So Eartha Kitt is having the last laugh.
Effectively driven from American show business during the Vietnam War era for her headline-making political views, marginalized years later by a raucous American pop-music culture that left little room for purring cabaret singers, Kitt is “Back in Business,” as her elegant comeback CD proclaims.
Having played a critically applauded engagement earlier this year at the plush Cafe Carlyle in New York, Kitt is on the road again, taking on the same American audiences with whom she has had a tumultuous relationship for roughly half a century.
She seems to be relishing the return.
Indeed, for an artist who was abandoned by her mother at age 3, forced to pick cotton for a living wage by age 6, kicked out of the house at 16, humiliated from the first moments of her career by dance legend Katherine Dunham, spied on by the CIA and frequently demeaned by talent agents and movie producers (who often asked, “Do you know what color you are?”), the apparently indomitable Eartha Mae Kitt sounds remarkably light of heart these days.
“I certainly laugh more at myself today than I did when I was much younger, because I was an urchin and an ugly duckling and unwanted thing,” says Kitt, on the eve of her return to Chicago. On Thursday night, she will headline a benefit concert for the Illinois Federation for Human Rights at the Skyline Stage on Navy Pier.
“So I invented Eartha Kitt and laugh now about how funny it was when everybody said I was ugly and nobody wanted me.
“Actually, I don’t really think of Eartha Kitt as being me at all, except when I’m on the stage, when the two of us meet–Eartha Kitt and Eartha Mae. Now Eartha Mae can laugh at Eartha Kitt the way she never could before.”
Born Eartha Mae Kitt without so much as a birth certificate (she guesses that she’s somewhere between 65 and 68 years old), Kitt faced a turbulent childhood. Her white and affluent father disavowed any link to her from the start. Her impoverished black mother gave her away at age 3.
Yet Kitt apparently had no interest in playing the victim.
“When I was a teenager in New York, I was working in a factory mending clothes, but I dreamed of joining the Katherine Dunham ballet company,” she recalls.
“And on the very day I was fired from the factory, I picked up my girlfriend, went to the movies, and outside the theater a girl walked up to me and asked me for directions to Max Factor’s makeup shop, where she had been sent by Katherine Dunham!
“So I asked her to take me to the Dunham school, and while I was waiting to see Miss Dunham, they were giving auditions, and my girlfriend said to me, `I dare you to join the class.’
“I took the dare, someone threw me a rehearsal garment, I walked into the class laughing my head off, followed the teacher’s instructions and won a full scholarship, on the spot.”
Where on earth did Kitt find the audacity to do it?
“Starvation is a strong motivator,” she says. “And, also, the fact that I was unwanted, in every sense of the word. The blacks didn’t want me because I wasn’t black enough, and the white people didn’t know what I was.
“So since I wasn’t wanted by anyone, I simply took fate as she presented herself to me, and did whatever I could, however I could, the best I could. I had a very strong desire to survive.”
From the moment she entered Dunham’s company, Kitt did more than merely survive. She learned how to move, how to perform, how to capture an audience’s attention on a stage crowded with dancers.
Indeed, in her five years with Dunham, Kitt may have learned her lessons a bit too well, for she quickly encountered the great artist’s wrath.
“It was a marvelous experience being in that company, but Miss Dunham was very hard on me,” recalls Kitt. “When we got to Paris, the newspaper photographers liked my legs, they always made me the prominent figure in photos, and that didn’t suit Miss Dunham very well.
“So she said to me, `Kitty, you will never be anything because you’ve got too much excess baggage,’ which meant I had long hair and bosoms.
“Finally, in Paris, when I asked Miss Dunham to allow me to perform at a cabaret every midnight after our curtain went down, she wouldn’t let me do it and dared me to leave the company. I took the dare.”
Alone in Paris, Kitt had only her nightclub engagement to sustain her. That was enough, though not even Kitt could have anticipated the sensation she would cause in that city. The critics cheered the arrival of the next Josephine Baker.
No doubt it was Kitt’s hushed and insinuating vocals, her gift for projecting a song not only as a vocalist but as an actress, her ability to move sinuously across a stage, her knack for singing persuasively in several languages, that endeared her to the French.
If her countrymen back in the States were utterly unaware of her European triumphs when she returned home, in 1951, she quickly brought them up to date in “New Faces of 1952,” a Broadway musical that made her a star anew in the U.S.
But though the success of the play inspired “New Faces,” a 1954 film featuring the same cast, Kitt’s tenure in Hollywood would be troubled and sporadic. She may have sung beautifully with Nat “King” Cole in “St. Louis Blues” and co-starred eloquently as a prostitute opposite Sammy Davis Jr. in “Anna Lucasta,” but those films did not pave the way for other, more important ones.
“It’s like Abe Lastfogel said to me: `You’re a beautiful woman and a fantastic talent, but we don’t know what to do with you. You’re not white enough to be white, you’re too beautiful to play a maid, you’re too intelligent to play a dumb broad. You’re in trouble.’ “
So Kitt tried to turn her attention to television, telling her managers at the William Morris agency that she wanted to do Oscar Wilde’s “Salome.”
“And they said to me, `Eartha, do you know what color you are?’
“I was insulted. I said, `I have no color, I’m an artist.’ “
Eventually, Kitt finagled a role in a television “Salome,” but such tony parts were not in her future. More characteristically, she would play Cat Woman on TV’s “Batman.”
Nevertheless, Kitt persevered, recording many hit songs (“C’est Si Bon,” “I Want to Be Evil,” “Santa Baby,” “Goldfinger”) and becoming a major nightclub star in the process.
That she recorded with several of the world’s foremost jazz artists, including trumpeter Doc Cheatham, said a great deal about her stature in that rarefied world.
“Eartha sounded fine and pretty every time she got in front of a microphone,” recalls Cheatham today. “She couldn’t sing a bad note if she wanted to.”
She hit quite a chord, however, the day in 1968 when she spoke her mind at a White House luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson. Invited to lunch with the First Lady and 49 other prominent American women, Kitt was asked her thoughts on crime, poverty and other social woes. “No wonder the kids rebel and take pot,” she told the stunned luncheon crowd. “Boys I know across the nation feel it doesn’t pay to be a good guy. They figure that with a record they don’t have to go off to Vietnam.”
The remarks set off a media firestorm, with Kitt lambasted on Page 1 of newspapers across the country.
And all at once, her phone stopped ringing. Previously signed engagements fell through, Las Vegas showrooms lost interest, record companies slammed doors on her, and she found herself venturing as far off as Hong Kong, Bangkok and Manila to find work.
Years later, she learned that the CIA had started a dossier on her a week after the White House contretemps.
Ultimately, it took a decade before Kitt could relaunch her career in the United States, with “Timbuktu,” a black version of the Broadway musical “Kismet,” in 1978.
Since then, she has been performing frequently in Europe and elsewhere around the world, less regularly in the States–until now.
“I never really stopped working, you know–I just haven’t been so visible in my own country,” says Kitt, who was married briefly in the ’60s and has one grown daughter.
“When I look at my Eartha Kitt scrapbooks today, I think, `You know, she did a pretty good job of herself, this Eartha Kitt, without any guardians, without anyone looking out for her.’
“I think the gods have been very kind to her, and she didn’t do too badly–for an ugly duckling.”
