“There were two different people that coexisted within my mother,“Kitt Shapirotells PEOPLE. “One was Eartha Kitt. The other was Eartha Mae. They were two distinctive parts that made one person.”
Eartha Kitt was the legendary entertainer who seduced audiences worldwide and whose signature purr as Catwoman in the late ’60s made the role all her own. Eartha Mae was born into poverty in the small town of North, South Carolina, the illegitimate daughter of a young Black woman and a man she assumed to be white — and whose identity she never knew.
“Eartha Mae was the one who gave her strength,” says Shapiro, who’s new memoirEartha & Kitt: A Daughter’s Love Story in Black & White, is excerpted in this week’s PEOPLE. “My mother would often say, ‘I’ve used all the manure that’s been thrown on me as fertilizer.'”
“But she also overcame,” she adds.
Eartha & Kitt: A Daughter’s Love Story in Black & White.
Even when she urged her mother to let go of her childhood pain, her response was always the same: “Why would I let it go?” she’d say. “It’s who I am and itmademe who I am.”
Both illegitimate and of mixed race, Eartha “was treated as an outcast,” she writes. When her mother met a man who offered to marry her, he demanded that she leave Eartha behind, telling her “I don’t want that yella gal in my house.”
“At the time in the South they referred to her as a ‘yella gal,’ because she was mixed race,” says Shapiro.
Eartha Kitt as a young woman.
Over the next six decades, she sang all over the world. And at her side was her daughter Kitt. “She named me Kitt because she wanted to be sure that her name lived on,” says Shapiro.
For more fromEartha & Kitt, pick up this week’s issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.
Theo Wargo/Wireimage
“She was a fierce protector of me,” says Shapiro. “We were a team.”
Shapiro, 59, who owns a clothing boutique in Westport, Conn. and oversees her mother’s estate, now works withAmerican Cancer SocietyandColon Cancer Allianceto increase awareness about the importance of screening and early diagnosis.
Shapiro’s bookEarth & Kittis out May 4.
source: people.com
