Bette Midler (11 page)

In late September of 1971 came an engagement that would really advance her career. It was going to snag her the one thing that could spell tangible stardom for her: a record deal.

The supper club known as Downstairs at the Upstairs was located on West Fifth-Sixth Street. It was a very important gig for Bette because it was her first legitimate New York City booking. Here was her big chance, and she was mortified that something would go wrong and she would blow it. Just to make certain that she looked right, in the eleventh hour she pleaded with Laura Nyro’s lighting man to come into the club and light her show; it had to be perfect. The lighting man was Peter Dallas, and he came immediately to one of her rehearsals to draw up a lighting scheme.

Opening night was September 20, 1971—Rosh Hashanah—and to top it all off, the night of a huge hurricane in New York. Talk about the kiss of death! Bette made her grand entrance that night, only to find that the audience consisted of eight people.

On the second night there was no improvement; and on the third night there were only five people in the audience. Here she was the hit of a gay bathhouse, and she couldn’t even get arrested by straight New Yorkers! This called for drastic measures.

Bette hustled her buns down to West Fourteenth Street, to the tacky offices of the controversial swinging-sex-scene tabloid
Screw
magazine. She plunked down her own money and took out a big ad with her picture
on it that carried the headline “Bette from the Baths—At the Downstairs!” and all of the details.

Talk about amazing intuition: By the sixth night of her engagement, the place was crowded with patrons. And the following night, it was “standing room only.” The next thing Bette knew, her two-week engagement was extended to ten weeks, to accommodate the demand for reservations, and people like Johnny Carson, Karen Black, and Truman Capote were showing up to see Miss M perform.

Peter Dallas was certain that a recording contract was what Bette needed, and he was going to help her get it. Laura Nyro was recording for Columbia Records at the time, and through working with her, he knew several people who worked for the company. He invited one of his friends from Columbia to the Downstairs, and the friend flipped out when he saw Midler’s act. Dallas urged him to get the president of Columbia Records, Clive Davis, to see the show. Davis accepted the invitation, but was totally unimpressed by the act and left the club without a word to anyone. Bette and the band were very disappointed.

By some odd turn of fate, however, the next night Ahmet Ertegun, president of Atlantic Records, was in the audience. Ertegun recalls, “I went there after a ball at the Plaza Hotel. I told my wife that I had to go hear a singer I had been told about” (
40
).

Strangely enough, a troupe of Bette’s biggest fans from the Baths, an outrageous contingent of hairdressers from Brooklyn, showed up that same night—in rare form. They screamed and carried on throughout the show, and when it was over, they stood on the tops of their tables and threw confetti at her. The crowd was so wild that night that Bette was literally carried off the stage by fans, like a victorious gladiator who had just slain an arena full of lions. There sat Ertegun in a tuxedo—totally unrecognized and completely knocked out by what he had just witnessed.

“She had done the Baths and made a few Carson appearances when friends told me to catch her at the Downstairs at the Upstairs,” says Ertegun, who vividly recalls that particular evening (
4
).

“She was unlike anybody I’d seen before. People of all types—grandmothers, couples, drag queens—everyone was screaming and jumping up and down on tables for this woman. She was doing everything: fifties greaseball stuff, swing era nostalgia, current ballads. You could discern a great wit there—she was trying to seem raunchy and
tasteless AND exude a certain elegance, and she pulled it off. What she had was STYLE” (
15
).

“She was overwhelming. I couldn’t believe that a young person like her could not only understand those old musical styles so well but capture the flavor of the periods and make them a part of herself. It was the wittiest musical performance I’d ever seen. It was striking to see such innate elegance and good taste in someone who superficially appeared not to have elegance or good taste. You know, she never EMBARRASSED onstage” (
4
).

So much for taste and elegance—Ertegun was blown away by what he saw on the stage at Downstairs at the Upstairs that night. “I went to her dressing room after her show and said, ‘Listen, I’m Ahmet Ertegun from Atlantic Records, and I would like to sign you.’ She said, ‘That’s it! That’s what I’ve been waiting for.’ I signed her the next day” (
40
). It wasn’t long afterward that she went into the studio to begin to record the album that would let the whole world know about the outrageous redhead who began in the Baths.

