by Mark Bego
The benefit raised $60,000 for Phoenix House. According to the president of the organization, Dr. Mitchell S. Rosenthal, “We’re happy to be connected with The Rose because I think the film shows how people who get caught up in drugs are in as much pain as they are. Drugs have been glorified in show business and in rock, and this film punctuates that.” (92).
A couple of ironies punctuated the night, however. At the party, several darkened corners of Roseland reeked of marijuana smoke, and the antidrug fundraising was hosted by none other than automotive industry czar John DeLorean, whose own cocaine troubles were later to become headline news.
The ballroom of Roseland was decorated that night with three thousand real roses, imported from Michigan. But the starring flower that evening was Bette herself. She was resplendent in a strapless black lace dress, a $2,500,000 diamond necklace, her golden locks—which she referred to as being “Venetian blond”—and her nouveau svelte figure. She had lost twenty pounds for her transition to movie star. According to her, she accomplished the weight loss by living on liquid protein. “It came in these plastic bottles that looked just like Janitor-in-a-Drum [liquid cleaning soap]. It tasted like it, too!” she laughed (89).
Her date for the premiere and the party afterward was her current boyfriend, Peter Riegert. Speaking to the press about her love life, she stated at the time, “I’ve been lucky in love lately. I think I’ve been lucky in that I’ve experienced all kinds of men, and I’ve learned a lot about the way human beings are with one another. So that in part, I’ve been lucky. But there has been a certain amount of pain, too” (86).
The following night the West Coast Premiere was held in Los Angeles at the Plitt Century Plaza Theater, and a party was given at the Century Plaza Hotel. The benefit premiere raised $130,000 for the Los Angeles International Film Exposition. The star-studded crowd that gathered that evening included Raquel Welch, Nick Nolte, Jacqueline Bisset, Milton Berle, Hugh Hefner, and Bette’s former musical mates Melissa Manchester and Barry Manilow.
The reviews and—even better—the crowds that The Rose drew were phenomenal. Bette was an instant hit in the film role. The reception to her acting was so overwhelmingly good that everyone wondered what took so long to get her up on the big screen! She truly threw herself into the demanding role of the Rose and obviously released gallons of pent-up emotional venom on the characterization. She was able to act out her resentment toward Aaron Russo in the scenes where Rose battles her fictional manager, Rudge. She also, very poignantly and painfully, brought to life her frustration with her parents and her lifelong unsuccessful struggle to create a rapport with her father.
One of the most emotionally devastating scenes in the film shows Bette in a phone booth before the final concert. Forlorn, pathetic, and frantic for the helping hand that she needs so desperately, Rose telephones her parents in a last attempt at communication, only to find that they have nothing much to say to each other. It is one of the most depressing and draining scenes ever captured on film. The emotions were obviously real—as they were drawn from Bette’s own life. The scene ends up with the drugged-out Rose collapsing on stage and dying, without ever finding the kind of love and acceptance that she so desperately sought.
“It was very moving, the whole evening that we shot it was very moving . . . and then there was the memory that I used when I was doing. . . . whenever I see that clip it brings it all back. . . . To be honest, it was real,” Bette later admitted. “They took something very lovely out of that scene that really burned my ass, because I thought it was the most telling thing in the whole film. She [Rose] says, ‘What are you watching [on television]? . . . Oh, she’s good, I like her.’ Those two or three sentences told the whole story of the relationship between the mother and father and daughter. They’d prefer to watch somebody else, some other girl on the show. It’s so mystical, it makes me all misty-eyed” (16).
The telephone scene is very close to me,” she claimed (86). “I used to phone my parents every time something came up. Of course, being so far away from each other, everything always has a distance to it—you know, death, sickness. They used to not tell me a lot of stuff about sickness, and I never told them the bad parts. Until real desolation set in, like when my sister died. What happens when you leave home is you turn around to watch and see how your folks are doing, and they’re the same. I tried to say everything to my folks, but they never listened, they never asked for any daughterly advice. I told them to try to have a little more fun, but they couldn’t get themselves into that frame of mind. It used to drive me mad, because I could see them wasting away before my eyes” (8).
When Fred Midler was reached in Hawaii for his comments on his daughter’s first starring movie role, it was clear that something wider than the Pacific Ocean separated Bette and her father. “I’m just not interested in that kind of entertainment,” he said. “Now I hear she’s in the movies, though. Something about Janet Joplin? I think she was some sort of rock singer. I don’t like to spend money and I think charging four or five dollars to see a movie is outrageous. But to see my own daughter . . . well, I guess I’ll splurge” (15). Reportedly, he never did go to the theater to see The Rose.
One of the strangest things about being in a movie is seeing yourself up on the screen for the very first time. You have a mental picture of what you think you looked like doing it, what you were supposed to be doing while the cameras were rolling, but it is rarely the same as what appears in the final cut of the film. Bette had a very negative reaction to her first look at herself as the Rose.
“There was a cast and crew screening of The Rose at a huge theater at Fox,” she explained, “and I was so upset that I was gasping for air in the last row. People were turning around and looking at me, and they couldn’t watch the picture because I was so frantic” (18).
According to her, “I had a strong mental picture of myself. You know, someone sort of very glamorous and exquisite, I mean, in this body is a thin white duchess. And imagine my surprise when I saw a sort of ratty, broken-down, exhausted, split-ended, bleached blond creature on the screen. I mean, I know I made her up and I did my hair myself, but when I finally saw the rough cut, the mental picture I had been carrying all these years crumbled. It was a big shock. The second time I saw it, though, I really enjoyed it” (86).
The critics all agreed that the Rose was a character that only Bette Midler could successfully portray. No other singers-turned-actresses could or would tackle such a part and let themselves be seen as so self-debased. There was also a scene that depicted explicit lesbianism. According to Bette, the scene was more graphic before editing. “That was a nightmare,” she said. “I’m real straight, but we were really trying to be sympathetic. I jumped into it, hugging and kissing this girl. When my [former] manager Aaron Russo saw the dailies, he about jumped out of his drawers. He said, ‘How could you do that? I told you, “No tongue!’ ” I thought it was nice, though they cut it all out in the film” (71).
This film gave Bette the chance to be totally over-the-top with frankness, whether she was dealing with sex, foul language, or the excesses of rock & roll. The very first scene with Midler in The Rose, she is shown descending an airplane staircase, obviously stoned out of her mind. Halfway down the staircase toward the tarmac, she stumbles and falls. Once she gets up on her feet, she accidentally drops a fifth of booze she had been clutching among her possessions. This scene sets the tone for the downward slide of the singer who calls herself the Rose.
In one of the first concert sequences, her manager, Rudge (Alan Bates), warns her that several VIPs and camera crews are in the audience, and he implores her, “Please don’t say ‘motherfucker.’ ” Naturally, the first words out of her mouth once she hits the stage are “Hiya, motherfuckers!”
Mid-movie, after a night of lovemaking, the Rose confesses to her new boyfriend Houston (Frederic Forrest) that she once took on the whole high school football team—sexually—and woke up on the fifty-yard line. When this revelat
ion fails to shock him, she feels that she has met her match—a man who can accept her on her own terms. Another sexually charged scene is the one where the Rose introduces Houston—her current male lover—to Sarah (Sandra McCabe), her female ex-lover.
Bette was able to weave so many aspects of her own life into The Rose. After a wild ride together in a limousine, the Rose takes Dallas to a drag bar in Greenwich Village. As they walk in, the performer on stage is impersonating her real-life namesake—Bette Davis. When another drag queen impersonates “The Rose,” it as a sequence that pokes fun at, and simultaneously spotlights, who she was, who she is, and who she wanted to be—a legendary movie star.
In another tongue-in-cheek self-parodying scene, she chases Houston into the all-male Luxor Baths, where they have a heated discussion. The sequence emerges as a strange sort of tribute to her past at the Continental Baths.
There is also a fascinating postconcert sequence, in which Rose and Rudge are seen having a dialogue before getting aboard a waiting helicopter. They are standing on top of what was then the Pan Am building, on East 42nd Street. Directly behind the actors are the lights of the World Trade Center, looming in the background. Now, with the World Trade Center a tragic piece of American history, it is haunting to see Bette as the Rose, standing in front of it.
