Coming face-to-face with Eartha Kitt, it is easy to imagine her as an exotic
extraterrestial from some far-off Venus. The cabaret chanteuse, still
perhaps best known for her delicious portrayal of Catwoman, is almost
preternaturally glamorous. Now 81, and when I meet her dressed all in black,
you nevertheless can tell that she can still high-kick far beyond most
mortals. Even her name sounds like something from science fiction.
On stage, Kitt, who opens the HSBC Cheltenham Jazz Festival on April 28, is a
legendary seductress. Orson Welles once famously called-her “the most
exciting woman in the world”, Her former boyfriend Charles Revson, the
founder of Revlon cosmetics, created a flaming red lipstick for her, called
Fire and Ice. All her performing dresses have the same slit up the side to
display her celebrated gams. During shows, she flirts with the men in the
audience so mercilessly that their wives have been known to give them a good
handbagging on the way out. Her persona is that of the ultimate femme
fatale.
Off-stage, in person at her daughter’s sprawling suburban home in Westport,
Connecticut, Kitt is a sylphlike figure who, far from being aggressively
sexy, seems fragile and circumspect. She may collect hornets nests as a
hobby but, today at least, there is no bravado. No purring. No flaming red
lipstick.
Speaking of her past, tears well up repeatedly. While not quite an orphan,
Kitt was a waif born into poverty on a cotton plantation in the American
South. Even now, she does not know with any certainty who either her mother
or her father were. Kitt reveals herself to be a woman who invented herself
from nothing through an act of almost superhuman will.
Her mother, she says, was “taken advantage of” by the son of a white
plantation owner in South Carolina. Kitt was raised by a woman named Anna
Mae, who had a second daughter with a much darker complexion. For most of
her life, Kitt believed Anna Mae to be her mother.
As soon as the children could walk, they were sent into the fields to pick
cotton. It was a harsh existence of overbearing poverty with no electricity.
Kitt had to cook, clean and work for her board. At 8, her childhood was
rocked by an act of betrayal that marked her for life. Anna Mae went to live
with a black man, who welcomed her darker daughter but refused to accept the
mixed-race child. He said: “I do not want that yella gal in my house.”
Decades later, the insult still rings in Kitt’s ears. “I still think I’m an
ugly duckling,” she says.
Anna Mae went on to bear another child, but died soon afterwards. Family lore
holds that she was poisoned by her stepchildren – her husband’s two
daughters by another woman. Kitt, who had been living with another family,
was dispatched by train to a woman named Mamie Kitt in Harlem, the historic
black neighbourhood of New York. Kitt was told that Mamie was her aunt –
Anna Mae’s sister. But in recent years, she has come to believe that Mamie
was really her mother. “I think she left me out of shame with whoever would
have me,” she says.
Kitt has written three autobiographies – Thursday’s Child
(1956), Alone with Me (1976), and I’m Still Here: Confessions of a
Sex Kitten(1989). Yet the mystery of her origins has lasted a lifetime.
A decade ago, Kitt performed at Benedict College in Columbia, the capital of
her native South Carolina. The college located her birth certificate. It
gave her place of birth as the tiny rural town of St Matthew’s. She was
listed as “Eartha Mae Keith” – a spelling of her surname she had never seen
before. Her father was not named. The certificate specified her birthday as
January 17, 1927. Until then, she had always believed she was born on
January 26, 1926. Suddenly, she had become a year younger.
Kitt got a further surprise when she arranged with a lawyer to view the
document in the presence of a judge. The lawyer announced that her cousin
worked just across the hall. Kitt met a white man in his forties at her
hotel, who said he was related to her father, the plantation owner’s son. He
said the family name was Kitt, of German or Dutch descent. “He said: ‘We are
very proud of the fact that you are a member of our family, but . . . It’s
not going to go any further than that.’ ” The disorienting uncertainty over
her parentage gave Kitt a steely resolve to forge her own identity. She
views all the turmoil with equanimity. “I do not go through life hating
anything,” she says. “That is the way it was so that is the way it was.”
In Harlem, Mamie arranged for her to take piano lessons and she joined the
church choir. To this day, Kitt refers to Mamie as “my aunt/ mother”. “The
church members were saying she was my mother. I had accepted it to some
degree. She never sat me down and had a conversation with me. It was just
blurting things out: ‘I am your mother and therefore . . .’ ” she recalls.
But Mamie was ill-equipped to look after a child. “She never felt any
affection for me. I just felt I was in the way and I had to get out of
there.” One day, Mamie’s boyfriend had to intervene to stop her bashing Kitt
with a stool.
Escaping at the movies, Kitt saw Stormy Weather, featuring the
choreographer Katherine Dunham, the founder of America’s first black
modern-dance company. Kitt was entranced. “She was the same colour as me.
That gave me the feeling that if she was accepted, maybe I could be. I made
up this fantasy that I was going to join Katherine Dunham’s company and go
around the world.” Soon afterwards, she ran into a woman on the street who
asked for directions to the nearest Max Factor make-up shop. The woman was a
dancer with Dunham. “That clicked in my head,” Kitt recalls. “I said: ‘I
will take you to the make-up shop if you take me to see Katherine Dunham.’
