The Full Biography
Eartha Kitt. Singer. Actress. The South Carolina child who made a purr into a weapon, then used it at a White House lunch and paid for the sentence for a decade.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is Catwoman, or “Santa Baby,” a glance that treats a mink as a joke and a threat. What the still cannot show is Eartha Mae Keith of North, South Carolina, a girl born to a Black and Cherokee mother and a white father she was not supposed to claim, a cotton-field childhood, a Harlem aunt, Katherine Dunham’s company, and a life that included exile from American television after she told Lady Bird Johnson the truth about Vietnam.
She was born on January 17, 1927, in the South Carolina low country, in or near the town of North. Annie Mae Keith, her mother, was Black and Cherokee. The father was a white man the family was not supposed to name. The early years were work and not belonging — too light for one world, too dark for the other, a story she told without perfume. She picked cotton. She was abused in a household that treated a mixed child as a problem. An aunt, Mamie Kitt, took her to Harlem. The second life began in a walk-up, not in a talent show. She learned that a body could be an instrument that paid.
The door was Katherine Dunham’s company. In the mid-1940s Dunham took her on as a dancer: Mexico, Europe, a finishing school that paid in calluses and in rooms that did not require Jim Crow’s permission. Paris finished what Dunham started. Orson Welles cast her as Helen of Troy in his 1950 production of Faust and called her “the most exciting woman in the world,” which is the kind of sentence that helps a career and can also trap one. She made records that sounded like a cat and a conservatory at once. “C’est si bon.” “Santa Baby” (1953), a Christmas gold-digger carol written by Joan Javits and Philip Springer, a character who knows the price of fur. The decades cannot kill it. Nightclubs. New Faces of 1952 on Broadway. A face that could sell a glove or a warning.
She kept the rooms and then the pictures. The Mark of the Hawk (1957) with Sidney Poitier. St. Louis Blues (1958). Anna Lucasta (1958) with Poitier again. On Broadway she did Mrs. Patterson and, in 1957, Shinbone Alley. The cabaret was the living: a diction so precise it could cut a steak, a French that was a weapon and a joke, a sex that was a mind. She married Bill McDonald in 1960; their daughter, Kitt McDonald — Kitt Shapiro — was born in 1961. The marriage did not hold. The daughter did. She wrote, already, as if the South Carolina years needed a clerk. Thursday’s Child (1956) is a memoir that does not sand the field.
In 1967–68 she played Catwoman on ABC’s Batman after Julie Newmar, a purr the camp series did not have to invent. It is the American job the Halloween costumes remember. It is not the monument. The monument is a lunch.
On January 18, 1968, she was invited to a White House luncheon on juvenile crime. Lady Bird Johnson asked a question. Kitt talked about the war. She said the country’s best young men were being shot in Vietnam, and that a kid might steal a car if the country was sending him to die. The room froze. The administration froze her. The CIA kept a file. Club dates in America thinned. Television dates vanished. She worked Europe: London rooms, continental cabaret, a living that did not require a Washington apology. She did not recant. That lunch is the turn, and it is easy to miss if you only play the Christmas record.
Europe in those years was not an exile she decorated. It was a living: London Palladium dates, continental clubs, a woman who could still fill a room when American television would not put her on a soundstage. She recorded. She toured. She kept the diction. She kept the daughter. She did not write a letter of regret to Lady Bird. The CIA file, when it surfaced in pieces, confirmed what she had already lived: a singer treated as a security problem because she had answered a First Lady’s question. She had answered it. She went back to work in rooms that would still have her.
She came back when the country was ready to pretend it had not blacklisted her. Timbuktu! (1978), a musical reworking of Kismet, brought a Tony nomination. Cabaret rooms in New York filled again. A gay audience that had always heard the joke and the wound in the same note took the front tables. She took the rooms. She did not pretend the White House lunch had been a misunderstanding. In the 1980s and 1990s she was a one-woman industry of precise consonants and unpretty honesty. Disney hired the voice as Yzma in The Emperor’s New Groove (2000) and in the television follow-up, a villain who is also a joke, an Emmy in the house. She kept touring. She kept the memoirs coming: Alone with Me, I’m Still Here. The titles are not branding. They are a report.
I’m a dirt person. I trust the dirt. I don’t trust diamonds and gold.Eartha Kitt
The American rehabilitation was slow and then sudden: cabaret, a Disney villain, a Christmas song that prints money every December, a daughter at the table. She took the bookings. She cashed them without kneeling. She had already, in 1968, chosen the sentence over the booking.
Six things most people never knew
- North, South Carolina, is the first hurt. A mixed child in a Jim Crow field. Harlem was the second life, not the first myth.
- Dunham’s company, not a talent show, is the door. Dance as a ticket off the dirt. Paris as a finishing school that paid.
- “Santa Baby” is a character, not a wish list. 1953. She plays a woman who knows the price of fur.
- The 1968 White House lunch ended her domestic prime time. Vietnam, Lady Bird, a CIA file. She worked Europe rather than apologize.
- Catwoman was an American job, not the monument. The monument is the lunch and the records.
