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Bette Midler: The Art of Compassion
I knew nothing about Bette Midler when I first saw her perform at the
Bitter End. If I had, I suppose, my uneasy presentiments might have
hardened into prejudices. Bette Midler really is showbiz, easy to pass
off as a minor-league camp queen or a ringer for Barbra
Streisand. Upon reflection, however, I prefer to think of her as the
Beatles.
A Jewish girl from Honolulu--a combination worth mulling over--Bette
achieved some Broadway success with a small part in Fiddler on the
Roof, but she really wanted to be a solo singer, waiting her turn
at clubs like Hilly's and the Improvisation, where she performed torch
songs, for free. Her present act came about only when she got what
appeared to be a dubious break--a gig at the Continental Baths, a gay
men's hangout. It was there that she got together with her band, and
there that she was discovered by Johnny Carson, who introduced her to
the night people of middle America both on television and live in Las
Vegas. It was there that her new career of club dates, talk shows, and
record contracts began.
The Bitter End was part of this new career, designed to introduce her
to people like me. Admittedly, my immediate reaction was
befuddlement. There was the band, a typical scruffy rock quartet
except for musical director Barry Manilow, who looks suave. And there,
followed by a slow spot, was the Divine Miss M., making her
entrance. This woman was definitely not pretty. Her hair was in some
weird bob, she wore a lot of obvious makeup, her left shoulder strap
slipped every time she shook her bazooms, and her matching platforms
and pedal pushers were gaud for a bawd.
I grew more confused as Bette opened her act with "Friends," by Buzzy
Linhart, a local singer-songwriter who seems determined to hang on
until God makes him a star or an egg cream, and Bessie Smith's "Empty
Bed Blues." Each song was performed in a brassy, gesticulatory style
appropriate to neither, and there was a moment during "Empty Bed
Blues," which had been stripped to its raunchiest metaphors, when Miss
M. sounded more like Betty Boop than the sainted Miss Smith. Yet
something in her enthusiasm for her audience and her material
captivated me. While I mulled the combinations over, Miss M. introduced
herself in a breathy voice, told what I assume were some fibs about
where she bought her shoes--she likes to refer to herself as "the last
of the tacky women"--and launched into a choreographed version of the
Andrew Sisters' "Chattanooga Choo Choo." Then she sang "Delta Dawn,"
which she said she had learned from Tracy Nelson.
I was amazed, and thinking of all the times I'd sat in my living room
turning people on to records they'd never try themselves, I decided
that this woman was one of us. She was obviously open to every emotion
and aspiration ever transfixed by pop music, somehow surmounting all
its forms without abandoning an eye-level perspective. She didn't
devalue Bessie Smith by implying that some of her images were slightly
overextended--on the contrary, that was how she experienced the
extremity of the blues singer's pain. And by parodying the absurd,
precise energy of the Andrews Sisters, she also celebrated the joy and
playful cunning with which they responded to their dilemma in their
time. It was all showbiz, just an act; we both knew that. In a way,
that was the point.
By the close of "Delta Dawn," which she performed
straight--melodramatic, but straight--I was physically moved. Bette
had had her way with me. I careened from laughter--at her patter, at
her self-deprecation, at the way she shook her bazooms--to a
surprising ache--her version of John Prine's "Hello in There," a song
I had always considered hokum, had me flashing on every old person who
ever struggled up the stairs of my building--and often I felt both at
the same time. The tour de force was her final selection, the
Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack," which she interpreted as the great
exploration of the conflict of love and authority I had always known
it was. Sure its tragic overstatement was silly--viewed in
perspective, adolescent breakups hardly warrant such sturm und drang,
even when parent-induced. But for both artists and audience, the
emotional reality went beyond the facts. Bette had the compassion to
respect that emotion.
