A View From a Broad Read online

  And so it was that as the sun set somewhere in the middle of August, I gathered up the broken shards of my Buddha and my life and committed myself. The Bette Midler World Tour was on. I would pick up the gauntlet my manager had thrown down and touch the whole earth with my Divinity.

  Dizzy with exhilaration and dread, I took my favorite Paper Mate in hand and began to do what I always do in a situation that demands bold and forthright action: I made lists.

  • THE BAND AUDITION •

  “How I uncover talent . . ”

  For the Reader’s Edification: Often I am asked how I have managed so consistently to surround myself with people of the highest creative caliber. I offer the following application as but one of the ways in which I uncover talent and excellence that might otherwise lie fallow in the fetid hog wallow that we call the field of entertainment.

  * * *

  BAND APPLICATION

  Name_____

  Alias_____

  Ht_____Wt_____Color of eyes_____

  Favorite Female Performer_____

  Please answer the following questions:

  Will you work for scale? Yes_____No_____

  When was the last time you were in jail?_____

  Offense and length of term_____

  Have you ever physically attacked a performer under whose employ you were at the time? Yes_____No_____

  If yes, was it: Onstage_____Offstage_____In the privacy of her home_____

  Do you take drugs? Yes_____No_____Not sure_____

  Can you arrange for your own supply? Yes_____No_____On occasion_____

  Can you arrange for mine? Yes_____No_____On occasion_____

  List your major contacts in a. Europe_____b. Australia_____c. Seattle_____

  Do you consider your sex drive to be:

  Normal_____Above normal_____Monklike_____

  In a no-sex situation do you: Play well_____Play badly_____

  Quit_____

  Have you been able to read this application by yourself? Yes_____No_____Sort of_____

  • CLOUDS ON THE HORIZON •

  “The World is my shoehorn; I shall not shlep . . .”

  DIVINE REVELATION, Chapter 8: Verse 6

  • CLOUDS ON THE HORIZON •

  There is no rest for the weary. No sooner had the gathering-of-the-forces been accomplished than I had to throw myself into the excruciating process of creating a show that would do two things at one and the same time: a) bring the world to its knees, and b) fit into a footlocker.

  Unfortunately, these two objectives were not easily reconciled, and this was causing a severe change in my ordinarily placid, even decorous behavior.

  For days on end, I would hardly speak, and when I did only the vilest sort of gibberish would spout forth. I became morose and fat. Unapproachable, except when eating—and then only by waiters. I became, in short, a walking fountain of misery and despair. And not only were my metaphors mixed: my entire thinking process was deranged, and I found myself dwelling, in the most morbid fashion, on the very things I had vowed not to think about at all. Every day, for example, I’d get up and stare in total panic at the seven little phrase books hanging so cheerily from my bedpost.

  You see, on stage, as in life, I talk a lot. In fact, random, rambling raillery makes up a rather large part of my act and I absolutely depend on it. People often say, “My, but the little vixen has a lot of energy,” mostly because I never shut up. But chatter is a respite for me, like treading water after miles of the Australian crawl, and the water that keeps me afloat, the English language. What would I do in, let’s say, Sweden? The few basic words I was gleaning from my phrase books hardly scratched the surface of my needs. I was, indeed, one scared piece of Divinity.

  I began to have recurring nightmares. In one of them, the instant I hit the stage icicles formed on the proscenium arch; snow fell from the flies; and a thick layer of hoarfrost covered the faces of the crowd which lay stretched out before me like the Dead Sea. Frozen to the spot, I could neither sing nor speak nor even cry out as the entire audience rose up as one, pelted me with Eskimo Pies, and walked out.

  “I was, indeed, one scared piece of Divinity.”

  Yes, I had terrible fears of what might happen, but they were as nothing when compared with what really was happening.

  My new band was crumbling under the pressure of trying to learn a wildly eclectic score from music sheets written in wildly divergent keys, the gift of some sadistic copyist who, I had no doubt, was working for Helen Reddy. Guitar players came and went with a regularity my nerve-racked system could only envy.

  My manager had blithely informed me that he would be coming along on the entire trip, and suddenly I understood why he had planned the trek in the first place. After all, the most exotic place the man had ever been to was Las Vegas.

  My choreographer had, since I last worked with her, turned in her tutus and plunged into Punk. This time out, number after number emerged dripping with violence and hostility. Every day she would come into rehearsal, the tattered threads of what was left of her mental fabric trailing behind her. And there she would sit: back straight, head held high, barking out the steps of the day from her makeshift throne. “Pas de bourée, step step; pas de bourée, step step; tour jeté, step, turn; Katie rip off Linda’s wig!”

  We all worked as hard as we could to fulfill her vision, but it didn’t make any difference how we stomped about. We tried to be up-to-the-minute, but it was no use. Invariably, she would sit there, occasionally raising her eyebrows, indicating, with weary little sighs she let escape now and then, that I should quit while I was ahead and cancel the tour before the rest of the world could plumb for itself the depths of my incompetence.

