Hard Work if You Can Get It

Is it funny?

After the dialogue has been retooled, the famous guest stars hired, and the overhead lights on the sound stage adjusted to go easy on Bette Midler’s nasal-labial lines (those dreaded little grooves in the skin between nose and mouth), the bottom line for the movie, stage and recording star making her debut in a comedy series is this: Is it funny?

“We’re interested in big laughs. We want yucks,” Midler says in that voice of hers that combines the playful authority of a first-grade teacher and the lilt of a Broadway singer.

“I said, ‘Boys and girls’ “--she means the show’s writers--” ’we’re going for guffaws here, we’re not going for titters, OK?’ ”

So that’s why one Thursday afternoon, the day before the filming of the fifth episode of the new CBS series “Bette,” she spends an hour figuring out how to lodge a cell phone under the front of her costume.

This is Bette playing herself--or a version of herself: a funny, smart, neurotic, high-maintenance actress fretting about aging and not being taken serious. She uses her own first name but never mentions her last. (Overkill, perhaps.)

In this episode, Midler has inveigled the director of a production of “Hamlet” into casting her so she can prove that she is a serious actress. While she’s onstage rehearsing “Hamlet,” her stashed cell phone will ring, vexing her “Hamlet” co-star Tim Curry. (That would be Tim Curry playing Tim Curry, of course.)

Girded into petticoats and a tight bodice, she goes wide-eyed with terror at the cue for the phone. Curry plays fuming. “Voice mail will pick it up,” Midler says brightly. “I’m screening.”

She jumps up and down, shimmying enough to make her breasts nearly jiggle out of the dress. (Though she is newly skinny, her famous bosom--she has a joke about it in the pilot--remains ample.) She bends over, frantically pulling up her skirts and capturing the cell phone that has supposedly made its way down the front of her dress. She whips the phone out, accidentally bashing Curry in the groin as he stands next to her. He lets out a growl of pain while she stares mortified.

The crew laughs at the comic ballet. But Midler, stone-faced, has already mentally moved on to the next try. “I can get the phone around to my back,” she says, and suggests Curry reach down her back to retrieve the pesky ringing phone. Someone tells her the full costume will have a neck ruff that will make this impossible. She scotches that idea.

Back to the phone in the front. She jumps, she shimmies, all to make it look as if she’s coaxing the phone down the front of her dress. Her longtime choreographer, Toni Basil, observes. (Yes, in addition to being a choreographer, she recorded the 1982 hit song “Mickey.”) Midler called her the night before at 10 p.m. to discuss this scene. “Just do the double jump,” Basil suggests.

Midler tries several more times. She wants to make a note.

“Does anyone have a pencil?” she asks. Everyone reaches for a pencil to offer.

She tries the routine again, eliciting laughs each time. She frowns. A hank of blond hair has worked its way out of her ponytail and over one ear. Her hazel eyes are covered by dark-blue tinted glasses. Devoid of makeup, she looks like the plain-faced, 54-year-old businesswoman that she is. (In addition to starring in the series, she serves as one of several executive producers.) Later, when the cameras are rolling, she will worry in some detail about how she looks on film, but at the moment, her face is not her preoccupation. The cell phone is. Could they Velcro it to her leg so she can whip it out quickly?

Finally, director Andrew Weyman, who has been watching quietly, making suggestions here and there, points at Midler and offers his most assertive direction in the last hour. “Go to lunch,” he says.

She turns to Curry and hugs him. Curry leaves, but Midler walks through the scene by herself one more time, conferring with the prop master one more time about the phone. He reassures her he can make the phone stay in place.

She nods. “It’ll work,” she says, sounding unconvinced.

*

“Oh my God, this is so hard,” says Midler the following Monday during her lunch break. She sits in a cozy bungalow office belonging to her longtime producing partner, Bonnie Bruckheimer, on the Culver Studios lot, next door to the sound stage where they film her show. An illness last January (“I had amoebas or parasites”) left her 25 pounds thinner, and she wants to keep it that way. Clad in jeans, a cardigan sweater and a man-sized, rose-gold Rolex watch, she devours soup and crackers and salad, and leaves uneaten the dumplings and spring rolls on her plate.

