Archive for the ‘Eartha Kitt’ Category
Eartha Kitt – the sexiest matriarch?
When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin to lose
Bob Dylan, Like a rolling stone
Eartha Kitt, 1927-2008
So before I go onto the second lecture on immunology, a break to write about a theme I’ve neglected for too long – interesting women as models for a future matriarchy. So the other night, in a slightly boozy session with friends, one of them happened to mention his interest in Eartha Kitt, whom I knew only as something of a sex icon who had the obvious bon goût, and the most unAmerican ability, to sometimes sing in la belle langue. So we spent the next pleasant hour or so sampling her most playful work on Youtube.
Before that session I knew vaguely of Eartha Kitt (the earthy kitten?) as perhaps a comedienne of sex, who sang purrrfectly absurd songs sending up and celebrating the world’s most delicious vice. But…. well, let’s find out more.
She was born in the tiny town of North (or on a nearby plantation), in South Carolina, and having checked out what information is available online about the town, I find no mention of surely one of its most famous daughters. But then, her beginnings weren’t auspicious. Her father is basically unknown – some say a plantation owner’s son, others say a local white doctor. Could it be that her success had to be attributed to ‘white genes’? Others, or maybe the same conjecturers, say that she was the product of rape. In any case, her mother (who was of mixed Cherokee and African descent) began a relationship with a black man, who rejected Eartha as being ‘too white’. So, not exactly your standard middle class or even working class beginnings.
So, just a few lines on that earthy name of hers. Eartha really was her birth name, and her family name was Keith, (or Keit) or at least that was the surname of her mother, Annie Mae Keith, who died when Eartha was still quite young. The inspired switch from Keit/h to Kitt seems to have been Eartha’s own.
But more on her unpromising beginnings. She was sent away to be raised by a relative, one Aunt Rosa, ‘in whose household she was abused’, according to Wikipedia. The nature of the abuse isn’t mentioned, but it’s clear that life wasn’t easy for her in this period. She recounted in a later interview that ‘we’ were near starvation at this time, though who exactly she was referring to is unclear. I may have to read one or all of the three autobiographies she has written…
The difficulties of her early years are, to me, made clear by the fact that she wasn’t even sure who her mother was, let alone her father. According to Wikipedia,
After the death of Annie Mae, Eartha was sent to live with another close relative named Mamie Kitt [okay, so that’s where the name came from], who Eartha later came to believe was her biological mother, in Harlem, New York City, where Eartha attended the Metropolitan Vocational High School (later renamed the High School of Performing Arts).
No date is mentioned for this big city move, clearly a decisive event, but it was likely in the early 1940s. According to her daughter, this was undoubtedly the essential move of her life, getting her away from the bigotry of the South, where she was discriminated against by both Blacks and Whites. Interestingly, she wasn’t aware of her own birth day, until a group of students from her home state of South Carolina unEarthaed her birth certificate in 1998. She was born on January 17, 1927. Wikipedia next states, without evidence, that ‘she began her career in 1942’, whatever that means. After all, she was only 15 at the time. In any case, she’d clearly shown enough talent to appear ‘in the 1945 original Broadway theatre production of the musical Carib Song’, though not in a major role. In the 1950s she recorded a number of songs and gained her enduring reputation as a tongue-in-cheek ‘sex kitten’, with a very distinctive and, to me at least, very unAmerican, voice. Speaking of which…
She toured Europe as a dancer and vocalist from 1943, an extraordinary opportunity for a young teen, where she also proved to be skilled at picking up languages – la langue d’amour especially, but according to Wikipedia she was able to sing in eleven of them and to speak more or less fluently in four. C’est ridicule ça! When as a youngster I first heard her singing in French, I thought she was a native, or from the French Carribbean (if I’d heard of such a place) – at least, not a United Stater. In any case, such polyglotism seems freakish to me, in the best possible way. But French was the foreign language that had the most influence on her early career. Apparently she’d been touring with the Katherine Dunham dance troupe and was offered work in a Paris nightclub, which she accepted, becoming fluent in the language much quicker than I ever could. Bitch!
So when she eventually returned to the USA, reputation enhanced, she came to the attention of one Orson Welles, and made her acting debut in a Welles adaptation of Faust, as Helen of Troy (of course). This was in 1950, and she want on to record songs such as C’est si bon, Santa Baby and I want to be evil in the early fifties, establishing her reputation as an earthy sex kitten. Or should I say tiger, panther, bonobo…?
So this is a real rags to riches story, of a talented and enterprising young girl from the most unpromising of backgrounds, which, frankly, moves me more than I can say. And she has all the best bonobo qualities, though much better looking, at least from a human perspective.
It’s interesting – and very USA it seems – that a performer who, in a most unAmerican voice, performed I want to be evil and a deliciously slurpy (but strangely affecting) Lilac wine in her younger days, to grand acclaim, would be ‘outlawed’ for her sympathy for the young American troops being sent to an unnecessary war in Vietnam (not to mention the Vietnamese and Cambodian people caught up in the slaughter). It’s likely her early touring life gave her more of an internationalist, humanist perspective. And she spoke often about ‘falling in love with yourself’ as a prerequisite to a happy and fulfilling life, which is, I think, a more sophisticated view than it might sound. Only she would know how many intimate relations she had, but not too many, it seems. She married only once, relatively briefly, a union which produced her only child, Kitt McDonald, who is devoted to her memory.
I feel quite privileged now to have discovered the life of this fascinating and worthwhile person, who was more than just a unique polyglot entertainer. Hell, I may as well quote some of the Wikipedia material on her activism:
Kitt was active in numerous social causes in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1966, she established the Kittsville Youth Foundation, a chartered and non-profit organization for underprivileged youths in the Watts area of Los Angeles. Kitt was also involved with a group of youths in the area of Anacostia in Washington, D.C., who called themselves “Rebels with a Cause”. She supported the group’s efforts to clean up streets and establish recreation areas in an effort to keep them out of trouble by testifying with them before the House General Subcommittee on Education of the Committee on Education and Labor. In her testimony, in May 1967, Kitt stated that the Rebels’ “achievements and accomplishments should certainly make the adult ‘do-gooders’ realize that these young men and women have performed in 1 short year – with limited finances – that which was not achieved by the same people who might object to turning over some of the duties of planning, rehabilitation, and prevention of juvenile delinquents and juvenile delinquency to those who understand it and are living it”.
I wish I’d been there to hear her! Articulate and precisely on point – this approach reminds me of what I’ve been reading in Rutger Bregman’s Humankind. Treat people like shit and you’ll get nowhere with them. Treat them as better than they have been and they will learn to love themselves and their environment more.
Kitt was also a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, formed during World War 1 and still in existence. She was under CIA surveillance from 1956, further proof of her bonafides as an international humanist. And there’s more:
Kitt later became a vocal advocate for LGBT rights and publicly supported same-sex marriage, which she considered a civil right. She had been quoted as saying: “I support it [gay marriage] because we’re asking for the same thing. If I have a partner and something happens to me, I want that partner to enjoy the benefits of what we have reaped together. It’s a civil-rights thing, isn’t it?”
Indeed. With the current turn to conservatism, intolerance and patriarchal attitudes, Eartha Kitt’s attitude and example, including even her sexiness, reminds me of the purpose of this blog (she surely would’ve loved the bonobo example). Vive Eartha Kitt! I wish I could’ve met her.
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