by Mark Bego
The funniest moment came after Madonna had just finished gyrating on stage, while singing “Like a Virgin.” Said Bette, “Now that the burning question of Madonna’s virginity has been answered, we are free to go on to even more GAPING questions, such as: How a video is made. We KNOW Madonna’s story!”
Bette’s “Beast of Burden” video was nominated for awards in several categories, including “Best Female Video,” “Best Choreography,” and “Best Stage Performance.” Unfortunately, she failed to take a prize home with her that night. “I thought this was the ‘Miss MTV Awards!’ ” she quipped.
Although she had sworn up and down that she would “NEVER, EVER” get married, in October of 1984 Bette ran into someone she had met a few years earlier, and she immediately fell in love. According to her, they met “years ago. We went out with a party of people to a show—King Crimson or something. We didn’t get a chance to talk very much” (18).
“Harry Kipper, that’s his stage name,” continued Bette. “Most of his friends call him Kipper. He actually sells commodities under the name of Harry Kipper as well. And he performs with Brian Kipper, which is not his real name either. I had met some performance artists, and I wanted to meet others. And a girlfriend of mine, Toni Basil, introduced me to him as one of the Kipper Kids. I always remembered him as that. I thought it was his real name. I ran into him a couple of years later, and he reminded me we had met and I put his name in my book. Two years later, he called me out of the clear blue. After two months of INTENSIVE dating, we were married” (18).
Much to the surprise of everyone, including Bette herself, on December 16, 1984, she became Mrs. Martin von Haselberg (a.k.a. Harry Kipper). In true Miss M tradition, Bette and her betrothed were wed in ever-tasteful Las Vegas . . . by an Elvis Presley impersonator!
“The Elvis impersonator was an accident. We wanted to get married quickly, and Vegas sounded like a good place to do it. We didn’t know he was an Elvis impersonator till the end of the ceremony, when he handed us his single. It was the Chapel of the Twilight or something. We had fun. We got all dressed up. I had my dress that I wore to the premiere of The River. And Harry had two used-car-salesman suits. The first one was a hounds-tooth check suit that he’d made a couple of years ago. He looked like something out of The Music Man. I said, ‘no, Harry, I really can’t marry you in that suit.’ So he changed into a nice black suit. The long drive to Vegas had been a lot of laughs. But the long drive back from Vegas was kind of quiet. We were fairly shaken. We went there on a lark, but it now was going to be real” (18).
Kipper, who had been married and divorced once before, is three years younger than Bette. “For the first couple of weeks after we got married, it was, ‘Uh-oh, what did we do?’ There were some rough spots, but we did our talking, we did our compromising. Fortunately, we liked what we got to know,” she remembers (100).
Harry, who was educated in England, had actually been born of German parents in Buenos Aries, Argentina. Bette said that she was a little surprised that she ended up married to a German. “I married a Kraut. Every night I get dressed up as Poland and he invades me,” she quips (100).
On January 28, 1985, Bette Midler was one of the many record industry superstars to come together at A&M Recording Studios in Los Angeles to record the Number 1 mega-hit song “We Are the World.” The funds that the song raised were to assist relief efforts in famine-plagued Africa, and especially the people in Ethiopia. “We Are the World” was written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, and produced by Quincy Jones. They were able to get the participation of a virtual “Who’s Who” of the current recording world, primarily because it was recorded the night of the annual American Music Awards telecast. It was kind of like those old Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney movies, where someone would announce, “I’ve got a barn—let’s put on a show.” Somehow, it seemed, everyone—including Bette—wanted to be involved. In alphabetical order, the cast of singers included Dan Aykroyd, Harry Belafonte, Lindsey Buckingham, Kim Carnes, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Sheila E., Bob Geldof, Daryl Hall, James Ingram, Jackie Jackson, La-Toya Jackson, Marlon Jackson, Michael Jackson, Randy Jackson, Tito Jackson, Al Jarreau, Billy Joel, Cyndi Lauper, Huey Lewis & the News, Kenny Loggins, Bette Midler, Willie Nelson, John Oates, Jeffrey Osborne, Steve Perry, the Pointer Sisters, Lionel Richie, Smokey Robinson, Kenny Rogers, Diana Ross, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick, and Stevie Wonder. The record received much airplay and raised millions of dollars. However, so much was made about the song, and what a wonderful humanitarian effort it represented, that “We Are the World” soon became the butt of several jokes.
