Bette Midler

by Mark Bego

  One of Lily’s funniest bits comes as she plays Rose Ratliff. Whenever she is up against one of her corporate enemies, she goes into her rattlesnake impersonation and puts a country curse on them. Bette likewise is at her goofiest as her country incarnation.

  Disney producers Michael Peyser and Steve Tisch populated this film with a cracker jack cast of supporting players. They include Fred Ward as Rune, Rose Ratliff’s hunky back-home miniature golf pro boyfriend; Michael Gross as Sadie Shelton’s suitor; Mary Gross as the ditzy receptionist at Moramax headquarters; Seth Green (Scott in Austin Powers) as Sadie Shelton’s rambunctious son; and Edward Harrmann and Daniel Gerroll as bumbling gay corporate henchmen Graham and Chuck.

  Right before the big stockholder’s meeting, Bette as country Sadie and city Sadie both purchase an identical polka dot dress from the same ladies shop in the Plaza lobby, heightening the confusion and the possibilities for sight gags. When the two Midlers end up in a mirror-lined ladies room, it is a classic sight gag waiting to happen. Via split screen, Bette has one of her most hysterical moments on film, mimicking the Marx Brothers’ famous two-Grouchos mirror routine from Duck Soup (1933).

  It turns out that Sadie Ratliff’s idol is Joan Collins on the 1980s prime-time TV soap opera Dynasty. When she is called upon to impersonate her Manhattan twin, Sadie summons the essence of Alexis Carrington to personify terror at a shareholder’s meeting.

  The plot of the movie begins to lose momentum somewhere in the middle, but the comic outcome is well worth the journey. Bette and Lily are great fun to watch, no matter which sister act they’re portraying in this clever comedy.

  Some critics loved it. People magazine glowed, “Midler and Tomlin . . . make a red-hot roaringly funny comedy team.” And TV’s Good Morning America proclaimed that Big Business had “Guaranteed big laughs” (122). The film did respectably well at the box-office and further cemented Midler’s reputation as one of the hottest comedy actresses in Hollywood in the mid-1980s.

  On the other hand, the reviews for the film were decidedly mixed. Roger Ebert, in the Chicago Sun-Times, gave Big Business the old “thumbs down,” affixing two and a half stars (out of four) to it. According to him, “The life all seems to have escaped from this movie. Midler and Tomlin can be funny actors, but here they both seem muted and toned down in all of the characters they play. The most promising character probably is Sadie Shelton, Midler’s New York company executive, who has the potential to be a bitch on wheels but never realizes it. The Jupiter Hollow Midler seems unfocused, and both Tomlins seem to be the same rather vague woman who has trouble with her shoulderpads” (123).

  Bette’s second movie of 1988 was a project that gave her the quintessential Disney role of her career—it made her into a cartoon character in a full-length animated film. In Oliver & Company, Bette provided the voice of Georgette, a diva-like pampered poodle. She was even given her own musical number in the middle of the film.

  This kid-oriented full-length cartoon feature is a tale of a gang of dogs, which is very loosely based on Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. However, this time around, the evil Bill Sikes is a rich man in a limousine, and Fagin is a scruffy bum living in lower Manhattan. The voices to the cartoon characters include many luminaries from the rock, film, and television realms. In addition to Midler, the film also stars the voices of Billy Joel, Cheech Marin, Ruth Pointer, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Richard Mulligan, and Joey Lawrence. On the soundtrack, Billy Joel, Huey Lewis, and Ruben Blades all contribute songs. Another pop diva, Ruth of the Pointer Sisters, performs the song “Streets of Gold.”

  The film opens up with an accurate animated establishment shot of lower Manhattan, with the World Trade Center prominently intact. As the action starts, a kitten named Oliver (Joey Lawrence) is abandoned on a New York City street and is taken under wing—so to speak—by a street-wise dog named Dodger (Billy Joel).

  When Oliver is adopted by a little girl in an upper Fifth Avenue townhouse, stuck-up Georgette cannot stand the competition the kitten poses. Convinced that Oliver has been snatched against his will, the doggie gang decides to spring the kitten loose from the tortures of his new aristocratic life on Central Park East.