It is Bette's genius to replace self-expression with compassion,
compassion that is directed not merely at the audience, in the manner
of Judy Garland, but also at the material. This is very much a woman's
genius. Because they are forced into narrower images and stereotypes
than men, women have barely participated in the long struggle to make
singing as real and undefended as speech--not until Carole King could
a natural woman exploit the modest range of a normal speaking
voice. Because everything about Bette screams artifice--not just the
way she stretches her voice into every conceivable theatrical shape,
but her clothes, her makeup, her comedy routines--she seems a
throwback. Her theatricality becomes a metaphor that unifies all her
styles and periods. The women in her songs inhabit images and play
roles, and so does she. Why not? Naturalness is a phony, and no matter
how many guys with guitars tell you different, doing your own
self-expression just isn't enough. The world is too hostile.
This is the kind of postsixties perception that has moved youth
culture toward electoral politics on the one hand and pastoral escape
on the other. Bette is anything but a throwback, because she
understands that artifice is a necessary gambit, not a desirable way
to organize your life, and like most of her contemporaries--she is in
her late twenties--she has gained from all the utopian canons of the
free self that made the sixties possible. One reason she doesn't want
to turn into Barbra Streisand is that her voice isn't as
conventionally beautiful as Streisand's--if all the strictures about
singing hadn't been relaxed, she might not have the chance to turn
into Streisand, and knowing that affects her ambitions. The gay people
who were her first fans understand better than anyone how essential
masks are to the survival of anyone with an unusual or threatening
self to express, but they are also striving to come out. Bette can
deal with this surface paradox because she is a child of the sixties
who has lived in a pocket of contrivance, the world of theater.
What Bette does has excited me more than all the new rock groups put
together, and in my palmier moments--especially at her Carnegie Hall
concert in June, where an auditorium full of peacocks gave her a
two-minute standing ovation just for trotting onto the stage--I wonder
whether the messiah will be a woman this time. For several years now,
those who live their lives by music have been waiting for a new
miracle worker, someone to bring us together again. Elvis in 1955, the
Beatles in 1964, and who in 1973? Not Bette Midler?
The very unlikelihood of the idea is what makes it intriguing, for
avatars never arise where you're looking for them. They need room and
time to grow among folks who love them, preferably in an environment
so ignominious that the outside world won't even notice. The contempt
inspired by English rock and roll in 1963 can only be compared to the
contempt inspired by Southern red-necks in 1954. Because
communciations are so expanded, the wise money in the music business
says it won't happen again, and the wise money is probably right. But
if it does happen, you can be sure it won't be a rock group. Music
from Africa or Latin America or Japan, perhaps. Or maybe someone who
paid her--yes, her--dues in a steam bath for New York's homosexuals.
If I were really serious, I suppose, I wouldn't jinx the chance by
writing about it, only I know not even Bette herself will believe
it. For she has yet to perform the essential task of the miracle
worker--the gathering of the new tribes--and if gay people and certain
women and the hip theater crowd suggest an interesting core, they are
not enough. She has to reach the kids. She has to convince the love
generation that she really knows about love, for if Elvis was about
sexual rebellion and the Beatles were about joy, love is what Bette is
about, in all its intricacy and effort. I don't even like to imagine
the kind of effort that will require from her, for if the youth
audience is the most flexible and devoted in the world, it is also the
most self-righteous, and it isn't about to cotton to a musical-comedy
queen.
So far, youth spokesmen have regarded Bette with suspicion. She
attracts older people, after all. The commonest put-down is to pass
off what she does as camp. It's a lot more than camp, I think, but
then, camp is more than it is usually imagined to be by those who
think the gay world is alien to us normal people by definition. Allow
me to quote Susan Sontag: "Camp taste is a kind of love, love for
human nature. It relates rather than judges the little triumphs and
awkward intensities of `character.' . . . Camp taste identifies with
what it is enjoying. . . . Camp is a tender feeling." Bette Midler
does something like that, and it seems to me that whole insular masses
of people could use a shot of it.
Newsday, Aug. 1972
Any Old Way You Choose It, 1973
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