The funniest jokes came from none other than Bette Midler herself. Although most of the people sang a solo vocal on the record, she was among the vocalists who were heard only in the chorus. She referred to the song as “We Are the Rich, We Are the Famous.” She recalls with sarcasm, “It was a fantastic night. I stood next LaToya. She was wearing a headband. I felt naked. Bruce Springsteen was there. He was chatting with the soloists. I ran up to him. I said, ‘Bruce, you look fabulous! What happened?’ ” (7).
On April 30 and May 1, 1985, Bette recorded her tenth album, before a live audience at Bud Friedman’s Improvisation comedy club in Los Angeles. It was something entirely new for Midler, a comedy album called Mud Will Be Flung Tonight! A completely different concept for Bette: an evening without mermaid outfits, without wheelchairs, without Harlettes, and without costume changes. The result, which was released late in the year, presented two sides of Bette Midler: the stand-up comedian and the singing satirist.
The album is very funny and contains several of her zanier bits of comedy and a couple of ribald songs. The highlights include a song about her weight, entitled “Fat As I Am”; the tale of Otto Titsling—inventor of the bra; her Sophie Tucker jokes; and a running commentary on life called “Why Bother?” A sticker on the original vinyl LP warned record buyers, “Contains material that may be deemed offensive by Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and Prince.”
“I haven’t had much luck with music,” Bette gave as her reason for recording a comedy album. “I wasn’t camp for a long time, and I really miss it. Life is a drag and people need to be ticked by someone as twitty as my own self.” She was especially pleased with the idea of poking fun at herself. “What I’ve got a really good take on is tits. Because I’ve had mine for so long, and they’re such a big part of me. I weigh more now than I’ve ever weighed, more than I could ever conceived of someone my size weighing. But you know what? I was zooming toward forty [years old], and I suddenly realized I didn’t care anymore how I looked. It’s a great weight off my mind” (103).
Mud Will Be Flung Tonight received favorable reviews. Unfortunately, it failed to find an audience, and it sold fewer copies than any Bette Midler album before it. In less than a year, it was already in the discount bins at record stores.
As 1985 ended, Bette Midler found herself a happily married forty-year-old woman, whose career was desperately floundering and who was in need of a hit. She was about to get the reward that she had been waiting for, and she could sense her forthcoming glory. “I really feel like what’s coming up,” she said prophetically, “is going to be better than anything I’ve ever done” (103).
14
HER OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE
It was just two months after she married Harry that something surprising and wonderful happened to Bette. Just when she thought that she might never make another movie again in her career, and that she had been totally blackballed in the industry by Jinxed, she was offered a role in a film that would revitalize her career completely. Down and Out in Beverly Hills was the life raft that rescued the drowning diva.
The film was the brainchild of director Paul Mazursky, whose illustrious track record includes Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) and Moscow on the Hudson (1984). Paul had long recalled a French film that he saw in the 1950s at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City called Boudu Saved from Drowning (Boudu Sauvé d
es Eaus). The 1932 film by Jean Renoir was based on an original play by Rene Rauchois and was about a well-to-do Parisian gentleman who saved a homeless bum from suicide and then ended up being responsible for him and his well-being.
“I’d seen Boudu Saved from Drowning in the early fifties,” recalls Mazursky. “I had a vague memory of a vagabond who jumps into the Seine and of a bourgeois bookseller who saves him and brings him into his house. That’s when the trouble begins. Years later, in the late seventies, I started thinking about the film again. I mentioned to [screenplay writer] Leon [Caperanos]—who like me is a great fan of Jean Renoir’s, that it might be interesting to switch Boudu to the United States. We decided to poke fun at Beverly Hills—to make fun of my own life, so to speak. Of course, we had to invent a new family and update the notion of the romantic vagabond, which in today’s society just doesn’t ring true. As we wrote, we aimed for something completely new and contemporary” (8).
