Authors: Mark Bego
The year 2000 was one of the most high-profile twelve-month periods of Bette Midler’s entire life. She headlined sold-out millennium shows in Las Vegas, she had three new films in the theaters, she released the eighteenth album of her career, and in a daring and unprecedented career move, she starred in her own weekly network television sitcom. Miss M has often been acknowledged as one of the hardest-working divas in all of show business—and that record-breaking year, she literally did it all.
This is not to say that all of this activity was highly successful, but she certainly ran the gamut of well-publicized projects in 2000. It seemed not so much to be the first year of the twenty-first century as it was “The Year of Bette.”
As the 1990s came to a close, several singing stars headlined high-ticket-price shows in New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. The Eagles and Linda Ronstadt were at the Staples Center in L.A., Barbra Streisand was charging up to $2,500 a ticket for her New Year’s bash, and at the Mandalay Bay Miss M was holding court and breaking in the new century as only she could. Appropriately, she called her Vegas shows “The Divine Miss Millennium.”
According to
Las Vegas Sun
reporter Jerry Fink, “ ‘The Divine Miss Millennium’ was the best ‘Bette’ for concert entertainment in Las Vegas as the year-decade-century-millennium drew to a close” (
174
).
From onstage at the 8,500-seat Mandalay Bay Events Center, Miss
M strutted around the stage before a near-capacity audience. “I can’t believe you came to be with me on the last night of planet Earth,” she gushed to the crowd who had come to say good-bye to the twentieth century with her.
Midler made several jokes about the Streisand concert, which was taking place in Vegas at that exact same time. At the conclusion of Bette’s show, a drag queen dressed as Streisand showed up onstage and announced to Midler and the crowd, “I slipped away from my show early so I could come over here to see my husband. He couldn’t afford my show.”
Her show included breast jokes, fart jokes, and everything that is divinely taboo. Midler asked of her crowd that night, “What did you expect for 500 bucks—Shakespeare?” Well, they knew what they wanted, and they got it!
In March of 2000, Bette Midler was back in the movie theaters, in the quirky black comedy
Drowning Mona
. As the film opens, the very first thing we learn is that the plot is set in Verplanck, New York, where the Yugo Car Company test-marketed its inexpensive cars. Hence, everyone in the town of Verplanck drives one of the plain-looking, boxy little automobiles. The citizens’ cars are Yugos of different colors, as if these were the only automobiles on the market. Even the town’s police cruisers are Yugos. The characters’ vanity license plates also differentiate the vehicles. The title star’s plate reads “UGOMONA.”
The first person we meet there is Bette’s character, Mona Dearly. She unsuccessfully attempts to start her own Yugo, then she tries the key in her son’s Yugo, and away she goes. Mona is killed off in a car accident in the first five minutes of the film. In fact, she doesn’t even make it through the credits before she “sleeps with the fishes.” It seems that someone has intentionally severed the brake lines to all four wheels on the Yugo Mona drove off a cliff and into a local lake.
Mona is dead, and it seems that everyone in town has a motive. Of all the residents in this small rural town, the only person concerned with finding out who murdered Mona is the local police chief (Danny DeVito). He is dismayed, in fact, by everyone’s blasé attitude. Police Deputy Fegee (Peter Dobson) comments on her death as “Ding dong, the witch is dead—end of story.” Her own son Jeff (Marcus Thomas) surmises, “I think she had a personality disorder.” Neighbor Bobby (Casey Affleck) claims, “She was the worst person I ever knew my entire life.”
After fielding a condolence message at a local bar, her husband’s Phil’s only comment about the death of his wife is “Hey, you snooze, you lose.” When someone asks about Mona’s funerary wake, son Jeff proclaims, “We’re having one of those Wake & Bake services.” Instead of flowers, Jeff places donuts on Mona’s grave.
Will Farrell of
Saturday Night Live
fame plays the dark and goofy funeral director, Cubby, owner of Cubby’s Custom Caskets and Funeral Home. With regard to the non-outpouring of sympathy for Mona’s death, Cubby drawls, “I’ve seen people more upset about losing money in a candy machine.”
In a series of detailed flashbacks, we get to see Bette as the ever-charming Mona in her unpopular life: slapping people, insulting people, hitting people, and assaulting their Yugos with a golf club. Wherever she went, it seems, she left her mark—literally.
