1979 • Behind the Songs
A disco record about married men, cut twice in one spring.
By the spring of 1979, disco was the weather — you could not step outside without getting caught in it. Bette Midler, who had built her legend in the anything-goes intimacy of the Continental Baths, decided to step directly into the storm. The result was Thighs and Whispers, her most disco-oriented album, and its second single was “Married Men”: a glittering, string-swept dance record about the oldest story in the book — husbands who stray, and the women who know it. She sang it with a wink the size of Studio 54. It was a risk only a singer completely sure of her audience would take.
The song began life as a movie theme. “Married Men” was written by Dominic Bugatti and Frank Musker as the title song for the 1979 film The World Is Full of Married Men, directed by Robert William Young. They gave the tune exactly what a disco-era film theme needed: a strutting beat, a chorus built for repetition, and a lyric with a raised eyebrow. What nobody planned was that the song would be recorded twice, almost at once — setting up one of the spring’s quieter chart races.
Bonnie Tyler got there first — or so she has claimed. Her version of “Married Men” was released on May 11, 1979, on RCA Records, and the Welsh singer has said she recorded the song before Midler did. But Midler’s version, cut for Atlantic and released the same month, is the one that carried the muscle of Arif Mardin’s production and the momentum of a full album campaign. Tyler’s single reached number 35 in the United Kingdom and number 19 in Spain; Midler’s would do its business an ocean away.
Midler cut her version at Atlantic Recording Studios in New York, with Arif Mardin producing — the same Mardin who was overseeing her Thighs and Whispers album sessions. The single ran 3:35; the 12-inch stretched to 7:58 for the clubs. The B-side was “Bang, You’re Dead,” written by Ashford & Simpson — a title that, sequenced next to “Married Men,” suggested somebody at Atlantic had a sense of humor about the whole enterprise.
Thighs and Whispers arrived in October 1979 as Midler’s fullest embrace of disco: eight tracks, recorded at Atlantic Recording Studios, with Mardin producing throughout. The album peaked at number 43 on the Billboard 200 and reached number 21 in Australia — respectable numbers for an artist whom rock critics had never quite known what to do with. “Hang On in There Baby” had been the first single, reaching number 70 in the United States; “Married Men” was the second; “My Knight in Black Leather” would follow in 1980. Eight tracks, three singles, one unmistakable message: the Divine Miss M could work a dance floor.
On the charts, “Married Men” did exactly what a well-made disco single was supposed to do: it went everywhere at once, without dominating anywhere. In the United States it reached number 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 — the same peak, by coincidence, as her debut single “Friends” six years earlier — and number 32 on the Disco Top 80, with number 46 on Cash Box, number 65 in Record World, and number 39 in its Disco File survey. It traveled, too: number 37 in Australia, number 81 on Canada’s RPM chart. Not a smash, but a genuinely international record — the kind of single that kept a career warm between bigger moments.
The trade press heard a singer in her element. Billboard called it a “polished disco record” that “best emphasizes the singer’s energy” — a neat summary of what Mardin had done: he had not tried to turn Midler into a disco automaton but had polished the act she already had until it reflected the mirror ball. In Record World, reviewer Brian Chin went further, noting the full orchestral support Mardin had assembled and singling out the song’s punchline — “They do it, they do it” — as the hook around which the whole record turned. Chin heard hints of “Sinner Man” and even of Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” in the groove, though he added that the single lacked a bona fide disco mix of the kind that had powered Cher’s “Take Me Home.” The comparison was telling: in the spring of 1979, every disco record was being measured against every other one.
What to listen for is the tension Midler builds into the performance. The lyric is a warning — married men will stray, and the singer knows it — but she delivers it as a celebration, riding Mardin’s strings with the timing of a comedian who trusts her audience to get the joke. The “They do it, they do it” refrain lands like a punchline repeated until the whole room is in on it. It is a cabaret singer’s solution to a disco problem: when the beat threatens to make everything anonymous, put the personality up front and let the orchestra chase it. That is the whole trick.
Disco’s commercial peak was already cresting — by year’s end the backlash would be in full swing — but “Married Men” captured Midler at a moment of perfect poise between her club past and her pop present. The film it was written for, The World Is Full of Married Men, has faded; the record has not, quite. It remains the sound of an artist who could take the most formula-driven music of her era and bend it, by force of personality, into something unmistakably hers. Married men, the song insists, will do what they do. Bette Midler, the record proves, would do what she did: make it swing, make it glitter, and make sure everybody got the joke.