Divas at a Crossroads: Bette Midler in The Rose
By: Joe Shetina
Tags: Bette Midler, Pop Culture, Film, Divas At A Crossroads, Movies

Divas at a Crossroads: Bette Midler in The Rose

When Bathhouse Betty became a household name

Bette Midler in The Rose (2oth Century Fox)

Presenting Divas at a Crossroads: A recurring feature looking at transitional moments in the lives and careers of beloved divas of stage and screen.

I originally wrote this piece in the fall of 2017. I revised it for some errors and additional material.

I’ve fallen into a diva hole as of late. A diva hole full of ribald and fabulous toilet humor, shameless yukking, and lounge act parodies that verge dangerously on earnestness. Presenting Bette Midler’s Live At Last album:

Bette Midler’s Live At Last album is a recording of a 1976 Cleveland performance. If you want to know what kind of show it is, just know that she begins the first song in a hospital bed, powers through the “Lullaby of Broadway” while sitting on King Kong’s arm, and coos an obscene blues tune about a dentist who’s gifted with his drill. She conjures up corny song and dance routines of the past only to sully them with base humor. Her playful hostility toward the audience is pretty delightful, too. She calls them “motherfuckers” multiple times. At one point, someone in the audience shouts at her to ask which hotel she’s staying in. It goes south from there:

BETTE: How’s that? What hotel am I staying in? The Bond… uh… What’s it called, the Bond Court? The Bond Court. Oh, it’s so chic!

GUY IN AUDIENCE: What room?

BETTE: What? … What room… Ha, heeeeeeeey… (At this point, she gives the guy an Italian salute and the audience loses it) Heeeeeeeey… This ain’t no cheap meat you’re lookin’ aaaaaat. Heeey, whatsa mattah yoooou? God damn, he thinks for six bucks he gets to see the whole thing! Gonna cost you a lot more than six bucks to see the whole thing. A lot more!

I was most struck, though, by something that feels like an overlooked and charming component of her early career. There’s a certain frantic nature to her performance. I’m used to the Bette Midler who’s so relaxed into her couldn’t-give-a-shit persona that she could take a nap and make it funny. When speaking to the audience here, she’s quick-witted as ever, yet often stumbles over the first part of her sentences. She flubs words and misspeaks. She doesn’t try to cover. She embraces her mistakes. It’s this mixture of messiness, which feels genuine, and Messiness, which feels like an aesthetic choice, that endears me to the freshly-famous Bette Midler of the 70s. She’s clearly not far from her Bathhouse Betty beginnings here. I’m inclined to employ the kind of language that people often use to describe the most explosive rock stars and comedians. This is the Bette Midler who could say or do anything at any moment.

Much has been made of her early career, during which she was playing the cabaret lounge of the Continental Baths in New York. She spent those nights singing offbeat early 20th Century pop hits, showtunes, and even a few original songs (some she would later feature on her early albums), to men in various states of undress, who had recently engaged or were just about to engage in various forms of illicit sexual acts.

Bathhouse Betty in action

Within a few years, she was performing on Johnny Carson and headlining at sold-out auditoriums and concert halls. It feels significant that she became a star based on performances she gave in a gay bathhouse, although I’m not sure how or if contemporary writers addressed this. It’s kind of satisfying to think that an act that went down in the cabaret lounge of a bathhouse would appeal to the masses. It’s doubly wild that it doesn’t seem like her act or persona changed that much between those early days and the nights she shook hands with Johnny Carson, whom, by all accounts, adored her.

Since her Broadway success in Jerry Herman’s classic Hello, Dolly!, I’ve been pushing my favorite Bette moments on other people like a Jehovah’s Witness. The diva artifact I’m most incessant about is her Oscar-nominated performance in The Rose.

Released in 1979, The Rose’s protagonist, Mary Rose Foster, is a rock star rumored to have been modeled on Janis Joplin, but even if a few traces of Janis’ biographical details linger, they’re eclipsed by a personality and a verve that belong unequivocally to Bette Midler.

Director Mark Rydell’s film follows Mary Rose in the weeks preceding her return to her Florida hometown for a special performance. On stage, she’s a firecracker, an explosive and dynamic larger-than-life personality. The problem is she’s that way off-stage, too. Fueled by narcotics and insecurity, the film pits her against her demanding manager Rudge (Alan Bates) and a potential love interest named Huston Dyer (Frederic Forrest) as both try to stop her from losing control. It’s like Speed. If Mary Rose were the bus.

The Rose comes at the end of Bette Midler’s 70s era. It’s fitting because it feels like the end of her early career as a quirky, bawdy oddity. Afterward, she begins turning herself into a bonafide, but somewhat sanitized, mainstream star who has to be much cleverer about slipping her irreverence into her persona. That isn’t to say it wasn’t clever before, but it was all on her sleeve — very much a “what you get is what you see” proposition. Part of that growth, I realize, is age, maturity, and becoming a “seasoned” performer. Her performance in The Rose is raw — I hate that word when it’s used to describe performances but it’s appropriate here — and so full of Life that if anyone else were doing it it would seem self-indulgent, overwrought, and parodic. Maybe it is in Bette’s case, too, but that’s her bread and butter. That frantic liveliness, the cackling vulgarity, and the unexpected, earnest vulnerability that creeps into her early live performances (the one-two punch of the “Fried Eggs” monologue bleeding into her rendition of John Prine’s “Hello In There” on Live… At Last being a stellar example of this) is serving a character that is built to handle that overload of feeling. It’s not just a great performance; it also feels like a loving tribute to her own persona. The performance encompasses that anything-can-happen feeling she was known for, perfectly encapsulated by the moment where, after Rudge warns her not to curse on live TV, “the Rose” immediately goes onstage and shouts “HEY, YA MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!” at the audience. Then, she launches into a song. Sounds familiar.

