Orson Welles said it best. He called original sex-kitten Eartha Kitt "the most exciting woman in the world." The legendary jazz singer — known best today for her inimitable "Santa Baby" and her iconic Catwoman character on TV's "Batman" — died Christmas Day at age 81. She had colon cancer.
Eartha delighted fans for more than sixty years as a singer, dancer and actress. She won two Emmys, and was nominated for two Grammys and a number of Tonys. But her career was not without controversy. As the Associated Press reports, Eartha was outspoken about politics, making headlines in the Sixties when she told Lady Bird Johnson at a White House luncheon:
You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the street. They don't want to go to school because they're going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam."
After that she was hounded by the FBI and CIA, so she performed mostly overseas for a few years. Later she told Essence magazine:
The thing that hurts, that became anger, was when I realized that if you tell the truth — in a country that says you're entitled to tell the truth — you get your face slapped and you get put out of work."
Eartha Kitt was an amazing woman. She was beautiful, smart, talented and compassionate. On stage she was outrageously sexy, but privately she was said to be very shy. She blamed her reticence on being unwanted and unloved as a mixed-race child in the South. The AP says she called herself "that little urchin cotton-picker from the South, Eartha Mae."
Our world is a little less purrfect without her.
Here's Eartha Kitt in 1963, doing a version of "C'est Si Bon" that will knock your socks off:
Click HERE to watch a YouTube playlist of Eartha Kitt videos.
R.I.P. Eartha Kitt******
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