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over 56 years ago--and I remained in love with her--this is her NYTimes
orbit--thanks to Alfredo for bringing this to my attention though it
did end Christmas Day on a sad note.)
Eartha
Kitt, a Seductive Legend of Stage and Screen, Dies at 81 By ROB
HOERBERGER
Eartha Kitt, who purred and pounced her way across Broadway stages,
recording studios and movie and television screens in a show-business
career that lasted more than six decades, died on Thursday. She was 81
and lived in Connecticut.
The cause was colon cancer, said her longtime publicist, Andrew E.
Freedman.
Ms. Kitt, who began performing as a dancer in New York in the late
’40s, went on to achieve success and acclaim in a variety of mediums
long before other entertainment multitaskers like Julie Andrews, Barbra
Streisand and Bette Midler. With her curvaceous frame and unabashed
vocal come-ons, she was also, along with Lena Horne, among the first
widely known African-American sex symbols. Orson Welles famously
proclaimed her “the most exciting woman alive” in the early ’50s,
apparently just after that excitement prompted him to bite her onstage
during a performance of “Time Runs,” an adaptation of “Faust” in which
Ms. Kitt played Helen of Troy.
Ms. Kitt’s career-long persona, that of the seen-it-all sybarite, was
set when she performed in Paris cabarets in her early 20s, singing
songs that became her signatures like “C’est Si Bon” and “Love for
Sale.” Returning to New York, she was cast on Broadway in “New Faces of
1952” and added another jewel to her vocal crown, “Monotonous”
(“Traffic has been known to stop for me/Prices even rise and drop for
me/Harry S. Truman plays bop for me/Monotonous, monotone-ous”). Brooks
Atkinson wrote in The New York Times in May 1952, “Eartha Kitt not only
looks incendiary, but she can make a song burst into flame.” Shortly
after that run, Ms. Kitt had her first best-selling albums and recorded
her biggest hit, “Santa Baby,” whose precise, come-hither diction and
vaguely foreign inflections (Ms. Kitt, a native of South Carolina,
spoke four languages and sang in seven) proved that a vocal sizzle
could be just as powerful as a bonfire. Though her record sales fell
after the rise of rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll in the mid- and
late ’50s, her singing style would later be the template for other
singers with small-but-sensual voices like Diana Ross (who has said she
patterned her Supremes sound and look largely after Ms. Kitt), Janet
Jackson and Madonna, who recorded a cover version of “Santa Baby” in
1987. Ms. Kitt would later call herself “the original material girl,” a
reference not only to her stage creation but also to her string of
romances with rich or famous men, including Welles, the cosmetics
magnate Charles Revson and the banking heir John Barry Ryan 3rd. She
was married to her one husband, Bill McDonald, a real-estate developer,
from 1960 to 1965; their daughter, Kitt Shapiro, survives her, as do
two grandchildren.
From practically the beginning of her career, as critics gushed over
Ms. Kitt, they also began to describe her in every feline term
imaginable: her voice “purred” or “was like catnip”; she was a “sex
kitten” who “slinked” or was “on the prowl” across the stage, sometimes
“flashing her claws.” Her career has often been said to have had “nine
lives.” Appropriately enough, she was tapped to play Catwoman in the
1960s TV series “Batman,” taking over the role from the leggier,
lynxlike Julie Newmar and bringing to it a more feral, compact energy.
Yet for all the camp appeal and sexually charged hauteur of Ms. Kitt’s
cabaret act, she also played serious roles, appearing in the films “The
Mark of the Hawk” with Sidney Poitier (1957) and “Anna Lucasta” (1959)
with Sammy Davis Jr. She made numerous television appearances,
including a guest spot on “I Spy” in 1965, which brought her her first
Emmy nomination. For these performances Ms. Kitt very likely drew on
the hardship of her early life. She was born Eartha Mae Keith in North,
S.C., on Jan. 17, 1927, a date she did not know until about 10 years
ago, when she challenged students at Benedict College in Columbia,
S.C., to find her birth certificate, and they did. She was the
illegitimate child of a black Cherokee sharecropper mother and a white
man about whom Ms. Kitt knew little. She worked in cotton fields and
lived with a black family who, she said, abused her because she looked
too white. “They called me yella gal,” Ms. Kitt said. At 8 she was sent
to live in Harlem with an aunt, Marnie Kitt, who Ms. Kitt came to
believe was really her biological mother. Though she was given piano
and dance lessons, a pattern of abuse developed there as well: Ms. Kitt
would be beaten, run away and return. By her early teenage years she
was working in a factory and sleeping in subways and on the roofs of
unlocked buildings. (She would later become an advocate, through
Unicef, on behalf of homeless children.)
Her show-business break came on a lark, when a friend dared her to
audition for the Katherine Dunham Dance Company. She passed the
audition and permanently escaped the cycle of poverty and abuse that
defined her life till then.
But she took the steeliness with her, in a willful, outspoken manner
that mostly served her career, except once. In 1968 she was invited to
a White House luncheon and was asked by Lady Bird Johnson about the
Vietnam War. She replied: “You send the best of this country off to be
shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot.” The remark
reportedly caused Mrs. Johnson to burst into tears and led to the only
derailment in Ms. Kitt’s career. (Ms. Kitt claimed that the C.I.A.
drafted a negative memo that referred to her as a nymphomaniac.)
As bookings dried up she was exiled to Europe for almost a decade. But
President Jimmy Carter invited her back to the White House, and she
earned her first Tony nomination for her work in “Timbuktu!,” an
all-black remake of “Kismet,” in 1978. By now a diva and legend, Ms.
Kitt did what many other divas and legends — Shirley Bassey and Ethel
Merman among them — did: she dabbled in dance music, scoring her
biggest hit in 30 years with “Where Is My Man” in 1984, the same year
she was roundly criticized for touring South Africa. Ms. Kitt was
typically unapologetic; the tour, she said, played to integrated
audiences and helped build schools for black children.
The third of her three autobiographies, “I’m Still Here: Confessions of
Sex Kitten,” was published in 1989, and she earned a Grammy nomination
for “Back in Business,” a collection of cabaret songs released in 1994.
As Ms. Kitt began the sixth decade of her career, she was as active as
ever. In 2000 she received her second Tony nomination, for best
featured actress in a musical in “The Wild Party.” Branching out into
children’s programming, she won two daytime Emmy Awards, in 2007 and
2008, for outstanding performer in an animated program for her role as
the scheming empress-wannabe Yzma in “The Emperor’s New School.” And
all the while she remained a fixture on the cabaret circuit, having
maintained her voice and shapely figure through a vigorous fitness
regimen that included daily running and weight lifting. Even after
discovering in 2006 that she had colon cancer, she triumphantly opened
the newly renovated Café Carlyle in New York in September 2007. Stephen
Holden, writing in The Times, said that Ms. Kitt’s voice was “in full
growl.”
But though Ms. Kitt still seemed to have men of all ages wrapped around
her fingers (she would often toy with younger worshipers at her shows
by suggesting they introduce her to their fathers), the years had given
her perspective. “I’m a dirt person,” she told Ebony magazine in 1993.
“I trust the dirt. I don’t trust diamonds and gold.”