The script that Paul and Leon came up with transferred the original story concept to 1980s Beverly Hills. Their characters are a homeless street person, Jerry Baskin, who tries to drown himself in the swimming pool of a nouveau-riche couple, Dave and Barbara Whiteman. Dave made his fortune in the wire coat-hanger business, and his wife is a spoiled Rodeo Drive matron who lives a world of gurus, psychoanalysts, aerobics, flawless manicures, and hours and hours of nonstop shopping.
When it came time for casting, Mazursky had Richard Dreyfuss in mind for the role of Dave Whiteman. “I met with Richard,” he explains, “and definitely wanted him as Dave, but I didn’t want to commit until I knew who would play his wife and vice versa. The same is true of the actor who would play Jerry. These things are very tricky” (8).
Mazursky’s first choice for the part of Jerry was Jack Nicholson. “He read the script,” says Paul, “but it became quite evident within a few weeks that there was to be no clear starting date for another project of his, The Two Jakes [which ended up being postponed]. By then I had already cast Richard Dreyfuss, and when Richard read the script, he suggested Nick Nolte [to play Jerry]. I’d already had that idea, so it was good to have the confirmation” (104).
Next came the casting of the role of Barbara Whiteman. “For the wife,” explains Mazursky, “I thought about Dyan Cannon, or Cher, but decided on Bette Midler, because the casting would be funnier. It would be a surprise. When I told the studio executives, they were ecstatic” (104).
Bette had never met Mazursky, and when he contacted her and set up a meeting to discuss the possibility of doing the film, she didn’t know what to expect. “I thought I was going to meet some silver-haired Hollywood type,” says Midler, “but Paul turned out to be an ex-stand-up comic, a guy with whom I had an instant rapport” (97).
Paul recalls their meeting. It was not the wild and crazy Divine Miss M who showed up that day, but a very modest Bette. When Mazursky described the film role, it was Bette who had misgivings. “Do you think I’d be real?” she asked shyly. Says Mazursky, “Pretty soon she lit a cigarette and was relaxed. I knew she’d be funny” (104).
Although she didn’t think that the part of Barbara Whiteman had anything to do with herself, something about the role and the opportunity appealed to her. “I don’t consider myself even remotely a Beverly Hills matron,” she explains, “although I certainly know what they’re like. And I sort of appreciate them, too, in a way that a lot of people don’t. I find them amusing and colorful. They try to be exotic flowers—daisies trying to be orchids. And I like people who try to get better, even if it’s only in a physical sense” (18).
The film was originally called Jerry Saved from Drowning, but a month before filming began, the title was changed. According to Mazursky, he changed his mind one night with his card-playing buddies. “At the poker game I play once a week with people not in the movie business, I mentioned the title and everybody thought it was some rescue movie, like The Poseidon Adventure” (104). And so the film became Down and Out in Beverly Hills.
Both Bette Midler and Nick Nolte did extensive research for their roles in the film. Nolte spent several hours at the Union Rescue Mission in downtown Los Angeles dressed as a bum, to try and understand the part. According to him, “Three months prior to the start of production, I started to get into character by letting my personal appearance go. I stopped bathing, and I no longer brushed my teeth or combed my hair” (8).
Bette’s role preparation was quite the opposite experience. “I walked all around Beverly Hills, and I shopped until I was blue,” she laughs. “I decorated, I went to lunch at the Rodeo Collection and met all kinds of people. I met landscapers, pest-control people, and dry cleaners. You’d be amazed at how much the people who work in the backstage of the rich and famous know about the people who are actually on the stage. I also spent some time with ladies who actually live the guru life. You know, rather wealthy women who are in search of fulfillment. Barbara Whiteman is an amalgam of all those ladies. They’re fabulous people in their own way. I mean, I wouldn’t want to be in a world where they don’t exist” (8).
Before the cameras rolled, Mazursky insisted upon rehearsing every scene thoroughly. Recalled Midler, “We rehearsed for three weeks. If you’re doing a stage production, that’s not a lot, but it’s a lot for pictures. It was a big help—a tremendous help. We knew each other, and we knew what the relationships were. We had explored all that, even to the point of knowing what our blocking would be” (8).
