Bette Midler (38 page)

She explained, “In the old days, people used to do a lot of pictures—eighty in a career. I got a late start, and I’d like to have a body of work to show at the end. I’m doing as many as I can. I like the process. I want to make eighty, so I have seventy-five left to go. That’s four a year for the next twenty years” (
121
).

“From now on, I’m just going to take chances and not treat everything like it was a career move. And that way, I’ll make eighty pictures, all right!?” she promised, after completing
Outrageous Fortune
(
101
).

In the mid-1980s, Midler literally put Touchstone Pictures on the map, with three back-to-back box-office hits:
Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Outrageous Fortune
, and
Ruthless People
. She really was the acknowledged darling of Disney.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was at the time the chairman of Walt Disney Studios, signed Midler to a three-picture deal. According to him in 1987, “Bette Midler is the single greatest asset as a performer we have” (
20
).

Without losing a bit of momentum from her hot comedy streak, Disney quickly paired Bette with another comedy actress of her own Oscar-nominated stature. By teaming her with Lily Tomlin, they upped the ante on the antics with a bit of onscreen silliness known as
Big Business
, which hit the theaters in 1988.

In the middle of nowhere—Jupiter Hollow, West Virginia, to be specific—two pregnant women suddenly go into labor. One married couple is the Sheltons of Manhattan, and the other is the rural Ratliffs. Both women are pregnant—and each is about to give birth to twin girls. When the only medical facility is a local manufacturer’s company doctor, Mr. Shelton simply buys the company on the spot, so his wife can get instant medical attention. The elderly nurse on duty is so dizzy, she mistakes a urine sample for apple cider on a lunch tray. When the nurse
mixes up the sets of twins, the film’s premise is born. To top off the confusion, at a loss for baby names, Mr. Ratliff overhears Mr. Shelton naming his daughters “Sadie” and “Rose,” and he does so as well. Before the opening credits have run and the story unfolds, the babies have grown up to be a set of mismatched Bette and Lily twins in Manhattan and another in West Virginia.

The premise—and the comical contrast between the two sets of twins—is amusing in itself. Here we have bitchy city Sadie (Midler); aspiring sophisticate, country Sadie (Midler); feisty country Rose (Tomlin); and modestly big-hearted city Rose (Tomlin).

In New York City, Sadie Shelton has grown up to be a terse and cold business woman, and her sister Rose Shelton is a hapless klutz. Since their parents have died and left them the family company, Moramax—whose greedy motto is “More for America”—they know very little of the town in which they were born. Making a corporate decision, Sadie wants to sell Hollowmade Furniture and sell the town of Jupiter Hollow for strip mining. When asked her reason for dumping the company, Bette shouts in disgust: “They still make porch rockers!” Aside from accidentally affixing a blueberry from a muffin to her front teeth mid-meeting, Rose is unable to do anything to deter her business-aggressive sister.

Meanwhile, we have their Jupiter Hollow country counterparts: aspiring social climber Sadie Ratliff and her rabble-rousing sister Rose. It seems that Rose Ratliff is leading the movement to defeat the big business swindle that Moramax is about to hand out. When it comes time to head to New York City to fight Moramax, while Rose is set on defeating the New Yorkers, Sadie is determined never to return to West Virginia.

The first time we see Bette onscreen in
Big Business
, she is onstage, performing at a Hollowmade company picnic. While Bette sings the yodeling country song “Little Ole Lady,” she is actually milking a cow and wearing a gingham dress. This scene alone is worth the price of admission—or video rental. In her time, Bette has certainly milked several things for laughs, but
never
before has she publicly milked a cow! And midsong no less.

It seems that the big Moramax showdown is to take place at the annual stockholder’s meeting at the Plaza Hotel on Central Park South. As they prepare for their trip, Bette, as Sadie Ratliff, says to her sister Rose, “I gotta get me some of those Press-On nails. Do those things
stay on?” Several minutes later in the film, as she arrives in New York, she looks at her semi-nailless hands and bemoans, “Gee—these Press-On nails. I guess I shoulda pressed harder, huh?”

When the Ratliffs come to Manhattan, there is an establishment shot of the lower island and the glittering World Trade Center towers. This pair of comic country mice has officially arrived in the Big Apple. When a limousine meant for city Rose and Sadie Shelton accidentally picks up country Rose and Sadie and takes them to the Plaza, where the Shelton sisters are staying, the mistaken identity gags swing into full gear. Both sets of sisters end up in suites next door to each other. When all of the suitors, boyfriends, and ex-husbands get into the mix, the men all fall for the opposite twin, in good Shakespearean style—ala “Twelfth Night.”

