Authors: Mark Bego
The fact of the matter was that Bette was recording during this period—song after unreleased song—and still she wasn’t satisfied with the finished product. Originally, her third album was going to be a “Miss M Goes Motown”-type of soul extravaganza. She went into the studio with one of the key Motown producers, Hal Davis, who was responsible for many Jackson Five and solo Michael Jackson hits. These four or five songs that Hal Davis and Bette did record are, to this day, on the shelf somewhere, unreleased. Davis went on during the next year to produce the Number 1 hits “Love Hangover” for Diana Ross and “Don’t Leave Me This Way” for Thelma Houston, but Bette didn’t like the songs that she and Hal did together. People from Atlantic Records who did get a chance to listen to the Hal Davis/Bette Midler recordings still rave about them as being among her best.
Midler also went into the recording studio with another pair of Motown hitmakers, Nicholas Ashford and Valerie Simpson. She recorded a composition of theirs written especially for her, entitled, “Bang, You’re Dead.” While Bette was in Nick and Valerie’s own personal recording
studio, working on the song, a disc jockey friend of Ashford and Simpson’s dropped in to say “hello.”
“She threw a fit!” recalls the DJ of that afternoon. “ ‘Who is he?’ she demanded when she saw me looking in from the control room. She insisted that I be thrown out before she would sing one more word. Nick and Valerie just looked at each other, and I knew that I had to leave that second” (
35
). A studio version of “Bang, You’re Dead” was eventually released as the B side of Bette’s “Married Men” single in 1979.
After the Broadway run of
Clams
, several more people left the Midler camp. One of the Harlettes, Robin Grean, announced her departure, and Bette’s longtime press agent Candy Leigh also quit. Bette had gotten to the point of hating to grant interviews because she was sick of being asked about the Continental Baths, Barry Manilow, and Melissa Manchester. Candy found it an impossible situation. When Aaron Russo asked Candy what he was going to do for a press agent for Midler, Candy suggested that he place a want-ad in one of the local newspapers—under the heading “Masochist Wanted!”
Bette was beginning to get a reputation for being difficult to work with. “I am a bitch,” Bette explained in a
Playgirl
magazine interview. “I am a bitch in the sense that I like the wonderful things about being a bitch, but not the negative things. When I say ‘bitch,’ I mean being on top of it, being aware and knowing the answers. I like that part. But I don’t like doing it at the expense of other women. I don’t like to sit around and dish the dirt with the girls. . . . I think of it in terms of, ‘Do I know what I’m talking about?’ or ‘Do I not know what I’m talking about?’ If I do know, then it doesn’t matter if I’m a man or a woman. I have to know what I’m doing. If I don’t, I’m going to get shit upon, no matter what!” (
21
).
During the late summer and the fall of 1975, people were bugging Bette to death. Aaron was begging her to start rehearsals for her upcoming cross-country concert tour, and Atlantic Records was bugging her for her third album. There were several scraps of things that Bette thought she would allow to be released on her third album, but on some of them she didn’t have the time to complete her vocal tracks.
One of Bette’s biggest thrills during the recording of her third album came when she met and worked with Bob Dylan, who was one of her idols. They had recorded a song together called “Buckets of Rain,” which was one of his compositions. “He absolutely charmed the pants
off of me,” she claimed, but not literally. “But close! I tried. Actually, I tried to charm the pants off him. And everyone will be disappointed to learn I was unsuccessful. But I got close. Oh, you know . . . a couple of fast feels in the front seat of his Cadillac. He used to drive this hysterically long, red Cadillac convertible, and he couldn’t drive worth a pea. He’s not a big guy, and he always drove with the seat all the way back, refusing to pull it up to the steering wheel. He was just fabulous” (
30
).
Bette decided that she was going to have to concentrate on the tour and on finding a third Harlette. For the moment, the album would have to be Atlantic Records’ problem. The result was ultimately going to end up to be something of a patchwork quilt of an album.
