Eartha & Kitt: A Daughter's Love Story in Black and White

CHAPTER 1

The Most Exciting Woman in the World

I’m not black and I’m not white and I’m not pink and I’m not green.

My mother may have been known as a consummate talent, coy sex kitten, and courageous trailblazer who helped break down racial barriers, but she began her long, illustrious life in a distinctly different way. As she would be the first to tell you, she was just a poor cotton picker from the South. And no matter how far she got in life—and considering that she was world-famous by the time she was 23, and was still headlining when she was 81, I’d say that she went pretty far—on some level she still always felt like just a poor cotton picker from the South.

She starred in many Broadway shows, from New Faces of 1952 and Timbuktu! to The Wild Party and Nine, and performed her consistently sold-out one-woman show in Las Vegas, London, New York, Paris, and other major cities throughout the world. She made dozens of movies, from Anna Lucasta and St. Louis Blues to Boomerang and The Emperor’s New Groove; recorded 40 albums, both studio and live; was nominated for three Tony Awards, three Emmys, and two Grammys, several of which she won; and wrote three autobiographies, including one called I’m Still Here, for no matter what befell her in life—and an awful lot of tough stuff invariably did—she would always pick herself up again and still be there.

She spoke four languages, sang in seven, and had a unique, unforgettable sound—a voice for the ages that was mysteriously unidentifiable in geographic origin, yet unmistakably hers. And who hasn’t heard her many classic hit songs, including C’est Si Bon and Santa Baby, the best-selling Christmas song of 1953 and still an evergreen staple of the holiday season?

Her music remains as popular and relevant as ever, as evidenced by the soundtracks of the widely acclaimed HBO superhero series Watchmen, starring Regina King, and the hit Netflix series Emily in Paris, starring Lily Collins. Never mind that she may be best known by many today for playing her iconic role as Catwoman, the Caped Crusader’s feline adversary, on the 1960s TV series Batman.

Yet she was far more than just a celebrity who commanded both stage and screen. Along with being an outspoken civil rights activist who avidly supported Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., she served as a tireless social advocate on behalf of historically-underserved youth, gay rights, women’s rights, and countless other causes. Then there was that infamous incident at the White House. The one when she stood up to the First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, at a luncheon in 1968, daring to voice her opposition to the Vietnam War, a defiant move, unheard of by celebrities in those times, which caused the CIA to compile a defamatory dossier on her, characterizing her as a sadistic sex nymphomaniac. That controversial episode nearly derailed her career.

Orson Welles once pronounced her the most exciting woman in the world. Yet the one achievement she was the proudest of was not any of those things.

What she prided herself on most by far was having brought a mutt into this world.

And when I say mutt, I mean me.

Despite the many famous men to whom my mother was linked romantically, all before I was born, there could be no question who the one true love of her life was.

Revlon founder Charles Revson? Entertainer Sammy Davis Jr.? Actor James Dean? New York banking heir John Barry Ryan III? MGM Studios scion Arthur Loew? No, no, no, no, no.

It was her one and only child. Her daughter, Kitt.

That would also be me.

She named me Kitt because she wanted to make sure that her name would be carried on. Regardless of whether I turned out to be a boy or a girl—and until I popped out on that Sunday afternoon in November of 1961, she didn’t know which—that’s who I was going to be.

I’m Eartha, and this is Kitt, she would declare to almost everyone we ever met. She would make that comment as though I completed her. And in many ways, I did.

Complete her, I mean. And vice versa. We were a really good fit for each other.

I got it. Got her, that is—who she was, and who and what she needed me to be. Those were things that, instinctively, I always understood. She needed me to care for her. Needed me to be there for her. Needed me to give her the roots that she never had.

Having been given away by her young single mother and never having known who her father was, who could really blame her?

When I was a little girl, she would put me to bed herself almost every single night, and we would read books together. One of my favorites was Are You My Mother? But for me that question was never in doubt. Never mind the notable differences in our appearance. She was mine, and I was hers. As if we were meant to be. I would often say to her, "I picked you! God had me pick you for my mommy. How funny that I remember thinking that I had intentionally chosen her. Yet now, looking back, I sometimes describe it as believing that God, or some sort of higher power, had decided, You would be a really good fit with her."

