I heard this song for the first time in decades not long ago and instantly fell in love with it again. Wow - Kim’s haunting, throaty voice, the cool 80’s clap machine percussion track, those wonderful lyrics. I didn’t realize it was the number one song of 1981 until I read about it just now.
But this brings up an old memory. Back when this song was popular we were talking about my Mom’s eyes (for some reason I can’t remember) and I said something like, “Maybe you have Bette Davis eyes.” She was quite startled and quickly denied it, “Oh, I don’t think so!” Why? Mom was born in 1923 so she was familiar with Bette Davis. I get it that Bette was quite the screen seductress. But Mom was pretty and athletic and smart, why did this comparison bother her?
Bette Davis had somewhat exophthalmic eyes (e.g. they bugged out a little) which in most women would not be an attractive look. That may be what your mother didn’t like. Davis was short, though, and ended up spending a lot of time looking up at men in the movies, and that made her eyes seem bigger and more expressive. I think she used that to her advantage in her acting. She could also do wicked sideways looks with those eyes.
Those eyes didn’t age well, though, possibly due to drinking and smoking as well as to their general topology. Like Katharine Hepburn’s crepey neck, they made her look older than she otherwise would have, which in Hollywood can be death for an actress. Fortunately for both of them, they had both talent and force of personality to carry them through for quite a few more years.
I have always thought Bette Davis eyes looked bugged-out. I am willing to wager your Mom was thinking about Ms.Davis’ looks later in her career. She was quite the hag in her last movies.
Or, maybe she was being demur.
No one’s answering this directly? Where’s Eve when we need her here on the SDMB?
Taken in context of the lyrics, it’s about Bette Davis’s scandalous nature. She was known for being a broad - smart, sexy, gives as good as she gets. Her role in Jezebel, to my knowledge re-popularized the term for a woman of easy virtue. She had a rep for negotiating hard with the studio and standing up for herself.
From the song: She’s pure as New York snow.
And a personal favorite lyric, a line any rapper would be proud to have written:
she’s precocious,
And she knows just
How to make a pro blush.
Your mom thought Bette Davis was too racy to be compared to.
I don’t know if this was only regional, but our area radios played “'lizabeth Taylor Thighs,” with accompanying waddling duck sound in the background. Wasn’t all that funny.
Yes, back in 1981 at the height of the song’s popularity, if I had heard someone described as having Bette Davis eyes, I would have thought they meant eyes that were deliberately and manipulatively seductive.
There’s an episode of Law & Order about a sperm bank where one of the clues involves genes for “Bette Davis eyes” - it’s implied that a child born from these genes will grow up to be extremely sexy.
At about that same time, Taylor was married to John Warner, who had just been elected to the Senate. There was a story arc in Doonesbury about Taylor and Warren, and a line from it became the title of a collected book of Doonesbury strips: “A Tad Overweight, But Violet Eyes to Die For.”
Yes, this exactly. Bette Davis did have very large seductive bedroom eyes, but so do many lovely young girls. The secret is in how she used hers, and what was behind them. She is applauded today for her bold career moves and not shying away from playing unlikable characters, but at the time most women did not aspire to be like her.
She was considered too loud, too pushy, and downright unladylike. She was beautiful in an unconventional way, and was unafraid to obscure that beauty for her art. As she aged, she was unafraid to exaggerate the crags and wrinkles of her face. This was horrific and unthinkable for women of her era and one reason Jane and Charlotte were so freaking scary.
This was not truly appreciated until she was gone. Modern women see her as a trailblazer because she wasn’t content to just play pretty-girl ingenue parts, but I distinctly recall my very prim and proper Grandmother saying of Davis “She’s so pretty. Why does she have to go and do that to herself? Why can’t she just be nice?”
If Bette had just been nice, we likely wouldn’t remember her today at all.
Slight Hijack - No, it’s not funny, and this kind of thing is one reason I can’t completely like Joan Rivers. Joan’s whole comeback period was based on making bad fat jokes at Elizabeth Taylor’s expense. I remember one of them to this day: “Liz Taylor stands in front of a microwave oven and yells ‘Hurry Up!’ Oh, please! Can we talk?”
Well, I have been known to stand in front of a microwave and yell hurry up…:rolleyes:
I’d rather hear Buckwheat’s version, because then I wouldn’t have to hear the tortured words in the real song. I never wanted to be “unheased”, whatever that is.
