Bette Midler (7 page)

“When I was in the chorus,” Bette explains, “I understudied the part of Tzeitel, and when the part opened, [director] Jerry Robbins had to see all the girls up for it, but the lady who was casting didn’t want me to have the job. She called me up two hours before the audition, and said I didn’t have a prayer. But if I didn’t go in, she said, I could have the chorus job back” (
11
).

Bette, who had found the original chorus job to be a temporary assignment, was dying to get back into the show, so she decided to gamble. According to her, “I at least wanted to get a look at Robbins—I worship the ground he dances upon—so I said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m taking the audition!’ ” (
11
). She was cast in the part, and she stayed in
Fiddler on the Roof
for three years as Tzeitel, the eldest of the three daughters in the family. During those three years, the roles of the other two sisters were played by several actresses who also had their sights on bigger things. Among the girls to play Bette’s sisters were Adrienne Barbeau and Pia Zadora.

“I was really good in
Fiddler
for the first two years,” says Bette. “But in the third year I came to a screeching halt. There I was in the third year, working for the same money I made in the first, breaking my ass, and feeling miserable because I couldn’t get into agents’ offices. And when they would send me out for auditions, the people wouldn’t like the way I looked, or the way I sounded. I couldn’t make them understand that there was really something there” (
25
).

“I saw it wasn’t going to be the way I thought it was going to be,” she continues. “I wanted to work a lot, to grow, and the theater is a closed market. I couldn’t get anything else, and the way I was brought up, I was taught you must work. But I came to New York to have a career, not to be in one show, so at the end of the second year, I thought, ‘Time to move,’ and I had a bunch of experiences that related to that move. I was getting very high, and I was with people who were brilliant, and they were flashing things across my brain. I was getting freaked out on everything that was going on” (
3
).

When tragedies strike, weak people often crumble, while strong people look inside themselves for courage and emerge with an even stronger will to survive. It was during Bette’s third year in
Fiddler on
the Roof
that the Midler family suffered a horrible loss, and it was Bette who had to remain a tower of strength.

Bette’s eldest sister, Judy, like Bette before her, had left Honolulu to pursue her career aspirations. Judy moved to San Francisco, where, according to Bette, “She was studying to become a moviemaker” (
14
). That year Judy came to New York City to see Bette—her younger sister, the Broadway star. In a bizarre twist-of-fate accident, Judy was in the heart of the theater district when she was hit by a speeding car and killed.

It was Bette who had to telephone Hawaii to notify her family. Her sister Susan remembers answering the call. “I gave the phone to my father,” she recalls. “Bette spoke to him first, and then it was passed around to all of us. It was a nightmare. I don’t think my mother ever got over it” (
13
).

“It was very bad losing Judy,” Fred Midler recalled. “As I understand it, an auto came out of one of these indoor garages and smashed her right up against the wall. Mutilated her completely. The funeral directors wouldn’t even permit us to view the body” (
13
).

Judy’s death had a profound effect on Bette’s life. She realized how short life can be, and she felt that hers was passing by, and she was not moving quickly enough. She realized that it was time to get out of the Broadway show she felt stuck in and to move on to new experiences.

She explains, “See, by that time,
Fiddler
wasn’t where it was at; it was the Beatles and marijuana, and
Hair
and Janis Joplin. All of a sudden people my age were happening, and I just wanted to see where, and IF, I could fit in” (
13
).

When her sister Judy was killed, Bette took off only a week and a half and then returned to the show to ponder her future. During her time away from
Fiddler
, the role of Tzeitel was played by her understudy, Marta Heflin.

Heflin recalled lending her support to Bette when Judy died. “It was a terrible, terrible thing. I was there at her house for sitting
shiva
. I was very impressed with her then. Because it was a terrible tragedy. But she is very strong. You could tell that she was very upset, but she was very strong. She’s a very strong lady, you know. You saw those guts coming through. I’ll never forget that. There was no self-pity, no breast beating. I did the role for a week and a half, and then she was back” (
5
). It was Marta who threw a much-needed life preserver to a creatively drowning Bette.

