Kitty Carlisle Hart

Michael Kantor: Yeah, I thought we might start with a semi-historical question. In 1866, a show was done at Niblo’s Garden on Broadway. What was the start of American musical theater and Broadway?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: The start of American musical theater, my research tells me, is the Black Crook at Niblo’s Gardens, 1866, an extravaganza with extraordinary sets, marvelous costumes, and girls, and legs, legs, everybody was showing their legs. That was the beginning, and then it went on from there through Webber and Fields and Siegfeld, and on and on, and which was… And apparently, in the 20s, millions of people went to the theater. Millions. And it was, of course, the movies hadn’t taken over, nor television. I guess that’s the whole answer. But it was a fine time to be an actor.

Michael Kantor: Terrific. For people who don’t have any idea what it was, tell me, what was Vaudeville?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Oh, I was in Vaudeville. Vaudevil was still going when I came around. And it was fascinating because it was a little bit of everything. It was a potpourri. There were actors. There were animal acts. There were jugglers. There were singers. There were even people who did, a little bit before my time, people did great scenes from great plays. George Arliss, a famous actor. Did scenes. Ethel Barrymore did scenes in vaudeville. These were first-rate actors, but they were not when they weren’t working. They went into vaudevilles and made a lot of money, but the animal acts were the ones that always dogged my steps. I once followed a seal act, and I wore very beautiful long evening gowns, and of course the seals made the stage too bloody wet, and i had to follow the seal act and it was always and I hated the SEALs and they hated me. Oh, I followed a dog act once. They were adorable. Little fox terriers and they built houses. This was at Low State on Broadway. And there were maybe 25 fox terrier and they build houses. They laid the bricks and they brought the buckets and they did everything. It was adorable.

Michael Kantor: Great, thank you. You came, according to, I think, your autobiography, you came to New York City in 1932. Do you remember the first Broadway show you saw and was it tremendously exciting?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: The first Broadway show I saw was more than exciting. It was the best show I ever saw. It was Arthur Schwartz and Dietz. And it was called… I’ll have to come back to that. But it was just, it had the upstairs, I think. It was a wonderful show.

Michael Kantor: Come back to that one on a break. Tell me about the first time you appeared on a Broadway stage. What did that feel like?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: The first time I appeared on the Broadway stage was in something called Champagne Sec. I had already performed it in Westport because we tried out in West port. Actually what it really was was the Flater Mouse but they couldn’t call it Flater mouse because of some problem with the title. It hadn’t been cleared. So they called it Champagne sec but it really Flater Maus and I played Prince Olovski in Black Tights up to here and I got brilliant notices. None of my singing. What I hoped for brilliant notices on my singing, I got brilliant notices on my legs. But the first performance on Broadway was terrifying. When I made my debut on Broadway and I finished my first big song, I thought that it was raining and there was there was the noise of rain on the roof and nobody He had heard my number, but it was applause. I had never heard that sound before in a theater, and I didn’t recognize it, but it was quite thrilling when I discovered what it was. And I made a big hit. And I went straight to Broadway, to Hollywood.

Michael Kantor: Was Broadway sort of the top of the heap in terms of vaudeville and burlesque in those days to aspire to?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Yes, I mean if you played, if you play low-state, you had, you had pretty much made it. It was the top of the heap. And Broadway of course was the top-of-the-heap for the theater and always has been. Not quite as exciting as it used to be, because they’re not that many plays. It’s too expensive to put plays on today.

Michael Kantor: You met George Gershwin in the early 30s and you said he was at the center of everything that was happening. What was happening to our culture at that time?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: What was happening to our culture in the thirties? I don’t, it’s a, I can’t answer that question. I don’t really know what you’re asking me.

Michael Kantor: You said he was the center of what was happening. Oh, he was the s-

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Oh he was the center of what was happening because he was that kind of a personality. Any way he went he was a center of attention. He had the energy of the devil. He was enormously attractive. He was charming and he made it his business to be the center of attention! You know there are people like that. They do it automatically. I mean it didn’t look like he was trying but he was obviously making an effort to be the center of the attention. He played the piano, he danced well. He was fun to be with. He told stories well. He had an enormous sense of the enjoyment of life and of fun. And he made everything fun that we did together. We danced at El Morocco. We had once a seder at his house with some wonderful people. And he and Oscar Levant did the whole thing in rhythm. They sang the whole service. And it was great fun. And that’s the sort of thing he did all the time.

