Bette on Bette

Bette Midler Interview by Myrna Blyth

Ladies Home Journal January, 1992

Bette Midler would be the ideal girlfriend next door--if you live in a pretty wild neighborhood. She's warm, smart and fun. And her fans seems to know this. "I lo-o-ove Bette Midler. I always rent one of her videos when I need cheering up," a woman told me when I mentioned that I was going to interview "The Divine Miss M." Another declared that Midler was the only star she'd ever want to meet because she was sure Bette would be both irreverent and easy to talk to.

They've got it almost exactly right. Midler comes to our interview wearing what you might when hanging around with an old pal--a comfy pair of wren-brown leggings and a brown velour top. She doesn't bother with makeup, keeps her horn-rims on and doesn't seem to care that about an inch of brown roots shows inher curly blond hair. While she sips mineral water and noshes on french fries, she jokes and hoots and relaxes after a while into no-holds-barred girl talk. Why, she'll even tell you, "I never fake orgasm. Ne-ver. Never had to."

Still, you don't quite forget that however down-to-earth she may be, she's also a superstar. Every so often, with a perfectly timed wisecrack and a guffaw, her larger-than-life personality bursts through. And when she dishes about friends and enemies and those in between, it is the likes of Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand and Geraldo Rivera she's talking about, after all.

Now, Woody she absolutely loves.

"It was the most fun I ever had in my life," she says about co-starring with Allen in last year's Scenes from a Mall. Although the film was a box-office flop, Midler says she doesn't regret making it. "During filming, I'd get up every day and say, 'I'm going to see Woody,' and I'd jump into makeup and runout there and wait to hear what he was going to say next. He was really magical to work with."

About Barbra she is considerably more restrained. Both Barbra and Bette had important movies, movies critical to their careers, come out recently. Bette stars in For the Boys, which was released at Thanksgiving, in which she plays a USO entertainer; she sings as well as acts in this role. Barbra is the producer, director and star of Prince of Tides, a Christmas release. Midler claims she does not feel at all competitive, not even a teensy bit, with the performer with whom she's frequently compared.

"I think Barbra has one of the most beautiful pop voices in the history of pop voices. But I think her music doesn't mean as much to her as it once did," she says, considering every word as she speaks. "I think she wants to be a director. Barbra's looking for a different kind of respect than I am. I like her in a funny way. I'm not friends with her, but I'm not not friends. I've cooked for her."

Did she eat?

"And how!"

As for Geraldo, who wrote about their brief sexual encounter in his steamy autobiography, Exposing Myself, Midler declares--"Oh, he was a slimeball! If I had known then that he was going to do this twenty years later, I never would have given him the time of day." (In truth, Geraldo speaks well of her. He writes admiringly of Bette's voluptuous figure and sexual appetite.) "Actually, he was grotesque," she continues. "I was very young--well, relatively young--and he and his producer pushed me into my own bathroom and broke two poppers under my nose and started to grope me. And I kept going, 'What is this? What is this? What's going on?' My friends say, of course, he was such a charmer, right after that I had to go to bed with him," she says, laughing. "He pursued me all the way to Oklahoma. I think he was doped up. I think he was doing a lot of drugs in those days. I don't mind saying this. I really think he was."

Midler seems only semi-incensed about Rivera's tale of their lusty interlude. "My husband was amused," she admits. "He says it will be good for my career, for people to know what a wild woman I am." She grins.

Midler's been married for the past seven years to Martin von Haselberg, a somewhat mysterious German; in the past, he has claimed to be both a commodities broker and a performance artist withthe stage name of Harry Kipper. Now, Midler says, he is studying for his master of fine arts degree at the American Film Institute and wants to become a filmaker. Their daughter, Sophie, is five. Midler, at forty-six, still wants to have another child. "Why not? My doctor says I have the insides of a nineteen-year-old." She seems to adore her husband and says that they have a good home life because it is very un-Hollywood and "very private." The only thing that annoys her about Martin? "He shaves his head. It really drives me crazy."

