Bette Midler

by Mark Bego

  David saves Jerry (Nolte) from drowning himself in David’s immaculate backyard swimming pool. Much to the shock of Barbara, David decides to move the rescued bum into their house until Jerry gets his act together. In the ensuing action, Jerry, the bum, ends up improving the lives of each member of the Whiteman family. They come to find out that, although financially broke, Jerry is rich in wisdom, and much more so than any of the members of the Whiteman household.

  Down and Out in Beverly Hills has a lot in common with the classic William Powell and Carole Lombard comedy My Man Godfrey (1936). As Godfrey, Powell goes from living under the 59th Street Bridge to owning a ritzy bar under the 59th Street Bridge. In many ways, this is the 1980s West Coast version of that tale.

  Jerry plants charm and wisdom everywhere he goes. And before he is finished, he has slept with every female under the Whitemans’ roof—including their maid. And, yes—thanks to Jerry—by the end of the film, Bette’s Barbara comically achieves her elusive orgasm.

  In another delightful twist of casting, rock star Little Richard co-starred as one of the Whitemans’ neighbors. His appearance further upped the ante for zaniness.

  Midler fans and critics alike were surprised and delighted with the amusingly restrained Miss M on the screen in the hilarious comedy role. “I was holding back as much as I knew how,” she explained. “When I saw the picture, I thought I was in a Jerry Lewis movie—I looked like I walked in from another set” (18).

  The critics and moviegoers alike loved this film. Even fussy Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun Times gave the film four stars (out of four) and proclaimed, “Down and Out in Beverly Hills made me laugh longer and louder than any film I’ve seen in a long time” (106).

  Time magazine’s Richard Schickel claimed, “The old film that Down and Out most consistently evokes is Mazursky’s own Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, also a nervously ambiguous but hilariously etched caricature of the bourgeois at self-improving play. . . . on a basically farcical level where it chooses to stay, it is a funny and likable movie” (107).

  One of the most complimentary reviews that Bette received for Down and Out came in the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina—a town she once performed in while she was still a fledgling singer wishing for fame and fortune. “[The film] gives Miss Midler a chance to catch up with her image, proving that she’s an actress as well as a star. That’s what she dreamed about when she was playing clubs like the old Frog and Nightgown in Raleigh. She’s achieved what she set out to achieve” (108).

  Down and Out in Beverly Hills represented a rebirth in Bette Midler’s career. After years of playing the role of a star who had to shock, stun, and amaze her audiences time and time again, she suddenly found she was a bigger star than ever in a role that required her to tone herself down.

  In January of 1985, Bette went on The Tonight Show as Johnny Carson’s guest and sang a song from her Mud Will Be Flung Tonight album. The song was the self-parodying “Fat As I Am.” In the song Bette sang that “they could park a DC-10 on my rear.” It just so happened that three of the millions of people watching the show that night were brothers David and Jerry Zucker and their business partner Jim Abrahams. They were busy developing a film property that they were going to direct for Touchstone Films, called Ruthless People. Zucker, Zucker, and Abrahams had become famous for their first hit comedy, Airplane! (1980), which starred Robert Hayes and Julie Haggarty. According to Abrahams, “We knew she would be perfect” for the role of out-of-shape Barbara Stone in Ruthless People (109).

  When Desperately Seeking Susan became a huge box-office hit in the spring of 1985, however, Disney decided that it wanted to sign that film’s big star—Madonna—to play Barbara Stone. Disney/Touchstone had already signed Danny DeVito for the part of Sam Stone, and it was going to be a bit of a stretch for Madonna to play his wife of fifteen years, but the role was the only one the studio had available. Happily for Bette, Madonna instead went on to film the huge box-office disappointment Shanghai Surprise (1986).

  By October, Zucker, Zucker, and Abrahams still did not have a female star. According to a November 1, 1985, item in Variety headlined, “Disney’s People Still Searching for Femme Lead,” “Both Madonna and Bette Midler’s names have been bandied about, but Madonna is rumored to be pregnant and Midler reportedly is not interested” (8). Well, Madonna was not pregnant, and Bette was interested. She was signed for the role, and in January 1986, before Down and Out in Beverly Hills even opened, she was in front of the cameras, doing her second Disney/Touchstone film.