Michael Kantor: George talked about himself all the time you wrote. What did he say?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: George talked about himself because he, well, I’m a very good listener. And I think that’s been my charm with men. He talked about his work. He talked what he wanted to do. He talked, it was a good gossip, he talked about friends and he was fun to, you know, he would, but he was mostly interested in what he was doing. His work, the project that he had, most of the time I knew him, is working on porgy and best. And this was a very big project and an enormous undertaking. And so he talked a great deal about it. And I used to go up to his apartment to, you know, he would say come on up and maybe you could sing a couple of bars of summertime and I would help me with the orchestration. And I did that until I figured out that this was uploy. The way other men said come on and see my etchings, he said come up and help me with my orchestration

Michael Kantor: Was he always playing at parties? Give me a sense of a party with George Gershwin.

Kitty Carlisle Hart: He was always the center of the party because he always played the piano. And everybody asked him to play the piano, and he loved doing it.

Michael Kantor: Was Georgia later in fact.

Kitty Carlisle Hart: In fact, he had a song that he had, that he composed, and there was sheet music to it. But the song had, and when he would go to a party, he would say to a young lady who took his fancy, I’m inspired to write a song for you, come. And he would put her down on the piano bench next to him, and he would play this presumably that he’d just composed just for her. But the song had a blank space in it for the girl’s name. Any girl.

Michael Kantor: That’s great. You mentioned that George would bring you in when he was creating Porgy and Bess. Tell me about, what was he like? I understand he was collaborating by letter with, is it Dubose Hayward?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: I don’t know very much about that.

Michael Kantor: What was it like to see Corgi and Bess with George Gershwin?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Well, I was absolutely dazzled. I thought it was simply marvelous. It had not gotten good notices. But I thought he was first class. And apparently I was right. They had a lot of cutting to do. It was over long. But it was wonderful. And it was a breakthrough. It was so special. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. It was original. The singers were so good. It was dramatic. And it held your attention, so… From beginning to end, I thought it was wonderful.

Michael Kantor: You mentioned it wasn’t well received critically. What was the color barrier an issue at that time?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: I don’t think so, I don’t think so no. On the contrary, it seems to me it was less than it is now.

Michael Kantor: Porgy and Bess, was it adventuresome in terms of the racial color barrier?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: With that, I’m not very good at answering because I never had much feeling about that having been brought up in Europe. There was no feeling. But I do know one thing, and that is that we used to go to Harlem, George and I, with other people, sometimes in what the song says, in ermine and pearls, all dressed up, you know, sometimes not all dressed up, and we were always, he was always received like an honored guest. Because I suppose of Porgy and Bess and because of who he was and what he was, but in Harlem we used to go to Smalls Paradise and we used to go to the other nightclubs and everybody adored George and we were always happy there because everybody came around and we all together and it didn’t seem to have any feeling of color barrier.

Michael Kantor: You dated George Gershwin and I read in your autobiography that he asked you to marry him. Tell me about your relationship.

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Well, he was very sweet. He asked me to marry him, but he didn’t really love me. He thought it was time to get married, I think. And he thought I would be very suitable, because he had an enormous horde of friends, but he had some very social friends. And, you know, the theater in those days and society was much closer together than it is today. In the first place, the theater was smaller. We all knew each other. I knew my husband Moss Hart before. We were married long before. Because he had asked me to be in a couple of his plays. And we saw each other, you know, at openings or restaurants and so forth. People didn’t live out of town as much as they do today. The automobile wasn’t as fast. And so we were all together. And he thought I was very suitable to be a wife because I was good with his sort of social friends. And on top of that, I was Jewish. And he obviously, he told me he wanted to marry a Jewish girl.

Michael Kantor: Great, should we go back on part of that? Just briefly, because we lost part of it. Tell me how he proposed you, specifically.

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Well, you know, I don’t honestly remember. I remember a telegram more than… This must be the witching hour for telephone calls.

