Stephen Hunt: My glimpse of Eartha Kitt, 1950s

Stephen Hunt: My glimpse of Eartha Kitt, 1950s

IN THE LATE 1950's in my mid-twenties I worked in Manhattan for Dorothy and Marjorie Marsh, Marsh Tours, Inc. in their Rockefeller Center upscale travel agency [1] . I was in training with the prospect of becoming a tour guide to squire spring-fling Ivy League college students to Bermuda and back in ASTA style. Jack Thompson, our handsome office manager, was my quite literally beloved superior. He had hired me after a joint interview over cocktails with his lover Bob Thayer, a New York interior decorator, at their apartment on King Street. When by chance at work I spied the very metropolitan and dapper Duke of Windsor ascending by elevator to a dental appointment, and then spied short-haired Mary Martin in a circular stick hat passing me on her way for a passport photo take near the 'Well of the Sea' oyster eatery in the office building's lower level, I became engrossed in celebrity-spotting simply because it was happening for me.

At this time I lived with my dear courtesy aunt, a widowed, retired Wall Street executive secretary still comfortably into stocks, on a high floor in Glen Cairn Mansion, Riverside Drive, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Near jet-stream strength winter winds swirled down along the Hudson river from West Point, and a garish winking 'SPRY' ad sign was all too apparent in the distance on the Jersey side. In my aunt's ear I dropped the names of those I had celebrity-spotted so far. She countered, "Well, then you'd be interested in meeting our neighbor, the world-famous harp player." She said his name fast and familiarly – Carlos Salzedo [1885-1961]. She looked amazed I had begun dropping names as if I were a native New Yorker.

When I rapped on the back door of his floor-through apartment opposite our kitchen door, Carlos Salzedo showed me in. He lived alone in his dim rambling apartment, which wasn't very inhabited, orderly or dusted. Tilting, Salzedo leaned back his principal performance harp onto himself, and stroked it audibly for my benefit a few times -- plucking, I suppose, ethereal fugue themes. He strummed to a supposed baton before a wall cabinet panel, a built-in mirror in the dining room where he practiced between times when home from performance engagements. The great musician made me quite envious by confiding that he had a son in college in California for whom he had just bought a new car. Then he disarmingly inveigled me into doing some heavy lifting of large, wooden, harp shipping cases with him -- so I didn't stay long.

"Oh, and by the way, you know Eartha Kitt of “Mrs. Patterson” popularity lives in the penthouse on our roof," my aunt coached me several days later when she thought of it. I didn't! So I became very watchful from the windowsill of my high, west-facing front bedroom. Soon one dusk I caught glimpse of a diminutive figure in torso street furs alight from a black limousine, way below -- my sole peep at the singer vivid in life. As no introduction seemed forthcoming from my aunt, my curiosity prompted me into the elevator later that week to press the top button -- to dare at least an ascent and perhaps a wee knock at fabulous Eartha Kitt's door. The elevator rose to Glen Cairn Mansion's top floor, but decidedly not all the way to the roof.

Of a self-actualizing nature, I had almost learned to think entirely independently of my aunt. But not quite. For example, that winter my captious girl friend from junior high school days in western North Carolina , novelist-to-be Annie Proulx [THE SHIPPING NEWS, 1993], aka Edna Annie Proulx Bullock Plastrik Jr. of the three husbands, frantically phoned me late one night. She sounded a bit buzzed and overwrought – wasted in fact while tending her new baby in her steamy midtown apartment. Annie wanted me to bring her, like now, a fresh bottle of whiskey by taxi. She insisted, “Do me something!” and declared exactly what. Overhearing, my aunt frowned on my going out on such an errand. She said nobody nice would call that late to get a bottle totted to her. But like me, Annie was Radio Baby generation, born in the same year just two days after me. Recently she'd brought to the Marsh Tours office an early Shakespeare folio she owned, trusting me to get the tome examined and appraised on Fifth Avenue. Still, I didn't disobey my disapproving aunt.

I listened to my aunt and didn't go out into the night. Eventually she nicely invited to dinner my best friend (but I not his...) Richard W. Peck , the future, prolific, mainstream young-adults novelist [NEW YORK TIME, 1981, Gollancz]. Richard from Decatur was a fascinating rapid-fire garrulity, even a flip one, who had visited me at the office in a corduroy three-piece summer suit. He had the habit of snapping his fingers to be supplied with his next lit cigarette, to preclude having to pause when speaking. My aunt was good and understanding too when the future theatrical producer Obie Bailey [Charles C. Bailey] of “Dream” and “My One and Only” came for me and my things -- and warmly stole me away to live joyously with him in Washington Square Village until I split for Chapala, Mexico to write a first novel, the unpublished KINDRED STRANGERS.

Gently I confronted and pressed my aunt, however, about Eartha Kitt's pad until she explained, "Oh, and by the way, Miss Kitt's penthouse is actually a glassed-in rooftop laundry room. It was formerly used for linen airing and sun-bleaching by tenants. You ride the back freight-service elevator to the top, and then take the stairs up a few steps, and cross the roof to where she lives."

I waited to case the penthouse by moonlight. I was beginning to suspect it might be an illegal unit. On the roof, a single lamp burned in the singer's sky box as it were. The structure was all but transparent with filmy curtains on all sides and a few furnishings behind the surprising glass walls. She wasn't there. And I never had the nerve to try visiting her again. She was probably abroad a lot, or mostly. Was I living in the shadow of her only occasionally used New York pied-a-terre? Much, much later, Obie Bailey ran into her in the Pan American Clipper Club Lounge at Heathrow. When the plane was airborne she came back to him in Coach and they talked about Mabel Mercer and a shared love of the theatre. Eartha Kitt lived in Connecticut by then. [End]

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