Bette Midler (18 page)

The show was to have one of the jazz and swing greats from the 1940s open the second act and usher Bette into her “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”—and “Chattanooga Choo Choo”—era tunes. The producers originally tried to hire Benny Goodman for the slot, but he wasn’t interested in a long Broadway run. Instead, they hired the vibraphonist who first found fame in 1936 playing with Goodman’s trio and changed the act into a quartet. After leaving Goodman in 1940, Lionel Hampton formed his own big band. He had been a star in his own right ever since.

“Look at Lionel out there,” said Bette during rehearsals. “He says doing this show is a learning experience for him. I say it is for me. Now I’ll tell you something. I have never dared to sing Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust.’ Really, it’s a dream of mine. But now with Lionel playing ‘Stardust’ behind me, I’m doing it. We sound real good together. Wherever I go, he goes right along. You’re really singing and it’s a big challenge for me to keep up with him, because he knows a helluva lot more about music than I do. My ears are opening up!” (
58
).

Joe Layton admitted that the teaming of Bette and Lionel was a way of stretching Miss M into some new areas, especially since in that second act she would be sharing the stage with someone of whom she was in awe. “Take Hampton,” said Layton. “Now that’s a nice meeting of the minds. Bette does nostalgic stuff, music of the thirties and forties as well as the sixties and seventies. We’re extending her, putting her with an all-time great who lived those years before she was born. They both love jazz, and he’s reaching forward, and she’s reaching back. They’re stretching.” Said Bette of Lionel, “We wanted someone of his strength to work with me. He was willing, and he was available. He wants to open a new door, and here he is seventy years old, opening new doors. He has more chops, more interest, more enthusiasm than most guys I know half his age. He just loves to work, and so do I. This is a revue, a salute to Lionel and a salute to me. It’s not just me anymore standing out there busting my butt. My girls are working: The Harlettes. And we have the Powell gospel group. We have a new dimension” (
58
).

Hampton had just recently come out of the hospital, where he had been suffering from an intestinal infection. “After my illness, I wanted to come back with a big bang,” he said prior to the opening. He was also enjoying working with Midler. “Bette does everything from the blues to rock. It’s always the beat, has been since we were making it with ‘Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar.’ There’s nothing wrong with rock, nothing. So together we’ll do it all. And I’m likely to teach her some authentic jive talk!” (
58
).

Bette promised to give her all for her audience this time around. “Suffice it to say there will be lots of tits and ass. The sets are beautiful. The costumes are gorgeous. Tony Walton, who did [the film]
Murder on the Orient Express
, created them. The sets are extremely gaudy and real expensive-looking in a sleazy sort of way. People want color. They want explosion. It’s pretty gray out there, so I gave them an evening of color. The show is staged within an inch. There isn’t a moment that’s not choreographed!” (
59
).

The show wasn’t without anxieties for Bette, who proclaimed of her production company, “We are now taste-free.” In fact, she admitted right before the opening, “It’s extremely frightening. I was relatively calm until last week and then I think I psyched myself into a fit. I had two or three days that I literally hit people and called them horrendous names. I also started dreaming. Strange dreams. I had a nightmare that David Bowie opened up across the street from me and he had the same sets and he was wearing my costumes!” (
38
).

Bette was also nervous about working onstage for the first time in years without Barry Manilow to play piano and fight with her on and off stage. “Yeah, I’d have to admit that Barry’s unavailability delayed my getting back to work,” she said. “My new accompanist, Don York, is brilliant. He’s not as volatile as Barry, but he’s wonderful” (
38
). She was at least reassured by the fact that York had been broken in by Manilow personally.

Prior to her opening on Broadway, Bette made a highly memorable appearance on the 1975 Grammy Awards telecast, live from New York City. She presented an award to Stevie Wonder. What she wore was a riot. She was dressed in a tasteful low-cut gown, and atop her head was a 45 r.p.m. single. The record was angled slightly to one side and bobby-pinned to her hair. “It’s ‘Come Go with Me’ by the Del Vikings.” She explained in typical Miss M fashion. “A great record, but a better hat!” She was the highlight of the entire show.