  The film was originally called Would Anyone Please Kill My Wife? and is about a man who plots to murder his obnoxious spouse. Ruthless People ended up being one of the funniest movies of the past ten years. It is filled with plot twists involving mistaken identities, sharp dialogue, and snappy performances by the entire cast. As in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Bette accepted a role that was not the lead. Instead she is part of an ensemble effort that includes Danny DeVito, Anita Morris, Judge Reinhold, and Helen Slater.

  In this film, Bette not only had to portray an obnoxious moneyed matron, but she was padded to show off the character’s weight problem. The film is something of a twist on the classic O. Henry short story “The Ransom of Red Chief.” In that story, a little boy is kidnapped, and he is such a spoiled little beast that the kidnappers offer to pay the parents to take him back. In the film Ruthless People, on the day that Sam Stone (DeVito) plans to kill his wife, he returns to their overdecorated home to discover that she has been kidnapped. Not only has he no intention of paying the kidnappers what they demand, he actually encourages them to make good their threats to murder her.

  As Barbara Stone, the kidnap victim, Bette Midler is at her zany, fire-breathing best. She ends up locked in a basement with nothing to do all day but watch exercise tapes and make dietary demands of her kidnappers. In the course of the film she ends up losing weight and conspires with her captors to get even with her husband. One of the funniest moments in the movie comes when Midler discovers that her husband has not paid for her freedom, even though the kidnappers have continually reduced their demands. “I’ve been kidnapped by K-Mart!” she wails in disgust (110).

  Barbara Stone’s mid-film self-improvement was one of the things that appealed most to Midler. “Once again, I had my nails done,” she says with reference to her Down and Out role. “This time I got long, but very wide acrylic nails painted dark purple. They make me feel like a caged animal, which is how I believe my character felt” (8).

  In her first scenes, Bette does look like a demonically possessed creature from hell. She was even startled when she first saw herself on the screen in Ruthless People and explained, “I was pretty shaken when I saw the movie. I didn’t realize just how terrible I was going to look. I wouldn’t have done the role five years ago. I would have thought it was too small a part, that it was beneath me, because this was when I was going to be a great dramatic actress. And yes, I cared too much to look like that” (111).

  Speaking of the fact that her character has an onscreen metamorphosis, Midler claimed, “I love the fact that she changes from horrible to wonderful in the course of the picture. And, the screenplay was as funny as anything I’ve read” (112).

  To make the transformation of Barbara Stone even more dramatic, Bette lost additional weight and worked out with trainers Jake Steinfeld and Bob Carrricro. She had put on twenty pounds in recent years. “Oh, I’ve gained a lot of weight since I’ve been married,” she admitted. “My husband loves restaurants, and I’ve never gone about eating with the gusto he’s taught me. I’ve been eating food from countries you didn’t even know had food!” (101).

  “Ten pounds is like blimp city for me, so I made a resolution to lose the weight. I went on a juice fast, and I started working out. Jake worked me over. That was good, because I have a whole exercise scene where I have to do push-ups and sit-ups,” Bette explained (18).

  During the filming of Ruthless People, on February 6, 1986, Bette b
ecame the 1,821st celebrity to have her name emblazoned on a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. “I hope you’ll come and walk all over it!” she told the crowd that gathered on Hollywood Boulevard. She gushed with astonishment at the ceremony, “It really does have my name on it, but I really feel this star is the work of the fans. I am really overwhelmed and I am flabbergasted, and I think this is probably the greatest thrill of my whole life” (8).

  In March 1986, it was announced that Bette was expecting her first child in the fall. She was still working on Ruthless People at the time. The press had a field day heralding the arrival of Bette’s own “Baby Divine.” Midler had her own ideas about bringing up baby. “Well, I’m going to put my baby in boarding school as soon as possible, in a far corner of England—no, Scotland, near the heather and the highlands—so my baby will never hear any of this!” she laughed (10). On a more serious note, she added, “I’m going to have to keep doing something, because that’s my livelihood. Joan River’s child [Melissa] seems to be developing okay, hasn’t turned into a serial killer or anything. And Joan’s much more abrasive that I” (97).

