A View From a Broad (7 page)

My wardrobe dilemma brought everything to a standstill. And the time pressure was enormous. Tempers flared. Fights broke out. Some threatened to quit if I didn’t come out of the dressing room. Finally, having no other choice, I swallowed my pride and called my designer in Los Angeles, the nut who’d made the clothes I loathed so much, and begged him to come to Seattle. Always the soul of honesty, I told him he’d be walking into an atmosphere charged with tension.

“Nothing fazes me” was all he said.

When he arrived, that very same evening, he looked like the brash young man in his late twenties that he was. But a mere twenty-four hours later, he was unrecognizable. His entire body sagged. The flesh fell from his eyes. His face became wrinkled and puffy. If you asked him for the time or the salt, he would cry. His gait, once so confident and strong, became halting. His hands began to shake. At the end of rehearsal, we carried him sobbing to his hotel room, where he spent the night sewing— the sheets to the bedspread; the towels to the shower curtain; his shoes to his socks.

Oh, it was not an easy time. For any of us. Only Miss Frank, exhausted though she was from zipping and unzipping, hemming and unhemming, was able to smile. In fact, she seemed very pleased with herself, forever mumbling in my ear about just deserts and the terrible wages of sin.

But as is so often the case in a business where you lose fifty grand if it doesn’t, the show
did
go on. Two hours late and in a shambles, but a show nevertheless. The audience was, as most audiences usually are, unthinkably patient and forgiving. Dolores and The Magic Lady were ragged but wonderful. The crowd even liked my dog dress, which I actually wore and which became the surprise hit of the evening, retrieving for my designer both his reputation and his youth.

Of course, I kept telling myself, trying not to let the elation go to my head, this was still America, home sweet home. The real test lay about six thousand miles away. In London. And that night of reckoning was getting closer by the second.

“. . . in a business where you lose fifty grand if it doesn’t the show
did
go on.”

PALLADIUM LONDON STOP AM ON MY WAY STOP ARRIVING MOMENTARILY STOP TALLY HO STOP BETTE

O
h, my, my! London! At last! What a thrill it is to be here playing the Palladium right in the very heart of The Old UK— or The YUK, as we sometimes call it. Well, there’ll always be an England, they say. Tonight we put that to the ultimate test. Oh, I tell you, we are so excited. We have done it all. We read our Shakespeare. We boned up on Blake. We read Milton till we went blind. I did so want to impress you all. Unfortunately, I don’t speak Arabic. Well, at least I haven’t had any trouble with the metric system. We’ve gone metric too, you know. It was a difficult transition to make. So many of us had been thinking in inches for so many, many years. And you know, while we’re in London we’re hoping to meet the Royal Family. I don’t know why it is, but every time I hit a town the blue-bloods all seem to flee to their summer residences. I can’t imagine why. I’m just crazy about royalty, especially queens. Your Queen, for example, Elizabeth the Second . . . Elizabeth the Tooth, we call her. My dears, she is the whitest woman of them all. She makes us all feel like the Third World. I only have one question to ask Her Maj:

“What have you got in that handbag?” . . . Oh, I tell you, I love her. I’d kill to get my hands on one of her hats. Such unerring taste. Who do you think makes those hats for her, anyway? She’s probably got a little hat fairy chained to the basement saying, “Queenie’s gonna love this one!” His specialty is special hats for special occasions. I was lucky enough to see one of them. It’s called The Last Supper. It has twelve little apostles about the brim and little pieces of matzoh hanging down about the ears. It’s her Easter number. . . . And of course, I just adore Charles. Do you think I stand a chance in this hot dog suit? I read somewhere that he can marry a commoner. I guess he wouldn’t want someone as common as my own self. . . . Well, some of us are losers and some of us are wieners. But you know, my very favorite of all is Princess Anne. Such an active lass. So outdoorsy. She loves nature in spite of what it did to her. Oh, my God! Did I say that? I didn’t say that. Dare I go on? . . . All right. How many of you would like to see my impression of Princess Anne? . . . Hmmm. Now, if I can only get out of this sausage drag. . . .

