She's Got Bette Davis Eyes
My apologies if you’ve got that song in your head now. It’s one of my favourites, so today, in honour of Bette Davis's 115th birthday, I want to write about its history and how it gave her a second burst of fame in the ‘80s.
‘Bette Davis Eyes’ was written in the ‘70s by Jackie DeShannon, a hit songwriter and singer, and Donna Weiss, equally as famous. The original version of the song was first recorded by DeShannon but never really gained traction.
DeShannon later said in an interview that the inspiration came from the film Now, Voyager. “The one thing that always stuck in my mind, was the look in her eyes when Paul Henreid handed her a cigarette in Now, Voyager.”
Less than a decade later, singer Kim Carnes, in search of a chart-topping hit, heard ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ for the first time and knew she wanted to record it.
In
an interview with Pop Matters in 2017, Carnes said, “George Tobin [a producer
she worked with] had played me a Jackie DeShannon demo that was completely
different. It was all major chords, not minor, but the lyric killed me. Just
the title—a song called ‘Bette Davis Eyes’? I’m interested!”
DeShannon’s version was entirely different from the version
Kim Carnes popularized. And she agonized over how to play it. “I wanted
‘Bette Davis Eyes’ to be dark and mysterious like the lyric. We rehearsed it
for three days trying to figure out, how are we going to do this? We tried it
every way.”
A bandmate, Bill Cuomo, riffed on the synthesizer what would
become the opening of the song and everybody stopped. “I just said, ‘Oh my
God. That’s it! That’s how we do it.”
‘Bette Davis Eyes’ was released in March 1981 and was an immediate
hit. In the United States, the song spent nine weeks at the top of the
Billboard charts. It also charted at number one in 21 countries and was
certified platinum and gold.
In her 1987 autobiography, This ‘N That, Bette wrote about her eponymous hit song: “During the spring of 1981, I was constantly being asked if I had heard the song ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ performed by Kim Carnes, and on its way to becoming the runaway hit of the year. My grandson Ashley thought it was a riot that a song about his grandmother’s eyes had, for many weeks, been the number-one hit on the rock-and-roll charts. His grandmother agreed with him. It was a riot.”
She said that once she heard its lyrics, which included the line “She’ll expose you, when she snows you/ Off your feet with the crumbs she throws you,” that she wrote a letter to the songwriters and to Kim Carnes saying, “How did you know so much about me?”
Bette wrote in her autobiography that she’d been given a framed copy of each certification and that they both hung proudly in her trophy room. When the song took off in the summer of 1981, Bette quipped to People magazine, “Not being a Rita Hayworth or a Jean Harlow, my eyes were probably my biggest asset.”
At the 1982 Grammys, ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ won awards for Record of the Year (won by Kim Carnes and her producer Val Garay) and Song of the Year (won by songwriters DeShannon and Weiss). Bette sent them all flowers in celebration.
When she died in 1989, Kim Carnes was a guest at her funeral.
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