One of Lily’s funniest bits comes as she plays Rose Ratliff. Whenever she is up against one of her corporate enemies, she goes into her rattlesnake impersonation and puts a country curse on them. Bette likewise is at her goofiest as her country incarnation.

Disney producers Michael Peyser and Steve Tisch populated this film with a cracker jack cast of supporting players. They include Fred Ward as Rune, Rose Ratliff’s hunky back-home miniature golf pro boyfriend; Michael Gross as Sadie Shelton’s suitor; Mary Gross as the ditzy receptionist at Moramax headquarters; Seth Green (Scott in
Austin Powers)
as Sadie Shelton’s rambunctious son; and Edward Harrmann and Daniel Gerroll as bumbling gay corporate henchmen Graham and Chuck.

Right before the big stockholder’s meeting, Bette as country Sadie and city Sadie both purchase an identical polka dot dress from the same ladies shop in the Plaza lobby, heightening the confusion and the possibilities for sight gags. When the two Midlers end up in a mirror-lined ladies room, it is a classic sight gag waiting to happen. Via split screen, Bette has one of her most hysterical moments on film, mimicking the Marx Brothers’ famous two-Grouchos mirror routine from
Duck Soup
(1933).

It turns out that Sadie Ratliff’s idol is Joan Collins on the 1980s prime-time TV soap opera
Dynasty
. When she is called upon to impersonate her Manhattan twin, Sadie summons the essence of Alexis Carrington to personify terror at a shareholder’s meeting.

The plot of the movie begins to lose momentum somewhere in the middle, but the comic outcome is well worth the journey. Bette and Lily are great fun to watch, no matter which sister act they’re portraying in this clever comedy.

Some critics loved it.
People
magazine glowed, “Midler and Tomlin . . . make a red-hot roaringly funny comedy team.” And TV’s
Good Morning America
proclaimed that
Big Business
had “Guaranteed big laughs” (
122
). The film did respectably well at the box-office and further cemented Midler’s reputation as one of the hottest comedy actresses in Hollywood in the mid-1980s.

On the other hand, the reviews for the film were decidedly mixed. Roger Ebert, in the
Chicago Sun-Times
, gave
Big Business
the old “thumbs down,” affixing two and a half stars (out of four) to it. According to him, “The life all seems to have escaped from this movie. Midler and Tomlin can be funny actors, but here they both seem muted and toned down in all of the characters they play. The most promising character probably is Sadie Shelton, Midler’s New York company executive, who has the potential to be a bitch on wheels but never realizes it. The Jupiter Hollow Midler seems unfocused, and both Tomlins seem to be the same rather vague woman who has trouble with her shoulderpads” (
123
).

Bette’s second movie of 1988 was a project that gave her the quintessential Disney role of her career—it made her into a cartoon character in a full-length animated film. In
Oliver & Company
, Bette provided the voice of Georgette, a diva-like pampered poodle. She was even given her own musical number in the middle of the film.

This kid-oriented full-length cartoon feature is a tale of a gang of dogs, which is very loosely based on Charles Dickens’s
Oliver Twist
. However, this time around, the evil Bill Sikes is a rich man in a limousine, and Fagin is a scruffy bum living in lower Manhattan. The voices to the cartoon characters include many luminaries from the rock, film, and television realms. In addition to Midler, the film also stars the voices of Billy Joel, Cheech Marin, Ruth Pointer, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Richard Mulligan, and Joey Lawrence. On the soundtrack, Billy Joel, Huey Lewis, and Ruben Blades all contribute songs. Another pop diva, Ruth of the Pointer Sisters, performs the song “Streets of Gold.”

The film opens up with an accurate animated establishment shot of lower Manhattan, with the World Trade Center prominently intact. As the action starts, a kitten named Oliver (Joey Lawrence) is abandoned on a New York City street and is taken under wing—so to speak—by a street-wise dog named Dodger (Billy Joel).

When Oliver is adopted by a little girl in an upper Fifth Avenue townhouse, stuck-up Georgette cannot stand the competition the kitten
poses. Convinced that Oliver has been snatched against his will, the doggie gang decides to spring the kitten loose from the tortures of his new aristocratic life on Central Park East.

