Bette Midler Steals Hollywood

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The actress-singer orchestrates her vocal versatility and preternatural empathy to slip inside the spirit of each song. Performing the title tune from The Rose, the 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 the soul with this one. In six minutes she wrings out herself and the song, and mops up the audience as well. Her cover versions of all these songs make the originals sound like demo tapes.

For 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, Chinese. Bette's family were the only whites.

"My father was a bit of a tyrant," Bette recalls. "He would flush the girls' makeup down the toilet. He'd lock my sister Susan out of the house when she came home too late. He taught my younger brother Daniel, who is brain damaged, to read and write by hammering and screaming at him until he got it. Every afternoon. None of us wanted to be in the house. But Daniel did learn, and it's made a big difference in his life. It gave him freedom. My father always thought I was a little odd. He never chose to see me perform -- except on Johnny Carson. He said I looked like a loose woman. My mother, on the other hand, thought I could do no wrong. One night she sneaked out to see The Rose, and she thought it was wonderful. She died the next year, of liver cancer. She had also had breast cancer, twice. My father died of heart trouble last May. It was too bad. It was just too bad."

$ Bette adored her older sisters. Susan is a health-care executive in New York City; Daniel lives with her. Judy, the eldest, was a brilliant, unhappy girl. She came to New York and, Bette says, "in 1968, as she was walking along 44th Street, a car came out of a garage and killed her. I was the only family member in town. I had to go to the morgue and identify the body. I don't think my mother ever recovered from the shock. It was a very bad time in our lives."