Michael Kantor: From going off to Hollywood. Just to go back briefly, George Gershwin asked you to marry him.

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Yes, well, you know, it’s very strange. I wish I had the telegram in which he asked me to marry him. But I can’t find it anywhere. And I’m a pack rat when it comes to saving bits of paper and letters. And this is the one thing I could never find. So did I invent it? I don’t think so.

Michael Kantor: How did you hear of George Gershwin’s death?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: When George died, it was really terrible because the day he died, I had been called by his great friend in California to see if I could find the famous Dr. Dandy, who was a famous brain surgeon. He called me. It was a Sunday, I think, because I was supposed to go on a television show, The Fire Chief. What was his name? Um, um. It was a famous comedian. We’ll have to go back and think of it. And so it was Sunday. I know it was a Sunday. And the phone rang, and it was this guy from California who said to me, see if you can find Dr. Dandy, because George is in the hospital, and he’s got a brain tumor. And we want to make sure he gets the best surgeon to operate. Well, I discovered that Dr. Dan Dandy was fishing in Chesapeake Bay because he lived in Baltimore. And there was no ship to shore, so there was no way of contacting him. And therefore, he never got to San Francisco, where George was in the hospital. But then I had to go to the television show. It wasn’t television. I think it was radio in those days. And so I went down to the show. I was in my dressing room. And I heard von Zell, who was a famous announcer, coming along dressing room row. I remember Helen Hayes was on the show. It was a variety show. And I heard muffled voices saying, oh no, oh, no. And he began to get closer and closer to my dressing room, and finally he said to me, George Gershwin died this afternoon. And that’s how I heard.

Michael Kantor: What does his death mean to the Broadway community and the world?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Well, you see, when George Gershwin died, he was only 37 years old. And it was a terrible loss, because heaven knows what he did already so far with his life was so important. And the work was tremendous. He was prolific. But think what would have happened if he lived to be 70 or 80, as people do today. Heaven knows what He could have given us. It’s a great loss.

Michael Kantor: Richard Rogers said that Jerome Kern’s music was the first truly American theater music. How was Jerome Kern influential on Broadway?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: I think Jerry was enormously influential because, Jerry Kern, because he spanned the European operetta. And the American musical era, which was so special. And I think that he was the first one that created a kind of bridge for this sort of music. And he wrote such beautiful songs. He was a very interesting man, very cultivated, very proper, very, I would say, conventional. I never saw him outside of a coat and tie, even though he lived in California a lot of the time. And he was a bit of a gambler, because I knew a story about him that hadn’t happened to me. But should I tell it? Well, it was a story a fellow composer who was a gamblar and much younger. And he wrote to Mr. Kerr and asked if he could see him. And Jerry knew that this man was a big racetrack player. So he said, sure. So the guy arrived, and he was hoping that Mr. Kern would work with him. So they have breakfast, and wait, and thinks, and waits. And finally Jerry brought out of the draw a racing form. And he said do you think you could kind of handicap a horse or two for me tomorrow? And so of course he did. And the horse came in. And the next day, he called him for breakfast again. The guy thought, I’m doing frightfully well, he’s gonna ask me to work with him today. Well, he never did. He only asked him to handicap horses.

Michael Kantor: Great. What do you think was the importance of Shogo to Broadway musical theater?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: I suppose it was the first big real Broadway musical that had extraordinarily beautiful songs and required good singers. It was a major work and I think that time has proven that. Jerome Kern was sort of scary for young singers because he was so important and he had such a dignified way of the whole. His demeanor was very dignified, but I was a friend of his daughter Betty and so one day I was asked to sing Smoke Gets in Your Eyes at a party and I asked her if she thought that her father would coach me because he’d written the song and she said yeah I think he might so I asked him and he said yes, and he coached me in and he played it for me at the party and And every time I sing Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, I do it just the way Jerome Kern. Taught me to do it.

Michael Kantor: How did you first meet Moss Hart and what was your first impression?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: How did I first meet him?

Michael Kantor: How did I first? It was an audition for Jubilee. I haven’t.