“Candice”--that would be her pal, Candice Bergen, star of the long-running sitcom “Murphy Brown”--”warned me. She said they keep you hopping that first year. This is rough. It’s an enormous amount of work. And this stuff is very ambitious--I think. Last week, there was a 10-page scene--and a song and a dance and a wig and an Elizabethan ruff. I thought I was going to die.”

Filming a show a week is warp speed for Midler, more accustomed to the studious pace of a movie shoot. The sitcom films on Friday nights before an audience at the Culver City studios starting around 6:30 p.m. and ending in the wee hours, driven by Midler’s desire to get it as perfectly funny as she can. It is a quest that the cast, crew and writers share. They’re all struggling to find the right balance of elements that will make the show sing. They’re not indulging a diva, they say. They’re helping the star who wants the work to be great.

“She always wants to do it one more time because she thinks she can do it better--and she can,” says co-executive producer Janis Hirsch. “I’ve never seen an actress work so carefully.”

The director knows how much is at stake. “I never want to say, ‘Good enough,’ ” says Weyman. “Her whole image is on the line. I’m going to do everything I can to protect her.”

It’s not uncommon for freshman sitcoms to film or tape late into the night. Still, the producers and writers routinely hold a pool on when they will wrap for the night. (Bets are $5. Even Bruckheimer, another executive producer of the show, participates.) Coordinating producer John Kenney won the $120 pool the night of the “Hamlet” show--his entry was 1:11 a.m.

Ask a producer, a cast member, a guest star how they feel about Midler having a strong hand in the show, and they all universally say, “Well, the show is called ‘Bette.’ ”

“I know! They say that to me too!” says Midler, acting like she’s not sure what to make of all the deference.

After three decades, Bette Midler is nothing less than an icon of show business. Often bawdy, always brassy, she is a peerless performer on tour, a box-office comedy star in movies. She’s earned a Tony and been nominated for an Oscar (for her performances in “The Rose” and “For the Boys”).

The closest she’s come to conquering TV was the night she serenaded Johnny Carson on his next-to-last “Tonight Show.” It was an unforgettable performance--and won her an Emmy--but it doesn’t compare to the daunting task she’s taken on with “Bette.”

Certainly, the sitcom has a lot going for it: proven writers, talented cast, a blanket of publicity. If you haven’t seen the TV promos or the billboards plastered with pictures of Midler that airbrush about two decades off her, then you live on another planet.

Most of all, the show has Bette. Smartly, she chose to play herself--a successful, neurotic, funny actress who frets about aging and banters with her doting husband, dry-witted manager and tart-tongued musical accompanist. And she gets to sing and dance. (Her new CD, “Bette,” featuring the show’s theme song, is out Tuesday.)

Midler adored Lucille Ball. She thought she never made a wrong move. But despite her pratfalls, Midler’s comedy is of a different age. It’s more sophisticated. It’s as if she’s winking at the audience sometimes.

There is something inherently funny about Bette Midler sashaying out on stage playing Bette Midler playing Gertrude in “Hamlet,” sparring cattily on her cell phone with an unseen Sally Field, her supposed rival. “Sally, you’re home! What’s the matter--not working?” asks Midler, her voice curling deliciously around the question. (The rivalry, says Midler, is just a gag. Field beat out Midler for the Oscar the year she was nominated for “The Rose.”)

But the landscape of television is littered with the bodies of downed movie stars trying to leap through the small screen in search of an audience. For some reason, they seem to have a particularly difficult time translating themselves to TV. And viewers don’t really care how hard the stars worked all those days on set because they, themselves, worked just as hard at their jobs for a fraction of the money. So their bottom line becomes the same as Bette Midler’s: Am I laughing?

Unfortunately, Midler doesn’t know how that question will be answered until the show debuts Wednesday. All she can go by are the laughs of the studio audience and her friends and colleagues. She’s already had pilot-episode viewing parties in her home. Some people she made climb into her bed and pull up the covers before they were allowed to watch. “Because that’s how people mostly watch TV,” she says. Reviews varied. Atlantic Records mogul Ahmet Ertegun (she didn’t make him get in her bed) told her it was too “inside” the world of entertainment. Someone else told her it wasn’t inside enough.

