Posted 8:07 PM by Gene

Someday the world will know in its full flavor the strange and incredible story of Kitty Carlisle Hart. The granddaughter of Shreveport's first Jewish mayor (!), she was born to -- to put it politely -- a scheming social climber of a mother, and after her physician-husband named Conn died when Kitty was ten she squired her to Europe to marry royalty and spend most of the time in singing lessons. With the Crash it was back to the states for an expedient in show-biz; Kitty looked through a phone directory and found her stage name Carlisle -- as did her mother. Several Broadway shows followed, and soon Kitty was off to Paramount opposite Bing Crosby and introducing "June in January" and "Love in Bloom", and then to MGM with the Marx Brothers and the unlikely A Night at the Opera. A decade of marking time followed -- radio, nightclubs, one last bad movie, and who knows what had she not made her great catch: the brilliant (and bisexual) playwright and director (and psychiatrists' slave) Moss Hart, whom she married in 1946 not for love but because it seemed a good thing at the time. (Among other hobbies Hart liked having nude swimming parties with his "friends." They stopped after the wedding. She was aghast at having to share his bed.) It worked: the couple begat four children and were inseparable until Hart's untimely death at all of 57 in 1961. Most important, it gave her entrée into the great New York social scene, where the natural grace and poise and charm that somehow came from all that time puppy-dogging an imperious mother found a tremendous outlet, and part of it she displayed most famously as a panelist on To Tell the Truth. A life like Mrs. Hart's is unthinkable now, least in part for the opportunites she wouldn't have -- she saw Caruso, and knew Toscanini and his daughters, and dated George Gershwin, and was close to such society bigwigs as Phyllis (Mrs. Bennett) Cerf and Irene (Mrs David O.) Selznick and Dorothy (Mrs. Richard) Rodgers, forces of nature in their own right. You do not rub against all that stardust without a little of it sparkling you, and if her public persona was the real thing -- and we don't doubt it -- Kitty Carlisle Hart had it in galaxies. Here is another reminder of what we have lost, which is far more than we can ever hope to reclaim.

P. S. Most of these facts came from Steven Bach's bio of Hart, a not-bad source for such information.

(First posted at 5:37 p.m.; I moved it several times for obvious reasons, and also corrected Moss Hart's age; grammatically corrected 2/16/2008)