My Encounter With The Divine Eartha Kitt: "I AM Cinderella!"
Eartha Kitt’s daughter has a new book out about her mother and their lives. It reminded me of the afternoon I spent with the divine Ms. Kitt (grrrrrrrr) and the subsequent story for The Hartford Courant in 2012. Below is the piece which was an advance story of the touring show of the musical “Cinderella,” which was heading for Connecticut ticket. and starred Ms. Kitt.
By FRANK RIZZO
One doesn't easily picture Eartha Kitt as the Fairy Godmother in "Cinderella." That character is usually played in a Nutrasweet way, whereas Kitt brings a sophisticated marinade to anything she does. Kitt's Fairy Godmother is one who's been around the block more than a few times, one who has lived several lifetimes (and counting), one whose authority is so deep, she doesn't even need a wand.
As she says in the new touring production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein show, which runs Wednesday through Sunday at the ctnow.com Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford, "Been there. Done that."
Sitting in the lobby of a New York theater where "Cinderella" was rehearsing before starting the national tour last month, the petite 73-year-old Kitt is an intimidating presence. Her cool, limp handshake, her regal bearing, her faraway focus give an interviewer that uh-oh feeling.
But ask her about her affinity with the title character and -- shazam! -- the diva turns divine.
"I AM Cinderella!" she says, in a voice so strong, so uniquely accented, so essentially Eartha that you dare not doubt it for one second. Then, switching to a seductive feline softness, she purrs, "I've always referred to myself as the sepia Cinderella."
Given how she started out in life, she makes a great case for how a girl from the ashes can get to the ball.
She was born Eartha Mae Kitt on a cotton plantation in South Carolina to dirt-poor sharecroppers. Her parents never married. When she was 2, her white father died. When her black Cherokee mother decided to marry, she left 3-year-old Eartha and her half-sister, Pearl, with a neighbor's family. At 8, she was sent to live with an aunt in Harlem.
Kitt started to write about herself in 1954 in her first of three memoirs; it details her struggle growing up, her feeling of abandonment and her wounds from others for being of mixed racial parentage. In "Confessions of a Sex Kitten," she writes about the day her mother left her. She instructed Eartha to sweep the yard as she walked out of her daughter's life on the arm of her new husband. Eartha instinctively knew she was losing her mother forever. "I stood in silence," she writes, "with some kind of long stick in my hands -- it must have been a broom -- and the movement of my body slowly swept the leaves closer to the plants as though I had been hypnotized. My movement continued to sweep my hurt under the bushes. Now I knew Moma was gone forever. I did not cry. I could not cry. I would not cry. My soul was hurt and lost."
Sadness Of Rejection
When she is reminded of the similarity to Cinderella's own sense of abandonment and mother loss, tears well up in Kitt's eyes.
"When Cinderella is rejected by her family and retreats to her little chair and sings 'My Own Little Corner,"' she says, "I remember myself as a kid running off into the nearby woods and just sitting there under the trees. When I'm now at rehearsals watching the kids perform the 'Cinderella' story, I'm in tears. I had the feeling of rejection all through my life. I had people tell me I wasn't black enough, wasn't white enough.
"Things are getting better now, thank God. But when I started to write about myself, I realized that other people have gone through the same things that I went through, and I felt talking about it would also be therapeutic for them -- as well as for me."
Nobody in the world goes through life without having some kind of problems, she says.
"But it's what you do about that problem that's important," she says. "And that's what the Fairy Godmother says to Cinderella in the show. 'Everything starts with a wish,' she says. But if you want to wish yourself out of a difficult situation, you've first got to get up and do something about it yourself."
And who has been her Fairy Godmother?
She flashes that Eartha cat-ate-the-canary smile.
"No, I didn't have anyone there to specifically guide me anywhere," she says without self pity, "so, in a way, the public became my Fairy Godmother. That's what is so wonderful about being who I am."
Still, she says, there have been forces looking out for her.
"I remember when I was brought up to Harlem and my aunt put me in the choir of the Salem Methodist Church, and we did 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.' They gave me the part of Snow White. When the play was over, one of the ladies in the audience came up to me as I was standing next to my aunt, who was talking to someone at the time and not paying much attention to me. And this woman put her hand on my shoulder, and she looked at my aunt, and she said, 'Your child was born with the hand of God on her shoulder.' I never have forgotten that. So whenever I'm in trouble, I refer back to that feeling I got from what that woman said to me."
