The Meaning of ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ by Kim Carnes

By Dr Oliver Tearle

When a young and then-unknown Bette Davis took the train to Hollywood to meet casting directors, she was surprised when nobody turned up to greet her at the studio. She later found out that a studio employee had waited for her, but left because he saw nobody who ‘looked like an actress’. Curiously, I heard the opposite thing happened when a then-unknown Maroon 5 turned up to try out for a record deal, and despite seeing nobody with any discernible talent, a studio employee promptly signed them right away.

Okay, I may have made that last story up. But it’s true, so biographers say, that Davis’ start in Hollywood was very nearly a false start. She went on to become an iconic star of the silver screen during the golden age of Hollywood, with distinctive eyes that revealed glimmers of the powerful personality behind them.

Which Version?

It is this star quality of Bette Davis which the Kim Carnes song, ‘Bette Davis Eyes’, pays tribute to. Although when I say ‘the Kim Carnes song’, I’m actually being a little reductive: the song was not initially hers.

No, ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ may have been a worldwide hit for Carnes in 1981, but the song was actually written in 1974 by Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon, and it was DeShannon who first recorded the song (in that same year) for her album New Arrangement. Even more surprisingly, the track was originally an entirely unrecognisable schmaltzy country number. If you don’t believe me, take a listen here, and remember that sometimes, when it comes to songs, the original is unfaithful to the cover version (to borrow slightly from Jorge Luis Borges).

The synth version recorded by Carnes (in just three takes, though even more remarkably it was the very first one which was released) has, of course, become the iconic one, and the only rendition most listeners are aware of. The song is about a woman who has eyes reminiscent of Davis’, because the woman behind those eyes has the same flair for teasing, pleasing, and general playfulness which the Hollywood starlet possessed.

Star Quality

Of course, the song is not about Davis as such, but merely about a woman who possesses some of her qualities. Indeed, she has a number of irresistible traits drawn from various movie icons: her sighs are like Greta Garbo’s, and her hair like Jean Harlow’s. Harlow, another 1930s star of the big screen, was in many ways a precursor to Marilyn Monroe: in the song the girl’s ‘hair’ is ‘Harlow gold’, an allusion to Harlow’s famous light-blonde hair. (Harlow was the original ‘Platinum Blonde’, so ‘Harlow gold’ actually debases the precious currency of her locks.)

Femme Fatale

And what kind of a woman does the song immortalise? She’s undoubtedly a femme fatale or, as John Keats put it, a ‘belle dame sans merci’: beautiful, but without mercy.

She is flirtatious, yet ‘pure’ as the snows of New York; ferocious, and yet keen to please the (presumably male) addressee of the song; she’s young and yet hardly innocent, knowing how to make a professional or ‘pro’ blush with embarrassment and, presumably, sexual desire.

The word ‘precocious’ also suggests a young woman who is sexually mature ahead of her time, from a young age. (Surely I can’t be the only one who always hears the mondegreen ‘make a crow blush’; though perhaps I am alone in having misheard for many years the line ‘All the better just to please you’ as ‘Have a bad time just to please you’; though many long-suffering wives will doubtless attest to the universality of such a sentiment.)

She’s also a demon in the sack, as the reference to rolling the lucky (unlucky? hapless or deliriously happy?) man as if he were dice makes abundantly clear. The fact that he comes out ‘blue’ – a colour poised ambiguously between denoting a fit of the blues occasioned by being promptly dumped by such a fine woman, and a case of bad bruising caused by having been rolled around in bed by her – tells us that any innocence this woman possesses is only skin (or cornea) deep.

What Bette Davis Herself Thought

Bette Davis was still alive when Carnes’ rendition hit the charts in 1981, and the 73-year-old living legend of Hollywood was so touched by the song that she wrote letters to Carnes, Weiss, and DeShannon to thank them for making her ‘a part of modern times’. She even credited the song with inspiring her grandson to look up to her; she was suddenly ‘current’ again.

Many people have mistaken Carnes’ rasping vocals for Rod Stewart’s, which is just about understandable. Meanwhile, over on Reddit an anonymous listener publicly admits that he always assumed the song was about Bette Midler, despite the rather clear clue to the song’s real inspiration in its title. We should remember that the world’s biggest search engine (at time of writing) is busy training its AI to become more ‘intelligent’ by inputting such intellectual insights into its software.