Bette Midler (5 page)

Recalls Bette with residual pain, “I remember children being so cruel. You don’t forget these things” (
18
).

She found Aiea to be “equivalent to any of the tough neighborhoods in Harlem or Brooklyn, except from a different perspective. You rarely saw blacks. What you would see were the Japanese, Chinese, Samoans, or Filipinos—heavy on the Filipinos—the Filipinos were always the
toughest. The Portuguese were very tough. See, they always took me for a Portuguese because in Hawaii there’s a distinction between them and whites, even though they’re both Caucasian. The Portuguese used to work in the fields, and ‘hacles’—white people—were the overseers. I wasn’t Portuguese, but I let them think it because it was easier than anything else. Because Portuguese people were accepted, Jews were not” (
11
).

“I thought of myself as a poor kid, poorer than any of them because they always seemed to spend money and I never had any to spend. It was the fashion among the kids not to speak good English—they spoke
pidgin
English. It was a put-on, but I didn’t realize it at the time” (
12
).

Unhappy with her home life and her social life with the local kids, Bette found it easy to bury herself in her schoolwork. In the first grade she had her first real taste of show business when she sang “Silent Night” in front of her class. She won a prize for her performance, but she couldn’t even share her glory at home, “I was afraid to tell my mother, because I was Jewish and we weren’t supposed to sing Christmas carols” (
19
).

According to her, “After that, you couldn’t stop me from singing. I’d sing ‘Lullaby of Broadway’ at the top of my lungs in the tin shower—it had a really good reverb. People used to gather outside to call up requests or yell that I was lousy” (
20
).

“The Midlers were the only white family for blocks and blocks around . . . [and] we were Jewish, which was even weirder. We didn’t even have a Christmas tree, which would have made us normal in the eyes of the neighbors. They were all Christians, and they had Christmas trees which they decorated to death. No matter how poor a family was, they would scrape together money and give their children the most wonderful Christmases” (
21
).

Bette recalls that her first cinematic dreams came from watching MGM’s most famous swimming movie star and her opulent musical numbers. “I wasn’t really smitten with show business until I saw Esther Williams. Technicolor killed me. You felt like you were in paradise when you saw those pictures” (
22
).

At the age of twelve, she saw a touring production of
Carousel
, and she went Broadway-crazy. “I couldn’t get over how beautiful it was. I fell so in love with it. Everything else in my life receded once I discovered theater, and my mother was all for my starting on the journey and going full speed ahead. When I was the lead in the junior-class play, she
brought a bouquet of roses and presented them to me over the foot-lights” (
20
).

As a little girl Bette took hula-dancing lessons, and when she turned twelve, her mother taught her how to sew. “On Saturdays,” she remembers, “from the time I was six years old to the time I was eighteen, my father would take me and my sister to town and go to the library. My parents would go off shopping at the local John’s Bargain Store, and my sister and I would either stay in the library or walk around town. When I was young, I would rush in and read about French courtesans till it was all rushing out of my ears. Later, when I got very brave, I’d go out to the red-light district and walk around. All the sailors and people in the armed forces would go there to see a dirty movie or a bawdy show or pick up a girl. It was a REAL red-light district and it was so wonderful!” It wasn’t bullshit Forty-Second Street or bullshit Eighth Avenue [New York City]. It was for real—opium dens and lots of Orientals” (
21
).

According to Bette, her parents never knew what she was up to when she was supposedly perusing books at the library. “They never knew. They went out shopping. I never had any misadventures except for one at this movie house when I was thirteen. This guy put the make on me and that was scary. Usually, it was a great thrill for a child to walk around in that environment. You must remember that even though I was in Hawaii, I had a very, very strict lower-middle-class Jewish upbringing, so it was quite mind-boggling to be in the midst of all this Orientalia, and still be in New Jersey at the same time” (
21
).

