Why did eartha kitt died screaming

Singer, dancer, actress

Moved to Harlem

Won Spot in Dance Company

Launched Recording Career

Unlucky in Love

Caused a Stir in the Press

Cast in Timbuktu

Selected recordings

Selected writings

Sources

Eartha Kitt’s life story is one of show business’s most unusual and poignant tales. From an unimaginably humble background in the Deep South, Kitt rose to become the toast of Europe during the glamorous 1950s as a cabaret singer with a dynamic persona and memorable, throaty voice. Back in America, however, she faced criticism from the African-American community for being perceived as too “white,” but later earned public support the hard way after speaking out against the Vietnam War in 1968. The media backlash over Kitt’s remarks, combined with government harassment, effectively derailed Kitt’s career in the United States for several years. Later, however, Kitt returned to both stage and screen and her recording career. She is one of the few performers to have earned nominations for Tony, Grammy, and Oscar awards in her lifetime.

Though Kitt is uncertain about her exact date of birth, since no birth certificate exists (her mother was most likely still a teenager, while her father was white), she recalled a hardscrabble life in the sharecropping territory of South Carolina during the Depression. She, her mother, and younger sister moved from house to house while their mother did chores in exchange for room and board. The young Kitt routinely suffered taunts of “yella” because of her lighter skin; eventually her mother left her behind with one farm family when she married a man who rejected Kitt because of her mixed race. “My mother felt a man was more important than her daughter,” Kitt told Richette Haywood in Ebony. “I would never have left my child,” she added.

Moved to Harlem

The young Kitt, who wore a dress made from a potato sack and did not own a pair of shoes, worked the fields and tended the animals. She was an outsider, and suffered for it. “Their children would put a sack on my head, tie me to a tree and throw stones,” she remembered in an interview with the New York Times’s Michael T. Kaufman. In her autobiography, Confessions of a Sex Kitten, she recalled accidentally allowing the farm’s milk cow to stray near a patch of lima beans, poisonous to the bovine anatomy. The cow had a seizure and died before her eyes, but not before it bellowed terribly; across the field, its calf heard and replied in distress, and “the sound of her calf in answer brought me to sobs I cannot describe—afraid for the whipping I knew

At a Glance…

Born Eartha Mae Kitt, January 26, 1927, in North, SC; daughter of William and Anna Mae (Riley) Kitt; married William McDonald, June 1960 (divorced, 1965); children: Kitt Shapiro.

Career: Singer, dancer, actress, and stage performer. Worked as a dancer, singer and soloist with the Katherine Dunham dance troupe, 1944-49; debuted as a nightclub singer at in Paris, 1949; played Helen of Troy in Orson Welles’s production of Faust, Paris, 1951. Stage appearances include New Faces (1952), Shinbone Alley (1957), and Timbutku (1978). Movie credits include Accused (1957), Anna Lucasta (1959), Syanon (1965), Ernest: Scared Stupid (1991), Boomerang (1992), and Fatal Instinct (1993). Kitt has also appeared on television and is perhaps best remembered for her recurring role as the Catwoman in the original Batman series.

Awards: Woman of the Year, National Association of Negro Musicians, 1968; Kitt has won Grammy, Tony, and Emmy award nominations for her work.

Addresses: Home—Pound Ridge, NY. Office—Eartha Kitt Productions, 888 Seventh Ave., Floor 37, New York, NY 10106-3799.

I would get and afraid for the calf who, like me, might be left without a mother,” Kitt recollected in her autobiography.

Kitt’s life changed when a distant relative from the North sent clothing and instructions to send the girl to New York City. She learned that this was her mother’s sister, but in later years she suspected this “aunt” was in reality her biological mother. Kitt arrived alone at Pennsylvania Station at the age of eight, and when brought to her aunt’s apartment, saw electricity and an indoor toilet for the first time. Yet her aunt was abusive, and in many ways life in Spanish Harlem was no easier than it had been down South.

Nevertheless, Kitt quickly left behind her humble beginnings by exhibiting an aptitude for learning. She learned several languages while living in Spanish Harlem. She excelled in school, and also sang in a choir and took piano lessons. One day a sympathetic teacher gave Kitt bus fare and sent her to audition at New York’s High School for the Performing Arts. Kitt was accepted, one of only six African-Americans there at the time. Again, she excelled in her new and challenging setting, despite the sometimes precarious nature of her home life. Another kindly teacher gave her a ticket to a Broadway play and told her not to come to school the next day. Kitt was so moved by the experience she cried at the end.

Won Spot in Dance Company

As Kitt’s situation at home deteriorated, she began to run away. She would stay with various friends or classmates, but sometimes she would sneak into apartment buildings and sleep on the roof. “When I see the homeless now, I empathize,” she told Kaufman in the New York Times. “I know there but for the grace of God go I,” she continued. Kitt managed to find work as a seamstress, and dropped out of her prestigious high school, though she was threatened with juvenile hall. One day, Kitt went to see a movie and was impressed by the famed Katherine Dunham Dance Company on screen, the first African American corps de ballet. She decided she wanted to join it, and lucked into an audition not long afterward when one of the dancers happened to stop her in Harlem and ask for directions.

