Divine Miss Moment

In this series, we’ve spent time with giants—singers, songwriters, bands, entire movements. Some of them changed my life from a distance, through vinyl and radio and the accidental sacrament of a TV set in the living room.

Today’s subject changed my life at arm’s length.
Not in a stadium, not in a Broadway theater, not on a movie screen, but in a small brick house in Richmond, Virginia—the Edgar Allan Poe Museum—where a visiting diva looked across a desk and aimed one very sharp line straight at a truth I was not ready to say out loud.

Today we’re talking about Bette Midler—The Divine Miss M. Her unlikely beginnings in Hawaii, her nights in the New York bathhouses, her Broadway stints and Hollywood turns, her persona that seems to mix stand-up comic, torch singer, drag queen, Jewish mother, and Vegas showgirl… and that one five-minute encounter that told me more about myself than any song ever had.

Let’s start far from Broadway, far from Manhattan clubs and Hollywood sound stages.

Bette Davis Midler w she studied drama for a while at the university of Hawaii at Manoa and even worked as an extra and the 1966 film Hawaii showing up very briefly as a seasick passenger not exactly a star making moment         as born on December 1, 1945, in Honolulu, Hawaii—the third of four children in a working-class Jewish family in a mostly Asian neighborhood. Her mother, Ruth, was a seamstress and housewife; her father, Fred, worked as a painter at a Navy base and did house painting on the side. 

Transcript

Welcome to Celebrate Creativity. I’m George Bartley. And this episode is Divine Miss Moment - and hopefully the title will make a lot more sense by the end of this episode.

In this series, we’ve spent time with giants—singers, songwriters, bands, entire movements. Some of them changed my life from a distance, through vinyl and radio and the accidental sacrament of a TV set in the living room.

Today’s subject changed my life at arm’s length.
Not in a stadium, not in a Broadway theater, not on a movie screen, but in a small brick house in Richmond, Virginia—the Edgar Allan Poe Museum—where a visiting diva looked across a desk and aimed one very sharp line straight at a truth I was not ready to say out loud.

Today we’re talking about Bette Midler—The Divine Miss M. Her unlikely beginnings in Hawaii, her nights in the New York bathhouses, her Broadway stints and Hollywood turns, her persona that seems to mix stand-up comic, torch singer, drag queen, Jewish mother, and Vegas showgirl… and that one five-minute encounter that told me more about myself than any song ever had.

Let’s start far from Broadway, far from Manhattan clubs and Hollywood sound stages.
Bette Davis Midler w she studied drama for a while at the university of Hawaii at Manoa and even worked as an extra and the 1966 film Hawaii showing up very briefly as a seasick passenger not exactly a star making moment         as born on December 1, 1945, in Honolulu, Hawaii—the third of four children in a working-class Jewish family in a mostly Asian neighborhood. Her mother, Ruth, was a seamstress and housewife; her father, Fred, worked as a painter at a Navy base and did house painting on the side. 

This is not the standard show-business origin story: no “born in Brooklyn, raised in the Catskills” path. Bette grew up on an island thousands of miles from the entertainment capitals that would eventually claim her. She’s said that being one of the only Jewish families in that environment made her feel like an outsider from an early age—an experience that would later fuel her empathy for other outsiders and her deep connection with gay audiences.
She went to Radford High School in Honolulu, where she was voted “Most Talkative” and “Most Dramatic.” Honestly, that might be the truest foreshadowing any yearbook has ever produced. 
She studied drama for a while at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and even worked as an extra in the 1966 film Hawaii, showing up briefly as a seasick passenger. Not exactly a star-making moment. But it put her in contact with people from the mainland, and soon she took the leap that so many dream about and so few actually make: she moved to New York City. 

New York in the late 1960s was not rolling out a red carpet for unknown actresses from Honolulu. Bette did what working performers do: off-off-Broadway shows, odd jobs, all the grunt work of “paying dues.” 