In Greenwich Village there were several small “showcase” nightclubs where an aspiring singer could arrive on specified nights with sheet music in hand and perform. Marta was already going down to a club called Hilly’s and trying out her own material in front of the audiences on “open mike” nights. Marta invited Bette to go down to Hilly’s on one such night, to try her hand at cabaret singing.

“She wasn’t making [any] money at it,” Bette recalls of Marta’s ventures to Hilly’s, “but she was having a good time. So, the next time she went down there, I went along” (
19
).

Bette will never forget her first night of performing at Hilly’s. Up until this point, she had never considered becoming a singer—apart from the musical theater stage. “I always sang, but never seriously,” she remembers. “I got up in front of this little audience and just sang. The first two songs weren’t anything special, but the third—something just happened to me—something happened to my head and my body and it was just the most wonderful sensation I’d ever been through. It was not like me singing. It was like something else!” (
25
).

“I sang” ‘God Bless the Child,’ which I don’t sing. I never sang it. I sang it once and that was all, because it frightened me so. It really freaked me out. I was screaming at the end of it. The song had a life of its own that imposed itself on me and I don’t even know what happened. I was just this instrument for what was going on. Bizzzzzarre . . . so I decided that was a nice change. I decided to just do it for a while, and I did” (
25
).

Bette suddenly found herself wrapped up in discovering all sorts of old songs that she had not previously been aware of, and she would test them on audiences at Hilly’s and other small nightclubs and cabarets in the city. She spent several hours each week at the Lincoln Center Library, listening to old albums and getting turned on to the music of Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and the Harry Warren tunes from the famous 1930s Busby Berkeley musicals. Suddenly, a whole new world of music and performing opened up to her. She had been so obsessed with the idea of being a Broadway actress that she didn’t even consider that every song could become an act, a mood, an emotion, and a characterization all its own. She fell in love with singing and with breathing a unique life into each song she sang.

According to her, “I love Bessie Smith. I love Aretha Franklin. Gospel is some of the most wonderful music around. You get up and you can’t stop. I makes you vibrate. I like torch songs and torch singers that
make you cry. Ethel Waters used to kill me when I first started listening” (
25
).

“I heard the stories these women were telling, they were laying incredible stuff down, their lives were fabulous lives, and it was in their voices and their songs, and I was fascinated by that. And there were some things I had to say about where I’ve been and who I’ve been with, and the pain I know” (
3
). She was especially enamored of torch songs, and all of a sudden she was singing all sorts of classic blues numbers like “What a Difference a Day Makes,” “My Forgotten Man,” “Ten Cents a Dance,” and “Am I Blue?”

At the time, Bette was dating one of the other cast members from
Fiddler on the Roof
, Ben Gillespie. She would go over to Ben’s apartment, and the two of them would listen to old records. It was Gillespie who introduced her to Aretha Franklin’s early recordings from the era when Aretha was a young blues singer, years before she was dubbed “Lady Soul.” Bette still recalls the night he put on Aretha’s
Unforgettable
album, and she sang at the top of her lungs to the album. “A real awakening” is what she called the music on that particular Aretha Franklin album, which was recorded as a tribute to Franklin’s singing idol, Dinah Washington. One of the performances on that classic Aretha album was a torch number that would later become one of Midler’s earliest signature songs: “Drinking Again.” According to her, “It was like I had no idea what music was all about until I heard her sing. It opened up the whole world” (
5
).

“My mentor was a man named Ben Gillespie,” Bette later recalled. “Ben was a dancer I met when I was doing
Fiddler on the Roof
on Broadway. He opened up the world for me. . . . I was crazy for him. He really opened up my eyes. He taught me about music and dance and drama and poetry and light and color and sound and movement. He was an artist with great vision of what the stage could provide. He taught me a grandeur I had never known before. He inspired me not to be afraid and to understand what the [music of the] past had to offer me. I never lost the lessons he taught me” (
30
).

