Bette Midler
Is back with a trove of showbiz memories, inside stories of the music that meant the most and a book about a Central Park duck.
It’s never too late to learn something new. On the week of her 75th birthday in December, Bette Midler was sitting in the kitchen of her country house, located outside New York City, talking by Zoom with Parade about her latest discovery: the seasons. “I’d never seen them change before,” she says. “We’re normally in the city, which is all steel, glass and brick. But since the lockdown, we’ve been up here and went through spring, summer and autumn, three of the most extraordinary seasons.”
“Nature,” she says. “Who knew?”
The singer-actress’s late-in-life discovery of “every leaf, shrub and flower” at her home likely ranks behind the marriage of her daughter, Sophie von Haselberg, now 34, as one of the rare bright spots amid this bleak pandemic year quarantining with her husband, Martin von Haselberg, 72. But it’s one she’s eagerly stoking with her latest project, a children’s book she wrote to celebrate a real-life occurrence in the natural world. Her book, The Tale of the Mandarin Duck: A Modern Fable (Feb. 16), was inspired by the true story of a brilliantly colored, floridly feathered bird that arrived, out of nowhere, in New York City’s Central Park in 2018 and instantly became a tourist attraction and media sensation. “There was a gleam in its eye, a look of innocence, as if it were seeing something brand-new too,” Midler says. “And there was something humble about it, despite its fantastic colors. That really moved me.”
‘I can be my
own person
and do my
own show.
Once I got
that idea,
I never
looked back.’
Of course, like all children’s books, Midler uses the storyline in hers to send a message. In The Tale of the Mandarin Duck, everyone who sees the creature does something miraculous by modern standards: They put down their phones and experience what’s right in front of their eyes. More, they interact with each other in physical space rather than through a glass screen.
Is it fair to conclude that Bette isn’t a fan of modern technology? “I’m tortured by it!” she says with a laugh. “If I do anything with social media, it takes me at least 20 minutes to recover. I had an event recently where you had to tape yourself, then upload it to Dropbox, and I cried. I had to have a gallon of alcohol.”
An Odd Duck
It’s clear Midler far prefers interacting with people in real time. She speaks chattily and openly about a career that includes four Golden Globes, three Grammys, three Emmys and a Tony and has lasted for more than half a century—a duration that staggers her. “I’m old,” she says several times. “I don’t know where the time went.”
And yet, she embraces the inevitable result. “I’m a fogey. In fact, I celebrate my fogey-ness!” Such self-awareness has guided
Midler through a life and career that suggests she’s just as odd a duck as the one she wrote about in her book.
Growing up in ethnically diverse Hawaii, she never fit in. “I was the white girl, the only one for miles around,” she says.
Her family was poor: Midler’s father painted houses while her mother was a seamstress and homemaker. As a child, she didn’t have enough money to buy records, but her parents had two compilations that set her on a far different musical path than most young people in her generation. “They were all songs of the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s,” she says. “That was my musical education. Those were the records that I sang along to until I wore out the grooves.”