Then came a gig that most people today barely know about, but that changed everything for her: Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway. She made her Broadway debut during the original New York run in the late 1960s, joining the company and eventually playing Tzeitel, one of Tevye’s daughters. It wasn’t a star entrance with her name above the title; it was a young actress doing eight performances a week.

I actually sat in the audience during the original production. At the time, I had no idea that one of the actresses onstage was Bette Midler. Only later did I connect the dots and realize I had seen her on Broadway before I really knew who she was.

So there’s the official résumé line—Fiddler on the Roof, Broadway.
And then there’s the unofficial footnote: somewhere, sitting in a movie theater or watching a grainy copy years later, a young man named George notices this actress in a small part and files her away in his memory… not knowing that she will walk through the front door of his future workplace.

Hold that thought—we’ll get back to that front door.

After Fiddler, Bette did something that sounds, on paper, like career suicide… and turned it into rocket fuel.
She started performing at the Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel in New York. This was not Carnegie Hall. This was a steamy, towel-wrapped, underground world where men went to escape judgment and find each other. Bette stood onstage in that unlikely venue and sang her heart out, cracking jokes between numbers while her young accompanist—Barry Manilow—played piano behind her. 
The bathhouses were a sanctuary for her audience, and she became a kind of high priestess of that sanctuary—campy, raunchy, warm, and fiercely loyal. That’s where she earned the nickname “The Divine Miss M,” a nod to grand old show-business titles like “The Divine Sarah Bernhardt,” but with a wink and glitter glued around the edges.

Those sets at the Continental Baths led to a record deal with Atlantic and, in 1972, her debut album The Divine Miss M. The record was a wild, unapologetic mix of pop, old standards, and emotional ballads—“Do You Want to Dance?”, “Friends,” and her show-stopping revival of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” a tribute to her beloved Andrews Sisters. The album went Top Ten, went Platinum, and won her the Grammy for Best New Artist. 

The combination was already there: old-school showgirl polish, left-of-center material, and a deep connection with people who didn’t see themselves represented in polite entertainment. She took the energy of those bathhouse shows and scaled it up for bigger and bigger stages: nightclubs, then concert halls, then Broadway revue shows like Bette Midler’s Clams on the Half Shell Revue in 1975, which cemented her reputation as a live performer who left the audience both dazzled and a little shell-shocked.

Once you have a personality that big, Hollywood comes calling.
Her first major starring film role was The Rose in 1979, loosely inspired by Janis Joplin. She plays Mary Rose Foster, a rock star spiraling under the weight of fame and addiction. The performance is volcanic—funny, terrifying, vulnerable, and musical in the most literal sense. The film won her a Golden Globe and her first Oscar nomination for Best Actress. 

From there, the film résumé becomes a tour of late-20th-century pop culture:

Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Ruthless People, Outrageous Fortune, and Big Business showing her flair for screwball comedy.

Beaches, the tear-jerker that gave the world her version of “Wind Beneath My Wings,” which won the Grammy for Record of the Year.

Hocus Pocus, where she reinvented herself again as Winifred Sanderson, a cackling witch whose musical numbers are now Halloween canon, leading to a 2022 sequel and an upcoming third film she’s still excited about in her late seventies.

The First Wives Club, where she stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn in a comedy about aging, divorce, and revenge—with a finale that turns into an anthem of female solidarity.

Throughout all this, the persona stays consistent: sharp wit, emotional generosity, a willingness to go bigger than anyone else on screen, and a kind of protective, almost maternal energy toward the people she champions.

Fast-forward to the 2010s. Many performers by this point are living on “tribute tours” or cameo roles. Bette Midler? She comes back to Broadway and takes on Hello, Dolly!—a role indelibly associated with Carol Channing and Barbra Streisand.

The production opened in 2017, and she promptly won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. Audiences described the show as feeling less like a revival and more like a coronation: this was Broadway honoring one of its own, someone who had carried the flame of live performance through pop, film, Vegas residencies, and back home again to the stage. 

