Content area
Full Text
Some People's Lives. Bette Midler. Produced by Arif Mardin. On Atlantic records, cassettes and compact discs.
Bette Midler started her career as a gay rumor and brought it around to being a gay fact, all the while remaining heterosexual. "There's this woman who sings at the Continental Baths," I remember a friend of mine telling me when I lived in upstates New York. "She's right there at the poolside with men in towels, and naked men in the pool. She sings songs about marijuana and bad sex, and she does old things, like Cole Porter." Sure, I thought: she's me, in my wildest dreams.
Over the next two decades Bette Midler conjured up and delivered some of our wildest dreams. She took Bob Dylan's "I shall be released" and made it a feminist anthem (and was told by a Rolling Stone critic that she had no right to sing Dylan, had no understanding of his work; Dylan showed up on her next album to sing his "Buckets of Rain" with her). She recorded her marijuana song, which turned out to be even older than most Cole Porter tunes. And she became almost as cherished by straight people as by gay people, but as Nina Simone once said about Black people in her audience, "I know where my roots are." The Continental Baths are only a memory now; but Bette Midler doesn't pretend they and she weren't there.
Midler recently told Redbook magazine that her career as a stand-up comic was probably over. "I don't find life funny anymore," she said. "I've lost so many friends [to AIDS.]" Probably everyone at her level of Hollywood has lost so many friends to AIDS, but with the exception of Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep showing up with pink triangle buttons (Sarandon on a morning talk show and Streep in the new movie Postcards from the Edge), you wouldn't know it, would you?
When Midler won her Grammy for "The Wind Beneath My Wings," she said, "Hey, Bonnie (Raitt), I've got...