Bette Midler

by Mark Bego

  Her next decision involved her male co-star and love interest. She ended up with Ken Wahl, whose previous films were The Warriors (1979) and Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981). Oddly enough, Wahl was Bette’s first choice, but once she met him she realized that working with him was going to prove difficult.

  “To tell you the truth, I suggested him,” she later admitted, “but after I read with him, I felt it wouldn’t work. Mr. Siegel felt the same way, but Steven Bach [the former heard of United Artists Pictures] wanted him, so we were gracious about it. However, Mr. Siegel immediately told Ken that he had not been our choice, which right away set the guys teeth on edge. He never recovered from that particular blow to his pride” (30).

  Filming began in Lake Tahoe on May 5, 1981. It started out bad and only got worse. “I never knew it got so ugly,” Bette later said in amazement. “I never knew it got down to such mudslinging. It was an enormously painful experience” (30).

  The script was reportedly changed almost daily. The final plot revolved around the murder of a slimy gambler by his wife and the blackjack dealer he keeps stacking the deck against. Rip Torn played the gambler who has a formula for winning. He has his lucky cigars and his own lucky dealer (Wahl), whom he keeps breaking the bank with. Aside from gambling, his other favorite pastime involves slapping around his wife [Midler], who is an aspiring gambling-casino lounge singer. Wahl keeps getting fired from job after job because the casino owners think that he is in cahoots with Torn.

  Wahl seduces Midler, and the two of them conspire to kill Torn and split his insurance money. However, Torn commits suicide after losing a bundle one night, and it is up to Midler and Wahl to make his death look like an accident. After Torn’s death, Midler discovers that she is endowed with her ex-husband’s gambling prowess, and after a falling-out with Wahl, she gets him fired from his job by setting him up at the blackjack table. At the end of the film Midler surprises Wahl by splitting her winnings with him, and off they ride into the Vegas neon sunset to live happily ever after. It was a bit off-the-wall, but as a black comedy it could have worked. Unfortunately, it didn’t. One of the most gigantic problems was the chemistry between Bette, Ken, and director Siegel.

  Bette and Ken Wahl loathed each other upon sight. “Ken was unbelievably hateful to me. All during the shooting he was sending over these ‘mal’ vibes and wanted everybody to know it. That’s the kind of guy he is. The first time I met him, the first thing he said was, ‘I want you to know that I hate niggers and faggots.’ That was the first thing out of his mouth after ‘hello.’ I had no idea why he said that, because we had neither of those in our picture. It wasn’t as if I said to him, ‘We’re going to introduce you to a lot of gay black people who are going to do your hair and dress you every morning!’ ” (30).

  “After that comment, he turned to an Aubrey Beardsley that was hanging on the wall and said, ‘What the fuck is that?’ Now, I had not decorated these rooms. But I felt compelled to tell him, ‘That’s an Aubrey Beardsley.’ And I told him about Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. To which he replied, ‘Well, I don’t know nothin’ about that fuckin’ shit, and I don’t want to know nothin’ about it. I’m a baseball player.’ By that time, of course, I knew what particular terrain I had stumbled onto” (30).

  “Originally, I felt Ken Wahl had what we used to call ‘animal magnetism,’ even though he’s a little on the chubby side. And I still feel he photographs beautifully, and that there is a place for him in show business, somewhere—although hopefully not in my pictures!” she stressed (30).

  Changes in the script and reported demands for retakes caused Siegel and Midler to clash. According to one source in the Midler camp, Bette would get her comedy writer Jerry Blatt on the phone every night before the shooting, and they would rewrite the scene and the dialogue. Each morning, Bette would show up on the set with new pages of rewrites to be shot instead of the current script.

  The name “Brian Blessed,” which appears in the film’s credits as screenplay writer, was actually a name that was made up by the original writer, Frank D. Gilroy, so that his name wouldn’t be associated with the film. Jerry Blatt’s name was never on the film because there was a writer’s strike, and no one was supposed to know that he was working on the film. At different points in the production, Don Siegel, Bette Midler, and Jerry Blatt each separately rewrote scenes. “At times,” according to Siegel, “the three of us worked together” (8).

