Trash talk has always been part of Bette Midler’s act.
In the 1970s, she performed at the Continental Baths in New York and toured the world with a variety act in which she played characters like Delores DeLago, a mermaid in a wheelchair who, in between musical numbers, makes fun of herself and the audience.
For years, Ms. Midler has been one of Donald Trump’s most reliable entertainment industry critics. She has called him a “parasite,” “a flibbertigibbet” and once referred to a public spat with him as her “personal Battle of the Bulge.” (He has called her an “extremely unattractive woman” and a “washed up psycho.”)
But in Brooklyn on a sunny fall afternoon, Ms. Midler was literally talking trash.
“Go on, put your finger in,” she said to the reporter standing beside her. “Doesn’t that smell great?”
Ms. Midler was ambling around a garden in Bushwick, surrounded by sunflowers, hibiscuses and tomato plants.
The pungent smell to which she was referring emanated from a nearby compost heap.
At her request, I stuck my index finger into the dirt, which was indeed warm. Then, with a finger that was covered in dirt, I looked around for something to wipe off with.
“Use your jeans, you silly man,” she said. “Or use my sweatpants.”
I did not use her sweatpants, which she said were designed by “no one.” (Her black blazer was Gucci, her charcoal sweater Dries Van Noten.)
Ms. Midler was holding forth in the garden in her capacity as the founder of the New York Restoration Project, an organization she started in 1995 and which has since built and maintained 52 green spaces around the city.
Many charities are started by celebrities. A much smaller number of those organizations last until their 30th anniversary, which is what Ms. Midler is celebrating this month with tours to her many gardens, a slew of late-night talk show appearances and her annual “Hulaween” gala, which took place at Cipriani South Street on Friday.
She went on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” a few weeks back and performed a parody of her chart-topping late-’80s power ballad “Wind Beneath My Wings,” with lyrics that extolled Mr. Colbert and bashed Mr. Trump yet again.
After that, she hit Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen,” gabbed about her six-decade career and played a game called “Let’s Restore or Please, No More,” about famous outfits she has worn over the years. (A black-and-white bustier from Live Aid was saved; the deep-plunging violet gown she wore to the Grammys in 1977 got the boot.)
At her benefit on Friday, Ms. Midler hit the stage in red Crocs and overalls — identical to the ones she had worn to plant many trees. In her arms were several boxes of Kleenex, all but one of which she threw into the audience and one of which she used as she wept while talking about the devotion of the staff, volunteers and donors.
The biggest moment of levity came as she recalled those early years and expressed gratitude to Rudy Giuliani, for helping the organization when he was mayor. “Back when he was sane!” she said.
Then, the fashion designer Michael Kors (dressed as a yellow taxicab) and the theater producer Jordan Roth (dressed as a Barneys shopping bag and Barneys window display) gave out awards for best costume.
And Ms. Midler closed out the evening doing a rendition of her 1973 smash “Friends,” with several fellow divas and Broadway stars.
In Bushwick the week before the event, Ms. Midler made it plain that vanity was not why she was again making herself this available to a willing entertainment press.
“Some years you’re lean and some years you’re fat,” she said of her charity’s coffers. “The last few years have been tough.”
In 2018, the organization received more than $9 million in donations and grants, according to its tax returns. Last year, for the year ending in December 2023, donations and grants were just shy of $6.8 million.
Gordon Davis, a former city parks commissioner, noted that many civic groups faced funding challenges during and after the pandemic.
And the fact that the New York Restoration Project’s gardens are scattered throughout some of the five boroughs’ poorest neighborhoods could make raising money more difficult.
“What she has done with that thing is remarkable,” Mr. Davis said of the organization.
Ms. Midler spent much of the past 30 years on the Upper East Side, in an airy triplex apartment on Fifth Avenue. She loved her view of the reservoir but put it up for sale in 2019 to the tune of $50 million, partly, she said, because her daughter, Sophie von Haselberg, had fled the nest and partly because the cost of maintaining it was so high.
