Eartha Kitt

An actress, cabaret performer, and All-American success story, Eartha Kitt (1927-2008) entertained audiences around the world over the course of a career that lasted more than 60 years.

Kitt is perhaps best known for a stint as Catwoman in the 1960s television series Batman, but her career has gone through many different stages, both before and after that TV appearance. In the years after World War II she became a nightclub-singing star in France. She appeared in plays and films, and she notched several hit recordings in the 1950s, singing in various languages. After a much-publicized attack on the Vietnam War, delivered in person at the White House in 1968, Kitt returned to Europe, for she found doors closed to her in the American entertainment industry. But her career was revived in the 1980s, and, well past an age when most performers would have been long since retired, she kept her exotic yet by then familiar face in the spotlight with high-profile theatrical experiences and near-constant touring.

Faced Extraordinarily Difficult Childhood

For much of her life, Kitt did not know for certain where or when she had been born, but research by students at Benedict College in the 1990s unearthed a birth certificate from St. Matthews, South Carolina, dated January 17, 1927. Her name was Eartha Mae Kitt-Fields. Kitt's father, whom she never knew, was white, and her part-Cherokee mother, struggling to survive at the height of the Depression, moved from place to place, doing chores and odd jobs wherever she could. Finally Kitt's mother met a man who asked her marry him, but he rejected Kitt because of her mixed-race background. Her mother's response was to leave her in the care of a local family, who abused her physically. The abuse was matched by kids in the area, who tied her to a tree and threw rocks at her. "I was told I was an ugly duckling, a yellow gal, even lower than the 'N' word," Kitt recalled to Leslie Gray Streeter of the Palm Beach Post. "I was not accepted by anybody on either side."

When she was about ten, Kitt was called to New York City by a woman she was told was her mother's sister. She heard that her mother had died, but, she told Karen S. Schneider of People, "I didn't even cry." It was in New York's Pennsylvania that she saw electric lights and indoor plumbing for the first time. Things did not immediately improve for Kitt; her aunt mostly ignored her, and Harlem school kids were as harsh as those in South Carolina had been. But teachers began to respond to Kitt, who always did well in school - she had a passion for reading and later enjoyed contemplating the works of philosophers such as Plato and Nietzsche. One gave her a ticket to see the play Cyrano de Bergerac, and she walked through Central Park afterward, wishing that she could have a career in which she enjoyed the adulation that the show's star, Jose Ferrer, had received. Another steered her in the direction of New York's High School for the Performing Arts, the incubator of numerous show-business careers. "But what really opened me up was a beautiful Black woman who was a member of my Harlem church," Kitt recalled to Pamela Johnson of Essence. "One day she put her hand on my shoulder - it felt so spiritual. Then she said I was born with the hand of God on my shoulder. It gave me a spark inside, a fire that started burning in me."

Hoping to get away from her aunt, Kitt ran away from home several times. She got a job sewing clothes in a Harlem sweatshop and succeeded in living on her own and in eluding juvenile law enforcement officers. She was inspired to act on her performing ambitions after she saw the Katherine Dunham Dance Company - the first African-American troupe to gain a major reputation in the world of ballet - in a movie. After a lifetime of bad luck, Kitt received a break when one of the company's dancers stopped her on a Harlem street to ask for directions; Kitt parlayed that chance encounter into an audition and won a place in Dunham's troupe for a salary of ten dollars a week.

To the 16-year-old Kitt, it was a fortune. Her life began a dizzying upward spiral as the well-regarded company traveled around the Americas and Europe after the war. Dunham picked her for solos, and the athletic, exotic-looking Kitt found herself the object of attention from well-heeled men. The company toured France and England in 1947, and Kitt received rave reviews. "They didn't call me a beautiful woman," she told Schneider. "It was 'the beautiful creature.'" Kitt decided to capitalize on her growing fame; she resigned from the Dunham company in 1949 or 1950 and was booked into an upscale Paris nightclub.