  Siegel claimed that he tried to enter the project objectively. “She was the one who picked me to direct the picture. So it became, I guess, rather strange and awkward. I can’t say that I enjoyed making the picture. I’m very glad that she took the responsibility, because the picture’s terrible!” (8).

  It is unclear exactly at what point in the making of Jinxed the production became an out-and-out battlefield, but the rumblings were heard early on. Not only did Siegel dislike working with Bette, but he also had very little power over what happened on the set each day. United Artists vice president Anthea Sylbert sided with Bette time and time again in disputes and overrode Siegel’s decisions. Somehow it became a matter of squaring off into opposing sides and taking aim. It was, oddly enough, the men against the women. Bette and Anthea were on one side, and Siegel and Wahl were on the other.

  “I’d never realized how men can gang up on women,” said Bette. “I mean, in the back of my head somewhere, no doubt, I had plenty of leftover vestiges from my childhood about guys beating up on me emotionally, but I don’t dwell on that kind of thing. I don’t like to be mired in mud. And I had never really realized how men don’t like a woman to be in charge, or to have power” (88).

  Siegel said Bette was one of the most problematic people he had ever worked with. “It was very difficult working with her. She comes on as an expert in every facet of the business. I’ve worked with many stars who are difficult, but she’s really a rough customer. . . . It shouldn’t have been anywhere near $15 million,” he said about the cost of the production. “It’s not up there on the screen, but she was constantly rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. All this from a girl who made two pictures, one a bomb” (95).

  “In every major disagreement I had with Bette Midler, and there were hundreds, UA [United Artists] backed her. They always gave in to her and that made my life an unhappy one. If I could have my name taken off it, I would. I wish to God I hadn’t made it. There were many things I expressly wanted to do, but they were all blocked by those two women who work there [Sylbert and UA studio president Paula Weinstein]” (95).

  At the same time, there were Bette’s battles with Ken Wahl. During the shooting of the film, Ken told the press that every time he was required to kiss Bette on camera, he had to think of kissing his dog in order to bear embracing Midler. “I just don’t get along with Bette very well,” said Wahl. “We come from two different worlds. It’s been miserable with her and took all my concentration to get up and go to work in the morning. If I knew before how this was going to be, I wouldn’t have done the movie. She doesn’t talk, she yells. I think the main problem is that she’s so insecure about everything. I enjoy being happy: Bette’s the kind of person who thrives on being miserable” (96).

  In her own defense, Bette claimed that the rest of the production company was being sloppy and lazy about the film. “I was trying to make the best movie I could make, and I was resented for it. Listen, when people make films, their work lives forever. I’m not modest about this: it happens to be a fact. And when somebody gives you that much money to make a picture, you can’t short-changè them. But these people—there wasn’t a single one of them who wasn’t out to stiff the studio. When I’m paid that much money, I feel that I have to do what they’re paying me for and not slough off. So I did it and I got kicked for it. And that’s hard, because when you are raised with that ethic, and you believe it, it’s debilitating to find that you’re surrounded by people who are actually just petty thieves. They’re lazy and they’re not committed, and they resent you for being so square
. It was like pulling a caravan up Mt. Everest all by myself. I had a horrible time. I thought it was the worst experience of my life” (88).

  Someone else who didn’t have his name on the production was director Sam Peckinpah. Explained Bette, “Sam Peckinpah came in and did one scene, which was a second-unit scene, a trailer-goes-over-a-cliff scene. I guess it was too much work for Mr. Siegel” (88).

  The atmosphere on the set had deteriorated to the point where Bette dreaded going to work every morning. “It was an enormously painful experience, but it was pain about something as trivial as a movie. A movie is basically a piece of fluff and entertainment.”

