Word: midler
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Such jokes -- delivered, as all her slings are, with a great guileless smile -- fulfill the tradition of the defiant female wit, alive with innuendo, that stretches from the Wife of Bath to Belle Barth. They also tend to obscure Midler's unique talent. Yes, she coos bedroom ballads like Long John Blues; sure, her charts tease five decades of popular music with the wink of parody. But her laser-precise technique is no counterfeit of feeling. It is the art of the Method singer, who approaches a song as an actor does his text: finding the heft of a melodic...
...lovely mantra of regeneration that has become Bette's Over the Rainbow, she sings in her own haunting alto. But she can go seductively nasal for E Street Shuffle, chicly bonkers for Twisted, brassy and clinging for her evocations of the low-biz Songstresses Vicki Eydie and Dolores DeLago. Midler's most powerful number, Stay with Me (best heard on the sound-track album of her 1980 concert film, Divine Madness), is the plea of a woman to her departing lover. Her mood is desperate; her sexual pride has been flayed raw. She can only beg and scream. Bette scorches...
...once the bromide may be true: you don't learn songs like Stay with Me, you have to have lived them. This woman has a right to sing the blues. To hear her story is to find autobiography in every Midler song, and tragedy as the punch line. All that love, drive and desperation in her voice had to come from somewhere. Most of it came from Honolulu...
...Fred Midler, a civilian house painter for the Navy, and his wife Ruth moved there from Paterson, N.J., in the late '30s. Ruth named Bette, the third of her four children, after Bette Davis. "My mother was, oh, stunning," Bette recalls, "and very hardworking. She sewed beautifully. She made all our clothes for years, until my parents discovered the Salvation Army. We were really poor. We didn't have a TV or a telephone until the late '50s. We lived in subsidized housing in the middle of sugarcane fields." Most of the families in the neighborhood were Samoan, Japanese, Hawaiian...
...came downstairs in this turban and an outfit that could have come from my grandmother's closet. She was a tornado of energy and talent. I was six feet away, and this vision was one of the thunderbolts in my life." Another fan-Aaron Russo, signed on as Midler's manager in 1971, while she was still at the Baths, and they briefly were lovers. Their eight-year affiliation was productive and destructive; they were two strong wills making success possible and life miserable. "Aaron began booking me into theaters," Bette says, "and lo and behold...