Cast by Orson Welles

Kitt quickly became the talk of the town. She had picked up bits of foreign languages while living in Harlem, and she had no trouble mastering French. Her voice was not conventionally beautiful, but it had an odd timbre that probably worked to her advantage, for it complemented her exotic looks. Some observers compared her with Josephine Baker, an earlier American performer who had found success in Paris. Among the throngs that showed up to catch her act was legendary film director Orson Welles, who was in the process of casting a production of Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus. He tabbed Kitt to play the role of Helen of Troy. Welles also starred in the play, and he got carried away when he reached the lines "Helen, is this the face that launched a thousand ships? Helen, make me a mortal with a kiss": "Crunch, right into my bottom lip," she told Charles Osgood of CBS News. "The blood is seeping down my chin, and [Welles] has a hold of me so I can't get away…. And when I ran into him afterwards, and asked, why did you bite me? He said, 'I got excited.'" If Kitt was confused by such events, they also filled an emotional need. "Orson Welles called me the most exciting woman in the world," she told Ed Condran of New Jersey's Bergen County Record. "It was so nice to be accepted."

Returning to the United States. in 1952, Kitt won a part in the Broadway revue New Faces. She signed a recording contract with the RCA label, and by the mid-1950s she was well on her way to replicating her French success. Two songs she had added to her act in Paris, "C'est si bon" and the Turkish-language "Usku dara," became hits in the United States once more, and "I Want to Be Evil" furthered her sex-kitten image. She was one of just a few black vocalists to receive regular radio airplay outside of the urban rhythm-and-blues format prior to the rock and roll era. Kitt made two films in France, but mostly she stuck to the stage in the United States, for serious roles for black actors were rare. "I couldn't compromise on playing quote unquote nigger parts," she told Ebony's Richette Haywood. "We're here to carve a path for others, and if you don't take challenges you are not going to make it better for those people who are going to come behind you." In 1958 she had a major success on Broadway in Shinbone Alley, and she did appear in a film that year; costarring opposite actor Sammy Davis Jr. in the African-American family drama Anna Lucasta and becoming romantically involved with Davis.

Attention from gossip magazines may have helped Kitt's career by raising her profile, but her romantic life was not happy. In addition to Davis she dated Charles Revson, the founder of the Revlon cosmetics line, and Arthur Loew Jr., a member of the family that owned the Loews chain of movie theaters. The latter romance was perhaps the closest Kitt came to a mutually rewarding relationship, but any talk of marriage was scotched by Loew's family, which disapproved of the interracial pair. Finally, in 1960, Kitt married Bill McDonald. The couple had a daughter, Kitt, but soon divorced amid Kitt's allegations that her husband, who installed himself as her accountant, had handled her financial affairs dishonestly.

In the 1960s, Kitt rose to national entertainment prominence. She appeared in Bill Cosby's early television series I Spy and on Mission: Impossible, and she cracked the talk/variety show that defined the middle-American mainstream, The Ed Sullivan Show. Her biggest success was a stint as Catwoman on Batman, a role that was played by a series of actresses. Although Kitt was only involved with the show for a short time in 1967, she was identified with the part for decades afterward. The only weak spot in Kitt's popularity, ironically, was among African-Americans, some of whom perceived her as a product of the white-dominated entertainment industry.

Shut Out After War Critique

A major African-American leader came to Kitt's defense, however, as she was enveloped by controversy in 1968. Invited to a White House luncheon by Lady Bird Johnson, wife of President Lyndon Johnson, Kitt thought about the women she had met while giving dance workshops in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles; they told her that it was primarily poor people who were being sent to fight in Vietnam, while well-off college students avoided the war through student deferments. Kitt in turn told the assembled dignitaries at the White House that the Vietnam War was to blame for growing civil unrest in the U.S. "You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot," she was quoted as saying by Schneider. During the firestorm of criticism that followed, the Reverend Martin Luther King called her and said she should be recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize. The antiwar student counterculture of the day also came to Kitt's defense, and "Eartha Kitt for President" buttons were seen on college campuses.

Signed contracts for performances quickly evaporated, however, and Kitt was not even allowed to appear on Hollywood Squares, a well-known haven for careers on the way down. She was effectively blacklisted in the United States and did not work there again until 1978. Kitt was investigated by the Central Intelligence Agency (which once issued a report calling her a sadistic nymphomaniac) and suffered losses of friends and money. But she was unrepentant. "This country has given all Americans IOUs: freedom of speech, freedom from oppression, freedom from hunger, etc.," she told Haywood. "Then I tell the truth, and I get my face slapped…. If you don't want my honest opinion, then don't ask me the question." Kitt kept her career going with performances in Europe, and, having faced criticism from conservatives in the United States, she took more from liberals when she appeared in apartheid-era South Africa in 1974. She was unrepentant about that, too, pointing to the humanitarian projects she had funded with proceeds from the show.

