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I have attached videos also, I reccomend watching!
Eartha Kitt, who purred and pounced her way across Broadway stages, recording studios and movie and television screens in a show-business career that lasted more than six decades, died on Thursday. She was 81 and lived in Connecticut.
The cause was colon cancer, said her longtime publicist, Andrew E. Freedman.
Ms. Kitt, who began performing in the late ’40s as a dancer in New York, went on to achieve success and acclaim in a variety of mediums long before other entertainment multitaskers like Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler.
With her curvaceous frame and unabashed vocal come-ons, she was also, along with Lena Horne, among the first widely known African-American sex symbols. Orson Welles famously proclaimed her “the most exciting woman alive” in the early ’50s, apparently just after that excitement prompted him to bite her onstage during a performance of “Time Runs,” an adaptation of “Faust” in which Ms. Kitt played Helen of Troy.
Ms. Kitt’s career-long persona, that of the seen-it-all sybarite, was set when she performed in Paris cabarets in her early 20s, singing songs that became her signatures, like “C’est Si Bon” and “Love for Sale.”
Returning to New York, she was cast on Broadway in “New Faces of 1952” and added another jewel to her vocal crown, “Monotonous” (“Traffic has been known to stop for me/Prices even rise and drop for me/Harry S. Truman plays bop for me/Monotonous, monotone-ous”). Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times in May 1952, “Eartha Kitt not only looks incendiary, but she can make a song burst into flame.”
Shortly after that run, Ms. Kitt had her first best-selling albums and recorded her biggest hit, “Santa Baby,” whose precise, come-hither diction and vaguely foreign inflections (Ms. Kitt, a native of South Carolina, spoke four languages and sang in seven) proved that a vocal sizzle could be just as powerful as a bonfire. Though her record sales fell after the rise of rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll in the mid- and late ’50s, her singing style would later be the template for other singers with pillow-talky voices like Diana Ross (who has said she patterned her Supremes sound and look largely after Ms. Kitt), Janet Jackson and Madonna (who recorded a cover version of “Santa Baby” in 1987).
Ms. Kitt would later call herself “the original material girl,” a reference not only to her stage creation and to Madonna but also to her string of romances with rich or famous men, including Welles, the cosmetics magnate Charles Revson and the banking heir John Barry Ryan 3rd. She was married to her one husband, Bill McDonald, a real-estate developer, from 1960 to 1965; their daughter, Kitt Shapiro, survives her, as do two grandchildren.
From practically the beginning of her career, as critics gushed over Ms. Kitt, they also began to describe her in every feline term imaginable: her voice “purred” or “was like catnip”; she was a “sex kitten” who “slinked” or was “on the prowl” across the stage, sometimes “flashing her claws.” Her career has often been said to have had “nine lives.” Appropriately, she was tapped to play Catwoman in the 1960s TV series “Batman,” taking over the role from the leggier, lynxlike Julie Newmar and bringing to it a more feral, compact energy.
Yet for all the camp appeal and sexually charged hauteur of Ms. Kitt’s cabaret act, she also played serious roles, appearing in the films “The Mark of the Hawk” with Sidney Poitier (1957) and “Anna Lucasta” (1959) with Sammy Davis Jr. She made numerous television appearances, including a guest spot on “I Spy” in 1965, which brought her her first Emmy nomination.
For these performances Ms. Kitt likely drew on the hardship of her early life. She was born Eartha Mae Keith in North, S.C., on Jan. 17, 1927, a date she did not know until about 10 years ago, when she challenged students at Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., to find her birth certificate, and they did. She was the illegitimate child of a black Cherokee sharecropper mother and a white man about whom Ms. Kitt knew little. She worked in cotton fields and lived with a black family who, she said, abused her because she looked too white. “They called me yella gal,” Ms. Kitt said.