Bette was to find her third Harlette for the tour in Ula Hedwig, a tall Polish girl with a flair for Bette’s land of comedy. And so, Bette and her new troupe began to prepare for what was to be billed as “The Depression Tour.” The only other concert appearance that Bette had made earlier that year had been on the fundraising telethon for the United Jewish Appeal. While on the show, Bette announced that she was willing to give more than her singing for the charity. She promised that if someone would pledge the sum of $5,000 dollars, she would throw in something extra. According to her, “You know, this cause means so much to me that I am prepared to drop my dress for Israel! Out there in television land, I know there is someone who wants to see it. Someone who wants to be responsible for allowing all of New York to see the end of my reputation, the end of my career—and my legs, which are the most beautiful in the business. Thank you, thank you, and kiss my tuchas!” Well, to make a long story short, after she sang “Hello in There,” someone pledged the five grand, and she promptly stripped down to her lace slip.
It was later that year that things started to go awry. When Paul Simon’s album
Still Crazy after All These Years
did finally come out, the song “Gone at Last” was included, but Bette Midler’s vocals had been stripped off the track. Apparently, following an artistic dispute with the Midler camp, Simon rerecorded the song with Phoebe Snow. Bette never forgave him.
Paul explained at the time, “The version with Bette had more of a Latin street feel. I changed the concept with Phoebe and tried a gospel approach because she was perfect for it” (
64
). However, it always seemed like there was more to the story.
Finally, over three decades later, a close friend of hers—who refused
to be identified—shed some light on the incident. Apparently, the rumors were true about Midler having a romantic flirtation with Simon. It was when this went sour that he removed her from his album. “I can’t be quoted about her sex life,” says the source, “because I know what she did to Geraldo Rivera. I am going to stay away from her sex life. But, yes, she was unhappy that he took her voice off and put on Phoebe’s. It was
more personal
than that—if you know what I mean. I think things started with the duet, and it progressed from there. She never actually came out and told me that. . . . she kinda hinted that it was sexual. She never came out and said it, but she sure intimated it, and hinted that their falling out was ‘highly personal,’ and that ‘Paul Simon is a total prick’ ” (
65
).
Bette and the Harlettes were still in rehearsals for the upcoming tour when Midler became ill. She was stricken with appendicitis on her thirtieth birthday—December 1, 1975—and she was rushed into Beverly Hills Medical Center. Bette quickly recovered, and the tour opened as scheduled on December 21, in Berkeley, California.
The emergency appendix operation served as inspiration for a brand-new opening for the show. Originally, the curtain was going to open to reveal a pile of laundry and junk on the stage, and Bette was going to emerge from its depths, singing the old Patti LaBelle & the Bluebelles hit “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman.” Instead, she devised a whole hospital-bed scene, with the Harlettes carrying enema bags and tubes, bed pans, and IV bottles while she sang a medley of “Friends” and the Ringo Starr hit “Oh My My.” The Starr song starts out with the line, “I called up my doctor, to see what’s the matter,” so it all worked perfectly around the newly devised medical motif.
While still in the surgery setting, Bette quipped, “Many of you may have heard that I was stricken with appendicitis. But I’m here to tell you the truth . . . and that is: that in a spasm of sisterly generosity, I donated my tits to Cher! And she was so glad to get them—I can’t even tell you!”
According to Ula Hedwig, that was a night she will never forget: “I’d only seen Bette once, back at Mr. Kelly’s in Chicago years ago. I’d never experienced working with her in front of an audience until we opened in Berkeley. When she came out in that bed and started singing her song, the audience went wild. I got such a rush, you know, and she did such a great show—she got my adrenaline going, too, and it was such an ‘up.’ Rehearsals had been nothing, but once we got on that stage, it
was magic. As a performer, I suddenly understood the whole Bette thing” (
48
).
Most of the material on this tour consisted of slightly altered versions of the
Clams on the Half-Shell Revue
, complete with the King Kong set to close Act One, and without Lionel Hampton. There was one major addition to the act, however, a segment called “The Vicki Eydie Show,” and it was Bette’s interpretation of a tacky lounge singer who is accompanied by her once-famous back-up group, the Dazzling Eat-ettes. The character of Vicki Eydie was borrowed from the group Gotham, a campy New York-based male singing trio that was being managed by Bill Hennessey.
