Beaches, first published as a book in 1985 and adapted into a popular 1988 film that was remade in 2017, is now a Broadway musical. The book, about the lifelong, tumultuous friendship between flamboyant Cecilia “Cee Cee” Bloom, an aspiring Jewish actor, and quiet, proper Bertie White, who first meet in Atlantic City as 11-year-olds, was written by Iris Rainer Dart. The friendship between the two, the author and playwright said, was inspired by her own emotional connection to her cousin—and by the relationship between her mother and her aunt.

“Our mothers were sisters, and we saw how close they were,” said Dart, 82, in a Zoom interview from her home in California. “All the times that we were together, we would hear them laughing and joking and loving each other so much.”

Dart and her family lived in Pittsburgh, while her cousin lived in Miami Beach. “We rarely got together physically,” she said.

But they wrote regularly—much like Cee Cee and Bertie do in the book—and on those occasions when the families connected in person, the two were inseparable.

“We’d walk on the beach in Miami. We went to Atlantic City together,” Dart recalled. “We’d tell each other everything we were thinking and feeling.”

“And when we were in our 30s, she said to me, ‘When one of us dies, I hope it’s me first, because I couldn’t live in a world that didn’t have you in it.’ And I thought, ‘Wow! I have to write about it.’ And that became the inspiration for Beaches.”

Dart, who co-wrote the script for the musical adaptation with the late Thom Thomas, also created song lyrics for the show. The iconic ballad “Wind Beneath My Wings,” immortalized by Bette Midler as Cee Cee in the 1988 film, which also featured Mayim Bialik as an 11-year-old Cee Cee, is naturally part of the new production. The show is at the Majestic Theatre through September 6 and will then go on a national tour. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

After it was published, your book became a major best seller, yet originally you had had trouble generating interest from a publisher. Can you tell us about that?

My agent took three pages and an outline to various publishers. All of them said the idea was not commercial. Who cares about two little girls who meet on a beach in Atlantic City? So my agent called back and asked if I had any commercial ideas.

My first husband, Steve Wolf, started in the mailroom at MCA Records with three other guys who all became successful very quickly. So I thought I’d write a trashy Hollywood novel about it called The Boys in the Mailroom. Aaron Spelling bought it as a miniseries. That book was extremely successful, a dual main selection of the Literary Guild.

Once that happened, suddenly the story about two little girls who met on a beach in Atlantic City was very interesting to a lot of people.

Before you became a successful author, you were a successful television writer for The Sonny and Cher Show. In fact, wasn’t Cher another inspiration for Cee Cee?

I wrote 63 episodes over four seasons, and because I was the only woman writer for the first two years, the guys, who were all scared of Cher, would push me into her dressing room to find out what she’d talk about that week. It was easy for me. She was lovely and so funny. We were both going through divorces at the same time and raising kids alone. So we had a lot to talk about. She had this giant personality. So, yes, when I started writing Beaches, she was really my inspiration for Cee Cee.

Some assume a play goes straight from the page to Broadway. But Beaches has taken more than a decade to develop, right?

You do the math. I’m 82, and we celebrated my 70th birthday at the Signature Theatre in Virginia, which featured an earlier version of the musical. So it opened 12 years ago. Now we have a different composer. A different director. A different everything. I’ve rewritten the script 1,000 times. I was a novelist. I was a comedy writer. But to really sit down and pull apart a play and put it back together again, I learned that from Thom Thomas.

The play hews more closely to the book than the film and retains much of its Yiddishkeit. And this new musical is not your first foray on the stage. In your previous musical, The People in the Picture, about a grandmother who is a former Yiddish theater star in Poland, describes her life in the theater and the Holocaust to her granddaughter. Tell us a little bit about that show.

The other musical I wrote is called The People in the Picture, which had a brief run at the Roundabout Theatre in 2011. It began when Bette Midler called and said, ‘Iris, write me a musical.’ I had no idea for one. But when my daughter was 4 or 5, I joined a synagogue in the Carmel Valley. I even became a teacher of young kids at the synagogue, and as a result, I was on every Jewish mailing list—including one that was a catalogue of Yiddish films.

I watched all the Yiddish films, Yidl Mitn Fidl, and all of Yiddish actress Molly Picon’s films. I didn’t need subtitles. I understood the Yiddish. I love Yiddish. It’s such a wonderful language with built-in humor. So I brought Bette some of the original Yiddish music. This is a girl who grew up in Hawaii and hardly knew anything about Yiddishkeit. She wept when she heard the music. However, Bette ultimately did not appear in the play. The star was Donna Murphy, who is just out of this world, a wonderful actress.

I’m trying to re-do The People in the Picture…because I love Yiddish.

How did Judaism infuse your upbringing?

I was brought up in a Jewish household in Pittsburgh. Both my parents were immigrants. My mother, Rose, was from Ukraine. My father, Harry, was from Lithuania. And in my home, they spoke more Yiddish than English. When I was much younger, we belonged to an Orthodox temple that later became Conservative. I had a bat mitzvah. But my father was a social worker in a settlement house, so the idea of having an expensive party was never in the mix.

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Curt Schleier, a freelance writer, teaches business writing to corporate executives.