Midler acknowledges that, year ago, she used to drive people pretty crazy herself. She went to New York in the mid-sixties with one goal: to be a star. "I was totally and completely focused and interested in only one thing, my career. I missed a lot. I didn't see hardly anything." Was she surprised by her success? She shakes her head no. "I never was surprised. I would have been surprised if I had failed."

Midler's story is a classic rags-to-riches saga. She grew up poor, the daughter of a housepainter, in a Samoan neighborhood of Honolulu, an outsider among outsiders. She was one of only a few Caucasian students and the sole Jewish girl in her school.

For years, as a part of her act, she has made cracks about her large breasts. "Big boobs mean big bucks," she jokes. But, she remembers, she was terribly self-conscious in seventh grade as the girl with not just the biggest but the only bust. "My mother wouldn't buy me a brassiere, and I had to pin my slip together so that they wouldn't jiggle around. I had to go to phys ed class with all these Oriental girls who had brassieres that were holding up nothing. It was horrible. They teased me incessantly because I would, like, bobble on my way home."

Still, as a performer, Midler has always played up her vibrant sexuality. "Oh, thank the Lord I;ve got something going," she says. Her first real breakthrough was a flamboyant cabaret act at New York City's Continental Baths, a gay men's club. In her act, which she eventually turned into a stage show, she sang, told raunchy jokes and managed to be both outrageous and endearing. At the time, her life offstage was just as unconventional and out of control. "You mean when I was drinking and taking drugs and falling down in a stupor?" she says.

Nowadays, Midler is more low-key in every way. But Bette, the brash and brassy performer, is still around. "You know, when twenty thousand people come to see you, you better light up. So I do, and I enjoy it very, very much," she says. "But in my own life, when I get home I just veg out."

These days, her private life, as she describes it, is a diary of domesticity that would make even Martha Stewart envious. "I'm a fabulous cook, and my husband is a fabulous cook," she says. "I collect cookbooks. I love good food. I sew. You won't believe it, but I sew. We decorate. We go to flea markets and swap meets. We have a lot of friends who own restaurants, people who like to eat well. I like that. There's a certain quality of life that's missing in this country. People go so fast--everything in this country is about speed, about going faster, having more status, more money. And I find that's not really the way."

Does she think she's having as much fund as she did in her wild-and-crazy days?

"Of course I'm having fun," she snaps, a bit defensively. "Doesn't it sound like fun? A different kind of fun. Now we are cooking from the garden, which is our new thing. Have you heard about Heritage seeds? There is a group of people who believe some species or varieties of plants are being lost, so they collect the seeds and they trade. So cooking from the garden is planting many different varieties of many different vegetables and making all the recipes that go with them. There are thousands of varieties of eggplants. Aren't you fascinated?" She grins, her eyes glinting and narrowing, challenging you to be fascinated by eggplants, too. "They come in red, yellow, green, Purple . . ."

Is Miss M putting me on? She pauses for a moment, watching my reaction, and wrinkles up her forehead. "You know, I've got to admit it. I'm not as much fun as I used to be."

When she isn't nurturing her eggplants, Midler finds being a mother to Sophie, her little dynamo, both complex and challenging. "She's a lot like me. So it's comforting, and also horrifying." Midler admits, "she really gets on my nerves sometimes. I love her, but she's really stubborn. If you ask her to apologize, she won't do it." Midler knows that she is just as stubborn as her daughter and, like Sophie, can't stand to be wrong. "That's one of the main things my husband hates about me--I always have to be right. I tell him, 'I don't have to be right. I simply am right,'" she declares in a way any wife would understand.

How will she handle Sophie as the little girl gets older? What will she say if, for example, Sophie asks her if she ever took drugs? Midler thinks for a moment. "I'm going to tell her the truth: 'I never took drugs, and I never had a drink,;" she replies sweetly, with her perfect comic timing.