  Still, for all her safety pins, alligator clips, and acute lack of enthusiasm, she was a wonderful choreographer, and I loved the way she perceived the world. Once she told me that she had seen Baryshnikov and Kirkland dance Giselle. I asked her how it was. “Oh, doll,” she said, “I loved it, but they were so brilliant and so pompous I was afraid God would strike them down dead.”

  How Old Testament of her. Here was a woman who could surprise me. I liked that and the extension cords she wore around her neck in her quest for the true Punk pose. But, my dears, I could have used some encouragement.

  My choreographer had turned in her tutus and plunged into punk.

  Miss Frank, my dresser and confidante of so many years, was no help either. She would constantly hint—or outright tell me— that it was both foolish and dangerous to think I had something the entire world was panting for.

  “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,” she would intone while hemming up my skirt or pinning down my cleavage. “There’s a punishment coming. That’s for sure. I can feel it in my bones.”

  “That’s polio, dear,” I would tell the silly woman, but to no avail.

  Miss Frank was no help either.

  THE

  * * *

  •HARLEMETTES•

  * * *

  My

  three favorite chotchkes on the break of life

  Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised by Miss Frank’s behavior. Miss Frank has always been, and I hope always will be, the very model of humility and moral rectitude. As, indeed, am I, although she does not think so. Being moral isn’t what you do, I have often tried to tell her, it’s what you mean to do. And, naturally, I always mean the best.

  Miss Frank remains unconvinced of my virtue and in deep concern for my immortal soul. I’m sure the only reason she comes along with me on these monumental shleps is because she considers it her duty to save me from the perils that can befall a young woman of my station and bodily proportions. “The road!” Miss Frank proclaims each time we go on tour. “Why, it’s the Devil’s Walkway, and anyone who trods it is bound to Hula in Hell.” Well, what can you do? She’s such a good dresser. It must be all those steeples in Boston. But then again, who knows? Certainly not 1.1 know nothing, despite my avid thirst for
knowledge and enlightenment. While others study, explore, experience, I go to fittings.

  But be that as it may. In those early, dark days of rehearsal, only my new Harlettes—Katie, Franny and Linda—gave me comfort. From the very first moment I discovered them, selling their cherries at the Farmers’ Market, they never let me down. I had to find new background singers for my Grand Tour, because my old ones had decided to find fame and fortune on their own. I was pissed, but not surprised. You know me: Bette Midler, brood hen to the stars—Barry Manilow, Melissa Manchester, the Platform Shoe. And actually, I adored my new threesome. When others turned their backs on this hapless Diva, my Harlettes did what they could to shore me up against the tidal waves of depression that threatened to engulf the vast, cold spaces of Rehearsal Hall 6. For not only were my girls fine singers and dancers, they also thought I was God.

  Oh, those girls! My three favorite chotchkes on the breakfront of life! I’ll never forget how they looked when I first saw them— so flushed, so filthy. But I knew, even then, that under those dirt-streaked, rouge-stained cheeks, there was Magic.

  The shocking verbal abuse they hurled at me when I first approached them only made me more certain I was right. I could do so much with them, I thought. And for them. Duty was not the exclusive province of Miss Frank. I would be more than their employer, I would be their Benefactress. I would raise them out of the gutter, nourish their minds, their souls, be privy to the elevation of their spirits. I would see them become noble and thin . . . God, I love a Mission!

  But even they could not keep me from my rendezvous with misery, for my most pressing problem was one that only I could solve. What I needed to make life worth living again was simply this: an Entrance. I have always believed that the way you first appear on stage is the way the audience will remember you for the rest of the show—perhaps, if they are the sensitive type, for the rest of their lives. Keeping this in mind, I had, on previous outings, come as a clam, as a jukebox and as a patient in a hospital bed—which was not, may I take this opportunity to say, a cheap and tasteless plea for audience sympathy, as some benighted critics have charged, but rather a bold foray into the political arena which contained within its small but swollen framework a thoughtful, even angry cry for socialized medicine.

  In any case, for this new and most important of tours I needed something different; something wonderful and astonishing, yet easy to pack. Something with a message from me to all the peoples of the world. Something, above all, that would be seen as unmistakably American. I imagined myself as the Long Island Expressway; as the Grand Canyon; as a Q-Tip. But all that seemed too expected, too Holiday on Ice, if you dig my drift.

  For days I feverishly racked my brain for an answer to this question of questions. Then, one afternoon, whilst I was preparing some Oscar Meyers in the kitchen, I happened to overhear the Red Sox game that Miss Frank—half deaf from endless hours of band rehearsal—had blasting on the tube. Suddenly, I realized that the answer was lying—or in this case, frying—right before my eyes.

  I would come as a Hot Dog!

  How brilliant! How perfect! First I’d have my girls come on as waitresses. Then I would make my grand entrance, mustard and relish glistening in the lights. I would shake my wiener, wiggle my buns. How could anyone resist such a delectable vision?

  There was no stopping me. I would become the hot dog and the hot dog me. We would be as one. Like all true artists, I was determined to bring my own mighty vision before the public, no matter what that effort might entail. Let the Philistines spit on my wiener now. Time and the public would prove me right, as they had so many times before.

