Eartha Kitt - what a woman!

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Today we celebrate Eartha Kitt and her amazing life. While we lost a few years ago, she was a great singer and actress that will be missed.

 

The Cd section is on sale at 25% in her honor today!

 

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 uiqqer 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.

 

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Favorite song she sang IMHO is March of The Winkies/The Jitterbug . Why this was not in the original movie just makes me sad;o(