The legendary
Bette Midler holds forth on art, illusion, marriage, kids,
and the eternal lure of Las Vegas.
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.
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