“You Made It Up, I Didn’t”

From The Times
February 14, 2009
The still divine Bette Midler

Bette Midler is famed for her brash, camp stage and screen persona. But the Divine Miss M tells Tim Teeman that she had to fight her father and a stultifying childhood to achieve her showbusiness dream. Now, if only Meryl Streep would kindly step aside…

It’s only since she turned 60 that her swearing has become really bad, Bette Midler insists. When George W. Bush passed her Upper East Side apartment in a motorcade, she knocked her doorman aside and screamed: “Get the hell out of my neighbourhood.” She said “arsehole” on Loose Women earlier this week. “I did? I thought that was allowed,” she says in mock-horror. She said “bullshit” on another show. “That was live?” she says, feigning ignorance. “It’s the English language. You made it up, I didn’t.”

This is all said in the camp growl that the Divine Miss M has made her trademark. She is dressed daintily, in sensible skirt and cardigan, her hair a whipped peak but restrained: a demure transformation from the sequins, feathers and more sequins and more feathers she sports in the Showgirl Must Go On spectacular that she is currently performing in Las Vegas. Midler, 63, has a new “best of” album out, including her famous hit from the movie Beaches, The Wind Beneath My Wings, and also From a Distance and The Rose.

To promote it she performed From A Distance alongside a skating Torvill and Dean on Dancing on Ice. “Eugggh,” she says, looking down. “I was as sick as a dog with jetlag. Those two kids started dancing and it was crazy, a vision. My teeth were chattering it was so cold.”

Ensconced in the luxury of the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, she doesn’t seem a diva (the only thing she asks for is green tea served at “the right” temperature). Her speech swoops all over the place, peppered with indiscriminate wisecracks, exclamations and riffs (on the plethora of wires and cables in her life and her bafflement with computer technology, for example).

She reveals that as a little girl growing up in Hawaii, she never imagined becoming a singer . “I thought I would be an actorrrr. I thought I’d be Ethel Barrymore. I didn’t know who she was, but she was my idea of an actorrrr. It seemed it would be more fun to be someone else rather than myself.”

Didn’t she like herself? “Not particularly. We were very poor, it was a hard-scrabble childhood, not particularly happy. The best part was nature, which is so intense there. The sky is bright blue, the clouds are puffy, the grass is lush, it feels like you can touch the stars. But the people were not very nice. I was a white kid in a mostly Asian neighbourhood. You heard Hawaii was a great melting pot? Hooey. I had a very strong fantasy life.” She stops and looks askance like Wile E. Coyote after he’s just run over the cliff. “Sorry, what was the question? I’m bonkers. Where am I? Who am I? I love your socks.”

The rich fantasy life nourished her desire to escape a stultifying home life. “My parents (mother Ruth a seamstress, father Fred a painter) were not encouraging. My father put everybody down. Yeah, it was a real drag but he had his moments. His saving grace was a wicked sense of humour. He was a good provider. They were a team. They were at Pearl Harbour, they knew hardship. My mum was supportive, she had a tinge of showbiz fever and named me and my sisters after Hollywood icons. My dad was like, ”˜Get a job’. But that gave me something to fight against.

“I battled with him to the end, but we made our peace. I miss them both very much. As whacked out as they were, I loved them. But I’m curious about how private they were. They never spoke of their adventures, misfortunes, dreams … they rarely spoke about the war. But look how well I turned out. I wish some things had gone differently in my life, but my daughter [Sophie, 22] and my husband [Martin] are healthy, I have a lot to be thankful for. I’m not unlike them. I very much live in the present. If I don’t take a picture, I don’t have a clue.”

What does she wish had gone differently in her life? “A couple of things I wish I hadn’t bought,” she says, grimacing. “Land. I’m an open-space person. I’m not a believer in sprawl. I don’t particularly care for postmodern architecture. I believe in solid fare and building fair. I’m green to the core. This group I run in New York bought 60 community gardens and helped another group to buy 55 in congested neighbourhoods. I’m doing a similar thing in Hawaii, but it’s harder there, the tracts are so big and there are these things about road zoning, dams, reservoirs …” She clenches her palms to her head. “Oh, my God! Holy cow!”

Her parents left New Jersey for Hawaii. She couldn’t leave Hawaii fast enough. “I had rock fever. Now I can’t wait to go back there. I’ve had my fill of big cities.”

Midler attended only three terms at the University of Hawaii, where she had “no idea what anyone was talking about”. Now she adores history and poetry but not fiction (“Real life is so much more shocking”) and says she wishes she had been better educated. “I’m glad my daughter [who studied sociology at university] has been. I sometimes think I should go back to school to learn French and music, but who would have me?” Is she kidding? Oxford and Cambridge, get in line.

