A View From a Broad

by Bette Midler

  On that unforgettable night, I snorted a bit of something the promoter, with only the best intentions, had left for me on my dressing table. It was hardly enough to do any normal person harm, and I felt I was entitled. That tour had been a killer, and I was exhausted. So I snorted it and went onstage.

  Four and a half hours later, I was still onstage. I sang every song I knew and quite a few I didn’t. But of course, I didn’t just sing. I expounded at length on such up and entertaining topics as How Do You Think the Soul Feels at the Moment of Violent Death? And the oh-so-cheerful, oh-so-amusing What to Do About the Highway Slush Fund.

  At one point during that sterling performance, I left the stage altogether, not to interact more closely with the audience, but to walk out to the candy counter in the lobby, where I bought and consumed an entire quart of buttered popcorn before being returned to my right and proper place.

  In every way, the show and I were disaster areas, and I punished myself for it for months afterwards.

  So I certainly should have known better in Amsterdam. But, as I said, I was a wreck, and everyone kept telling me how great the hash was and how they ate tons and tons of it and were feeling terrific and how it would relax me and I would be wonderful and funny and full of cosmic energy.

  Well, what I was, was nauseous beyond belief. But the nausea took a back seat to the waves of Nameless Terror that came flooding over me with tidal-wave force. I looked out towards the stage from my dressing room and saw a dark, cavernous abyss where soon I would be led only to be flailed and humiliated by those who had claimed to adore me not ten minutes before. My fears weren’t lessened. They were heightened. Not just heightened. Blown out of all proportion.

  “. . . I would be wonderful and funny and full of cosmic energy.”

  I tried desperately to talk myself down. I tried to do my vocal runs, my exercises. I tried to remember my name. But I had truly gone to Gouda. And I was terrified.

  Miss Frank, of course, knew something was wrong the minute she walked in and saw me sitting inside the wardrobe case sucking my thumb. She offered me some tea, but not much sympathy. She had been with me in St. Louis and heard me swear never to work stoned again.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Sick,” I said.

  “How sick?” she wanted to know.

  “Very, very sick,” I said.

  “Good” was all she said, and then she quickly left the room.

  How heartless! I exclaimed to myself, my mind struggling to form even that self-pitying thought. I’m going to find that woman and tell her what I think of her! But I could barely put one foot in front of the other. And curtain time was only minutes away!

  When my girls came in for our usual preshow chat, they too saw what pathetic shape I was in. Each of them had some advice: a cold shower, a bowl of borscht, a hit of speed. But I knew I was too far gone for any of that. I didn’t know what to do. But, as always, Miss Frank did.

  I had no idea where she had gone after she left me so abruptly a few minutes earlier, but now she came back to the dressing room carrying a large book under her arm. As she got closer, I saw that the book was, in fact, my reference tome to all known medical diseases, which hadn’t been opened since I bought it. “Here, dear,” Miss Frank said, “I want you to see something.” “Really, Miss Frank,” I said, feeling dizzier by the minute, “I don’t want to look at that book now.” “Oh, yes, you do,” she answered back, shoving before my face a two-page full-color photograph of advanced mytosal phelyngitis, featuring in gruesome detail both rear and frontal views. Shrieking and heaving like the sea, I fled into the bathroom.

  When I came back out, I was quite a bit lighter and sober as a nun. Miss Frank was waiting, dog dress in hand. She didn’t say a word to me as she zipped me in or even as we walked to the wings, where I waited to make my entrance. But just as the curtain went up and the timpani roll began, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

  “Goodness, you looked so sick” she said, and even in the semidarkness I could swear I saw a tear in her eye. “Well, go on, get out there. Before I jab you with this needle.”

  I gave my light man the cue to go. As the house lights went to black, I could hear the crowd shouting and stamping in anticipation. I looked back over my shoulder for Miss Frank. But she was gone. She knew I didn’t need her anymore, and she had work to do. And, her absence told me, I did too.

