December 15, 2005
Bette Midler covers Peggy Lee
By JANE STEVENSON – Toronto Sun
Bette Midler, the campy singer with the big, beautiful voice and the raunchy sense of humour, realizes she’s an unlikely candidate to interpret such Peggy Lee songs as Fever and Is That All There Is?
But interpret away The Divine Miss M does on Bette Midler Sings The Peggy Lee Songbook.
People think of her as hyper-emotional, says Midler, 60, down the line from her New York home recently.
“That was the challenge for me — to make emotion out of these songs that were basically very restrained. I learned a lot, stuff that I could keep and use for the rest of my life. It was really, really fascinating.”
Blame the outwardly oddball idea on Barry Manilow, Midler’s original piano accompanist when the New Jersey native was just starting out in the early ’70s playing in New York City bathhouses.
Manilow dreamed up — literally — their last 2003 collaboration, Bette Midler Sings The Rosemary Clooney Songbook, and apparently had another dream which led to this year’s Lee collection.
“We had a wonderful time,” says Midler, who has Manilow join her on the duet, I Love Being Here With You.
“This one was a little different because I didn’t know Peggy. Rosemary I did know. But I got interested really quickly ’cause (Peggy)was a tremendous musician, and led a very interesting life, wrote a brilliant biography, and I guess it was time, you know.
“She has a daughter and a granddaughter, both of whom look after her estate, and they made all kinds of material available to me and to Barry. We got all the catalogue and all the recordings and she’s since sent me photographs and we saw some DVDs and we saw some home movies.”
Lee, a jazz-pop legend best known for her smoky voice, cool singing style and blond good looks, passed away at the age of 81 in 2002.
She died of a heart attack at her Bel-Air home after more than 50 years in show business, which began with a troubled childhood in North Dakota — her mother died when she was four and she was abused by her stepmother –and endured through four marriages. Lee’s later health problems included diabetes, weight and glandular problems, double pneumonia, heart surgery and a stroke.
“She was a really complicated person,” says Midler. “She was not at all what people think she was. She was really detached in her musical style, although I think she could sing probably anything. She chose that style. She had had a pretty terrible childhood and emerged as very strong, very tough-minded. She took on the Walt Disney company when she discovered they hadn’t paid her for her work on Lady And The Tramp and she won. And she did things like that her whole life.
“And she was a songwriter at a time when women typically didn’t write songs and she was just immensely talented.This big, big talent in this little bitty perfect package of beautiful blond hair, gorgeous skin and tremendous allure. That’s an old word that means irresistibility, sex appeal, and she was just the complete package.”
Lee came to the forefront when Benny Goodman hired her to sing with his band — she later fell in love and married his guitar player Dave Barbour — and had hits in the ’40, ’50s, and ’60s. She was also a composer of songs when not many women were. “I knew her work from when I was a kid,” says Midler. “But because I was so interested in a different kind of energy on the stage, I didn’t pay much attention.”
Midler says half the joy of the Lee album was doing the research.
“It’s one of the charms of being in this position,” she says. “I don’t write my own material so I’m not examining my own life, but I’m interested in holding my life up to other people’s lives and seeing the differences and the similarities.
“Some of this home movie footage I put on my DVD. I made a dual disc for the first time in my career, so I have a video portion too. Some of the video is her home movies that her daughter and her granddaughter gave us for this project. Some of the stuff is so moving. She was a really romantic woman who had an intense private life. Fell madly in love with this guitar player and wrote songs for him, about him, raised this daughter and it’s just so magical. It was a window on a life that I never expected to know in such depth.”
Midler discovered that Lee, in later years, sometimes closed her show with Midler’s signature song, Wind Beneath My Wings.
“In fact, I saw her doing that on this PBS show that they did on her not so long ago,” says Midler. “That was a revelation and it was also kind of a thrill too.”
When asked if she could imagine a Peggy Lee biopic, given the current proliferation of films about singers like Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Bobby Darin, Midler thought it was an interesting idea.
“I think it’s as interesting as anything else that I’ve seen,” says Midler. “I think that when people reach that iconic status, they have a built-in audience for them. Whether the material supports that or not is another story. Some of them are well done and some of them are not. Yeah, I do think it’s a terrific story.”
Gwyneth Paltrow is reportedly playing Lee in a second Truman Capote film, Every Word Is True.
Midler says casting the lead role in a Lee biopoic would require someone “with lots of sex appeal. I think Gwen Stefani’s a good target. She’s young. She’s blond!”
Sinfully good singer eyes a show in Las Vegas
The Divine Miss M is considering touring in support of Bette Midler Sings The Peggy Lee Songbook.
She has just 13 gigs to go to reach the 100 show mark with her most recent Kiss My Brass tour, which came to Toronto in 2004, and could make room in Kiss My Brass for the Lee material, she says. “But will I do it? I do not know.”
Midler says she next plans to go to North American venues she hasn’t been to yet. “Manitoba? Halifax?” she jokes.
But would she ever consider an extended stay in Las Vegas, since her pal Barry Manilow is currently drawing crowds at his new show at the Hilton where he’s booked through next year?
“I think about it from time to time,” she says. “He seems to think it’s a lot of fun. My show is longer and harder because I wheel around in wheelchairs and all that kind of thing and he doesn’t do any of that. It seems like something that people do.”
She says she talked to Elton John about it. “He said he was having a ball.” Celine said it was hard, says Midler.
“I saw her on that same trip, and she said it was really, really hard to keep your voice, and that made me very nervous. Because if she’s saying it’s hard to keep your voice — I mean, she’s someone whose main thing is the way she sounds. I’m not a songwriter, so I have to sound pretty good too.”
She and Dion talked about “Vegas throat.”
“Nobody really knows where it comes from. Celine thought it came from the desert. It’s like a spore. Something that’s kicked up when the winds come in. So that’s something to think about. You don’t want to be so sick and so stressed that you can’t do your job.”
Still, Midler caught Manilow’s Sin City act too and enjoyed it. “He’s in the same suite that Elvis Presley was in. And he’s on the same stage as Elvis was on. What could be bad?”
Turning 60 was just Divine
Bette Midler talked with the Sun just days after she turned 60, on Dec. 1, and said she’d had the time of her life.
“My husband threw a big party for me,” says Midler.
“It was great. It was quite magical. My husband, he’s just great. He gave me a fabulous 50th and a great 60th .
“I think he just does it every 10 years whether he needs to or not.
“I laughed all night long. I was roasted a little bit. I was toasted a little bit. And my daughter was there. She came up from school. And my husband was there and a lot of good friends I hadn’t seen in a while that I’d lost track of. It’s great to be 60, in a funny way. I know I’m on the downward slope, but I have my skis on and I’m just having a ball.”
Midler plans to spend Christmas at her New York home with family.
“We’ve been doing the same thing since my husband came into my life,” she says. “It’s very ritualistic. He rings a bell and my daughter comes down and it’s very festive. He cooks goose and it is what it is. I enjoy all the holidays. I love this time of year because people are at their best.
“People are out. They come to the city full of pep and curiosity, and then January comes and it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, could it please warm up a little bit!”
