MOVIES : The Definitive Ms. M : Don’t worry, the Divine Miss M isn’t gone; it’s just that Bette Midler has all these new responsibilities these days

One minute she is demure, bespectacled and as serious as a librarian. She sits rather primly on her office couch, speaking precisely of contract negotiations, story development and the unreleased garage tapes of Hoagy Carmichael. This is Ms. Midler, Disney producer.

In the next instant, however, she is the Divine Miss M, jumping to her feet to demonstrate a wild and esoteric dance routine from the turn of the century. “Have you ever heard of the butterfly woman, Loie Fuller and her sticks? That stuff is so fabulous, I just can’t understand why no one does it anymore.”

She catches herself in the midst of pantomiming Fuller’s once-renowned act which involved an Isadora Duncan-like whirling of sticks and gossamer to simulate the flight of a butterfly. She sits back down, perhaps just a bit self-consciously. “Just the thought of music can really carry me away,” she says. “I embarrass people because I’ll jump up and dance to ‘Rock the Boat’ if I hear it on the radio. Well, fortunately, I still get excited about what I do. The excitement of it all still carries me along. Every once in a while I think, ‘Hallelujah, I’m still working!’ ”

That’s rather an understatement. For the last six years, the supercharged Bette Midler has hardly stepped off one sound stage before leaping onto another. Starting with the career-reviving “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” she has starred in a flurry of Disney comedies (“Outrageous Fortune,” “Ruthless People” and “Big Business”) before making, most recently, “Scenes From a Mall” with Woody Allen.

The passionate performer has recorded two best-selling albums--one of which, “Some People’s Lives,” garnered her four Grammy nominations--and a comedy record, “Mud Will Be Flung Tonight.” And as Disney’s No. 1 employee, Midler has guided her production company, All Girl Productions, to the screen with the highly remunerative “Beaches.” Her clout is becoming considerable. Her partner in All Girl Productions, Bonnie Bruckheimer, says: “A person’s degree of power in Hollywood is usually measured by their ability to get movies made . . . and everyone wants to make a movie with Bette.”

Furthermore, Martin von Hassleberg’s wife and 5-year-old Sophie’s mother does not have time to sit around and gab all afternoon.

Oh? Cocktails with the Katzenbergs? The theater with the Eisners?

“Honey,” Midler says, leaning forward and confiding in salty broad-ese, “when I get home I’ve got a helluva lot of cooking and cleaning to do.”

Her latest venture is “For the Boys,” a $40-million dollar epic that kept her out of the kitchen quite a bit. It’s not a film that follows conventional wisdom. The musical spans five decades in the lives and loves of song-and-dance team Dixie Leonard and Eddy Sparks as they take their USO show on the road through three wars. The film, directed by Mark Rydell and produced by All Girl Productions, examines the best and worst years of our lives from World War II to the present.

Nonetheless, it is far from simply a nostalgia piece. Through the characters, “For the Boys” charts America’s loss of innocence as the “last just war” gives way to Korea and McCarthyism, and then to Vietnam and nihilism.

As screenwriter Marshall Brickman puts it: “The film charts the enlightenment of a woman who has derived many benefits from the experience of entertaining the troops over four decades but finally has to confront the paradox of what she has devoted her life to--war as a means of solving problems.”

A big-budget musical is risky enough in Hollywood these days, but a vehemently anti-war film, especially in the wake of Gulf War euphoria, seems to raise enough red flags to get everyone out of the water.

Gulf War or not, Midler strongly believes that the film delivers a message that will reach the hearts of hawks and doves alike.

“The truth about people is that no one wants war, any war,” she says.

20th Century Fox studio chairman Joe Roth, who has risked a lot of the black ink accumulated from “Home Alone” with this venture, admits that the potential controversy is difficult to gauge but strongly endorses the film’s anti-war theme.

“ ‘For the Boys’ is a film which traces the way we felt as a country about World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam,” he says, “and in the end, there is nothing really good to be said about any war.”

