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

On the windswept crest of a desolate hilltop 30 miles north of Los Angeles one April day, Rydell is coaching several hundred extras at a replica of a Vietnam firebase. Dixie Leonard, the singer Midler plays, has reluctantly agreed to rejoin Caan's Eddie Sparks for one final, front line tour, but by this point she is a 60ish skeptic, weary of flag-waving and suspicious of calls to honor. ''The humanity you all have is what I need,'' Rydell tells the crowd. ''Let her hypnotize you guys. It's not hard when Bette sings. Give yourself over to it.'' Midler makes her way to the improvised stage, tosses off a few timeworn jokes, and then, singing with a prerecorded musical track, slips into a wistful version of the Beatles' ''In My Life.'' The extras are indeed mesmerized: They're supposed to remain pensively silent as she finishes and instead they burst into applause, blowing the take altogether.

That Midler has Dixie's moves down pat shouldn't come as any surprise. In many ways the part is a throwback to her days as the brassy Miss M. Midler and her producing partners, Bonnie Bruckheimer and Margaret South, spent more than six years developing the musical epic. ''Bette has such a huge range,'' testifies South, ''that you need a big picture, with a big scope, to use everything that she can do.''

When Midler first proposed the idea to Disney, though, the studio passed, leery of a period musical that might look like ancient history to younger moviegoers. Fox took on the risk of mounting the $40 million film. ''I think it was very brave of Fox,'' says Caan. ''What's so fresh about it for me is the fact that it's an old-fashioned movie.''

Unfortunately, Fox's bravery doesn't appear to be paying off. For the Boys has received high marks from moviegoers who've actually seen it: Cinemascore, which surveys audience response, reports that the movie rates a resounding A- from its viewers. By comparison, The Addams Family, a Thanksgiving-weekend smash with nearly $28 million, scored a lackluster B. The problem is that For the Boys has also attracted an older audience — only 15 percent of the ticket buyers during its opening weekend were under the age of 25 — and older audiences don't rush to the theaters in the same big numbers that younger moviegoers do. Observes Neal Jimenez, who cowrote the movie's early drafts with his partner, Lindy Laub, ''I keep hearing from a lot of my friends that their parents have seen it.''

Opinions vary as to what might have been done differently. Nervously approaching the movie's release, Fox executives had urged Rydell to trim the movie's 2-hour-40-minute length, but he resisted. Jimenez argues that the harder-edged version he wrote, which ended with Dixie delivering a fiery speech amid the wreckage of Vietnam, might have played better than the sentimental reunion that writer Marshall Brickman added to the final screenplay.

The movie's disappointing reception only makes its star's future that much more uncertain. ''This is a really strange time for me,'' Midler confessed on the eve of its opening. ''The studio doesn't have anything for me to do. I don't really have any sense at all about what's coming. I don't have much of a plan. I'm a big believer in serendipity.''

Certainly, that belief has paid off in her personal life, which began to settle down seven years ago when, after a six-week courtship, she married Martin Von Haselberg, a commodities trader and part-time performance artist. With the arrival five years ago of their daughter, Sophie, Midler happily settled into a comfortable domesticity. ''I love my house and my garden. I love to sew and I bake. It keeps my feet on the ground. I really need that,'' she says. ''And I have a great husband. When he's working, I pick up the slack, and when I'm working, he picks up the slack''

For the Boys may yet earn Midler vindication: She's a top contender for an Oscar nomination. And the film's soundtrack album is in the Top 40. Still, the movie's commercial reception could make it harder for her to move forward with any of the other musical biographies (bandleader Ina Ray Hutton, German songstress Lotte Lenya) that she's been developing.

Midler's even trying to find a project that might team her with Barbra Streisand. One possibility: A film version of James Kirkwood's Diary of a Mad Playwright, a backstage account of touring a play with two feuding actresses. Though the press keeps insisting on pitting For the Boys against Streisand's upcoming The Prince of Tides, Midler dismisses the subtly sexist notion that the two of them are necessarily cutthroat competitors. ''About a year ago, we had lunch and chatted,'' Midler confides. ''I said, 'You know, you ought to sing and be funny. You're so funny and you sing so great.' And she sort of kicked the rug and said, 'Well, if you find something, you let me know.'''

At her All Girls Productions, Midler used to joke that the company motto was ''We hold a grudge!'' But as she has weathered the travails of maintaining a career and as her own home life has grown ever more satisfying, Midler has mellowed. She now says of her production company, ''We just keep plodding along.'' Since her subversive sense of humor is always lurking nearby, Midler can't help but laugh, ''It builds character,'' she says. ''It builds character.''