The overweight teenager with Coke-bottle glasses and dreams of stardom stared glumly into the family back yard-a sugar cane field-where a mammoth garbage dumpster was plunked in the red mud like a sunken hippo.
No grass, no tulips. No television, not even a telephone.
”Oh, God, it was soooo dreary,” Bette Midler sighs, conjuring up gray memories of rural Aiea, Hawaii, where an alien Jewish girl in a Samoan neighborhood battled the cynicism of her father, a house painter for the Navy.
”Daddy was a yeller,” Midler recalls, ”the original curmudgeon-negative and undermining.
”I was,” she whispers sadly, ”constantly fighting for some self-esteem . . . and even after I became famous, he`d say: `Yeah . . . well . . . it will be gone tommorrow.”`
Not likely. Fred Midler`s sour grapes would have withered on the vine had he lived to meet The Queen Bee of Walt Disney, the mistress of comic blockbusters now unleashing her darker side in ”Stella” (a remake of the 1937 ”Stella Dallas” starring the late Barbara Stanwyck), which opens in Chicago Friday.
”When I first read the script, every three pages I was sobbing,” says the family-oriented actress, perched on a floral couch in her ”jewel-box-decorated-down-to-the-inch” Beverly Hills haven, 3-year-old Sophie fingerpainting a mama bear nearby.
On this day, Mama Midler`s reddish hair is short and faded, the absence of any makeup congruent with her mood.
”I sobbed a lot!” she groans, pulling off burgundy spectacles to do exactly that while recounting the tale of a working-class woman who has a short love affair, gets pregnant, raises her daughter alone, and eventually drives the teenager into the arms of a new family and a better life.
First a 1925 silent picture, then Barbara Stanwyck`s ticket to fame,
”Stella” 50 years later is a woman redesigned: ”In the `37 version,”
Midler explains, ”Stella`s a trampy, trashy, wily, cunning, scheming bitch who sets her cap for a rich husband, then gets rid of him, though she takes his money to raise Jenny. We didn`t feel people would buy that anymore.
”In our picture, Stella has no cunning or guile, and she`s a single mother who works, who has great pride, and who lives for that daughter,” a woman not unlike Midler`s own mother, Ruth.
”My mother reigned indomitable. She believed in me, and with no money, no help, four kids and a difficult husband, she pressed on through the morass. Nothing got her down,” though she hated the family`s government-subsidized housing.
”She must have been embarrassed because she never invited guests over,” says Midler, who easily identified with the core of humiliation experienced by her heroine.
”Stella is deemed vulgar. Her poverty is beyond her control. She has no education, no social status, and she knows it. In one of the film`s key scenes, she gives Jenny a birthday party and, humiliatingly, nobody shows up. She eventually decides to make the ultimate sacrifice.”
Midler calls the film`s finale, when Stella stands outside in a snowstorm, her nose pressed up against glass watching her daughter marry,
”heartbreaking beyond belief. I`ve never heard of a mother giving her daughter away . . . only Stella Dallas. . . . It`s mythic.”
But on the heels of the mushy ”Beaches,” is mythic melodrama what the public craves from the queen of camp?
”`Beaches` touched a huge chord in women,” Midler bristles, ”but it was reduced to tear-jerker status by 50-year-old male reviewers who feel they`ve been manipulated when they start to cry. I`m afraid that`s what I`m up against on `Stella` too.”
But whether in comic farce or melodrama, ”the work I do in pictures is not the kind of work I dreamed I`d do,” says the diva with clout to burn, who envisions ”unearthing a little rabbit of my own . . . a fantastical movie like a South American novel with music, which nobody will want to make, though I haven`t even begun to use my power,” she warns.
”Also,” she complains, ”in the `30s and `40s there was an elegance to pictures . . . now it`s all very low, coarse and vulgar.”
Vulgar? Mmmmmm. Are we talking to the real Divine Miss M, who strutted at Manhattan`s sex-crazed Continental Baths in the early 1970s, telling raunchy jokes and crooning torch songs in wedgies and a towel, who later commandeered the stage from a motorized wheelchair, outfitted as a mermaid in sequinned bra and tail?
”Yes, I know, but now everybody is vulgar. How dare Madonna wear a corset in public. I`m totally offended.
”I did worse,” she giggles. ”I did better . . . and worse. I was brilliant. I am,” she finishes, ”the most enchanting live performer.”
One minute prudish, shy, vulnerable, the next sly, testy and worthy of her motto, ”trash with flash, sleaze with ease,” who is this?
”There are,” she reckons, ”two people living in this body. Yeah . . . I have a duchess mentality and a tramp mentality. I love the low life and still have an affinity for it,” this from the doyenne of the Mickey Mouse studio.
”Disney always tells the press they found me face down in the gutter and dragged me out of it,” snaps the woman who yanked the studio`s sagging fortunes heavenward with her quartet of comic blockbusters: ”Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” ”Ruthless People,” ”Outrageous Fortune” and ”Big Business.”
”That`s right! So I`ve told Jeffrey Katzenberg (chairman, Walt Disney Studios) to stop saying that,” though Midler`s career, after ”The Rose”
(1979), was dead-ended by the time ”Jinxed” made her box-office poison in 1982.