  Things were suddenly going beautifully for Bette. She had one hit movie in the theaters, one in the can, and another one in production. She had a husband who was wild over her, and she was expecting a baby. She had even come to an understanding with her father. “My dad was very ill last year,” she said, “he had two bypasses. I thought I was too much of a wimp to look after him and pull him through, but I wasn’t. He didn’t want to go on, he really wanted to lie down and die. And I said, ‘No, what’s the point of doing that?’ And I got him through it. I rose to an occasion I didn’t think I could rise to—and I feel that a lot of that was because I had Harry in back of me saying, ‘Yes, you can do it’ ” (8).

  “My father needed me, and I think he was very, very happy that I came through. I think he felt that he didn’t deserve any support because, when he was raising me, he didn’t really pay much attention. But I just went ahead and gave him all the help I could. I guess he thought I wasn’t so bad after all, even thought I do stand up and tell dirty jokes” (8).

  Bette had just discovered that she was pregnant when Fred Midler suddenly died. “He was very happy. I kept saying, Top, you gotta stick around to see the baby.’ And he said, ‘Oh I will, I will. . . .’ But he didn’t. He was seventy-eight. I thought he’d live longer,” she remembered (18).

  Her strained relationship with her father was a lifelong source of pain and disappointment for Bette. “He wanted me to be a professional person and to have a stable job and not get into trouble, not make any noise, not have people look at me,” she said. One of Bette’s perpetual sources of regret was that no matter what she accomplished in life, Fred Midler would not acknowledge her achievement, or as she puts it, “He wouldn’t give me any reward” (18).

  When Ruthless People opened in theaters in June 1986, it became the summer’s hit comedy film, gleaning excellent reviews. Eleanor Ringel in the Atlanta Journal called it “A riotous comedy that’s not only full of funny people but is also exceedingly well-written. The funniest of the funny people are Bette Midler and Danny DeVito. They play Barbara and Sam Stone, a wealthy Bel Air couple who are a kind of Bizarro World version of the prosperous pair played by Midler and Richard Dreyfus in Down and Out in Beverly Hills” (113). And, Rich Beebe, in the Torrington, Connecticut, Register Citizen, wrote, “Ruthless People is a blaring boom box of a movie comedy. It’s rude, obnoxious and crass; it’s about as subtle as a dirty joke. It’s also funny, extremely funny. . . . Bette Midler’s brutal comic portrait . . . makes her transformation in the second half of the film into a vengeful, but likable Harpy all the more amazing and fun” (114).

  Bette Midler had wanted for years to have a hot winning streak like this, and she wasn’t about to let go of the momentum. Almost immediately, she began work on her next Touchstone comedy, Outrageous Fortune.

  Cameras began rolling in New York, with Arthur Hiller directing. One of the first scenes was filmed at the Newark International Airport in New Jersey. The company then moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for six weeks of location filming. Bette’s co-stars this time around were Shelley Long, George Carlin, Peter Coyote, and John Schuck. Bette referred to the plot of the film as “Abbot & Costello Go to Santa Fe” (110).

  On the set of Outrageous Fortune, reports of Bette Midler and Shelley Long feuding with each other began to leak out. The disagreement occurred over which actress was going to receive top billing in the movie. To quell any arguments, the Disney company struck upon a settlement. Half of all of the film prints, press releases, television advertisements, and film posters used Bette’s name first, and the other half used Shelley’s first.

  In the film, Bette plays the part of slobby Sandy Brozinsky. For her role in Outrageous Fortune, her fingernails are stubby and polished in alternate colors: yellow and green, and glittered. Bette’s fingernails were indeed becoming an important part of her characterizations. Says Bette, “Laurence Olivier changes his nose, I do it with my nails” (111).

  Shelley Long and Bette Midler play two very different women who unwittingly have their lives entwined. Lauren (Long) is a classically trained actress, who has yet to land a paying gig. Sandy is a brash, streetwise New Yorker, whose main acting credit is for her role in Ninja Vixens. Not only do they end up in the same acting class, much to their horror, they also discover that they are both sleeping with the same man: Michael (Peter Coyote).