'Yellow Gal'
Kitt also got some godmotherly help from two teachers: "One was Mrs. Bishop from P.S. 136, and the other was Mrs. Nearson from the New York School of the Performing Arts, where I attended. Mrs. Bishop realized I had a problem of loneliness. I didn't talk. I didn't want to attract attention to myself because ..." Her voice trails off for a moment, and she pauses as she steps back to a private place in her mind. "I think once you are called a 'yellow gal,' it's worse than someone calling you a nigger. It's terrible. It means you're rejected by everybody. Nobody wants you."
When she was 16, she met a young woman on the street who was a dancer with the famed Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe who told Kitt about an audition for Dunham's dance school. Kitt tried out and landed a scholarship with the school, which soon led to a position with the company, first as a dancer and later as a dancer-vocalist. By the time she was 20, Kitt was performing in the world's capitals.
"But I don't think I ever felt I belonged anywhere," she says, "because I was so conditioned from the time when I was a child that I didn't belong. So I sort of followed my own path. Of course, now that I do have a family, I'm still on my own path, but I have taken the responsibility for both my work and my child and her family," she says.
Kitt married real estate investor Bill McDonald in 1960. Their daughter, Kitt, was born in 1961. They divorced in 1965, and Kitt stayed closed to McDonald's family. Kitt McDonald married entrepreneur Charles Shapiro in 1987, and they have two children, Justin and Rachel.
"When I was starting out, I didn't have a family unit," Kitt says. "And there was no one there to say 'no.' So when I wanted to go out and do something, I would just take my chances. Like going to Turkey, for instance, when all I had was a round-trip ticket. There was no one there to say, 'No, you can't do that.' I also realized that when someone waves a finger in my face and says I can't do something, watch out."
Challenged By A Dare
Katherine Dunham discovered this when she warned Kitt not to take on any solo engagements as a singer while she was also a member of her company. She dared Kitt to leave the troupe, threatening that she would never get work anywhere again if she did.
That's all Kitt needed.
"I didn't have any intentions of leaving the company," she says. "I just wanted to try my own wings as a singer after the curtain went down on the dance company. But when she put her finger in my face and then dared me, well I just went out on my own. I decided to do it because I wanted to see just how dangerous it was for me to take that next step."
It was the beginning of the transformation of Earth Mae to Eartha Kitt. She immediately began performing in nightclubs throughout Europe, where she met Orson Welles in1950, who cast her as Helen of Troy in his Paris production of "Dr. Faustus."
Shortly after, she returned to Broadway, where she created a sensation in the hit revue "New Faces of 1952," singing the seductive, slinky and sublime "Monotonous." Her image as the original Material Girl was further solidified with a series of "gimmie gimmie" pop tunes, such as "I Want To Be Evil," "C'est Si Bon," "I Love Men," "Mink, Schmink," "My Heart Belongs to Daddy," "Uska Dara" and the holiday perennial "Santa, Baby." Her nearly 50-year-plus career has spanned records, nightclubs, films ("St. Louis Blues," "Boomerang"), TV (Catwoman on "Batman") and Broadway ("Timbuktu" and last season's "The Wild Party," for which she was nominated for a Tony Award).
Her reputation of being an outspoken independent reached new heights when she was invited to the White House in 1968, which led to an incident she refers to as "that thing with the government."
She was asked to participate in a luncheon forum on juvenile delinquency that included Lady Bird Johnson, "who seemed to be more interested in decorating the windows of the ghettos with flower boxes." Kitt related youth crime to alienation because of the Vietnam War, and the incident was widely reported as offending the first lady. As a result, she suffered a major loss in popularity and professional engagements.
In 1975, the Washington Post revealed that the FBI and CIA were keeping files on her containing information about her professional and personal life. In 1978, President Carter invited "the bad girl" back to the White House with the words, "Welcome back, Eartha."
From Naughty To Nice
"I always played the naughty girl along the way, being cast as the vamp or the sharp-tongued woman," she says. "But I don't think agents ever understood me as being a mischievous personality -- either as myself as Eartha Mae or as Eartha Kitt, the marquee name. But now I'm playing a good girl as the Fairy Godmother.
" My life is a circle. This very theater [now the Ford Center for the Performing Arts] was where I started my career with the Katherine Dunham School. I remember someone daring me to some here to audition, and I managed to have the guts to do it. Right here -- in this very same place where we are now!"
She takes in the moment, lowers her voice another register and gives a sly smile.
"Well," she purrs, "maybe you have to say there is a fairy godmother."