One of the most unique aspects about
Drowning Mona
is that Bette allows herself to look her all-time frumpiest on film. She does have one scene, at a knife-throwing contest at the local picnic, where she looks lovely, just to let the audience know that most of the time she has no sense of vanity. In fact, the Mona that Bette plays is an obnoxious beer-guzzling Harpy.
Apparently, she didn’t have a happy life in Verplanck, and she made sure that no one else around her was happy for long. In one of the many flashbacks featuring the deceased Ms. Mona Dearly, she announces, “Life handed me a whole pile of shit. What am I supposed to make out of that?” Phil, her dim-witted husband (William Finchtner), replies, “Shit salad?”
Jeff, who is the co-owner of a yardwork business, has one of his hands missing. The film shows three filmed scenarios on how Jeff supposedly lost his hand—all of them involving reaching over his beer: across a running chain saw, into a wood chipper . . . and so on. He, however, claims that his own mother, Mona, cut off his hand. We get to see her wielding a meat cleaver that fateful night, as if she were in an episode of TV’s
The Iron Chef
.
Mona’s husband is cheating on her with Rona (Jamie Lee Curtis), the waitress in the local diner. Mona’s way of confronting him with the affair is to ask, “You been playing
Wheel of Fortune
with someone else?” Funny thing is, when we see Phil and Rona together in bed, they have the board game
Wheel of Fortune
with them.
In addition to the frequent sight of Yugo automobiles, the soundtrack
of Verplanck consists mainly of Three Dog Night songs like “Shambala,” “Never Been to Spain,” “Sure As I’m Sitting Here,” and “Joy to the World.”
The town is also populated with several other bizarre characters, including a lesbian mechanic, a hobo who seems to know more about what is going on in town than anyone else, a hunky but abusive jerk named Murph (Mark Bellegrino), and the police chief’s pretty daughter Ellen (Neve Campbell). She spends most of her time onscreen whining or lamenting about one thing or another. When her fiancé asks her who is ringing the doorbell, she snaps back at him, “What am I? Dionne Warwick?”
This slow-moving film has its moments of sheer fun. And Bette certainly gets to overact with great delight as the dastardly Mona. However, when the murder is solved, the film seems to come to an end as abruptly as Mona’s death occurred.
While the reviews on
Drowning Mona
were mixed, some of them were downright vicious. In
USA Today
, Susan Wlosczyna didn’t beat around the bush in a review headlined: “
Mona
Immersed in Swill.” According to Wlosczyna, “If you’ve never been the same since your mom sold your copy of
Three Dog Night’s Greatest Hits
at a garage sale, this dud’s for you. . . . No landfill is big enough to hold all the white trash littering the screen. . . . Dirty secrets leak out and who did it is finally revealed, while Midler bobs by now and again in flashback just to remind us how monstrous Mona really was. She and her movie are actually two of a kind: They’re stinkers who deserve to sink” (
175
).
For CNN, reviewer Paul Tatara likewise lit into the film on several levels. “They really should work out a system where famous actors return the money they were paid when they perform in something as thoroughly useless as
Drowning Mona
. . . . this is one of those movies where every character is dumb and mean, and every joke focuses on the hilarity of them saying dumb, mean things. . . . The story consists of unamusing flashbacks in which Mona belittles and attacks her possible killers. Midler gives it a rote run-through at best. She has a couple of hilariously nasty lines of dialogue, but she mostly just grimaces and throws things at her supposed tormentors. You can hardly call it a performance” (
176
).
Other reviewers really liked it. Bill Zwecker of WMAQ-TV claimed, “It’s a wonderful off-beat comedy!” (
177
).
Leonard Maltin’s Movie & Video Guide 2002
nonetheless found it entertaining: “Fairly amusing
black comedy about a small town shaken by the drowning of its most reviled citizen—Midler” (
178
).
The Video Movie Guide 2002
by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter loved it; they exclaimed, “This dark, tasteless and cynical comedy is funny as hell. . . . Peter Steinfeld aptly calls his script ‘White trash
Murder on the Orient
Express’ ” (
179
).