  She began to break down. “Every day, every morning toward the end, I felt I was holding on for dear life. I would wake up with heart palpitations. And sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would wake up, not screaming but not being able to breathe. I would just wake up with a shudder and have to pound my back or chest to catch my breath. On the set, it was as though a wall had come between them and me. I kept thinking, ‘If I can just get through one more day, one more day of having to face them and their awful hatred—or if it wasn’t hatred, indifference.’ Every day I walked between those walls feeling complete alienated and alone and worthless” (30).

  After the filming was completed, Bette continued in a downward spiral. “I had a terrible nervous breakdown,” she later admitted. “I was sick for a good three months. I was very, very ill. And I started to see a doctor because it was just too much for me to deal with by myself. . . . I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t get out of bed. I just cried for weeks on end. And anything would set me off. I couldn’t control myself. I had just been so attacked, and so humiliated. It was as though they wanted to destroy me, and I couldn’t understand what I had done” (88).

  In the September 15, 1981, issue of Variety, in Army Archerd’s column, Siegel stated that Bette demanded “twenty to twenty-five takes and print four or five.” However, a United Artists interoffice memo dated September 18, 1981, addressed to Anthea Sylbert from Dennis A. Brown, tells a very different story. It stated that the “average number of takes” was 2.7, with 1.3 printed takes. The memo also went on to conclude, “All of which means that over a third of all the scenes with Bette were done in only one or two takes and over half were done in three or less takes, while only five percent took more than nine takes. Only one take with Bette (or with anyone, for that matter) took more than fifteen takes and that was scene 99, which took twenty-one takes and involved the cat” (96).

  While Bette spent the rest of the year recovering from her nervous breakdown, United Artists was sorting through the footage of Jinxed and trying to figure out what to do with it. According to Siegel, he turned in three different versions of the picture, each with a completely different ending. United Artists also went on to edit the film even further. According to Siegel, “There was a marvelous scene in which Rip Torn breaks down and says he’s sorry for how he treated her. He was just marvelous. I was told to take it out. I refused. They felt it worked against Miss Midler. She’s wrong. The better he is, the better she is. She had another marvelous scene. They’re living in a trailer; she’s threatening to leave, they took that out, to my astonishment. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to go through things like that. I know Midler wasn’t pleased with the way she looked. I think [cinematographer Vilmos] Zsigmond did a very good job with her. Considering all we went through, it’s miraculous the movie turned out as well as it did” (95).

  She later sympathetically said of Jinxed, “I don’t think it was that bad a picture. He [Siegel] actually cut it quite sensitively. Even though he didn’t like me, he didn’t make me look bad” (97).

  Recalled Siegel, he turned in three different versions of Jinxed, each with a slightly different ending: “The one I liked was the longest. She leaves her boyfriend, sings a song and goes out in a blaze of glory in a remarkable sunrise-sunset shot by Vilmos Zsigmond” (95).

  On a upbeat note, Bette Midler got to sing a bit of country music in Jinxed, which never appeared on record. As she explained, “We sing ‘Cowgirl’s Dream’ which is out of Snuff Garrett’s office. It was written by Cliff Crawford and John Durrell; that’s the opening song. And then there’s a whole little medley in the middle, which is just, you know, en passant, because the plot comes during this number. But it’s cute, and it’s very Vegas-ey, with lots of fringe and rhinestones and balloons and stuff” (88.)

  Critics were mixed on the results. It seemed that the best the New York Times could say about it was to call it “an entertaining jumble of a movie” (98). Yet the Video Movie Guide 2001 found “Bette Midler in peak form as a would-be cabaret singer . . . (in) this often funny black comedy. . . . If it weren’t for Midler, you’d notice how silly and unbelievable it all is” (99).

  In the year between the completion of Jinxed and its release in October 1982, Bette recovered from her breakdown, got a new boyfriend, and began work on a new album. She was feeling well enough by early spring to virtually steal the entire Academy Awards telecast with just five minutes of time on screen.