The gig at Downstairs at the Upstairs was truly the one that was the charm. In the October 3, 1971, issue of the
New York Times
, Bette received her first major review. Written by John S. Wilson, it really captured her strengths and her weak points at that time. Wilson admitted, “She has presence, she has a fine voice, she has wit and total mobility, including an unusually expressive face.” However, with all of her divergent musical styles, he felt “she never clarifies what she is trying to do.” In spite of that, he pointed out that, his opinion notwithstanding, “The night I saw her, the audience had no doubts; they thought she was absolutely wonderful” (
41
).

Ahmet Ertegun couldn’t wait to get her into the recording studio, but what was he going to do with her when he got her there? Ballads? Boogie-woogie? Rock & roll? Early sixties girl-group pop? “She posed a great problem,” he admitted, “because she didn’t fit into any categories; it’s very hard to make a record that doesn’t fit into any categories, it’s
very
hard to make a record that doesn’t fit into any category and then find an audience. Also, it was obvious that a lot of her appeal was her onstage magic. So there were lots of different theories as to what to do with her, and her first album was a compromise between people tearing her in different directions” (
4
).

Atlantic Records was not only the label that Bette’s idol Aretha Franklin currently recorded for; it was also the home of one of the
music industry’s newest success stories: Roberta Flack. Roberta had been singing in a Washington, D.C., jazz club and had become a local sensation. She was signed to Atlantic and put into the recording studio with a producer who was working for the label: Joel Dorn. Dorn’s success with Roberta’s first albums, and his ability to recapture the intimate magic that existed between Flack and her audience at the Bohemian Caverns in D.C., made him seem the ideal person to turn the diva of the Continental Baths into a recording star.

Joel Dorn was the perfect producer for Roberta Flack. The song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” brilliantly illustrates this fact. At the time Roberta was projecting the image of a very focused jazz and ballad singer who accompanied herself on the piano. Dorn was great at showing off Flack and her music and its delicate and intricate sound. While several songs in Bette’s repertoire were heartfelt ballads, there was nothing intricate or delicate about her sound, her music, or her appeal.

Barry Manilow felt that since it was he who had polished Bette’s stage act and done all of her arrangements, he should also be given a chance at producing her in the studio. He was quite disappointed when he learned that Dorn had been selected as Bette’s producer.

“Bette’s first album was the most painful experience of my life,” remembers Manilow. “They never wanted me to produce it. They got Joel Dorn, a fantastic producer who unfortunately did not know her well enough. I was called in at the very beginning, to lay down the basic arrangements, and they said, ‘Thank you very much. Good-bye.’ So I left. I was very mad, but I left. It was Bette’s first time out, so she didn’t know what to do. I said, ‘Bette, how could you let me leave?’ But she was scared” (
38
).

After that, Barry was always looking out for his opportunity to make his own mark in the music business. He wanted to write and to produce his own material, and he was going to find a way to market himself. “It was a case of two strong egos clashing,” he recalls (
38
). And so, in the fall of 1971, Bette began recording her debut album with Joel Dorn at the helm.

In February of 1972 Bette returned to the Continental Baths for what she thought would be her final engagement there. Rex Reed joked in the
Sunday New York Daily News
that Bette at the Baths had given “more farewell appearances . . . than soprano Kirsten Flagstad ever made at the old Metropolitan Opera House” (
33
).

“Gawd, I don’t know how long I’ve been there. It seems like forever,” commented Bette during that run at the Continental. “But they are loyal. Loy-a-al! I played more glamorous places than a steam bath. I had a two-week booking at the Downstairs at the Upstairs, and the guy who owned the joint was in love with me. What he really loved was my fans. They came in droves and practically stood on tables cheering. My two-week gig turned into ten weeks. Listen, you think the Baths is the pits? Next week I’m playing Raleigh, North Carolina, in a place called the Frog and the Nightgown. Who do you think lives there?” (
33
).

