Eartha Kitt at sixtysomething

Ebony, Oct, 1993 by Richette Haywood

Before Patti was a Blue Bell, before Diana reigned supreme, before Janet was in control, there was Eartha. The original diva.

With that dangerously curvaceous figure, bedroom eyes circled in lashes that go on forever, and a drawl that has been known to bring grown men to their knees, Eartha Kitt is a legend. And at "sixtysomething," she is still every bit the woman a member of the House of Windsor once described as an arrangement to unhinge men's minds.

"I admit it," says Eartha, half joking, half serious, "I've aged well."

Just returning to her 77-acre farm in Connecticut after a 10-day tour in New Zealand, Eartha is re-introducing herself to the peaceful serenity of home. Away from the pressure-cooker pace of the entertainment world, Eartha Kitt, glamorous show business sex kitten, is free to be Eartha Mae, "a very basic very sweet" grandmother from the cotton; fields of South Carolina.

Dressed casually in jeans and yellow T-shirt, Eartha Mae tells you straight out, "Don't come to my house and expect to find Eartha Kitt."

Not that Eartha Kitt and Eartha Mae aren't inextricably connected. They are, they just have their own distinctive needs and natures. "Eartha Kitt makes a very good living for me and she's a very good friend , and I like her very much," says Kitt, who often speaks in the third person about herself and seems to relish her dual personalities. "But in order to take care of her," she says, "I have to take care of Eartha Mae."

And that's exactly what she's doing. With a daily and disciplined exercise program and naturaly healthy diet, the original Catwoman and self-described "sex kitten" has somehow managed to seduce Father Time, turning him from foe to friend.

How? Her body is her temple and she treats it as a hallowed sanctuary. Overindulgence in anything is verboten, even though, when it comes to food, she denies herself nothing she really wants. Instead, she lives by her motto: "Everything in moderation." "But I try to eat food as fresh as possible," she points out, standing in her sizable kitchen, grinding freshly picked vegetables and herbs from her garden in her juicer. "I live by my juicer."

And by her exercise program. Every morning and evening she and her two French poodles run three to four miles around her bucolic grounds - passing the apple and pear trees, the pond stocked with trout, the garden where she grows her own carrots, beets, greens and other vegetables, and through the woods were she feeds her soul as meticulously as she feeds her body. "It's me and nature," says Kitt. "We understand each other."

Even when Kitt lived in Beverly Hills, she had 2 1/2. acres of land where she grew her own food and raised her own chickens. "I'm a dirt person," she explains. "I trust the dirt. I don't trust diamonds and gold. I know how to survive in the dirt."

And in the world. In truth, she's done far better than merely survive. She has triumphed - over the loss of her mother who abandoned her before she was 10; over what she calls emotional abuse by the aunt who took her in; over the derailment of her career at its height because she dared to speak out against the Vietnam War while attending a White House luncheon; even over the anger of Blacks who once scorned her because they thought she wanted to be White.

lronically, all she really ever wanted was to belong. "Once your mother gives you away, you think everyone is going to give you away," she says softly of the woman who sent her to live with her aunt when the man she was about to marry said Eartha was not welcome in their new family. "My mother felt a man was more important than her daughter. I would never have left my child."

The child she is referring to is her namesake and adult daughter, Kitt, who manages Kitt's career. She is, Eartha says, the only good thing to come out of her five-year marriage to Bill McDonald, a White man, who, she says, repeatedly threatened to kill himself if she did not marry him.

"Even though I was not in love with Bill - and told him so repeatedly - the idea of marrying him, of having a partner to care for my child and look after the business side, became more reasonable," she writes in her book, Confessions of a Sex Kitten, "All Bill had to do was play the game fairly."

Unfortunately, says Kitt, he didn't. "I had a husband who was robbing me blind," she believes today, the anger still audible in her voice.

That's probably because playing the game of life fairly, despite the repercussions, is Kitt's 11th commandment. How else to account for the fact that, even had she known she would be whiteballed from the industry for speaking out against the Vietnam War at a 1968 White House luncheon, she would have done it anyway.

"This country has given all Americans IOUs: freedom of speech, freedom from oppression, freedom from hunger, etc." she says. "Then I tell the truth, and I get my face slapped."

And her career derailed. For more than a decade, Kitt was completely ostracized from the U.S. entertainment industry ("I had to go to Europe"). The CIA called her a sadistic nymphomaniac" ("Even if I was, what has that got to do with the government?"). Money became an issue ("Thank God I still had some real estate, but nothing like I had before"). And to "friends" she became persona non grata. ("They basically said, |Don't you think you should apologize?'")