Bette Midler

by Mark Bego

  Said Caan of Midler, after working with her on For the Boys: “Bette is the hardest worker I’ve ever dealt with” (40).

  The film For the Boys tells the story of two USO performers, through their career, which spans fifty years and three different wars: World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Like Beaches, it was an All Girls picture, produced by Bette Midler, Bonnie Bruckheimer, and Margaret South.

  The premise of the film is that veteran song and comedy stars Dixie Leonard and Eddie Sparks are being honored with a presidential medal on a huge television special, and a production assistant is being dispatched to try and coerce Leonard out of the Hollywood apartment she has been holed up in for years, to appear on the program.

  When the production assistant arrives at Dixie’s memorabilia-filled apartment, we find Bette in a ton of aging makeup, playing an eighty-year-old. Bette looks something like the comedian Sophie Tucker did in the 1960s, and her character of Dixie Leonard also has the same salty tongue of foul-mouthed “Soph.”

  While trying to convince the aged singer to participate in the show, the production assistant, Jeff Brooks (Arne Gross), has to sit and listen to Dixie’s reflections about the past. It is through those reflections that the action of For the Boys unfolds, in a series of flashbacks.

  In the first flashback Dixie Leonard is seen in a recording session, recording the song “Billy-a-Dick,” with her girlfriends Myra (Pattie D’Arcy) and Colleen (Melissa Manchester) singing harmony vocals. This is one of the film’s biggest treats, seeing and hearing Bette with Melissa—her very first Harlette.

  When Eddie Sparks’s female singer drops out of the show midtour, Dixie is invited to England as her replacement. It would be her job not only to sing on the show for the American troops, but to banter jokes with Eddie Sparks onstage.

  While in makeup and waiting in the wings for her first appearance with Eddie, she rips her gown. So, instead of missing her cue, she bounds onstage dressed in an officer’s jacket, high-heels, and no skirt or pants. This causes quite a stir. Then she sells an up-tempo song to the troops—the catchy boogie-woogie number “Stuff Like That There.” When the lights suddenly go out, she carries on like a seasoned trooper, singing Johnny Mercer’s “P.S. I Love You.”

  Although Dixie’s sexually suggestive repartee on stage offends Eddie and almost gets her fired, when he sees how adept she is with a song, he begins to mellow. After a backstage battle and a nightclub reconciliation, an act is born.

  The Eddie Sparks and Dixie Leonard duo is such a hit as a wartime act that it blossoms in the next decade, not only in front of the troops in Korea, but on 1950s television as well. Some of the liveliest scenes take place in the TV show sequences.

  There is no question that Eddie Sparks is a clone of comedian Bob Hope, who was famous for entertaining troops around the world during the exact eras that For the Boys is set in. The same is true for Eddie’s theme song “I’ll Remember You,” which is obviously fashioned from Bob Hope’s trademark tune, “Thanks for the Memories.”

  As Dixie tells her story, she paints Sparks as quite the ladies man. “How they loved him, those boys,” reminisces Dixie of Eddie. However, she is always quick to explain, “He screwed everything that moved.”

  Also crucial to the act is Eddie’s longtime gag writer, Art (George Segal). He happens to be Dixie’s uncle, who was instrumental in introducing the famous pair to each other. However, in the 1950s, when Art expresses an opinion that sounds decidedly Communist, Eddie is forced to fire him from the show. With that, Dixie starts her own World War III, against Sparks.

  Another pivotal relationship that occurs in the film involves Dixie’s young son Danny. Since Eddie has a wife and three daughters of his own, he clearly longs to have a son. Instead, he has a bond with thirteen-year-old Danny. Danny is like the son that Eddie never had.

  As the film progresses into the late ’60s, Eddie convinces Dixie to put the act back together to tour Vietnam. He does this by setting up a meeting with her drafted son, Danny, since they both miss him terribly.

  When Eddie and Dixie reunite for a tour of entertaining the troops in Vietnam, For the Boys suddenly swings into “Bette Midler does Apocalypse Now”– mode. Dixie is in shock when she sees that all the soldiers are tripping out on drugs. One soldier has gone totally nuts and is amassing a collection of dead enemy ears—which he keeps on a string. But when a horrified Dixie offers to pull some strings to get Danny out of there, he declines, because it might break his “uncle” Eddie’s heart.