  In the voice of Georgette, Bette has fun playing the pampered poodle with an attitude. It seems that Georgette is a six-time national champion dog show winner and is used to getting a lot of attention lavished upon her. This spoiled doggie is such a diva, in fact, that she even wears hats and billowing scarves for an outdoor walk. In one sequence, Georgette is seen watching human exercise shows on TV and doing canine leg lifts to them.

  In the film Georgette is romanced by tiny Tito the Chihuahua (Cheech Marin). When it was inquired of her whether or not she wanted to play with him, she sarcastically snipes, “I’d like to play with him all right—the little furball!”

  One of the best aspects of the project was that it rekindled her working relationship with Barry Manilow. As Georgette, Bette sings a brassy song called “Perfect Ain’t Easy,” as she surveys her own reflection in the mirror. In the song, Midler immodestly sings to her canine self, “I’m beauty unleashed.” The song was written by Barry Manilow, Jack Feldman, and Bruce Sussman and was produced by Barry Manilow. It was fun—even if only for one song—to hear Bette with Barry reunited, in this doggie diva routine.

  After Dodger and the gang “rescue” the kitten, Oliver isn’t so sure whether they saved him or just out-and-out kidnapped him. However, when Fagin gets a look at the new tag on Oliver—with a Fifth Avenue address—he greedily decides to hold him for ransom. As the criminal scheme rolls along, they end up kidnapping the little girl of the household and Georgette as well.

  Following is a car chase, that leads to a subway chase, and then evolves into a chase across the Brooklyn Bridge. Naturally, in the end, Oliver the cat is rescued, to be returned to his Fifth Avenue address, and everyone lives happily ever after in good Disney fairytale-style. Even Bette’s stuck-up canine alter ego, Georgette, bonds with Tito, and the two of them dance together at the film’s finale. Running a fast-paced seventy-three minutes, Oliver & Company is a cute and clever cartoon adaptation of the original classic. And besides, it gave Midler a chance to do a film for the fun of it, without making it a career move.

  On March 19, 1988, the diva and her husband, Martin von Haselberg, were seen in her latest HBO TV special: Bette Midler’s Mondo Beyondo. Based on a character that Bette invented with Jerry Blatt, the hour-long program is presented as a spoof on late-night cable TV shows—with poor lighting and tacky sets. On the program, Bette has taken on the character of an Italian “Euro-Trash” female who calls herself “Mondo Beyondo,” and she introduces a host of bizarre performance artists. Dressed as Beyondo in a mound of mercurochrome-red hair and a loud bosom-revealing low-cut white and black dress, Bette hosts film clips of performance artists Bill Irwin, Paul Zaloom, and, last but not least, the Kipper Kids (Martin von Hasselberg and Brian Routh). She also introduces us to Eudora P. Quickly, who is actually Midler singing a Jeanette MacDonald song. Unsurprisingly, the special was executive produced by Martin von Haselberg. Although they don’t appear on camera together, we do get to see Midler introduce her husband in a bizarre act of physical comedy, under his stage persona: Harry Kipper.

  A low-budget television romp, it was an unpretentious little spoof for the chameleon-like diva—who just happens to look fabulous here. According to Marvin Kitman in Newsday, “Bette Midler is hilarious. The show is the best spoof of the TV variety format. . . . Midler is making fun of the public access show, one of those wonderfully tacky vanity cable programs. Midler as Mondo Beyondo—a character created by Jerry Blatt and Midler—continues demonstrating she is one of the most outrageous funny people on TV, a maximalist comedienne in a minimalist age” (124).

  In the final sequence of Mondo Beyondo, Bette at long last introduces the public to the man she married. Beginning with several jokes on flatulence, Midler and her camera crew venture into the men’s room of the cheesy TV studio to invest
igate who is making all of the “fart” noises. What she—and the audience—finds there are two men in Speedo bathing suits, barely visible through the automobile-tire inner tubes they wear around their waists. With clown-white makeup on their faces and white bathing caps on their heads, the self-christened Kipper Kids proceed to wage a battle of sorts. First they break raw eggs on each other’s heads, then douse each other in baking flour, canned Spaghetti-O’s, and various gooey concoctions. At the end, they apply whipped cream to each other’s heads, insert firecrackers in the foam crowns, and ignite them. Not exactly high-brow humor, but humor nonetheless.

