The Divine Mama Rose

Bette Midler passionately recalls the first time she heard the score of “Gypsy” 30 years ago.

“I remember I heard the overture,” she says warmly. “I never got over it. It was the most exciting overture I have ever heard. I would imagine the curtain going up and hearing these wonderful songs.

“I saw Angela Lansbury and I liked her. I thought Tyne Daly did a fabulous job. But I had my own ideas. My memory, my idealization of it was so extraordinary. I never thought I would get old enough to play it.”

Midler, 48, pauses and smiles. “But I did.”

And does she. The Divine Miss M makes the formidable Mama Rose her own in CBS’ lavish three-hour edition of the musical in its Sunday premiere. The production also features Cynthia Gibb in the title role, in addition to Peter Riegert, Ed Asner and Michael Jeter.

“Gypsy” is one of Broadway’s most beloved musicals. Loosely based on stripper Gypsy Rose Lee’s 1957 memoirs, the musical premiered on Broadway in 1959, with a book by Arthur Laurents. The memorable score, with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, includes such standards as “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” “Small World” and “Together Wherever We Go.”

The late Ethel Merman starred as Rose, the ambitious stage mother of child performers Louise Hovick, who later became known as Gypsy Rose Lee, and Baby June, who enjoyed a successful Broadway and movie career as June Havoc.

Though the Broadway production was a huge success, the 1962 film version with Rosalind Russell as Rose and Natalie Wood as Gypsy, proved to be a major artistic and commercial disappointment. But two Broadway revivals in 1974 and 1989 starring Lansbury and Daly, respectively, as Rose were enormous hits.

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On this day, “Evening Shade’s” Jeter joins Midler and company on a nondescript sound stage in Van Nuys, where working conditions aren’t ideal for filming the spirited “Mr. Goldstone” number.

The hotel room set has been built on a high platform directly under the studio’s hot lights. Director Emile Ardolino (“Sister Act,” “Dirty Dancing”), who died of AIDS last month at the age of 50, sits on the crowded platform, watching the proceedings on a video screen.

The prerecorded music begins: “Have an egg roll, Mr. Goldstone,” mouths Midler, as she drops one onto a plate and hands it to Jeter. The egg rolls get passed around, over and over, for the next four hours. Between takes, Midler watches the scene on playback to check out her performance.

At other times, Midler walks outside the set and asks to have the lyrically intricate song repeated. She sings along with her prerecorded voice to get the pacing and the phrasing. Then she’s ready to go back for yet another take.

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It’s now nearly two months since “Gypsy’s” completion and Midler is eating a bowl of soup and a plate of fresh fruit in a conference room at the Sheraton Universal Hotel.

Midler on a one-to-one basis is a presence far different from her larger-than-life stage persona. This day, her usually red tresses are now short, curly and blond. Petite and trim, she’s serious, thoughtful and speaks softly and with affection as she recalls the intense experience of making “Gypsy.”

“The music is wonderfully constructed and the book is wonderfully constructed because these echoes of what really set people on the path of their life is constant,” she says. “They never stop echoing throughout the piece.”

Had “Gypsy” been a theatrical film, it probably would have had a six-month shooting schedule. This being television, the schedule was whittled down to a grueling eight weeks. But the cast did get seven weeks to rehearse. “We insisted on it,” Midler says. “We insisted on it because it is really a Broadway show. We were doing a play; we were not doing a movie.”

Indeed, this production of “Gypsy” utilized Laurents’ original book. “When I first looked at it, I said, ‘Gee. Are you going to make any adjustments in this to make it more cinematic?’ ”

The producers told her the only way they were able to obtain the rights was to agree that the book would not be altered.

“So we had to do major memorization,” Midler recalls, “ and major blocking rehearsals. Once we started, we knew where we were going. Once we got on the set, we knew what all of our moves were. We didn’t have to stand there in the morning and block it as people usually do. So we saved a lot of time that way.”

Midler, who didn’t think the 1962 film was “that bad,” found Laurents’ book amazingly strong.