  The Vietnam sequences give Bette some of her strongest dramatic moments on screen. One of the high points comes when she sings the sentimental Beatles song “In My Life” to a drug-altered troop of soldiers. Then tragedy suddenly strikes.

  In a catastrophic scene, while Dixie and Eddie are in attendance, a vicious enemy strike occurs, and Danny is riddled with bullets. Witnessing the death of the boy they both loved so dearly becomes the event that splits Dixie and Eddie up for twenty-five more years—until the present-day ’90s.

  After refusing to have anything to do with Sparks or his Presidential Medal, Dixie suddenly decides to show up at the live telecast. However, her motive is not necessarily to appear at the show, but to have a final backstage showdown with Eddie Sparks.

  Alone in his dressing room, Dixie asks of Eddie, “Mind if I smoke?”

  He shoots back at her: “I don’t care if you burn.”

  This ignites a fight up to the bitter end. After she tells him off, she turns to leave and lets him take the stage alone. With heightened emotional drama, Dixie watches from the wings as Eddie starts to dotteringly “lose it.” As he rambles on, visibly upset, Dixie decides to take the stage for one last tearful reunion.

  Some of For the Boys is tear-jerkingly sentimental. Although it has some very funny moments, it is also highly dramatic. For Midler, it provided her with the most even and emotional drama of her film career. When viewing this film, we have no doubt that Bette has put her heart into it. It is finely crafted and well acted, and it contains some great musical performances.

  When the film was released, it was marketed like a big glamorous movie from the 1940s. The Los Angeles debut of the film had the air of an old-time Hollywood premiere. In grand Hedda Hopper style, Jeannie Williams, in USA Today, leaked out La Midler’s fashion choices for the opening night gala by announcing, “She’ll go for the glamour. But with a sensible difference. Designer Robert Turturice (Beaches) has remodeled the purple velvet number Bette wore to the Grammy Awards. They got lots of favorable mail on the dress, and it’s reappearing calf-length with a V-neck, minus roses, plus beads” (144).

  On November 14, 1991, Bette gave a forty-minute live musical performance at the premiere of For the Boys. Held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, she sang songs from the film for a special invited audience of VIPs and press. And, during her publicity sweep, on November 22 she appeared on The Tonight Show.

  It’s a drama, it’s a musical, it’s a soap opera, it’s political, it’s patriotic, and it somehow roundly missed every audience. Yet the really strange thing about For the Boys was that it received great reviews. It indeed received some horrible reviews as well, but mainly, the critics seemed to love it. “Don’t miss For the Boys! A sassy, sensational performance from Bette Midler, the best of her career,” claimed Pat Collins of WWOR-TV (145). “Midler struts her best stuff,” wrote David Ansen in Newsweek (145). “Hilariously funny. Bette’s most magnificent movie ever!” Larry Frascella, US magazine (145). “Midler is not only divine, she could walk home with the Oscar,” said Joel Siegel on TV’s Good Morning America (145). “The best slambang entertainment of the year!” claimed Bob Thomas for the Associated Press (146).

  Renata Polt, in the Pacific Sun, proclaimed, “In all, For the Boys is a winner, a perfect vehicle for Bette Midler, who carries the show, and has never been in better form. . . . It’s a funny, sexy, tuneful, even thoughtful. I can’t think of a better way to start off the holiday seaso
n” (147). In USA Today Mike Clark gave it three stars out of four and proclaimed, “For the Boys, which allows Bette Midler to fulfill what is probably her life’s dream: to look just like the twilight Sophie Tucker. . . . Midler may have her career role here; Caan has never been so loose and likable on screen. If you savor moldy show biz sagas with Ethel Merman or Susan Hayward, you may (like me) find For the Boys a guilty pleasure that’s not for the birds” (148).

  A lot of the raves were for Midler herself. The New York Times called For the Boys “a custom-tailored showcase for [Midler’s] talents. . . . Midler has wisely taken the bull by the horns” (98).