  Bette’s first line on camera consists of a loud entrance into the lobby of an acting school office and the utterance, “Holy Mary, isn’t there one fucking phone in this whole town that works?”

  After Michael fakes his death, Lauren and Shelley run into each other at the morgue, where they go—separately—to identify the body. They know it’s not Michael, after a look at the corpse—below the belt. “It’s a fucking pencil!” exclaims Bette as Shelley, in typical Divine Miss M fashion. Complaining of a body mix-up, she asks a guard, “Does the phrase ‘needle dick, the bug fucker’ mean anything to you?”

  Both wanting to track Michael down, to find out which one of them he truly loves, the pair ends up in a series of harrowing misadventures together. While surviving together on their wits, they eventually discover that their bond as friends is stronger than they could have imagined.

  What the two battling women don’t realize is that Michael is a crook, and one who would kill to succeed. It seems that he possesses a serum that could defoliate the planet, and he is holding it for ransom. As a pair of sleuths, Shelley and Lauren each get to show off their best “method” acting, by throwing themselves into situations that require new identities.

  Chasing Michael out to Santa Fe, New Mexico, the girls end up chasing their prey into the mountains. One of their funniest sequences together comes when they are disguised as fourteen-year-old boys visiting a whorehouse. As a comic foil, they enlist the help of Frank (George Carlin), who is their “Indian” guide through town. However, Frank is not sober and not an Indian. Carlin proves a great comic “banana” for both women to play off. Showing that New Yorkers can handle themselves in any situation, the duo refuses to give up the chase until they get their man.

  “Nuts,” says Bette, as she takes a pause from dodging bullets and running for her life; it seems she has broken one of her fingernails. However, in the end, the two women finally see Michael for what he is—a foreign espionage agent and a colossal rat.

  Outrageous Fortune is a laugh riot from start to finish. As unlikely as it seemed, this pairing of Bette Midler and Shelley Long brilliantly works on camera. They play off their diverse, contrasting characters, and it looks like they are both having fun while being funny.

  When Outrageous Fortune opened in January 1987, it became an instant box-office smash. Bette and Shelley, as rival actresses in love with the same deceitful man, showed off the best of each other’s comic strengths. Midler’s bitchy bawdiness provided the perfect counterpoint for Long’s deadpan prissines
s, and vice versa. In Outrageous Fortune it became obvious that Bette was the silver screen’s hottest comedy chameleon.

  This time around, the critics unanimously loved it. Peter Travers, in People magazine, claimed, “Bette Midler and Shelley Long bring out the bitchy, bawdy best in each other in this breakneck farce. . . . A particular howl comes in watching Long’s slow descent into shock as Midler, in return for information, offers oral sex to a tobacconist. . . . Midler and Long’s low-comic high jinks make Outrageous Fortune the perfect laugh cure for the blues” (115). David Ansen, in Newsweek, wrote, “Outrageous Fortune has the obvious, but long overdue comic concept: It’s a buddy movie with two women in the leads. . . . The plot is madcap nonsense, and the comic aim is sometimes very broad and very low, but the belly-laugh quotient . . . is the highest since the last Midler movie, Ruthless People. . . . The libidinous Bette, of course, gets the best of the down and dirty zingers, but Long isn’t just a straight woman. . . . They could become the Hope and Crosby of female raunch!” (116). And, in Time magazine, Richard Corliss called Shelley and Bette, “The lady and the tramp,” announcing that “in this witty, rambunctious caper movie, the lady is Lauren (Shelley Long). . . . when she does meet a dashing, sympathetic hetero (Peter Coyote), he turns out to be sharing his favors with a tramp in Lauren’s acting class. This would be Sandy (Bette Midler), who has a bulldozer mouth and the sensitivity of a whelk. . . . Midler breezes through her role, looking fine and giving the punch lines pop. . . . Cheers all around!” (117).

  Having just left the popular TV series Cheers to pursue a film career, Shelley Long had a lot on the line in this pivotal film. The landscape is littered with ambitious careers dashed by small screen stars aiming for big screen success. And Midler was still undergoing her own film career resuscitation. Outrageous Fortune was a home run for both of them.