At 8 she was sent to live in Harlem with an aunt, Marnie Kitt, who Ms. Kitt came to believe was really her biological mother. Though she was given piano and dance lessons, a pattern of abuse developed there as well: Ms. Kitt would be beaten, she would run away and then she would return. By her early teenage years she was working in a factory and sleeping in subways and on the roofs of unlocked buildings. (She would later become an advocate, through Unicef, on behalf of homeless children.)
Her show-business break came on a lark, when a friend dared her to audition for the Katherine Dunham Dance Company. She passed the audition and permanently escaped the cycle of poverty and abuse that defined her life till then.
But she took the steeliness with her, in a willful, outspoken manner that mostly served her career, except once. In 1968 she was invited to a White House luncheon and was asked by Lady Bird Johnson about the Vietnam War. She replied: “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot.” The remark reportedly caused Mrs. Johnson to burst into tears and led to a derailment in Ms. Kitt’s career.
As bookings dried up, she was exiled in Europe for almost a decade. But President Jimmy Carter invited her back to the White House in 1978, and that year she earned her first Tony nomination for her work in “Timbuktu!,” an all-black remake of “Kismet.”
By now a diva and legend, Ms. Kitt did what many other divas and legends — Shirley Bassey and Ethel Merman among them — did: she dabbled in dance music, scoring her biggest hit in 30 years with “Where Is My Man” in 1984, the same year she was roundly criticized for touring South Africa. Ms. Kitt was typically unapologetic; the tour, she said, played to integrated audiences and helped build schools for black children.
The third of her three autobiographies, “I’m Still Here: Confessions of a Sex Kitten,” was published in 1989, and she earned a Grammy nomination for “Back in Business,” a collection of cabaret songs released in 1994.
As Ms. Kitt began the sixth decade of her career, she was still active. In 2000 she received her second Tony nomination, for best featured actress in a musical in “The Wild Party.” Branching out into children’s programming, she won two Daytime Emmy Awards, this year and in 2007, as outstanding performer in an animated program for her role as the scheming empress-wannabe Yzma in “The Emperor’s New School.”
All the while she remained a fixture on the cabaret circuit, having maintained her voice and shapely figure through a vigorous fitness regimen that included daily running and weight lifting. Even after discovering in 2006 that she had colon cancer, she triumphantly opened the newly renovated Café Carlyle in New York in September 2007. Stephen Holden, writing in The Times, said that Ms. Kitt’s voice was “in full growl.”
But though Ms. Kitt still seemed to have men of all ages wrapped around her finger (she would often toy with younger worshipers at her shows by suggesting they introduce her to their fathers), the years had given her perspective. “I’m a dirt person,” she told Ebony magazine in 1993. “I trust the dirt. I don’t trust diamonds and gold.”
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More, more, more!
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This collection is very personal for me and was ignited by a moment under the stars with my friends last summer. We all drank whiskey and stripped down to little dresses and bathing suits, it was a warm windy night in Joshua Tree and we had nothing but blankets and an i-phone speaker blaring music from the inside of a cup (a trick I learned on that trip!) It made me think of my summers camping in High School, my inseparable group of friends and I used to climb the water tower in the mountains of Santa Barbara, toss up our sleeping bags and play truth or dare while gazing out at the twinkling city far below. It's a magical experience and one I attribute to California. I don't think the magic will ever leave me...
We had dreamy Lauren Ward shoot this for a more subtle, quiet feeling (a little different than our other campaigns) and cast muse, Daria Pleggenkuhle, to play the ultimate, High school flashback Tomboy. her cropped hair, lanky body, and bushy eyebrows conjured the feeling of self discovery, hot summers, and dreaming of what the future held.
Another girl who was a major inspiration for me was teen photographer, Nirrimi. Please check out her blog for incredible inspiration!! One of the shirts "Alba" is named after her baby. Please enjoy!! I hope you can find your own magic this summer.
