Getty Images Eartha Kitt at 79 is as busy professionally as ever. Here she walks the runway at the Heart Truth-Red Dress Fall 2006 fashion show in New York City.

IF YOU GO: CROWN JEWELS OF JAZZ

-- Eartha Kitt performs at the annual Crown Jewels of Jazz benefit at 8 p.m. Saturday at Music Hall Ballroom. Opening act, Kathy Wade. -- Tickets ($150) include cocktails and dinner (5:30 p.m.) (866) 242-3252; www.learningthroughart.com. -- The event is the sole fund-raiser for Wade's Learning Through Art, Inc., which sponsors multi-cultural, music-based art education programs to schools and business. -- Previous performers at Crown Jewels have included Dionne Warwick, Dianne Schuur, Rosemary Clooney, Nancy Wilson.

She says she can still purr her patented sex-kitten growl. By all accounts, her voice is as fine as ever, and she is as busy as ever on stage, concerts halls and television.

At first glance one would think 79-year-old Eartha Kitt is in the twilight of her career. But it would seem the quintessential femme fatale chanteuse, who likes to call herself the original "material girl," is still in her prime.

"Once people hear the voice and the growl they know who I am. I can still sing the songs I'm known by in the same key I did 40 years ago," Kitt said in an interview from her New York home last week.

Eartha Kitt performs at Music Hall Ballroom Saturday at this year's Crown Jewels of Jazz, the gala fund-raiser for Kathy Wade's Learning Through Art, Inc., which sponsors music-based, multi-cultural learning programs in schools.

Amazingly, Kitt is getting some of the biggest accolades of her 56-year career this summer with her sold-out, month-long run at New York City's Café Carlyle. The performance, "Live at the Carlyle," will be released on CD this fall.

"Indestructibly seductive at 79, the greatest and wittiest of all singing tigresses," wrote New York Times' critic Stephen Holden about Kitt's Carlyle performance. He went on to call it "her lightest, swiftist and funniest one" she has done in decades. Elements of that show will be in her Music Hall performance.

All from a woman who got her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame when John F. Kennedy was president. By 1978 she had written two autobiographies; a third update came in 1988.

Born on a cotton plantation in South Carolina, Kitt would be sent to New York as a child to live with an aunt, never really knowing her parents. She broke on the New York cabaret scene in the early '50s, quickly signed to a record contract, releasing "C'est Si Bon (It's So Good)," which would become her signature song.

By 1957 she was starring on Broadway and it was on to feature films, appearing with the likes of Sidney Poitier, Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis, Jr.

But she may forever be best known for a non-musical performance as the original Catwoman on the "Batman" TV Series in the late '60s - still in reruns.

Kitt has absolutely no problem that a baby boomer generation may remember her mainly for that role, rather than her dozens of records and numerous Tony awards and nominations.

"Well, thank God for that," she says with her throaty laugh. "At least I will be in peoples' minds as long as Catwoman is being played on television somewhere. I can be on Broadway and, in the rest of the country, no one outside of New York will know who I am. Because of Catwoman, people do know who I am."

She said she has never seen Halle Berry's "Catwoman," but figures it's fruitless to make comparisons.

"I thought it was wonderful they asked her to do it," Kitt said. "Halle Berry is Halle Berry and Eartha Kitt is Eartha Kitt and never the twain shall meet."

She has a similar response when it's pointed out a couple generations of female singers - from Madonna to Shakira - have knowingly, or by accident, essentially borrowed Kitt's act of the sensual, exotic sex kitten.

"Imitation is the greatest form of flattery. I think Madonna does a pretty good job imitating Eartha Kitt," Kitt said with a laugh.

One modern-day analogy she won't buy into is the Dixie Chicks. Ironically, one could be made.

In 1968 Kitt was invited to a White House luncheon hosted by first lady Lady Bird Johnson. Kitt criticized the impact of the Vietnam War on poor minorities, supposedly infuriating the president and reducing the first lady to tears. Kitt says she was essentially blacklisted, unable to find work in America for much of the following decade.

Kitt insists the incident was very different than Dixie Chick Natalie Maines' criticism that she was "ashamed" of President Bush for invading Iraq. The country singers have seen their concert sales fall off and some stations boycott their records.

"I was criticizing the war, not my government. And I was not criticizing my president," Kitt said.

Kitt insists she wasn't looking for a public forum, just reporting to the first lady the hardships the war was imposing on poor people.

"I told her what the boys had told me. I was not on a soapbox trying to get publicity. I was there with the president's wife, and was not there interested in blurting out what I thought, because I don't think that's my job as an entertainer."

But tough years followed. Kitt could only get work in Europe, where she became a hit, wowing audiences with her ability to sing in 10 different languages.

"I thought, this too shall pass. I have no animosity about that," Kitt said of the period. "I can say I'd still rather be in America than anywhere else in this world."

Kitt is hardly slowing down. She is reprising her role on a new Saturday morning TV cartoon as the voice of Yzma, the villain in animated Disney films "The Emperor's New Groove." It was just announced she will star this fall in an off-Broadway musical, "Mimi Le Duck."

She will celebrate her 80th birthday next year with a performance at Carnegie Hall, 50 years since she first performed there.

Kitt acknowledges throughout her varied career she ultimately comes back to the cabaret setting. (Her first performances as a singer came in the Paris cabarets in 1950.)

"I like being a cabaret performer even though the cabaret is not what it used to be. But it's trying to make a comeback. There is nothing like it. That personal contact with the audience. You and me talking to each other."

She laments the demise of the cabaret over the years, noting the singers that can pull of such a performance long ago opted "to make big money in the big arenas. They could not get anyone who wanted to do a sophisticated stand-up performance. That intimacy is gone."

As for her secret to still being a lively performer at her age:

"It's probably not having a secret. Because then there's too much pressure ... And I don't get too involved with unnecessary wants. We should go with what we need more than just want.

"When you want, want, want, that's when you get pressure. That's one reason why I don't wear jewelry. I don't need that unnecessary pressure."