The diva, the series and the presidential upset

4:07pm Monday 5th January 2009

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Paul Welsh recalls his meeting with American Eartha Kitt, who continued to perform until a few months before her death.

I hope you all had an enjoyable Christmas and may I wish you a healthy new year.

It was sad to hear of the death of Eartha Kitt at the age of 81. She had been fighting cancer for two years but continued performing in cabaret until just a couple of months ago.

Eartha was a singer and actress who was born into poverty in America. She famously upset President Lyndon B Johnson at a White House lunch in 1968 when she criticised the Vietnam War and was investigated by the FBI.

I first met Eartha when she attended the 1989 Elstree film evening. She arrived with the late actor Robert Beatty, who had starred in a Fifties Elstree TV series called Dial 999.

It was good to see Stanley Baxter was given a television special over the holidays to celebrate his career. It is amazing to think his TV Christmas specials 30 years ago were getting twice the audience figures nowadays achieved by the current top shows.

Stanley, 82, is a very shy man in private life but I was able to persuade him to attend our Barbara Windsor tribute earlier this year. At the event he told me how he was cast in a Bing Crosby TV show in the mid-Seventies.

Stanley said: “One of his sons had seen me playing a send-up of the butler in Upstairs Downstairs on my show and so I was asked to play Bing’s butler. We recorded the show at the old ATV studios in Borehamwood in the summer, although it was a Christmas show.

“Sadly, Bing died on a golf course just three months later.”

Some of you may recall the show in which Bing sang a duet with David Bowie and I think sang White Christmas for the last time on screen.

When I went to the Hollywood cemetery in which Bing is buried, I was surprised to see it was a lawn cemetery, like Allum Lane, and with the same simple flat-style plaque — a modest final resting place for one of the 20th Century’s biggest recording artists and actors.