If I had a ribbon bow to bind my hair, If I had a fancy sash, my own true love would think me fair . . .
Patrons of the Blue Angel nightclub, accustomed to hearing these lines sung with folk-song innocence, were wondering last week whether they ever did understand the old song. They were concentrating on Eartha Kitt, a Negro newcomer to Manhattan night life. Eartha launched into the song with a voice of husky sweetness, but before she had gone very far she was wailing out the lyrics in a first-class imitation of jungle cat.
A lithe figure in skin-tight satin, she followed up her folk song with some smoldering blues (“Bury me where he passes by”), switched to a playful chant for “I want to be evil and cheat at jacks,” then to the piquant for a French number. Whatever Eartha chose to give them, the crowd paid her back with devout attention. Her nightclub act was proving just as much a hit as her Broadway debut last month in New Faces of 1952, which drew from the New York Times’s Brooks Atkinson the fervent report: “Eartha Kitt not only looks incendiary . . . she can make a song burst into flame.”
Up to the Hip. Eartha is her real name. She was born 24 years ago on her family’s cotton farm near Columbia, S.C. “My parents had a hard time for a couple of years, but the year I came along they had a good crop, so they decided to name me after the earth.” Her mother took her to New York after her father died, and at 16 she surprised herself by winning a scholarship to Katherine Dunham’s dance school. She had bit parts (dancing and some singing) in three Dunham shows, but in the midst of a European tour with the troupe, Eartha decided she had learned all she wanted to learn about dancing. She quit the company to sing in a Paris cabaret, promptly learned something more. Just before she went out to sing, the manager took one look at her demure, opening-night dress, then & there ripped it up to the hips on both sides. Fortunately, says Eartha, “I have nice legs.”
One connoisseur was Orson Welles, who called her “the most exciting woman in the world,” cast her as Helen of Troy in a Paris production of his own version of Faust. The show traveled to Germany as An Evening with Orson Welles, was soon being dubbed “an evening with Eartha Kitt.” Last year she even got a letter from Winston Churchill. She was singing at a
London club called “Churchill’s” (no kin), and a fan letter addressed to her was mistakenly delivered to the old statesman. Churchill forwarded it with a note of his own: “My dear Miss Kitt, I presume that this extraordinary document was meant for you.”
Keep Them Guessing. Eartha returned to the U.S. six months ago, and now, with her role in New Faces and her after-the-show nightclub stint, is as busy as she has ever been in her life.
Recordings are sure to come, but so far she and the record companies don’t agree on the songs she ought to sing. To sell the most records, they tell her, she ought to go to work on songs like Wheel of Fortune and Cry. Eartha is reluctant, feels they aren’t her type.
What is her type?
“That’s the problem,” says Eartha. “Nobody is able to put a definite type on me. All I can do is keep them guessing. I’m a liberal artist.”
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