Bette Midler (49 page)

Well, Bette Midler has never been one to sit still for long. Nor has she been one to be idle and rest on her laurels (or her assets . . . or her ass). Having again revitalized her career with such hits as her incredibly appealing film
Gypsy
, the
Bette of Roses
album, and her hugely popular concert touring, the indefatigable Miss M was about launch onto still another career peak.

The year 1996 found Bette Midler making the rounds of the TV talkshows and specials to promote her
Bette of Roses
album. On February 13 she was a guest on
The Late Show with David Letterman
. And Bette even went a little bit country, when she appeared on the CBS-TV special
Wynonna Revelations
, starring Wynonna Judd.

On June 11, the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) officially certified Bette’s
Experience the Divine
album as Platinum. And on June 21, the soundtrack for the Disney animated film
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
was released. On the album, Bette contributed the song “Go Help the Outcasts.” All of this activity helped set the stage for her next cinematic adventure—and what an adventure it was to be!

In the past, Bette had a great track record for starring in film hits opposite other strong women, as she had with
Outrageous Fortune, Big Business
, and
Beaches
. Why not cast her with not one, but two equally dynamic female stars? That’s exactly what happened with her next screen outing, which became her first number one box-office hit. Teamed with both Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton, Midler had the biggest film hit of her career:
First Wives Club
.

According to her, it wasn’t always a picnic: “That was a really tough movie to make. The script wasn’t solid at the beginning. It was the blizzard of ’96. There was no lunch. You had to go get your lunch. I mean, it was tough. But I must say, I loved the girls” (
164
).

First Wives Club
opens with a flashback to Middlebury College and four girls from the graduating class of 1969. The quartet of twenty-something college girls is shown graduating with hopes and aspirations, and thanks to one of them—Cynthia—they each have a gift of matching pearl necklaces, for remembrance.

Cut: to the present. An adult Cynthia (Stockard Channing) is seen contemplating suicide by jumping from the balcony of her Central Park-adjacent apartment. Right before she takes the leap of no-faith, she pens notes to her three college buddies to say “good-bye,” which she asks her maid to mail for her. In these notes she asks them to actively rekindle and maintain their once-strong friendship. This becomes the reason for the bond between Midler, Hawn, and Keaton, members of a trio who have long ago grown apart from one another.

Annie (Keaton) has a teenage lesbian daughter, and she has broken up with her husband, Aaron (Stephen Collins)—but she still occasionally sleeps with him and lives with the hope that he will eventually return to her. She is the most timorous of the threesome.

Elise (Goldie Hawn) is a Grade B movie star who is obsessed with her youth and her looks and is hooked on plastic surgery. Her funniest scene is in the office of her doctor (Rob Reiner). When she decides she needs her face surgically freshened up, she commands to him, “I want to be young: SCIENCE FICTION YOUNG.” When he tells her she is being absurd, she explains to him that there are only three ages in the life of an actress: “Babe, district attorney, and
Driving Miss Daisy!”
She insists on collagen injections on her already-accentuated lips. She instructs the doctor as to the degree of inflated lips she wants: “I want Tina Turner! I want Jagger!”

Hawn’s husband, Bill (Victor Garber), is now suing her for half of her production company and assets from the films in which she has starred. His new girlfriend is a beautiful airhead, Phoebe (Elizabeth Berkley), who hopes to become an actress of the magnitude of Elise. Fresh from her starring turn in
Showgirls
, Berkley plays Phoebe with all of the common sense of a Hostess Twinkie.

Bette is Brenda, the brassy but self-suffering member of the triumvirate. At the start of the film she is dressed a bit on the dowdy side, and she is slightly chunky, weight-wise. Her philandering husband, Morty (Dan Hedaya), sells home appliances via awful TV ads in which he stars. The new, younger girlfriend he has traded Brenda for, Shelley, is comically portrayed by a ditzy Sarah Jessica Parker.