  With a smile to the girls that said, I’m okay, I picked up my mike, straightened my hem, threw out my chest and strode onto the stage.

  “Oh, Amsterdam, Amsterdam,” I shouted to the crowd. “What a thrill it is to be here. . . .” And to my fondest surprise, I found I really meant it.

  • I VANT TO BE ALONE •

  I told a lie in Amsterdam. A big lie.

  The entire troupe, myself included, was scheduled to leave on the Tuesday flight to Sydney, where we were to rest our weary bods before beginning three weeks of performances Down Under. But I didn’t want to do that. I had other plans in mind.

  I told my manager I needed to be alone for a while, that I wanted to stay in Amsterdam and come to Sydney a few days later. He, of course, supportive as always, objected vehemently. He absolutely forbade me to stay alone in Holland.

  I reasoned with him as best I could, but I could see it was hopeless. At first I found his protectiveness almost charming, but as he railed on about how he couldn’t possibly allow me to do this, or possibly allow me to do that, I began to feel like a prisoner, and rebelled like a child. I told him that if he didn’t let me stay in Amsterdam for a few days on my own, I would simply cancel the dates in Australia and go home.

  Reluctantly, he gave me my airplane ticket, if not his blessing. “All right,” he said, “stay in Amsterdam. See if I care.”

  “I will stay,” I told him, “and I’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

  Only I didn’t stay in Amsterdam. I did something I had dreamed about doing for as long as I could remember. And I did it alone. Because I needed to do something brave and daring and maybe even foolish.

  I went to India.

  “. . . I needed to do something brave and daring and maybe even foolish.”

  • THE RIVER OF KINGS •

  My head was swimming with images of rick-shaws and golden temples as we headed down through the clouds towards the steaming jungles of Thailand—a one-night layover on my way to Sydney. But nothing, nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.

  There was no land anywhere. Only water. At first I thought my eyes were deceiving me, but as we continued to descend through the steel-gray clouds, I could see that my first impression was correct. The entire country was covered by water. It lay over the farms and the towns, the jungles and the roads. In fact, there were no roads as far as I could tell, no landmarks of any kind. I didn’t know it then, but I was arriving smack in the middle of the monsoon season. And the monsoons so far had been particularly severe.

  During the taxi ride to my hotel (the very same, I was told, where Somerset Maugham wrote several novels and had a few shirts made), through the lushest of landscapes and ten inches of water, I searched for my malaria pills and wondered how I could see it all in just twenty-four hours without a snorkel and a pair of fins. A talk with my taxi driver, who made English sound like a jazz tune, convinced me that the one thing I had to do was take a rice barge upriver into the jungle and see Thai life au naturel. But where would I find a rice barge?

  It was easy. Tied up to the pier outside my hotel were twenty barges or more. I didn’t waste a moment. Using the same bargaining principles that have allowed me in the past to put a show together for $12.98, I hired a barge for the afternoon and a mere pittance. At least, I thought it a mere pittance. After all, I got myself a whole barge for the day, and I still had enough money left over to buy a banana.

  As I stepped into the boat, clouds of pink and purple raced low overhead and lightning flashed everywhere. Soaked through to the skin, but with my spirits soaring, I made my
way up the River of Kings.

  This is what I saw:

  Enthralled, I looked up at my boatman to see if years and years of rowing up and down these same waters had inured him to the beauties of the place, but from the broad smile on his face he seemed as charmed as I was. He must have felt me staring up at him, because suddenly he turned that broad grin on me and said, “You like?”

  “Oh, very much,” I answered.

  “You smart,” he said. Then suddenly the smile under the straw hat disappeared completely. “And you lucky . . . you see it now. . . . Few years . . . all be gone.”

  “Gone? But why?” I asked, wondering how this way of life that looked so eternal could ever change. “Will the cities take over?”

  “No cities . . . war.”

  “But Thailand is at peace,” I said, trying to remember how long it had been since I’d last had time to read a newspaper.