  Entering the stage in a low-cut and shiny gold gown and red-and-blue silk spangled scarves billowing from the sleeves, Bette beamed at the television cameras. “I guess you didn’t think it was possible to overdress for this affair,” she said. The audience roared with laughter. “So this is what it feels like to be up here. This is fantastic. I’ve been waiting for two years for the Academy to call me up and say they made a mistake! Don’t you hate it when presenters come out and use this moment for their own personal aggrandizement? This is the Oscars. We have to be as dignified as possible. That is why I have decided to rise to the occasion,” she said with her hands tugging her breasts upward with her hands. She then proceeded to present the award for the Best Original Song, complete with her own snide comments about each of the tunes. She was a sheer riot to watch, and all of the articles about the show made clamorous mention of her spontaneous and humorous performance. She was the hit of the show.

  “That sure was fun,” she said later of her appearance on the Academy Awards. “And the feedback on it was extraordinary! I couldn’t have had more people call or wire or write or send flowers if I had actually won the damn thing!” (88).

  Jinxed landed on the movie marketplace the following fall with a resounding thud. The posters for the film carried the headline, “This tootsie’s on a roll!” Well, she gambled, and she certainly rolled anything but “sevens.” The majority of the critics hated it and were unable to tell whether the film was a comedy, a tragedy, a spoof, a love story, or none of the above. The review Bette received in the Hollywood Reporter was among the most sympathetic: “Jinxed actually isn’t cursed as much as it is wildly uneven. . . . Midler’s screen Opus No. Three falls far short of its two predecessors in coherency, importance and impact, but still imparts enough breezy entertainment value to doubtless gather partisans to its cause” (8).

  What it did fail to find was an audience. Less than three weeks into its release, the ticket sales were already dwindling. The film reportedly lost United Artists $20 million.

  This was the beginning of one of Bette’s bluest periods. In the movie business you are only as big as your latest hit or as small as your latest bomb. “Nobody wanted to hire me,” recalls Midler (100). Suddenly, word spread that Bette’s temperamental displays on the set of Jinxed had ruined United Artists and left it broke. In 1980 she was an Academy Award-nominated superstar. In 1982 she was labeled “production poison” in the film industry.

  13

  READY TO BEGIN AGAIN

  In 1982 Bette had strengthened her ties to the West Coast by purchasing a large Hollywood home in Coldwater Canyon. The Midler mansion was designed in a Mexican style, with high ceilings, windows with cut glass, and a huge fireplace. Over the fireplace hung a portrait of silent film star Mary Pickford.

  According to Bette, she liked to gaze up at that particular sad-eyed portrait and ponder. “She had all that money and she was miserable
! That’s why I schlepped up to the auction at Pickfair and bought that picture. It slayed me to think that this woman would have had the world by the short hairs and still would have been so unhappy. Every time I look at it, I think, ‘There but for the grace of God’ . . . And in fact, I’m sure I may end up that way yet” (88).

  Since her disastrous Jinxed experience, Bette had been dating and living with a man by the name of Benoit Gautier. It was Gautier with whom she had an affair in Paris in 1974.

  Speaking about him, Bette explained in the summer of 1982, “Benoit I’ve been with, on and off, for about a year. We went to Europe together last fall. He’s a personal manager. He’s in zee show biz-i-ness. He manages Jon Anderson, who used to be the lead singer in Yes, who’s now on his own and is making those wonderful records with Vangelis. Beautiful symphonic pieces, long tone-poem things. But Benoit has a public relations firm in Paris. We see each other evenings, we have dinner together. It’s very traditional: nothing ‘kinqué.’ Calm, always calm, because there’s so much of people screaming during the day, you really do need a chance to catch your breath” (88).

  At that same point, Bette definitely nixed the idea of marriage. “Oh nevair, NEV-AIR! There’s community property in this state. I’m not giving away one nickel,” she stressed (88).

  Now it was time to piece her career back together. This started in the summer of 1982 when she began working on her ninth album, to be entitled No Frills. Since she had documented her 1970s stage act in the HBO special and in Divine Madness, Bette felt that it was time to move on to something new musically, something between the cabaret campiness of her early albums and the screaming rock & roll belting of the Rose.