New York Times Bette Midler Goes Hollywood By Warren Hoge Dec 10, 1978
Her hair is such a mad maze that when it recently caught fire in an encounter with a lighted candle, no one noticed the difference afterward. Her nose crooks at its tip like the prow of the Concorde. She stands little more than five feet tall, and her speaking voice, which sounds as if it swings on rusted hinges, can close on a vowel and place it on a frequency otherwise exclusive to the yapping of small dogs. She is Bette Midler, and she wants to become “a legend.”
When she told her new manager Aaron Russo in 1972 that that was her life goal, she in one sense was only suggesting a lateral promotion; she had, after all, been calling herself “the Divine One” for two years.
But, in a larger sense, she was dreaming of an improbable elevation. Her appearance was somewhat less than heavenly. Also she was at the time operating on the slimmest base of popular appeal for someone intent on becoming mythological — her adoring audiences were largely homosexual and mostly barely dressed, since the gig that had brought her notice was the Continental Baths, an early 1970’s gay group?sports arena in the basement of Broadway’s Ansonia Hotel.
While she has made a number of records, played leading nightclubs, done two television specials and starred in her own national touring shows since then, she has never fully escaped the image the rhinestone?corseted, “trash with flash,” camped?up Jeanne d’Arch of the Tubs.
The time is now at hand to move from divinity to legend, and the place where this revelatory passage may occur, if it ever will, is—where else? — Hollywood.
Midler is making her first motion picture, a big?budget ($9 million) film for 20th Century?Fox called “The Rose,” which has a director, producers, actors and actresses like any other movie, and is based on the life of Janis Joplin, but which in the end is all Midler. She is in virtually every frame and she is being paid $500,000 plus a healthy percentage of the profits for her effort, a huge sum for a first outing before the cameras and an indication of the enthusiasm Hollywood will muster these days for promising female talent in the wake of the successes of Barbra Streisand, Faye Dunaway, Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton and Jill Clayburgh.
As further evidence that the industry has decided that Midler belongs on that list, United Artists has already signed her to a second picture, this one a comedy with no singing, and she will get $850,000 for that. At the same time, several studios are bidding for her to star in a new film of “Gypsy,” a darker, Kurt Weill?like rendering of the Broadway musical, and plans are under way to create for her an original screen drama based on the life of the early 20th?century anarchist Emma Goldman.
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“The excitement of this,” said Bruce Vilanch, one of Midler’s writers, “is more about finding a new female star than it is about a singer trying to get into pictures. Donna Summer in ‘Thank God It’s ‘While Bette Midler has made records, played nightclubs, toured and done two television specials, she has never fully escaped the image of the rhinestone?corseted, “trash with flash,” camped?up Jeanne d’Arch of the Tubs.’ Friday,’ that’s a case of a singer getting into pictures.”
A parallel often drawn is with Streisand. Both share the image of goslings who became glamorous, and who place great emphasis on staging their songs. One Los Angeles publication, giddy over the possibility of a new Hollywood star war, reported that the two had met at an Equal Rights Amendment party at a local luau this spring and had fallen into a face?slapping match over the issue of Palestine. Actually, the two women met for the only time at a Grammy Awards ceremony.
Midler, who agonizes over her looks, has, thanks to liquid protein (“It came in these plastic bottles that looked just like ‘Janitor?in?a?Drum.’ It tasted like it, too”), trimmed herself down from 119 to 100 pounds and has tinted her once?orange hair (its real color is brown) honey.
Midler fans married to the old cheeky stage persona will not recognize their heroine. Her character in “The Rose” is in no way a send?up. Patterned as s composite of a number of 60’s rock stars, but modeled most notably on Janis Joplin, Rose is much more literal, sincere, vulnerable and sexy than the characters Midler has peopled her shows with. Also, the vulgarity exceeds anything that Midler, no stranger to munch, has ever attempted. Said Vilanch: “There might be disappointment from some of her old fans who want the film to be more ‘Tutti?Frutti Serenade’ or ‘Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here,’ with Bette playing all the parts. But I think even her most devoted followers want her to into other areas.”