  According to Midler, as Italian-accented chat show hostess Beyondo, “Those-a boys, they are-a sooo bizarre and yet, so wonderful.”

  In good Midlerian fashion, Mondo Beyondo ends with her singing the “Mondo Beyondo” theme song and shaking her prominently displayed breasts. Obviously, the product of the “I’ve got a video camera and a studio” kind of brainstorming, no matter what Midler put her hands on, it drew a crowd. This TV special was decidedly silly, but a frothy, no-risk bit of nonsensical fun.

  Meanwhile, as Bette was filming Big Business, she was also busy with her own film production company. She had earned so much money for Disney that she was thrilled to have her own chance at selecting, developing, producing, and starring in her own movies, with her own production office on the Touchstone lot. The two women whom Bette brought in to work with her—Bonnie Bruckheimer-Martell and Margaret Jennings South—had been working hard to launch their first full-scale production. Bette felt very confident teaming up with both women. Bonnie once had been employed by Aaron Russo, and Bette recalled that she was very detail-conscious. Bonnie excelled in overseeing contracts and planning logistics. Margaret had previously worked for 20th Century-Fox, where she was a story editor. She excelled at finding strong scripts and coming up with story ideas.

  By naming their company All Girls Productions, Bette felt she was making a strong statement. “We wanted to be liberated, but we wanted to be girls,” she explained at the time. “We didn’t want the business to perceive us as aggressive, domineering females. We thought if we had, like, this twitty title they’d give us some room” (125).

  One of the things that frustrated Bette the most about the movie business was that everything took so long. From making major artistic choices, to putting them into action, everything seemed to move so slowly. Now that she had her own production company, she could make decisions much quicker. According to Bette, “Everyone likes to pussyfoot in this business. And we don’t want to pussyfoot. We just say, ‘Oh, that stinks. What are you thinking about?’ Then the ice is broken and it’s a relief and people can speak their minds. We’d rather have that comfort” (125).

  She was, however, quick to add, “I have the last word because my name is above the title. But I try to be good and not abandon any idea out-of-hand and say, ‘Oh, that’s garbage!’ I try to let it develop and give it a chance to blossom—and then step on it!” (125).

  Several of the projects that All Girls was initially considering were musicals—specifically, dramas with music. At the time there was a projected biographical film about famed Austrian actress Lotte Lenya, a film about a group of USO singers, and their proposed movie about the leader of an all-girl band: Ina Ray Hutton. Since the days of late ’70s blockbusters Grease (1978), Fame (1980), and Saturday Night Fever (1977), musical films had pretty much been a bust. After the Village People’s Can’t Stop the Music (1980) and Olivia Newton-John’s Xanadu (1980) proved to be expensive box-office miscalculations, it seemed that musicals were rarely ever mounted.

  According to Midler at the time, she was determined to somehow make the formula of blending music and dramatic acting viable for her again, the way it was with The Rose. “I think people really do like them. I like the musical formula a lot. The only people who hate musicals are the studios, because they don’t know how to make them and they’re too expensive and time-consuming. My feeling is they can be made. They just have to be well-planned” (125).

  She was also very dismayed that she was never considered by other producers for dramatic roles. After the bawdy reputation she had acquired for herself—via her stage act and her campy musical sense—she was basically looked at as a comedian. Not even her Oscar nomination for The Rose made people perceive her as a gifted dramatic actress. She was determined to change that. With all of these ideas in mind, Bette and her partners at All Girls set about to find the perfect picture to kick off their production company. They didn’t have to look for long.

  Among the first film ideas that came to Bette and her new business associates came from a writer by the name of Iris Rainer Dart. When Iris wrote the story about the friendship of two women and called it Beaches, she claimed that she had done so with a clear vision of who should star in the movie. She told Midler point-blank, “I’m writing a book with a part you’d be perfect for” (125). She was right.

