Word: midler
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...there are some things even an Emmy, Grammy, Golden Globe and Tony winner can't do. But never let it be said Bette Midler doesn't have cojones. The woman who used to be lowered onto her stage show half-dressed on a clamshell has a famously unembarrassed willingness to say or do anything. It's around that bawdy, brassy presence that CBS built Bette, an old-fashioned star showcase that calls on her to sing, pratfall and generally serve up more ham than at an Easter dinner...
...huge workload too, as Midler has discovered, three weeks into shooting. Doing the series required Midler to leave her home in New York City for Los Angeles--the show will move East next year if there's a second season--and the unfamiliar demands of a sitcom left her rattled. "I kept thinking it was a play and I had to be letter-perfect," she says. "Today I don't feel so freaked out, but this is only Monday. By Friday I'll be freaked out again...
...conventional wisdom is that movie stars descend to do TV when they can't get other work--which Midler admits, refreshingly, was at least partly true for her. After numerous successes (The Rose, which earned her an Oscar nomination, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, The First Wives' Club), Midler, 54, made the bad career moves of being a woman and aging. The offers dwindled, and recent efforts (Drowning Mona) fizzled. "They don't make movies with people my age anymore," she says. "That is the hard economic truth." She and longtime producing partner Bonnie Bruckheimer had a deal, however...
...what? As development season dragged on, Midler rejected five scripts that placed her in sitcom situations--selling real estate, running a nightclub--that came off as insufficient for her outsize talent. Finally, as pilot-shooting season loomed, Mad About You producer Jeffrey Lane brought her a simple premise: let Bette be Bette...
...rather, "Bette." The diva-ish drama queen Midler plays fuses the real woman's resume--a famous singer- actress who started out singing in New York City's gay bathhouses, starred in Beaches and so on--with the persona of the Divine Miss M, the blowsy, flighty, attention-craving alter ego Midler created in her stage shows. "Bette" blitzes her way through the series, to the bemusement and exhaustion of her family and support group: her professor husband (Kevin Dunn), her teenage daughter (Marina Malota), her manager (Joanna Gleason) and her fussy British accompanist (James Dreyfus). "You can't have...