Regardless of some strong reviews,
Drowning Mona
failed to find an audience in the theaters. It came and went out of the American cineplexes in rapid succession—and, like ill-fated Mona, quickly drowned. It found a wider audience when it was later released on DVD.
To some people, best-selling author Jacqueline Susann represents the cheesiest of novelists. To others, she is the most-exalted high goddess of the divine literary realm. According to the
Guinness Book of World Records
, she still remains the biggest-selling American novelist. From 1966 to 1973 she broke publishing records by becoming the first writer to hit number one three consecutive times, with her enormously successful novels
The Valley of the Dolls, The Love Machine
, and
Once Is Not Enough
.
The very idea of Bette Midler playing the bigger-than-life Susann at first seemed both inspired and outlandish. A tall, commanding woman, Susann was quite the opposite of shorter and curvier Midler. However, their legendary acid-tongued remarks, their lust for life, their love of a good punchline, and a trademark fashion sense made Bette an intelligent choice.
Susann became a literary star as much for her moxie, drive, and self-promotional ability as for her writing. As
Valley of the Dolls
was being shipped from the printing plant, Jackie and her manager/husband, Irving Mansfield, brought coffee and donuts to the drivers of the trucks delivering her volumes. She was on
The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson the same night Jim Morrison was a guest, and she stole the show.
Her life was also marked with tragedy. She and Mansfield’s only child, Guy, was born autistic. And she developed breast cancer prior to finding her calling as a best-selling author. According to Susann herself, she made a pact with God to give her ten more years of life, and she would work her ass off to create a literary masterpiece.
What an incredible life to make a movie about. However, there were two Jacqueline Susann biographical movies being filmed in Hollywood at exactly the same time. Actress Michelle Lee, who is most famous for her long-running role on TV’s
Knots Landing
, announced that she was
slated to star as Susann in the made-for-television film, based on the book
Lovely Me
. It was played as a drama and was quite touching and accurate to the facts about Jackie’s life.
Isn’t She Great?
was meant to be a comical life story, lived in the face of life-and-death situations. The challenge for the filmmakers here was to balance the comedy and the tragedy.
“It was the funniest script I ever read,” said Bette, as the film was in production. She also felt that she was ready for the demanding cancer scenes. According to her, “My mother had breast cancer twice, and eventually she died of liver cancer. But I remember how it [cancer] was a word you only whispered” (
17
).
For Jacqueline Susann and
Valley of the Dolls
fans,
Isn’t She Great?
was both a treat and a disappointment. The look and the fashion of the film was very Pucci-colored ’60s, and there were some real accurate touches in the sets and the costumes. In fact, many of the details of Jackie’s life are present. In a scene at the Mansfields’ apartment, in the background there is a reproduction of the large portrait of Jackie, done in the style of her famous Philadelphia painter father, Robert Susann. However, other details were muddied. Her real-life affair with comedian Eddie Cantor is depicted as an affair with a clownish fictional comedian named Morry (John Laroquette).
Several real gossipy gems about Susann’s life aren’t even present here. Jackie supposedly fashioned the character of Jennifer in
Valley of the Dolls
after the tragic suicide of her friend, film star Carole Landis. She supposedly had an affair with and an obsession about Ethel Merman. She also finally became a screen actress, by appearing in cameos in the films of her novels. These would be great angles to delve into here, but the script passes by all of these stories and more.
Furthermore, instead of depicting real-life publisher Bernard Geis and giving him due credit for finally buying the much-turned-down
Valley of the Dolls
manuscript, here he is represented by the fictional Henry Marcus. In real life, Jackie used to have boozy, gossipy luncheons with a circle of girlfriends. In
Isn’t She Great?
all of her girlfriends have fictionally been rolled into one best buddy, “Flo” (Stockard Channing).
These details aside, this film did give Bette Midler some memorable moments of fun on camera, as she lets loose in her portrayal of Susann. Demonstrating how to make cheese fondue in a department store, Jackie yells “Shit” when her presentation goes awry in front of an audience. “They say I’m too intense!” Bette screams, while standing in the
middle of one of the swampy ponds in Central Park—with the Plaza Hotel directly behind her. And there is a delightfully silly scene at a publication party where Jackie is supposedly singing onstage with Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.