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Studio viewers, watching the dailies as the 14?week shooting schedule came to an end this summer, had little doubt that Midler can be a compelling screen actress. There is not a detractor among the cast and crew, a group not always given to generosity in receivng an unproven leading lady in its midst. Fabled years ago as a flaming termagant backstage, Midler has caused only one unscripted scene in the filming of “The Rose.” It had to do with her scarf catching on a nail and coiling her backward one time too many in an airport sequence, and it was, in her words, “a very tasteful tantrum” for which she immediately apologized to the witnesses
She has worked hard, and she has been particularly impressive in her ability to shed artifice and project feelings with convincing honesty, a feat one wouldn’t have assumed the Midler of the Carmen Miranda put?ons could pull off.
It is that kind of truthfulness that film stars strive for; sham is quickly detected by a movie camera. A lot of good stage singers — Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Carol Channing, to name three— have had their problems facing down a lens. One notable exception was a big?band singer of the 40’s named Doris Day.
Alan Bates, Midler’s co?star in the film, said, “She’s a natural actress. She tries things a hundred different ways, has a tremendous sense of when something’s right or wrong and is quite uncompromising when she’s found it.”
“As adult actors,” said Mark Rydell, director of “The Rose” and himself a former actor, “you spend your time peeling away the insulation. Bette is nude, available to all stimuli.”
Rydell, whose directing credits include good ones (“Cinderella Liberty”) and bad ones (his most recent, “Harry and Walter Go to New York”), is rapturous about his star’s potential. “I think she’s really one of those people who come along once every 100 years . There’s some odd thing about her, being Jewish, raised in Honolulu, some strange and wonderful combination of genetic factors that has produced someone with instincts that are so free, so full and so deep. She’s like a gland that you throw salt on and it responds. She’s an American natural resource, and I feel very responsible recording her for history.”
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Midler comes in three different sizes. Standing by herself in the gloaming of backstage, intent on her work, she strikes one as a tiny, frail creature, a foal on untested legs. She wears no makeup and her hair is hidden beneath a black beret, lending her face a plaster?of?Paris?death?mask kind of starkness. “I have walked into her dressing room and not known she was there,” said Rydell. “Sitting there in her little robe and hat — you’d think she was a patient about to be taken to the intensivecare ward.”
When she strides onto a concert stage, something of a metaphysical marvel occurs — her small engine begins turning out an impossible number of thermal energy units. She is large and loud, shaking her head with a vigor that sends the curls dancing around her temples like poppies in a high wind. She stands at stage center, hands on hips, chest thrust forward like a galleon’s proud bowsprit, then she skitters back and forth in front of the band like a sandpiper dodging sea spume on a beach. Her cheeks generate colors beyond a cosmetician’s touch, her eyes delight in being where she is and ask everyone watching to join in the fun, and the smile is a gorgeous ear?to?ear thing that makes her, although she will never believe it, quite beautiful
Finally, up close, Midler seems to adjust to the dimensions of her company. You don’t have the sense of looking down at someone, and you’re also not addressing the strapper you’ve just seen on stage. She is confident, quickly conversational, willing to listen and prompt with a grin. Her humor, despite what you might anticipate, is not verbal. She does tell funny stories, but what you laugh over is not the narration, which leaps from cliché to cliché the way an outdoorsman steps on exposed rocks to ford a river, but the vocal inflections and accents, the oscillating eye feats of mischief and other wares off the storeroom shelf of the working physical comedienne. Her best conversational line came from one of her writers. “Bruce Vilanch said,” she relates with glee, “that we should rework the ‘Jaws 2’ slogan for my film and say, ‘Bette Midler in “The Rose”: Just when you thought it was safe to go to the movies again.“
‘She has worked hard and been particularly impressive in her ability to shed artifice and project feeling with honesty, a feat one wouldn’t have assumed the Midler of the Carmen Miranda put?ons could pull off.’
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Hollywood personalities, confronted by iaterviewers from the East, make a lunge for profundity by mentioning books they are reading. True to form, Midler, curled into the corner of a sofa in a Spanishstyle Sunset Boulevard bungalow late one night after 14 hours on the set, dropped the names of Saki, Evelyn Waugh and W. Somerset Maugham in the first five minutes of an interview. She said her favorite activity after appearing in a rock concert — a time when musicians commonly are so wired that they need hours of night life to wind down — is “to come home and read. I’d rather just go home with Charles Dickens or something.” Midler snuggling up to David Copperfield is hard to picture.
A little more posturing greeted a request that she talk about the possibility of becoming a movie star. “I think it’s all very nice,” she said, flouncing her head and shoulders saucily, rolling her eyes upward and smoothing her lap like a fastidious clubwoman.
