03/23/2026
After Eartha Kitt spoke out about Vietnam at a 1968 White House luncheon, a CIA file described her as a ‘sadistic nymphomaniac,’ and her U.S. career was derailed for years.
Eartha Kitt toured with ten tuxedos. They were not for her.
They were different sizes, packed alongside her gowns and stage shoes in the luggage that followed her from city to city across six decades of performing. Before every show, her manager had one job that mattered more than the lights or the sound or the set list.
He had to walk into the venue and look at the audience.
If there weren't enough Black faces in the crowd, the tuxedos came out. Kitt would have the kitchen staff dressed in them, brought from the back of the house, and seated in the first row.
Then, and only then, would she perform.
This was not a stunt.
This was a clause she insisted on in her contracts, a requirement that she would not sing for a segregated room, and when the venue couldn't or wouldn't integrate the audience on its own, Eartha Kitt did it herself with ten tuxedos and the authority of a woman who knew exactly what it felt like to be the person nobody wanted in the room.
She was born Eartha Mae Keith on January 17, 1927, in North, South Carolina, though she wouldn't know that date for another seventy years. Her mother, Annie Mae Keith, was fourteen years old, and her father was a white man whose name was never spoken.
Eartha's skin was lighter than her mother's, and in the rural South of the late 1920s, that was not a kindness. Her mother's boyfriend refused to accept the child, so Annie Mae gave her daughter away.
The girl was sent to live with a woman she called Aunt Rosa, in a household where she was beaten, overworked, and starved. She later remembered eating weeds pulled from the ground and wild grasses with small onions at the roots, because there was nothing else.
The other children called her "yella gal." They meant it as an insult, a word that accused her of thinking she was better than them, though she was too young to understand that the slur was not about her at all but about the man whose name would never appear on any document.
At eight, she was sent to Harlem to live with a woman named Mamie Kitt, who Eartha came to believe was her biological mother. The abuse did not stop.
But a teacher noticed. That teacher, whose name has been lost to history, gave Eartha a dime for bus fare to audition at the Metropolitan Vocational High School, which would later become the High School of Performing Arts.
She was accepted. One coin, from one woman who chose to see what everyone else was looking past, changed the entire direction of a life.
By sixteen, she had run away from Mamie's house, sleeping in friends' apartments and sometimes in the subway. She worked in a factory in Brooklyn, and then a friend dared her to audition for the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe, the all-Black company performing across the world.
She got in. And the girl who had eaten weeds in South Carolina began learning French on a stage in Paris.
Eartha toured with Dunham through South America and Europe, and in Paris a nightclub owner saw her perform and hired her as a solo singer before she was even twenty. Orson Welles found her at that nightclub, cast her as Helen of Troy in his production of Dr. Faustus, and told anyone who would listen that she was the most exciting woman in the world.
Back in New York, her performance in the Broadway r***e New Faces of 1952 made her a star overnight. A recording contract followed, then "C'est Si Bon," then "I Want to Be Evil," then "Santa Baby," the song that would follow her through every December for the rest of her life.
By the mid-1950s, she was earning ten thousand dollars a week, roughly ninety thousand in today's money. She had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame by 1960, appeared alongside Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. in films, and collected Tony, Grammy, and Emmy nominations across a career that spanned six decades.
In 1966, she established the Kittsville Youth Foundation in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, working with underprivileged young people. And in 1967, she became Catwoman on the television series Batman, replacing Julie Newmar and becoming one of the first Black women to play a lead villain on network television.
But here is the thing about that role that rarely gets told. The show's writers deliberately stripped the sexual tension between Catwoman and Batman from Kitt's episodes, replacing the flirtation that had defined the character with purely criminal schemes, because the in*******al dimension was too much for 1967 television.
America would let Eartha Kitt be dangerous, but not desirable. She wore the mask, she purred, she played the villain beautifully, and less than a year later she took the mask off at the White House and said something true, and it nearly ended her.