In 1978 Kitt was rehabilitated in the U.S. with an appearance in the Broadway musical Timbuktu, and President Jimmy Carter invited her to sing at the White House. Though she was at an age when most performers slow down, she climbed back to popularity. A disco recording, "Where Is My Man?" (1983), added a homosexual contingent to her fan base, and she began to find stage and film roles. Cameos in Ernest: Scared Stupid (1991) and in Eddie Murphy's Boomerang (1992) kept her camp-sexy image before the public, and she stayed in shape with an exercise-and-raw-juice regime that allowed her to pull off her act convincingly. In 1996 she appeared in the one-woman show Lady Day, a biographical treatment of the life of jazz singer Billie Holiday. Major stage successes came with appearances as the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz in 1998, and as the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella (2001). She supplied the voice of the sorceress Yzma in the film The Emperor's New Groove, and in 2005 she was still going strong, touring and taking over for the late cabaret singer Bobby Short with a recurring engagement at the Hotel Carlyle in New York City. Eartha Kitt seemed indestructible. At the age of 81, Kitt succombed to colon cancer. She died on December 25, 2008, in Weston, CT.

Books

Kitt, Eartha, Confessions of a Sex Kitten, Barricade Books, 1991.

Kitt, Eartha, with Tonya Bolden, Rejuvenate! (It's Never Too Late), S. & S. Audio, 2001.

Periodicals

Book, November -December 2001.

Ebony, October 1993.

Essence, January 1993; July 2003.

Palm Beach Post, November 21, 2005.

People, July 21, 1997; October 25, 1999.

Record (Bergen County, NJ), May 27, 2005.

Variety, April 6, 1998.

Online

"Eartha Kitt: Orphan Turned Star," CBS News, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/08/28/Sunday/main798791.shtml (December 20, 2005).

singer; dancer; actress

Personal Information

Born Eartha Mae Kitt, January 17, 1927, in North, SC; daughter of William and Anna Mae (Riley) Kitt; married William McDonald, June 1960 (divorced, 1965); children: Kitt Shapiro. Died December 25, 2008.

Career

Singer, dancer, actress, and stage performer. Worked as a dancer, singer and soloist with the Katherine Dunham dance troupe, 1944-49; debuted as a nightclub singer at in Paris, 1949; played Helen of Troy in Orson Welles's production of Faust, Paris, 1951. Stage appearances include New Faces (1952), Shinbone Alley (1957), and Timbutku (1978). Movie credits include Accused (1957), Anna Lucasta (1959), Syanon (1965), Ernest: Scared Stupid (1991), Boomerang (1992), and Fatal Instinct (1993). Kitt has also appeared on television and is perhaps best remembered for her recurring role as the Catwoman in the original Batman television series.

Life's Work

Eartha Kitt's life story is one of show business's most unusual and poignant tales. From an unimaginably humble background in the Deep South, Kitt rose to become the toast of Europe during the glamorous 1950s as a cabaret singer with a dynamic persona and memorable, throaty voice. Back in America, however, she faced criticism from the African-American community for being perceived as too "white," but later earned public support the hard way after speaking out against the Vietnam War in 1968. The media backlash over Kitt's remarks, combined with government harassment, effectively derailed Kitt's career in the United States for several years. Later, however, Kitt returned to both stage and screen and her recording career. She is one of the few performers to have earned nominations for Tony, Grammy, and Oscar awards in her lifetime.

Though Kitt is uncertain about her exact date of birth, since no birth certificate exists (her mother was most likely still a teenager, while her father was white), she recalled a hardscrabble life in the sharecropping territory of South Carolina during the Depression. She, her mother, and younger sister moved from house to house while their mother did chores in exchange for room and board. The young Kitt routinely suffered taunts of "yella" because of her lighter skin; eventually her mother left her behind with one farm family when she married a man who rejected Kitt because of her mixed race. "My mother felt a man was more important than her daughter," Kitt told Richette Haywood in Ebony. "I would never have left my child," she added.

The young Kitt, who wore a dress made from a potato sack and did not own a pair of shoes, worked the fields and tended the animals. She was an outsider, and suffered for it. "Their children would put a sack on my head, tie me to a tree and throw stones," she remembered in an interview with the New York Times's Michael T. Kaufman. In her autobiography, Confessions of a Sex Kitten, she recalled accidentally allowing the farm's milk cow to stray near a patch of lima beans, poisonous to the bovine anatomy. The cow had a seizure and died before her eyes, but not before it bellowed terribly; across the field, its calf heard and replied in distress, and "the sound of her calf in answer brought me to sobs I cannot describe--afraid for the whipping I knew I would get and afraid for the calf who, like me, might be left without a mother," Kitt recollected in her autobiography.

