Bette Davis Eyes

Today I tried a technique suggested to me by my friend Marcus Anthony (see link on right); to allow a song title to come into one's consciousness as a way of tuning into what needs to be seen or thought of. And the song that came up was "Bette Davis Eyes" - so I dutifully went searching for the song (a more or less obscure hit of nearly 30 years ago which I hardly remembered), and equally dutifully listened to it.

It's a pleasant but utterly standard-issue ditty about one of those femme-fatale/heartbreaker types, so WTF, Mr. Synchronicity? No connection with my life that I can see, and no hidden messages in the lyrics. Then I reflected that I was literally being directed toward Bette Davis and her eyes, so I went to research her - and her eyes, which were indeed remarkable, though not in the "come-hither" way suggested by the song. They have that penetrating look of someone who sees further and sees more than most of us - they're eyes that speak of courage, of truth to one's self and one's destiny.

In an age when glamor was pretty much the indispensable attribute of all female film stars, and after a middling career which never quite caught fire, she chose to play a slatternly and shrewish waitress with whom the hero falls hopelessly and destructively in love and who later dies of consumption, in the movie of Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. This went totally against the advice of her agent and friends (and several better-known actresses had already turned the role down), but it won her huge critical claim, and pretty much made her career.

All her life she followed the advice given her by Charles Laughton when she commented on her "nerve" in daring to play the sixty-year-old Queen Elizabeth I: "... it's the only way you grow in your profession. You must continually attempt things that you think are beyond you, or you get into a complete rut."

That, far more than an invitation to bed, is what we see in Bette Davis's eyes - that and the willingness to explore and portray the darker and more troubling aspects of human character - right up to her last significant role, as Lillian Gish's cold and embittered blind sister in The Whales of August.

Let's salute Bette Davis, and pray that some of her spirit can inhabit all of us, encouraging us to attempt what we think is beyond us and not to be deterred by the fear of being ugly, ridiculous or unlikeable.