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Eartha Kitt on the cover of a 1950s’ album
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Sultry, sassy Eartha’s the original sex Kitten
She growled and purred her way to the top and now at 80 Eartha Kitt is to perform in London for the first time in 15 years. She explains why to Sunita Rappai
ORSON Welles famously called her “the most exciting woman in the world”.
Sultry, sexy and sassy – at a time when few black women were publicly acknowledged – Eartha Kitt was the original sex kitten, alternatively purring and growling her way to fame and fortune.
Now a stately 80 – although, like all true divas, she looks decades younger – the legendary songstress shows no sign of slowing down.
In June, she plays Carnegie Hall in New York. And next week, she makes her first visit to London in more than 15 years to perform five concerts at the Shaw Theatre in Euston.
On the menu are many songs that have come to be defined by her – ‘C'est Si Bon’, ‘I Want to be Evil’, the career-defining ‘Santa Baby’ – blended with witty anecdotes about her life and dished out in her inimitable, trademark purr.
“It’s old-fashioned cabaret,” she tells me, on the telephone from her home in New York.
“Cabaret artists are getting extinct. So it’s great that I am being asked to come back – perhaps we can encourage more of it. There is no cabaret today that is as classy as the Talk of the Town or Café De Paris.”
One of only a handful of artists to be nominated for all three major showbusiness awards – a Tony, a Grammy and an Emmy – her career has been as remarkable for its longevity as its notable ups and downs.
Born in grinding poverty to a black Cherokee mother and white father on a cotton plantation in South Carolina, Kitt was sent to live with her aunt in New York at the age of eight.
She got her start as a dancer with the Katherine Dunham Company after a friend dared her to audition and ended up travelling the world with the troupe.
But it was her encounter with Welles – the boy wonder of Hollywood – who cast her as Helen of Troy in his production of Faustus that really brought her to the public eye.
The two were alleged to have had a torrid affair – though Kitt denies it. Instead she says, her popularity led to occasional friction between the two.
“Working with Orson was scary but wonderful,” she reminisces. “Once, when the audience applauded so much, he took me in his arms – my back was to the audience – and bit me on my bottom lip strong enough to draw blood.
“When it was over I ran over to him and I was pounding him on the chest saying: ‘Why did you do that?’ And he said: ‘I got excited’.”
Broadway stardom led to a recording contract and a succession of best-selling records.
In 1967, at the age of 40, Kitt’s feline charms led to her stint as Catwoman in the TV series of Batman – perhaps the role that she remains best known for.
But while her light skin and honed beauty opened doors for her around the world, her popularity did not always go down well with black American audiences.
They accused her of forgetting her roots and thinking of herself as white. “I didn't think of myself as a black woman,” she says. “I still don’t. As an entertainer, I belong to everyone.
“Of course the negative coverage upset me. You seemed to have to constantly prove yourself – that if you were a particular colour, you had to sing a particular type of song. At least, the times have changed now.”
At the height of her fame, Kitt was also blackballed after speaking out against the Vietnam war at a White House lunch – and allegedly reducing Ladybird Johnson – President Lyndon Johnson’s wife – to tears. For a woman who defines her reason for living as her work, it led to a painful stretch in the wilderness – and a sizable CIA dossier, as she later discovered.
“It put me out of work for something like 10 or 11 years.
“I didn’t want to leave America but I had to leave to find work. It wasn’t that they didn’t want me as an artist.
“It was because they didn’t want the CIA on their doorstep.”
Kitt being Kitt, she came back with a vengeance in a Broadway revival of Timbuktu in 1978 and hasn’t looked back since, with three volumes of her autobiography to date and a slew of best-selling records.
Despite battling against colon cancer last year, she says she is in good health, – crediting good food and regular exercise for her remarkably youthful shape.
“I am looking forward to working continuously,” she adds. “When I’m not working I get bored and dissatisfied with myself. That feeling of being needed and wanted – I have to have that all the time. I would not say I have to be in demand as much as I was. But as long as I am wanted, I’m okay.”
Click here to book tickets
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