  Beaches was a project that was several years in the making. In the May 16, 1985, issue of the Hollywood Reporter, under a headline that read, “Beaches to Disney as Midler Picture,” the publication announced that the film would be directed by Lynne Litman (Testament). Fascinatingly, the debut hardcover edition of Beaches wasn’t due in bookstores until July 1 of 1985, so it was published with its film rights already optioned by Disney and earmarked for Midler. During the three years of its development, it underwent several changes along the way, including the replacement of Litman with Garry Marshall as director.

  From the very beginning, Midler was really intrigued with the story. However, she was a bit apprehensive about playing the role of C. C. Bloom as claw-her-way-to-the-top ambitious as the character in the book was written. “This character was much bigger in her personal life than I ever was,” Bette claimed. “So domineering and so pushy and so aggressive, and I’m not really like that” (125). Yet the story seemed like the kind of film that would appeal to her.

  With that, the production rights to Beaches were passed on to All Girls Productions, with Disney marketing and distributing. Bette was thrilled with the idea of being very “hands on” with this project. According to her, “I wanted to be responsible for the color of the movie, what the clothes looked like and the style. But I was so anxious and nervous about picking who should play the other part. I was so afraid I would make a mistake. I don’t like being responsible for people getting or not getting jobs. It’s really creepy” (125).

  However, “creepy” or not, if she was going to be a movie producer, and if she was truly going to be in the driver’s seat, she did have to have a hand in casting who would play opposite her onscreen in Beaches. Since the film is about two very different women, Midler also had to be believable on camera with the other woman. Bette was fixated on the fact that she wanted to act opposite Anne Archer. When Bette finally settled on starring in Beaches, one of the first people she had audition for the part was Archer. “Whenever I read the script, I had her in mind,” Bette claimed. “Anne was really, really good. And Donna Mills turned in a surprising performance. But when Barbara Hershey came in to test, you couldn’t ignore her. Her test had such a fragile quality to it. . . . But I really didn’t want to have to say, ‘I want so and so.’ It really took a toll on me” (125). Regardless of the emotional toll it took, finally Bette and her two partners decided to hire Barbara Hershey for the role of Hillary in Beaches.

  The plot to Beaches is a perfect “women’s picture”—or, as they are now known, a “chick flick.” Two eleven-year-old girls meet on the boardwalk at Atlantic City’s beach in the 1950s. C. C. Bloom is a precocious redhead from the Bronx, with a pushy stage mother (Lanie Kazan). Hillary Whitney is an Ivy League school-bound girl from a blueblood family from outside San Francisco. The two girls remain pen pals during their growing-up years. In the early ’70s, Hillary shows up in New York City for their first face-to-face reunion since Atlantic City. They hadn’t seen each other since childhood; C.C. (Bette) has now become a struggling actres
s, and Whitney (Barbara Hershey) has fled the West Coast and the clutches of her controlling and restrictive father.

  Beaches follows their very different but parallel lives through the next several years. An unlikely duo of friends—the film offered them two of the most fascinating and multilayered roles in their individual film careers. In addition, Beaches gave Bette a platform to sing several great songs. The mechanical-sounding techno-pop “Oh Industry” is presented as a stage piece, personifying the dehumanization of the American Worker. She also sings “Otto Titsling” (resurrected from her Mud Will Be Flung! album), which is used as a showcasing sample of her character’s Broadway career, and “I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today” is presented in a recording studio scene. She also sang three jazzy standards from the 1930s and 1940s: “The Glory of Love,” “Baby Mine,” and Cole Porter’s “I’ve Still Got My Health.”

  C.C. and Hillary become adult roommates, vie for the same boyfriend—John (John Heard)—and forge ahead with their career goals. While C.C. is intent on launching a show business career, Hillary becomes a socially conscious lawyer.

  One of the funniest scenes takes place in C.C.’s over-the-top Manhattan apartment, when Hillary comes to visit her friend who is now the star of Sizzle ’76 on Broadway. After running on and on about herself, Bette takes a breath and says to Barbara, “But enough about me. Let’s talk about you. What do you think about me?”

  It became known as the movie’s most memorable line—quoted by everyone who saw the film, and several times by Bette herself—onstage and off. If one were to select the most famous line from a Bette Midler movie, that is undoubtedly it.