Monthly Archives: December 2008

The Huffington Post
Eartha Kitt: My Encounter with a Legend
By Bruce Vilanch

Of course I adored and wanted to be Catwoman. That goes without saying. Eartha Kitt was another matter. I had interviewed her once for the Chicago Tribune. It was a couple of years after she told Lady Bird Johnson what she thought of LBJ’s Vietnam war. Unfortunately, she chose to tell her at a girly luncheon all about Lady Bird’s beautification program. Eartha took the entire luncheon off-message and maintained that she didn’t work for eleven years after that, but here it was l971 and she was headlining a nightclub in Chicago. She’d already been a legend for twenty years, and legends have very vague calendars. I had a great time interviewing Eartha. who spent a lot of time telling me how she had created Eartha and was now spending the seventh day resting. The next great time I had with her was about a decade and a half later,and this time I got to participate in the creation. Things were slow-ish for both of us. I had just been fired after refusing to do free rewrites on my script of Can’t Stop the Music, widely considered to be the best first-draft screenplay since Citizen Kane. One of the benefits of working on the Village People movie was I got to see them all naked which, at the time, helped me see lots of other people naked, from villages far and wide. The other benefit was I met Jacques Morali, the insane gay French Jew who created the group and wrote their songs. In another pocket of his existence, Jacques annually created a score for the Crazy Horse show in Paris. Spectacular showgirls lip-synched the English lyrics as well as spectacular showgirls could to an audience of non-English speakers who had about as much interest in the lyrics as Lorenz Hart might have had in the showgirls. Armed with this knowledge, Jacques asked me to write a lyric to one of his disco tunes. And he had another reason. “The girrrrl will be lap-sinking to Eartha Kitt. And zo the lyrics need to be special.” Will she be doing an Eartha Kitt impression? “Don’t be bizarre. It is not a drag show. Eartha is sitting on a hill in Connecticut, not working. She will record this one thing.” The song was called “Where is My Man?” It’s about Eartha and her endless search for a soul-mate who never met Bernard Madoff. Read More