  “Peace? Now maybe, but not soon. Look,” he said, pointing at a laughing child about to jump off his mother’s banana boat into the bustling river. “In all Asia only Thailand never conquered . . . only Thailand always free. Yet all around us, countries un-free. Maybe they don’t stay home . . . maybe they come here. Then what you do?”

  “Me?”

  “You. Miss America. All Thailand watch you leave Vietnam. Civil war you say, why we there? We say maybe you right, but maybe you just tired. Everything look different when you live next door. Thailand okay now. But soon maybe we must fight to keep her free. Tell me, Miss America with your nice blond hair, you ever let your son fight again with mine?

  The question, the whole conversation was so disturbing. I hate moral confusion. I like my right and wrong clear-cut, in vivid black and white, but in Thailand I had definitely stumbled into a very gray area.

  In the sixties I had been committed to the antiwar movement and done my share of shouting to “Get Out of Southeast Asia Now” and “Bring the Boys Back Home!” Now here I was faced with a people I adored on sight who might soon have to battle for all they held dear. And if Thailand was attacked by her neighbors, would the United States do anything, after Vietnam, to help her? And where would I stand on the question this time?

  As I rode back down the River of Kings, the sun was beginning to set on the beautiful world around me. Temple bells were chiming, and monks were everywhere in their saffron-colored robes. Was this world about to pass away forever?

  And if it was, I wondered with a sinking feeling, had I, in my own small, unintentional way, contributed to its passing?

  • AUSTRALIA •

  Subcontinent: the end of the earthI

  Land area: 198,007,987 sq. miles

  Population: 14,000,000

  Largest city: Sydney

  Smallest city: Sydney

  National dish: Pineapple Pizza

  National bird: the Fly

  Language: derivative of English, as yet unnamed.

  I. Traditionally the last place to escape nuclear holocaust,

  • AN AMERICAN IN SYDNEY •

  Australia! Land of jumbucks, billy-bongs, mystery meat pies and the wombat. I looked forward to arriving in Australia more than I had ever looked forward to anything—if you don’t count getting my ears pierced. Being on the road in non-English-speaking countries was exhilarating to the point of breakdown, but the burden of speaking even a few words of the native language from the stage each night was beginning to take its toll. I was becoming the Tower of Babel.

  “Dank yu veil,” I would tell Miss Frank as she hooked me into my no-nonsense bra, and then unable to stop myself, “C’est difficile de trouver des domestiques, n’est-ce pas? Wenn’s etwas gewalt’ger als das Schicksal gibt, so ist’s der Mut, der’s unerschütter-lich trdät”

  “Of course, dear,” Miss Frank would say, patient as ever, “as soon as I’m finished with this corset.”

  And not only did we have to change our language every day. We had to change our change. Pounds, kronor, French francs, Swiss francs, drachmae, guilders, Marks. I became so confused I stopped using money altogether. I made what few purchases I required by bartering personal items such as long underwear or short exposes on celebrities unlucky enough to have crossed my all-seeing, all-retentive path.

  Happily, Miss Frank assured me that all would be well once we hit Australia. Not only did they speak our language there. They even had the sense to call a dollar a dollar. Of course, theirs was worth more than ours, but I was glad to pay extra for the privilege of being able to count my change again. Yes, hopefully, Australia would save us all from that extra thinking we’d had to do in Europe.

  And it did. Once we hit that vast continent Down Under, we didn’t have to think again. I came to believe, in fact, that it is a crime to think in Australia. Or to eat either, for that matter.

  There is no food in Australia. Not as we know it. The natives do, of course, on occasion put matter to mouth, but one cannot possibly call what they ingest food.

  Still, I felt happier in Australia than almost anywhere else, because life there is so basically relaxed and uncomplicated. The Australians have the best sense of humor of any of the English-speaking nations. I felt young and carefree again. My whole troupe felt the same about the place. In fact, we left a few of the kids from our crew there. In the alcoholic ward of Sydney General—victims of the Australian national pastime.