Then a new character appeared, this one leaning forward, fearful and earnest. “You think my life will change? God,” the voice dropped to basso, the eyelids drooped, she summoned fatigue to her face, “if my life would only change.” These cameos completed, she answered the question:
“It’s so easy, it’s sooooo easy. You don’t have to get up there for four hours every night and sweat like a pig. They sort of come and get you when they need you and they feed you when you want to be fed. It’s very self?indulgent, I find. And if you have any kind of standards about your craft at all you can push on through, and that’s very exciting.
“I’ve also discovered in doing this film that people really do respect me. In rockand?roll you don’t feel that so much because in popular music, if you’re not on the charts every minute of the day, you really feel you’re a failure, and it’s not like that in acting. If you do the scene well and they see the dailies, they’ll come to you and say, ‘You know, that’s a good piece of work you did.’
“And people respect me because I’m full of ideas and full of invention. There are a lot of people here with lots of experience in making movies, and they really respect me because I’m not making it with the gaffer and not making it with the soundman, though he’s cute, and they know I really love what I do. I’m ready for the work.”
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She would have gut her shot earlier if it hadn’t been for the career master plan of Aaron Russo, her manager since the contemplation?of?legend conversation six years ago. The Stockard Channing role in “The Fortune,” the Talia Shire role in “Rocky.” the Jessica Lange role in “King Kong,” the Barbara Harris role in “Nashville,” film biographies of Sophie Tucker, Dorothy Parker and Texas Guinan, the ill?fated “Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood” — all were under active consideration as vehicles for Midler. Russo said no to all of them.
“I wanted her first film to be a role that only Bette Midler could play,” said Russo, pacing the Fox back?lot office he occupies along with countless pictures of Midler, gold record citations and posters from past concerts. “I mean, who else could play ‘The Ruse’? Liza Minnelli? You know what I’m saying?”
Russo has placed her periodically in Hollywood &Ales so that local moguls could look over his property. On one such occasion, Marvin Worth, the producer of both the Broadway and film versions of “Lenny,” caught her act at the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard and that night discussed with a friend the possibility of putting her in a film biography of Janis Joplin. It was to take five years, five directors, one co?producer (Russo) and a number of reworkings of the original screenplay to bring “The Rose” to flower.
Asked what aspect of the central character most closely approximated herself, Midler said, “Rose wants to be looked at while at the same time she doesn’t want to be looked at because she knows she’s not that attractive. There’s lots of that stuff I’ve drawn on from myself.”
Midler is obsessed with her appearance. She has a habit of nudging the tip of her nose back into line with the rest of it, and she is constantly at her hair, fluffing it, twisting strands of it around her finger, shaking it loose. “I haven’t seen the dailies,” she said, “because I’m a little nutty about my looks, though it’s not quite so bad now that I’ve lost weight. I was afraid I would get very self?conscious and start turning my good side to the camera. I don’t want to stiffen up. I don’t want to freak out, because I’ve got so many other things on my mind. I’m so crazed that I probably would have stopped it if I had seen anything I didn’t like. I decided I will not see any of it and just trust in
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Midler saw Joplin perform once in 1967. “I must have told 15 people afterward, ‘I’m not saying I’m Janis, but I am saying that the energy is mine.’ “
Russo, 35?year?old son of the owner of a Manhattan lingerie firm, has been harnessing that energy for the past six years. He has become the most important person in the 32?yearold life of Bette Midler, daughter of a house painter from Honolulu by way of Paterson, N.J. The relationship reminds one of other fabled tough?guychanteuse collaborations like Sid Luft and Judy Garland, Marty Melcher and Doris Day and the contemporary example, Jeff Wald and Helen Reddy.
Russo still speaks as if he had never left the Bensonhurst of his youth; he has yet to find his way to the final “r” in Midler’s name. Like Midler, he is a college dropout; she did one year at the University of Hawaii; he, four months at Tampa University in Florida. After a brief stint in the family business, he got into promoting rock, opening clubs in Chicago (The Kinetic Playhouse) and Detroit (The East Town Theater) and becoming, in his own words, the “Avis” to Fillmore entrepreneur Bill Graham’s “Hertz.” He subsequently operated a small record label called Kinetic for Columbia Records and had given up the whole music business for silver and gold trading in New York when, in 1972, he met Midler.
He had seen her on the “Tonight” show two years before and had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Clive Davis of Columbia Records to sign her. Then at a Radio City Music Hall rock concert in 1972 he ran into a boyhood friend who told him Midler was unhappy with her Artists’ Entertainment Complex management and was looking for someone new to direct her career. For Russo, it was the call.
