Movie Music: Miss Bette Davis

Certified film legend, actress unparallel, unquestionable gay icon. Bette Davis was known as many things in her life (some not even nice), but did you know that she was a recording artist as well?

Sure, she warbled her way through such onscreen numbers as the Oscar-nominated "They're Either Too Young or Too Old" in Thank Your Lucky Stars and "I've Written a Letter to Daddy" in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and she even played a "musical comedy girl" (at age 44) in Two's Companyon Broadway.

But in 1976, Miss Bette Davis actually recorded her very own album, titled Miss Bette Davis (as if it could have been called anything else). On it, you can hear the above two movie songs, plus her own surprisingly haunting rendition of the title track from Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, as well as "It Can't Be Wrong" from Now, Voyager and (for no other reason then to give the listener a break from her singing, I guess), her big "you're not a woman" car speech from All About Eve. These and the other standards that fill out the album are sung in her own, shall we say, distinctive style. Granted, she is no vocalist by any stretch of the imagination, but what she lacks in vibrato she makes up with in sheer bravado.

That ol' show biz moxie is amply apparent in this vintage clip of Davis' appearance to shill the album on that 70's classic daytime talker Dinah! In it, she begs off actually singing "I Wish You Love" due to "this croak", and instead "goes along with" the recording. As you, I and Dinah Shore back in the day know, that's called lip-synching, but Miss Bette Davis, ever the consummate professional, will have known of that nonsense. She may have been many things in her life, but at that moment, she was a singer.

Click here to purchase the Miss Bette Davisalbum from Amazon.com.
Links via Imdb.com and YouTube.com.