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by Sandra Hale Schulman
News From Indian Country 2-09
 Eartha Kitt, the part Cherokee, part black, and part white singing sensation who purred and pounced her way across Broadway stages, recording studios and movie and television screens in a show-biz career that lasted more than six decades, passed away on December 25th.
She was 81 and lived in Connecticut. The cause was colon cancer, said her longtime publicist, Andrew E. Freedman.
Ms. Kitt, who began performing in the late ’40s as a dancer in New
York, went on to achieve worldwide success and acclaim in a variety of
mediums long before other similar entertainers like Julie Andrews,
Barbara Streisand and Bette Midler.
With her petite, curvaceous frame and powerful vocal come-ons, she was
also, along with Lena Horne, among the first widely known multi-racial
sex symbols. Orson Welles famously proclaimed her “the most exciting
woman alive” in the early ’50s, 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 been-there-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” whose lyrics
still amuse (“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.”
By the mid 1950s Ms. Kitt had her first best-selling albums and
recorded her biggest hit, “Santa Baby,” whose precise, come-hither
diction and oddly foreign inflections (Ms. Kitt, a native of South
Carolina, spoke four languages and sang in seven) proved that a vocal
glow 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 pillow-talky 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 eventually call herself “the original material girl,” a
reference not only to her stage creation and to Madonna but also to her
string of romances with rich and 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, along with two grandchildren.
From almost the beginning of her catty career, as critics gushed over
the aptly named Ms. Kitt, they 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.” Eventually she was tapped to play Catwoman in the
1960s TV series “Batman,” taking over the role from the leggier,
lynxlike Julie Newmar and bringing the role a more feral, toughened
energy.
Yet for all the camp appeal and sexually charged banter 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 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 of German descent about whom Ms. Kitt knew little,
except that he was the son of the owner of the farm she was born on.
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, she would run away and then she would
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 street steeliness with her, in a willful, outspoken
manner that mostly served her, except once. In 1968 she was invited to
a White House luncheon and was asked by Lady Bird Johnson about the
Vietnam War. She caustically 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 a blacklisting of Ms. Kitt’s career.
As bookings dried up, she was exiled in Europe for almost a decade. But
President Jimmy Carter invited her back to the White House in 1978, and
that year she earned her first Tony nomination for her work in
“Timbuktu!,” an all-black remake of “Kismet.”
By the 80s she was a diva and legend, Ms. Kitt did what many other
divas and legends 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
a 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 still active.
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 2008 and in 2007, as
outstanding performer in an animated program for her role as the
scheming empress-wannabe Yzma in “The Emperor’s New School.”
All the while she remained a fixture on the cabaret circuit, having
maintained her voice and hourglass figure through a fitness regimen
that included 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 finger, 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.”
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