“I have no real empathy for matrons who don’t have a lot to do with themselves,” she continued. “You know the type—so much time on their hands and no real imagination. However, Paul showed me what was wonderful about Barbara and how to make her amusing. Barbara Whiteman is a soul in torment. The reason it’s funny is that she really doesn’t have anything to be in torment about. She has a lovely family, lots of money, and the freedom to do whatever she wants to do, and yet she feels unfulfilled. She’s a character who’s searching blindly for the way to live her life. She’s nothing if not an explorer of the psyche and—trends, she loves a trend” (8).
“I was able to bring my own saltiness to the role,” she went on to say. “Barbara is quite cynical and more than a little angry. I have those elements in my own personality, but the rest is totally new to me. I’ve never worn clothes like this, or nails like this. The whole visual thing is completely different from my own life, and I can’t tell you how bizarre it is to be playing a woman with grown kids” (8).
One of the most unique aspects of the casting of Down and Out in Beverly Hills was that Midler, Dreyfuss, and Nolte all had reputations in Hollywood for having personal problems that spilled over into their movie careers. Principal photography began on May 20, 1985, and on the set, Mazursky fondly referred to his stars as “the Betty Ford Kids”—after the famed rehabilitation clinic (100).
“That hurt our feelings,” said Bette, who had to admit, “We all had these strange reputations. I was supposed to be impossible to work with, Richard had certain drug or alcohol-related problems, and God only knows what they said about Nick” (100). Nolte had a reputation as a heavy drinker.
One of the most amusing ironies about the production was that it was produced by Touchstone Films, which at the time was the new adult division of Disney Films. Imagine the raunchy Miss M’s surprise to awaken one day and find herself a Disney employee. The outrageous singer who exposed her breasts was suddenly working shoulder-to-shoulder with Mickey and Minnie Mouse! This was the film that marked the beginning of a long and very creatively productive phase of her film career.
“I never tell people I’m working for Disney,” exclaimed Bette at the time. “Walt would roll over in his grave! If I hadn’t made my name practically taking my clothes off and being bawdy, I’d be delighted to work for the straight Disney guys. I grew up watching Dumbo and those movies. And Hayley Mills—I was crazy about her” (101).
Recalls Mazursky, the entire cast really projected themselves into their roles. While Midler was in Beverly Hills stu
dying the lives of rich matrons, Nolte was wearing bum’s clothes and wandering the streets. “He started wearing those clothes for two or three weeks. All during the rehearsal he didn’t shower. He sort of . . . became Jerry. In rehearsals he didn’t immediately snap out of it. He’d walk off by himself and sit in a corner. I remember Bette looking at him as if to say, ‘Is he all right?’ But this was really what I wanted. I tried to create an atmosphere in rehearsal that would really make them believe that what was going on was actually happening. That’s good. I think comedy has to be [more real] than drama” (105).
The result of the pleasurable working relationship between Midler, Nolte, Dreyfuss, and Mazursky was an instant hit when it was released in January 1986. According to Bette, being a member of an ensemble rather than being the lead character was a welcome change of pace. “That’s why Down and Out in Beverly Hills was such a relief for me,” she said. “Paul wants everyone to get in the spirit of the silliness. I can generate that kind of silliness myself, in my shows, but at home I don’t because I’m too beat. So it’s nice when somebody else is the clown and the host for a change” (97).
Although he was gregarious and charming, Mazursky ran a tight ship. “With Bette’s problems and Richard Dreyfuss’s problems, perhaps we should have filmed at the Betty Ford Center. Instead I made it clear that if either stepped out of line, they would be replaced,” he later admitted. In fact, said Paul of Bette, “She managed to pull Richard Dreyfuss and Nick Nolte out of their shells” (8).
David Whiteman (Dreyfus) became wealthy in the wire coat hanger business. So wealthy is he that he lives the lush life in Beverly Hills, drives a Rolls Royce, and even his dog—Matisse—has its own psychiatrist. His wife, Barbara (Midler), employs both a nutritionist and a personal guru. She hasn’t had an orgasm in ages. And David and Barbara’s two teenage children are already having their own separate identity crises.