As designer Kimberley Gordon describes the inspiration behind the unique pieces, “When I was 11 and moved to California, we started going on camping trips and I haven’t stopped since. From Yosemite, Joshua Tree, tents, ghost stories, campfires, and bug spray, to first kisses, swimming, fishing, home made burritos, and bucket hats! Camping always makes for the most wonderful memories.” Gordon adds, “The open road through the desert with the windows down and heat rushing in or laying under the stars with your friends drinking whiskey and playing spin the bottle; the collection is inspired by all of these feelings and memories. The last three weeks before school begins, the urgency of cramming in all the fun, and that feeling that you know it’s all going to end soon which makes it all the more magical.”
The Daydream group features a selection of unique photorealistic images sublimated onto signature Wildfox bodies. The “Kissing Under The Stars” Cassidy tank is covered in an allover galaxy print featuring a vibrant graphic of luscious red lips on the front. Other styles include images of desert highways, Los Angeles horizons, and swimming pools with phrases such as “The Road is Home” and “Dream On Dreamer”. The “Motel Mirrors” jumper features a lifelike image of a hotel room across the entire body as if the garment had been cut out of a photo.
The Besties group is a pairing of favorite Spring 13 graphics with signature Wildfox tees, tanks, and White Label sweaters, creating an ultimate must-have collection for summer. In addition to popular t shirt graphics like ‘Rainbow Pony’, ‘Meow!’ and ‘Grey Wolf’, signature bodies included are both Desert and Hippy crew necks and Classic v neck tees offered in a palette of soft pinks, teals and yellows. Highlights from the White Label sweater knits are the allover floral print ‘Little Edie’ on a classic Lennon body and ‘Hampton Tennis Club’ on the School Girl V.
Photos: Lauren Ward
Make up: Carlene K
Hair: Anna Lee Fiorino
Styling: Kimberley Gordon, Meredith Leyerzaph
Wildfox production team: Emily Siegel, Casey Wisdon, Aurora Rivera, Alexandra Green, Kevin Ramirez
Photo Edit: Kimberley Gordon
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Sandra Dee looking adorable with her dogs. I feel the same way about my baby!!
I LOVE Gidget so much, whenever I go through a breakup I put it on all day and fall asleep to it at night. Thank God, it's been a while since I've had to do that!!
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Take one former supermodel, mix with a successful career in cookery writing and add a large dollop of domestic bliss for the perfect result, says Sophie Dahl.
By Sali Hughes
05 October 2011
Sophie Dahl has requested we meet in a salvage yard coffee shop off the M40. I’m browsing some vintage doorknobs when she bounds in. And, even after 13 years of interviewing some of the world’s most beautiful women, I am unprepared. She is insanely pretty – like, Sistine Chapel pretty. In a simple ‘mum shirt’ and boyfriend jeans, an enormous black Chanel tote is the only clue to her former life as one of the world’s most successful fashion models. Skin like double cream – the kind that only British girls possess – poured over the most exquisite, aristocratic bones and the body of a vintage Playboy bunny. Her lips are so pouty, and her curly-lashed eyes so enormous, she looks like a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Tweetie Pie.
As she sits down and politely orders a pot of builder’s tea, I wonder aloud if, when Sophie’s career turned to writing, her extraordinary looks got in the way? She did, after all, spend her twenties as a supermodel with an agenda of ‘real woman curves’ forced upon her. No smart and impressionable young woman wants her appearance to be debated ad nauseum in the national press.
She nods, more shyly than you might expect. ‘I’d been a fantastically plain child, so it felt super weird when my appearance became a talking point in the press, and this politicised thing,’ she says. ‘To begin with, I was bouncing down the catwalk like a Labrador puppy, having just had an enormous baguette for lunch. It was only when it became really public that I started feeling quite embarrassed and shy, and that was what prompted my move to New York. I just wanted to disappear.’
Sophie left New York and, with it modelling, in 2007.‘I didn’t like being a model,’ she says now. ‘It feels weird to stand in your knickers in front of people you aren’t married to.’ Now 34, it’s remarkable and refreshing that she devoted her post-fashion life to food – Kryptonite to most models. For someone who claims greed is her biggest vice (she gave up cigarettes when she quit modelling, despite still missing them dreadfully), cookery writing seemed like a logical next career step. ‘I’d known I wanted to write since I was little, and food was always very important to me, and my family. I like routine, and cooking became a ritual when I was modelling in New York. My life was nomadic, so making supper felt like an announcement that I was home.’