Kitt won a spot—she was just sixteen—that paid a rich sum of $10 a week. With the Dunham troupe she toured Mexico, South America, and Europe, and appeared in the movie Casbah, the musical adaptation of Casablanca. The prominence of belonging to such an acclaimed dance company afforded Kitt a wealth of opportunities, and she began dating playboys and celebrities. When the Dunham Company was performing in Paris in 1949, Kitt—by now a soloist, too—was offered a nightclub singing engagement. She was promptly fired from the company after giving her two weeks’ notice, but was a hit with her new audience at Carroll’s, a swanky Paris nightclub.

Kitt became a Parisian sensation overnight. Critics raved about her sultry, unusual voice and slinky stage demeanor. Orson Welles cast her in his avant-garde stage production of Faust as the mythic beauty Helen of Troy. “I asked Orson at one point in the rehearsal who this character was,” Kitt recalled in her autobiography. “What kind of woman is she? How old is she? ’Don’t ask stupid questions, you stupid child,’ Orson told me. I chose you to play this part because you are the most exciting woman in the world. You represent all women of all ages. You have no place or time.’ This confused me more than ever,” Kitt remembered, “so I just played myself,” she added.

Launched Recording Career

Kitt’s cabaret repertoire came to include several foreign-language songs, of which two—the French “C’est Si Bon” and “Usku Dara,” a Turkish song, became her signature tunes. She also appeared in two French films. Still, her name was relatively unknown in the United States, and she hoped to conquer Broadway. She was selected as part of a revue called New Faces of 1952, and the show was a hit. Again, she was the subject of a great deal of media attention, and with this success she began a recording career with RCA. Back in New York, she lived on her own for the first time in her life in a studio on Riverside Drive. The building had an unwritten “whites-only” rule, but two of Kitt’s friends were tenants and signed over their lease in private to her when they moved.

Kitt’s glamorous celebrity lifestyle continued uninterrupted in the United States. She dated a British aristocrat as well as Porfirio Rubirosa, the famed raconteur. At one point she was earning three thousand dollars a week, but that figure jumped to ten thousand after a scandal in the papers. It was claimed that Kitt had offended the royal family of Greece at a performance at Los Angeles’s Mocambo nightclub, but it was simply a misunderstanding over another part of the show that had nothing to do with her. Headlines trumpeted the mayor’s denunciation of Kitt. The star also faced the subtle disapproval of the African American community, with whom her cosmopolitan cabaret act did not catch on. She was viewed as a bit oversophisticated, someone who “acted white.” Kitt’s unusual act did not always find favor with industry types, either. The person who signed her to her first recording contract was fired because of it; it was said that Kitt’s voice was “too weird to sell records,” according to Ross Wetzsteon in the Village Voice.

Unlucky in Love

Kitt sold many records on the RCA label despite that prediction. She performed nearly non-stop during this era, appearing back in Paris, in Las Vegas, and again on Broadway in such plays as Shinbone Alley and Mrs. Patterson. When she appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, the host instructed her to wear pants, saying, “Every time you wear a dress we get letters from the Catholics saying you are too sexy,” Kitt remembered in her autobiography. During this era she fell in love with Arthur Loew Jr., heir to the movie-theater chain, and the two even lived together for a time. Gossip columnists treated the interracial relationship kindly—Loew’s personality and drinking habits were said to have improved considerably under Kitt’s watch—but he was the only Loew son and his mother was viciously opposed.

Kitt also dated Sammy Davis Jr. and Charles Revson, founder of Revlon (the lipstick shade “Fire and Ice” is rumored to be named for her), and was pals with James Dean. In 1960 she married Bill McDonald, a mentally unbalanced man she had dated casually—he had threatened to kill himself if she would not marry him, and she succumbed since she felt he would make a good father to the child she wanted so badly. She later described her daughter Kitt as “the only good thing” about her five-year marriage, she told Ebony. McDonald took over as Kitt’s accountant, sold properties without her permission, and refused to pay child support after they separated. Kitt raised her daughter alone in Bel-Air and London.

Caused a Stir in the Press

In 1968, Kitt was invited to the “Women Doers’ Luncheon” at the White House hosted by Lady Byrd Johnson, President Lyndon Johnson’s wife. It was publicized as a serious discussion on juvenile delinquency, but Kitt found it to be a showy, staged event whose attendees exhibited little concern for the nation’s problems. In preparation for the event, Kitt—who gave dance workshops in Watts—had met with a mothers’ group in a poor section of Los Angeles. They had explained to her just how the Vietnam War and the draft negatively impacted children in impoverished neighborhoods. Young men who were ineligible for deferments were fodder for the war machine. Going to college was one way to earn a deferment—or coming from a well-connected family—and thus a disproportionate number of minorities came back from a one-year tour of duty in Southeast Asia in body bags. However, as the mothers pointed out, young men with criminal records were not eligible to serve in the armed forces, and this was a certain factor in the recent rise in inner-city crime. When it was Kitt’s turn to speak at the luncheon, she declared that “Vietnam is the main reason we are having trouble with the youth of America,” Kitt remembered in Confessions of a Sex Kitten.

