Midler and Minnelli
Midler and Minnelli
The surnames are eerily alliterative. And, as luck would have it, both appeared on the 2014 Oscar ceremonies, Midler as performer, Minnelli as audience member.
This is, perhaps, as good an occasion as any to contrast the careers of these legends. (In my unauthorized autobiography, Wet Firecrackers, I contrasted Liza’s more legendary mom, Judy Garland and Madonna).
The parallels are remarkable. Both Bette and Liza were born and bred in the gay culture. Bette started out performing with the expert assistance of Barry Manilow at the Continental Baths on Manhattan’s West Side. Liza married Peter Allen, a notoriously gay performer. Both had singing voices that could most charitably be described as mediocre. Both demonstrated superb acting skills for tragic-comedy. Liza clearly inherited her formidable comic timing, but regrettably not her vocal capacity, from her mother; the roots of Bette’s are less clear.
Liza’s star ascended more quickly, burned more brightly, and sank into the Icarian Sea more devastatingly than Bette’s which, if the Oscar performance is any barometer, is still gloriously aloft.
After Liza dazzled in Cabaret, New York, New York, and The Sterile Cuckoo, she not only rested on her laurels, she trampled on them. She seemed intent on duplicating the dissolute later years of her mom, forgetting that Judy had earned the right to do so by decades, not years, of disciplined devotion to her several crafts.
Bette built her career more methodically. While Liza was appearing most anywhere screaming into a microphone, Bette was producing stellar stage shows at Radio City Music Hall and elsewhere, exhibiting extraordinary stage craft and multi-layered entertainment.
The difference between discipline and indulgence was painfully evident last Sunday, when Bette, looking abfab, performed the socks off the by-now-very-tired The Wind Beneath My Wings, while Liza, looking a bit like a mortician’s work of art, was the deserving brunt of a hilarious riff by Ellen Degeneres.
The surnames are eerily alliterative. And, as luck would have it, both appeared on the 2014 Oscar ceremonies, Midler as performer, Minnelli as audience member.
This is, perhaps, as good an occasion as any to contrast the careers of these legends. (In my unauthorized autobiography, Wet Firecrackers, I contrasted Liza’s more legendary mom, Judy Garland and Madonna).
The parallels are remarkable. Both Bette and Liza were born and bred in the gay culture. Bette started out performing with the expert assistance of Barry Manilow at the Continental Baths on Manhattan’s West Side. Liza married Peter Allen, a notoriously gay performer. Both had singing voices that could most charitably be described as mediocre. Both demonstrated superb acting skills for tragic-comedy. Liza clearly inherited her formidable comic timing, but regrettably not her vocal capacity, from her mother; the roots of Bette’s are less clear.
Liza’s star ascended more quickly, burned more brightly, and sank into the Icarian Sea more devastatingly than Bette’s which, if the Oscar performance is any barometer, is still gloriously aloft.
After Liza dazzled in Cabaret, New York, New York, and The Sterile Cuckoo, she not only rested on her laurels, she trampled on them. She seemed intent on duplicating the dissolute later years of her mom, forgetting that Judy had earned the right to do so by decades, not years, of disciplined devotion to her several crafts.
Bette built her career more methodically. While Liza was appearing most anywhere screaming into a microphone, Bette was producing stellar stage shows at Radio City Music Hall and elsewhere, exhibiting extraordinary stage craft and multi-layered entertainment.
The difference between discipline and indulgence was painfully evident last Sunday, when Bette, looking abfab, performed the socks off the by-now-very-tired The Wind Beneath My Wings, while Liza, looking a bit like a mortician’s work of art, was the deserving brunt of a hilarious riff by Ellen Degeneres.
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Gordon Osmond on Writing
Based on my long career as a playwright, author of fiction and non-fiction, editor, book and play critic, and lecturer on English,I am establishing this new blog for short articles and comments to ass
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