Eartha Kitt: A sex symbol born to confront the world.
by David Patrick Stearns
DECEMBER 25, 2008 TAGS:
Sex symbols always confront the world’s morality, but few went to such lengths as Eartha Kitt, who died on Christmas Day from colon cancer at age 81 after some six decades of being a flash point of provocative glamour. Whether asking Santa Claus for a yacht (with an obvious payback in mind) in her hit “Santa Baby” or seductively plying a man young enough to be her grandson with champagne during her nightclub act, Kitt presented herself with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude that defied the judgments of others. While the pop music world breathlessly wonders if the similarly confrontational Madonna has gone too far, those sexual-cum-political trails were blazed earlier and more completely by Eartha Kitt.
Her confrontational sensibility hardly stopped at sex. "You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed," Kitt proclaimed at a 1968 White House luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson (who was left weeping). After she was exiled to Europe (which was her second home in any case), she returned to the U.S. with renewed fierceness. Opportunities to promote her latest stage appearance in any given city were given over to discussions having nothing to do with her work, but the African-American separatist philosophies of Marcus Garvey.
Even in later years as she played the diva with an almost Liberacian extravagance with designer sunglasses, furs and slit skirts that showed off her still-great legs, her stage appearances were marked by her "wrath of god" stare. No anti-war, anti-racist comments needed to be uttered when Kitt’s brow was ominously knitted and turned on an audience that had, almost always, paid quite a lot for the privilege.
That stare came from a background of want, having been born out of wedlock – the result of a rape, she claimed – in the pre-civil rights deep south that gave few breaks to this small African American/Cherokee Indian woman. That, perhaps, was the source of the dark undercurrent often present in her work, whether playing The Cat Woman in the TV series version of "Batman" or the Wicked Witch of the West in a touring stage version of The Wizard of Oz. Never one to give her audiences an easy ride, she paid the price of rarely being a first choice in the entertainment industry. But there was never any denial of who she was, whether playing Kaa the python in BBC Radio’s version of The Jungle Book or supplying the voice to the animated character Queen Vexus in TV’s "My Life as a Teenage Robot."
Such enterprises may have been unseemly for a stage artist who was a model of cosmopolitan elegance. Yet even as she seemed to ply herself as her own most inexhaustible commercial resource – whether authoring three autobiographies or, in recent years, positioning herself as an oracle of fitness and longevity – her sense of confrontation, even when under the surface, meant that the world never got the best of her. When performing, she enjoyed the applause, but never demanded it. Even in a benefit concert for Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell last year in Philadelphia, she left the stage assuring you that the honor belonged to the audience for having her there – and that after the final encore, her evening was still young, younger, in fact, than yours.
David Patrick Stearns, classical music critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, writes often about the theater.
Her confrontational sensibility hardly stopped at sex. "You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed," Kitt proclaimed at a 1968 White House luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson (who was left weeping). After she was exiled to Europe (which was her second home in any case), she returned to the U.S. with renewed fierceness. Opportunities to promote her latest stage appearance in any given city were given over to discussions having nothing to do with her work, but the African-American separatist philosophies of Marcus Garvey. Even in later years as she played the diva with an almost Liberacian extravagance with designer sunglasses, furs and slit skirts that showed off her still-great legs, her stage appearances were marked by her "wrath of god" stare. No anti-war, anti-racist comments needed to be uttered when Kitt’s brow was ominously knitted and turned on an audience that had, almost always, paid quite a lot for the privilege.
That stare came from a background of want, having been born out of wedlock – the result of a rape, she claimed – in the pre-civil rights deep south that gave few breaks to this small African American/Cherokee Indian woman. That, perhaps, was the source of the dark undercurrent often present in her work, whether playing The Cat Woman in the TV series version of "Batman" or the Wicked Witch of the West in a touring stage version of The Wizard of Oz. Never one to give her audiences an easy ride, she paid the price of rarely being a first choice in the entertainment industry. But there was never any denial of who she was, whether playing Kaa the python in BBC Radio’s version of The Jungle Book or supplying the voice to the animated character Queen Vexus in TV’s "My Life as a Teenage Robot."
Such enterprises may have been unseemly for a stage artist who was a model of cosmopolitan elegance. Yet even as she seemed to ply herself as her own most inexhaustible commercial resource – whether authoring three autobiographies or, in recent years, positioning herself as an oracle of fitness and longevity – her sense of confrontation, even when under the surface, meant that the world never got the best of her. When performing, she enjoyed the applause, but never demanded it. Even in a benefit concert for Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell last year in Philadelphia, she left the stage assuring you that the honor belonged to the audience for having her there – and that after the final encore, her evening was still young, younger, in fact, than yours.
David Patrick Stearns, classical music critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, writes often about the theater.
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