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Eartha Kitt: South Carolina
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Eartha Kitt frequently stood up against what she perceived as wrong, and took the consequences when they followed. She made Lady Bird Johnson cry at luncheon at the White House by speaking out against the Vietnam war. She was "blacklisted" and was not able to find work for approximately eleven years in the United States (p.249). She was investigated by the FBI and the CIA. Her CIA files contained this excerpt describing her as: "a sadistic, sex nymphomaniac...rude, crude, shrewd, difficult...one of six children...mother and father farmers in South Carolina...ranaway from home at the age of sixteen...would do anything to get attention..." (p.240).
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Born 1927, January - Born in the South and raised in Harlem, sultry black actress/singer Eartha Kitt attended New York's High School of Performing Arts. After touring with Katherine Dunham's dance troupe, Kitt headlined at choice nightclubs in both Paris and the U.S. She made her acting debut as Helen of Troy in Orson Welles' 1951 staging of Faust.
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Eartha Mae Kitt's actual origins are somewhat in doubt. It's likely she was born on January 17, 1927, on a cotton plantation in the small South Carolina town of North. A birth certificate discovered in the late '90s seemed to corroborate that information, but Kitt was never entirely sure, because she lost contact with both her parents at a very young age. Her white father (sometimes alleged to be one of the plantation owner's sons) abandoned her when she was very young, and her mother, a black sharecropper, later remarried and sent her to live with neighbors. Kitt's mother died not long afterwards. Overworked, overlooked, and teased for being biracial, Kitt was finally sent to live with an aunt in Harlem when she was eight.
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Eartha Mae Kitt was ostracized at an early age because of her mixed-race heritage. At 8 years old, she was given away by her mother and sent from the South Carolina cotton fields to live with an aunt in Harlem. In New York the shy teen auditioned for the famed Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe. She won a spot as a featured dancer and vocalist and before the age of 20, toured worldwide with the company. During a performance in Paris, Kitt was spotted by a nightclub owner and booked as a featured singer at his club. Her unique persona earned her fans and fame quickly, including Orson Welles, who called her "the most exciting woman in the world."
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When she was about ten, Kitt was called to New York City by a woman she was told was her mother's sister. She heard that her mother had died, but, she told Karen S. Schneider of People, "I didn't even cry." It was in New York's Pennsylvania that she saw electric lights and indoor plumbing for the first time. Things did not immediately improve for Kitt; her aunt mostly ignored her, and Harlem school kids were as harsh as those in South Carolina had been. But teachers began to respond to Kitt, who always did well in school - she had a passion for reading and later enjoyed contemplating the works of philosophers such as Plato and Nietzsche. One gave her a ticket to see the play Cyrano de Bergerac, and she walked through Central Park afterward, wishing that she could have a career in which she enjoyed the adulation that the show's star, Jose Ferrer, had received.
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Eartha Mae Kitt was born almost 75 years ago in the small town of North in South Carolina. She is the child of a white father, whom she never knew, and a black mother, who gave her away at a very early age. This has colored her life forever, yet it has made her stronger and more open to life’s opportunities.
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