HOPES, DREAMS & AMBITIONS
“Can I tell you how many lives Life magazine ruined?” Bette Midler said to me in 2018 about the weekly picture magazine that was always in her house—and in millions of others’—when she was a girl growing up in the 1950s in Hawaii. “It was such a strong magazine. People who were out in the hinterlands were so caught up in it. It exposed you to a lot of things you did not know existed. Even if you went to the movies, you knew it was a movie—they were actors. In Life magazine, those were real people in wonderful clothes and wonderful cars, living fabulous lives and you thought, ‘Wow, what am I doing in this backwater?’”
Bette Midler was sitting in her fabulous New York apartment with spectacular views of Central Park. We were sipping champagne. She had just come back from some fabulous vacation somewhere in Europe, and she was preparing to do forty-two more shows on Broadway in Hello, Dolly!, following her starring, sellout, Tony Award winning performance the year before. Bette and I have known each other since the 1970s, when she first got major attention singing in the gay baths in New York City’s Ansonia Hotel basement. Without question, considering the longevity of her career, her continued popularity and success, and everything she’s been through—underground theater on the Lower East Side, cabaret, a Broadway chorus, the music business, the movie business, back to Broadway—she’s handled fame and success better than anyone I’ve interviewed in over four decades. “It never went to my head,” she said. “If it had gone to my head, I would have been either a drug addict or dead by now. Or something terrible would have happened. I said to myself, ‘This is how it is, I know I’m well known,’ it’s in the back of my mind and I tamp it down because I think it’s unhealthy. I never let it go to my head, never.”
As Bette and I continued our talk that summer day, I remarked that she isn’t at all showy: she doesn’t flaunt houses, cars, jewelry. None of the material trappings of success that so many female stars—or just rich people in general—parade all over Instagram. “Why would I?” she said. “Why make people feel bad or angry or jealous that they don’t have what you have? It’s like Life magazine. And now, it’s like Life magazine times 150,000.” Bette told me she wanted to get out of her childhood hometown in Hawaii, because she knew she had a talent, and she was poor, and she didn’t want to be poor. She didn’t want to be famous, she said, she didn’t even want to be rich—she just didn’t want to be poor. “I was poor for a long time,” she said. “For nineteen years. I shoplifted, I filched money from my mother, I walked two and a half miles to school and two and a half miles back because we didn’t have fifteen cents for the bus. I would watch The Ed Sullivan Show or other TV variety shows and I would think, ‘I can do that.’ And they all looked like they were having so much fun. That’s what they were selling. Who knew?”
“But,” she continued, “real life is real. And when you get caught up in the fantasy of it, it takes years—years and years—to realize that you’ve been had. And that’s big. To realize that you fell for something that’s incorrect, that’s a lie. It took me fifty years to realize it.”
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At 9 years old, Joni Mitchell had polio, and because of the effects of the disease on her hands, she eventually had to figure out her own weird guitar tunings. She had a baby, gave it up for adoption, and sang in coffeehouses in her native Canada and in New York City, until she was “discovered” in a Greenwich Village folk club by Byrds guitarist (and later Crosby, Stills and Nash’s) David Crosby.
Donna Summer sang in her Boston church and performed in school musicals. She left Boston for New York City, joined a rock band, then got a job in the German production of the rock musical Hair. She sang background vocals for producer Giorgio Moroder in Munich until he convinced her, as a joke, to sing the orgasmic vocals of “Love to Love You Baby.”
As a teenager, Sheryl Crow was an athlete, a majorette, a member of the Pep Club and a winner of the Paperdoll Queen beauty contest. She was a music teacher before she got into her car by herself to drive from her native Missouri to Los Angeles, where she started a career that began by singing background vocals for Michael Jackson.
Courtney Love was expelled from school, put in foster care, and was legally emancipated at 16. She was a topless dancer in Portland, a stripper in Los Angeles, and a founding member of several bands in the Pacific Northwest before forming Hole in 1989.
Raised in Kansas, Janelle Monáe worked as a maid in order to get to New York City to learn how to act, how to perform. “It was in my DNA,” she said. “This is why I’m here. I developed myself behind closed doors before anybody knew me.”
Growing up in Queens, New York, Cyndi Lauper said she’d do anything to get noticed. She said she always felt like an outcast, but it was what made her feel like an artist.
Years before she was discovered singing in a California coffeehouse, Jewel sang as a child at open mic nights in Alaska with her father, lived in a van with her mother, washed her hair in Kmart sinks and lived on food stamps.
Cher had so little money as a child of divorced parents that she tied rubber bands around her shoes to hold them together. After she acted, directed and choreographed school plays when she was 9 years old, she knew she wanted to be famous, and ultimately went to Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip to introduce herself to anyone and everyone she thought could give her a break.
Debbie Harry was born in Miami, moved to Hawthorne, New Jersey, with her adoptive parents, then moved to New York City. She worked as a go-go dancer, a waitress at Max’s Kansas City and a Playboy bunny before joining several bands, and then, with her partner Chris Stein, formed Blondie—which they thought of as a “pop art project.”
Janet Jackson initially wanted to be a racehorse jockey or an entertainment lawyer, but she didn’t have a chance in the family that spawned the Jackson 5, and was eventually pushed into showbiz by her father, Joseph Jackson.
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In July 2005, Beyoncé sat in the living room of her cousin/assistant Angie Beyincé’s apartment overlooking the Hudson River on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. This was several years before she moved in with, and then married, Jay-Z in his Tribeca penthouse. She talked about her Houston, Texas, childhood, her family and her “obsession” with music. “I wasn’t doing this to support my family or get out of a bad situation,” she said. “This just was what I dreamed of. I was so determined; this is what I wanted to do so bad.”
Her mother, Tina Knowles—still known to everyone in showbiz as Miss Tina—put Beyoncé and her sister Solange in dance classes, and when Beyoncé was 6, her teacher, Miss Darlette, had her perform in front of everybody in a talent show. She sang John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and, because she was shy and quiet around other kids, she said she was “terrified. I didn’t want to go out there, but Miss Darlette said, ‘You can do it, you do it all the time.’ She always would say, ‘This little girl is different, this little girl is special.’ She would always have me sing for everyone in class—I was like her little baby. My parents—who had never seen me perform before, were shocked; it was like ‘Is that my child?’”
The young Beyoncé entered talent shows like the Texas Sweetheart pageant, but eventually her mother said no more of those, and Beyoncé started performing at a bunch of local award shows. She was asked to join a girls’ group, and, she said, “That’s when I fell in love with being in a group.” There were around fifty girls; some could dance, some could sing, and it was, according to her, “a big mess. So I got Kelly [Rowland] and my father started helping us get a record deal. I did Star Search when I was nine and we did everything—we rapped, we danced, we sang. It’s embarrassing, but it was cute. I hear those demos now and it’s like, oh my god, it’s like hearing another person.” When that first incarnation of Destiny’s Child lost Star Search, “We were devastated,” she said. “We were kids—we were crying, sobbing … but our mothers were there and they were like, ‘Get over it, we’re going to Disney World.’ Still, we thought the group was over, we had a producer who quit, I was so sad. But then my dad started trying to find producers for us and shopping us a deal.”
Copyright © 2020 by Robinson League, Inc.