It seems that every scene between the Rose and her manager directly echoed Bette’s real-life relationship with Aaron Russo. In the film, the Rose escapes him by dying; in reality, Midler escaped Russo’s clutches by firing him right before the film opened.
In The Rose, the concert footage—especially on “When a Man Loves a Woman,” is very intense and lovingly filmed. Bette’s portrayal of the Rose is complex, emotionally multilayered, raw, frank, and quite tragically magical. She charges every one of her scenes with drama and crackle.
Rose’s final conversation with her parents—from a phone booth—is a devastating reflection of her awkward relationship with her own father. It mirrored the fact that her dad refused to see her in concert—even when she was a star, headlining a stadium full of screaming fans in her own hometown.
There are also some interesting cameo appearances in the film. Doris Roberts, who in the 2000s is known as one of the stars of the hit TV series Everybody Loves Raymond, appears briefly as the mother of the Rose. And late disco star Sylvester is seen in the drag bar sequence as a male Diana Ross impersonator.
In the Rose’s final self-destructive hour, cranked up on a fatal dose of heroin, she is led to the stage like a fragile rag doll. However, she is able to come alive long enough to sing an impassioned version of “Stay with Me, Baby.” Over twenty years later, The Rose is still one of the best movies about the excesses of rock & roll ever made.
When the film came out, Bette was very verbal about pointing out that drugs were the crutch of the Rose, and not with Bette. With regard to the drugs, she proclaimed at the time, “I don’t do drugs. I have a devil. I don’t like to get stoned because then it comes out and I can’t control it and it’s very sick. In the early days, I used to smoke dope and drink stingers before I worked. I had a lot of fun, but I used to lose my voice all the time. At least I think I lost my voice. I was so stoned, I was never sure” (30).
According to Frank Rich in Time magazine, “Midler is not a great singer or a subtle actress or an exquisite beauty; yet she just may be a movie star. . . . For Bette Midler, self-styled queen of ‘trash with flash,’ The Rose is an ideal throne!” (93). David Denby, in New York magazine, raved, “What a storm of acting!” Jack Kroll, in Newsweek, said, “Bette Midler’s performance is an event to be experienced—a fevered, fearless portrait of a tormented, gifted, sexy child-woman who sang her heart out until it exploded,” while in the New York Daily News, Rex Reed exclaimed, “Remember this day. It’s the same one that will go down in history as the day Bette Midler made her movie debut” (16).
Even more gratifying were the phenomenal figures at the box offices across America. Twentieth Century-Fox reported that in its first three-day weekend, The Rose grossed a spectacular $793,063. In its first five days of release at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City alone, $91,111 was taken in; and in four days at the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles, the total came to $60,189. The Rose was a huge hit in less than a week, and Bette Midler became the year’s hottest new film star.
The soundtrack album from The Rose was unlike any of Bette’s previous albums, as it is recorded in the character of the Rose, a woman who—like Joplin—holds back nothing to pump emotion into every song, no matter how raspy or dragged out her voice sounds. This was in complete contrast to the controlled, heavily orchestrated sound on Bette’s Broken Blossom album. The tone is set by the opening cut, the rocking guitar and horn-driven “Whose Side Are You On?” The Southern rocker “Midnight in Memphis” and the rock anthems “Sold My Soul to Rock ’n’ Roll” and “Keep on Rockin’ ” showed her off in a hard-rocking light that she had never dredged up before in her concerts. Tracing the physical downfall of the character of the Rose, by the time Bette gets to the song “Stay with Me,” her voice is low down, raspy, and filled with gutsy emotion. Finally, the album ends with the bittersweet ballad of “The Rose,” which is more clearly sung by a recognizable Bette Midler, as opposed to the Southern Comfort–laced character of the Rose. For the most part, Bette clearly poured out her heart and soul on the recording of these songs, like never before.
The first single that was released from The Rose album was Bette’s raw and conviction-filled version of the soulful “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Originally, it was a Number 1 hit for Percy Sledge in 1966. Midler’s hard-edged version, sung from a female perspective, became the album’s first Top 40 hit, peaking at Number 35 on the Billboard singles chart.
