War Stories: Bette's Big Gamble in 'For the Boys'

''Oh, my goodness, me! This night is finally here! Big wigs, celebrities, high life, low life, and junketeers!''

Print cannot do justice to the way Bette Midler delivers a line. Radiating attitude like a flashing neon sign, she's at once sincere and sarcastic, ingratiating and impudent, both the flirtatious ingenue and the imperious grande dame. Eclectically outfitted in a strawberry-blond '60s beehive and an emerald green '50s cocktail dress slit to reveal toreador pants. Midler skitters across the stage of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences' Samuel Goldwyn Theatre.

The premiere of For the Boys — in which Midler plays a sort of song-and-dance version of Mother Courage, buoying the troops through three harrowing wars — has just ended, but Midler won't let the packed house go. Her audience includes a suit-rack full of executives from Twentieth Century Fox and a gossip column's worth of bold-faced names like Richard Gere and Alec Baldwin, and Midler is keeping them in their seats for a live encore. Backed by an 18-piece orchestra, she has just joyously wiggled her way through ''Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,'' one of her signature tunes ever since her legendary shows at New York's all-male Continental Baths in the early '70s. Next she introduces her Boys costar, James Caan, for a soft-shoe duet of ''Baby, It's Cold Outside'' (a number cut from the film); finally she turns warmly emotional with her Grammy-winning single ''Wind Beneath My Wings.'' Through it all, she keeps up that trademark patter, tailoring her lines to the knowing audience and paying particular attention to the press that has flown in from around the nation.

''Do you like your hotel rooms?'' she coos to the writers she hopes will carry her Boys message to the heartland. ''Do you all have cable? I'll be by later to fluff up your pillows.''

The line gets a big laugh, because fluffing their pillows is about the only thing Midler hasn't done to promote this movie. For the Boys was made to order for Midler — it was produced by her company, All Girl Productions — and its success is a personal mission for her. In addition to the usual gauntlet of print interviews, she invited Barbara Walters for a stroll through the gardens of her Coldwater Canyon home and belted out four numbers on The Tonight Show. And here she is working the stage like a trouper, as if to remind the Hollywood elite — one more time — of her many, sometimes contradictory, talents.

And yet, it hasn't worked. Despite her efforts, For the Boys, which was launched on over 1,300 screens, captured less than $6 million over the critical five-day Thanksgiving weekend. Like Robert Redford's Havana last year, this big-budget drama geared to grown-up audiences had failed to draw in the crowds during the competitive holiday season.

Sitting in All Girl Productions' modest offices on the Disney lot — ''our little hovel,'' she calls it — Midler suggests that Hollywood has never known quite what to make of her.

''I don't know how I'm perceived,'' she says. ''I'm not on anybody's list of the greatest singers around. I'm not on the list of great comics. And when it comes to the list of the great leading ladies, I'm never even mentioned.'' And yet her mix of talents positions her squarely in the tradition of the all-around entertainers that Hollywood once showcased so well.

Midler's first success was as the Divine Miss M, a gloriously camp act mixing big-band tunes, rock numbers, and dishy wisecracks, which brought her a best-selling album in 1972. But when Midler, still in her late 20s, began contemplating the move to movies, she knew that Miss M's flamboyance would never survive the closer scrutiny of the camera. ''Basically, what I was doing was a character that has always had a place in show business, and that's the Broad,'' she says. ''People always love a broad — someone with a sense of humor, someone with a fairly wicked tongue, someone who can belt out a song, someone who takes no guff. When I came up, there wasn't anyone like that. The last one, I'd have to say, was Sophie Tucker.

''In pictures, it's hard to find a part for that character, because that character has to admit to a certain amount of life experience. She's usually cast as an older person. Because if it's a very young person playing that part, then you're a slut.''

So when Midler made her starring screen debut, in The Rose (1979), it was in a role more closely attuned to her own generation — that of a self-destructive rock & roll singer.

''I loved her so much,'' Midler says with genuine affection of the Janis Joplin-inspired character that brought her her first, and to date only, Oscar nomination. ''I was so sorry that she died. I wished she could have gone on.''

But following up on the success proved difficult. Midler remembers Divine Madness, her 1980 concert film, as ''horrible. I had left my manager. I was destitute. And it was not a pleasant experience.'' The next one, Jinxed!, the 1982 black comedy that cast her as a murderous Las Vegas lounge singer, was even more of a botch. Without the careful nurturing that the old studios once lavished on idiosyncratic personalities like Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck, Midler was beginning to look like a one-shot wonder.

And then Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), in which director Paul Mazursky cast Midler as a nouveau riche housewife, brought just the sort of security she needed. Disney, which released the film, saw long-term potential in her brassy charm and signed her as its house comedienne.

But though she's found a congenial home on the Disney lot, where she is committed to three more movies, Midler is tired of reading that she owes everything to the Disney Career Resuscitation Plan. ''It's getting a little tiresome,'' she acknowledges. ''It's assumed this mythic proportion. I've complained about it to both (Walt Disney Co. chairman) Michael (Eisner) and (Walt Disney Studios chairman) Jeffrey (Katzenberg), and they always assure me that it will never happen again, but it invariably happens. It had a freshness in the beginning, but now it seems kind of conniving.''

Actually, there are those who question just how good Disney has been for Midler. Mark Rydell, who fought to cast her in The Rose and who directed For the Boys, thinks Disney has never gotten a grip on Midler's talents: ''In The Rose, Bette demonstrated to anyone who cared to watch that she was an actress of some importance,'' Rydell says. ''Since then, I don't think she has been given material that is equal to her gifts. In my estimation, with the exception of the Mazursky picture (Down and Out), very little of what she's done since has been really top quality.''