Her parents clearly would have flipped out if they’d had any inkling of what their daughter was up to. “My mother was always trying to make sure I wasn’t exposed to any of the seamier aspects of life. Consequently, I was always fascinated by the seamier aspects of life. That was the biggest influence in my life. She was trying to keep me away from the seamy type of life and I just thought it was the best, I wanted to be with seamy people and be in seamy places,” she explains (
23
). And so began the bawdy side of Bette Midler, even though at the time she had no outlet to express herself.

When Bette and her sisters were in their teens, they began experimenting with makeup and hair coloring. According to her, her first foray into hair dye was a total disaster. “I’ve been dyeing my hair religiously since I was thirteen. I started out with what I thought was going to be ash-blonde, but which turned out green!” (
24
).

Bette’s sister Susan remembers how violent their father would get at the idea that they were becoming painted women. “He didn’t like us wearing makeup and we had a curfew: some ridiculous hour like ten o’clock, and if you weren’t in the house, you usually got locked out. Us sisters were always sticking up for each other, and sneaking each other in the window at night” (
13
).

“My sister Susan and Pa, they’d have terrible riles. She used to call the cops on him! He used to piss her off,” says Bette. “My father was always right, never wrong. It was simple: he was the loudest and the oldest, and the heaviest. It was usually him against us. My mother tried to be a soothing influence, but she wasn’t very successful at it. There was that kind of passion” (
13
).

When she was in the fifth grade, Bette teamed up with a classmate and presented a skit in front of the class. “Me and this girl, Barbara Nagy—I remember
everybody
—we decided to put on a skit for the class. She was the man, I was the woman: Herman and Oysterbee. I don’t know where the
hell
that name came from” (
16
). They both forgot the script that they had worked out and ended up improvising the dialogue. When the class laughed at the skit, Bette discovered a whole new kind of love that comes to a performer on stage when the audience laughs and applauds.

In the sixth grade Bette entered a school talent show and won first prize for her rendition of “Lullaby of Broadway.” She convinced herself that what she wanted to be when she grew up was an actress. “As I grew older, all the best times in my life were when I was standing in front of an audience performing,” she remembers (
24
). “I learned that I could be popular by making people laugh. I became a clown to win people’s acceptance, and I think that’s when I decided that I wanted to be in show business” (
25
).

“I was an ugly, fat little Jewish girl with problems. I kept trying to be like everybody else, but on me nothing worked,” says Bette of her years at Radford High School (
26
). “The school I went to was just like any high school anywhere, like a high school in Brooklyn or Cleveland. We had rock & roll, sock hops,
American Bandstand
, the same as anywhere else. The only thing different was that all the kids were Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Samoan, and all the girls hated me because I had such big boobs” (
25
).

Bette was titillated by the audacity of street-wise girls in Honolulu. According to her, “I was always fascinated by the local bad girls. And
we were surrounded by these JDs—juvenile delinquents—and listen, I LOVED them! I used to follow them even though they wouldn’t take me with them or anything. I’d go after them on their adventures like shoplifting. I always liked that other side of life, you see” (
21
).

Remarking about her short-lived life of crime, Bette later explained, “Once my friend and I were shoplifting at a Woolworth’s or Piggly-Wiggly’s; we were carrying those great big purses women were using then and we were loaded with stuff we’d taken. As we were leaving the store it was pouring rain, approaching a hurricane. My girlfriend had a cold, and she got down on her knees in the middle of this deserted road and repented. She cried, ‘Oh God, if I don’t catch pneumonia, I swear I’ll never shoplift again!’ And she didn’t, so after that I had to shoplift by myself—I didn’t get down on my knees, see.
Never!”
(
16
).

“I was a little chubbier than I am now. I had gigantic tits, and I was very plain. I wore harlequin glasses—you know, those hideous glasses that ruined a lot of people’s lives. I was fairly bright. I had a terrific sense of humor,” she recalls (
21
).

The fact that she developed a bust early in puberty was one issue that bedeviled her, and the fact that she developed such a
big bust
so early in life compounded the problem. “I’ll never forget eighth grade,” she recalled. “My mother wouldn’t buy me a bra. I used to get teased, and I remember coming home weeping, so she broke down and got me one for my birthday. Oh, I was so relieved. Oh my dear, sooooo relieved” (
16
).

