Bette Midler Shares Photo From Her 1984 Las Vegas Wedding She Never Saw Until 5 Years Ago

Bette Midler’s wedding to husband Martin von Haselberg might have been 36 years ago, but she only saw a photo from the happy day five years ago! The iconic performer shared details of her intimate Las Vegas wedding on Tuesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, looking back nearly four decades to the day she said “I do.”

“My wedding was two people — my husband and me — and, of course, the Elvis impersonator that married us,” Midler told Kimmel during a video interview Tuesday. “We eloped to Vegas so we had nobody except the Elvis impersonator.” Midler and von Haselberg’s 1984 wedding was a last-minute decision after the Tony winner popped the question to her husband-to-be.

“He had a tape of Nino Rota music from Juliet of the Spirits and we walked down the aisle and the Elvis impersonator did the ceremony and we walked out,” she recalled of the ceremony. “And the funny thing is that there were no cell phones, of course, in 1984 and we had no pictures.” Midler went on to share that it was only about five years ago that she and her husband laid eyes on a photo from their wedding day. “Apparently there was a photographer there and when the Starlight Chapel closed its doors, which was about five years ago, they sent us the pictures,” Midler said, showing the photo to Kimmel on screen. “We’d never seen the pictures!”

Midler’s daughter, Sophie von Haselberg, followed in her parents’ footsteps when she got married in June 2020 in an intimate ceremony amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “In the midst of COVID, a piece of $h!t president, and the power and poignancy of the Black Lives Matter movement, I got married!” she wrote on Instagram at the time. “Because honestly, WHY NOT. It’s great to have cake smeared on your face by someone you love! And hot DAMN do I love this man!”

Midler said on Tuesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live that she was thrilled to be one of the 11 people in attendance at the ceremony, doing the flowers as her husband handled the food. “It was so sweet, so sweet,” the mother of the bride shared, revealing that she initially thought her daughter was going to say she was pregnant when she sat her parents down to break the big wedding news. Asked if she lent her famous voice to the nuptials in any way, Midler laughed, telling Kimmel, “She spent the first five years of her life saying, ‘Mommy, don’t sing!’”