Forever Feline, Forever Fierce
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
“Je cherche un billionaire,” Eartha Kitt purred last year from the stage of the Café Carlyle, the chic, intimate club in the Carlyle Hotel that had been her regular stomping ground for more than a decade.
It was an ideal setting for Ms. Kitt to strut her archetypal show business persona: a glamorous, calculating international gold digger enslaving rich men with exaggerated feline wiles, then treating them like cat toys. If this ageless catwoman, who died at 81 on Christmas Day, was an amusing caricature, the role was fueled by a steady current of anger.
Ms. Kitt, like so many divas before her, seemed driven by an unquenchable anger. Her childhood rejection by both black and white society because of her mixed and uncertain parentage might have left her with a profound sense of having to go it alone.
This cat who walked by herself had few qualms about criticizing the Vietnam War to Lady Bird Johnson when she visited the White House in 1968. Ms. Kitt paid dearly for her remarks when she found bookings canceled, and her career nearly evaporated for a number of years.
Her catwoman archetype is now as embedded in our collective pop psyche as Mae West’s swiveling sex goddess. Both personas were comic inventions with dashes of seriousness. But where sex came first with Ms. West, and the usual tokens of male appreciation — diamonds, mink, Champagne and caviar — followed, it was the other way around for Ms. Kitt’s colder, harder vamp. You didn’t have to prove yourself in the bedroom with her, only in the boardroom and the bank. Once you possessed her, she would bestow her favors, but only at her discretion; she remained aloof.
As with Ms. West, unabashed candor was central to her strategy. Young male suitors were jokingly advised to be patient until she had finished with their wealthy fathers. Singing “Too Young to Be Meant for Me,” she brushed off a 20-year-old admirer by reminding him, “Can’t you see I’ve got a date with someone rich and 82?”
To one and all she would address “Speaking of Love,” an early-’30s song by Vernon Duke and E. Y. Harburg that became one of her signatures. “Give me a frank account/How is your bank account?” go the lyrics, which promise, “I’d be compassionate/If there was cash in it.” Or as this sultry emblem of avarice cooed in her 1953 Christmas hit, “Santa Baby,” “One little thing I really need is the deed to a platinum mine.”
Many years later Madonna, the so-called Material Girl, covered “Santa Baby.” But Madonna’s gold digger was only one of dozens of images through which she riffled. Ms. Kitt remained true to a fixed image established more than 50 years ago.
Her first hit, “Uska Dara,” an adaptation of a Turkish song with Turkish and English lyrics and a belly-dancing pulse, established her as an exotic international voice. The hits that followed, including “C’est Si Bon” and “I Want to Be Evil,” refined the image of a dangerous wildcat.
It is no accident that Ms. Kitt’s seesawing career reascended during what has been called the new gilded age, now suddenly behind us. Especially in the 1970s age of feminist consciousness, the very term “gold digger” was considered offensive, along with “cat fight,” “chick” and a whole dictionary of sexist slang that has since roared back into style. For a while at least, Ms. Kitt’s catwoman persona seemed a nostalgic, camp artifact.
That persona is a complicated mixture of ingredients. Ms. Kitt’s early years in Europe were a crucial formative factor. Marlene Dietrich’s imperious femme fatale, Josephine Baker’s exotic expatriate, the emotionally exacerbated cry of Édith Piaf and even the voice of Maria Callas could be detected in her singing
An important step in her career renaissance was her 1996 engagement at the Café Carlyle. It came shortly after her appearance in “Unzipped,” the documentary about the designer Isaac Mizrahi, in which she held her own among a pantheon of supermodels, a number of whom showed up at her opening night.
Suddenly everything about Ms. Kitt that had seemed benighted clicked and became contemporary, made more so by her extraordinarily fit physical condition. Almost until the end Ms. Kitt would extended her long, shapely legs in the direction of male ringside patrons; during “Uska Dara,” she would perform a modest belly dance.
I will never forget the moment I sat too close for comfort to the stage, and she fixed her eyes on mine with an intensity that made it impossible for me to look away. I was scared to death. I never sat so close again, but over the years I would see her play the same trick on unsuspecting ringside patrons, who were both flattered and intimidated.
Men at ringside were sometimes subjected to deadpan comic interrogations about their backgrounds and finances. Because Ms. Kitt was fluent in several languages, these interviews were sometimes conducted in shifting tongues, as if to determine if the man were as cosmopolitan as she; of course he never was.
In later years Ms. Kitt added to her repertory many of the same summing-up songs associated with Frank Sinatra later in his career — “When the World Was Young,” “It Was a Very Good Year” and “September Song” — along with “I’m Still Here,” “I Will Survive,” “Here’s to Life” and “All by Myself.” The comedy would fall away, and you were listening to a woman telling her story, fiercely, and in charge to the end.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
― Dr Morbius, Saturday, 27 December 2008 14:30 (seventeen years ago)