  Of this I was blissfully, pigheadedly sure.

  “What I needed to make life worth living again was simply this: an Entrance.”

  Dear Diary: I just got a letter today from the Johnson Girls, two of my most loyal fans, telling me that they bought tickets for every show of mine in London and will be doing the same for all my European performances as soon as they go on sale.

  I am, of course, flattered. I am also troubled.

  I guess it’s always troubling to be faced with that kind of devotion. Like most performers, I can deal with intense adulation from the multitudes, but as soon as it comes from a focused source . . . well, that’s another matter altogether. Maybe that’s why so many performer friends of mine refuse to have any dealings with even their most ardent fans. They don’t want them to become specific, particularized people. Well, sometimes they hire them (they make such loyal employees), but that’s just another kind of distancing as far as I’m concerned, and I’ve never been able to do that.

  Fans. It’s so tempting to dismiss their behavior as deviant or simply crazy. But when I’m actually faced with the humanity of it—the Johnson Girls, for example—there is something so essentially sweet about the whole thing, something so naive, that I find I can’t dismiss it, or ignore it, or belittle it at all.

  I embrace it.

  Just knowing that they’ll be in London or Gothenburg or wherever already makes those places less strange to me, less frightening. And what is so wonderful about the Johnson Girls in particular is that they always travel with their mother. I suppose most mothers would discourage such a consuming (and expensive!) obsession with a performer. But not theirs.

  Mrs. Johnson not only encourages it, she also seems almost proud of it. For her, it is something that makes her daughters not odd, but special; not silly, but serious; not limited, but giving.

  I wish you could see the three of them standing backstage after a performance, looking like they just got off the train from Boise, Idaho. Which they did. They seem to have nothing in common with the circus around them or the people around them—least of all me. Yet there they stand in all their gingham glory. So unlike anything I think I stand for. Or anyone I would ever really know. Certainly unlike anyone you’d think would ever want to know me.

  But in some strange way, they give—to me—meaning. I always feel more solid, more real when they’re around. They make me think that maybe there is more to me than I know.

  They say they love me, the Johnson Girls do, but I love—and need —them . . . more than they’ll ever know.

  The Divine’s Test for the Traumatized Traveler

  Multiple Choice

  PART ONE

  25 Points

  1. The Great Wall of China was originally built as part of:

  * * *

  a) a defense plan

  b) a Chanukah celebration

  c) a divorce settlement

  d) the world’s longest dog walk

  2. The Great Pyramids of Egypt are actually in:

  * * *

  a) Yemen

  b) Lake Havasu, Arizona

  c) The British Museum

  d) a terrible state of disrepair

  3. The passageway leading up to the king’s burial chamber in the Great Pyramid is only three feet high because:

  * * *

  a) that’s how tall the Egyptians were

  b) that’s how tall the Jews were

  c) The foreman was a jerk-off

  d) they ran out of stepladders

  e) the low ceiling forced everyone to bow as they approached the Pharaoh

  4. The Baths of Caracalla are:

  * * *

  a) where the nobility gathered to wash and gossip

  b) a spa in Calabria known for having extremely hot water and no towels

  c) the latest novel by Gore Vidal

  d) a fashionable shop in Kensington specializing in brass-and-marble toilet fixtures

  e) where Liza Minnelli got her start

  5. Charmant is a word the French use to describe:

  * * *

  a) vacationing American tourists

  b) foreigners in general

  c) the last ten years of the nineteenth century

  d) Fats Domino

  e) only themselves

  6. Upon first seeing Paris, Noel Coward was heard to exclaim:

  *
* *

  a) Quelle ville!

  b) Ou sont les garçons?

  c) J’ai besoin d’un pissoir

  d) Hello, sailor

  7. When in Rome, one must always:

  * * *

  a) do as the Romans do

  b) never do as the Romans do

  c) visit the Spanish Steps

  d) learn the Spanish Steps

  e) keep alert for a place to hide

  8. Truk is:

  a) Munich’s newest disco

  b) A Moroccan delicacy made of cherries and lamb’s wool

  c) a small island in the Pacific

  d) the Slavic word for “misunderstanding of a sexual nature”

  e) a much-beloved Norse god responsible for herring

  PART TWO

  In the Following Lists, Cross Out the Word That Does Not Belong 25 Points

  Bangkok, the floating market, Wat Po, Big Foot, the Emerald Buddha

  Lomotil, aluminum hydroxide, miesskeit, Valium, Kaopectate

  Richard the Lion-Hearted, Frederick the Great, Mad Ludwig, William the Conqueror, Crazy Eddie

  Swedes, Finns, Germans, Poofters, Koreans

  PART THREE

  Essay Question 50 Points

  In early 1978 the Indonesian island of Komodo was closed to visitors because a giant Komodo dragon went berserk and ate an American tourist. In 300 words or less deal with the following: What did the tourist look like? What was he wearing that so antagonized the reptile? Was the dragon’s act a political statement? Was he acting on orders? On impulse? Is there anyone you would like to eat? See eaten? Who? Should the lizard be punished? Rewarded? What do you think this all means? Wouldn’t you really rather have a Buick?