Bette — sedately divine

Press, 2 November 1983, Page 10

Bette — sedately divine

There is but a mere puff of soft blond curls atop Bette Midler’s head these days instead of the usual explosion of harlot red locks. And tailored slacks and leather boots have replaced the boas and mules of her trashy-flash past. Miss M., though still divine, is a little more sedate. She is busy promoting a new book, “The Saga of Baby Divine,” and a new record album, “No Frills.” She is also pensive. “This book and this record are the end of a certain period in my life,” she says. “I want to take stock of myself. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but it will be something I want to do.” It will be nothing like her last film, the appropriately titled “Jinxed,” which almost made moviegoers forget the excellent performance she gave in “The Rose” — a role that landed her an Academy Award nomination for best actress. “Rose — that was one of the happiest times of my life,” she said. “She never let me down. Afterwards, I went back on the road, went back to the studio and continued my life.” She’d like to do more

By

DOLORES BARCLAY,

movies, but says you have to be a robot or a Martian or a Superman to get a role. Hollywood and its prescribed way of making a movie frustrates her. “Martha Raye once said she had had some offers to do her life story and she said the only person she wanted to do it was me,” Miss Midler said. “It’s terribly frustrating — it’s like pulling teeth. By the time I get to play Martha Raye, I’ll be her age.” She has written a screenplay — a comedy about a girl who does not win an Oscar — and is thinking about doing a documentary on a woman who won the lottery in England. She has learned from the film business, though she is slightly fed up. “I’m a little tougher from it,” she said. “It’s made me more irritable and I’ve lost patience. I used to love the picture business and I wanted to do great work.” Now she casts her eyes on writing as a source of creative joy. Her book, “The Saga of Baby Divine,” with pop art airbrush illustrations by Todd Schorr, was published earlier this month by Crown Publishers Inc. It. is the

A.P., New York

story of a red-haired babe who wears purple highheeled shoes, a feathered boa and a diamond-studded safety pin in her Hawaiian print diaper. As the tot’s mother gasps in the book: “If only she weren’t so flashy! I know this is odd for a mother to say — but I find her — well — just a bit trashy!” The story, written entirely in verse, “originated from the depths of my soul,” Miss Midler said. “I was a great reader as a child. I loved the parts you had to memorise, you know, like, Solomon Grundy, born on Monday, christened on Tuesday, married on Wednesday. “The story came to me one day before I passed out — went to sleep. It sounded like a winner. I could see her in my mind’s eye.” She spent two years putting the book together. If you read between the lines, it is a fairly hopeful book. There is a comforting quality to it, too. In the early days, when she first landed in New York from Hawaii to pursue a career in the theatre, Miss Midler was a big hit at the Continental Baths and had a largely homosexual follow-

ing. By the time she did her Clams on the Half Shell Broadway show in 1974, she was a national cult figure. “I set out to . I didn’t want to be anonymous. That was the basic thrust of it,” she said. “Most people do. Some people walk through life without a single hello from a fellow human being.” She is 37 now, pondering motherhood as the Biological clock ticks away, and living out of a suitcase between New York and California.

“I can’t sleep in either place,” she laments. “I don’t feel at home. I even drag things around, like my jammies and my pillow.” Her older sister, Susan, and her younger brother, Daniel, live in New York. Herldest sister, Judith, died in a car accident in New York in 1968. Her father, a former house painter, is still in Hawaii.

“We never had subscriptions to anything except ‘Readers Digest’,” she said. “One of my father’s biggest thrills was when they printed something in ‘Quotable quotes’ that I had said. He thought I had finally made it.”