Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot off the presses.
Book Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . .
Kevin Winkler. On Bette Midler: An Opinionated Guide. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. 201pp.
34th Edition.
Since I’m about to review Kevin Winkler’s excellent new book, On Bette Midler: An Opinionated Guide, this is as good a time as any to boast about my tenuous connection to the 78-year-old star. I was one of two future theater critics who went to the University of Hawaii with her. The other was the British writer Sheridan Morley, who passed away at 66 in 2007. Sherry and I were there at roughly the same time in the early 60s. From 1963-1964, Bette, a Honolulu resident, was an undergrad, leaving after three semesters for the mainland to pursue a showbiz career. Bette’s family was Jewish, a rarity in Honolulu, which I discovered when I not only had trouble locating a rabbi to officiate at my wedding, but also in finding two Jews to witness the ceremony.
I was in Japan during the fall of 1963, but returned in the spring of 1964, directing The Caucasian Chalk Circle in the smaller of the new Kennedy Theatre’s two venues. There’s a chance Bette even auditioned for me. Earlier in the semester, though, I saw Bette on the mainstage in Murray Schisgal’s one-act, The Typist, part of a two-play Schisgal production—I still have the program. That’s where our connection ends (apart from her appearing on Broadway with later friends of mine in Fiddler on the Roof.)
I never actually met Bette, although I might have had I delayed leaving Hawaii until I’d auditioned for the new film based on James Michener’s novel Hawaii, about to be shot locally. Honolulu theater students had been invited to audition. Exciting as this was, I, without further Hawaiian prospects, and with a bride and baby in tow, was anxious to return to New York. Bette, though, was cast as an extra, and thus began her brilliant career.
Winkler doesn’t mention whether he himself ever met Bette Midler; judging from his book, however, if he hasn’t, he’d probably give a pound of flesh to do so. His is not a conventional biography, it should be noted. The narrative chronology that opens the book provides, along with information in the text proper, enough details for us to appreciate his main purpose, to examine each broad area of Midler’s performance output. A number of photos, black and white as well as color, help.
Winkler opens with a chapter on Midler’s early years as a struggling New York singer and actress, highlighted by her work in downtown ventures, like Café La Mama; her three years in Fiddler; her minor background work in several films; and, most significantly, her remarkable success performing not only in louche nightclubs, but at the Continental Baths at the Ansonia Hotel. It was at the Baths, known for their homosexual hedonism in the pre-AIDS era, that Midler first found her footing as a gay men’s idol, performing for an audience most of whom wore little more than a towel.
During these years Bette developed the persona of a brassy, bosomy, comedian-singer who reveled in wittily bawdy camp humor; she borrowed old-time vaudeville star Sophie Tucker’s cocky attitude, and dressed in a style referred to as “trash with flash.” Winkler repeatedly reminds us of the warm relationship Midler, a straight woman, maintained during her career with gays; her “gay show-biz sensibility,” in fact, is one of the book’s principal motifs.
Subsequent chapters cover Midler’s stage work, recordings, television (where she played Mama Rose in Gypsy), and film. It’s a daunting task, especially for a book that, without its index, would be less than 200 pages; nevertheless, Winkler takes both shallow and deep dives into what seems every significant stage and cabaret show, concert, recording (song by song), TV show, and movie Midler ever made. Winkler’s research also turns up oodles of opportunities she turned down only for others to reap their rewards. His critiques of those she chose offer smart, snappily written, and insightful opinions.
While Winkler deliberately doesn’t get micro about Midler’s private life, mentioning, mostly in passing, only landmark events, like her marriage to Martin Von Haselberg, the birth of their child, Sophie, or her work on behalf of the environmentally sensitive New York Restoration Project, he does now and then expand nicely on related side issues, like the trio of backup singers she created, called the Harlettes. We also get a taste of her progressive politics,
I especially appreciated Winkler’s perceptively entertaining, point-by-point comparison of Midler with a certain other multi-talented Jewish superstar of the same generation named Barbra Streisand. Streisand did two Broadway shows early in her career that rocketed her to stardom, after which she never returned to the Great White Way. Midler’s Broadway career began (after being an ensemble member) with the supporting role of Tzeitel in Fiddler, after which she presented an eponymous, sell-out, concert-style show at the Palace in 1973, earning a special Tony for it. She then appeared in 1974 at the Minskoff in the spectacular, self-glorifying revue Clams on the Half-Shell in 1975.
She waited many years, though, before returning to Broadway in 2013 in I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers, a one-woman piece about the notorious, titular super-agent. Most sensationally, in 2017, she starred at the Shubert in Hello, Dolly!, for which she earned another Tony. Winkler bites into these shows with relish, also citing Bette’s other onstage productions, including her early Off-Off-Broadway ventures in outré shows like Tom Eyen’s Miss Nefertiti Regrets.
Midler’s album and singles production was prodigious, if nowhere as commercially successful as Streisand’s. Winkler, it might be added, is perfectly aware of Midler’s vocal flaws. Her biggest singles of new songs—apart from her terrific rendering of standards like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”—were often sentimental ballads like “Wind Beneath My Wings” and “From a Distance.” Winkler, recognizing their impact, has less respect for them than for some of her earlier, more intense numbers, like “Stay with Me” and “Friends.” His extensive coverage, though, will have you going back to many other songs to see just what he’s talking about.
Much like the other facets of her work, the Divine Miss M’s movie career was a roller coaster ride of huge artistic and commercial hits. At the top were films like the first one she starred in, The Rose (1979), to those at the bottom, like Jinxed (1982). One of her greatest disappointments, the big-budgeted WWII flop, For the Boys, gets a good dose of the Winkler side-eye. He manages to discuss the vast majority of her several dozen movies—hits and misses—and the nature of her fluctuating relationships with institutional Hollywood.
And, while Winkler’s passion for Bette as both a person and an artist is palpable, he’s an equal opportunity critic, glorifying her best work and vilifying her worst. It’s the kind of book that took me longer than I thought to get through because I was constantly putting it down while I searched for its references on YouTube. There’s even an extensive video of Bette at the Baths, although I suspect only the most hardcore Midlerites will watch its grainy black-and-white images from start to finish.
Despite my brush with the Divine Miss M’s pre-divine fabulosity (a neologism that pops up several times), and my continuing affection and admiration for her, I haven’t followed her career with much avidity. Winkler’s book opened my eyes to many things, like the fact that Barry Manilow had been her accompanist and musical director before he took off on his own stellar career.
As Winkler’s carefully annotated “selected bibliography” makes clear, there have been several valuable biographies before his—and a couple of clunkers as well. This one, though, which includes some color photos, is a keeper. Fans—even if they disagree with Winkler’s assessments—will love it. It is, after all, “an opinionated guide.”
Coming up: Cindy Rosenthal. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La Mama Experimental Theatre.
Leiter Looks at Books welcomes inquiries from publishers and authors interested in having their theater/show business-related books reviewed.
