Bette Midler Steals Hollywood

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"She has everything she ever wanted," notes Bruce Vilanch, who writes Bette's "Soph" jokes, "things she didn't even realize she wanted and didn't set out to get." Two things, anyway: a doting husband as dotty as she is and a three-month-daughter. Of Martin von Haselberg, 38, a commodities trader who has cavorted as a performance artist under the name Harry Kipper, Midler declares, "He sees to the heart of things. He respects and supports what I do. And he leads me, too, when I lose my way." Now listen to the new mom, 41, on the subject of Sophie ("not for Sophie Tucker") Frederica ("for my | father Fred") Alohilani ("Hawaiian for 'bright sky,' which is what I always wish for her") von Haselberg: "I adore her. Her face swims before me when she's not there, and I think about her before I go to sleep at night and I dream about her, and I wake up and I can't wait to see her." Miss M never delivered two more fervent monologues.

In commemoration of all she has given and, lately, received, the world's top singer-dancer-comedian-songwriter-actress-author-survivor-thriv er-dynamo- divinity deserves some special prize. The Tony isn't tony enough. The Nobel Prize wouldn't be noble enough. And so to you, Bette Midler, the academy of your admirers is pleased to present its Life Achievement Award for the body of your work. And the work of your body.

As chanteuse or bawd, in concerts or movies, Midler has put her body to nonstop work. Harnessing the energy of some Rube Goldberg perpetual-motion machine, prancing on those fine filly legs like the winner of the strumpet's marathon, Bette uses her body as an inexhaustible source of sight gags. She shimmies it, twists it, upends it to reveal polka-dot bloomers. In 1978 at the London Palladium she flashed the front of it; at Harvard she exposed the rear. She has made a cottage industry of her buxom bosom. In the 1985 album Mud Will Be Flung Tonight, she confesses that she once consulted a postage scale to determine just how heavy her breasts were, and "I won't tell you how much they weigh, but it cost $87.50 to send 'em to Brazil. Third class."

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 line, trolling for the truth in a lyric, daring to shift emotional gears without stripping them. She is a demon explorer, possessed by music.