Bette Midler Plays the Role of Her Life--Literally

When you're a big star, you don't pass gas for just anybody. But then the star of CBS's most hyped new sitcom is hardly just anybody. So when the writers of Bette conceived a new gag--a celebrity breaks wind in an elevator and blames it on the leading lady--they sent Bette Midler to work the phones herself.

"My writers pitch all these ideas with big stars and then wait for me to make the call," she fake-laments, snacking on cantaloupe between takes. "My God! Who knew?" Candice Bergen and Lily Tomlin were intrigued by the bit but had to pass--or rather, not pass. Finally Midler said, "Why don't we just go for the biggest star we can get? Why don't we call Jack Nicholson?" With the crew giggling around the phone, she rang up the Joker himself.

"'Jack,' I said. 'Bette. I'm doing a show.'"

She drops into Nicholson's lizardy drawl. "'I don't do TV.'"

"C'mon, it's no big deal," she pushed. "You'll get in your car, you'll come down here. All you have to do is fart. It'll be hilarious." She laughs. "Of course, I didn't get Jack." They finally got a noncelebrity actress to play the scene instead.

O.K., so there are some things even an Emmy, Grammy, Golden Globe and Tony winner can't do. But never let it be said Bette Midler doesn't have cojones. The woman who used to be lowered onto her stage show half-dressed on a clamshell has a famously unembarrassed willingness to say or do anything. It's around that bawdy, brassy presence that CBS built Bette, an old-fashioned star showcase that calls on her to sing, pratfall and generally serve up more ham than at an Easter dinner.

And the network's counting on her to deliver more than celebrity methane. This season the networks have recruited scads of established celebs to draw viewers (see box), always a risk. (Nathan Lane's crash-and-burn in 1998's Encore! Encore! hovers like Marley's ghost over star vehicles.) On Bette, CBS has placed a huge, um, wager, running it opposite Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (which provides a cute running gag in one early episode). "It's probably the most anticipated show of the new season," says CBS television president Leslie Moonves, "and that's a huge burden."

A huge workload too, as Midler has discovered, three weeks into shooting. Doing the series required Midler to leave her home in New York City for Los Angeles--the show will move East next year if there's a second season--and the unfamiliar demands of a sitcom left her rattled. "I kept thinking it was a play and I had to be letter-perfect," she says. "Today I don't feel so freaked out, but this is only Monday. By Friday I'll be freaked out again."

The conventional wisdom is that movie stars descend to do TV when they can't get other work--which Midler admits, refreshingly, was at least partly true for her. After numerous successes (The Rose, which earned her an Oscar nomination, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, The First Wives' Club), Midler, 54, made the bad career moves of being a woman and aging. The offers dwindled, and recent efforts (Drowning Mona) fizzled. "They don't make movies with people my age anymore," she says. "That is the hard economic truth." She and longtime producing partner Bonnie Bruckheimer had a deal, however, to develop a TV series. Midler had attempted a couple of series that never aired--one was called The Harlettes, the name of her old backup group--but Moonves was eager to sign her up.

To do what? As development season dragged on, Midler rejected five scripts that placed her in sitcom situations--selling real estate, running a nightclub--that came off as insufficient for her outsize talent. Finally, as pilot-shooting season loomed, Mad About You producer Jeffrey Lane brought her a simple premise: let Bette be Bette.

Or rather, "Bette." The diva-ish drama queen Midler plays fuses the real woman's resume--a famous singer- actress who started out singing in New York City's gay bathhouses, starred in Beaches and so on--with the persona of the Divine Miss M, the blowsy, flighty, attention-craving alter ego Midler created in her stage shows. "Bette" blitzes her way through the series, to the bemusement and exhaustion of her family and support group: her professor husband (Kevin Dunn), her teenage daughter (Marina Malota), her manager (Joanna Gleason) and her fussy British accompanist (James Dreyfus). "You can't have Bette Midler on television playing a housewife," says Lane. "It would have been hard to separate the character from the entertainer we all know. It would also have been tough to find an excuse for the character to sing."

The TV character, Bruckheimer says, is far removed from the real Midler, a "shy" woman who prefers cardigans and jeans to mermaid outfits and plunging bustlines. "One of her favorite expressions is 'That's unseemly,'" Bruckheimer says. "She's well mannered, a real lady." Where "Bette" frets about preserving her cheekbones--she seeks out plastic surgery in a mid-life crisis--Midler has made a crusade of preserving New York City parks. "The character is much broader and sappier," she says. "She's harebrained and sexier, and I like those things." But there are similarities. Midler too has a husband and a teen daughter, and both Bettes have a survivor's stamina. Says Midler: "[The character] has a certain amount of drive and doesn't want to let go. She likes her little place in the sun and won't be booted out."