Guilty Pleasures….Bette Davis, and the Song About Her Eyes.

As we often do, my wife and I were recently lounging downstairs with our dogs about when the show we were watching concluded. Many times when a movie or other program finishes we watch some kind of musical performance for a bit.

A few days before I had DVR’d “Billy Joel at Shea Stadium”, so I popped that on…..no go. I knew Jayne wasn’t the biggest Billy fan, but I thought at least she might indulge me in the opening number “The Entertainer”. She’s very cool about being open to various musical styles generally, but this time just refused.

So I popped over to one of those PBS specials that does a fundraiser wrapped around a musical genre, with the ability to buy DVD’s and the like. This one was the 1980’s and I had to admit it generally was pretty bad. But I had cued it up to one of my all-time favorite songs in the guilty pleasure category “Bette Davis Eyes”. Uh-uh. “I hate that song, can’t listen to it”, intoned Jayne.

It actually was our anniversary, we had gone out for a lovely dinner and come home and relaxed, had a great time. It was good natured refusal from Jayne, and I good naturedly shot back “You know, you won’t even watch Billy Joel for a minute, you can’t stand “Bette Davis Eyes”, I mean, we might have to reconsider this whole marriage thing”.

We laughed, and she said,” I know you love Bette Davis, and that’s why you like the song”. While it is very true that I love Bette Davis, I would love that song if it featured anybody. It doesn’t feature just anybody, and in fact it also references Greta Garbo and Jean Harlow, also stars I enjoy in some of my favorite movies of the 1930’s and early 40’s. I imagine that doesn’t hurt.

But I really do just like the song. Now, many favorite songs benefit from what is called “milepost syndrome”, a connection that the song has to a significant place and time for the listener. I absolutely plead guilty on that front. “Bette Davis Eyes” was the number one song for nine out of ten weeks, right at this time of year in 1981. It was a blistering hot summer in Kansas, and it was right at the start of my horrifying stint working at the Stokely Van Camp bean factory in Lawrence. (For further details, I refer you to my book “Leaving Cancer for the Circus”).

I was working the late shift at that time, and one of my clearest memories was being dropped off by my friend Rick at the plant after we had gone out to the lake. More than once it just so happened that “Bette Davis Eyes” was playing. I would instruct Rick to drive around the block. For one, I wanted to hear the song, secondly I wanted to delay to the last second entering the dungeon where I would spend the next ten to twelve hours.

Also, before and after the song was out, I dated a couple of girls who I told that they had “Bette Davis Eyes”, so there was that. You might well be surprised that I think that was a great compliment, because yes, I do love Bette Davis. But probably not the one that pops into your head, the fading star Margo Channing in 1950’s “All About Eve”, or the shrieking hags she played quite brilliantly in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jayne” and “Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte” in the early ‘60’s. Or the Bette Davis of the raspy vocal imitations.

You might thing that I am as mad as Charlotte Hollis, her character in “…Charlotte”, and that may well be true, but my best case for YOU falling in love with Bette Davis is to watch 1936’s “The Petrfied Forest” on TCM some time. The platinum blonde wistful dreamer Gabrielle, stuck working the family diner in the middle of an Arizona desert, who falls for, well, the best wistful dreamer ever, drifter Leslie Howard.

They are thrown together as the diner is taken over by the ruthless gangster Duke Mantee, in the part that put Humphrey Bogart on the map. The film is incredibly stagy (it was a very successful Broadway play that both Howard and Bogart were in, Howard insisting that Bogart be in the film), but it works beautifully. And of course, there are the big, round, yearning, pleading, Bette Davis eyes as she dreams of going to Paris someday.

Those wildly expressive, lovely eyes are on display in many fine films in the 1930’s and early 40’s, even when she starts to develop her nasty side in the excellent “Gone With the Wind” precursor, 1938’s“Jezebel”, an underrated classic. But just indulge me (hey, if you’re still reading this you already did) and google an image of Davis in “The Petrified Forest” and just maybe you’ll understand my whim.

My wife understands that whim, but not the Kim Carnes one. I think the song and video, while clearly products of the era, are excellent. Jackie DeShannon (best know perhaps for “Put a Little Love in Your Heart), wrote the song with Donna Weiss, a full seven years before, and it was on one of her own albums with little note. The totally different arrangement became one of the biggest singles of all time.

I admit following the crowd isn’t one of my main traits, but I did in this case. I plead guilty to liking everything about it, from the lyrics, to the hand claps, to the extra raspy delivery of Carnes (hell, I liked her eyes, too.)

I don’t even like watching the later work of Bette Davis, even though much of it is quite good. That’s not MY girl, which is really quite the fantasy, because Bette Davis was every bit as tough, stubborn and difficult off the screen as she was sweet in many of her early films. I really admired that about her. She risked her career numerous times, went on strike, etc. to get parts she felt were up to her standard.

I also like the fact that even at a feisty 73 years old when it came out, she was quite happy with the song. That almost surprises me, but it puts a smile on my face.

So do those eyes.