An intrinsic part of my life, Eartha Kitt is dead. I am distraught.
Eartha was the artiste who outshone them all - she saw Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Pearl Bailey, Nina Simone and Sarah Vaughan come and go, she was courted by Howard Hughes and Orson Welles, yet all her success and her long-term relationships (with film producer Arthur Loew Jr and cosmetics mogul Charles Revson) failed to bring her happiness after a sad and abusive childhood.
She was apparently considered "too white" to be treated seriously in the black music fraternity. Of the experience she said "I was ostracised by ... black people for twenty-five years because they were conditioned by the media into thinking that all black people should be singing the same kind of music". But white society in general considered her an "uppity" black woman.
Yet by the time she had reached her mid-twenties Eartha Kitt was headlining at top clubs in the United States and Europe and rubbing elbows with such twentieth-century heavyweights as physicist Albert Einstein and Indian prime minister Nehru.
At the peak of her success at the end of the 60s - sell-out cabaret appearances, hugely successful songs like C'est Si Bon, Uska Dara, An Old-Fashioned Girl, I Want to Be Evil and Santa Baby, and an acclaimed part as Catwoman in Batman - she famously clashed with First Lady Mrs (Lyndon B.) Johnson over the Vietnam War and overnight the work dried up for Eartha in the USA.
She only made a real commercial comeback - with the help of her largely European gay fan base - in the 1980s with a string of Hi-NRG songs, including Where Is My Man? - the soundtrack to my own coming-out.
It was not just for her exotic beauty and strangely haunting talents, but for her resilience in spite of setbacks that we loved Eartha Kitt. I was overjoyed a few years ago to have the privilege of seeing her on stage at the Sondheim 70th Birthday Gala "Children Will Listen", and it was inevitable that we would cheer the roof off the Palladium at her choice of song - what else but I'm Still Here?
The world has lost a truly great star - and we will never see her like again. RIP.
Eartha Kitt biography
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