Of her painful years as a teenager, says Bette, “I had to go to phys ed class with all these Oriental girls who had brassieres that were holding up nothing. It was horrible. They teased me incessantly because I would, like, bobble on my way home” (
27
).

One of her classmates, Penny Sellers, later commented, “When I first met Bette—she spelled her name Betti and we pronounced it ‘Betty’—she was a quiet and serious student. She wore harlequin-shaped glasses, thin shirt-waist dresses, and had sandy blonde hair that frizzed in the Honolulu humidity. In our junior year, although she made the requirement of the National Honor Society, she seemed less studious. Her raucous laugh made us all giggle, and her witty remarks were—well—
bawdy”
(
16
).

During her junior year in high school, Bette became best friends with a girl named Beth Ellen Childers. She remembers Beth as “hysterically loud and loved noise and a good time. I fell in love with her. She
was the most adorable thing. She made me feel okay to be who I was, enjoyable, good to have around. My family never made me feel this way. She drew me out of myself” (
14
).

According to Bette, her life started to change for the better. “I came into glory in high school. I
bullossomed
. I blossomed into a D-cup and there were finally white kids in my school. I was even popular. It was a real surprise. . . . in high school I became a person. That was when I began to realize I wasn’t as bad as I thought” (
16
).

“I never had boyfriends until high school, and then I found myself mainly with military kids, because a lot of them were nice and smart. But I never really fit it—even though I was elected senior-class president. I won that by default: you should have seen the other candidate! The truth is that I was just about the only white in an all-Oriental school, and most of those kids never said two words to me. So I got buried in studying. I was always the best in English. I had to be the best, because it was all I had” (
4
).

Bette graduated from high school in 1963. The school newspaper’s graduation edition exuded the kind of confidence in her that her previous seventeen years didn’t substantiate. According to the newspaper, “Bette Midler, who is considered to be one of Radford’s greatest dramatists, is the president. Unknown to many is her scrawny soprano warble, which can be heard while taking her Saturday night bath. . . . Her ambition is to join the Peace Corps and, perhaps, someday become another Bette Davis” (
28
).

Her theatrical experience at that time was limited to her appearance in the school’s production of
When Our Hearts Were Young and Gay
, yet she felt that she had found her calling in life . . . as a thespian. Being declared class valedictorian didn’t mean half as much to her as the prospect of pursuing a life in the theater. “I was always perfectly sure. I couldn’t think of anything else to be,” remembers Bette (
24
). By the end of her senior year in high school Bette was crazy to be an actress: “I had entrenched myself into performing very heavily—a lot of speech festivals; they have a huge speech problem in that state—and I was always working on a show or some kind of presentation. . . . I really liked the theater better than anything else” (
11
).

Of the music that Bette was exposed to at that time, she remembers mostly what she heard on the radio airwaves. “I used to listen to the radio a lot,” she recalls, “but always AM. Before rock & roll it was mostly white music. I didn’t get into rhythm and blues until later on in rock &
roll like the early sixties. I loved the girl groups and I loved straight ahead rock & roll: the Coasters, and the Del Vikings, and the Skyliners. I wasn’t a collector” (
6
). At that point her only musical experience came as part of an all-girl trio. They sang folk songs, and they called themselves the Pieridine Three (“It means ‘like a butterfly’ ”) (
13
).

Like so many people who have lonely, unhappy childhoods and teenage years, Bette had a powerful drive toward making something of herself. She had felt so much like an ugly duckling that she was determined to prove to all of the classmates who’d snubbed her, to her strict parents who’d disciplined her, and, more important, to herself, that she could make her dreams a reality and become the envy of them all.

According to Bette, “When you’re an outcast, your imagination works, becomes honed a little sharper. You learn to rely on yourself more. It readies you for what life is really about: Life isn’t all camaraderie and games. I guess it’s better to have a miserable childhood and a terrific adulthood than to live the other way around” (
21
).