Winning Bette

As I wait outside the Colosseum, the 4,100-seat theater at Caesars Palace, the Las Vegas weekend is getting under way. Actors dressed as Roman soldiers stroll among the slot machines. A cheer goes up as somebody wins. Looming over all is a huge banner of the Divine Bette Midler, shapely gams and shoulders bare, clouds of boas hiding her naughty bits. Advertising her new spectacle, The Showgirl Must Go On , she’s an airbrushed goddess blessing the casino from on high. And alone among the plebeians, I’m about to meet the Divine.

The theater door opens; a burly young man comes out and grins. “I’m Bette’s bodyguard,” he says. We take an elevator below ground. You can feel the mass of this place. It’s like a bunker. At the end of a chilly hallway, I’m shown into the headliner’s dressing room. Beyond a partition, a piano pounds out a driving rhythm. “Viva Las Vegas!” sings a full-out voice, more powerful than I’d imagined. I sit down and let the voice transport me.

When it comes to Bette Midler, we all have memories. Her star power is such that, depending on our ages, we love her in completely different contexts. For some, she’s still the wild child who sang for guys in towels at the Continental Baths in New York City in 1970. For others, she’s the gloriously hammy leading lady of hit films like Beaches and Down and Out in Beverly Hills. In recent years she’s had fun with her own legend, serenading the kids on American Idol and picking up litter on The Simpsons.

It’s almost impossible now to remember how original she was. She was completely on her own wavelength, a retro rebel in the polyester ’70s. She brought an outrageously queer new groove to pop culture -- and why not? Outrageous queers were writing for her, including peerless comedy scribe Bruce Vilanch and, later, composer Marc Shaiman, who would go on to write the score for Hairspray.

Her stage shows were like musical thrill rides through pop history, bawdy and often unexpectedly moving. Who else would zip onstage on an electric wheelchair as a singing mermaid named Delores DeLago, the Toast of Chicago? And who but the gays were hip enough to get it?

Eventually the world began to catch up. As she proved in 1979’s The Rose, Miss M could act. She became a mainstream movie star, so bankable she brought Disney a gold rush that lasted into the ’90s. Off-screen, her All-Girl Productions, with its motto “We Hold a Grudge,” challenged the boundaries of the male-dominated film business. She collected piles of Grammys and Emmys. She got the green message long before it was in vogue, masterminding such efforts as the New York Restoration Project, charged with restoring and maintaining the city’s underserved parks and open spaces.

She also got married in 1984 to performance artist–turned–commodities broker Martin von Haselberg. They wed in Las Vegas -- at Caesars Palace, where 24 years later Bette is headlining now. In 1986, Bette gave birth to daughter Sophie. The family moved to New York City in 2000, with the idea that Bette would work there on her titular sitcom for CBS. Although that soon folded, her star kept on shining. Her Divine Miss Millennium Tour played to nearly half a million people. Her 2003 Rosemary Clooney songbook was her best-selling record in 20 years. In 2004 she scored more than $50 million with her Kiss My Brass tour.

Throughout this nearly 40-year period, gays have stayed loyal to Bette. But some of us wonder whether she stayed loyal to us. Which brings up the topic of gay marriage -- and an interview she did with Larry King in 2003. When asked whether gays should have the right to marry, she was unhesitatingly in support of civil rights like hospital visitation, but she wondered aloud whether gay men would want to commit to traditional monogamous marriage. She wasn’t insulting. (The transcript is easy to locate online.) But many gay fans were crestfallen. “We made her,” their argument went. “She should have supported us, no questions asked.”

In 2004 an Internet prank fanned the flames. A blogger posted an open letter to George W. Bush in defense of same-sex marriage, and someone in cyberspace attributed it to Bette. The letter went viral; she had to deny writing it, disappointing fans again. Soon afterward, when an Advocate reporter brought up gay marriage, she remained politely noncommittal. He pushed her: “We need you, Bette!” She retorted, “I don’t think you do. You’re doing just fine.”

That pronoun was what stung-- you, not we. Despite her long friendship with the gay community, Bette Midler did not see herself as a gay man. She thought of us as separate entities with separate points of view. Could we forgive her?

I realize the piano has stopped. Bette appears in the doorway. Her face is not the airbrushed icon of the ads. She looks her age, which is to say trim, attractive, and nobody’s fool. She’s wearing light gray slacks, a zip-up hoodie, and a scarf wound high around her throat. She’s sipping tea from a cup and saucer. We begin.