Over a girls-only postfuneral lunch, the three women’s personalities are defined by the cocktails they order. Keaton has a Virgin Mary, Midler has a Bloody Mary, and Hawn orders vodka on the rocks. In this amusing scene, Bette gets drunk and pressures Goldie about the surreal plastic surgery that is before their eyes.

Hawn’s lips are so inhumanly inflated that she can’t even light a cigarette she holds in her comically bizarre mouth. With regard to the plastic surgery, Bette pries, “Did you have a little bit, or the full enchilada?” Interestingly enough, in the original film trailer (available on the DVD), the line is “Did you have a little bit, or the full IVANA?”

Bette has some great lines in
First Wives Club
. She describes the emotional valley that has grown between her and Morty. “He starts working out,” she explains to her girlfriends. “He grows a mustache, he gets an earring. I said, ‘Morty, Morty! What are you a pirate? What’s next? A parrot?’ ”

Dissing Hawn’s youth-chasing plastic surgery, Midler proclaims, “And, thanks to Cher’s pioneering efforts, you still haven’t hit puberty!”

When Bette lights into Goldie about her excessive liquor consumption, Goldie looks down at a garbage pail filled with empty fifths of booze. “I had guests!” claims Goldie in her own defense. Without missing a beat, Bette fires back, “Who? Guns & Roses?”

Naturally, the trio of dumped wives ends up turning the tables on their unfaithful ex-husbands, getting even where it really hurts—the wallet. By the end of the film Goldie regains her perspective, Diane gains her self-confidence, and Bette loses a significant amount of weight—and looks fabulous for the transformation. By the end the triumphant trio emerges from a cocktail party singing an anthem-like version of the Leslie Gore hit “You Don’t Own Me.”

The film is also filled with a delicious cast full of supporting characters and glittering cameo appearances. Bronson Pinchot is a hoot as an affected gay designer; Maggie Smith is Grunella, a wealthy matron who bonds with the girls; Eileen Heckert is Annie’s dry-humored mother; and Heather Locklear is the mistress of Cynthia’s widower. The real-life Ivana Trump makes a brief appearance, as do former New York City mayor Ed Koch, comedian Lia DeLaria, Kathie Lee Gifford, and famed feminist Gloria Steinem.

When
First Wives Club
was released, it drew only rave reviews, and audiences loved it.
Rolling Stone
said, “This witty revenge romp is sinfully satisfying. . . . Irresistible fun . . .”
Variety
agreed, “Midler, Hawn
and Keaton are a refreshingly cohesive comedy combo with that indefinable thing known as screen chemistry” (
98
).
Leonard Martin’s Movie & Video Guide
rated it as “entertaining, thanks to three lively stars and an impressive supporting cast” (
128
).

In
Entertainment Weekly
, Owen Gleiberman wrote of
First Wives Club
, “Paced like a Chris Farley movie and photographed like a denture-cream commercial, the
First Wives Club
is the sort of overbright plastic-package comedy that tends to live or die by its jokes. . . . Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, and Diane Keaton play Manhattanites in their mid-forties who’ve all been abandoned by their husbands. . . . As soon as you see the actresses bite into their roles, though, you realize that, for them, the film is hitting much closer to home. Who, after all, knows the agony of being passed over for youthful flesh better than Hollywood leading ladies? . . . Hawn, Midler and Keaton luxuriate in the pleasure of their own haughtiness, their proud-to-be-a-bitch venom. . . . Midler, as a housewife too full of rage to worry about vanity . . . If black-widow spiders wrote punchlines, they’d sound like that” (
165
).

Great pacing, funny one-liners, and excellent performances all around,
First Wives Club
was the biggest box-office smash of Bette Midler’s entire career. It was such a widespread hit that it made over $100 million in its theatrical run. According to Bette, “It was incredibly popular. And it really made us think . . . made me think, anyway, how rewarding it is when people love what it is that you do” (
164
).