So we have Bette the Hawaiian outsider, Bette the bathhouse diva, Bette the pop singer, Bette the movie star, and Bette the Broadway headliner.
Now let’s place her in a very different setting: a modest, slightly creaky house in Richmond, filled with manuscripts, daguerreotypes, and a lingering smell of old paper.

At one point in my life, I worked at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. Not exactly a place you’d expect to see modern pop stars. The museum is tucked not very far from the old Richmond Coliseum, which meant that every now and then, someone performing there might wander over in the afternoon, looking for a little atmosphere.

One day, the door opened, and in walked Bette Midler.
I was behind the front desk, very much the dutiful new employee. I looked up, and my brain did that thing where it says, “That can’t be who I think it is,” followed by, “Oh, that is absolutely who I think it is.”

And what did I say? Did I say something poised and timeless like, “Welcome to the Poe Museum, Ms. Midler”?

No. I gushed.
“Oh, you must be Bette Midler!”

She gave me that smile—mischievous, knowing—and nodded.

Desperate to prove that I really knew who she was, I blurted, “Oh, I saw you in Fiddler on the Roof—you played one of Tevye’s daughters!” Which was true. I had seen her in that small part and filed it away in my brain like a little trivia jewel.

I wanted to say, “That was several years ago.” What actually came tumbling out of my mouth was:
“That was years and years and years ago!”

You can imagine the pause.
Her eyes widened, just a bit. She leaned in, and with perfect comic timing, said, “Toots, are you saying that I’m old?” 

Before I could fall through the floor, my boss rushed out from the back, mortified. “Oh, I am so sorry, Miss Midler,” he said. “I do hope we have not insulted you. Please let me apologize for this new employee, and I will be glad to give you a tour of the museum myself.”

And then Bette Midler did something that, in retrospect, feels like one of her most generous gestures—not just to me, but to my future self.
She gave my boss that sly, wicked smile and said, “Oh no, that won’t be necessary.”

Then she pointed directly at me—very theatrically, the way only a seasoned performer can—and declared, with impeccable timing:
“I want the little faggot to give me a tour!”
Time froze.
In that instant, she named something central to my nature that I was still frightened to name. It was as if she had ripped a piece of subtext off the page and read it aloud under a spotlight.
My boss shot me a look that said, as clearly as words, “This is… new information.” His face also said, “Absolutely not, you are not giving Bette Midler a tour today.” And so, despite her declaration, the tour did not happen. I did not get to walk The Divine Miss M around Poe’s parlor and talk about ravens and tell-tale hearts.

But I have never forgotten that moment—Bette’s word, her tone, the way she reclaimed a slur that, in other mouths, would have felt like a weapon. In hers, oddly, it felt like an initiation. A rough, campy, lovingly transgressive sort of welcome.
It was as if the woman who had built her career as a patron saint of misfits and queer audiences had stepped into the museum, looked at me, and said, “I see you. Don’t think you’re hiding.”

I have never seen Bette Midler as The Divine Miss M in concert. I have not sat in a Vegas showroom or a Broadway seat while she wiped the sweat from her brow and lobbed insults at the front row. But I can say this: no musician has had more impact on my life in less time than she did in those five minutes at the Poe Museum.

That story, as embarrassing and as life-changing as it was, actually lines up perfectly with the persona Bette Midler has cultivated all along.
From the bathhouses to the big stages, she has mixed camp and care in equal measure. Her act is full of bawdy jokes, double entendres, outrageous costumes, and sharp one-liners. But underneath the glitter, she offers something profoundly serious: recognition.

For gay men in the 1970s, she wasn’t just a singer; she was a kind of secular priestess. She stood onstage in a space not many mainstream performers would touch and said, through her presence: “You are worth a show. You are worth a big, brassy, over-the-top evening of music.” 

