Word: kitt
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...their subjects hardly knew where to pay homage first. At the Waldorf-Astoria's Empire Room, demure Dorothy Dandridge rambled through her slinky-but-sweet songs about love and how to enjoy it. A few blocks away, in the downstairs den known as the Copacabana, petite Eartha Kitt took her listeners on a quadrilingual (English, French, Spanish, Turkish) tour over much the same ground, sticking mostly to its back alleys...
...Eartha Kitt, 27, did not seem the type to ask people to do what they wished-only what she wished. Where Dorothy shimmered in white satin, Eartha smoldered in red bugle beads. Where Dorothy swayed in sweet resignation, Eartha froze and darted her almond eyes. When Eartha sang, it was in a smoky, reedlike quaver. Most of the time she was the fervid, grasping female as she trumpeted C'est Si Bon, Après Moi and The Heel. But at the end she often inserted a wistful and not very convincing twist-the manner of the little girl...
Eight minutes after the curtain went up on the 81st performance of the Broadway hit play Mrs. Patterson (TIME, Dec. 13), the show's star, feline Warbler-Actress Eartha Kitt, departed from the script to murmur: "I can't go through with it." Then she departed from the stage. With no understudy to throw into the breach, the theater gave refunds to some 900 playgoers. Why hadn't the show gone on? Eartha, according to her agent, was ailing seriously with a kidney infection. Whatever ailed her, she was back in the show next evening, looked...
With strikingly individual Eartha Kitt-risen from blues-singing to stardom-playing Teddy in a darting, prickling style, Mrs. Patterson has more in its favor than a sympathetic theme and a sharp approach. Yet the play as a whole is curiously flat and eventually tedious. The fault springs from nothing genteel or unhumorous in treatment: the authors squarely face Teddy's conflicts long before she does. Nor need the play's want of real movement, its mere alternations between fact and fantasy, prove fatal. But lacking outward progression, Mrs. Patterson needs real leverage of words, real voltage...
Toast of the Town (Sun. 8 p.m., CBS). With Eartha Kitt, John Raitt, Janis Paige...