Shelly Duvall’s Hips

So there’s three things going on here: my fascination with bad 80s pop music, a childhood fondness for Dr. Demento and my fascination with horrible, strange things that defied plausibility and happened. The three may well be related.

First, the soundtrack to a neon sweatband generation. I have a complicated relationship with “Bette Davis Eyes.” If I hear it, it plays in my head over and over to the point that the experience verges on post-traumatic stress disorder. However, I can’t completely hate the song, possibly because there’s value in a pop culture relic that builds upon an even older pop culture relic, possibly because the song actually has a few neat turns of phrase, like “She knows what it takes to make a pro blush,” which is funny once you realize what it’s talking about. (Answer: whores.)

Today, Spencer sent me a link to the lyrics to a parody version that came out shortly after Kim Carnes’s cover of “Bette Davis Eyes” became a hit: “Marty Feldman Eyes.” Yes, between the respective reigns of Peter Lorre and Steve Buscemi, Feldman was Hollywood’s go-to man with the googly eyes. See?

People would probably most often recognize Feldman as Igor in Young Frankenstein, but he found success in a few other roles, at least to the point that he was famous enough that people would understand what a song titled “Marty Feldman Eyes” was funny.

Her head is growing bald
Her feet are twice her size
She says it’s not her fault
She's got Marty Feldman eyes

She’ll turn the sprinklers on you
And dry you off with her thighs
She'll confuse the hell out of you
She’s got Marty Feldman eyes

And she’ll woo you
Then she’ll moon you
And forget to pull her pants up
She’s obnoxious
And she knows it
And she knows how to blow her nose up
All the boys think she’s fried
She’s got Marty Feldman eyes

She’s ferocious
Narcoleptic
Ambidextrous
Supercalafragalisticexpialadocious
Bogus
Vegamatic
All the boys think she’s a guy
She's got Marty Feldman eyes

And Jimmy Walker’s lips
Liberace’s clothes
Shelly Duvall’s hips
She’s got Willie Nelson legs
And Nancy Reagan’s spleen
Dolly Parton’s lungs
She’s got Leon Spinks’s teeth
Bob Seger’s pancreas
All the boys think she's some kind of guy
She’s got Marty Feldman eyes

So maybe Bruce Baum isn’t for everyone, and even at the time the song came out it wouldn’t have exactly been incisive comedy, but I had a laugh reading the lyrics. But it got me thinking: Why the hell did Marty Feldman’s eyes look like that, anyway? (Answer: whores. Wait, no. Graves’ disease. But whores would have been funnier.) But, as I learned by reading about him, it wasn’t the disease that killed him. No, it’s much more interesting that that.

And here’s where I get to the third part of today’s post: the strange death of Marty Fedlman. I could try to put tin my own words, but there’s really nothing more I could add than what Wikipedia has, so here are the two paragraphs verbatim:

Feldman died from a heart attack in a hotel room in Mexico City on 2 December 1982, during the making of the film Yellowbeard. Cartoonist Sergio Aragonés was filming nearby, and dressed for his role as an armed policeman. Aragonés abruptly encountered Feldman while introducing himself, frightening Feldman, and possibly inducing his heart attack. Aragonés has recounted the story with the punchline “I killed Marty Feldman.” The story was converted into a strip in Aragonés’s issue of DC Comics’ Solo.

On the DVD commentary of Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks cites additional factors that may have contributed to Feldman's death: He smoked sometimes six packs of cigarettes daily, drank copious amounts of coffee, and ate a diet rich in eggs and dairy products. Michael Mileham, who made the behind-the-scenes movie Group Madness about the making of Yellowbeard, said he and Feldman swam to an island where a local was selling lobster and coconuts. Mileham and Feldman used the same knife on their lobsters. Mileham said he got shellfish poisoning the next day, and theorized that since Feldman used the same knife he also could have been poisoned.

Rest in peace, Googly Eyes. Now, the next time I watch Young Frankenstein, I’ll be thinking about that instead of “Why the hell do Marty Feldman’s eyes look like that?”

What It Takes to Make a Pro Blush

Lyrics from Kim Carnes’ 1981 song “Bette Davis Eyes,” arranged into appropriate categories:

Things that are meant to sound like a compliment and actually do:

• “Her hair is Harlowe gold”
• “Her lips a sweet surprise”
• “Her hands are never cold”
• “She’s got Bette Davis eyes”

Things that seem to be an insult:

• “She’s pure as New York snow”
• “And she’ll tease you, she’ll unease you”
• “She’ll expose you / When she snows you / Off your feet with the crumbs she throws you”

Things that initially sound like a compliment but then, after thinking about it, you realize that it might not necessarily be a nice thing to say:

• “She’s got Bette Davis eyes”
• “All the better just to please you”
• “She’ll let you take her home / It whets her appetite”
• “She’ll lay you on the throne” (Meaning “treat you royally” or “do you on the toilet”?)
• “She’ll take a tumble on you” (Meaning “fall for you”? “Take a dive for you”? Or “will literally fall on you because she also has Bette Davis’s hips”?)
• “She’s ferocious”

Things that seem neither here nor there:

• “She’ll turn the music on you”
• “You won’t have to think twice”
• “She’s precocious”
• “Roll you like you were dice / Until you come up blue”
• “All the boys think she’s a spy”

Things written because they rhymed and not because they sound like anything a native English-speaker would say out of the context of a pop song:

• “She’ll turn the music on you”
• “And she knows just what it takes to make a pro blush”
• “She’ll expose you / When she snows you / Off your feet with the crumbs she throws you”

Things that 80s youth might not have understood and which the passage of time has only made more obscure:

• “Her hair is Harlow gold” (Many of the 10,000 hits you get by Googling “Bette Davis eyes lyrics” incorrectly state this line as “hollow gold,” which puts an interesting spin on things.)
• “She’s got Bette Davis eyes” (Like the old crinkle lady from Watcher in the Woods?)
• “She got Greta Garbo’s stand-off sighs” (Sometimes confused with “thighs”)

Incidentally, Carnes’s recording wasn’t the first version of the song. Jackie DeShannon, probably best known for singing “Put a Little Love in Your Heart,” wrote “Bette Davis Eyes” and recorded it herself in 1974. Now, I can’t say that I like the Kim Carnes version all that much, but it is indisputably an iconic early 80s song. Consequently, DeShannon’s original take feels bizarre and wrong, despite coming first.

I imagine I’d have a similar reaction if I found out that, for example, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was actually a remake of some obscure Norwegian arthouse movie and tried to sit through that.