I look back now on our life together, and it really is a love story. There are people who believe that there is only one person put on this earth for them, and that all they need to do is find that person. Well, I never needed to go find my person. I had already found her the moment that I was born. At least in terms of being a mother and daughter, we came about as close as any two people conceivably could to being a perfect match.

No, I’m not saying that she was a perfect mother. That would be a stretch for anyone. And honestly, how could she have been? Never really having been mothered herself, she didn’t have any real role models when it came to parenting. She followed her gut and her instincts and sometimes had to make it up as she went along.

But I have no doubt that I was a really good fit for her as a daughter. For one thing—and I think that this really helped—I never aspired to become an entertainer myself. I didn’t have any real desire to have my own spotlight. I already had a spotlight. My mother, as famous as she was herself, always put the spotlight on me.

Or maybe it’s that my mother was the spotlight on me. As a little girl, isn’t that all that you really want—for your parent to pay attention to you and think that you’re the greatest thing ever? Well, my mother thought I was the greatest thing ever. She didn’t do it to the point at which she indulged me, though. I was never, ever spoiled. On the contrary, she was strict as a mom, and always insisted that I have good manners and be well-behaved. She had a sense of command about her that made you fall in line. Everyone around her always did. Anything else wasn’t going to be tolerated, so you really had no choice. What’s interesting is that she wasn’t a person who ever yelled or screamed. She never threw fits in any form or fashion. It was more that she had this regal presence. She had an aura, an innate energy about her, that people, animals, and virtually all living things picked up on. It made you want to behave.

My mother may have been known as an international sex symbol—an image that she carefully cultivated to her dying day—but here’s the first big secret that I’ll share with you: Behind the scenes, my mother was far from risqué, in the sense of being lewd or the least bit crude. She was actually quite proper. She shunned profanity. Shied away from almost any mention of sex. You might even say she was a prude.

She was also very much a stickler for manners. She demanded good behavior. Especially from me. She expected me to act like a lady. That may have just been a product of the times in which we lived, but if you were female, she believed that you had to be ladylike. That didn’t mean that you weren’t strong and independent, as she decidedly was herself. You just had to behave like a lady. One thing that ladies don’t do, apparently, is chew gum in public. That was absolutely forbidden in front of my mother.

Many things were forbidden by my mother. I’m not talking about crazy things like no wire hangers, as Joan Crawford’s daughter Christina divulged in her tell-all book Mommie Dearest. I mean any kind of poor behavior. Like whining. Or talking too much. Or talking too loudly. Or cursing. Or being late.

Tolerant, she was not.

She wasn’t a difficult person per se. But she could be very demanding.

And even though she had the means and maybe the desire to spoil me, she never did. My manners were impeccable. In fact, the entire staff at the Plaza Hotel (where we often stayed when my mother performed in New York City in the 1960s) knew who I was. They called me the good Eloise, as opposed to the wayward six-year-old in the classic book series. I was the little girl who never got into trouble. The one who waited patiently in her mother’s dressing room while her mother was onstage. An only child who learned to entertain herself while her mother was busy entertaining the rest of the world.

Yes, I was a good Kitt to her Eartha. And she was the ultimate Eartha to my Kitt. We were a team. Inseparable. From the first day of my life to the very last day of hers.

As an adult, that meant that I served not only as her manager, but also sometimes her spokesperson, even in the most mundane situations. She had one of the world’s most recognizable voices, and yet I often served as her voice. For there’s another thing that might surprise you. Despite my mother’s brazen public image and her sensual, coquettish stage persona, she was extremely shy. At least she often felt that way when she was meeting someone for the first time, or walking into a room full of strangers. Me, on the other hand? People have called me many things over the years. Given the self-confidence that was instilled in me, shy is not one of them. I had no trouble introducing her to others or speaking up on her behalf.

There are people who may even think that I’m a little too loud. My mother’s longtime musical director, Daryl Waters, for one. He worked with her for at least thirty years. I once remarked to him that I was just a delicate flower, and he looked at me and said, Sweetheart, you’re a cactus if I ever met one.

And I said, Cacti have flowers as well, and they take no crap from the outside, so I take that as a compliment.

No doubt this book will appeal to my mother’s many fans—including her hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook—who still abound across all generations over a decade after her death. I hope it will also find an audience among those seeking strong female role models (for my mother unquestionably was one of the strongest you will ever find). It should speak as well to all women, and men as well, who love their mothers, may have lost their mothers, or who yearn to have a person in their lives who filled that role. And it has the added dimension of being an interracial mother-daughter love story, between a pair who looked very different on the surface, even if my mother defied anyone to define what either of our racial identities was.