Still, Ms. Midler’s working-class roots continue to define her sense of self. They have informed her work in parks all over the city, most of them in areas that are underserved (or were back when she got to them).
As she told The New York Times in 2003, “There were already enough rich stupid white women like me who could save their own parks.”
Ms. Midler grew up in Honolulu. Her father was a house painter; her mother was a seamstress and housewife. The building her family lived in during the 1950s was a converted Army barracks that had space for residents to garden.
One of Ms. Midler’s three siblings got into it. Eventually she did, too.
The N.Y.R.P.’s first efforts in the 1990s involved trash removal in Fort Tryon Park in Washington Heights.
In 2003, the organization completed a restoration of a five-acre park on Harlem River Drive that had previously been used as a dumping ground.
The park was named Swindler Cove in honor of Billy Swindler, a city garden supporter who died of AIDS in 1997. The city provided Ms. Midler’s organization with $10 million in funds for restoration of the site, which came to include waterfalls and a garden where students could plant fruits and herbs.
Ms. Midler completed the park by raising $2.3 million to have a boathouse from Norwalk, Conn., transported in.
From there, the organization branched out to projects in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx and on Staten Island.
In 2007, the city partnered with the N.Y.R.P. to plant a million trees. The person who championed the arrangement was Michael Bloomberg, whom Ms. Midler honored at her benefit in 2009.
“He was the best one for us,” she said last week, standing over a tomato patch.
She didn’t want to offer an opinion on the current mayor’s race, though. She said she votes in Dover Plains, N.Y., where she has a large estate with gorgeous gardens and chickens whose eggs she eats and whom she greets daily by saying, “Hello, girls,” as if they’re part of her stage act.
From the tomato patch, the tour continued, with a driver taking us to the next garden stop.
In the back seat, our conversation turned to the vehicle itself.
“It’s a friggin’ Volvo hybrid,” she said. “Sometimes we run out of charge because there’s not enough charging stations and I don’t like to get stuck on the Taconic.”
Which has happened.
“We have gotten stuck!” she said. “And sometimes you get to the charging stations and they’re broken. Or the line is so long you have to wait for hours and hours and hours. This country is not forward-thinking.”
Still, she isn’t about to trade the Volvo in for a gas guzzler — or another Tesla.
(In April, Ms. Midler posted on social media that she had sold a Tesla, writing “No longer do I have to drive a symbol of racism, greed and ignorance!”)
While the car veered left on Lafayette Avenue, Ms. Midler veered left, politically, in her remarks, as she talked about all the places in Europe and Asia where clean-energy infrastructure has been more successful. “You go to so many countries in the world, and the charging stations are there. It’s orderly.”
Then, she criticized the president for his administration’s axing tax breaks on electric vehicles and abandoning a $7 billion plan for solar energy.
She let out a deep sigh, and moved on to lighter subjects.
Ms. Midler showed off videos of the guinea fowl she was thinking about purchasing. “I mean, have you ever seen anything like this in your life?” she said.
She gossiped about the recent movies and Broadway shows she had seen and loved (“One Battle After Another,” “Death Becomes Her”) and recent plastic surgery trends.
“I can’t be judgmental about it,” she said. “I’ve had some stuff done. I’m not going to tell you what. Whatever Dolly Parton says, I say the same thing.” (Ms. Parton’s famous comment on the subject: “If something is bagging, sagging or dragging, I’ll tuck it, suck it or pluck it.”)
Then Ms. Midler gave her assessment of billionaires in space. It was not approving.
“The problem is they’re going with each other and they will never get along,” she said. “Can you imagine? You think there’s war here? Imagine what’s going to be out there. It’s ridiculous.”
Nor did she have praise for plutocrats who freeze their remains in hopes of getting another go at life in the future.
“I’m going to be wrapped in a shroud and I’m going to have a tree put over me,” she said, as the car pulled up to the next site. “Let the worms come.”
Jacob Bernstein reports on power and privilege for the Style section.
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