Looking Back: The Magic Of Miss M (Jan. 19 2004)

Onstage
The New Yorker
The Magic of Miss M.
Bette Midler on the road again.
by Hilton Als January 19, 2004

(from Design Alliances’ “A Masquerade” – October 22, 1988 performance-1998)

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If you’re fortunate enough to catch Bette Midler’s extraordinary revue “Kiss My Brass” (on tour through March 2nd), you’ll be reminded not only what a star is but what makes Midler such a great one. Even before she got to work on January 3rd at the Nassau Coliseum, in Uniondale, Long Island, where I saw the show, Midler was in evidence everywhere–not least in the memories of those who had come to see her. As I waited for a parking space near the arena, the car’s headlights illuminated a group of young black boys hawking T-shirts silkscreened with the Divine Miss M.’s brightly colored likeness: there were her Egyptian eyes, her mischievous mouth, and that long, crooked pillar of a nose. But soon the Technicolor Bette faded, in my mind, to a black-and-white photograph of the star that I remember seeing in the mid-seventies. It was a backstage shot, taken after a performance of Midler’s hit show at the Palace in New York, which broke box-office records in 1973. In the photograph, the twenty-seven-year-old Midler was holding a bouquet of blossoms and smiling her soon-to-be-famous Bette smile–a wide, coquettish grin that verges on lunacy. It was clear from her expression that the girl who just three years earlier had been underground, singing in a gay bathhouse, had metamorphosed into a popular artist.

That artistry was on full display once Midler took the stage at the Nassau Coliseum–which for the first act was designed to resemble Coney Island (though it oddly reminded me more of the Moscow skyline). Midler arrived on a mechanical horse, like a Jewish Lady Godiva. I never got the point of the horse or the backdrop, but over the next two and a half hours Midler gave us no time to worry about what they or anything else might be supposed to mean. Dressed in blue satin sailor pants, a sheer sailor blouse with anchors stitched on its short sleeves, and a sailor cap that was set rakishly on her mop of Lucille Ballish red curls, Midler began by dismissing the horse she rode in on (“Beat it, Seabiscuit!”) and blasting us with applause-raising cries of “I’m not going to retire yet!” Then, with her three backup singer-dancers, the Harlettes, she minced and sashayed across the stage, describing everything she’d gone through to give us the show we were about to see. “This is the biggest thing I’ve ever done, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, bullying us into believing it. “We’ve got shit backstage that I’ve never seen!” She briefly established her political leanings–“Poor Rush Limbaugh! Poor, fat, stupid, hypocritical, drug-addicted Rush!” And then she went in for the kill. “I’ve seen the young people,” she said, casting a sidelong glance at the audience. “I’ve seen Christina Aguilera,” she sniffed. “She was wearing pasties and garters! All these new girls are so trashy!” Beat. “And do I get a thank-you note? I opened the door to trash! I was trashy before any of these girls were born!”

Having staked out her territory in contemporary culture, Midler felt ready to introduce–or reintroduce–us to her past. She left the stage for a moment, and three video screens descended from the rafters. There, onscreen, was the Divine Miss M. as she had appeared thirty years before–frizzy hair, plucked eyebrows, big clunky platform shoes–kicking it to what has become one of her signature tunes: “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” But, just as we were about to settle into a warm bath of nostalgia, the present-day Midler took the stage again, singing and dancing along even more gleefully than her former self. Having been around long enough to experience her share of pain, Midler seemed to be telling us, she can now experience greater joy.

To prove the point, she then regaled the audience–again from the video screens–with a skit about the failure of her 2000-01 TV sitcom, “Bette.” The video showed Judge Judy admonishing Midler for having trashed CBS after the network cancelled her show. Just as the entertainer began to argue in her own defense, she was trumped by a clip of herself telling David Letterman that CBS had made her feel like a “dung beetle.” Cut to: Midler, onstage, intoning, “Who cares if my show is cancelled? . . . My people! The Jews.” Cue: “Hava Nagilah.” Then: “Who gives a damn if my career’s in the toilet? . . . My people! The queens! Hello, girlfriend!” Of course, by acknowledging her core fan base, Midler was again acknowledging her past, the cult of difference that grew up around her and a number of other female artists of her generation–most notably the Pointer Sisters–whose allure had less to do with their musicianship than with their marginalization, the way they used their own cultural identification, along with a heavy dose of gay irony, to get their shows across.

During the twenty-minute intermission that divides the show’s two acts (the first is stronger than the second, which relies too heavily on old shticks that didn’t work to begin with), it occurred to me that I had never actually seen Midler live before. She is so palpable as an icon that I had confused her many appearances on TV and in movies and my knowledge of the general Midler lore–goofy-looking Semitic girl, born and raised in Hawaii, moves to New York, lands a role in the original Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof” while moonlighting as a cabaret singer, and the rest is history–with her actual presence. But unlike other icons, such as Marlene Dietrich or Judy Garland, whose legendary status was based partly on their beauty and partly on their narrow escapes from disaster–Nazis and drugs, respectively–Midler is a blue-collar heroine: a Rosie the Riveter, whose strength, rather than her looks, gets her through. She isn’t glamorous or fragile; rather, she is a kind of hysterical variation on your Aunt Sadie, who made a career out of entertaining with family lore while boiling up a batch of chicken soup. Her appeal has to do not with her diva qualities but with her ability to be a parody of a diva–to be as grand as Norma Shearer in “Idiot’s Delight” while at the same time behaving like an idiot. Beneath Midler’s boss-lady antics and psychodramas–her complaints about her exhaustion and her backstage crew–there is a truly democratic style and spirit. Nothing pleases the citizens of a democratic society more than sending up the aristocracy, and, in America, stars are the only aristocracy we have. Midler, even as an aristocrat, has never lost her outsider status, because she never fails to refer back to her roots. She’s the perennial émigrée in show business, the tough Jewish girl from the sticks who continues to charm the Gentiles with her moxie and her anxiety; no matter how big she gets, she reassures us, her background, her religion, will keep her small. And since she’ll never be one of them, why not make a joke out of the reality, and surreality, of her down-to-earth self?

By adopting certain elements of postwar American culture for her stage act (her underrated film “For the Boys” was in part a homage to the songs of that era), Midler has been able to manipulate the combination of skepticism and optimism with which Americans meet any call to arms. Her penchant for nostalgia–in addition to “Boogie Woogie,” she sang a lovely cover of Rosemary Clooney’s “Tenderly”–is a distinctly American impulse, too. Audiences here aren’t ashamed of sentimentality; the spectators at the Nassau Coliseum were happy to cry and sing along with Midler’s soppy standby “The Rose.” But it was when she performed Tom Waits’s ballad “Shiver Me Timbers”–a song about running away to sea–that Midler truly put the audience in her pocket. Center stage, with a spotlight on her face, she used her hands with the expressiveness of a mime to trace waves through the air, and she used her voice–with its particular mixture of Broadway, Motown, and amped-up Phoebe Snow–to travel to that place we all inhabit: the land between time present and time past. ♦