Bette Midler Plays the Role of Her Life--Literally

By James Poniewozik

When you're a big star, you don't pass gas for just anybody. But then the star of CBS's most hyped new sitcom is hardly just anybody. So when the writers of Bette conceived a new gag--a celebrity breaks wind in an elevator and blames it on the leading lady--they sent Bette Midler to work the phones herself.

"My writers pitch all these ideas with big stars and then wait for me to make the call," she fake-laments, snacking on cantaloupe between takes. "My God! Who knew?" Candice Bergen and Lily Tomlin were intrigued by the bit but had to pass--or rather, not pass. Finally Midler said, "Why don't we just go for the biggest star we can get? Why don't we call Jack Nicholson?" With the crew giggling around the phone, she rang up the Joker himself.

"'Jack,' I said. 'Bette. I'm doing a show.'"

She drops into Nicholson's lizardy drawl. "'I don't do TV.'"

"C'mon, it's no big deal," she pushed. "You'll get in your car, you'll come down here. All you have to do is fart. It'll be hilarious." She laughs. "Of course, I didn't get Jack." They finally got a noncelebrity actress to play the scene instead.

O.K., so 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.

And the network's counting on her to deliver more than celebrity methane. This season the networks have recruited scads of established celebs to draw viewers (see box), always a risk. (Nathan Lane's crash-and-burn in 1998's Encore! Encore! hovers like Marley's ghost over star vehicles.) On Bette, CBS has placed a huge, um, wager, running it opposite Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (which provides a cute running gag in one early episode). "It's probably the most anticipated show of the new season," says CBS television president Leslie Moonves, "and that's a huge burden."

A 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."

The 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, to develop a TV series. Midler had attempted a couple of series that never aired--one was called The Harlettes, the name of her old backup group--but Moonves was eager to sign her up.

To do 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.

Or 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 Bette Midler on television playing a housewife," says Lane. "It would have been hard to separate the character from the entertainer we all know. It would also have been tough to find an excuse for the character to sing."

The TV character, Bruckheimer says, is far removed from the real Midler, a "shy" woman who prefers cardigans and jeans to mermaid outfits and plunging bustlines. "One of her favorite expressions is 'That's unseemly,'" Bruckheimer says. "She's well mannered, a real lady." Where "Bette" frets about preserving her cheekbones--she seeks out plastic surgery in a mid-life crisis--Midler has made a crusade of preserving New York City parks. "The character is much broader and sappier," she says. "She's harebrained and sexier, and I like those things." But there are similarities. Midler too has a husband and a teen daughter, and both Bettes have a survivor's stamina. Says Midler: "[The character] has a certain amount of drive and doesn't want to let go. She likes her little place in the sun and won't be booted out."

Nor will she be ignored. In the pilot, she makes a big entrance--as if she's capable of any other kind--hyperventilating with stage fright before a show. "The biggest names in Hollywood, with their knives drawn!" she wails. "What if they hate me? They're gonna hate me!" She moans, she wheedles, she feigns deafness--then takes the stage and belts out Midler's signature song, Friends. The scene, meant to introduce her as a force of nature, has funny moments, but there's something offensive about a sitcom metafictionally begging you to love its star in its first three minutes. Make no mistake, Bette loves its lead, all too well. It indulges her with Lucy-esque slapstick (she wrestles an exercise machine! She bashes a block of frozen waffles!). It surrounds her with weak characters who merely react to her. It makes TV jokes ("Pretty soon I'll have my own series, and then I might just as well kill myself") that tell us how lucky we are that such a big star is visiting that little box in our humble living rooms.

The problem with Bette is not Bette but "Bette." Miss M is a perfect stage persona, high decibel enough to reach the cheap seats. But TV needs character, not caricature, and interplay, not vamping. When "Bette" sings Wind Beneath My Wings to make up to her hubby, Midler is really playing to the studio audience. If this were satire, like Grosse Pointe or even Cybill, it might show her character as a bit self-absorbed. But since Bette is at most a loving spoof, the message, in "Bette's" words, is "I'm a goddess!" Even if you agree, you may wish she'd dim down the halo.

CBS plugged Bette heavily during Survivor and hopes it will draw some of that summer hit's young viewers. That seems iffy, not because its star was born in the middle of the past century but because its premise was. From her start belting '40s show tunes in the '70s, Midler has been a revivalist at heart, and her hooray-for-Hollywood vehicle is Jack Benny redux, a wannabe I Love Lucy with Midler as both Lucy and Ricky but without the innovation of its forebears. That said, it has the ingredients of a much better show. The writing is sometimes sophisticated, but spotty. Here, there's a wry, if insider-y, one-liner: a weary Midler looks in the mirror and moans, "I look like the last 20 minutes of For the Boys," her 1991 drama about USO performers. Then there's a gay-flight-attendant cliche, surprisingly lame on a show from a longtime gay-community icon.

But it has the vivacious Midler, who could shine if her character broadens to let her stretch her skills, not just her vocal cords. Midler is an actress, after all, even if an ageist movie biz tends to forget that. As she says, "There is still a lot of life in this old girl. I think I'm funnier, look better and am better than ever before, and I think it's stupid to quit." Let's hope she doesn't. And let's hope Bette lets Bette be a better "Bette" yet.

--Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles