Bette Midler Read Online Free PDF Page B

something else!” ( 25 ).
    “I sang” ‘God Bless the Child,’ which I don’t sing. I never sang it. I sang it once and that was all, because it frightened me so. It really freaked me out. I was screaming at the end of it. The song had a life of its own that imposed itself on me and I don’t even know what happened. I was just this instrument for what was going on. Bizzzzzarre . . . so I decided that was a nice change. I decided to just do it for a while, and I did” ( 25 ).
    Bette suddenly found herself wrapped up in discovering all sorts of old songs that she had not previously been aware of, and she would test them on audiences at Hilly’s and other small nightclubs and cabarets in the city. She spent several hours each week at the Lincoln Center Library, listening to old albums and getting turned on to the music of Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and the Harry Warren tunes from the famous 1930s Busby Berkeley musicals. Suddenly, a whole new world of music and performing opened up to her. She had been so obsessed with the idea of being a Broadway actress that she didn’t even consider that every song could become an act, a mood, an emotion, and a characterization all its own. She fell in love with singing and with breathing a unique life into each song she sang.
    According to her, “I love Bessie Smith. I love Aretha Franklin. Gospel is some of the most wonderful music around. You get up and you can’t stop. I makes you vibrate. I like torch songs and torch singers thatmake you cry. Ethel Waters used to kill me when I first started listening” ( 25 ).
    “I heard the stories these women were telling, they were laying incredible stuff down, their lives were fabulous lives, and it was in their voices and their songs, and I was fascinated by that. And there were some things I had to say about where I’ve been and who I’ve been with, and the pain I know” ( 3 ). She was especially enamored of torch songs, and all of a sudden she was singing all sorts of classic blues numbers like “What a Difference a Day Makes,” “My Forgotten Man,” “Ten Cents a Dance,” and “Am I Blue?”
    At the time, Bette was dating one of the other cast members from
Fiddler on the Roof
, Ben Gillespie. She would go over to Ben’s apartment, and the two of them would listen to old records. It was Gillespie who introduced her to Aretha Franklin’s early recordings from the era when Aretha was a young blues singer, years before she was dubbed “Lady Soul.” Bette still recalls the night he put on Aretha’s
Unforgettable
album, and she sang at the top of her lungs to the album. “A real awakening” is what she called the music on that particular Aretha Franklin album, which was recorded as a tribute to Franklin’s singing idol, Dinah Washington. One of the performances on that classic Aretha album was a torch number that would later become one of Midler’s earliest signature songs: “Drinking Again.” According to her, “It was like I had no idea what music was all about until I heard her sing. It opened up the whole world” ( 5 ).
    “My mentor was a man named Ben Gillespie,” Bette later recalled. “Ben was a dancer I met when I was doing
Fiddler on the Roof
on Broadway. He opened up the world for me. . . . I was crazy for him. He really opened up my eyes. He taught me about music and dance and drama and poetry and light and color and sound and movement. He was an artist with great vision of what the stage could provide. He taught me a grandeur I had never known before. He inspired me not to be afraid and to understand what the [music of the] past had to offer me. I never lost the lessons he taught me” ( 30 ).
    William Hennessey was another of her friends from that same era. She had met him when he was one of the hairdressers who worked on
Fiddler
. Hennessey remembered, “She had another friend then, a dancer named Ben Gillespie, who was a thirties and forties freak, and the three of us used to hang around