Midler, who's no longer as moody or tempestuous as she was in the past, tries todeal with her work in a more relaxed way. She says she is not terribly concerned if she is going up or going down in the Hollywood hierarchy. "They used to make lists of the bankable girls, the girls who made the big bucks. I was never on anybody's list. It was like I was invisible. I was very upsetting. Finally, I decided it's a conspiracy. I can't even think about this. So I gave up on it," she says with a shrug. Now she is reportedly paid $ 3 million a movie.

She doesn't even get very annoyed when the executives at Disney keep congratulating themselves on how they rescued her lackluster career. "It wasn't in the toilet. Oh, maybe I was headed for the bathroom door," she says, laughing. Midler's first major movie, The Rose, in which she played a Janis Joplinesque rock star, was a 1979 hit, and she was nominated for an Academy Award. (The Rose was directed by Mark Rydell, who is directing For the Boys.) But her second film, Jinxed!, proved to be just that when it was released in 1982, and the box-office disaster derailed her in Hollywood. She had a breakdown and considers the experience of making the movie the low point in her career. She didn't make another film for several years, until the hit Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Disney signed her to a long-term contract followed by a series of successes, including Ruthless People and Big Business.

"Sometimes I'm sorry I got swept up in it," Midler says, trying to explain exactly how she views her career. "Remember when Pinocchio goes to Stromboli, and Stromboli convinces him to be actor? And Pinocchio performs a little bit, and Stromboli puts him in a cage? Well, that's a lot like what it's like. You want to do this, and you're completely fascinated by the dream. And you get there. And suddenly you're in a cage."

Although Midler now feels that no one can take away her accomplishments, she does seem concerned about the success of her current film. Like Beaches, it has been developed by her own company, All Girl Productions. In the movie, she and her co-star, James Caan, play a song, dance and comedy team that entertains the troops during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. During the course of the movie, she sings seven songs from the different eras. She also ages almost fifty years, maturing from a blond bombshell to a show-business legend.

Bette went into intense training to get into shape for the role. "I had to. I'd let myself go. Totally. Remember, I lo-o-ove to eat. So I had to fast. I'm a very good faster. I have a trainer. I have a clensing regimen that I go on, and I do everything: hair, nails, waxing, teeth, everything."

She said the filming went well and was enhanced by a remarkable coincidence. The movie began production during the crisis in the Persian Gulf. Many of the extras playing World War II servicemen were soldiers and reservists who were called up when Operation Desert Storm began. Like the troops they were playing in the movie, young soldiers watched Midler perform just hours before they would fly off to war.

Besides promoting her new movie, Midler is currently very active in raising money for AIDS research.

"I do try to help," she says. "If I didn't, I would really feel like I wasn't a human being. It's as through you were living in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. What would you have done? How would you have behaved? I think most people don't perceive it as a holocaust because many people are not touched. The other day I was at an AIDS benefit and I mentioned seven names of friends who have died. I could have stood there and named two hundred people. I could have stood there for another hour. I happen to be someone who is touched, every week, every month, every year for ten years," she says softly.

In her act, Midler jokes, "I don't have to be well informed. I'm well endowed. I'm a star." But she tries very hard to be well informed and serious. She says in her free time she has been studying different religions. She worries about who will be the Democratic presidential candidate. And she says she tries very hard to be an ethical person. "Absolutely, every single minute."

She's even serious about her role as the most entertaining of entertainers. "I'm a cheerer-upper," she explains, thoughtfully. "That is my mission."

She says shes's learned many valuable lessons through the ups and downs of the past twenty years. "I've learned how to make deals," she says. "I've learned how to negotiate and that some things are more important than others. In order to get what you want, you have to choose what's important. You have to find the point past which you would never go." She thinks a moment and adds, "I've learned how to take responsibility for what comes on my watch. You know the old expression 'It happened on my watch'? Well, you have to take responsibility. And," she pauses and flashes her dazzling trademark grin, "I've learned where to buy my bras."

LHJ Editor-in-chief Myrna Blyth has also recently interviewed Katharine Hepburn and First Lady Barbara Bush