She dismisses the notion that the show could be too inside in an age of hundreds of channels of television and stacks of entertainment magazines. “Most stand-up comics, that’s all they talk about is TV,” she says. “You say to yourself, don’t they have a life? Don’t they ever get out into the world and see what’s going on?”

But since Midler’s life is lived in Hollywood--figuratively; she has a house here but spends most of her time in New York--she will plumb that and exaggerate it as much as she can. She has corralled a number of celebrity friends into making appearances on her show. Danny DeVito appeared in the pilot and Curry was in the “Hamlet” episode. Dolly Parton will show up in a future episode. Midler is trying to get Oprah to come on for an episode about her book club.

“It’s very weird,” says Curry during a break in rehearsals. “They said, ‘You’ll be playing yourself.’ And I said, ‘Who is that?’ ”

Some celebrities shy away when she calls.

“I needed a famous person to come and fart,” Midler says.

(The guest star didn’t really have to fart, just play someone who did.)

“Candice Bergen said, ‘I wanted to do it but I ran it by my people and they didn’t embrace the idea.’ I wanted to say, ‘Well, why not?’ ” Midler chuckles.

She tried Jack Nicholson.

“I called him up and he was very amused but he wouldn’t do it. I said, ‘Jack! You’re just up the road, come on down!’ He said, ‘I don’t do TV.’ I said, ‘Well, you don’t do TV, yet, babe!’ ”

She laughs the way people who’ve already changed their lives laugh at people who think they’re never going to change.

So why exactly is Midler doing TV? Why does any movie actress over 40 do TV--because there are fewer roles.

“There are no movie roles,” she corrects. “But I still have a lot to offer.”

Of course, the answer is more complicated than that.

She doesn’t need the money, although she likes having substantial funds for her philanthropic causes. She’s no longer involved in AIDS fund-raising. “All my friends died,” she says. “I did my part and then I moved on. I wanted to get into an area where there was absolutely nobody.” Now, that’s preservation in New York City.

Midler has movie projects in various stages of development around town, but that’s a slow process. Besides, her movie career has always been an erratic thing. Her hits have mainly been comedies that often cast her as one shrewish woman or another. Her more dramatic roles have often been either box-office or critical failures. Increasingly, television is a medium that lets women (and men, for that matter) be something more than a cardboard character. Although, generally, that depth can’t be found in sitcoms. At least in Midler’s case, she gets to play herself.

“It isn’t exactly like my life but it’s enough like my life that it’s very odd,” she muses. Even her house--which, she loves pointing out, is in the wannabe Beverly Hills neighborhood called Beverly Hills Post Office--is replicated down to the multicolored glass knobs on the kitchen cabinet.

“My husband didn’t think it was anything like our house,” she says. “He keeps saying, ‘Where’s the staff?’ ”

The main reason she wanted to do a sitcom, she says, was so she could spend more time with her husband, Martin von Haselberg, a fine arts photographer and occasional financial trader, and her daughter, Sophie, 13, who has just started her freshman year in high school in New York. The idea was that Midler would do the sitcom in New York and have decent hours. It turns out that at the moment, she has neither. She toils into the night, and the show started filming too late to put together a crew in New York. But Midler was committed, so she decided she would do the show in Los Angeles its first season.

She brushes off the possibility that failure would wound her.

“OK, let me explain to you,” she says. “I’m up against Regis.” Her show, at 8 p.m. on Wednesdays, airs opposite the first half-hour of the juggernaut “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”

“If I fail, what does that mean? Regis is an hour. Do the math. Two half-hours per network. There are three other networks. If I go down, there are five other shows with me.”

Arguably, there are six broadcast networks these days, but it’s such a great image--Midler going down with this motley crew of Wednesday-night characters.

*

Midler is rehearsing the finale of the “Hamlet” episode, which has her singing and dancing with the Harlettes, the women who accompany her during her concert tours. From her office, Bruckheimer can watch the closed-circuit monitors of the four cameras they use to film the show. As the filmed rehearsal ends, the crew is applauding, but Midler stands onstage shaking her head ruefully.

