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Eartha Kitt’s daughter, Kitt Shapiro, says she recently met the co-writer of the Christmas song her mother made famous: “Santa Baby.”
The song, performed by Kitt with Henri René and His Orchestra, was co-written by Joan Javits and originally released in 1953.
But it wasn’t until 2025 that Kitt’s daughter — who penned the 2021 memoir Eartha & Kitt: A Daughter’s Love Story in Black & White — connected with Javits, who surprised her at the clothing boutique she owns in Westport, Conn.
“I mean, it was such a funny thing,” Shapiro, 59, tells PEOPLE, adding that a local news station had done a story on her and her store. “A lot of people happened to see it because it’s a channel that everybody gets their local weather and their local traffic and all that stuff. I’m just standing in the store and this woman comes in with this older woman and she looks at me and she says, ‘I have a Christmas present for you.’ and I’m like ‘What?” and she goes, ‘This is my mother. This is Joan Javits and she wrote ‘Santa Baby.'”
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Shapiro tells PEOPLE she had previously met the song’s composer, Phil Springer, but meeting Javits was so surprising that it left her emotional.
“I literally, I broke down. I mean, there just were tears in my eyes,” Shapiro says, adding that Javits was “born and raised here in Westport, Connecticut.”
“How my mother, how their paths never crossed, because my mother lived in … the town right over from me, three minutes from here,,,. It was just such a moment of like, oh my gosh. The only thing that could have made it different, more impactful is if — because we had Spotify on — if ‘Santa Baby’ had come on at that moment,” she adds.
Meeting Javits, says Shapiro was “such an incredible feeling” and felt “full circle.”
“Santa Baby,” she adds, was written specifically for her mother to sing.
“It was very obviously risqué at the time … and even the video and the photograph, where she’s staring at the window and she’s wearing that white stole… and it looks like she doesn’t have any clothes underneath,” notes Shapiro, adding that record label RCA later “painted in a bra strap” so they would stop getting so much negative feedback about the album art.
She continues: “There’s so many double entendres in that song… and it’s very flirty. Of course, nowadays we don’t think anything of it. I mean, we just think it’s a song. We don’t think about what that must have been like in that time, and this woman of color — think about it. I mean, not only was she this gorgeous, sexy woman, but she was a woman of color … and we all think of Santa as being this old white [man], you know?“
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Shapiro also oversees her mother’s estate, saying that it is “in talks” about a potential biopic focusing on Eartha.
“We are in talks. I mean, they’re very preliminarily, but yes,” she says, adding, “You see my mother continues to impact … the younger generation even … It just feels like my mother’s very present.“
Together till the end, she writes how her mother died in her arms on Christmas Day in 2008 from colon cancer at age 81. How fitting that the woman known for her sultry rendition of “Santa Baby,” a song that was written for her, died on Dec. 25.
“She knew the importance of timing,” Shapiro told PEOPLE in an earlier interview, adding with a laugh, “and in a way, it was poetic.”
