains. One of their funniest sequences together comes when they are disguised as fourteen-year-old boys visiting a whorehouse. As a comic foil, they enlist the help of Frank (George Carlin), who is their “Indian” guide through town. However, Frank is not sober and not an Indian. Carlin proves a great comic “banana” for both women to play off. Showing that New Yorkers can handle themselves in any situation, the duo refuses to give up the chase until they get their man.

“Nuts,” says Bette, as she takes a pause from dodging bullets and running for her life; it seems she has broken one of her fingernails. However, in the end, the two women finally see Michael for what he is—a foreign espionage agent and a colossal rat.

Outrageous Fortune
is a laugh riot from start to finish. As unlikely as it seemed, this pairing of Bette Midler and Shelley Long brilliantly works on camera. They play off their diverse, contrasting characters, and it looks like they are both having fun while being funny.

When
Outrageous Fortune
opened in January 1987, it became an instant box-office smash. Bette and Shelley, as rival actresses in love with the same deceitful man, showed off the best of each other’s comic strengths. Midler’s bitchy bawdiness provided the perfect counterpoint for Long’s deadpan prissiness, and vice versa. In
Outrageous Fortune
it became obvious that Bette was the silver screen’s hottest comedy chameleon.

This time around, the critics unanimously loved it. Peter Travers, in
People
magazine, claimed, “Bette Midler and Shelley Long bring out the bitchy, bawdy best in each other in this breakneck farce. . . . A particular howl comes in watching Long’s slow descent into shock as Midler, in return for information, offers oral sex to a tobacconist. . . . Midler and Long’s low-comic high jinks make
Outrageous Fortune
the perfect laugh cure for the blues” (
115
). David Ansen, in
Newsweek
, wrote,
“Outrageous Fortune
has the obvious, but long overdue comic concept: It’s a buddy movie with two
women
in the leads. . . . The plot is madcap nonsense, and the comic aim is sometimes very broad and very low, but the belly-laugh quotient . . . is the highest since the last Midler movie,
Ruthless People
. . . . The libidinous Bette, of course, gets the best of the down and dirty zingers, but Long isn’t just a straight
woman. . . . They could become the Hope and Crosby of female raunch!” (
116
). And, in
Time
magazine, Richard Corliss called Shelley and Bette, “The lady and the tramp,” announcing that “in this witty, rambunctious caper movie, the lady is Lauren (Shelley Long). . . . when she does meet a dashing, sympathetic hetero (Peter Coyote), he turns out to be sharing his favors with a tramp in Lauren’s acting class. This would be Sandy (Bette Midler), who has a bulldozer mouth and the sensitivity of a whelk. . . . Midler breezes through her role, looking fine and giving the punch lines pop. . . . Cheers all around!” (
117
).

Having just left the popular TV series
Cheers
to pursue a film career, Shelley Long had a lot on the line in this pivotal film. The landscape is littered with ambitious careers dashed by small screen stars aiming for big screen success. And Midler was still undergoing her own film career resuscitation.
Outrageous Fortune
was a home run for both of them.

To accommodate the sudden demand for Bette Midler movies and to reward her explosion of creativity on the screen, Disney gave Miss M her own production deal, to plan, develop, and execute her own films. To fulfill the order, Bette established her own production company, which she named “All Girls Productions.” Her business partners were her longtime assistant Bonnie Bruckheimer and Margaret Jennings. The company’s motto, according to Bette, was “We hold a grudge” (
8
).