But that was just the beginning. For such a heavily rock & roll-themed movie, it would have seemed that the rock numbers would have been the best single choices. However, when the sentimental ballad of a theme song, “The Rose,” was released as the second single from the film, it went on to became Bette’s biggest single hit (Number 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart, Number 3 on the Billboard Pop chart). The song spent eight weeks in the American Top 10, and it was all over the radio airwaves in the summer of 1980. Catapulted by the success of its title song, the album hit Number 13 in Billboard, and it was her first Platinum certification for an LP, signifying a million copies sold. Suddenly, she was the toast of the record world all over again. Whatever momentum she had lost on her last four albums was quickly dispelled by the success of the song “The Rose.” Ultimately, the soundtrack to The Rose and the theme song of the same name went on to become the biggest-selling records of her career—up to that point in time. She had set a new high-water mark for herself.
Regarding the song “The Rose,” Bette claimed, “It’s the kind of song singers wait for all their lives. My real fans know me as a ballad singer anyway. They don’t pay attention to the nutsy stuff. But for me to finally get some kind of mass recognition as a straight-ahead balladeer is probably the greatest thrill of my career” (87).
Commenting on the film, music producer Paul A. Rothchild noted that it “shows all the negative aspects of a performer’s life, and then closes with a song that’s a total positive statement. And Bette’s vocal is very melancholy and beaten, which I like as a counterpoint to the optimism of the lyric. The film opens with ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart,’ an a cappella ballad, and closes with ‘The Rose,’ which starts with single voice and piano. So it opens with her singing a girl’s plaint and closes with a grown woman’s affirmation” (87).
The rest of the music in the film is out-and-out screaming rock & roll, with Bette hitting some the harshest notes of her career. “I’ve always loved that kind of music,” she stated, “but I never really had the nerve to sing it. I wasn’t sure about my own credentials and people in rock & roll can get real uppity about that. I always sort of skirted the issue: I’d throw in one of those songs every now and again, but I never came out and said that’s really
all I want to do” (87).
Rothchild decided that the soundtrack version of “The Rose” was a bit too sparse for radio airplay, so he sweetened it a bit for release as a single. “I had fought scoring all along. There’s not one note of scoring in the film: it’s all live music except for the diner scene where there’s music coming out of the juke box. I told them, ‘We haven’t used one violin in this entire movie and I want to keep it that way!’ But when it came time for the single, I didn’t dare release it to AM radio with just piano and voice. So for the single I added strings, French horns, and some woodwinds” (87).
The Rose added the frosting to a career that was already an outrageous piece of cake for Bette Midler. When it came time for industry accolades to be handed out, her name was prominently displayed. For acting, she won not one but two Golden Globe Awards, for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy and for New Female Star of the Year. The Rose also won a Golden Globe for Best Song from a Feature Film. The cherry on top of the icing came when Bette was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in a film. Although she ultimately lost the award to Sally Field’s performance in Norma Rae, Bette was now considered a bona fide “A list” movie star.
The song “The Rose” was not nominated for an Academy Award. Explained its writer, Amanda McBroom, “The Academy requires a song be written specifically for the film. They send you a form to fill out and I told them the truth. So now I have a reputation for being stupid, but honest” (87).
However, for Bette, the awards and accolades were just beginning. In 1981, her recording of “The Rose” was nominated for a Grammy Award as the Record of the Year and for Best Pop Performance—Female. She ended up winning the award in the latter category.
The Rose was such a smash that the big question now was how to follow it up. Among the film possibilities discussed was a 1930s-style comedy called The Polish Nightingale, a bizarre domestic comedy called Strike and Hyde, and even the first mention of a big-screen remake of the Gypsy Rose Lee musical Gypsy, with Bette starring as Mama Rose. According to her at the time, she liked the idea of staying with the “rose” theme. “I’d like to spend the rest of my life doing only characters named Rose: The Rose Kennedy Story . . . The Life of Rose Marie,” she laughingly claimed. “I was really sorry that the Rose died. I could have gone on forever: I loved her with all my heart, she had everything, and people loved her, too. I could have done Rose II, Rose Goes to Vietnam, Rose Shops at Dior . . .” (94). For Midler, suddenly everything seemed to be coming up roses.