Brash Trash With Flash

Brash Trash With Flash

The first lady of sleaze, Bette Midler, rolled into Detroit in late January on the middle leg of her 1976 tour, still thin and pale from her recent emergency appendectomy. In case you didn't catch it in the tabloids, Bette had to cancel a few of her Los Angeles gigs at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion when she was striken with appendicitis.

Bette met the press at the St. Regis, dressed in a frilly cream-colored blouse, jeans and ankle boots. She revealed that a little misunderstanding had cropped up in Los Angeles about her operation between her management and an "assistant" of Bill Graham, the promoter. Apparently the assistant had questioned whether in fact Ms. Midler had gone under the knife, and whether his boss2 should fork out the dough for the gig she missed. Tempers flared, and people muttered, "Well let's see this scar, then."

"In a fit' of passion," said Bette, "I dropped my knickers and let them all have a look. They all agreed that it was a tasteful scar."

Queried why she didn't go along on Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour (it's reported that she was kicked off after throwing a drink in Patti Smith's face), Bette insisted that she wouldn't have hesitated if it hadn't been for her own tour. How does she like Patti?

"She's great. I knew her back when she was a yeller.

She used to stand up and yell poetry at Reno Sweeney's, and I always loved her juxtaposition of images. It was like being attacked by a machine gun. I've never been much for four chord rock 'n' roll, though, and I haven't seen her perform since she got her band together."

Groupies? Bette admitted that she had one.

"A very ia-arge young man from Cincinnati with a lot of money. He only goes after the big ones. He said to me, 'Bette, you blow Mick Jagger right offstage.' I said to him. Darling, that's not where I'd want to blow him."

Sources in El Lay reported that Average White Band guitarist Hamish Stuart was at Bette's bedside while she recovered, so we asked her who her latest crush was. She joked around about how she'd heard that Detroit was a butch town, and that she hoped that she could get some action, but admitted that she saw Hamish when both could get time off from touring.

Bette volunteered that she thought the mood of the country was "distraught for entertainment."

"I'm a vulgarian, from the coarse and vulgar school of performing. That's what I do best, and I think people need that now. Lucy and Ethel, Amos 'n' Andy...I love great actresses like Ellen Terry, but I know I could never be like that."

Sue Whitall