Kitty Carlisle Hart: No, I first met Mosshart on the set of A Night at the Opera in California. He’d come out with Cole Porter to cast his musical, Jubilee, and he was looking for a leading lady. And, of course, he was a great friend and collaborator already of George Kaufman, and George Kaufmann was directing the dialog for A Night At the Opera. So he said to me, there are two guys here from New York and they want to meet you, and their names are Mossart and Cole Porter. Well, I got so excited at meeting my two heroes because I had sung Cole Porter’s songs and I knew all about him, but I’d never met Morse Hart, but I knew about him. And so I started to run and I fell flat at Morse’s feet. I tripped over one of those cables, you know, that they have on those movie sets. And after that, I kept falling down all the time. Every time I saw him, I fell down a whole flight of stairs once when he was getting his coat. At 21 and I was upstairs coming down from the dining room and I fell right at his feet again and I thought, he must think I’m drunk all the time. But then they asked me to come up to the hotel suite that evening and they played the score of Jubilee, which was marvelous. It had Begin the Beguine and Why Shouldn’t I and The Cling Cling Bird on the Divy Divy Tree. Wonderful score.

Michael Kantor: How was Moss Hart a man of the theater?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: I think the one thing he really cared about and the thing he really wanted was to write good plays and to direct well. He cared passionately about the theater. And it showed in his work. Because he once wrote a very good play called Light Up the Sky about theater people, and it was very affectionate. It was knowing, but it was affectionate, a big hit. And I played in it for many, many years in Summer Stock. He was just, he wanted to be in the theater from the time he was a little boy and he told me that when the boys used to gather around the stoop after, you know, around five or six o’clock after, or maybe after supper up in the Bronx, he would be the storyteller and he would tell them all the stories and they’d all sit there and listen with rapt attention. He said he once did a whole Dreiser book. He said he had to keep ahead of him. Himself by reading the next chapter very quickly for the next day, but he mesmerized the boys. He was a wonderful storyteller and that translated itself into his work.

Michael Kantor: He was also on stage and off stage. There was something about him. Very few.

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Very theatrical, Morse was a very theatrical person. I used to say he wears his coat like a, like a medieval cloak around his shoulders. When he walked into a restaurant, it was an event. He had that air, he looked like a great actor. And I think he cultivated it. I think you love doing it, because he was very theatrical and he liked the kind of attention that he, created when he walked into a restaurant.

Michael Kantor: Wonderful, I just don’t want to miss just when you were describing the cloak we got a bus come by tell me How would how would Mosshart dress?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Well, he was beautifully dressed always, but when he went out at night, he wore his overcoat over his shoulders like a cloak, the way a young actor would wear a costume. And he walked into a restaurant, to a theater. It was an event.

Michael Kantor: Thank you. Moss came from very poor beginnings, didn’t he? How did that affect it?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Morse’s background was very poor, his family was very poor. His father was a cigar maker. And cigars making went out of fashion. When Morse was about, I guess, 13 or 14, he had to quit school right after, he never went to college. He always felt very, he felt, I think, self-conscious about not having gone to college. Because he would make up colleges that he invented. He’d make a joke about it. He would say, I went to Hebrew Tech, or whatever, you know, something like that. And they were very poor. In his book, he writes that his, I never knew his mother, she died before we were married, but he said that his mother used to have to walk 20 blocks when she ran out of credit at one grocery store in order to get a bottle of milk from another one. And this affected him tremendously, because Moss spent money like a drunken sailor. God bless him. And he made the most of his success, but he always surrounded himself with beautiful apartments and good clothes. And he was the first man to wear a mink coat inside his overcoat. He once said to me, now that mink coat you’re wearing is very ratty, and I need it. Because I want to line my overcoat and he was the first guy we ever saw who had a mink lined overcoat. But we lived, he lived like an Indian potentate.

Michael Kantor: And you think that had a lot to do with just where he was.

Kitty Carlisle Hart: I think it had all to do with the fact that he was so poor as a child growing up. Well, you know those awful stories about the summer camps when he was the camp director in the Catskills and he had no money for clothes and he has this terrible disappointment because he once went to a clothing store and they promised to send him all kinds clothes for summer, and they never did. And so he had to borrow clothes from the costume department and pretend that this was what he really wanted to do, to appear at dinner as a pirate or as a beggar, to make the whole evening more fun for the people who went to these summer camps. It was very humiliating.