After having her as a guest on
The Tonight Show
on several different occasions, Johnny Carson asked Bette to be his opening act during his upcoming engagement at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. The Divine Miss M, in the town where even the sunshine is artificial? Naturally, she accepted.

As she explained it, “He asked me to open his show in Vegas for him and I was pleased to do it for him because he had been very good to me. Really good. The more consistent I became, the more he warmed up to me. I like working for him. He’s a professional with an astonishing kind of professionalism. He’s ‘up’ every night. He gives the same-caliber performance every night” (
25
).

So, in April of 1972, Bette opened for Johnny at the Sahara Hotel in the Congo Room, which she kept referring to as the “Congoleum” Room. According to her, “Vegas was amazing. You have to see it once before you die. It’s culture shock. Not my style. Everyone wears wigs. It’s a heavy wig town. I got real good reviews, but I had lots of trouble dealing with the audience. I have to have love from an audience. When I feel warmth, then I’m warm. They just didn’t know what to make of me. They didn’t understand why they had left the gambling tables. Las Vegas—puh-leeze! Honey, I hated it, but it was an experience, you know” (
25
). In her put-downs, she snidely referred to Las Vegas as “Lost Wages.”

In May of 1972 she played the Bitter End on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, and she returned to Chicago for a third engagement at Mr. Kelly’s. Her next gig in New York City was the big enchilada: Carnegie Hall. “Another first,” she said in anticipation of the date. “The first time anyone has ever played the revered Halls of Carnegie without having made it big on records. From the steam baths, straight to Carnegie Hall. Can you dig it?” (
33
).

This really had to be special. Miss M had to pull out all the stops this
time. At this point she was commanding $1,500 a night in clubs across the country, but she had to pay the band as well. Nevertheless, she felt that she needed to scrape together enough money for her own background singers. She had once announced on
The Tonight Show
that she always dreamed of having backup girls, and she wanted to call her act “Bette & the Bang-Bangs.” Instead, she hired three girls and dubbed them the Harlettes.

As she explained the selection process: “I called up my friends who sing and I had them all down and we sang together. I wanted to pick up people who I could really get along with” (
25
).

The first girl Bette asked about possibly singing backup in her Carnegie Hall debut was a singer she knew from the showcase club scene: Melissa Manchester. Melissa was interested in discussing the opportunity and suggested a friend of hers named Gail Kantor. Bette, Melissa, and Gail finalized the deal over lunch at Wolf’s Delicatessen on Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street, on the block north of Carnegie Hall. A third girl, Merle Miller, was suggested by Barry Manilow. Although they all had aspirations of becoming lead singers on their own, a Carnegie Hall gig was a Carnegie Hall gig and quite prestigious. Naturally, they accepted, and so were born the first in what is now a long series of Harlettes.

Carnegie Hall is the type of place that can be booked without the aid of a booking agent, and that’s exactly what Bette and Barry did. Never in their wildest dreams did they think that they could sell it out, but they did. Bette’s devoted fans from the Continental Baths came out in droves, and the evening was a smash, even though Bette later admitted that she was “terrified” of failure. The concert date was June 23, 1972.

Because of stipulations with the musicians’ union contracts at Carnegie Hall, the use of personal tape recorders was strictly forbidden. However, since Barry was Bette’s musical director, he figured that he would simply make his own cassette tape from the stage. He was very surprised to be told that he was forbidden to tape any part of it. Later that day the hall’s soundman—who had a little sideline going for himself—offered to run a “bootleg” tape off the master soundboard, on the sly. Manilow agreed and paid the man $275 for a reel-to-reel copy of the show.

Among the songs that Bette performed in Carnegie Hall were her at-this-point traditional opening number, “Friends”; Bessie Smith’s raunchy “Empty Bed Blues”; Helen Morgan’s “Something to Remember
You By”; and Dorothy Lamour’s “Moon of Manakoora.” The Dixie Cups’ hit “Chapel of Love” closed the show, and as the encore she sang Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” The concert was a roaring success, and everyone who saw it knew that Bette Midler was something more than a flash in the pan—or rather . . . a flash in the tubs.