Gary Herb of Gotham explains the origin of Vicki Eydie: “We were all working in Washington, and we were working with a girlfriend named Toby Stone, who is a singer. We were just being real crazy one night, and coming up with names for her, and we came up with Vicki Eydie as a lounge-act singer. It was basically a little backstage name that we used with Toby” (
66
).
“We went out to lunch with Bette, about a month or so after that,” Gary continues, “and we were talking, and we explained to her Vicki Eydie, and our girlfriend Toby. Well, Midler thought it was hysterical, and she said, ‘I’m going to work on this. I want to use this. Is that okay?’ And we said, ‘Oh sure!’ But Toby was PISSED OFF when she heard that Miss Midler decided to do it. Miss Stone—I don’t think I’ve spoken to her since! So that’s the story of Vicki Eydie, and from there it went” (
66
).
The next stop on the four-month twenty-city tour was Los Angeles, and the closing night of this particular engagement was New Year’s Eve. The California state legislature had passed a bill that would go into effect at 12:01
a.m.
, January 1, 1976, which reduced the charge for possession of marijuana from a felony to a misdemeanor. Hence the penalty for possession of a single joint would become all but inconsequential. Bette had an outrageous idea that would turn her New Year’s Eve concert into one of the most memorable nights of the entire tour. Under each of the venue’s seats she was going to have one marijuana joint taped for everyone in the audience, as a little gift from the incorrigible Miss M.
The day of December 31, Bette and her entire troupe of band members, background singers, and crew members were busy—rolling joints. They had rolled their little fingers off and were all the way up to joint
number 1,800 when they were informed that word had leaked out to the press and the local police had been tipped off to the planned party favors. Everyone was crushed. It was such an excellent idea, and try as they might, no one could come up with any idea as outrageous to replace it with.
Bette was so looking forward to midnight and the look on the audience members’ faces when they all reached under their seats to find that “the marijuana fairy” had left them all a little treat under their seats. She realized, while perched in King Kong’s hairy purple hand and the first second of 1976 tolled, that she had to give the crowd something extra to remember the evening by. And so she pulled her top down and exposed her famous breasts to the audience. The crowd, most members of whose consciousness—to say the least—was already considerably altered, went crazy with screaming and cheering at this sight.
Bette later explained, “At the New Year’s Eve show, you have to do something. You have to have balloons or confetti—you have to have a surprise. And we had one. We were going to have joints. The marijuana laws had just been changed, and as our New Year’s Eve surprise were going to have a joint taped under each seat, so that at midnight we could yell ‘Happy New Year’ and tell everybody to look under his seat. Well somebody leaked the plan to the press, and the cops said, ‘No, that’s not going to be your surprise.’ So at the last minute, we couldn’t do it. Oh, I was desperate” (
30
).
According to her, “I kept hoping until the last minute that someone would come up with another idea as marvelous as that. But when push came to shove, I realized it was up to me, and what did this poor woman have to barter but her own body, the flesh of herself? So at the stroke of midnight, I dah-ropped my dress to thirty-six hundred people. I don’t think they even saw it, you know. It was just my little chest: nipples to the wind!” (
67
).
“When in doubt, go for the jugs!” she contended. However, when the curtain came down, and Russo got hold of her, all hell broke loose: “Aaron FREAKED out, called me every name in the book.” They proceeded to have a huge fight, and he accused her of being totally reckless and self-destructive. Security guards had to break up their argument, and Act Two went on as scheduled. Bette recalls, “I went through the rest of the show under this rotten cloud of ghastly doom” (
67
).
During this time period, Bette was dating one of the members of the Average White Band, who also recorded for Atlantic Records: Hamish
Stuart. Following the concert, she and Hamish went to a big party that was being thrown by Atlantic, and several music-industry heavyweights were also present. The company, which was getting ready to ship Bette’s new album in January, had pressed several copies of her first single from the LP and sent preview copies of it to some of the key radio promoters. The single was her disco/samba version of the Frank Sinatra song “Stranger in the Night,” and one of the people invited to the party was a man named Paul Drew. It was Drew who was responsible for deciding which new records would—or would not—be played on over three hundred RKO-owned radio stations across the country.