“Once you fall into the rhythm of it, it practically sings itself,” she says. “All the big speeches are rhythmic. You can hear the music in them and the characters are right there. Right on the page. If you sing it in the way it is meant to be sung--and I don’t mean songs, I mean the words. If you speak the way it is supposed to be spoken, you don’t have to hardly do anything at all.”

The cast, she says, really got into it.

“There were a lot of tears,” Midler says. “People just cried because they never get a chance to do (a musical). They came back from seeing ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’ and people went up to Emile and said, ‘I can’t thank you enough for letting me have this experience, because it was so magical that we could get to do this material and hear these songs and see this on film again.’ It was blessed.”

Gibb acknowledges that it was a “big deal” to do such a great musical and to work with the legendary Midler.

“It’s hard to say in a word what it’s like,” says Gibb. “She’s so talented and so powerful. She’s a very, very strong woman. She’s very sharp. She’s really the most powerful person I have ever worked off of. She gave me so much to work with.”

As part of her research, Midler read books on the vaudeville era depicted in “Gypsy.”

“The Marx Brothers lived hand to mouth,” she says. “They slept outdoors. They were practically homeless. Those who were really extraordinarily talented wound up in film. Most of it was not glamorous. There was the big time and there was the small time, which was those Podunk houses where you really had to struggle.”

Struggle and burning ambition are the keys to Midler’s interpretation of Rose. “I think every actress brings her inner soul to the part,” she confesses.

Midler recalls the time early in the production when Gypsy’s son, Erik Preminger, came by with film footage of his mother “doing all the things that she did, being on the road with Jackie Gleason, home movies he took of her on stage, when he was a kid. One of the things he showed us was this footage of Ethel Merman.”

It included Merman as a guest on Gypsy’s ‘60s daytime talk show. “Gypsy looked so fabulous,” Midler says. “She was this fabulous personality. Ethel said how much she enjoyed playing Mama Rose because she was so warmhearted.”

Midler was shocked. “I thought to myself, I don’t see her as warmhearted at all. From the minute I knew what the story was about, my perception of it was of someone madly ambitious because she herself as thwarted. I think that I felt that everything that came into her view she saw as a way to (an end).”

She even shared her feelings about Rose with Laurents. “I told Arthur I thought she was much darker than she had ever been (portrayed). I wanted to tell the truth, that the girls were really very young. (June) ran away when she was 13. Gypsy was on stage (as a stripper) when she was a 15-year-old girl. It’s appalling. I thought she was like a shark in a way. He agreed with me. That’s all I needed to validate what I was thinking.”

Still, Midler, the mother of a 7-year-old daughter, believes that Rose loved her children. “It’s just that she has this dream. She keeps talking about her dream. The music is wonderfully constructed and the book is wonderfully constructed because these echoes of what really set people on the path of their life is constant. They never stop echoing throughout the piece.”

Midler’s show-stopping climatic number, “Rose’s Turn,” proved to be her biggest hurdle. “I wanted it to be funny and I wanted it to be terribly sad. It’s like the gasp of a dying whale in a way. She drags her daughter kicking and screaming to be a star, and then her daughter throws her out and she has to confront what she had done.”

She knew the “beats” she wanted to make clear in the number. “I knew what I was trying to say. Whether I did it or not ... I think I did it all over the place. It is very hard to sustain because a lot of it is live. I had to sing a lot of it live. I was pretty bewildered, plus I had to do a lot of dancing. It was really hard. I think it’s OK.”

If “Gypsy” does more than OK in the ratings, Midler, whose acclaimed stage show arrives at the Universal Amphitheatre on Wednesday, would love to do another TV musical. But she doesn’t think it will start a new television trend. “You can always hope for it,” she says. “If it happens, it would be lovely. But I don’t expect anything to happen. I have lived too long to expect anything to happen and for people to change.”

The world, she laments, is whizzing by way too fast. “People don’t really take the time. ... They’re interested in other things now, more violent things. It’s a very violent world. It’s not the world we knew. It feels like there is no real humanity (on television). There is no real joy. There are only people screaming at each other. That’s all you get on MTV. This isn’t the world I want to live in. I’d love to live in a kinder, more beautiful world. I am a civilized person.”

“Gypsy” airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on CBS.