‘Gay people loved my fearlessness’

As ‘The Divine Miss M’ is re-released, Bette Midler talks to Paul Sexton about music, returning to theatre and the debt she owes ‘outrageous queens’

It’s hard to believe that Bette Midler isn’t a native New Yorker. She manages to combine a chutzpah and a Manhattan-style savviness that not everyone born to a seamstress and a house painter in Honolulu could manage. But the entertainer has been living in the city for more than 50 years and her intimate relationship with its cultural evolution is once again in sharp relief, thanks to a new production of Hello, Dolly! on Broadway and a remastering of The Divine Miss M, the 1972 album which made her name.

She arrives for our early evening rendezvous in a small hotel off Madison Avenue, in convivial mood, modestly but elegantly attired in a simple sweater and large earrings. Her generous demeanour belies a busy day, with rehearsals and a Facebook Q&A with her ever-admiring fans.

The singer, actress and comedienne has been actively involved in the remounting of her first disc. “I heard it again, and I like it,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh, don’t make me do that’, but I had to listen. I really wanted the old sound, because I think part of the charm of that record is that it’s very warm sounding.”

Some of it, indeed, was made in front of a crowd invited into the studio to eat Chinese food and observe her show. “It’s part-live,” she says drily. “Like me.”

As an ingenue in New York (she relocated to the city in 1965 using earnings from a bit part in a long-forgotten Julie Andrews film called Hawaii) Midler’s first focus was on musical theatre, notably in a longrunning production of Fiddler on the Roof. As a solo singer, her style was honed in the city’s live venues, but not to the usual rock club template. Instead, she performed her show in the bathhouses where gay men met for sexual encounters. Looking back, Midler, now 70, takes satisfaction in the pathfinding role she played in the emerging Gay Pride movement. “I had no idea at the time,” she says. “I knew there were gay people here, but I didn’t know I was helping them kick the door open, because I was just in there doing my job. And it was a great job. “I think I was the first person on television ever to say ‘gay’ on The Johnny Carson Show. I said I was working in a gay bathhouse, and I think the house went up, but to me it was no big deal. I’d been in community theatres where the place was full of queens, and I’d gone to see the drag shows. I didn’t pay any attention to it, it was just like ‘Oh, humanity’.” “[ The gay community] wanted me to succeed,” she adds. “They saw something in me that I think people didn’t see. The emotionalism [of my show], the intimacy, the fearlessness, the outrageousness. That’s what they enjoyed in their life and they saw me as part of it.” You might assume that such fearlessness evolved from her Jewish upbringing in a chiefly Asian community in Honolulu, but she won’t have it. “I never fought anything,” she says firmly. “I was the biggest coward in the world, I was hiding in the corner. “I was the only white person in my class, so I had it the opposite