E
ver since I first saw Greer Garson show Laurence Olivier how to shoot an arrow in
Pride and Prejudice,
I have been an avid Anglophile. So you can imagine how I looked forward to seeing all those famous English landmarks that had excited my imagination for so long: the Tower, with its cache of royal jewels I not only adored but coveted; the brooding moors where Emily Bronte walked in gloom and sensible shoes; the Albert Memorial with its stirring salute to Engineering; and, of course, Stonehenge. To my amazement, I soon discovered that they were all hundreds of miles apart from each other. I guess before one actually visits them, everyone tends to think of their favorite countries as one grand Disneyland filled with national monuments and historical treasures conveniently laid out for easy viewing, when what they really are filled with, of course, is people going to work, laundromats and places to buy rat poison. The realization that England was not just an efficiently organized museum was at first disappointing, then exhilarating, then disappointing again as I counted how few days I had to see it all. Faced with such a plethora of things to see and do, I had to decide where to go first. And I had to decide fast. Charles Jourdan seemed like a good idea.

Donning a gray knit cap that hung somewhat awkwardly down one side of my jaw, a pair of sunglasses that hid my eyes and a long woolen scarf which completely covered the lower half of my face, I stepped sweating into the English sunshine, blind as a bat and unable to breathe, but completely unrecognizable.

I felt these precautions necessary because of the tremendous success I had been in that tasteful town of swans and swains. In fact, when I wasn’t busy doing TV shows or radio spots, I was aflitter with parties and celebrations given in honor of my recent ascension to the English Theatrical Throne, an ascension which had taken everyone by surprise, especially me. Inevitably, of course, the good wishes and good feelings expressed by those present at Parties and Celebrations thrown to honor somebody else’s success are as forced as the mincemeat one is often made to eat at them. But being as great a lover of fakery and fraud as I am of accusation and scandal, I had a grand old time.

So my decision to go to Charles Jourdan was not completely frivolous. I needed a new pair of shoes for yet another
fete
to which I had been invited by a very noble group of English men and women who thought I might be amusing for an afternoon. Oh, yes, what a
rara avis
I was to those who had never been to the slums of Honolulu. I provided them with such delight. You should have heard this particular bunch gasp and swoon when I stuck two fingers into my bowl of haggis, mistaking it for a bowl of poi, a gloplike staple of the Islands. How I regaled them with tales of the South Pacific and the North Bronx. And how they regaled me with their stories of Forthright Industrial Action and the Truth about Ale.

After luncheon, things really picked up. I was quietly staring at an enormous painting of the lady of the house, trying to decide if she was holding in her lap a small dog or a rat with a bow in its hair, when a young woman of serious demeanor approached
me. I’d say she was about thirty-five and had never been—or, having been, was disappointed. She was all in black wool except for a red hat topped all over with what appeared to be a
salade niçoise.
As she approached, I could see a solid determination in her eyes that seemed totally at odds with the whimsical hat. In fact, everything about her was about as solid as solid can get. As she came striding towards me, she held out her hand for me to shake. Fearful of what she might do to my fingers, I gingerly gave her only two.

“I’m Cecily,” she said as she relaxed her grip.

“Bette Midler,” I responded in my most English Garden manner.

“I know,” Cecily said, “of course. That’s why I’m
so
anxious to speak with you.”

She practically towed me into a quiet corner.

“Well, darling,” she said to me in that tone the English consider chatty, “I have the most
extraordinary
idea. I want to use
your
face and
your
money in what I consider a daring—and brilliant—scheme of mine to produce a special designer line of diaphragms and douches.”

I looked around to see if anyone had heard. Then I had to laugh. But Cecily was dead serious, and her reason for thinking the venture worthwhile was a most curious blend of politics, hedonism and outright greed.