Return of the Celluloid Temptress

By JAY COCKS

Sexy and insinuating, Kim Carnes rasps out a winner

It sounds like the theme for some late-show fantasy starring yourself, the title song for a bit of vintage swank. The heroine is available but somehow indomitable, instantly recognizable but infinitely mysterious. She is constructed of several transplanted celluloid dreams and, as anyone who has turned on a radio over the past month will know right away, she has, most distinctively, Bette Davis Eyes.

This curious and seductive song, co-written and recorded by Jackie DeShannon in 1975, has turned into a surprise hit for Kim Carnes, who has been looking for a smash almost as long as Now Voyager has been playing on the late show. Carnes, 34, who served time in the late 1960s dishing up freezer-packed folk music with the New Christy Minstrels, has a voice that is throaty without being funky, insinuating but safe, sort of like Lizabeth Scott chugging Vicks cough syrup. Garbo and Harlow are mentioned with Davis in the song, an evocation of a killer-diller temptress who gives the guys a tumble and turns them inside out ("She'll expose you when she snows you/Off your feet with the crumbs that she throws you").

Carnes maintains that both Bette Davis Eyes (which has been the No. 1 single for nine weeks) and the hit album from which it comes represent a significant change of direction for her. She talks seriously about "the new romanticism, which is very big in England right now." She has done a video presentation of Bette Davis Eyes that looks like a production number from Scaramouche as directed by Federico Fellini. In fact, her Minstrels past and her new romantic future seem equally synthetic. She has, simply, a good solid way with a ballad. She is the kind of stylist an earlier time would have called a thrush, and despite what she calls her "perpetual frog," she sings as if she has a gardenia behind her ear.

For just that reason, she becomes ideal casting for a bit of nostalgic mythomania like Bette Davis Eyes. She does not try to camp it, or torch it. Carnes just glides through it, getting inside its slinky rhythm as if it were a cocktail dress cut on the bias. Whatever Carnes may think, this has less to do with rock 'n' roll than with the kind of straight-on pop craftsmanship that distinguished some of her previous albums, an unashamed hovering right above the middle of the road.

Carnes and her husband Dave Ellingson have collaborated on songs recorded by Sinatra (You Turned My World Around) and Streisand (Love Comes from Unexpected Places), keeping themselves comfortably off the dole while they waited for Kim's career to take off. Kenny Rogers, who like Kim and Dave is a Christy Minstrels alum, gave a boost last year when he recorded one of their tunes, Don't Fall in Love with a Dreamer, as a duet with Kim. That chart pacer paved the way. Carnes had a successful follow-up single on her own, but Bette Davis Eyes could become the kind of standard that turns a comer into an institution.

The Ellingsons, who live in a ranch-style house in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley and weekend at a cabin on Lake Arrowhead, are taking their son Collin, 6, with them on tour this summer. Carnes in concert will be trying on the new romanticism for size, promoting her fresh-minted image as a sort of upscale Debbie Harry. "The title of my album Mistaken Identity is really a statement of the direction I want to go," she explains. That does not mean she wants to be misunderstood but rather that she feels she has been misunderstood for too long. "Last year every one pegged me as a country singer because Kenny is. But I want to keep a variety of styles because they all reflect different sides of me. I've always loved rock 'n' roll. I'm not a manufactured product. I've made a point of changing." Changes are fine, of course. Just as long as the gardenia stays fresh.

--By Jay Cocks. Reported by Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles

With reporting by Elaine Dutka

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