Show Business: Midler: Make Me a Legend!

On Broadway and in the movies, Miss M is packing ’em in

What’s that angry green parrot doing on top of that mound of cotton-candy hair? And who is that in such an enormous wedding dress, balancing the cake, complete with bride and groom, on top of her head? Isn’t the answer obvious by now? She is, as she announces in the opening number of her new Broadway show, “the big noise from Winnetka.” She does not, in fact, come from Winnetka, but Bette Midler is the biggest noise—and one of the biggest talents—of the ’70s.

Those who do not yet know about her soon will. Hollywood tom-toms are all but nominating her for an Academy Award for her first screen role, in The Rose. The movie, the story of a doomed ’60s rock star, is one of the few commercial hits of the fall season, and enthusiastic word of mouth is proving more potent than any advertising. Meanwhile, for those who can make it to Broadway, the lady’s other, outrageously funny side is on view at the Palace Theater in Bette! Divine Madness. It is the hottest ticket in Manhattan.

Describing a tour of Europe, she lights upon the Queen of England, “the whitest woman in the world. She makes all the rest of us look like the Third World.” Where, Bette asks sweetly, with only the faintest hint of bitchery, does Her Majesty get her hats? Pretending to sew, she conjures up a whole line of milliners in the basement of Buckingham Palace, threading needles for their monarch at that very moment. Then, she notes, there is that noble equestrienne, Princess Anne. How would Anne answer if someone asked how old she was? Bette wonders. Without a word, she provides the answer: very slowly, like a trained horse at the circus, she taps out the number with her right foot.

Those are the clean jokes—just about all of them. Most of the others range from very dirty to dirtier still, and all of them are quite funny. She does not take them seriously, and neither does the audience. She giggles instead of leers, and there is no feeling, as there is in most such humor, that someone is being put down.

Most of all she laughs at herself. At 34, she is not a pretty woman, but she turns even that to advantage. Some of her jokes are about her ample breasts: “Two of the reasons why I did not become a ballerina.” A couple are about the rest of her body. Sitting down, she notices that her upper arm is still moving when the rest of her has stopped. She jiggles it and —incredible sight—her thighs, legs and neck too. “Isn’t it terrible,” she sighs, “that when you hit 30, your body wants a life of its own?”

She even laughs at her own pretensions to stardom. She announces that she is “a screen star, in the tradition of Shirley Temple, Liv Ullmann and Miss Piggy.” When the audience good-naturedly boos one of her jokes, she exclaims: “The crowd turns on the diva. [Pause] But the diva doesn’t care!” Her singing, much of it done with three saucy young women called the Harlettes, is no threat to Streisand, or even Minnelli. But it bursts with feeling—almost too much for mere lyrics to express.

The singer she plays in The Rose has often been compared to Janis Joplin, who died of an overdose of drugs in 1970. Though Midler admires Joplin, the rock singer in the film is, in many respects, Bette Midler. Rose grew up in warm Florida, Bette in balmy Hawaii, and they were both unhappy. In Bette’s family, as she remembers, there was always a lot of angry bellowing from her father, a house painter for the Navy. Even today Fred Midler has not come to see one of her shows, a source of obvious pain to his daughter. But Bette had a hardship even Rose didn’t have: hers was the only Jewish family in a neighborhood of Samoans.

Many people might long for a life in Hawaii. Bette was determined to get away, and in 1965 she did, arriving in Manhattan with the intention of becoming an actress. For her it was easier to make it as a singer, however. She joined the chorus of Fiddler on the Roof and eventually moved up to play Tzeitel, Tevye’s eldest daughter. When she left Fiddler, she did a cabaret act at the Improvisation club and, a short while later, at the gay Continental Baths. That is where the Divine Miss M, as she called herself, was born; the primarily homosexual audiences encouraged her free-spirited outrageousness. “They gave me the confidence to be tacky, cheesy, to take risks,” she says. “They encouraged my spur-of-the-moment improvisations.”

Then in 1972 something equally important happened: she met Aaron Russo, 36, a New Yorker and a rock promoter. He yelled like her father, she says, and he was her lover for six months, her man ager for six years, and her Svengali all the time. “Make me a legend!” Bette told him, and he did, or almost did. Like Alan Bates, who plays Rose’s tyrannical man ager in the movie, Russo dominated Bette’s life and her career, in terms of the job his advice was impeccable. Until The Rose, he turned down every film role that was offered, waiting for the one that would let her shine brightest. People laughed at the time, but on her European tour last year, he even demanded that she be paid in gold. He was turned down, but the idea was far from laughable. Gold has since more than doubled in value.

But the pair’s fights became almost epic in scope. “I liked a good fight like he did,” Midler recalls. “But I didn’t like any one to fight back, and he fought much harder than I did.” She left him and fled to Paris for three months in 1974, only to return for several more rounds. The knockout came last February, and Bette dropped Russo as her manager.

For the past three years Bette has been living with Peter Riegert, 32, the actor who played Boon, the social chairman of Delta Tau Chi, in Animal House, and the hero’s best friend in Head over Heels. Though they live in Los Angeles, they have rented a loft in Manhattan for their trips East. Calm and low-key, Riegert seems to be the grounding for Bette’s electric charge, her steadying influence. On stage, says Midler, she is “a character without fear, who has no problem being vulgar or outrageous. But in my private life, I’m one of the most paranoid per sons in the world.”

At one time, she admits, she might have gone the way of Rose or Janis Joplin. She smoked too much grass and she drank too many stingers. No more. Bette has managed to divide herself into two women, the one who prances onstage in a parrot hat and the one who enjoys a very quiet life with her boyfriend. Like Rose and Janis, she knows where she has been. But unlike those pathetic victims of their own talent, she also knows where she is going.