Her
Clams on the Half-Shell Revue
opened on April 14, 1975, and it was such a huge success that its original four-week run was extended to ten weeks to meet the demand for tickets. Bette was back, and Broadway had her.

The show was totally outrageous from start to finish. The opening number was a showstopper to end them all. Meant as a parody of every great Broadway musical of the past thirty years, Bette’s
Clams on the Half Shell Revue
began with the title song from
Oklahoma!
and segued directly into a number from
Showboat
. The
Showboat
routine had all of the supporting players and extras “down by the levee,” supposedly pulling on ropes that might have been the bow lines to the docking riverboat, the
Robert E. Lee
. What they were hoisting in from the wings, however, was a giant scalloped clamshell from the deep blue sea. As the shell was brought center-stage, the music shifted to a melody from
South Pacific
, and who else should appear within the shell as its halves opened up, but everyone’s favorite pearl of the Pacific—Bette Midler—looking dazzling! The cheering and screaming from the astonished audience seemed to go on for several minutes.

Here was the unpredictable Miss M, emerging from a seashell like the goddess of Botticelli’s masterpiece of a painting
The Birth of Venus
. Bette had shed several pounds and revealed a sleek new figure with plenty of curves.

The show was the revue to end them all, combining the best of Bette’s recorded signature songs, plus several new numbers that she was never to capture on record: David Bowie’s “Young Americans,” Elton John’s “The Bitch Is Back,” and several songs that Billie Holiday made famous, including “We’ll Be Together Again,” “If Love Were All,” and “Sentimental Journey.” Bette also sang Paul Simon’s new composition “Gone at Last,” announcing that she had just recorded the song as a duet with him for his upcoming new album.

Act One concluded with one of the most ingenious and hilariously insane pieces ever staged in a Broadway theater. While Bette made a grand exit, the Harlettes were left onstage singing “Optimistic Voices” from
The Wizard of Oz
and the opening lines of “Lullaby of Broadway.” As the upstage curtains parted, a downward-rolling backdrop gave the audience the illusion that they were ascending the most famous of Manhattan skyscrapers, the Empire State Building. Who else should be atop the famed building but a huge, fuzzy, purple King Kong! Through a clever use of stage mechanics, Kong’s huge left arm swung outward
toward the audience—with Bette Midler passed out in his outstretched hand. Here was a supine Miss M in a nightgown, with her feet dangling stageward in a pair of marabou-feather-covered high-heeled slippers, awakening from what she thought was a dream. Opening her eyes and sitting upright, she looked at King Kong, looked out at the audience, and dead-panned ala Streisand, “Nicky Arnstein, Nicky Arnstein!” The audience members all but wet their pants. Slam, bang, and Bette and her tart-like Harlettes swung into a rousing rendition of “Lullaby of Broadway.”

Act Two opened with a backdrop of a jukebox and stacks of classic swing-era 78 r.p.m. records, and there atop the stack was the classy Lionel Hampton in a cream-colored suit with his famous vibraphone (a melodic variety of xylophone). After a couple of solo jazz numbers, out popped Bette, to join the swing legend in some of the tunes that had become the hottest hits of the 1940s: “In the Mood,” “How High the Moon,” “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” and Hampton’s own composition, “Flying Home.” Bette took over from that point and followed Hampton’s exit with more of her famed song stylings and trashy pop-camp excursions.

In her
Clams on the Half-Shell Revue
, Bette Midler hit every mood, era, and sound that had made her the toast of the rock, pop, and nostalgia worlds. The show ended with Bette and the choral-singing Michael Powell Ensemble launching into the gospel-tinged “Gone at Last.”

Critics went crazy, and her fans went berserk. Bette even ended up gracing the cover of
People
magazine, the publication that she had once referred to in her act as
“Peep Hole
magazine.”

