I just wanna say thank you Ertha for showing the world the true talent and ambition of our people in a time when being a woman of color was a whole different battle within itself,your legacy will never be forgotten and your name will live on,hold it down I'll be home one day!!!!
Recap via google news:
WASHINGTON — In her fantastical life, Eartha Kitt came to like a great many things. Men, sex, bawdy songs. I personally know about the lemon sorbet, the mango sorbet and the strawberry sorbet.
I found myself dining with Kitt — who died of cancer Thursday at 81 — at the swanky Cafe Carlyle in Manhattan several years ago. I was working on a book about Sammy Davis Jr., once a romantic interest of Kitt’s. Kitt’s office suggested the Carlyle. Being on book leave, without a steady income and counting pennies, I gulped: The Carlyle wasn’t the place for a penny-pincher. But I needed the interview, so I dared not back out of the chance to talk with her. Kitt had known Davis when both were young and hanging out at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.
Arriving early for our meeting, I was led to a table. There was fine sunlight, lovely wood and an attentive waiter. I looked at the prices on the menu and wanted to scram. Kitt was late — first 10 minutes, then 20. She may have been born poor, but she traveled through life with the blood of a true diva. So, of course, she’d be late. But I fretted she might have forgotten, or changed her mind. Then I noticed heads swiveling toward the entrance, and there stood Eartha Kitt, wearing a short, bone-white fur coat, white slacks and a canary-yellow turban atop her head. She had a white poodle cupped in each arm. I gave a wave, and she strode over, the poodles twisting in her arms.
“Let’s order!” she demanded. She said she didn’t care to remove her sunglasses because it was still early in the day. It was around 1:30 in the afternoon.
A waiter came over and took the poodles away, delivering them to Kitt’s suite upstairs. She had a gig going at the Carlyle, and most of the shows were sold out.
The next 90 minutes were unforgettable. There were stories of men she had conquered (Davis among them), foreign lands she had traveled to, songs she had sung. I remember what she ordered because I held onto the receipt for years to show to people: sal-mon, asparagus, white wine, two glasses, which turned into three glasses. I wanted to cry every time I saw her motioning for the waiter: “Water, please, and bottled.” But every other minute brought forth some delicious revelation, a tale of a child born in South Carolina to sharecropper parents and who forced the entertainment world to take notice of her.
Consider the era she thrived in — and the competition she faced. Kitt came of age when a bevy of sepia beauties were just starting to strut their stuff from Broadway to Hollywood. It was the 1950s, and Madison Avenue may have ignored these women, but they were seen now and then in the pages of Life and Holiday magazines.
Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Hazel Scott, Joe Lewis’ wife Marva, Sugar Ray Robinson’s wife Edna Mae, and Kitt were different from the darkly hued and heavy-set black women of 1940s Hollywood, women like Hattie McDaniel, Ethel Waters, Butterfly McQueen and Louise Beavers. Those women were known mostly for playing maid roles in cinema.
This new group of beauties changed the way America looked at the black woman. They went to parties hosted by Joe Louis in Chicago or Manhattan; they hung out at Sugar Ray’s nightclub in Harlem, their images reflected in the long mirror behind the bar. They all came to admire themselves in some of those old Negro periodicals — Sepia, Ebony and Brown. Their pictures hung in hair salons in black communities throughout America. They competed against one another for movie roles: Kitt got Anna Lucasta alongside Davis, among other roles. And she had to sweat her way through the Anna auditions.
“The camera couldn’t conceal the fact that Eartha was not a beautiful woman,” Philip Yordan, the writer of Anna, told me.
But no one, absolutely no one, could have told Eartha Kitt she was not beautiful. She refused to be in the shadow of Horne or Dandridge. Kitt had a repertoire that ranged from nightclubs to Broadway to dramatic roles in movies and TV.
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