Not long after completing her Academy Award-nominated role in “The Rose” (1979), Midler says, she began contemplating an “idea concerning an entertainer who goes to Vietnam.”

“There were so many people--Americans, Filipinos, Australians--who went to Vietnam to entertain soldiers on their R&R;,” she says. “I was also interested in the story of a woman who raises a boy, and is crazy about him, but in the end sends him off to war. I knew the arena; we could just never quite come up with the characters.”

For reasons neither she nor partner and co-producer Bruckheimer can remember, Disney passed on the idea. (“It just wasn’t the kind of movie Disney was making at the time,” Bruckheimer suggests.)

At a Fox story meeting, the idea of two entertainers, representing opposite ends of the political spectrum, was discussed. Screenwriters Neal Jimenez and Lindy Laub were hired, but the resulting script, Midler says, “was extremely dark, and it frightened a lot of people. There were problems, such as Eddy’s relationship to his son, which couldn’t be solved because it was so dark and hostile. . . . I could imagine the audience picking up butcher knives and going at the screen.”

Enter Rydell, who had directed Midler in her “Rose” debut. A meticulous and exacting director, he had directed only two pictures in the ‘80s: “On Golden Pond” and “The River.”

“Bette had come to me for every picture since ‘The Rose,’ but I turned them all down,” Rydell says. “For me it is a two-year commitment, a responsibility where I am putting people in a dark room and, hopefully, revealing some kind of truth to them. I take that seriously. Now, Disney has made her a star by putting her in light, mindless comedies, but for the most part the material is not worthy of her talent. ‘For the Boys’ was the first script since ‘The Rose’ that I think is on the same level.”

Rydell hired Brickman (who co-wrote “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan” with Woody Allen) to make the son Dixie’s instead of Eddy’s and to give the story a stronger point of view by having Midler’s character recall her life through a series of long flashbacks. The result, Brickman says, opened up the film’s themes of loss and forgiveness.

Of great importance to Midler was the opportunity to combine serious acting with serious song styling.

“I knew where all the songs fell in the script, and I knew what I wanted as far as the emotional colorization of the scene,” she says. “The range of the music is really wide because it goes from the ‘40s to the ‘90s. We chose a lot of the old orchestrators like Billy May and Ralph Burns. But at the same time, I felt strongly the music shouldn’t be right on the nose. I think the audience should have to work a little and not go to sleep listening to the same old standards.”

For one of the crucial opening scenes, in which Eddy is premiering Dixie in a London air hangar during the blitz, Midler listened to countless boogie-woogie standards in her search for an appropriate song. “I know everyone was thinking, ‘Bette, why don’t you do ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy?’ . . . puuuhhhhleeeze! But I just was lucky because I was at a benefit and Michael Feinstein was at my table and he is just as nuts about this stuff as I am. He sent me a garage tape of a Hoagy Carmichael song, ‘Billy-A-Dick,’ that had never been released. It was fabulous.”

Though she got the songs right for the London blitz scene, she was unprepared for the emotional reality surrounding its filming.

“We were filming out at Van Nuys Airport, and all the extras were (actual) soldiers dressed up in vintage uniforms,” she recalls. “Then the Gulf War started. I think we were doing pickup scenes and all of a sudden, they just started walking out, going off to join their units and get shipped out. It was so incredibly strange. If you shifted your vision, suddenly you were in a different world.”

She becomes very quiet, her eyes shifting to her lap. “I can’t tell you what it was like that these guys were really going off to war . . . all the levels on which that was working. There are really no words to describe it.”

Yet the music in “For the Boys” is not confined to Midler’s love of ‘40s ballads and boogie-woogie. Just as the film explores the changing social and political climate in the entertainment industry since 1943, the music and comedy of Sparks and Leonard hits all the right notes, most poignantly in Dixie’s battlefield rendition of the Beatles’ “In My Life” to a besieged troop of Vietnam grunts--”right down to the crappy Fender Rhodes,” Midler notes.