In her
Diva Las Vegas
TV special, she later sang about her success in
First Wives Club
—to the tune of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses”: “One hundred million ain’t so hard to do. Honey, everything’s coming up grosses for me, so fuck you!”

Richard Corliss, in
Time
magazine, claimed, “
First Wives
is a hit. It has three stars playing to their strengths: Midler the canny yenta, Keaton mining lodes of pruney anguish, Hawn a glorious hoot encased in her collagenized lips and sprawling ego . . . Bette Midler, the designated frump in
The First Wives Club
, stares at Goldie Hawn’s body with mixed feelings: envy for it’s sleekness and disdain for the work needed to maintain it” (
166
).

In a cover story about the subject matter addressed in the film, writer Elizabeth Gleick, in
Time
magazine, reported, “Women scorned, women afraid of being scorned—and some curious men taken along for the ride—are helping
The First Wives Club
break records. Its $18.9 million opening weekend was the highest ever for a so-called women’s
film and captured more than one-third of the movie-going market from competition such as Bruce Willis’s
Last Man Standing
. The characters played by Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, and Bette Midler are like the furies crossed with the Three Stooges—college friends spurned by their husbands in middle age who plan a madcap payback” (
167
).

Indeed,
The First Wives Club
became the third major film of the 1990s in which women sought and successfully got revenge upon their philandering men. It joined the ranks of enormous box-office popularity alongside the decade’s other two top females-even-the-score flicks:
Thelma and Louise
and
Waiting to Exhale
.

One of the most significant things that happened to Bette during the filming of
First Wives Club
was her fiftieth birthday. According to her at the time, “I looked back and I said, ‘What happened?’ I realized that I had reached a certain point. I have my husband, my daughter, and a pretty good career. I felt that I didn’t have to keep doing it in the same way, because I did it. The compulsion is not the same. I’m not so afraid that it’s going to be taken away from me. I don’t feel like I am on a downward slope. I just feel like I am not so crazed” (
17
).

This became a time for her to access her life to date. She surveyed not only her career, but her personal life as well. With regard to her charitable nature, at the time she commented, “I never knew my impulse toward goodness was so serious. I think it comes from my parents. They gave to charity, and I remember them saying that no matter how bad things were for us, there were always people who had less. I have confidence that all this stuff will come back to Sophie, because it came back to me” (
17
).

Speaking of her vanity as a “screen goddess,” Midler downplayed the beauty aspect of it. “People don’t expect me to be a goddess in the way that Michelle Pfeiffer is considered a goddess. I have more leeway than she does. I never considered myself an artist. Whatever I was doing, I was trying to do it. Singing, acting, dancing. But the learning, that’s been the one thing that has been my total entertainment my whole life,” she claimed (
17
).

And then there was her day-to-day role as “domestic goddess.” Said Bette, “In a funny way, I’m just a big housekeeper. Martha Stewart has it to a much worse degree, but it’s definitely a compulsion. It’s my dictator gene—‘Let’s all live beautiful!’ ” (
17
).

While
First Wives Club
was still in the theaters, Midler set off on a short concert tour, which concluded on December 23 and 24 at Universal
Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. It was this show that was to become her next TV special. On January 9 and 10, 1997, Bette Midler headlined at the MGM Grand Garden. Those concerts were taped and on January 18 were broadcast on HBO, gloriously uncensored as
Diva Las Vegas
.

Said Miss M of the special: “It’s a beautiful show. It’s got something for everybody. It’s two hours, and it’s nonstop, and I’m in all of it. God only knows what’s going to happen. God only knows” (
164
).

Everything about
Diva Las Vegas
was grand, lush, and excitingly fun. Four showgirls with angel wings blowing trumpets to herald the arrival of Bette—who makes her entrance singing “Friends” hovering twenty feet above the stage, from a throne in a cloud. After she descends to the stage, she sings—and raps—a new autobiographical monologue of a song, called “I Look Good.” And she does indeed. Or, better yet, as she so eloquently put it, “So rich, so cheap!”