An illegitimate child, Eartha Kitt was born in the cotton fields of South Carolina, the daughter of a white dirt farmer and a black Cherokee mother. Given away by her mother, she arrived in Harlem at age nine, and at 15 she quit high school to work in a Brooklyn factory. As a teenager, Kitt lived in friends' homes and in the subways. By the 1950s, however, she had sung and danced her way out of poverty and into the spotlight: performing with the Katherine Dunham troupe on a European tour, so ...[Read Story]