Word: kitt
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Orson Welles was the first famous American to fall under her spell and exploit her allure. Calling Kitt "the most exciting woman in the world," he cast her as Helen of Troy in a production of Faust that played in France, Belgium and Germany. Back in the States, she went on to make her mark in seven media - cabaret, Broadway, pop records, movies, TV, the concert stage and the best-seller charts - one at a time. From a stint at the Village Vanguard, she was cast in the Leonard Sillman revue New Faces of 1952 and given...
...broke onto the pop charts with the flirtatiously francophonic "C'est si bon," and capped that with the Top 10 "Santa Baby, in which a gold-digger lays down the law to her sugar daddy. Through these songs, Kitt constructed her persona of the irresistible siren - both young and ageless - who is so sure of her control over men that it's often a chore just to rouse herself for another conquest. As she fairly said, "I am the original Material Girl." That this smooth dominatrix was an African-American, at a time when U.S. blacks were still denied basic...
...Christmas jingle, Kitt's voice has both the sexual authority that might reduce a plutocrat to Jell-O and the little-girl smile that let her listeners in on the fun. "Santa baby, just slip a sable under the tree / For me. / Been an awful good girl, Santa baby, / So hurry down the chimney tonight. ... Come and trim my Christmas tree / With some decorations bought at Tiffany. / I really do believe in you. / Let's see if you believe in me. ... Santa cutie, and fill my stocking with a duplex/ And checks. / Sign your X on the line, Santa cutie...
...Though it would be lovely to say that Kitt had the same success in other fields, the fact is that after her big splash she made only ancillary ripples. She did receive a Tony nomination in the play Mrs. Patterson (and two more, for the 1978 musical Timbuktu and, in 2000, for The Wild Party); but she didn't become the Broadway magnet she should have been. In the late '50s she had featured roles in The Mark of the Hawk, with Poitier, and St. Louis Blues, with Nat "King" Cole, and the lead in Anna Lucasta, a daring...
...occasion was a White House luncheon, hosted by Lady Bird Johnson, in Jan. 1968, near the zenith of the Vietnam War, just before the Tet Offensive. Kitt had given birth to a daughter in 1960, from her five-year marriage to real-estate developer William O. McDonald, and spoke more as a mother than as a criminologist. "You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed," she told the First Lady. "They rebel in the streets. They will take pot and they will get high. They don't want to go to school because they...