Free Bette Midler by Mark Bego

Street. It was a very important gig for Bette because it was her first legitimate New York City booking. Here was her big chance, and she was mortified that something would go wrong and she would blow it. Just to make certain that she looked right, in the eleventh hour she pleaded with Laura Nyro’s lighting man to come into the club and light her show; it had to be perfect. The lighting man was Peter Dallas, and he came immediately to one of her rehearsals to draw up a lighting scheme.
    Opening night was September 20, 1971—Rosh Hashanah—and to top it all off, the night of a huge hurricane in New York. Talk about the kiss of death! Bette made her grand entrance that night, only to find that the audience consisted of eight people.
    On the second night there was no improvement; and on the third night there were only five people in the audience. Here she was the hit of a gay bathhouse, and she couldn’t even get arrested by straight New Yorkers! This called for drastic measures.
    Bette hustled her buns down to West Fourteenth Street, to the tacky offices of the controversial swinging-sex-scene tabloid
Screw
magazine. She plunked down her own money and took out a big ad with her pictureon it that carried the headline “Bette from the Baths—At the Downstairs!” and all of the details.
    Talk about amazing intuition: By the sixth night of her engagement, the place was crowded with patrons. And the following night, it was “standing room only.” The next thing Bette knew, her two-week engagement was extended to ten weeks, to accommodate the demand for reservations, and people like Johnny Carson, Karen Black, and Truman Capote were showing up to see Miss M perform.
    Peter Dallas was certain that a recording contract was what Bette needed, and he was going to help her get it. Laura Nyro was recording for Columbia Records at the time, and through working with her, he knew several people who worked for the company. He invited one of his friends from Columbia to the Downstairs, and the friend flipped out when he saw Midler’s act. Dallas urged him to get the president of Columbia Records, Clive Davis, to see the show. Davis accepted the invitation, but was totally unimpressed by the act and left the club without a word to anyone. Bette and the band were very disappointed.
    By some odd turn of fate, however, the next night Ahmet Ertegun, president of Atlantic Records, was in the audience. Ertegun recalls, “I went there after a ball at the Plaza Hotel. I told my wife that I had to go hear a singer I had been told about” ( 40 ).
    Strangely enough, a troupe of Bette’s biggest fans from the Baths, an outrageous contingent of hairdressers from Brooklyn, showed up that same night—in rare form. They screamed and carried on throughout the show, and when it was over, they stood on the tops of their tables and threw confetti at her. The crowd was so wild that night that Bette was literally carried off the stage by fans, like a victorious gladiator who had just slain an arena full of lions. There sat Ertegun in a tuxedo—totally unrecognized and completely knocked out by what he had just witnessed.
    “She had done the Baths and made a few Carson appearances when friends told me to catch her at the Downstairs at the Upstairs,” says Ertegun, who vividly recalls that particular evening ( 4 ).
    “She was unlike anybody I’d seen before. People of all types—grandmothers, couples, drag queens—everyone was screaming and jumping up and down on tables for this woman. She was doing everything: fifties greaseball stuff, swing era nostalgia, current ballads. You could discern a great wit there—she was trying to seem raunchy andtasteless AND exude a certain elegance, and she pulled it off. What she had was STYLE” ( 15 ).
    “She was overwhelming. I couldn’t believe that a young person like her could not only understand those old musical styles so well but capture the flavor of the periods and make them a part of herself. It was