Kitt's life changed when a distant relative from the North sent clothing and instructions to send the girl to New York City. She learned that this was her mother's sister, but in later years she suspected this "aunt" was in reality her biological mother. Kitt arrived alone at Pennsylvania Station at the age of eight, and when brought to her aunt's apartment, saw electricity and an indoor toilet for the first time. Yet her aunt was abusive, and in many ways life in Spanish Harlem was no easier than it had been down South.

Nevertheless, Kitt quickly left behind her humble beginnings by exhibiting an aptitude for learning. She learned several languages while living in Spanish Harlem. She excelled in school, and also sang in a choir and took piano lessons. One day a sympathetic teacher gave Kitt bus fare and sent her to audition at New York's High School for the Performing Arts. Kitt was accepted, one of only six African-Americans there at the time. Again, she excelled in her new and challenging setting, despite the sometimes precarious nature of her home life. Another kindly teacher gave her a ticket to a Broadway play and told her not to come to school the next day. Kitt was so moved by the experience she cried at the end.

As Kitt's situation at home deteriorated, she began to run away. She would stay with various friends or classmates, but sometimes she would sneak into apartment buildings and sleep on the roof. "When I see the homeless now, I empathize," she told Kaufman in the New York Times. "I know there but for the grace of God go I," she continued. Kitt managed to find work as a seamstress, and dropped out of her prestigious high school, though she was threatened with juvenile hall. One day, Kitt went to see a movie and was impressed by the famed Katherine Dunham Dance Company on screen, the first African-American corps de ballet. She decided she wanted to join it, and lucked into an audition not long afterward when one of the dancers happened to stop her in Harlem and ask for directions.

Kitt won a spot--she was just sixteen--that paid a rich sum of $10 a week. With the Dunham troupe she toured Mexico, South America, and Europe, and appeared in the movie Casbah, the musical adaptation of Casablanca. The prominence of belonging to such an acclaimed dance company afforded Kitt a wealth of opportunities, and she began dating playboys and celebrities. When the Dunham Company was performing in Paris in 1949, Kitt--by now a soloist,too--was offered a nightclub singing engagement. She was promptly fired from the company after giving her two weeks' notice, but was a hit with her new audience at Carroll's, a swanky Paris nightclub.

Kitt became a Parisian sensation overnight. Critics raved about her sultry, unusual voice and slinky stage demeanor. Orson Welles cast her in his avant-garde stage production of Faust as the mythic beauty Helen of Troy. "I asked Orson at one point in the rehearsal who this character was," Kitt recalled in her autobiography. "What kind of woman is she? How old is she? 'Don't ask stupid questions, you stupid child,' Orson told me. 'I chose you to play this part because you are the most exciting woman in the world. You represent all women of all ages. You have no place or time.' This confused me more than ever," Kitt remembered, "so I just played myself," she added.

Kitt's cabaret repertoire came to include several foreign-language songs, of which two--the French "C'est Si Bon" and "Usku Dara," a Turkish song, became her signature tunes. She also appeared in two French films. Still, her name was relatively unknown in the United States, and she hoped to conquer Broadway. She was selected as part of a revue called New Faces of 1952, and the show was a hit. Again, she was the subject of a great deal of media attention, and with this success she began a recording career with RCA. Back in New York, she lived on her own for the first time in her life in a studio on Riverside Drive. The building had an unwritten "whites- only" rule, but two of Kitt's friends were tenants and signed over their lease in private to her when they moved.

Kitt's glamorous celebrity lifestyle continued uninterrupted in the United States. She dated a British aristocrat as well as Porfirio Rubirosa, the famed raconteur. At one point she was earning three thousand dollars a week, but that figure jumped to ten thousand after a scandal in the papers. It was claimed that Kitt had offended the royal family of Greece at a performance at Los Angeles's Mocambo nightclub, but it was simply a misunderstanding over another part of the show that had nothing to do with her. Headlines trumpeted the mayor's denunciation of Kitt. The star also faced the subtle disapproval of the African-American community, with whom her cosmopolitan cabaret act did not catch on. She was viewed as a bit oversophisticated, someone who "acted white." Kitt's unusual act did not always find favor with industry types, either. The person who signed her to her first recording contract was fired because of it; it was said that Kitt's voice was "too weird to sell records," according to Ross Wetzsteon in the Village Voice.