Michael Kantor: He worked as an office boy for Augustus P2 and as a social director in the Catskills Resorts. How was this good training for Broadway? I guess more, you know, there were these summer camps, there were things outside the city where people could do plays quickly and get trained, but I don’t think there’s that anymore. Tell me about…

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Well, the summer camp was great training for directors and for writers because they had to write a show every week. They went to Broadway, they couldn’t afford tickets, so they only saw the second act. They waited and went in with the audience in the second and cribbed everything they But they had to write play every week and put it on for the guests of the hotel who were all theatergoers and demanded good work. And so these young men really learn their trade. In these summer camps, and it was terribly grueling.

Michael Kantor: Once, once in a lifetime was a hit. What did Moss Hart do with his family?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: When Once in a Lifetime was produced, Marsh was living in Brooklyn with his family in what he called squalor. And it was, indeed, probably pretty awful. The show was an enormous hit. And the following day… Get some money from the box office, and he went out to Brooklyn and he told his parents to leave. And he said to his mother, I don’t want you to take anything. And she said, you know, she wanted to take her clothes or whatever she had. He said nothing. He said, You can take the box that has the family papers and the letters. And that’s it. And he had a taxi waiting outside and he loaded his mother and his father and his brother into the taxi. And it was pouring rain. And he decided to go back into the house once more, into the terrible apartment that he hated. And he raised all the windows and let the rain pour in and left unceremoniously and left Brooklyn behind it. He was a very dramatic fellow.

Michael Kantor: Marrying loss heart.

Kitty Carlisle Hart: The first time Morse proposed to me, I didn’t think it was quite serious enough. I thought it was rather offhand. It was on the phone. He’d gone out to cast a play in Hollywood, I think it was Christopher Blake, and it seemed rather off hand, and I didn’t think it wasn’t ceremonial enough. So I said, I can’t talk to you now, I’m very busy. And I hung up. So then when he came back to New York, he did it properly. My mother and and my lawyer were there And he asked them to have my hand in marriage. And they all agreed. And so he said, now, this is a wonderful thing. And what we’re going to do on our honeymoon is we’re gonna do a play. We’re gonna to do The Man Who Came to Dinner. So on our honey moon, that was what we did. We did The Man who Came to dinner. And it was, in a way, a bit of a disaster, because Moss was so romantic at that point. That he insisted that we share a dressing room, and he was so bad-tempered when it came time to take his beard off, because he wore a beard in the man who came to dinner, and it would stick, and he had trouble getting the hair off his face, and he so bad tempered, I said, we’ll never share another dressing room. And I threw him out.

Michael Kantor: How would you describe Moss’s style as a director? Let me put that a different way. He directed you an anniversary wall.

Kitty Carlisle Hart: It’s very hard for me to describe Morse’s style as a director because I didn’t get any direction in Anniversary Waltz and he directed everybody else. I watched him and I saw what he did but he didn’t direct me until it got to be about a week before opening and he was shaving one day in the bathroom and I went in with a script and I said, Morse, you never directed me at all in this play. You gave everybody else direction, but you didn’t help me at all. Now you read my part and I’ll just do what you do because he was a wonderful actor. So he read my pot and I just copied him and I got great notices and I had no pride because there was no time to, you know, the development of the pot and what the meaning was and I knew he had in mind what he wanted and so I just did what he told me to do and it all worked.

Michael Kantor: You said earlier that he and George Kaufman wrote play after play year after year, and that doesn’t happen now. Tell me, how prolific were they?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Well, they wrote, they had almost every year they had a play, and then if they didn’t have a play they went to Hollywood and wrote great movies.

Michael Kantor: What did Moss consider his favorite?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: I think his favorite play was Lady in the Dark. This was a play that was very close to his heart because it had to do with something that he cared a great deal about, which was psychoanalysis. And it was the first play about psychoanalyzes. In fact, Morse always said that when he went to his doctor, the Indians, it was so early on that the Indians were still shooting arrows from behind the trees on Fifth Avenue. And so he wrote this play about Lady in the Dark. Which is about a woman who had problems, and they were solved through her analysis. And it had wonderful dancing and marvelous music, and it was a huge production, had three revolving stages.