Though a limousine had taken her to the White House, it was nowhere to be seen and Kitt was forced to call a cab when the luncheon was over. On the ride back she heard on the radio that she had made the First Lady cry. Her remarks made headlines, and she was excoriated in the press. She lost friends—some prominent people conceded that what she had said was correct, but she acted rudely by saying it inside the President’s house. Her phone stopped ringing, the contracts Kitt had already inked for singing engagements simply “disappeared,” and she was left without work. “Some kind of plague had hit my house and I became an untouchable,” Kitt recalled in Confessions of a Sex Kitten. In a 1996 interview published in BlackLines, Kitt told reporter Catey Sullivan, “I was rejected artistically, emotionally and personally. I remember thinking, my own mother had given me away and now my country didn’t want me either.”

She did earn respect from some factions, however. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called to thank her, and she found a new audience with America’s youth of both races, who wholeheartedly supported her and even sported “Eartha Kitt for President” buttons. But Johnson had directed the Central Intelligence Agency to keep tabs on her, and an extensive dossier was compiled. She even suspected that her phone was tapped. It was not until the mid-1970s that political columnist Jack Anderson helped publicize the extent of the CIA’s surveillance of Kitt; the dossier even provided details of her love life.

Cast in Timbuktu

From 1968 to 1974 Kitt earned a living by performing in Europe. Her American comeback came when she was cast in the 1978 musical Timbuktu. It had long been her dream to return to Broadway, but she confessed to still being nervous about the Johnson flap before opening night. Timbuktu, however, was a great success and when it played in the nation’s capital, Jimmy Carter made a point of inviting her back to the White House. In the late 1970s Kitt also returned to a recording career, cutting a disco record with Jacques Morali that launched her new status as a gay icon. During the eighties, she spent time on her extensive estate in Connecticut, where she tended to a large garden that kept the health-conscious dancer’s kitchen well-stocked with fruits and vegetables. “I trust the dirt,” Kitt told Ebony. “I don’t trust diamonds and gold. I know how to survive in the dirt,” she continued.

Kitt returned to film in the early 1990s, appearing in Ernest: Scared Stupid and as a romantic interest in Eddie Murphy’s Boomerang. She played herself in Fatal Instinct, a Carl Reiner spoof from 1993, and appeared in Unzipped, the documentary look at fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi. She released yet another album of songs, Back in Business, in 1995, and portrayed a homeless woman in a benefit play entitled Sam’s Song, performed at New York’s All Souls Unitarian Church. Kitt also returned to the cabaret circuit, performing at Manhattan’s Cafe Carlyle in 1993 and appearing in the one-woman show Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill in 1996.

Though well into her sixties, Kitt still tours forty weeks out of the year. Her daughter Kitt Shapiro serves as her manager, and she remains as energetic as she was fifty years before as a Katherine Dunham dancer. Her legendary slinky, cat-like nature is still a draw for new fans, but age has seemed to mellow Kitt somewhat. She displays a Zen-like philosophy to life’s travails, and in particular about her own remarkable past. “I don’t wallow in the manure that was thrown on me,” Kitt told Sullivan in BlackLines“I use it as fertilizer for my life, and my life is extremely interesting,” she added.

Selected recordings

At the Plaza, 1965.

Bad But Beautiful, 1976.

At Her Very Best, 1982.

C’est Si Bon (recorded 1983), Polydor.

I Love Men, Sunnyview, 1984.

St. Louis Blues, 1985.

That Bad Eartha, RCA, 1985.

Eartha Kitt with the Doc Cheatham Trio (recorded 1950), Swing, 1986.

In Person at the Plaza (recorded 1965), GNP Crescendo. 1987.

My Way: A Musical Tribute to Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Caravan of Dreams, 1987.

Eartha Kitt in Person at the Plaza, 1988.

A Funny Dame, 1988.

Diamond Series (compilation), 1988.

Primitive Man, 1992.

I’m Still Here, 1989.

Live in London, 1990.

Best of Eartha Kitt (compilation), MCA, 1990.

Miss Kitt to You, RCA, 1992.

Thinking Jazz, ITM, (German import), 1992.

Love for Sale, Capitol.

The Romantic Eartha Kitt, Capitol.

Back in Business, 1995.

Selected writings

Thursday’s Child (autobiography), Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1956.

Alone with Me (autobiography), Regnery, 1976.

Confessions of a Sex Kitten (autobiography), Barricade Books, 1989.

Sources

Books

Contemporary Musicians, volume 3, Gale Research, 1993, pp. 121-123.

Periodicals

BlackLines, April 1996.

Ebony, December 1957, pp. 83-92; October 1993, pp. 112-116.

Essence, January 1993, p. 56.

Jet, January 16, 1995, p. 63.

New York Times, September 11, 1993, sec. A., p. 25; January 8, 1995, sec. WC, p. 11.

Village Voice, February 1993, p. 92.

—Carol Brennan