What was Bette Davis’s reaction to that song about her peepers?
Bette Davis, the two-time Oscar-winning Hollywood legend of the 1930s, might have seemed like an odd point of reference for a chart-topping synth-pop song of 1981, but she wasn’t some ghost from a black-and-white past.
She was still alive, still taking film roles, and hadn’t even turned 75 yet, meaning she was younger when ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ came out than Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren, Glenn Close, and Sigourney Weaver are right now.
Not one to suffer fools at any stage of her career, Bette didn’t seem remotely bothered about the use of her name and most famous feature as the subject for Kim Carnes’ song, which became the biggest hit of 1981, spending nine straight weeks at the top of the US Billboard chart, and ultimately winning the Grammy awards for ‘Song of the Year’ and ‘Record of the Year’.
“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” Davis told a reporter after a friend bought her a copy of the single. “At 73, I hit the rock and roll charts… If my eyes helped her, then I’m delighted”.
It was a nice ego boost for Davis at the time. Great roles have never fallen out of trees for ageing actresses in Hollywood, and the pickings were even slimmer in the 1970s and ‘80s, as she transitioned from major feature films to mostly low-budget TV movies. This was a quarter-century before the rise of prestige television as well, so it was a noticeable step down for a proud performer, as she spent most of 1981 working on the TV movies Family Reunion and A Piano For Mrs Cimino with D-list co-stars.
“We worked ten years to get the word ‘star’ attached to our name,” Davis said of her early years in Hollywood, “The biggest thrill of our lives was to see that word in the same sentence with our name. That’s one thing wrong with television. From the billing, there is no one who isn’t a star. Everyone is a star! Ha! It cheapens the word.”
Kim Carnes probably would have related to Davis’s story of that ten-year struggle for the stardom tag. The Los Angeles native released her first album in 1971 at the age of 26, but failed to break through, with her unusual raspy vocal style perhaps limiting her appeal among some listeners. For a while, it seemed as though Carnes might be resigned to writing songs for other artists, especially when Barbra Streisand recorded one of her compositions, ‘Love Comes From Unexpected Places’, in 1977. The chance at a breakthrough in her own performing career only really re-emerged in 1980, when Carnes’ cover of Smokey Robinson’s ‘More Love’ became a minor hit.
The subsequent year, she followed a similar formula, selecting a little-known Jackie DeShannon song from 1974 and giving it an up-to-date ‘80s feel. Powered by one of the most instantly recognisable synth riffs of all time, ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ finally made Kim Carnes a “star”. Maybe she’d climbed a bit too high up the mountain, though, as having the biggest hit of an entire calendar year makes any hope of a comparable follow-up achievement fairly hopeless. Still, as time passed, Carnes didn’t seem too bitter about having to carry the song with her for the rest of her career.
“When I first moved to Nashville,” Carnes said in 2004, “I did a couple shows, and just kind of decided not to play [‘Bette Davis Eyes’], thinking, ‘I’m in Nashville now’. Well, people didn’t like me not doing it. I quickly learned that I disappointed a lot of people. And I never would want to do that. And I like doing the song. I’m lucky. I still like the hits I have.” Kim Carnes turned 80 last year.