Kitt sold many records on the RCA label despite that prediction. She performed nearly non-stop during this era, appearing back in Paris, in Las Vegas, and again on Broadway in such plays as Shinbone Alley and Mrs. Patterson. When she appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, the host instructed her to wear pants, saying, "Every time you wear a dress we get letters from the Catholics saying you are too sexy," Kitt remembered in her autobiography. During this era she fell in love with Arthur Loew Jr., heir to the movie-theater chain, and the two even lived together for a time. Gossip columnists treated the interracial relationship kindly-- Loew's personality and drinking habits were said to have improved considerably under Kitt's watch--but he was the only Loew son and his mother was viciously opposed.

Kitt also dated Sammy Davis Jr. and Charles Revson, founder of Revlon (the lipstick shade "Fire and Ice" is rumored to be named for her), and was pals with James Dean. In 1960 she married Bill McDonald, a mentally unbalanced man she had dated casually--he had threatened to kill himself if she would not marry him, and she succumbed since she felt he would make a good father to the child she wanted so badly. She later described her daughter Kitt as "the only good thing" about her five-year marriage, she told Ebony. McDonald took over as Kitt's accountant, sold properties without her permission, and refused to pay child support after they separated. Kitt raised her daughter alone in Bel-Air and London.

In 1968, Kitt was invited to the "Women Doers' Luncheon" at the White House hosted by Lady Byrd Johnson, President Lyndon Johnson's wife. It was publicized as a serious discussion on juvenile delinquency, but Kitt found it to be a showy, staged event whose attendees exhibited little concern for the nation's problems. In preparation for the event, Kitt--who gave dance workshops in Watts- -had met with a mothers' group in a poor section of Los Angeles. They had explained to her just how the Vietnam War and the draft negatively impacted children in impoverished neighborhoods. Young men who were ineligible for deferments were fodder for the war machine. Going to college was one way to earn a deferment--or coming from a well-connected family--and thus a disproportionate number of minorities came back from a one-year tour of duty in Southeast Asia in body bags. However, as the mothers pointed out, young men with criminal records were not eligible to serve in the armed forces, and this was a certain factor in the recent rise in inner-city crime. When it was Kitt's turn to speak at the luncheon, she declared that "Vietnam is the main reason we are having trouble with the youth of America," Kitt remembered in Confessions of a Sex Kitten.

Though a limousine had taken her to the White House, it was nowhere to be seen and Kitt was forced to call a cab when the luncheon was over. On the ride back she heard on the radio that she had made the First Lady cry. Her remarks made headlines, and she was excoriated in the press. She lost friends--some prominent people conceded that what she had said was correct, but she acted rudely by saying it inside the President's house. Her phone stopped ringing, the contracts Kitt had already inked for singing engagements simply "disappeared," and she was left without work. "Some kind of plague had hit my house and I became an untouchable," Kitt recalled in Confessions of a Sex Kitten. In a 1996 interview published in BlackLines, Kitt told reporter Catey Sullivan, "I was rejected artistically, emotionally and personally. I remember thinking, my own mother had given me away and now my country didn't want me either."

She did earn respect from some factions, however. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called to thank her, and she found a new audience with America's youth of both races, who wholeheartedly supported her and even sported "Eartha Kitt for President" buttons. But Johnson had directed the Central Intelligence Agency to keep tabs on her, and an extensive dossier was compiled. She even suspected that her phone was tapped. It was not until the mid-1970s that political columnist Jack Anderson helped publicize the extent of the CIA's surveillance of Kitt; the dossier even provided details of her love life.

From 1968 to 1974 Kitt earned a living by performing in Europe. Her American comeback came when she was cast in the 1978 musical Timbuktu. It had long been her dream to return to Broadway, but she confessed to still being nervous about the Johnson flap before opening night. Timbuktu, however, was a great success and when it played in the nation's capital, Jimmy Carter made a point of inviting her back to the White House. In the late 1970s Kitt also returned to a recording career, cutting a disco record with Jacques Morali that launched her new status as a gay icon. During the eighties, she spent time on her extensive estate in Connecticut, where she tended to a large garden that kept the health-conscious dancer's kitchen well-stocked with fruits and vegetables. "I trust the dirt," Kitt told Ebony. "I don't trust diamonds and gold. I know how to survive in the dirt," she continued.

