26 November, 2014

Advice from 68 year old veteran- Trust your talent. You don’t have to make a whore out of yourself to get ahead.

Bette Midler has been in a showbiz for half a century. The 68-year-old star opened up about today’s generation of musicians. She spoke candidly in an interview with telegraph.


“Women now, they [have to] pose”. “They don’t want those ugly pictures of them on the internet, and I don’t blame them. It’s like a war! It’s poisonous, totally toxic." “If you get on that red carpet, you better be prepared for the results, truly.”
About the pornification of pop music. “It’s terrible! It’s always surprising to see someone like Ariana Grande with that silly high voice, a very wholesome voice, slithering around on a couch, looking so ridiculous. I mean, it’s silly beyond belief and I don’t know who’s telling her to do it. I wish they’d stop. But it’s not my business, I’m not her mother. Or her manager. Maybe they tell them that’s what you’ve got to do. Sex sells. Sex has always sold.”
“Well whatever strictures there were have fallen apart. And now it’s whatever you feel like doing you can do. I mean, apparently people really like to pretend they’re having sex. They really like to slap each other’s butts.” 
“I mean, don’t ask me. It’s beyond me. I’m too old. I don’t know what the end game is going to be. I don’t know where you go from all that sex in your twenties. I don’t know how you sustain it.” If she had any advice for a young woman wanting to break in to show business today, it would be this: “trust your talent. You don’t have to make a whore out of yourself to get ahead. You really don’t.”

“The whole world has become disposable,” she says, concern writ large over her small face. “People use things once, then they throw it away. I grew up really frugal. It was the end of the war and people didn’t have anything. They had to take care of what they had. They had to polish their shoes. I mean, you say polish your shoes to someone nowadays and they don’t know what you’re talking about!” She doesn’t let plastic in her house. All the water bottles in the room are glass.


Her work ethos is equally old school. “Now you feel entitled to it without working for it. You come out of college and think 'well, I can do anything’. No one is willing to learn the game and plunge in before they are a star.”
It was a wonderful life,” she says, “I did good with it. I didn’t shame anybody. I didn't mortify anybody. I didn’t take my clothes off. I wasn’t caught in flagrante. The fact that they never caught me is really kind of the thrill.”

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