It’s on these talents that Fox’s Joe Roth is banking: “I originally felt when the project came along, and still do, that there is (an) audience ripe to see Bette Midler in a screen performance encompassing all her skills. And in hiring Mark Rydell we had the successful partnership that made ‘The Rose’ a great picture.”

Says Midler: “ ‘The Rose’ was a violent picture. Not violent with guns, but violent in language and emotion . . . just the kind of picture I wanted to do, but the next script never arrived. I have been waiting ever since ‘The Rose’ to play someone like Dixie Leonard.”

There was a period after “The Rose,” in fact, in which Midler thought it was all over for her. The first picture she tried after her Oscar nomination was “Jinxed!”--a project that seemed to live down to its title.

Although she picked director Don Siegel and leading man Ken Wahl, there never seemed to be any consensus among the three about who was in charge or even what the film was about. In the wake of the film’s 1982 release came ugly statements by Siegel and Wahl that would have sunk a blockbuster. Midler was crushed by the criticism, and “Jinxed!” sank without a trace. It was more than three years before she made another film.

Says Rydell: “She didn’t fail the film business; the film business failed her.”

Midler sees it now as the lowest period of her professional life. Not even a successful European tour could stave off a nervous breakdown. The phone never rang and her days became filled with Courvoisier, crying jags and endless self-doubt. It was as if the compulsion and self-destruction of her “Rose” character was about to do her in. It was a long fall for the woman who’d proclaimed only a few years earlier that her abiding ambition was to become a legend.

When Bette Midler hit New York in the late ‘60s, she had a tough time, as befitting a self-respecting blues singer. Her father was a civilian painter for the Navy in Hawaii, and the family was so poor that it had neither telephone nor TV until the late ‘50s.

She and her three siblings were the only white, let alone Jewish, kids in a neighborhood filled with Samoans, Hawaiians, Japanese and Chinese. Her tyrannical father (who saw her perform only once, on “The Tonight Show,” before he died,) did little to bolster his daughter’s self-confidence. Luckily, Midler’s mother constantly encouraged her singing, and after a trip to see a production of “Carousel,” the fledgling performer’s sights were set.

In New York, Midler hooked up with such performers as East Village impresario Tom Eyen and Black Eyed Susan, a cabaret singer who was Midler’s ‘30s retro inspiration. Her first big break came as a member of the chorus in “Fiddler on the Roof.” By the time she left, she had worked her way up to the role of elder daughter. But her breakthrough came when she played the Improvisation and the legendary gay club the Continental Baths, where she perfected her blend of brassy humor and clear, open-throated renditions of classic ballads and boogie-woogie. The Divine Miss M was born.

In 1975 she won a Grammy as best new artist with her 1974 album “The Divine Miss M” and a special Tony for her show at Broadway’s Palace Theatre. Before “The Rose” came along, she made four more albums and starred in an acclaimed revue, “Clams on the Half Shell,” and an Emmy-winning special, “Ol’ Red Hair Is Back.”

“I had seen Bette at the Continental Baths and knew she’d be perfect for ‘The Rose,’ ” Rydell says, “but the studio refused. They wanted to dub the singing with an established actress. We went through half a dozen drafts before they gave in. I knew she was an incredible talent and she is capable of so much. At that time, she was such a desperate young person, not unlike the character in ‘The Rose.’ Now as she has matured into a woman of substance and depth, she is very much like the character she plays in ‘For the Boys.’ ”

According to Midler, her renaissance may not have bloomed had it not been for director Paul Mazursky and his “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.”