William Hennessey was another of her friends from that same era. She had met him when he was one of the hairdressers who worked on
Fiddler
. Hennessey remembered, “She had another friend then, a dancer named Ben Gillespie, who was a thirties and forties freak, and the three of us used to hang around all the old movie houses in New York. Afterward Bette would do takeoffs of Charlotte Greenwood, Martha
Raye, and Joan Davis” (
4
). Bette’s “Divine Miss M” persona was born from her interpretation of these famous Hollywood crazy ladies of the 1940s.

Bette and Marta began to go regularly to Hilly’s on West Ninth Street and to a club on West Forty-Fourth Street called the Improvisation. Also singing at Hilly’s during this same period was an aspiring blues and rock singer with a powerful voice, named Baby Jane Dexter. “There were a lot of us back then,” Dexter recalls. “We were just kids, and we were trying our hands at singing in front of an audience, and trying out new material. There was a woman who ran the showcase, and she made a big deal out of Bette coming in from
Fiddler on the Roof”
(
31
).

“Bette sang ‘Am I Blue?’ and she sang ‘Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe,’ ” explains Baby Jane. “She sang only slow songs—nothing fast—all slow ballads, and she would fondle her tits while she was singing and emoting. I gave her the worst advice that there ever was—which was to put a bra on!” she laughs (
31
).

“She used to wear this red velvet dress, and a guy named John Foster played the piano. She wore this red velvet dress until it wore into air—disintegrated. She was into old antique clothing, and she wanted to be a Helen Morgan type. She had dark brown hair, which she pulled back real tight, and made a thing that looked like Jane Eyre, on the side of her head—a snood. It was not that flattering, but I only know that it was not that flattering because later she got a more flattering look” (
31
).

According to Dexter, “People used to look at her rubbing her tits and not know what to think. She was always doing this stuff, and she was never boring. I thought her voice was strong then. Her voice hadn’t been rock & roll-ized—it hadn’t been harmed. I thought she sounded good, and I liked listening to her singing these songs. She was very emotional. It wasn’t that she was doing something so incredible, but there was something about her—she was totally driven!” (
31
).

Of her days at the Improv, Midler remembers, “Originally, in my velvet dress with my hair pulled back and my eyelashes waxed, I was convinced I was a torch singer. Because the Improv was a comedy club, you had to be a little bit funny, so I added chatter between songs. There I was, singing my ballads and crying the mascara off my eyes, and in the next breath telling whatever lame joke I’d just heard” (
20
).

While Bette was still in her third year of
Fiddler
, both she and Marta began to venture into other theater projects. Bette played the Red Queen in a children’s production of
Alice through the Looking Glass
,
and Marta left
Fiddler
to appear in a rock musical Off-Broadway, called
Salvation
. In the play, Marta played the part of a comic nymphomaniac. When she was offered the opportunity to play the same part in the Los Angeles company of
Salvation
, she recommended Bette as her replacement in New York. Bette landed the part of Betty Lou and joined the cast of
Salvation
in 1969.

Meanwhile, Bette’s performances at the Improvisation brought her to still another level. It was there that she met the owner of the club, Bud Friedman, who was to become her first manager.

At this time, Bette and Marta were regularly performing their material at the showcase clubs, and Bette was heavily into her torch-song and blues trip. Friedman distinctly remembers that Bette’s selections tended toward the maudlin—songs from
Three Penny Opera
and several sad blues numbers. He wasn’t particularly into her singing—and neither was the audience.

According to Baby Jane Dexter, a man named Frankie Darrow came down to Hilly’s one night and wanted several of the performers to come uptown to West Forty-Fourth Street, to a club he was managing called the African Room. “He wanted all of these people to come up to a big showcase he had,” says Dexter. “People like David Brenner, Irene Cara—she was eleven or twelve at the time—Jimmy Walker, Bette Midler, and me. Frankie had these Monday night showcases and they picked someone out of this showcase to be the opening act for a Caribbean singer named Johnny Barracuda. It was between two girls that Frankie was going to hire. Who was going to get this big gig, and get paid fifty dollars to open for Johnny? It was between Melba Moore and Bette. He went with Bette, and this was her first paying gig as a singer” (
31
).