On January 18, 1968, Lady Bird Johnson hosted a gathering of about fifty women at the White House to discuss juvenile delinquency. Kitt was there because of her work with young people in Washington, D.C., through a nonprofit called Rebels with a Cause.
Speaker after speaker offered polite suggestions about curfews and community programs. Nobody mentioned Vietnam.
When Lady Bird called on Kitt, she stood and spoke about the boys she worked with, the ones who said it didn't pay to be good because the good ones got drafted. She told the First Lady that you send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed, and the young people rebel in the streets because they don't want to be snatched from their mothers to die.
Lady Bird's eyes filled with tears. The next day, she issued a statement referring to Kitt's words as "the shrill voice of anger and discord."
The word "shrill" did a very specific kind of work. It always does when applied to a Black woman who has said something true.
Within days, the CIA formalized a dossier on Kitt, collecting secondhand gossip from former colleagues. The report called her a spoiled child with a vile tongue, and in a phrase that would follow her for the rest of her life, the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States labeled Eartha Kitt a "sadistic nymphomaniac."
When asked about it years later, her only response was to ask what that had to do with the CIA, even if it were true.
The blacklist was total. Club owners canceled her bookings, producers disappeared, and one venue told her manager she was "a problem."
For nearly a decade, the woman who had insisted that no audience she sang to could be segregated was herself segregated from America. She performed in Europe, in Asia, in the United Kingdom, singing for audiences who loved her in countries where telling the truth about a war was not a career-ending offense.
In 1978, she returned to Broadway in Timbuktu! and received a Tony nomination. President Jimmy Carter invited her to the White House, and according to Kitt, he greeted her with two words: "Welcome home, Eartha."
She never stopped again. She earned a Grammy nomination for Back in Business, played the Fairy Godmother in a touring Cinderella, and voiced the villain Yzma in Disney's The Emperor's New Groove, winning two Daytime Emmy Awards and introducing herself to millions of children who had no idea they were listening to a woman the CIA once tried to destroy.
Her daughter, Kitt McDonald Shapiro, was her constant companion through all of it. Eartha had named her Kitt regardless of whether the baby would be a boy or a girl, because she didn't understand why children always got their father's name, especially a child whose own mother had never been given her father's.
They traveled the world together. Eartha would introduce them everywhere they went by saying, "I'm Eartha, and this is Kitt," as if her daughter completed her.
In many ways, she did. The woman who had been given away at four, who had never known her father, who had been called yella gal and sadistic nymphomaniac and shrill, found in her only child the roots she had spent her whole life looking for.
Shapiro later wrote that her mother clung to her with an intensely deep, unconditional love. She said she always understood what her mother needed from her, which was to care for her, to be there for her, and to give her the roots she never had.
In her later years, Kitt became a vocal advocate for LGBT rights, supporting same-sex marriage openly and appearing at fundraisers across the country. When asked why the q***r community loved her, she said they were all rejected people who knew what it was to be refused, oppressed, depressed, and accused.
She knew. She had known since she was four.
Eartha Kitt died on Christmas Day, 2008, in Weston, Connecticut, at the age of eighty-one. The cause was colon cancer, diagnosed two years earlier, and she kept performing almost until the end.
Her daughter was with her when she died.
There is a quote attributed to Eartha Kitt that circulates widely, especially among Black women who carry something of her in their own experience. She said that many men wanted to lay her down, but few wanted to lift her up.
It is a line about being desired and discarded in the same breath. It could describe her romances, her career, her relationship with the country that made her a star and then threw her away for eight words of honesty at a luncheon.
But the truest thing Eartha Kitt ever did was not a thing she said. It was a thing she packed.
Ten tuxedos, various sizes, carried from venue to venue, decade after decade. She knew that the people in the kitchen were the same people she had been, the ones nobody thought to invite to the front of the room.
She refused to begin until they were seated. She carried the proof in her luggage.
That is what power looks like when it belongs to someone who remembers what it felt like to have none.
Source: Kitt Shapiro, NPR Here & Now, 2021 / CIA dossier revealed by Seymour Hersh, New York Times, Jan. 3, 1975 / White House Historical Association
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