“Despite the current myth, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner did not find me face down in the gutter,” she chuckles, referring to the Disney executives. “At the time, I don’t think Richard Dreyfuss, Nick Nolte nor myself had particularly full schedules, but when Paul called I really thought I’d been rescued. Then Disney told me how much they were going to pay me. I couldn’t stop crying. I kept thinking, ‘My God, have I really fallen so low?’ ”

“Down and Out” was the first picture in her first three-picture deal for Disney. Then came another three-picture deal. Mazursky’s “Scenes From a Mall” was the first in a new four-picture deal with the company. Nonetheless, she has the option of taking her projects elsewhere once Disney passes on them, as was the case with “For the Boys” and the current film biography of legendary German chanteuse Lotte Lenye, currently in development at Tri-Star.

Of course, it hasn’t all been a cakewalk. “Beaches” was soundly trounced by the critics, and “Stella,” a remake of the 1937 Barbara Stanwyck classic “Stella Dallas,” was almost unanimously reviled. “Scenes From a Mall,” in perhaps the cruelest cut of all, was more or less ignored.

“I know people once thought, ‘There goes the stupidest woman in town’ when I signed that deal, but I really like the security of being with this studio. It’s familial. I suppose it is a very odd relationship in Hollywood because I don’t hate them. They have taken me under their wing, and I have stood up for them. I like this safety net because let me tell you, pal, it is rough out there. If I have a bomb, my price doesn’t drop and people still call me. Actually, it says in my contract that everybody still has to call me.”

There’s little doubt, of course, no matter how “For the Boys” fares, that the phones at All Girl Productions will continue to ring. At the moment, Midler is gearing up for two projects that have more in common with “The Rose” and “For the Boys” than with her previous Disney hits: the Lenye project and a film biography of big-band leader Ina Ray Hutton--though Midler acknowledges that the latter is far from ready.

“Poor Ina Ray,” she says. “We still don’t have a script for her. I hope I am not too old by the time we figure out the story.”

Such serious endeavors are indicative not only of Midler’s interest in exploiting her dramatic range but also of her interest in finding a film forum for her musical talents. It seemed to many that her immersion in Disney comedies was at the expense of her music, but Midler doesn’t believe she ever moved very far away from it.

“I find music so incredibly exciting,” she says. “Of course, there’s a certain kind of old music I really love, a kind of open-throated singing where the main point is to be another instrument with the band. I am not a vocal gymnast. What I do is bring a certain amount of character, maybe truth, to a lyric.”

Still, she doubts whether she will go back on stage and try to create shows such as “Clams on a Half Shell.”

“I think about it all the time. But my best friend and collaborator, Jerry Blatt, died of AIDS a couple of years ago, and he was so irreplaceable,” Midler says. “When we didn’t have a big fancy production, we had to rely on wit and cleverness . . . because all those shows were put together with spit and glue. It was so much fun, and now that he is gone, I just don’t know if it would be the same experience, if I could ever find anyone to come up to his standards.”

Not surprisingly, fighting AIDS is an important issue for a woman who has stopped counting the good friends she’s lost in just a few years. Midler is active in such organizations as the American Foundation for AIDS Research, Project Angel Food and AIDS Project L.A.--she won the latter’s Commitment to Life Award in September. Still, she is modest about her own contributions.

“I do what I can when called upon, but I am not an initiator except in my personal life when friends need money or support,” she says. “I am grateful that people think I do a lot, but no matter what anyone is doing right now, it is not enough. I have to admit at the moment I am so disheartened at the lack of leadership. And I really do blame the White House. As the saying goes, the fish stinks from the head. Who do they care about? Maybe a couple of people in Europe but certainly not Americans. If Watts went up in flames tomorrow and everyone died, I don’t think they’d care. Such an incredible lack of humanity and compassion. It’s appalling.”

These days Bette Midler gets her energy and strength from her marriage to Martin von Hassleberg, and her daughter, Sophie. She credits them with straightening out her priorities.

“I compartmentalize my life now. I don’t let my businesses flow into my personal life, where before it was all pretty much one thing. I am crazy about my child, and I don’t want my profession to affect her in any adverse way. I also work a lot faster now because I simply don’t have the time to go through some languorous process where I agonize over every song and every decision. Like I said, I’ve got a lot of cooking and cleaning to do.”