Michael Kantor: Lady in the Dark was a huge producer.

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Lady in the Dark was a huge production. It had marvelous music, three revolving stages, endless costumes and dancers and actors. And yet, it seemed like a small play because the core of the play about these people’s lives was very concentrated.

Michael Kantor: And the stars were Danny Kay and Gertrude Lawrence. Tell me just a little bit about.

Kitty Carlisle Hart: And Victor Matuop, who was a famous movie star. Well, there was a big scene, actually, a very dramatic scene, which I wasn’t there, but it was one of the openings. It turned out that Danny had never been seen by a Broadway audience. And so when he, I better start again because it really happened in Boston.

Michael Kantor: What was Danny K’s introduction to Broadway?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Danny had never been seen on Broadway because up to then he’d been in nightclubs and not known at all. In fact, you know, I must tell you that I was playing a place called the Chez Paris in Chicago and Danny Kaye was playing it too. We were both, it was our first big nightclub engagement, both of us. I was headlining and he was the young comedian and he did all his numbers. And Sylvia, his wife, played the piano for him. And she had no place to dress, because this was a nightclub and they didn’t have much facilities for that sort of thing. So I knew right away that this was a young woman of enormous quality. And I said to her, why don’t you share my dressing room with me? So she did. It wasn’t very elaborate. It was just kind of a closet with some nails on the wall for our costume. And we’d sit there between shows, because we did three shows a night, and we’d sit there with our feet up on the counter. And this was the conversation every night. Moss Hart came to see Danny at his last little nightclub venture in New York. And he said he was going to write a play, and he had a part for Danny in it. Do you think he meant it? Well, I didn’t know Moss at that point. But I said, yes, I do. I’m sure he meant. And every night, I’d reassure him. My conversation was, do you think I would marry that third secretary at the Brazilian embassy? And she didn’t know him, but she gave me advice every night. P.S. Marsh wrote the show, Danny opened on Broadway, and he did Tchaikovsky. And it was solid applause, non-stop applause. Gertrude Lawrence was supposed to follow with her big number, Jenny, right after this number. And Morse Felt. If she was the normal leading lady, she wouldn’t allow it to go on again because she didn’t want to follow this kind of a hit. So he was trying to shush the audience and he was saying, enough, enough enough, no, no, shh, sh, sh. And eventually he did quiet the audience and Gertrude Lawrence started her number, which was Jenny and she had never done it that way in rehearsal. She did the kicks and the bumps and the grinds and against the proscenium. She did the whole thing, and she topped him. So both numbers stayed in.

Michael Kantor: Why was psychoanalysis so important to Moss Hart and his work?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Well, I can’t, that’s a silly question. Excuse me. It was, he felt it was a matter of life and death. He was so miserable and he was so unhappy that this was a court of last appeal. And he felt that it really made his life.

Michael Kantor: He was very good about bringing that out in his writing. Here’s a different side of him. Once Moss was inspired to plant 2,000 fully grown trees on his property, tell me that story.

Kitty Carlisle Hart: We had a house in Bucks County, and when Morse bought it, it was a very simple farmhouse, and it was set in the middle of a corn field. There wasn’t a tree or a bush on the place, and Morse was a patient man. He didn’t want to wait too long for anything. So he planted 2,000 fully-grown pine trees, and when George Kaufman came over to see the place one day, he looked around and he said, well, Morse. It’s exactly what God would have done if he’d had the money.