“It’s raunchy, it’s riveting, it’s regally welcome!” raved Rex Reed in the
New York Daily News
(
60
). Even though tough-to-please Clive Barnes in the
New York Times
found her buried in gimmicks, he had to admit that she was a unique talent and that the audience loved her.

Barnes, in his review, pointed out that “Bette Midler, the tackiest girl in town, has come home to roost. . . . She is a modern phenomenon, the low priestess of her own juke-box subculture, an explosion of energy and minutely calculated bad taste, a drizzle of dazzle, a lady both brash and vulnerable, a grinning waif singing with a strident plaintiveness of friendship and love. . . . She uses the theater as if it were a nightclub, and plays with the audience as if it were a shoal of fish. Her rapport is extraordinary, and she can laugh and insult, and laugh again. But what has happened to Miss Midler in this show! Oh, of course enough of
her comes through to keep the fans whirring, but something has happened. The vulgarity has become glossy rather than tatty. . . . For all this, when everything is said and done, by heck, New York is still her town, and she is still its best Bette!” (
61
).

Portland Opera
magazine glowed, “The revue is indeed a devastating delight: a play without a plot, a concert without the gaps. Director Joe Layton has taken each of the elements that makes Midler magnanimous, and has structured a lush, non-stop show around her, equipped with sets, costumes and best of all, has left plenty of leeway for spontaneously unabashed Bette to spread her wings. . . . Clad in what looks like a combination of Liberace leftovers and a basement sale at Frederick’s of Hollywood, Bette Midler and her
Clams
are cracking Broadway wide open with Ziegfeldian zest in THE stage extravaganza of the year” (
62
).

Richard Goldstein in the
Village Voice
glowed of the juxtapositioning of the styles found in the show, “[Director Joe] Layton’s touch is barely visible in the staging and the choreography, which are spare enough to allow Bette the dominance she needs to work effectively. Still, it is strange at first to see the good ol’ Harlettes backed by Tony Walton’s lavish deco sets, just as it is strange to hear Lionel Hampton on a swing version of ‘A Day in the Life.’ . . . A samba rendition of ‘Strangers in the Night’ is backed by a mock-rumba about the clap. An exquisite sequence of harmonies blends the Andrews Sisters and the Dixiecups. And the aforementioned Hampton medley segues ‘Day in the Life’ with [David] Bowie’s ‘(I Want a) Young American.’ . . . But it is precisely these jarring moments which make Bette’s revue the intelligent and provocative entertainment which it is” (
63
).

According to several sources, there was always a backstage rivalry between Bette’s three main comedy writers, Vilanch, Hennessey, and Blatt, over who wrote what and to whom credits for the laughs belonged. One of the
Clams’
production assistants remembers Bill Hennessey presenting everyone with opening-night gag gifts. Said the assistant, “Bruce Vilanch is one of those people who takes credit for everything. And the present [Hennessey] gave Bruce was a T-shirt with the Virgin Mary and the Christ child in her arms on the front of it. And on the back of the T-shirt it read: ‘I Wrote Their Act!’ ” (
35
).

Bill Hennessey wasn’t the only person to give out presents on opening night. Aaron Russo presented Bette with an expensive ring that was meant to be an engagement ring. Bette, however, said, “No!” to
his proposal. And she and Aaron proceeded to have one of their famous fights. Bette’s mother, Ruth, had come to town for the opening, so she and her mom left a hurt and steaming Russo in the backstage area of the Minskoff Theater and zoomed across Forty-Fourth Street to Sardi’s restaurant to await her glowing reviews in the next morning’s newspapers.

Bette had no intention of marrying Aaron. At that moment she was already happily married—to her legion of cheering fans.

One of the biggest questions raised by the success of the
Clams on the Half Shell Revue
was why there was no new album to promote while Bette was setting box-office records at the Minskoff? She had certainly learned enough new songs for the show—couldn’t she have selected some of those tunes?