I wonder if those New York loft model meals were quite the same as the nursery food in her new book, From Season To Season (I doubt the ‘Heartbreak Carbonara’ – though delicious – is catwalk-friendly). ‘Things were more disciplined when I was modelling,’ she admits. ‘I ate less bread. I’m naturally greedy and would end up the size of a house if I ate all I wanted all of the time. Nowadays, I arm myself with Spanx and I’m ready to go. I’m happy with myself, though. Women fetishise thinness but men don’t give a ****. I always had boyfriends, whether I was skinnier or rounder.’ At this exact moment, a waiter comes to offer us pudding. She orders a huge slab of strawberry cheesecake and two spoons.
This abundant appetite and love of food has served her well. After a novella and novel, her debut food book, The Delicious Miss Dahl was an instant bestseller, and the accompanying BBC series pulled in over two-million viewers in the UK (it has since been syndicated worldwide). Now married to musician Jamie Cullum and mother of seven-month-old Lyra, Sophie’s latest book, From Season To Season, feels even more intimate and nostalgic than the first. It draws heavily on her childhood, combining family anecdotes with comforting recipes (the apple cider omelette is a triumph) from the repertoire of Jamie’s family, and of her beloved grandmother, the late actress Patricia Neal (wife of her grandfather, Roald Dahl).
These affectionate stories appear alongside often uncomfortable memories of Sophie’s unconventional childhood with her actress mother, Tessa Dahl, who was just 19 when Sophie was born (her siblings, Clover, Ned and Luke, came much later).
The young Sophie lived a transient life, changing houses, schools – even countries – occasionally with dread and unhappiness, on her young mother’s whim. ‘My mum liked to move house,’ says Sophie matter-of-factly, ‘she loved adventure
, and didn’t like being tied down. If she was fed up somewhere, she would move.’ As a mother myself, this makes me feel sad, but Sophie’s philosophical. ‘It’s not until you’re in your thirties with the benefit of hindsight that you can say, “that was wrong”. As a child, that was my reality so it didn’t feel weird. Looking back, I can see that it was. But we forget our parents were so young. Think about people you know who are in their early twenties and it’s not fathomable for them to be having babies and making choices for them. You develop a softness and an appreciation towards your parents.’
I ask if all the old wounds have healed and she smiles. ‘I don’t remember who said it, but the moment you reach adulthood is when you forgive your parents, and I’ve definitely found that to be true. You get on with it because you accept they did the best they could.’
The adult Sophie – all cosy family pottering and countryside idyll – comes as a direct result of such an unsettled past. Significantly, she’s had the same best friend, Emily (a primary-school teacher), since birth and has chosen to settle in the only childhood base she knew – rural Oxfordshire – with Jamie and Lyra. ‘Oddly, my childhood gave me a grounding or, at least, a sense of wanting to create my own family unit that was consistent and rooted. So I am immensely grateful for my background, as it means I could come into my marriage and motherhood in a way that I feel like I’ve done all my partying and this, for me, is a massive luxury.’
She had made the tentative steps towards this new life before she met Jamie at a charity function in 2007. ‘Leaving New York and London, quitting that life and moving home, was quite a step. All of that time was transitional and frightening, but brilliant.’
The man she has chosen to share this new life with is suitably solid, and from a close family that has welcomed in Sophie as their own. It’s easy to see from the book that she adores her in-laws. ‘I thought he was great before I knew his background,’ she says, ‘but when you see where someone comes from, it gives you a stronger sense of them and what they are shaped by. The closeness of his family is, and was, very appealing. It feels very natural and easy, like it was always meant to be.’ She admits that meeting Jamie was a turning point. ‘I knew very early on that I had met my person,’ she says. ‘I think we both did. Life just felt fuller. I hate it when people say, “I felt completed”, but it felt like it was always meant to be in that way. He felt familiar to me. It felt like coming home, which I suppose is the mark of something great.’