She herself penned three autobiographies—Thursday’s Child in 1956, Alone with Me in 1976, and I’m Still Here: Confessions of a Sex Kitten in 1989—plus a memoir in 2001 called Rejuvenate (It’s Never Too Late). Yet the truth is that I can offer a very different perspective. A unique perspective. And in many ways, a truer, or at least more objective, one. For I was the one person on the planet who truly knew her best.

Besides, the tale that I have to tell you is not the story of my mother’s life. It is, rather, the story of my amazing life with my mother. The mother I loved. The mother I miss every day. The mother whom millions admired, but only I truly knew.

I knew what it was like for her when she was blacklisted during the Vietnam War and was unable to perform almost anywhere in her own country for nearly ten years.

I knew what it was like for her to walk me down the aisle at my wedding—not once, but twice—feeling like she was losing her only daughter, the one that she doted and depended on, rather than gaining a son.

I knew just what she meant when she said, I don’t have to be wealthy to be rich. Or, The only thing I can sell and still own is my talent.

Or, Sometimes it’s good to fall down to see who will pick you up.

Now, as I look back on all of these things that my mother would say to me, I understand the lessons that she was imparting to me.

So, I think it would be fair to say that, in many ways, I did complete her. But there was another person who’d once completed the picture. I did have a father, too.

My father, Bill McDonald, to whom she was married in 1960, was of Irish and German descent. In other words, as lily-white as anyone you could find.

My mother, meanwhile, was African-American and Cherokee—on her own mother’s side, at least. As I have said, she never knew the identity of her father. Theories abound. Some people speculate that he was a son of the owner of the cotton plantation in South Carolina on which she was born. But it was assumed by almost everyone that her father had been white.

As a mixed-race child born out of wedlock, my mother was often made to feel ashamed of herself when she was growing up in the South. Her own mother soon abandoned her because the man she was going to marry didn’t want that yella gal, as mixed-race children were known there at the time. This was a rejection that my mother carried with her all her life. But my mother loved the fact that I was someone you couldn’t pinpoint or pigeonhole in almost any respect.

You are a walking United Nations! she would frequently tell me with delight. You either fill every quota or you break every rule.

You couldn’t put me into any category. You couldn’t identify my background. You couldn’t say, She’s a white girl, or She’s a Black girl. She’s Asian… Native American.

My mother herself was similarly hard to categorize or assign to any one group. She may have been Black to some people, but to others she wasn’t Black enough. Growing up relatively light-skinned in the South, she wasn’t quite dark-skinned enough to be considered Black by many people who were Black. Then, when she went up North, she wasn’t white enough to be considered white. No one ever knew what to make of her.

There are letters in my mother’s archives from people—both Black and white—saying incredibly nasty, horrible things to her. My mother kept all of these letters because they reminded her of who she was. You think you’re white. Or, You think you’re better than everybody. Or, Who do you think you are?

That is one of the many reasons she loved that no one knew quite how to identify me. She loved that you couldn’t look at me and make a decision based strictly on my looks. You just didn’t know, you know? It was left up to your imagination to figure out what I was.

My mother enjoyed having things left up to her own imagination. In fact, that was something else she was fond of saying. I like to use the freedom of my own imagination.

She also was known to say to me, and others as well on many an occasion, God may not be there when you want Him, but He’s always on time.

She coined phrases like this so often that we began to refer to them as Kittisms. Whether or not she was actually the first one to utter any of these expressions herself, she adopted them as a sort of mantra to such an extent that I have chosen to use them as chapter subtitles for this book.

But of all her sayings, one stands out in my mind the most by far. And not just in my mind. I have taken it to heart to such an extent that I have it tattooed on my wrist.

Don’t Panic.

It was something she said to me whenever I would begin to get so anxious about unsettling situations that I would forget to breathe.

It’s what my own children still say to me now whenever I forget my mother’s words and begin to stress out. No, what they actually say is, Look at your wrist, Mom. Look at your wrist!

And it was one of the many lessons I learned from my mother over our many years together, most memorably when we traveled to South Africa in 1974.