It was all a joke. I did not think it would come true.”
At the dance company, someone threw her a rehearsal leotard and, on a dare,
she joined the class. Dunham offered her a $10-a-month scholarship. After
appearing in Carib Song on Broadway in 1945, Kitt found herself on a
ship to war-ravaged England with the troupe. “There was no meat,” she says.
“Next to the Prince of Wales theatre there was a Greek restaurant near the
stage door. On Thursday they had moussaka – the one day of the week they had
meat. I would save up to eat moussaka once a week. I still remember the
moussaka taste.”
Crossing to Paris, Kitt was asked to take the place of a Cuban singer at the
Carroll’s boite. She quit the dance company. Despite a bout of
stage fright on the first night, the gamble paid off. “I just stood there at
the microphone staring at the people, absolutely still, until everything
went quiet. Then I started talking. I did not know what I was doing . . .
The next day, the newspapers said: ‘The most exciting thing that has
happened in Paris in 25 years.’ ” Welles came to see her and cast her as
Helen of Troy in his Paris production of Dr Faustus.
Although Welles gave her her big break, Kitt credits her 1951 run at
Churchill’s nightclub in London as her formative gig. She became so famous
there that Sir Winston Churchill forwarded a fan letter to her at
Churchill’s, when it was wrongly delivered to him. “I began in England to be
Eartha Kitt more than I did anywhere else,” she says. “That was the
beginning of me.” Two years later, she recorded her biggest hit, Santa
Baby.
The key to Kitt’s voice is that “grrrowl”. She says she mastered the vibrato
when learning to roll her R’s to speak French. “You know how to gargle?
That’s it!” When I protest that it sounds too simple, she explains that the
rest is “voice placement” – channelling the voice to a particular place in
the mouth. Even today, Kitt speaks in sultry slightly French-accented
English after so many years abroad. There is nothing left in her speaking
voice of the American South.
Kitt returned to live in Europe after she offended President Johnson’s wife,
Lady Bird, with her antiVietnam War sentiments. Kitt, who had recently
beguiled audiences with her vampy Catwoman on the TV series of Batman,
was invited to a formal White House lunch on juvenile delinquency in 1968.
When the First Lady asked her why American youth were so disaffected, Kitt
replied: “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. No
wonder the kids rebel and take pot.” Mrs Johnson was falsely reported to
have broken down in tears. Kitt was effectively blacklisted from working in
the United States. Years later, she got her CIA file and found it described
her as “a sadistic nymphomaniac with a vile tongue”.
She returned to America with an acclaimed 1974 concert at Carnegie Hall. She
performed on Broadway, receiving Tony Award nominations for the musical Timbuktu
in 1978. When the show opened Kitt was again invited to the White House,
this time for a personal welcome back from President Carter.
In recent years, she has appeared in The Wizard of Oz and played the
Fairy Godmother in New York City Opera’s production of Cinderella.
Young fans got to know her inimitable voice when she voiced the villainess
Yzma in Disney’s animated film The Emperor’s New Groove,
its sequel and the spin-off television series. “I am very lucky because I am
still working. I am a comedienne. I am a dramatic actress. I am a singer. I
am a dancer. I am an integrator of work, like this Yzma character, which has
turned out to be quite interesting.”
She now lives a short drive from her daughter and manager, Kitt Shapiro, and
her grand-children, Jason, 17, and Rachel, 13. Shapiro’s father was Bill
McDonald, a tycoon to whom Kitt was married from 1960 to 1965. In
hind-sight, she suspects that she married him because she liked his mother.
Despite her reputation as a man-eater, Kitt laughs off reports that have
linked her romantically to Orson Welles and the world-renowned play-boy
Porfirio Rubirosa. “I do not have the chutzpah to be a femme fatale,” she
says. The love of her life was Arthur Leows Jr, the heir to the US cinema
chain. “I would have liked him to be the father of my child, but his mother
said she would rather shoot him in the foot than let him marry a brown-skin
woman,” she recalls ruefully.
For Kitt, Barack Obama’s presidential run represents a landmark moment in
American politics. “He is mixed, as I am mixed. If he does by chance become
president of the United States, that will show how far we have come in
America,” she says. But she does not identify with him because of her racial
make-up. “I have never thought of myself as a race. I have always thought of
myself as a communicator who has no race,” she says.
Kitt, who stays fit by walking two miles on the treadmill with 5lb weights on
her ankles and 2lb weights on her wrists, still plays once a year at the
Café Carlyle on the Upper East Side, where she was once the regular
attraction with signature songs such as C’est Si Bon. So, can
she ever envision a day when she hangs-up her thigh-skimming dresses and
says goodbye to the old act?
“I do not have an act. I just do Eartha Kitt. Eartha Kitt is my act and I am
still learning from her. Not that I want to be perfect. I do not believe in
perfection. What do you do with perfection? I want to be whoever Eartha Kitt
is until the gods take me wherever they take me.”
Eartha Kitt is at the Pigalle Club, W1 (020-7734 8142), April 23-25 and 27
2008. She plays the Cheltenham Jazz Festival on April 28 and 29 2008, at the
Pitville Pump Room (01242 227979).