In January of last year, the couple married in an intimate ceremony in the New Forest. The bride wore a simple dress by Alice Temperley and their first dance was to Steve Miller Band’s The Joker. Now, they are largely together while Jamie scales back his touring to be at home, for which she is grateful. ‘I feel very lucky,’ she says. ‘As a new mother, I have friends whose husbands went back to work within a week and, for me, having Jamie at home was invaluable. We really got to figure Lyra out and she got to figure us out. It’s been lovely.’
Is Jamie a good dad? She grins: ‘He’s divine, but I knew he would be. He’s a terrific father, tremendously patient and fun. You definitely look for that in a partner, albeit unconsciously.’
Life at the Cullums’ consists of hanging out with Lyra, while Jamie works in his home studio, rejoining the family for lunch. ‘I have somebody help me in the afternoon which is when I do my writing and emails and then we liaise again later for bath and bedtime.’
I wonder whether becoming a mother to a baby girl has caused her to revisit the issue of body image and whether she’d discourage her daughter from placing herself under the same scrutiny? ‘I don’t want to pre-empt that too much, because she may want to be a scientist,’ Sophie smiles. ‘But I do notice that people talk to beautiful little girls in a different way, and I think that’s terribly dangerous. I have a brother with an incredibly beautiful daughter and you see how self-aware she is already at a very young age. It’s no-one’s fault, it’s just the way that society is conditioned to tell little girls they look like princesses. It should also be that she’s incredibly clever, funny, kind and loyal and she’s such a great friend. You have to continue to reinforce other attributes which are more important than beauty.’
One senses that Sophie herself decided there was more to her life than beauty, and never really looked back. She is currently on something of a roll. Her next project is a BBC documentary on home-economics guru Mrs Beeton, with whom she’s long been fascinated, then it’s on to writing her new novel about a group of close girlfriends in New York. And then, possibly, more children – once she’s emerged from ‘the fug of early motherhood’. But, for now, a trip to John Lewis for new curtains is the priority. Sophie fishes around for her purse to pay the bill and gives me an enormous hug and promises to tweet me, despite feeling a constant low-level anxiety about ‘being boring’ on Twitter. As she sweeps out, with a nearby lunch group of old ladies gawping at her lovely face, I look down to the table and see that she has left me the last mouthful of strawberry cheesecake. Greed and good manners. Some things about Sophie Dahl have always remained the same.
Sophie Dahl's Best Things In Life
Best book: The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden (Pan, £6.99). It’s the most gorgeous coming of age story about a teenager’s transition into womanhood.
Best film: Annie Hall. I want to be Diane Keaton when I grow up. She’s the kind of woman you could drink red wine with and then she’d probably sneak off to buy a packet of fags.
Best stress relief: Cooking. I cook every day, even if it’s just eggs on toast.
Best TV Show: Californication. Though I spent the early days of motherhood glued to reruns of Come Dine With Me and Friends. I love Jennifer Aniston.
Best Designer: I love what Francisco Costa’s done at Calvin Klein.
Best Music: Hip hop like Jay-Z for going out, Joni Mitchell and a bit of Jamie for home.
Best Beauty Product: I love Crème de la Mer as a treat, and Ren Rose Otto Bath Oil.
Best memory: My brother’s 21st birthday in Martha’s Vineyard. My granny was still alive and we all ate fresh lobster and coleslaw.
Best thing in life: Love and family. People overcomplicate things. That’s really all it’s about.
It's also a little pre post before I post more episodes of Marissa's show, 'Tangents and the Times', on Monday!! YES!!! Oh man, I wish her show was on HBO and I could watch it over and over for hours.
XOXO
Kim
]]>See our other adventures and shop away at Lonelydot BUY A TICKET
This is all from a night at the Ace Hotel, Palm Springs