Kitt returned to film in the early 1990s, appearing in Ernest: Scared Stupid and as a romantic interest in Eddie Murphy's Boomerang. She played herself in Fatal Instinct, a Carl Reiner spoof from 1993, and appeared in Unzipped, the documentary look at fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi. She released yet another album of songs, Back in Business, in 1995, and portrayed a homeless woman in a benefit play entitled Sam's Song, performed at New York's All Souls Unitarian Church. Kitt also returned to the cabaret circuit, performing at Manhattan's Cafe Carlyle in 1993 and appearing in the one-woman show Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill in 1996.

Though well into her sixties, Kitt still toured forty weeks out of the year. Her daughter Kitt Shapiro served as her manager, and she remains as energetic as she was fifty years before as a Katherine Dunham dancer. Her legendary slinky, cat-like nature remained a draw for new fans, but age seemed to mellow Kitt somewhat. She displayed a Zen-like philosophy to life's travails, and in particular about her own remarkable past. "I don't wallow in the manure that was thrown on me," Kitt told Sullivan in BlackLines. "I use it as fertilizer for my life, and my life is extremely interesting," she added.

Kitt died on December 25, 2008, at her home in Weston, Connecticut, of colon cancer.

Awards

Woman of the Year, National Association of Negro Musicians, 1968; Kitt has won Grammy, Tony, and Emmy award nominations for her work.

Works

Selective Discography

• At the Plaza, 1965.
• Bad But Beautiful, 1976.
• At Her Very Best, 1982.
• C'est Si Bon (recorded 1983), Polydor.
• I Love Men, Sunnyview, 1984.
• St. Louis Blues, 1985.
• That Bad Eartha, RCA, 1985.
• Eartha Kitt with the Doc Cheatham Trio (recorded 1950), Swing, 1986.
• In Person at the Plaza (recorded 1965), GNP Crescendo. 1987.
• My Way: A Musical Tribute to Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Caravan of Dreams, 1987.
• Eartha Kitt in Person at the Plaza, 1988.
• A Funny Dame, 1988.
• Diamond Series (compilation), 1988.
• Primitive Man, 1992.
• I'm Still Here, 1989.
• Live in London, 1990.
• Best of Eartha Kitt (compilation), MCA, 1990.
• Miss Kitt to You, RCA, 1992.
• Thinking Jazz, ITM, (German import), 1992.
• Love for Sale, Capitol.
• The Romantic Eartha Kitt, Capitol.
• Back in Business, 1995.

Writings

• Thursday's Child (autobiography), Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1956.
• Alone with Me (autobiography), Regnery, 1976.
• Confessions of a Sex Kitten (autobiography), Barricade Books, 1989.

Further Reading

Books

• Contemporary Musicians, volume 3, Gale Research, 1993, pp. 121-123.

Periodicals

• BlackLines, April 1996.
• Ebony, December 1957, pp. 83-92; October 1993, pp. 112-116.
• Essence, January 1993, p. 56.
• Jet, January 16, 1995, p. 63.
• New York Times, September 11, 1993, sec. A., p. 25; January 8, 1995, sec. WC, p. 11.
• Village Voice, February 1993, p. 92.

— Carol Brennan

See Eartha Kitt Lyrics

• Born: January 17, 1927, Columbia, SC
• Died: December 25, 2008, Weston, CT
• Active: '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, 2000s
• Genres: Vocal Music
• Instrument: Vocals
• Representative Albums: "Miss Kitt to You", "Purr-Fect: Greatest Hits", "Eartha Kitt In Person at the Plaza
• Representative Songs: "Santa Baby", "I Want to Be Evil", "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)

Biography

Eartha Kitt epitomized the idea of the sex-kitten chanteuse, rising to fame with a nightclub act centered around her slinky stage presence and her throaty purr of a voice. As much as she enjoyed vamping it up, she also projected the image of an exotic international sophisticate, especially since she sang in several different languages. She brought a definite zest to her torch songs, and favored lyrics that painted her as the Material Girl of her time. Kitt's persona was so vivid and well-developed that she remained easily identifiable well after her early-'50s heyday, and it also helped her find success as an actress in movies, TV, and theater. Even if many remember her best as one of the actresses to play Catwoman on the '60s Batman series, Kitt was always a cabaret performer at heart, one whose act translated best in a live setting. After a dramatic rise to fame from a childhood of neglect and poverty, Kitt endured a ten-year blacklisting owing to her sharp criticism of the Vietnam War. She returned to performing in the '80s and '90s, both as an actress and as a singer on the nightclub circuit.