  And then, there were the press members who loathed the film. According to Entertainment Weekly, “For most of the movie she’s like a watered-down cross between the Divine Miss M and the long-suffering earth mothers she played in Beaches and Stella. Dixie isn’t a character exactly—she’s a walking Bette’s greatest hits package. . . . For the Boys wants to make you laugh, cry, and everything in between. In the end, though, the movie, with its schematic sentimentality and just-add-water period settings, is a great big empty shell—a reminder that, no, they really don’t make ‘em like they used to” (149).

  Amy Dawes, in Daily Variety, said, “Fox’s song-driven wartime show-biz meller For the Boys is a big, creaky balloon of a movie that lumbers along like a dirigible in a Thanksgiving parade, festooned with patriotic sentiment, clumsy but still fitfully likable as a vehicle for the punchy, effervescent Bette Midler. . . . Presented as a wildly popular comedian and legendary ladies’ man, he [James Caan] gives evidence of neither. Midler, as spunky singer Dixie Leonard, seems more like a gal enduring a tough job situation than like a woman feeling an attraction to Caan’s supposedly seductive Eddie Sparks. . . . pic suffers from the lack of electricity between them” (150).

  Detroit’s Orbit magazine tore into the film by stating, “There are two very frightening things about For the Boys. James Caan—Sonny Corleone—with red hair, singing, and Bette Midler as a senior citizen . . . [as Eddie and Dixie] their twenty-five years together entertaining troops and driving each other crazy, while driving viewers of this film to drink. . . . The fact that some critics are praising this mess, is mindboggling—unless of course they mistook the soundtrack for a quality film” (151).

  Well, on the positive side of things, there were several critics who conceded that the film was a “bomb,” but declared the coinciding album a big hit. “The soundtrack for the new film starring Bette Midler, is much more of a stand-alone listening experience. However sluggish business is at the box-office, the soundtrack is one of Midler’s better albums, reminiscent of her ability to send up a vintage style while giving it new life” (152).

  There was no question that Bette Midler excelled at bringing to life the classic big band swing sound of the 1940s. The soundtrack album of For the Boys gave her a platform to really delve into the music of this era. With the exception of two brief instrumentals, the For the Boys soundtrack is a full Bette Midler album. If one were to name the most prominent songwriter on this album, it would be the great Johnny Mercer. Of the eleven Midler vocal numbers it contains, she performs four Mercer numbers, including “P.S. I Love You,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and two versions of “I Remember You.” The only new material included here is the sentimental Diane Warren composition “Every Road Leads Back to You.” The aforementioned “Billy-a-Dick” (with Melissa Manchester) opens the album and really sets the tone for this—the ultimate 1940s-style Bette Midler album. Other great musical highlights include Bette’s swinging “Stuff Like That There,” her version of the ballad “For All We Know,” and her touching rendition of the Beatles’ “In My Life.” With the exception of the production of one Johnny Mercer instrumental, “The Girl Friend of the Whirling Dervish,” the album was produced by Arif Mardin.

  The For the Boys soundtrack album had a nice run on the record charts. It peaked in Billboard magazine at Number 22, and it was certified Gold, for selling over 500,000 copies in America. In England, it made it to Number 75 on the album chart. Only one single was released from the album. It was the song “Every Road Leads Back to You,” which peaked at Number 78 in America.

  She was nominated for a Golden Globe for her role as Dixie Leonard, and at the ceremony, held in Los Angeles, much to her surprise she won it. Accepting the award, she said from the stage, “I want to thank the Foreign Press Association for honoring a film when the American public dismissed it” (131).

  And she was again nominated for a “Best Actress” Academy Award, which she did not win. Although Golden Globe-winning and heralded by so many critics, the bottom-line could not be denied: For the Boys was a financial disaster. Playing at the height of the Christmas season, it was largely ignored. At cineplexes across America, it was playing to nearly empty theaters.

  The night of the 49th Annual Golden Globe Awards, Bette Midler complained to a reporter for USA Today, “I’ve been through a lot in the last couple of months. It’s been a lot of stress. All of us thought that it was a picture everybody would adore. We miscalculated. We were so sure we had a winner. That’s why it was so disappointing. . . . It was a grown-up picture for grown-up people and they simply did not come. It was so ambitious. Maybe it was too ambitious” (153).