In the voice of Georgette, Bette has fun playing the pampered poodle with an attitude. It seems that Georgette is a six-time national champion dog show winner and is used to getting a lot of attention lavished upon her. This spoiled doggie is such a diva, in fact, that she even wears hats and billowing scarves for an outdoor walk. In one sequence, Georgette is seen watching human exercise shows on TV and doing canine leg lifts to them.

In the film Georgette is romanced by tiny Tito the Chihuahua (Cheech Marin). When it was inquired of her whether or not she wanted to play with him, she sarcastically snipes, “I’d like to play with him all right—the little furball!”

One of the best aspects of the project was that it rekindled her working relationship with Barry Manilow. As Georgette, Bette sings a brassy song called “Perfect Ain’t Easy,” as she surveys her own reflection in the mirror. In the song, Midler immodestly sings to her canine self, “I’m beauty unleashed.” The song was written by Barry Manilow, Jack Feldman, and Bruce Sussman and was produced by Barry Manilow. It was fun—even if only for one song—to hear Bette with Barry reunited, in this doggie diva routine.

After Dodger and the gang “rescue” the kitten, Oliver isn’t so sure whether they saved him or just out-and-out kidnapped him. However, when Fagin gets a look at the new tag on Oliver—with a Fifth Avenue address—he greedily decides to hold him for ransom. As the criminal scheme rolls along, they end up kidnapping the little girl of the household and Georgette as well.

Following is a car chase, that leads to a subway chase, and then evolves into a chase across the Brooklyn Bridge. Naturally, in the end, Oliver the cat is rescued, to be returned to his Fifth Avenue address, and everyone lives happily ever after in good Disney fairytale-style. Even Bette’s stuck-up canine alter ego, Georgette, bonds with Tito, and the two of them dance together at the film’s finale. Running a fast-paced seventy-three minutes,
Oliver & Company
is a cute and clever cartoon adaptation of the original classic. And besides, it gave Midler a chance to do a film for the fun of it, without making it a career move.

On March 19, 1988, the diva and her husband, Martin von Haselberg, were seen in her latest HBO TV special:
Bette Midler’s Mondo
Beyondo
. Based on a character that Bette invented with Jerry Blatt, the hour-long program is presented as a spoof on late-night cable TV shows—with poor lighting and tacky sets. On the program, Bette has taken on the character of an Italian “Euro-Trash” female who calls herself “Mondo Beyondo,” and she introduces a host of bizarre performance artists. Dressed as Beyondo in a mound of mercurochrome-red hair and a loud bosom-revealing low-cut white and black dress, Bette hosts film clips of performance artists Bill Irwin, Paul Zaloom, and, last but not least, the Kipper Kids (Martin von Hasselberg and Brian Routh). She also introduces us to Eudora P. Quickly, who is actually Midler singing a Jeanette MacDonald song. Unsurprisingly, the special was executive produced by Martin von Haselberg. Although they don’t appear on camera together, we do get to see Midler introduce her husband in a bizarre act of physical comedy, under his stage persona: Harry Kipper.

A low-budget television romp, it was an unpretentious little spoof for the chameleon-like diva—who just happens to look fabulous here. According to Marvin Kitman in
Newsday
, “Bette Midler is hilarious. The show is the best spoof of the TV variety format. . . . Midler is making fun of the public access show, one of those wonderfully tacky vanity cable programs. Midler as Mondo Beyondo—a character created by Jerry Blatt and Midler—continues demonstrating she is one of the most outrageous funny people on TV, a maximalist comedienne in a minimalist age” (
124
).

In the final sequence of
Mondo Beyondo
, Bette at long last introduces the public to the man she married. Beginning with several jokes on flatulence, Midler and her camera crew venture into the men’s room of the cheesy TV studio to investigate who is making all of the “fart” noises. What she—and the audience—finds there are two men in Speedo bathing suits, barely visible through the automobile-tire inner tubes they wear around their waists. With clown-white makeup on their faces and white bathing caps on their heads, the self-christened Kipper Kids proceed to wage a battle of sorts. First they break raw eggs on each other’s heads, then douse each other in baking flour, canned Spaghetti-O’s, and various gooey concoctions. At the end, they apply whipped cream to each other’s heads, insert firecrackers in the foam crowns, and ignite them. Not exactly high-brow humor, but humor nonetheless.