Santa Baby
Slip a sable under the tree
For
me
Been an awful good girl
Santa Baby
So hurry down the chimney
tonight... 
Santa Baby has skedaddled north for another 11
months, and here at SteynOnline we were expecting to return to non-Yuletide fare
for this week's Song of the Week. But Eartha Kitt died at her home in
Connecticut on Christmas Day, and, although I'd prefer to remember her for some
of her other songs, the timing of her passing seems to dare us not to mark the
occasion with this seasonal hit from the dawn of her career. Over the course of
half a century, she sang "Monotonous", "C'est Si Bon", "Under The Bridges Of
Paris, "Je Cherche Un Homme", "Just An Old-Fashioned Girl", and stuck around
long enough to do Stephen Sondheim's "I'm Still Here", which is what she was
singing when I first met her - in London, during Cameron Mackintosh's production
of Follies. The role was really a cameo: She got a big entrance, big
applause, a showstopper of a solo, and not a lot of acting, or much need to
pretend she was doing anything else but being Eartha Kitt. When I met her after
the performance, she was annoyed with herself because (she said) she'd fluffed
the lyric - it's very long and intricate. I said, if she did (and I wasn't
entirely persuaded she had), I hadn't noticed - which was true, but she took it
as false flattery, which seemed to make her more annoyed. Follies came
and went, and the next time I saw her was for dinner at a restaurant hosted by a
mutual friend. She was the last to arrive, and made a spectacular entrance: I
remember a beautifully choreographed sweep in a swirl of fur through the throng
of tables as heads turned and waiters ceased waiting; and I thought, "It's
almost as if she can hear her walk-on music." In a sense, she could. She had
learned long ago that, if you behave like a star, you get treated as one. Over
the next couple of hours, she was fabulously rude and indiscreet, but also
appealingly vulnerable and endearingly exhausted by her own celebrity.
Eartha Kitt was self-invented: Endowed by the
Almighty with big saucer eyes and beautifully chiseled cheekbones, she
constructed a persona to match, adopting a parodically refined accent that
managed to suggest that, if English were not quite her second language, it was
merely one of several practised at some or other Swiss finishing school. In
fact, she was born on a South Carolina cotton plantation and raised in grim
hardscrabble poverty by a black woman called Anna Mae. She subsequently came to
believe that her white father had been the plantation owner, whose paternal
contribution had begun and ended with his act of rape. Oh, well. The cotton crop
was good that year so she was named "Eartha", in gratitude for the bountiful
earth. Then Anna Mae found herself a husband in the form of a black sharecropper
who wanted nothing to do with a child of miscegenation. So, having been rejected
by her father at conception, Eartha was now rejected by her mother, who sent her
to various relatives too impoverished to do much more than shuffle her on to the
next one. At eight, she washed up at her Aunt Mamie's in Harlem. Gradually, she
understood that Mamie was her real, biological mom, who'd given her away at
birth, adding a third parental rejection to what was already a full set. And,
saddled with the kid for a second bite of the cherry, Mamie declined to show her
"niece" any affection.
She did, however, arrange piano lessons for Eartha,
and then dance lessons. She went to the famous High School for the Performing
Arts, if only for a couple of years until Mamie threw her out the house and she
was on her own. One day, on the streets of New York, she was asked for
directions by a member of Katherine Dunham's dance company, and on a whim
decided to audition for them. She toured with the Dunham troupe in America and
then Europe. In Paris, while subbing for an ailing singer, she was spotted by a
nightclub owner, and, while performing in his boite, was spotted again
by Orson Welles, who signed her as Helen of Troy for a Wellesian version of
Faust he was producing on the Continent. While learning to sing in
French, she stumbled upon the Gallicly rolled "r", which subsequently provided
the purr in her sex-kitten songs and the grrrrrrowl in her Catwoman turn. She
took the rolled "r" across the Channel to England and began to construct her
stage identity. "It was here that I became Eartha Kitt," she told me in
London.
She made her name in New York in Leonard Sillman's
revue New Faces Of 1952. No other edition in the New Faces series launched as many careers as that season's entry: Carol Lawrence went
on to star as Maria in West Side Story; Ronny Graham was Mel
Brooks' longtime co-writer; and Paul Lynde became the center square of
"Hollywood Squares". But Eartha Kitt outlasted them all. Leonard Sillman thought
she needed material specifically crafted to show off her feline personality. So
June Carroll and Arthur Siegel wrote her a song called "Monotonous", and draped
slinkily over a couch Miss Kitt made a number about being bored totally
mesmerizing. Landing laugh after laugh on a succession of triple rhymes, she
complained that life is totally "Monotonous" even though the traffic will stop
for her, stock prices drop for her, and President Truman play bop for
her.
So by 1952 Eartha Kitt had
had success as a dancer, as an actress, as a nightclub singer, and as a Broadway
star. What she didn't have was a recording career. RCA Victor thought they could
rectify the situation and make her a pop star. The only problem was that, in
that last half-decade before rock'n'roll moved in in the mid-Fifties, Tin Pan
Alley's Number One hits were "I Went To Your Wedding" (Patti Page), "Here In My
Heart" (Al Martino) and other bland, anodyne, sexless ballads. The only boffo
alternative was insinuating novelty songs about the price of doggies in windows.
Doggies, yes. Sex kittens, no. Eartha Kitt's persona was at odds with
the historically freakish wholesomeness of the hit parade. You could find risque
material down in the rhythm'n'blues charts, but there wasn't so much dough in
that and RCA wanted a bigtime pop singer. So the word went out that they were
looking for new songs that would capitalize on the generally sensuous nature of
Miss Kitt's stage act, but without being so naughty they'd get no airplay. And
among the folks who answered the call were a trio of young writers. Or, to be
more accurate, a duo of young writers, plus the brother of one.
Joan Javits started out
writing music, and took on the duties of lyricist when she couldn't find anyone
to put words to her melodies. Then she decided she liked writing lyrics better
anyway. By 1953 she was writing songs with a composer called Phil Springer. And
that's when they ran into a record producer who said he was thinking that maybe
what Eartha Kitt needed was a sensual Christmas song. So Springer and Javits
went home and wrote:

Santa Baby
Slip a sable under the tree
For
me
Been an awful good girl
Santa Baby
So hurry down the chimney
tonight
Santa Baby
A 54 convertible too
Light blue
I'll wait up for
you, dear
Santa Baby... 
As conceived by Springer and Javits, Santa is the
eponymous "Daddy" of Cole Porter's "My Heart Belongs To..." or Bobby Troup's
even more direct plain ol' "Daddy" decked out in a white beard and red suit:
Santa as the ultimate sugar daddy. And that's quite a Christmas list he's being
given: A sable, a '54 convertible, a yacht, a platinum mine, and  then a duplex,
which seems a rather modest wish after the platinum mine but seems to have been
chosen mainly because it conveniently rhymes with a type of monetary
instrument:

Santa Baby
Fill my stocking with a duplex
And
checks
Sign your X on the line...
The song is in conventional
AABA form: Main theme, repeated, middle section, back to main theme. And the
real trick of it is that instant rhyme: "duplex/And checks"; "under the tree/For
me"; It not only gives the tune its character, but it's the first song that
seems shaped for Eartha Kitt's idiosyncratic phrasing: She loved to get to the
final consonant of a line early and then hold on to it, and with this song the
device comes kind of built in. It works so well that by the end of the chorus
the writers toss in an extra internal rhyme:

Santa Baby
Want a yacht and really that's not
A
lot...
By comparison, the release
is far more conventional:

Think of all the fun I've missed
Think of all the
fellas that I haven't kissed
Next year I could
Be just as good
If
you'll check off my Christmas list...
"It was a little naughty,"
said Joan Javits. "That's what it was supposed to be." But not too naughty. The lines about hurrying down the chimney and checking off the
Christmas list sound like they ought to be double entendres, but, on
inspection, aren't. They're entirely innocent - with the possible exception of
this image, which it's just about possible to imagine Andy Razaf working into a
seasonal version of one of his "My Handy Man" (keeps churning my butter/creaming
my wheat/etc) school of songs:

Come and trim my Christmas tree,
With some decorations
bought at Tiffany
I really do
Believe in you
Let's see if you believe
in me...
- and at that point the
space at the end of the phrase seems to all but insist on a boop-boop-a-doop. In
Miss Kitt's playful interpretation, the moral clarity of "Santa Claus Is Coming
To Town" - "he's gonna find out who's naughty or nice" - seems to have been
turned back on dear old St Nick: The clear intimation of the song is that, if
he's nice to her, she could get oh so naughty with him. Only up to a point, of
course. As the song concludes:

Santa Baby
Forgot to mention one little thing
A
ring
I don't mean on the phone...
No, indeed. Don't go
getting any ideas about what kind of girl I am, you fresh Santa, you.
Joan Javits and Phil
Springer finished their song, and decided to cut Phil's brother Tony, a lawyer,
in on the credits. They could afford tto be generous. The song was a huge hit
for Eartha. On the Billboard charts that Christmas of 1953, "Santa Baby" got to
Number Four, which was higher than any seasonal single in many a year. What to
do for an encore in '54? The answer was obvious: "This Year's Santa Baby." It
bombed, and that was the end of the Eartha Kitt Christmas Songbook.
Phil Springer went on to
write "How Little We Know" with Carolyn Leigh. Sinatra made two terrific records
of it, one at Capitol in the late Fifties, one at Reprise in the early Sixties.
They're both marvelous, although I have a mild preference for the later take.
It's a perfect pop song:

Who cares to define
What chemistry this is?
Who
cares with your lips on mine
How ignorant bliss is?
So long as you kiss
me
And the world around us shatters... 
And, at that point, Nelson
Riddle's arrangement almost literally shatters, very explosively. The chemistry
of popular music is as hard to define as that of romance: Phil Springer wrote
one goofily memorable song ("Santa Baby"), one great song ("How Little We
Know"), and ever after a ton of stuff that went nowhere. Who can say why? His
brother Tony stuck it out as a lawyer until 1968, when he decided to try life as
the painter he'd always wanted to be. And Joanne Javits persevered around Tin
Pan Alley and Broadway without lightning striking ever again. On the other hand,
a couple of years after "Santa Baby", her Uncle Jacob was elected as Senator
from New York. To Caroline Kennedy's already thin Senate resume, we must add
surely the definitive disqualification that she doesn't even have a niece who's
written a Christmas hit for Eartha Kitt.
A decade after its
debut, Miss Kitt went back into the studio and recorded "Santa Baby" at a
slightly brisker clip, which chart provided the template for Madonna's remake in
1987. Even by the standards of Madonna's oeuvre, "Santa Baby" is peculiarly
grisly: What exactly is that stupid voice she sings in meant to be? A sex kitten
in need of a final trip to the vet? The cover version performed two useful
functions: It introduced young listeners to a song they'd never heard, and it
reminded everyone else how good the original was. In fact, it put a not quite
forgotten novelty hit back in circulation, big time. Since then, "Santa Baby"
has made Ascap's annual list of the Top 25 Christmas songs, and any number of
chantoosies have had a crack at it, from Maria Muldaur to Kylie Minogue, Taylor
Swift to Calista Flockhart (on an "Ally McBeal" episode). Eartha Kitt named at
least a couple of her many autobiographies after signature songs -
Thursday's Child, I'm Still Here - but by the end
"Santa Baby" proved her most indestructible connection to the broader public. I
said earlier that, if you behave like a star, you'll be treated like one. By the
time I met her, it wasn't obvious that she was
still a star, at least in the technical sense of being able to sell large
numbers of tickets. But the name "Eartha Kitt" still had a cachet, and, if she
was ever in town, TV producers always lined up to book her: Those hosts who'd
been young men in the Fifties asked her about the sex-kitten songs -
"Old-Fashioned Girl", "My Heart Belongs To Daddy". And younger interviewers
who'd been Sixties kids watching "Batman" asked her about Catwoman. But, in the
final years of her celebrity, quizzed by media personalities too young even to
recall her Catwoman, she could usually bet on a question about "Santa Baby". Did
she ever get the '54 convertible (light blue)? If so, it must be up on bricks in
somebody's yard. But come December it gleams anew, now and forever:

Santa Baby
A 54 convertible too
Light blue
I'll
wait up for you dear
Santa Baby
So hurry down the chimney tonight...
You know, I'll bet he did. Rest in peace.