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Kitt Shapiro, the daughter of Eartha Kitt, discusses her new memoir Eartha & Kitt: A Daughter’s Love Story in Black and White (Pegasus Books, 2021), with Joseph Planta.
Click to buy this book from Amazon.ca: Eartha & Me
Text of introduction by Joseph Planta:
I am Planta: On the Line, in Vancouver, British Columbia, at TheCommentary.ca.
The life of Eartha Kitt is revisited in a timely and fascinating book, Eartha & Kitt: A Daughter’s Love Story in Black and White. It’s written by her daughter, Kitt Shapiro, who joins me now. Eartha Kitt was born in 1927 to extreme poverty in South Carolina. She was a mix of Black, Cherokee, and white, who didn’t know her father. And when her mother sought to remarry and bring young Eartha along, she was refused, and Eartha was forced to live with an abusive family. It was the source of immense pain that she carried through her life, as Ms. Shapiro writes in her book. She was then taken in by an aunt in New York City, and later became a student with Katharine Dunham. Her training in dance leads her to performing in nightclubs in Europe, and later back in America on Broadway with New Faces of 1952. She stars in films like Anna Lucasta with Sammy Davis Jr., St. Louis Blues with Nat King Cole, as well as Mark of the Hawk with Sidney Poitier. All this before Kitt’s birth in 1961, the product of Kitt’s marriage to the accountant Bill McDonald. Ms. Shapiro writes of her parents, and their marriage with the context of some letters she found after her mother’s death in 2008. From playing Catwoman on the television series Batman, to appearances on the stage as well as in concerts and cabarets, Eartha Kitt’s work in the United States dries up after a 1968 visit to the White House, where at a luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson, she criticises US involvement in Vietnam. She’s soon blacklisted on orders of Lyndon Johnson and smeared by the CIA and FBI. She maintains a following overseas, and only about ten years later does she find employment in the United States, in particular her Tony-nominated turn as the lead in the musical Timbuktu! I’ll ask Ms. Shapiro about her mother, what it was like traveling the world with her mother as a young person, to managing her career later on, and what life was like as the daughter of someone Orson Welles once described as “the most exciting woman in the world.” Kitt Shapiro managed her mother’s performances and recording career for many years, and now manages her estate. She is the founder and owner of Simply Eartha, and WEST, a women’s fashion boutique in Westport, Connecticut, where she joined me from last week. Visit www.simplyeartha.com for more. Her book is published by Pegasus Books. Please welcome to the Planta: On the Line program, Kitt Shapiro; Ms. Shapiro, good morning.
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