ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 17, 1996 TAG: 9603150091
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 9 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: MARY CAMPBELL ASSOCIATED PRESS
SHE'S STILL SEXY AT 68, a temptress who likes to tease the men in her audience. The earthy Miss Eartha Kitt, after four decades of purring into a microphone, is the consummate cabaret performer.
Eartha Kitt says, with a sly look, ``You're thinking, `I know she was in ``New Faces of 1952,'' so she must be at least ...' ''
Don't bother to figure, she says. She turned 68 on Jan. 26.
Kitt is at Manhattan's Cafe Carlyle, where she followed Bobby Short's annual engagement. She also has a new recording, ``Back in Business,'' a somewhat misleading title. Though Kitt based herself in Paris briefly twice, she never left show business.
But this is her first recording in years. She says nobody asked her to make one.
``It has been a very busy, interesting year, thank God,'' Kitt says. ``I've been very lucky. Even though I had my ups and downs, I was always working, 90 percent of my career.''
Cabaret singers these days tend toward the bland. Eartha Kitt is many things at 68 - straightforward, sexy, funny, reminiscent, imperious, even haughty. But never bland. She's a real show business personality from the days when performers were distinct from each other. And she's going strong. In her show, she mesmerizes the audience with autobiographical songs and gold-digging songs everybody thinks are autobiographical. She amazes with torso undulations, in a tight dress, standing sideways so every toned muscle can be seen. She was, after all, first a dancer.
There's also a strong current of Kitt laughing at herself.
Wide eyes blazing with vitality, she locks her glance onto a man at a front table and sings sexy songs to him. When he sits stiffly, she tells him next time to send his father.
Of course, sexy and funny go together, she shrugs later. They always have and everybody knows that. ``It doesn't matter if they respond,'' she says. ``It's still funny.
``I love it when the women go along with the joke.''
Sometimes they don't.
Take, for instance, one woman in Las Vegas. ``I was teasing her man, husband or not, I don't know,'' Kitt says. ``When I left the stage she was beating him over the head and yelling, `If you want the tramp, you can have her.' I don't think they were married long after that.''
As for bland, she says, ``I'm not going to talk against other entertainers and say they're bland. Generally the whole entertainment business now is bland. It depends so much on gadgetry and flash now. You don't have to have talent to be in the business today.
``I think we had to have something to offer, if you wanted to be recognized as worth paying for.''
This season, customers are paying to hear Kitt in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Munich, Miami, New York, Dallas, San Antonio and Atlantic City.
When she performs, Kitt says, she thinks of herself. ``It's that ugly duckling urchin, because of not being the right color, not looking like anybody you could be identified with, with this feeling how lucky I am to be standing here. No parents or guardians, I'm a reject.''
She's Cherokee, black and white, Kitt says, though she can't prove it. ``Where I was supposed to be born, in North, S.C., there's no record of my birth. No wonder they call me a legend; it means I don't exist.''
She's not sure whether her father was white, or a black sharecropper named Kitt who finally had good crops the year before she was born and named her Eartha because of it.
Now she questions who her mother was. ``There was a documentary on me 10 years ago. I was back, looking for what I think is my mother's grave. ...I was looking for the grave in the cemetery of the church they made me sing in when I was a kid. I was scared. I still am. I'm a nervous wreck before going in front of people. When I step on stage, I think, `It's OK.' Eartha Mae leaves and Eartha Kitt is there.''
Kitt mentions Orson Welles, which leads to reminiscing about men in her life. She met Welles after she toured in the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe. When the other dancers left Paris, Kitt stayed and got a job singing in a nightclub. Welles heard her and hired her to be Helen of Troy in his Paris production of ``Faust.''
``He was wonderful,'' Kitt says. ``He thought I was interesting. He wanted me to be in his company all the time.'' They weren't lovers, she says, and the same went for Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, ``who thought I was the most beautiful girl in the world. Men like to see themselves with a young girl on their arm.''
She was involved in the 1950s with Arthur Loew and then with Charlie Revson, of the theater chain and Revlon, respectively. She married Bill McDonald, a real-estate man, in 1960, after those love affairs were over. They divorced after four years. Kitt lives outside New York City near their one daughter, Kitt Shapiro, who is married and has two children.
There isn't a man in her life presently, Kitt says. ``I keep saying it's too late for me now. Not that I've closed myself up completely. One never knows. I love men. Like I say, I've had my share.''
The gold-digger songs, she says, aren't the real Eartha Kitt. ``Otherwise, I would have taken advantage of any of those guys who came into my life.''
In Las Vegas, she says, in the 1950s, a man who owned a theater offered her to a friend for the night for $10,000. ``I said, `I can't do that.' Think how rich I could be, tax free.''
Kitt's voice has been called a kitten's purr and a tiger's growl. ``I never thought of myself as a cat, or as anything,'' she says. ``Sometimes I put it on. Once you're called something you start using it. But I don't take it seriously.
``I have fun with it, being Eartha Kitt. I've been on the fringe of the highest echelon of society and started on the bottom.''
LENGTH: Long : 109 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. In her show, Eartha Kitt mesmerizes the audienceby CNBwith autobiographical songs and gold-digging songs everybody thinks
are autobiographical.