KITTY CARLISLE HART: 1910-2007
Actress, singer, 'To Tell the Truth' star
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Kitty Carlisle Hart, the supremely elegant actress, singer, arts advocate and TV personality who enjoyed one of the longest and most varied career runs in U.S. arts history, died Tuesday in New York at age 96. She had been ailing since a bout with pneumonia in December, according to her son, Christopher Hart. A scheduled San Francisco appearance in March had been canceled.
Hart, also known as Kitty Carlisle, is remembered for her role as the romantic musical heroine of the 1935 Marx Brothers film "A Night at the Opera" and she sang in the 1948 U.S. premiere of Benjamin Britten's opera "The Rape of Lucretia." Her long run as a panelist on the CBS game show "To Tell the Truth" made her a regular presence in the country's living rooms from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Hart's great talent, however, was not her own performing skills, but rather a faultless instinct for making the most of her own radiant charm, formidable intelligence and impeccable sense of style. Like an expert director or accompanist, Hart made everyone and everything else shine more brightly in her reflected light. She turned personality and her own glowing personal magnetism into an art form, most notably as an arts funding official and activist.
"She was always charming and very tough and very engaging," said San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas, who had been a friend for decades. "I don't think Kitty Carlisle Hart was upstaged ever, by anybody, in spite of the huge personalities who surrounded her." Thomas said he knew only two other women who could "plant" themselves in a room with the same authority that Hart did. "One was Ethel Merman, and the other was Pamela Harriman."
"I can't think of anybody left who really knew the great creators of the 20th century," said Michael Strunksy, trustee of the Ira Gershwin estate and nephew of Ira Gershwin's wife Leonore. "She was the lifeline to the Gershwins, to Rodgers and Hammerstein and everyone right through to Steve Sondheim."
Kitty Carlisle married playwright Moss Hart in 1946, after turning down a proposal, as she repeatedly said, from George Gershwin. The couple had two children. When her husband died in 1961, Kitty Carlisle Hart was just getting started. She spent 20 years (1976-96) as chair of the New York State Council on the Arts and received the National Medal of Arts in 1991.
She appeared in the self-referential role of a society dowager in the 1993 film "Six Degrees of Separation" and in her 90s, took to the cabaret circuit. Her touring one-woman show of song and reminiscence, "Here's to Life," played the Plush Room in San Francisco in 2006, when Hart was 95. In that 70-minute act, she sang tunes by Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and others and remembered an encounter with Harpo Marx when he was wearing only a towel.
One of Hart's greatest and most sustained achievements came as an unflagging lobbyist for government arts funding. Gracious and gifted with a perpetual museum-quality smile, she could also be blunt. "The funding problem has always been difficult," she told The Chronicle in 1996. "Now it's become impossible because the climate of the country has changed. And I don't understand it. The rich people have more money. Now we're turning into a country of yahoos. It's very distressing."
Born Catherine Conn in New Orleans on Sept. 3, 1910, Kitty Carlisle found her stage name in a phone book and studied singing in Paris and acting in London. She made her Broadway debut as Prince Orlovsky in "Die Fledermaus" in 1933. She appeared in three films, including "She Loves Me Not" with Bing Crosby, the following year. By the time of "A Night at the Opera" in 1935, her brief Hollywood career had already peaked. Hart first sang at the Metropolitan Opera in 1967, reprising her "Die Fledermaus" debut, and spent two decades as a regular panelist on "To Tell the Truth." Hart, who never had a styled hair out of place, looked as fabulous in a blindfold as she did in full-dress evening wear. Thomas said she was "one of the great party-givers in New York. No door was ever closed to her."
In addition to her son, Christopher, a Los Angeles theatrical director, Hart is survived by a daughter, New York physician Catherine Carlisle Hart, and three grandchildren.
Chronicle news services contributed to this report. E-mail Steven Winn at swinn@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page A - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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