In New York in the Sixties she couldn’t get acting work. “Nobody was acting, everyone was singing or playing the guitar.” She sang in musicals and this bit of her life sounds like CC Bloom’s, her character in Beaches, roughing it out before the big time struck. “Yes, absolutely,” Midler says. “I think [the author of the original book] Iris Rainer Dart based a lot of it on my life. She never admitted it, but it’s entirely possible.”

It’s well documented that in 1970 Midler began singing at the Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse, accompanied by Barry Manilow on piano, earning her the moni-ker Bathhouse Betty. Did she sing while men around her were having sex? “I’ve never been to a sex orgy in my entire life,” she says, mock-offended. “Studio 54 was way worse than the baths.” So nothing happened? “What do you mean nothing happened?” she shoots back. “I was riveting. Yes, it was a place where gay men met and had sex. I didn’t see that. Someone sent me a picture showing me in a 1930s costume with my hair pulled back and all these cute young men in bathrobes watching me. It seemed very innocent. I would stand at the top of a little staircase with a towel round my head and act out whacked-out movie heroines. Patti LaBelle played there, too. I wasn’t there long, but I was there long enough to make a splash, ha-ha.”

The longevity of her career is surely a lot down to her gay fans. “Thank God for the gays,” she says. Without them? “I don’t know what would have happened but I know what did happen. Good for them and good for me.”

In 1971 she starred in the first professional production of Tommy; two years later Manilow produced her first album The Divine Miss M, a nickname that’s stuck. In 1974 she won a Tony for a revue, and in 1979 secured a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role as a drug-addicted rock star in The Rose. Her film career took off in the mid-80s with a raft of Disney movies, including Ruthless People, Down and Out in Beverly Hills and, of course, Beaches, about the relationship between two women played by Midler and Barbara Hershey.

“I love Barbara and Lainie Kazan [who played CC’s mother].” Did she know it would become an uber-weepie? She bristles, smiling. “I had no idea it was an ”˜uberweepie’! The nerve! It wasn’t so bad. I co-produced it. It was a pretty damned good screenplay.” (Too true, it leaves me in molten pieces every time I watch it.) Midler thought it was “just another movie. I didn’t think of it as a women’s picture. I was so excited to be able to sing again and have a soundtrack.”

And Wind Beneath My Wings? “It’s really grown on me,” she says measuredly. “When I first heard it, I said, ”˜I’m not singing that song’, but the friend who gave it to me said, ”˜If you don’t sing it I’ll never speak to you again’, so of course I had to sing the damned song. Whatever reservations I might have had I certainly don’t have any more.”

Midler sang it many times after 9/11, and it has become “part of me, like an old friend” (which reminds me of the first lines of another favourite Midler song, The Glory of Love). She has occasionally had miserable times on movies. The Stepford Wives remake was “movie-making by committee”. Hocus Pocus was her favourite film because she “completely disappeared” into character. “I’d love to have that opportunity again, but I’m a certain age and I’ve made my peace with that.”

Is Midler as brash as she appears? “Of course not. It’s a f***ing act! Who knew!” But the feathers? “I do have a real weakness for that,” she says contritely. “I love sparkly, shiny things.” Midler says she doesn’t mind ageing: her husband threw her 60th birthday party in a deconsecrated synagogue. “My birthday cake was a sliced ham,” she roars, “because that’s what he thinks I am.”

She is “kind of healthy but has a little bit of arthritis, my eyes are a little shaky. I drank a little, I didn’t do drugs to any great extent. I do get depressed but not like you do if you drink or do drugs. I have pretty bad melancholia, but I’ve found you can get rid of that by exercising.” She has therapy. “A lot of people don’t love what they do and I do. I still love music and I love, love, love to dance. For most women – I can’t speak for men – I’d say dancing is the key to happiness.”

Of the future, she says very seriously that she wants “world peace. Please. Just for my sake, before I go.” She also hopes that Meryl Streep “has the good taste to step aside and let the rest of us have a crack … but I know she won’t. She has a really good agent. She’s great, but I know there are some ladies behind her saying, ”˜Meryl, for God’s sake, do you have to say yes to everything?'”

Not only might she return to university, she wants to go solo on stage with a ukulele that she is learning to play. “I love the idea of not having a band. It would just be me, the audience and a ukelele in my hand.” But hopefully still incorporating those vital sequins and feathers.

The Best Bette is out on Rhino Records

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