Russo literally looks the heavy. He has become so overweight in recent years that the middle part of his body can move latitudinally while the rest of him is on a longitudinal course. When he walks he must carry his arms away from his torso like a Western gunfighter about to draw. He doesn’t hesitate to throw any of his heft around in Midler’s behalf, and the wide and jagged swath he cuts is littered with the wounded and vengeful. He and Midler, lovers for the first six months of their association, fight noisily and physically, often in the company of whoever happens to be there. This has led a lot of people to think — many of them to hope — that she will leave him. The prediction doesn’t take into account the complementary nature, however perverse, of their relationship, and the forecasters will probably be disappointed.
“Many people think our relationship is unhealthy,” conceded Midler. “As a matter of fact, most of them do. But Aaron thinks I’m the greatest thing that ever walked, and he did when nobody else did. He’s not personally graceful, but he does what he thinks is best for me. Sometimes he’s wrong, but most of the time he’s right. I’m the only person he has. Who else is there on the market who has that? I consider myself very lucky to have someone who devotes all of his energies and time to my career. Why would I dump that? Who am I going to get? Some nice New York lawyer with 150 clients ? I can quarrel with Aaron’s methods. I fight with him all the time. But some of our work has been very good work. Some of it has been work that no other two people could do together. He knows how to present me, and he knows the timing and the ticket prices and who’s going to come and what it’s going to mean for me and when to push me this way and when to push me that way, all of which I know nothing about. We play pretty terrible games with each other, but in its way it’s a good relationship.”
Russo, seated in his Fox office, took off his yellow?frame sunglasses, planted them in his curly black hair like a giant plastic staple, and gave his side of it. “I’m not holding her by a piece of paper,” he said, turning his empty palms up. “It’s been six years without a contract. A lot of people do not understand our relationship. I love the woman so much. I think our ties are so strong. She would be broken if we split and so would I. We yell and scream, but I don’t think there’s anyone else whose decisions she can trust. She’s insecure. When we were lovers, there was a lot of shrieking and yelling in business that had nothing to do with business. It was very difficult to end the personal relationship and keep the business one intact, but we did it. The bottom line is that I need her approval, and she needs mine.”
They did split once, and their path back to each other involved a home movie that Midler made years ago in what literally was her film debut. At the time, Midler was playing a club in Ontario, and a man who called himself a poet came up from Detroit and signed her for $150 to play Mary, the mother of Jesus, in a movie entitled “The Greatest Story Ever Overtold.” In 1974, with Midler now a great attraction, the film surfaced at a 57th Street theater, retitled “The Divine Mr. J.,” with Bette Midler billed as its star. The Divine One herself was at that moment in Paris, having vowed she would go anywhere to get away from Russo, who had brought forth that pledge by emptying a bottle of CocaCola on her head in an argument minutes before she was to play a full house at the Palace Theater.
Seeing the film open in New York, Russo also saw his chance to entice his star back. Throwing a sandwich board over his body, he stood guard on the curb outside the theater in the rain, alerting potential theatergoers that Midler appeared in only eight minutes of the film. He then took to a telephone booth, called Paris and described his gallantry in de tail to Midler, who was miserable in the French city anyway and looking for an excuse to come home. “He saved me from disgrace,” Midler said with divalike dramatics, recalling the incident.
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Midler’s parents live in Hawaii, which she left for New York in 1965, using the earnings from being an extra in the George Roy Hill film “Hawaii.” She landed a chorus spot here in “Fiddler on the Roof” and eventually graduated to the role of Tevye’s oldest daughter, Tzeitel. A teacher at her acting studio told her that the Continental Baths wanted to book entertainment, and thus began her attention?getting performances there.
Guest spots on the Carson show and two albums —“Bette Midler” and “The Divine Miss M” — got her a national following, and soon she was on the road with her own show. She broke various attendance records on Broadway with her 1973 revue at the Palace and again in 1975 with her “Clams on the Half Shell” extravaganza. In 1976 she did a bawdy Home Box Office television special and a year later came up with a sanitized version for NBC called “Bette Midler: Ol’Red Hair Is Back.”