And she has never entirely left that mission. Even when she’s playing a witch in Hocus Pocus or a washed-up diva in The Rose, she’s often speaking for the character who feels like they’re on the outside looking in, the one who is “too much” for polite society and refuses to dial it down.
The word she flung at me that day in Richmond can be—and often is—used as a weapon. In her mouth, in that moment, it became something else: a kind of camp password. A reminder that the identities we fear can also be embraced, reclaimed, turned into badges of survival and humor.
Is it comfortable? Absolutely not. Neither is much of what she does. But that discomfort can be strangely liberating—like someone tearing down the worst insults and turning them into confetti.

The music behind the persona
It’s easy, when we talk about Bette Midler, to focus on the persona and forget the pipes. But the voice matters.

Listen to The Divine Miss M or the movie soundtrack to The Rose or her performances of “Wind Beneath My Wings” and “From a Distance.” You hear:

A deep love of older pop traditions—big vibrato, clear storytelling, phrasing borrowed from the Andrews Sisters and classic torch singers.

A willingness to tackle material that many pop singers would avoid: John Prine’s “Hello in There,” for instance, about aging and loneliness, which she recorded early in her career.

An emotional range that runs from wink-and-a-smile novelty songs to devastating ballads.

In other words, the persona is not a mask hiding a lack of substance. It’s a delivery system for some very serious emotional material. 

She once said that she was drawn to the old-fashioned style of performance because it allows for big feelings—grief, longing, joy—that our more ironic age tends to smother. If you walk into a Bette Midler show, you’ll get plenty of jokes, but you’ll also probably end up crying into your overpriced drink by the end.

Today, Bette Midler is in her late seventies, still active, still returning to old roles like the Sanderson sisters in Hocus Pocus 2, still showing up at events, still involved with her environmental nonprofit, the New York Restoration Project, which has planted trees and built community gardens across New York City. 

Her legacy stretches across multiple arenas:

In music, she opened a path for performers who mix camp and sincerity—drag performers, cabaret artists, and pop singers who refuse to choose between “serious” and “fun.”

In film, she proved that a woman who does not fit the typical Hollywood mold can headline movies, carry comedies, break hearts in dramas, and do it all while refusing to flatten her personality.

Onstage, she has stood as a guardian of old-school showbiz: the patter, the costumes, the full-evening experience.

And in quieter ways—in little museums and unexpected encounters—she has done something else: she has named people.

She named the gay men at the Continental Baths as worthy of a diva. She named aging women, divorcees, underdogs as main characters in her films and songs. And, just once, in the Poe Museum lobby, she named me.

So how do we sum up Bette Midler?

She is the girl from Honolulu who crashed the party in New York and never once apologized for being too loud, too emotional, too much. She took stages that were not designed for her—bathhouses, Broadway, movie sets, Vegas—and redecorated them in feathers and sequins and sharp one-liners. 

She gave us classic recordings, unforgettable film roles, and stage performances that felt like a hurricane in high heels.
But for me, personally, she also gave something else: a five-minute encounter that said, “You are not invisible. I see you, even if you’re not ready to see yourself yet.” 

We often talk about musicians in terms of albums sold, awards won, charts topped. Bette Midler has plenty of those: Grammy Awards, Golden Globes, an armful of hit records, a Tony for Hello, Dolly!. 

But there is another kind of influence that doesn’t show up on any list.
It’s the way a performer can walk into your life at the exact moment you’re trying to hide and, with one line—half joke, half blessing—pull you out into the open. 

That’s what The Divine Miss M did for me one afternoon in Richmond.
And whether or not I ever make it to one of her concerts, I already got the show.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Celebrate Creativity.
I’m George Bartley. May you encounter your own Divine Miss M at just the right moment—and may you be ready, or at least almost ready, when she points at you and says exactly who you are.

Until next time… let’s keep finding the artists who see us, even when we’re not quite ready to see ourselves.