CHAPTER 2

Not a Walk in the Park

Never miss an opportunity to stay quiet.

As an internationally known entertainer, my mother performed all over the world. But being always a mother first, she hesitated to leave me behind. She also felt that seeing the world was a much better education than you could get in a classroom or from reading any book. It was the best way to learn about other people, cultures, and beliefs. You just can’t get all of that from a book. So, when she was on the road, she usually took me along for the ride. From the day that I was born until the day that she died, first as mother/daughter and later with the added roles of entertainer/manager, we were rarely apart for more than a few days as we traveled the world together.

Our travels took us to many distant locales. I went almost everywhere with her, from Thailand and Tokyo to Morocco, Manilla, and Melbourne, and almost every place in between. But no trip was ever quite as memorable as the one that we made to South Africa in 1974, when I was twelve, which was considered to be a very controversial thing for anyone in the entertainment business to do at that time.

Many artists boycotted South Africa during that era because they didn’t believe in its racially segregated system of Apartheid. My mother didn’t believe in Apartheid either. But that didn’t dissuade her from going there. On the contrary, it encouraged her to go. She felt that artists were the true diplomats, since they didn’t need to abide by things like political correctness. That meant they had the ability to go places and effect change when politicians couldn’t.

So my mother accepted an invitation to perform in South Africa, but on one condition. She stipulated that she would only perform for integrated audiences, something that was not done during that era.

She also had another agenda in making the trip. She hoped to use it to raise money to help build schools there for the African children. And by African children, I mean Black African children, not the white children who were referred to as Afrikaans.

Now, being a celebrity, my mother was not only able to go to this racially segregated country, even though she was Black herself, but also to go with VIP status. That meant that she could travel anywhere in the country that she wanted to go while she was there. She essentially had free rein and wasn’t going to be held to their laws of segregation.

So off we went to South Africa. And not just for a week or two. We stayed, as I recall, for what may have been as much as three months. We spent most of our time in Cape Town, because my mother had friends there.

While we were in Cape Town, the Royal Ballet happened to be performing there, too. And not just the Royal Ballet, but Margot Fonteyn. THE PRIMA BALLERINA OF THE ROYAL BALLET! She was my idol at the time because I dreamed of becoming a professional ballerina. Ah, to dream! I also dreamt of being a professional ice skater, a policewoman (on horseback), an FBI agent, and the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. I was going to lead a very busy life. But at that time, my No. 1 goal was to become a ballerina. So, of course, while I was there, I wanted to go see the one and only Margot Fonteyn dance.

My mother wasn’t free to take me, though, because she was performing almost every night. So instead, my mother’s friends took me to the Cape Town Opera House to see the ballet. We went in together and were walking around, then we went to find our seats. As we took our seats, many of the people around us began whispering, Look! That’s Eartha Kitt’s daughter. That’s Eartha Kitt’s daughter!

I was thinking, Look at me! I’m this hot-shot little kid. Everyone knows who I am! How cool is that? I mean, c’mon, you saw my list of dreams. I thought I was the bomb.

Then, the next day, someone showed my mother a local newspaper. One of the headlines read, Eartha Kitt’s Daughter Goes to Opera House. This was considered big news because the Opera House was for whites only. If I had been South African, I would have been considered colored because my mother was colored. I wouldn’t have been allowed inside. So, technically, I had broken the law. But because of my light skin coloring and blonde hair, and because I had walked in with a white family, nobody had questioned me.

Well, my mother thought this was the greatest thing ever. My daughter broke the law! she said proudly. Never mind that I hadn’t known I was doing it. She proceeded to make a statement to the press about it, pointing out the ridiculousness of their rules and their Apartheid policies. But the story doesn’t end there.

At the time, being of school age, I often traveled with a tutor—a British instructor, whom I really didn’t like. Who wants to do schoolwork when you’re traveling the world? But my life on the road wasn’t all work and no play, even with a British tutor in tow. There was this really cool amusement park in Durban, South Africa, across the street from our hotel. And I was dying to go to it, so my tutor took me one day.

After that, I kept saying to my mother, You have to come to the amusement park with us. It’s so much fun! This was something that I didn’t ever get to do with her back in the U.S., because with her level of fame, it would have caused a major scene.

By the time I’d been born, my mother had already been famous for many years. As much as that may have brought certain privileges—such as getting to travel the world with her—there was