Bette Midler was 14 years old the first time she saw a stage show. She has spent the six decades since trying to get back into the light.
Now 80, Midler sat down with Rolling Stone for its Last Word column, walking through the auditions, gigs, and turning points that built one of the most decorated careers in American entertainment. She holds three Grammys, two Tonys, three Emmys, and four Golden Globes. She says she genuinely cannot remember all of it.
The beginning was unglamorous. Before any of that, she was a teenager in Hawaii helping a school librarian collate books. The librarian paid not in wages but in tickets. The show was Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel.
"The curtain went up, and the lights went on, and I just couldn't believe what I was seeing," Midler told Rolling Stone. "I never forgot it. I wanted to be up there in the light."
She left college after about a year. A casting call for the 1966 film Hawaii, starring Max von Sydow and Julie Andrews, brought her to Los Angeles along with a group of other locals. She earned enough from that film to move to New York, where she began auditioning for Broadway and landed a role in Fiddler on the Roof. The pay was $200 a week. When she asked for a $25 raise, the answer was no.
The next step came from an unexpected phone call. Her former acting teacher asked if she wanted to perform at a gay bathhouse called the Continental Baths. The money was better. She took the job.
"I put the show on in the gay bathhouse. I would be my most outrageous self," she said. "When I went on the stage in front of all those gays, they threw their hands up and screamed. And it was great fun. We went from 30 people in the house to hundreds. Because it was such an odd venue, and transgressive in those days, we were a huge hit."
The Continental Baths gigs in the early 1970s became a turning point. Midler described the venue as the place where she found her audience and her voice. She had a small band at first. The whole enterprise, she said, had an energy that came from its strangeness.
Her love of performance, she told Rolling Stone, still connects directly to the girl who sat in that theater in Hawaii. "I fell in love with film. I love Technicolor more than life. Now, everything's pink. Don't get me started," she said. "But [film], it was otherworldly. It was like having died and gone to heaven to see this lighting. I was captured by it. I was taken hostage by it. I was stage-struck."
Midler also recalled an early lesson in the rules of theater. At 14, she had a brief stint in community theater that ended when she was fired for drawing too much attention away from the lead actress. The lesson, she said, was clear: you cannot upstage the star. So she decided to become one.