Eartha Mae Kitt's actual origins are somewhat in doubt. It's likely she was born on January 17, 1927, on a cotton plantation in the small South Carolina town of North. A birth certificate discovered in the late '90s seemed to corroborate that information, but Kitt was never entirely sure, because she lost contact with both her parents at a very young age. Her white father (sometimes alleged to be one of the plantation owner's sons) abandoned her when she was very young, and her mother, a black sharecropper, later remarried and sent her to live with neighbors. Kitt's mother died not long afterwards. Overworked, overlooked, and teased for being biracial, Kitt was finally sent to live with an aunt in Harlem when she was eight. Although she remained at the edge of poverty, things improved somewhat, as she began piano and dance lessons, and also got some singing and acting opportunities through church. Kitt was admitted to New York's High School for the Performing Arts, but unfortunately, her home life took a turn for the worse, and her aunt threw her out. Kitt was forced to drop out of school and worked a few odd jobs to support herself.

A chance meeting with a dancer led Kitt to audition for Katherine Dunham's dance school at age 16. She won a scholarship, and went on tour with the school company all over Europe and the Americas. When the company stopped in Paris, Kitt got the chance to fill in for a singer who was too ill to perform. She was spotted by a nightclub owner who signed her on as a vocalist, and she stayed in Paris to work the cabaret circuit. There she was discovered by the legendary director Orson Welles, who called her "the most exciting woman alive" and, in 1950, cast her as Helen of Troy in his stage production Time Runs, an adaptation of Faust. Kitt returned to the United States and immediately found bookings on the New York nightclub scene, including lengthy runs at the Blue Angel and the Village Vanguard. She was also tapped for the Broadway revue New Faces of 1952, and her numbers -- especially "Monotonous" -- easily stole the show; they also led to a recording contract with RCA Victor.

Kitt recorded her debut album, RCA Victor Presents Eartha Kitt, in 1953, and it was a major hit, climbing into the Top Five on the LP charts. She scored a minor success with "Uska Dara (A Turkish Tale)," and had a breakout Top Ten hit that August with the French-language "C'est Si Bon (It's So Good)," which became her signature song. Her second album, That Bad Eartha, was released before the year's end, and also reached the Top Five; it featured much of her core repertoire, with songs like "I Want to Be Evil," "My Heart Belongs to Daddy," and "Under the Bridges of Paris." Kitt scored a holiday hit at the end of 1953 with the breathy, over-the-top "Santa Baby," which proved to be the biggest single of her career. It also marked the peak of her popularity; audiences who couldn't get enough of her act in 1953 were growing accustomed to her style, and she was a less dominant presence in 1954, though she did enjoy limited success with "Somebody Bad Stole de Wedding Bell (Who's Got de Ding Dong)" and the R&B-flavored "(If I Love Ya, Then I Need Ya) I Wantcha Around." She also returned to Broadway in the drama Mrs. Patterson, which earned her a Tony nomination, and made her film debut in the movie adaptation of New Faces.

Kitt's third LP, Down to Eartha, appeared in 1955 to a more muted response than her first two. She was still a top draw on the nightclub circuit, however, and found increasing success as an actress. In 1957, she starred in the Broadway show Shinbone Alley and appeared alongside Sidney Poitier in the film The Mark of the Hawk; the following year, she co-starred in two more films, the W.C. Handy biopic St. Louis Blues (with Nat King Cole) and Anna Lucasta (with Sammy Davis, Jr.). In 1959, Kitt left RCA and joined her producer David Kapp's new Kapp label; many of her recordings there were updated versions of her past successes. In 1960, she began a five-year marriage to real estate developer Bill McDonald, which produced a daughter, Kitt McDonald. Kitt continued to record sporadically over the '60s, including the 1965 live set Eartha Kitt in Person at the Plaza, a fan favorite. In 1967, she replaced Julie Newmar as the sultry villain Catwoman on the Batman TV series, which remains her best-known role as an actress.

It was not to last, however. In 1968, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson invited Kitt to a celebrity women's luncheon at the White House to offer her views on inner-city youth. Taking the event seriously, not as a publicity stunt, Kitt pointedly criticized the Vietnam War and its impact on poor minorities. An infuriated Johnson put out the word that Kitt's rudeness had reduced the First Lady to tears, and Kitt found herself essentially blacklisted across the country -- afraid of incurring the government's wrath, venues simply refused to book her. It was later revealed that Kitt was made the subject of a secret federal investigation; her house was bugged and she was tailed by Secret Service agents. When the FBI failed to find evidence that Kitt was a subversive, the CIA compiled a highly speculative dossier that attempted to portray her as a nymphomaniac. Unable to find work in America, Kitt moved to Europe, where she would spend most of the following decade. In 1974, she courted controversy once again by touring South Africa; although she performed for white-only audiences, her show was racially integrated, and she raised money for black schools by selling autographs.

