Jan 09, 2009  |  By: Michael Bedwell  | COMMENTS     

I THOUGHT SHE might collapse into my arms. It was June 1978 and Eartha Kitt had just strode into the wings of D.C.’s Warner Theatre, her erect elegance folding like a fan the moment she was out of the spotlight. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Months before, I had reviewed “Timbuktu,” the all-black version of “Kismet” then at the Kennedy Center on its way to Broadway, for the now defunct local “OUT” magazine. Among acres of gold lame, shiploads of chiffon, semi trucks of seashells, and mountains of beefcake, disco darling Melba Moore was ostensibly the show’s star, but she was forgotten the moment a certain legend, absent from theater for decades, entered.

And what an entrance it was. Someone shouted, “Where is Sahleem-La-Lume? Where is Sahleem-La-Lume?” and, to thundering drums, a near-naked man with bulging bodybuilder muscles appeared, a beautiful woman sitting on his shoulder, one lovely leg pointing forward. Another near-nude man got on all fours before them, and she, lifted up by her outstretched arms, then stepped onto his back, then onto the stage itself, declaring triumphantly, “I’m HERE!” and the audience exploded.

For all the talent behind it, I wrote that “Timbuktu’s” whirling colors and sounds never merged into anything whole — while giving Kitt the praise she’d earned. So when I arrived later for an interview, she was extremely appreciative, and we became friends of sorts, something I’d never dreamed of when first mesmerized by her years before on the classic Ed Sullivan TV show. I went back to her dressing room several times just to talk. Behind the femme fatale, “Kitty” was funny, mystical, and, I think, a little lonely given that the four leads had apparently not bonded — Ms. Moore allegedly refused to speak to her offstage — and she was away from the greatest love of her life, her daughter Kitt.

One afternoon, we went to the bar in the Watergate Hotel where she was staying; she in mink and I in Woodies-on-sale. When the bill came for her glass of Champagne and my Coke, I felt her nudge me under the table. Looking down, I discovered her discretely extending a $50 bill. She wanted to give me the dignity of paying.

ONE NIGHT AFTER the show, my roommate Leonard Matlovich accompanied her to a black private club. She had recently been given a copy of her FBI/CIA file that had been opened within hours of her having dared publicly tell First Lady Lady Bird Johnson at a White House luncheon gathering 10 years before that the greatest problem facing America’s youth was her husband’s war.
Everyone burst out laughing when I read aloud the passage that declared her a “sadistic nymphomaniac.” But what seemed ludicrous in retrospect had suffocated her career stateside for a number of years.

From there, we went to a D.C. drag emporium where a queen got the thrill of her life lip synching Eartha songs in front of La Kitt herself. Then it was on to the Capital’s then most popular bar, Lost & Found. Its door twink unknowingly nearly created a diva disaster when he asked the unknown-to-him black woman with us for multiple IDs. Before she realized what was happening, the mortified manager whisked us in and to the surprise 50th birthday cake he had waiting for her.
If racism and sexism persisted in the gay community, homophobia seemed never to have existed in Eartha, even before she and James Dean were pre-Hollywood pals in New York.

Sometime after seeing her off on the NYC-bound charter bus that she preferred to ride with “Timbuktu’s” gypsies over a limo, Douglas Moore, candidate for D.C. City Council chair, began campaigning on a platform Anita Bryant could have written. “We don’t let blind pilots fly planes, why should we let gays teach children,” he asked.

Exactly a year after our overwhelming defeat in Florida, some feared that gay progress in D.C. might be halted or reversed, and adequate money to fight bigotry was an even greater challenge then. A member of the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, I suggested asking Eartha to do a fundraiser for us.

TAKING THE TRAIN north, I saw the show again, and went to her dressing room at the Mark Hellinger Theatre. Despite our fears of a kind of Miami redux, I’m still amazed that I asked her not just to return to D.C. to give a concert on her one night off from eight “Timbuktu” performances a week, but added that we couldn’t pay her. More amazing was that ...