Though Kim Carnes (pictured above) made “Bette Davis Eyes” a hit, the song actually preceded her by a number of years, having been written in 1974 by Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon, as The Sun reports. Carnes, however, made it a No. 1 hit — it spent nine weeks at the top of the charts, according to SongFacts.
It’s not unlikely that Bette herself, being in her early 70s, didn’t much listen to Top 40 radio, and the song might have escaped her notice if it wasn’t for her granddaughter. Reportedly, Davis was tickled that her grandchildren thought having a hit song about her gave her cool points. For her part, the icon was happy for the attention, according to CheatSheet. Indeed, she wrote letters to the song’s writers, and to its performer, thanking them for making her “a part of modern history.”
Bette Davis died in 1989, according to Britannica. She didn’t live to hear “her” song popularized twice again, by Taylor Swift in 2011 and Kylie Minogue in 2014.