She has made three more records, but none of them have done as well as the two predecessors. So much of the Midler appeal has to do with stage presentation that studio recordings of her singing don’t draw the crowds that her live performances do,
She returns to Hawaii once each year, but, she says, she can’t remember much about growing up there. The family originally settled there, she said, when her father selected it as the place farthest away from his domineering mother in Paterson, N.J. The circumstances of her birth have given Midler a series of one?liners about being the only Jewish girl in a Samoan neighborhood, but there was clearly more poignancy than the gags suggest. “My mother just wanted to grow up Jewish somewhere,” Midler said, “and suddenly there she was as the only white person, a whole other category, and she never got over it.”
Midler was one of four children. An older sister, Judith, also came to New York, but she died 10 years ago when a car emerging from a West 44th Street parking garage went out of control and fatally pinned her against the wall of a building across the street. A retarded brother lives with the family in Hawaii.
‘Her relationship to Russo is like other fabled tough?guychanteuse collaborations, such as Sid Luft and Judy Garland, Marty Melcher and Doris Day and the contemporary example, Jeff Wald and Helen Reddy.’
Perhaps her greatest lasting disappointment has been the neglect her father has shown for her career. He has never seen her perform live. “I wanted him to for a long time, but then I gave it up,” she said, speaking with care. “He finally saw me on the NBC special, and he said it wasn’t so bad. ‘It wasn’t so had,’ that’s what he said.” She lighted a cigarette and looked out the window at the desultory latenight traffic on Sunset Boulevard. In a moment, her attention returned. “They’ve actually been more supportive recently. They’re so far away, you know. My mother loves my success. She thinks show business is the greatest thing on earth.”
It was her mother who named her after Bette Davis and who pronounced it with one syllable because she thought that was the way Davis said it. “She’s seen me live plenty, but my pop hasn’t because, well, he doesn’t like bad language. He once said, ‘Son of a bitch.’ Once. When someone stole his car, he said, ‘Son of a bitch,’ and I never forgot it.
“It’s too bad the language has deteriorated, and, you know, I didn’t want to add to that. I wanted to do something that said it more beautifully than …. What can I say? That’s what they gave me in this movie.”
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Russo filed the flight plan for Midier’s trajectory into movies years ago. “From the time we started, we knew movies would be the answer,” he said. “Movies are the art form of the day. To be a true legend, you can’t do it just in music.”
The movies were on his mind, he said, when he put Midler into the Palace in 1973. “No singer played on Broadway in those days. But I wanted her there because Broadway means a movie crowd and an intelligent New York crowd.”
For the “Clams on the Half Shell” revue a year or so later, Russo brought in a director and bankrolled a visually extravagant production. “That’s when the movie calls began coming,” he said. “I expected movie executives to come. It was a legitimate Broadway production, and I wanted them to see her acting talent.”
Television was ruled out. “It would have been easy to do TV shows. could have just picked up the phone and done game shows, talk shows, guest specials. But my feeling is that when you do too much television, people cease to be curious about you. Look at what’s happened to Cher.”
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Midler will not put her singing behind her, however. “Many stars’ biggest mistake,” Russo said, “is to lose personal touch with an audience. We’re interested in longevity as opposed to quick dollars. You have to understand that we’ve turned down millions, literally millions, of dollars. That’s why you see her in the Roxy, the Copa and other small clubs like that instead of stadiums. Stadiums are a lot less work and a lot more money, you know.”
At the moment, Midler is back in Hollywood, having just completed a tour of England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Australia, designed at least in part to acquaint foreign audiences with her and create interest in the film abroad.
Once the post?production work on “The Rose” is finished, she’ll begin the shooting of her next film, a comedy with the current working title of “Strike and Hyde” and a story line as bizarre as the zaniest fantasies from the Midler stage acts. Midler plays a Hawaiian woman named Leslie Strike who goes to Las Vegas to become a comedienne, meets a New York psychiatrist named Norman Hyde, who has come to Las Vegas to lecture Gamblers Anonymous on his new book, “The Self?Destructive Ape,” and falls in love with him while his wife, seeing her marriage to Dr. Hyde lapsing, runs away with a black lounge singer.
No sooner will that romp be on celluloid than Midler will be busy starting to promote “The Rose.” All this would seem to be enough to entitle even a working girl of Midler’s ambitious lust to some time off, but there appear to be no rest stops on the road to legend.
Russo has charted that path tar into the future. It includes world tours, more movies, better management of her recordings, extended bookings in foreign cities and a Broadway musical five years from now.
His goal, Russo said, is one that will be realized quite literally by her appearance on a movie screen. He wants, he said, to make Midler “larger than life.” ?