- She died on Christmas, which the “Santa Baby” DJs still have not fully metabolized. 2008. Eighty-one. The purr had become a grandmother’s and still had a knife.
Kitt Shapiro has kept the catalog and the story. Friends from the cabaret describe a professional who could be imperial about a lyric and tender about a young singer. She did not become sweet. She became exact.
The later years
Home, after Europe and the slow return, was a working life that no longer required a network’s permission. She lived, in the last long stretch, in Connecticut, a house that could hold a daughter and a rehearsal and a dog, and she treated the rooms of New York and London as the office. The cabaret set was a one-woman firm: a pianist, a gown, a diction that still collected rent on every consonant. She did not sand the South Carolina years for the tourists. She told them. She told the lunch. She told the blacklist without asking the audience to clap for her courage. The courage was already in the 1968 sentence. The last decades were the country paying, in tickets, for having frozen her.
The voice work was a second shop. Yzma is a Disney villain who sounds like a woman who has already survived a Senate and a field. Children who will never hear “C’est si bon” know that laugh. She took the job as a job. She also took the stage musicals, the benefits, the Pride bills, the rooms that had kept her when prime time had not. A gay audience that had heard the wound in the purr was not a market she discovered in old age. It was a room that had been there in the 1950s. She thanked it by remaining exact. She did not become a mascot. She became, if anything, more particular: a woman who would stop a lyric to correct a fact, and who would not pretend “Santa Baby” was a hymn.
The body, in the last years, was a schedule she worked around. Colon cancer. Treatments. A wig or no wig, depending on the night. She kept dates. In 2006 and 2007 she was still touring, still Yzma, still a woman who could hold a hush. Kitt Shapiro ran the business and sat at the table. Friends describe a professional who could be imperial in a sound check and then gentle with a young singer who had come backstage to say the lunch had mattered. She did not perform grandmother as a softening. She performed grandmother as a woman who still hit the note and still named the field.
She died on Christmas Day, 2008, in Weston, Connecticut. She was eighty-one. The date is a joke the DJs cannot quite metabolize and a fact the family has to live inside every December, when the gold-digger carol starts printing money again. The obituaries led with Catwoman and the mink. The better ones remembered North, Dunham, Lady Bird, the CIA file, and a woman who had chosen a sentence over a booking. She had outlasted the freeze of 1968 by remaining interesting, which is a professional skill as well as a moral one. The purr was a grandmother’s and still had a knife. That is a better last chapter than sweet.
What those years were not is a redemption arc the White House wrote. The country did not apologize in a way that unsay the file. It hired her again. She cashed the checks, sang the carol, voiced the villain, and kept the memoirs in print. The last act is a woman who had already decided, in 1968, that the truth was the job, and who spent the remainder of a long life collecting on that decision without kneeling for the collection. Connecticut was the house. The room was wherever a hush could be held. The daughter is the clerk. The record, every December, is the weather. The lunch is the monument.
She also, in those last years, kept the body as an instrument the way Dunham had taught. Yoga. A diet she talked about without making it a brand. A rehearsal standard that younger singers still mention: arrive able to do the job, leave the mink in the lyric. She played Carnegie Hall. She played small rooms that could still go silent. She played the Disney microphone as if it were a supper club. The through-line is not Catwoman. The through-line is a girl from a field who learned that a consonant, correctly hit, is a kind of rent, and who collected that rent until Christmas 2008. The field is in the memoirs. The rent is in the rooms. The knife is in both.
Kitt Shapiro has said her mother worked because work was how Eartha Mae stayed Eartha Kitt, and because a dumped child does not trust a quiet calendar. The last calendar was still full. Dates, treatments, a gown, a plane, a daughter in the wings. She did not issue a farewell special. She issued a set. Then the set stopped. The carol did not. That imbalance is the remainder every December asks the family to live inside. They live it. The catalog pays. The lunch, if you know to look for it, is still the monument under the mink.
The last tours had a shape she did not advertise as a last anything. A city, a sound check, a gown that still did the job, a talking-to if the piano dragged. She recorded cabaret dates that treated “C’est si bon” as a standard and the lunch as a fact she would name if the room earned it. She kept French in the set because Paris had been a finishing school that paid, not a souvenir. She kept the South Carolina sentences because the field was the first room and she would not let a supper club sand it. Cancer made the calendar tighter. It did not make the standard looser. Friends from those last rooms describe a woman who could be exhausted in the wings and exact on the downbeat. That is Dunham’s lesson, still collecting. That is also a dumped child who would not stay dumped, still collecting. Connecticut was only where the collecting stopped.
After she was gone
“Santa Baby” still prints money every December. The White House lunch is a civics clip. Catwoman is Halloween. The memoirs are the South Carolina child, still talking. All four are her. None of them is the whole throat.
She came out of a field, danced for Dunham, purred for a living, told Lady Bird the war was the crime, lost the rooms, took Europe, came back as Catwoman and as a cabaret fact, and died on the holiday her gold-digger carol owns. If you only remember the purr, you have the record. If you remember the field, the lunch, and the file, you have her.
Portrait: Boris Carmi (Meitar Collection / National Library of Israel) · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons