Bette Midler always knew she “was just going to make” in showbiz.
Bette Midler always believed in her ability to make it
The ‘Beaches’ star had a “compulsion” to become a legend as she knew she wasn’t cut out for anything but performing after trying out other careers like working in retail before she shot to fame.
The 78-year-old actress told The Hollywood Reporter: “This kind of compulsion, a determination. I was just going to make it no matter what. In my defence, I couldn’t do anything else. I’d had jobs before and had always failed at them. When I was a salesgirl, I was completely bewildered when someone came in to return something.
“I wouldn’t understand how it was done. I worked for Western Union for months. I didn’t understand how to send a telegram.
“So, it’s not that I didn’t try to do other things, but if it didn’t try to do other things, but it didn’t have a performative aspect to it, I didn’t know how it was done. And I was terribly lucky.”
Bette — who has 37-year-old daughter Sophie with her husband of 40 years, Martin von Haselberg, 75— also explained that she knew she had “hit the big time” after her work travel arrangements became much more five-star in nature.
She said: “It wasn’t evident until I moved from nightclubs to theatres to Carnegie Hall and then to arenas. That’s when I really hit the big time, because all the travel changed. Before you were riding in a car or a truck or a bus, and the next thing you knew, you were on a private plane, after my first couple of movies in the 80s. I remember the first time my label booked me into The Connaught [the hotel in London] and the butler arrived to ask if there was anything I needed. That’s when I said, ‘Oh, this is something different.’”
The ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ hitmaker also discussed her her 1973 sold-out homecoming stadium show in her hometown of Honolulu, Hawaii – which marked a decade since she graduated from high school – and explained how “fantastic” it was to have her late parents there.
Bette said: “It was absolutely fantastic. Everybody turned out. We had a luau and dancing girls, and I ate kalua pig. My old crew from high school came. My mom and dad came.”