Frederic Forrest and Bette Midler in The Rose

The soundtrack is full of songs worthy of Bette Midler’s most wrenching, violent screlting. Every track, one after the other, is a full-fledged rock tune. Except, of course, the title song. “The Rose” plays over the end credits, a torch song for the Rose, whose flame’s finally burned out. It could be the subject of a game of one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other. It’s hard to imagine the balls-to-the-wall rock star we’ve watched for two hours would even touch this heart-glowing ballad. The song feels dissonant, like some kind of harbinger of the direction Bette Midler’s music would later take, having more in common thematically and musically with songs like “From a Distance” and “Wind Beneath My Wings,” which would become her biggest hits in the next phase of her career.

Like Bette, Mary Rose Foster is at her own crossroads, but it’s one with actual life-or-death stakes. As she prepares for a literal homecoming, Mary Rose is living out the old rock star cliché: the only home she finds is in the bottom of the bottle or in the haze of whatever drug a groupie places in her hand. She might find a home in the stern, oppressive paternalism of manager Rudge — whose expectations only drive her back to her self-destructive behavior — or in the arms of her adoring lover, the industry outsider Huston Dyer, who grows tired of Mary Rose’s self-destructive behavior, which he recognizes as symptomatic of her life on the road. Faced with ultimatums from both of them, she eventually spins out, going on a binge that will cost her everything.

One of the best scenes involves Rose going back to the gay bar where she got her start. She is loved and adored once more among the Baby Jane impersonators and beautiful freaks. It is the first time we see her in a place that seems comfortable, someplace where she can feel love and comfort without the pressure to give up a piece of herself. As her drag queen friends swarm her, her admiration and love for them are overwhelming. She looks as if she might faint when a Streisand queen steps out and begins to sing with her. Rose buys so fully into the fantasy that it’s almost as if Barbra is there in the flesh. It’s not hard to see why she was so taken in by the queers and the weirdos. She loves what they do, and the feeling is mutual. It’s an obvious nod to her past as Bathhouse Betty. A return to the arms of the community that made and shaped her.

The Rose was released to a successful limited run on November 7, 1979. The film received mixed reviews, but Bette made fans of the public and the critics. For her role as Mary Rose Foster, she was nominated for the Best Actress award by the National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Circle, the BAFTAs, and the Oscars; she ended up winning the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Comedy or Musical (which The Rose is neither, but…) on top of their New Star of the Year in a Motion Picture Award— a trophy for industry newcomers because, despite some years of success as a live performer, The Rose had been her first film. The welcome was resounding. Bathhouse Betty was no longer an oddity for pot-smokers and hip Boomers who were a little too young to be true hippies. She was playing in the major leagues now.

The few months following her awards run for The Rose saw the release of a concert film of her live Divine Madness! (dir. Michael Ritchie) show. Though it showcases the best of Bette, the audience for which it was made must have been wider now. There were new stakes and a new definition of stardom for her to explore. The next few years saw a polishing of her humor. It was still loud and pointed ribald, but somehow not quite as messy.

That’s not to say Bette Midler turned her back on her past. A 1984 comedy album, Mud Will Be Flung Tonight, is as dirty as anything she did a decade before. The “Bathhouse Betty” moniker was honored as the title of her 1998 album. The Bette of the 70s still shows up now and then. I most recently saw her in the grande dame who stopped the Tony orchestra so she could finish giving her speech.

Shut that crap off!

As I write this, I’m watching her Vegas special from 2010, and of course, I’m enjoying myself, but it’s hard not to notice how smooth and slick it is. It’s polished in a way that appeals to the resort audience. It doesn’t stink of the vulgarity of those early performances. Even her classic stock character, Sophie Tucker, who was often the voice of Bette’s dirtiest jokes, becomes a vehicle for sentimental musings about aging. None of this is to say she’s become a bad or even a boring performer. No, she’s just a performer who knows who she is and who her audience is. She is still irreverent and yukking it up as shamelessly as she ever did. She’s changed and grown with her audience — as she puts it, “30 years ago, my audiences were on drugs. Now, they’re on medication.” Nobody at Caesar’s Palace screams to ask which hotel she’s staying in. There’s not an Italian salute in sight. The smell of sleaze and weed doesn’t waft over the audience like it did in those early days.

Like Mary Rose Foster, Bette Midler never turned her back on her origins, but unlike that character, Bette was smart enough to know she couldn’t be that performer forever. On that score, The Rose is a beautiful tribute to how an artist, a person, can transform, and in fact, must transform, or face destruction. For me, it’s also a farewell ceremony, a tribute to that era of the Divine Miss M. I wonder what that brassy instrument and even brassier attitude sounded like as it resounded across the steamy halls of the Continental Baths. I bet it was glorious.