  She also claimed at the time, that she would “never” star in another musical, “Because . . . people are [not] interested in them. They want a thrill a minute. They want violence. They want to be overstimulated” (153).

  When she was asked what she had going on in her career at the moment, a dramatic Midler shot back: “I have nothing” (153).

  According to Bonnie Bruckheimer, “We spent years on that project, and nobody went to see it. That was shocking to me. I thought it was a sure thing. I was catatonic when it failed” (22).

  Said Midler, “By the time For the Boys came around, I had been through Jinxed and so many other storms. I had so much armor around me. I had turned into a . . . man. And you know how they are. They have no feelings” (22).

  As she had proved so many times in the past, just when things look the bleakest, it’s simply time to stand up, brush yourself off, and start anew. That is exactly what Bette Midler was about to do—again.

  17

  BETTE OF ROSES

  While Bette’s feelings may have been hurt by the public’s reception toward her For the Boys project, she was too much involved in other films, new appearances, and reflecting about her life to dwell on this.

  One of the things that Bette most enjoyed between projects was her home life inside her Coldwater Canyon house. Said she at the time: “I really have decided that the outside world doesn’t have a lot to offer. You have to make your own heaven in your own home. How many after-hours bars can you go to? How many vodka gimlets can you drink?” (40).

  Speaking of her daughter in 1992, Midler claimed, “She’s a lot like me. So it’s comforting, and also horrifying. She really gets on my nerves sometimes. I love her, but she’s really stubborn. If you ask her to apologize, she won’t do it” (27).

  She was also very comfortable and happy with her marriage to Martin. However, she admitted that whenever the two of them did have an argument, she simply insisted that she win every difference of opinion. “That’s one of the main things my husband hates about me—I always have to be right. I tell him, ‘I don’t have to be right. I simply am right,” she proclaimed (27).

  According to her, “I’m a fabulous cook, and my husband is a fabulous cook. I collect cookbooks. I love good food. I sew. You won’t believe it, but I sew. We decorate. We go to flea markets and swap meets. We have a lot of friends who own restaurants, people who like to eat well. I like that. There’s a certain quality of life that’s missing in this country. People go so fast—everything in this country is about speed, about going faster, having more status, more money. And I find that’s not really the way” (27).

  On March 23, 1992, the United States Supreme Court made an official ruling on Ford Motor Com
pany’s appeal against Midler’s 1989 judgment, with regard to the recording of “Do You Want to Dance?” According to USA Today, “A $400,000 award was upheld for singer Bette Midler against an ad agency that used a ‘soundalike’ for a 1986 TV commercial. Midler’s former back-up singer was told to sound like Midler in the Ford ads” (154).

  That spring, the voice of Bette Midler was heard narrating the children’s story “Weird Peanuts.” It was telecast on Shelley Duvall’s Bedtime Stories series for kids on the Showtime network in America.

  On May 21, 1992, Bette Midler had the honorable distinction of being Johnny Carson’s very last guest on The Tonight Show. He had announced his retirement, and he wanted to have her on the final show to help him bid TV audiences “good-bye.” Carson had been hosting the late night show on NBC-TV since October 2, 1962.

  It was a very touching performance on both of their parts. It was a sentimental event, but Bette kept the program upbeat with her jokes and mugging with Carson. During the program she sang “Dear Mr. Carson” to Johnny, to the tune of “Dear Mr. Gable,” which Judy Garland once sang to Clark Gable in Broadway Melody of 1938. She made jokes about people at home having sex while watching The Tonight Show. She sang Carson a song that he identified as his favorite, “Here’s That Rainy Day.” Johnny, teary eyed, said the audience, “You people are seeing one hell-uva show.” Indeed, they were. However, the biggest highlight of the evening was Midler serenading and saluting Johnny with a special rendition of the Johnny Mercer/Harold Arlan song “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).”

  The show was a huge ratings hit, and everyone seemed to be talking about what a touching and wonderful performance Midler delivered. According to her, she was overwhelmed by receiving “such an outpouring of love and goodwill from vast numbers of people as I did after that show. What I’m trying to say is that people were so thrilled by that evening, and I think they were so glad because they felt that I had given him something that he deserved, what they wanted to give him if they could have, I said ‘thank you’ for them in the way they wanted. . . . That was great, just great” (155).