“Oh, nothing is ever good enough,” says Bruckheimer, chuckling, as she explains Midler’s reaction.

Bruckheimer started thinking about Midler in TV as early as five years ago. But it was only after Jeffrey Lane--who was an executive producer during the early years of “Mad About You”--brought them a pilot script earlier this year that the show became a reality. “I told her, ‘If you do a show, you really should play yourself because if you do anything else, you’re not going to use everything,’ ” says Lane.

Midler and Bruckheimer had told him some stories about their professional lives together. Then when he produced the script, “it was as if he had been a fly on the wall,” said Bruckheimer. “It captured an exaggerated version of our lives. I took it to Bette and she laughed out loud.” Lane (who is the show runner), Bruckheimer, director Weyman and Midler are all executive producers of the show.

The Midler quirks--a certain amount of stage fright, committing herself to projects she doesn’t really want to do--are all based in real life.

“Sometimes she can’t say no to people who ask her to do things and she’ll want me to get her out of it,” says Bruckheimer.

Has she asked to get out of “Bette” yet?

“Oh, every day!” Bruckheimer says with a laugh.

Hey, it’s an episode.

“That’s the last episode of ‘Bette’!” Midler says later. “Get me out of ‘Bette’!”

*

It’s Friday night and the audience is in place. These are Bette fans, by and large. Some have seen her on tour, and they’re wearing Bette T-shirts. They applaud everything she does. But she never interacts with them except for an occasional grateful smile after the director calls, ‘Cut.’ ” “You’re not supposed to play to the audience, but you have to be aware of them enough so that you use their laughs for timing,” Midler says later. Even between takes, she doesn’t schmooze with the audience. She’s too busy drilling the lines into her head.

Bewigged and corseted, she and Curry go through the “Hamlet” scene. The choreography is smooth, the lines punched just right. They do two takes.

Then Midler walks over to the TV monitors to watch the playback of what she just did, what she spent hours the day before rehearsing and worrying over. She sits expressionless watching the monitor, which is divided into four small squares, each showing what each camera has filmed.

Around her cluster the writers, the director and Bruckheimer, waiting expectantly for her reaction. Even the studio audience has located her downstage and watches intently.

“OK, turn it off,” she says when she’s done. She walks away.

“Does she like it?” one of the writers asks Bruckheimer.

She pauses. “I like it!” Bruckheimer says cheerfully.

Actually, Weyman has asked Midler to stop scrutinizing the playbacks. She tends to watch, then do the scene again and embellish, making it too big. Weyman ends up picking the earlier takes in the editing room.

“She’s one of the most interesting blends of insecurity and courage as an actor that I’ve ever seen,” says Weyman, who should know: He’s directed episodes of “Roseanne,” “Ellen” and “Cybill.” He says, with a chuckle, “My agent told me, ‘You have a reputation for being able to work with difficult people.’ I said, ‘Do me a favor, get me a different reputation.’ ”

*

Does Midler have any regrets that she took on this show?

“Major!” she shouts. “Major, major. I mean, I hope it’s a hit. But Bonnie and I should go to a home for abused women. We’re both like--’What the heck is this?’ ”

Television, she says, is like a machine. “I like everybody in it, I’ve met lovely, lovely people. But’s it’s a huge, huge machine that is absolutely ruthless and you just have to run to keep up.”

She turns fatalistic. “Some things are hits and some things are misses. You go on. The idea is to last and to do your work,” she says. “This is the road I took and this is what happened once I got on the path. Maybe another fork in the road will come. That’s what it’s about. It’s not about getting stopped and having nervous breakdowns and slashing your wrists because you didn’t get a job.”

Interesting that she should mention such a thing, since 16 years ago, during a lull in her career, she famously suffered what she described as a nervous breakdown. . . .

“It’s an episode of the show,” she says with a smug grin. “I will be addressing it. It’s going to be hilarious. You’ll see.”

*

“Bette” premieres Wednesday at 8 p.m. on CBS.