  But I think, more than anything else, I wanted to see Australian wildlife. Like so many others, I’m sure, the unique aspects of Australia’s animal population always held me in thrall. How cute they all would be, I thought: cuddly koalas, gentle kangaroos, feisty little penguins. And, it turned out, how deadly!

  My first indication of what Australian wildlife was really all about came when I was walking in a field behind one of the beaches in Sydney, and I saw a sign that said:

  WARNING: THIS AREA IS INFESTED WITH TAIPANS. KEEP OUT.

  Taipans? What the hell were they? Was this just another example of the racial snobbery that some said ran just under the hip Australian veneer? Or were taipans some sort of land mines planted by the Japanese?

  As it happened, the next night I was introduced to a young man who lived and worked on an animal refuge in the hills just on the outside of town. He told me what taipans were. In fact, he told me a lot. “You may not know it,” he said, “but Australia has more poisonous animals than any other place on earth. Not only more. The most deadly. The taipans you wanted to know about . . . they’re snakes—big, long, ornery snakes that make the cobra look harmless. But of course, we also have the tiger snake and the brown snake and the death adder. Not to mention the sea snakes, which we’re beginning to think are responsible for more deaths than we imagined. And other things, too.”

  “What do you mean, other things?” My eyes darted all around.

  “Well,” he went on, “We’ve got the funnel spider—very deadly! and the blue-ringed octopus—which can kill you in about thirty seconds; and several varieties of conefish and stonefish; but the deadliest of all, the deadliest living thing in the world, in fact, is the sea wasp. We get it up along the northern coast by the thousands.”

  “The sea wasp!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t know bees could live in the ocean.”

  “It’s not a bee,” he said, “it’s a giant jellyfish—nasty-looking thing, actually. But don’t forget, even the adorable little platypus can put you in the hospital for days.”

  Well, I was in shock! Australia was awash in venom, the land and sea teeming with things to stop your heart or paralyze your lungs. One could be killed instantly. Anywhere.

  But brave and feckless as I am, I refused to allow this information to dampen my enjoyment of either the fauna or anything else in Australia. Every dream has a dark side, after all. I simply dealt with any fear I may have felt in the most direct and intelligent way possible. I never left my room again.

  The Magic Lady, however, left hers. Ever since that day in Fontainebleau when Dolores decided to go out on her own, I had been waiting, maybe even hoping,
for The Magic Lady to do the same. In Melbourne, she finally did. But unlike Dolores, who, shameless hussy that she is, chose to flash her tail not more than fifty yards from hundreds—nay, thousands—of sun worshippers who couldn’t help noticing her, The Magic Lady chose to go where there were no people at all. Only animals. Perhaps after four months on the road and thousands of new people to face every night, an animal refuge was a refuge indeed. In any case, when they finally noticed her missing and went to find her and did find her and took her back, The Magic Lady protested vigorously. “You have no time to go hobnobbing with a bunch of marsupials,” the stage manager told her, rather peeved at the problems her outing had caused him. “Then you must make time!” The Magic Lady snorted. “For me, for you, for everyone.”

  And now as I sit here, eight thousand miles away from the nearest kangaroo, I wish to hell we had.

  On November 20, 1978, almost a week before we were to wind up the tour in Sydney, Miss Frank left to go home to Boston. It wasn’t that we had a fight or any some such; how could I ever fight with Miss Frank? It was simply that our time in Australia had been extended, and then extended some more, and Miss Frank had to get home by Thanksgiving. She had promised her family she would be. And Miss Frank never breaks a promise.

  Still, as I saw her board the plane, I had to keep myself from shrieking out and ordering her back. Even though the tour still had a week to go, I knew, as I watched Miss Frank wave goodbye and disappear into the plane, that it was over.

  I stayed for a moment to see if maybe I could see her little head peering out the window. But it was no use. Lifting up the collar of that same old brown coat which I had by now taken to wearing backwards and inside out, I turned and started back to the car.