How Bette Davis Reacted to Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes”
With its lilting synthesizer melody, hand-clap percussion and raspy vocals, Kim Carnes‘ 1981 hit “Bette Davis Eyes” is immediately recognizable. Used to great evocative effect in ’80s-set TV shows and films like American Horror Story: Hotel and 200 Cigarettes, this song instantly transports the listener back to that era, when this number one hit and Grammy Song of the Year was omnipresent.
But unlike many other tunes about movie stars — for instance, Bauhaus’ 1982 “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” — this song’s subject was still alive when it was released. In fact, Bette Davis wasn’t just alive, she was still working frequently; she had a major role in the 1980 Disney fantasy film The Watcher in the Woods (pictured below), and appeared in the made-for-TV movie Family Reunion just a few months after the song was released.
Buena Vista/courtesy Everett Collection
So how did the First Lady of the American Screen feel about her pop tribute?
She posed with Carnes for a photo shoot for People soon after the song’s release, in July of 1981, and then participated in a joint interview about the song’s incredible success. In the article, Davis noted “People used to say, ‘Have you heard ‘Bette Davis Eyes’?’ And I thought, ‘What the hell is that?’ Then one day, a friend brought me the record. Well, I almost flipped.” She mused further on the very asset celebrated in the song, saying “Not being a Rita Hayworth or a Jean Harlow, my eyes were probably my biggest asset. In 1930, Universal was going to drop my option, but decided I had beautiful eyes.”
20th Century Fox Film Corp./courtesy Everett Collection
Six years later, on a 1987 episode of the British interview program Sunday Sunday, Davis hadn’t changed her mind, telling presenter Gloria Hunniford of the song, “I was flabbergasted, and I thought it was fun, and I thought the words were pretty terrific. As a matter of fact, I wrote the girl who wrote the words and asked her how she knew me this well. But the big thrill of that was the reaction of my grandson, Ashley. That his grandmother was in the rock ‘n’ roll area, with a record … he looked at me completely differently from then on.”
The Original “Bette Davis Eyes”
An interesting twist to the tale: the Kim Carnes hit wasn’t even the first version of the song released to the public. In 1975, Jackie DeShannon, who co-wrote “Bette Davis Eyes,” released the original version, which features pedal steel guitar, horns, piano and a bit of country swing, on her album New Arrangement. That rendition failed to capture public attention, and the song might have languished in obscurity forever, had Carnes and her band not decided to revive it with a New Wave backing track — an ultra-modern sound that only served to highlight how Davis had a truly timeless appeal.
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May 2020
Celebrate the most glamorous leading ladies from the Golden Age of Hollywood
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