Kitt finally returned to the U.S. for good in 1978 as a cast member of the Broadway show Timbuktu, an all-black adaptation of Kismet. The audience greeted her with a standing ovation, and she went on to earn a second Tony nomination; President Carter even welcomed her back personally. Her career in America rehabilitated, Kitt returned to the cabaret/supper club circuit, and also revived her film career starting in the late '80s, appearing in comedies like Erik the Viking, Ernest Scared Stupid, and Eddie Murphy's Boomerang. She recorded a series of albums for the ITM label during the '90s, and earned a Grammy nomination (Best Traditional Pop Vocal Performance) for 1994's cocktail-lounge set Back in Business on DRG. She also continued her acting career, and toward the end of the '90s she moved into voice-over work as well, appearing in the animated series The Wild Thornberrys and the Disney film The Emperor's New Groove. In 2000, she received a third Tony nomination for her work in the musical drama The Wild Party. Kitt continued performing and recording into the 2000s, but was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2006, and passed from the disease in late 2008. ~ Steve Huey, All Music Guide

Where is My Man [Germany #1] Buy this CD	Eartha Kitt [Fast Forward] Buy this CD	Platinum & Gold Collection Buy this CD	She's So Good Buy this CD	Excellent and Decadent Buy this CD
Songs Buy this CD	Live from the Cafe Carlyle Buy this CD	Sentimental Eartha Buy this CD	Best of Eartha Kitt: Where is My Man? Buy this CD	Back in Business Buy this CD

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• Born: Jan 17, 1927 in Columbia, South Carolina
• Died: Dec 25, 2008
• Occupation: Actor
• Active: '50s-2000s
• Major Genres: Comedy, Drama
• Career Highlights: Anna Lucasta, Lieutenant Schuster's Wife, St. Louis Blues
• First Major Screen Credit: New Faces (1954)

Biography

Born in the South and raised in Harlem, sultry black actress/singer Eartha Kitt attended New York's High School of Performing Arts. After touring with Katherine Dunham's dance troupe, Kitt headlined at choice nightclubs in both Paris and the U.S. She made her acting debut as Helen of Troy in Orson Welles' 1951 staging of Faust. The following year, she came to Broadway in the musical revue New Faces of 1952 in which she stopped the show on a nightly basis with her sensuous rendition of "C'est Si Bon." It was the first of many top-ten hits for Kitt, who was one of a handful of black performers of the 1950s to receive regular air play on "white" radio stations. Subsequent Broadway appearances included the role of Mehitabel the alley cat in the 1958 musical Shinbone Alley.

Though considered a "crossover" performer, Kitt's movie appearances were often confined to films with predominantly African American casts, e.g. Anna Lucasta (1958) and St. Louis Blues (1958). She made several well-received TV guest appearances in the 1950s and 1960s, unexpectedly gaining a flock of preteen fans for her portrayal of The Catwoman on a 1967 installment of Batman. Never one to shy away from controversy, Kitt was banned from the White House for several years after making a series of anti-Vietnam statements within earshot of Lady Bird Johnson. Nor has she been a controversial figure only to the white mainstream: she was once booed off the stage of Harlem's Apollo Theatre, reportedly because the audience didn't care for her condescending onstage demeanor. After several years in England, Kitt returned to the U.S. to co-star in the 1975 Pam Grier vehicle Friday Foster. Back on Broadway in 1978, Kitt starred in the musical Timbuktu, an all-black reworking of the old stage chestnut Kismet. Her sporadic film appearances from 1980 onward included her manic (and all too brief) portrayal of a centuries-old witch in Ernest Scared Stupid (1991). Eartha Kitt authored several books of memoirs, and in 1982 was the subject of the documentary film All By Myself. She died on Christmas Day in 2008 after a battle with colon cancer. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Holes Buy this Movie	Santa, Baby! Buy this Movie	Anything But Love Buy this Movie	The Feast of All Saints Buy this Movie
The Emperor's New Groove Buy this Movie	Ill-Gotten Gains Buy this Movie	Harriet the Spy Buy this Movie	Unzipped Buy this Movie

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