”True. I didn`t work for three years, and was unjustly accused of sabotaging that terrible picture. Nobody wanted me.
”I had,” Midler reveals, ”a nervous breakdown. It`s a horrible thing to lose faith in oneself . . . a killer. I sat home crying, sleeping and spent plenty of time getting drunk on Courvoisier. Finally, I went to a therapist and learned I wasn`t to blame, that my feelings of persecution were correct. He told me to get busy.”
While reviving herself with stage shows and record albums (among 10 records, three won Grammys, and ”Wind Beneath My Wings” from the album
”Beaches,” which went platinum last Wednesday, earned her two Grammy nominations), Midler`s renaissance hit its full stride in October, 1984, when she met a British-accented German commodities broker/comedian named Martin Von Haselberg, a.k.a. Harry Kipper of the Kipper Kids, who performed his act wearing only shaving cream and a jock strap. (”Some act,” quips Midler.)
”I was,” she believes, ”fated to meet Harry,” and as a devotee of the occult and spirits, she married the zany comedian just two months after she met him.
”Women meet my husband,” she says, ”and they fall down dead. I liked his size-6 feet-and his aristocratic, commanding manner. He`s intense and formal and a genius father.”
And before him. . . . ”There was no before him. . . . I was so compulsive about my career, I was asleep at the wheel.
”I didn`t want Harry to be like all the others-`Ahhh, I`ll dump him in a couple of weeks when I`m bored.` This was a total commitment,” cemented in 1986 when the couple`s daughter, Sophie, was born. That same year, ”Down and Out in Beverly Hills” revived her fortunes.
”I`ve finally woken up from a long dream,” she exclaims, her compulsive ambition a thing of the past, though two more films are lined up back to back. First, for Disney, she will co-star with Woody Allen in ”Scenes From a Mall,” a comedy; next, for 20th Century Fox, she will play 1940s band leader Ina Ray Hutton.
”But no matter what I do,” she insists, ”I no longer have the need to show them-though I did. In fact, my misery and singlemindedness helped make my success. It never occurred to me that I could fail or that I had another option. Now that kind of ambition seems invalid.”
More interested nowadays in ”raising a happy kid who feels good about herself,” Midler proclaims: ”I am a fabulous mother . . . . I do not stop mothering my kid for a second, and I`d like to adopt a whole brood . . .
”I`d also love another baby of my own,” she adds softly, speaking of her miscarriage of a year ago. ”I was excited to be pregnant again . . . then very, very depressed. What died was my chance . . . though,” she vows, ”I`m gonna get pregnant again,” this at age 44.
Suddenly perking up, Midler hilariously describes the ”agony” of breast-feeding Sophie the first six months, ”before I discovered the electric breast pump, which made me fertile as a cow,” she deadpans.
And just ask about Sophie`s first appearance at the hospital: ”I was appalled. We both cried when she came out. She looked like a 60-year-old stockbroker: bald, wrinkled and puffy,” three years later a blond-haired princess:
”Oh, God, yes. I`m completely enchanted by my child. She`s very affectionate, though she wasn`t for a long time. She`d say: `No kisses, no kisses,` because she has a certain coldness, too. She can turn it off-just like her mother.”
Indeed, at times a disarming coldness rises in the air, more defense than offense, for Midler is battle-weary, she confides, worn down and out from a series of losses she rarely discusses:
Her younger brother, Daniel, was born retarded; her best high school friend, Beth, died at age 19; her older sister, Susan, walked out of a Manhattan garage in 1968 and was killed by a car, sister Bette identifying her body; her mother died of liver and breast cancer a decade ago; her father died of a heart attack in 1986; then Bette had the miscarriage.
”It`s unbelievable; it`s like I was in a war. I don`t think those losses made me stronger; they`ve robbed me of love and happiness and laughs-so I try not to think of them.”
Don`t even mention the shadow that AIDS has cast on her world: ”I`ve lost everybody,” she whispers, now beginning to cry. ”I don`t have any friends left-nobody to talk to. I know at least 35 men who have died from AIDS; dear, dear friends, three of them my dearest. I miss them . . . the laughs,” she trails off, no longer able to speak.
”Our culture,” she later finishes, ”is cruel, its homophobia unconscionable. Makes me wish I wasn`t in the human race.”
Little wonder that, before the cameras in ”Stella,” Midler is an emotional hurricane, delivering tears and pathos with no second takes required.
”I told you at the beginning, I sob a lot. And I`ve suffered a lot, paid my dues, and never felt entitled to my success. Now that I have it-and Harry and Sophie-I definitely feel a sense of gratitude. . . . I`m a lucky woman.
”Now,” Madame M smiles in parting, laughing at Sophie trying on one of her wigs, ”would you like to hear our wig song?”
Sure.
”I`ll sing it:
”Oh you gotta wear a wig-wig-wig-wig-wig if you`re gonna be famous,
”You gotta wear a wig-wiggety-wig-wiggety-wig if you`re gonna be smart.
”Because a wig will hide the worst of all your features,
”Yes, a wig will really help you play the part.”