Michael Kantor: Terrific. And again, if you can repeat his name in the reply, that would help. Wasn’t George S. Kaufman intimidating? What was it?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: George Kaufman was one of the scariest people I’ve ever known, for one simple reason, he did not tolerate foolish people or foolish conversation. You had to be very careful around him, what you said, because he’d nail you. And he was very impatient. I remember one of things that endeared Morse to me was that we were playing gin rummy one day. With four hands, you know, two against two. And I did something that George disapproved of and he leaned over and he gave me a real kind of tap on the cheek, like a little slap. And Marsh said, oh, I know what it was, no. It was that I was talking a little bit of baby talk and he thought that was outrageous. I said something and you know. And then he leaned over and he gave me the tap on the cheek. And Marsh said, she can say anything she wants to. And I thought, that’s my man. If he’ll defend me against George Kaufman, because Marsh was intimidated by him. See, George is 15 years older than Marsh. And they had a kind of a father-son relationship, almost, although they were equal collaborators. And so, for him to say that to George, I said, if he will defend me to George I know he’s my dad.

Michael Kantor: Wasn’t George Kaufman tremendously attractive to women?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Oh, yes, he certainly was. I don’t know what it was, because he never flirted with me, thank heaven, because I didn’t know him before I knew Moss, because he was directing, but it would have been too embarrassing. But he was enormously attractive to women. They really ran after him a lot, and so I don’t quite know why, because he’d never turned it on me, but I saw it happen a lot.

Michael Kantor: Didn’t that at one point get him into trouble? Tell me how George S. Kaufman became the center of the country’s biggest sex scandal of that time.

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Oh dear.

Michael Kantor: Isn’t it Mary Astor?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Yes. In fact, the last day of shooting on a night at the opera, it was just a two scene between Harpo and me and George was directing. And next to George there was a chair in which sat one of the most beautiful young women I’ve ever seen. I didn’t know who she was. But it was, the scene was called for 12 and we were finished at 12.30 and I was hoping that George would ask me to lunch. And, but he didn’t. The two of them got up, he and the lady, and they walked, and I watched them walk down the corridor. I picked up the paper about a week later and discovered that the lady was indeed.

Michael Kantor: Mary Hester.

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Mary Astor.

Michael Kantor: What do you think was George’s greatest skill in the theater?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Well, he was an all-round theater man. He was a first-rate writer. He was wonderful director. The only thing he had no patience with was music. When Morse and he did a musical, which was a very good one, called I’d Rather Be Right with George M. Cohen about FDR and the Supreme Court, Morse told me that when the music started, George would be walking up the aisle and Morse be walking down toward the stage. He didn’t have much patience with musical numbers.

Michael Kantor: I just want to make sure for the sound really we get that the show that they did together that George

Kitty Carlisle Hart: The show they did together that was the musical was, I’d Rather Be Right. And it was about FDR and packing the Supreme Court with George M. Cohen. And during the course of the show, Moss told me that George would be walking up the aisle during the musical numbers away from the stage, and Moss would be working toward the stage because he loved musical numbers.

Michael Kantor: What was the funniest thing George S. Kaufman ever said?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Oh, good Lord, I don’t remember him ever saying anything very funny to me, ever. I’m sure we laughed a lot, but I don’t remember anything that was specifically. On the contrary, I remember things that were sentimental. He was so, one day he was so enormously revealing about his feeling for Morse and how much he really cared about him. And it was very touching, but I remember anything funny. He rarely wore his heart on his sleeve.

Michael Kantor: Who was coal, just waiting for the graph, who was coal corn?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Well, Cole Porter was an enigma to many people because he was born very rich in a place called Peru, Indiana. And he defied his father’s feelings, supported by his mother, who wanted him to either be a lawyer or a banker. And he went to Yale, and he became a songwriter and a man of the theater. And he wrote Bulldog, Bulldog Eli Yale at Yale. And then he went on to be an adornment of the American musical theater. He had a very social, brilliant marriage. And he and his wife, there were long periods where he and his life were really just being social. And he wasn’t really writing. He’d had a couple of shows that weren’t all that successful, I think. And they would rent a palazzo in Venice for September. And all they would, Morse and he wrote Jubilee on a yachting trip around the world. He called up Morse one day and said, we’re going around the World on the Franconia with three or four of the friends and how would you like to join us? So Morse said, love to. And he said, we’re leaving Tuesday. I mean, people did things like that in those days. And so Morse joined the group and they wrote Jubiley on the tour. So he was, when he worked more, said he was extremely careful, conscientious. Devoted and very dedicated. Nothing else was allowed to get in the way. But all the other times, he was this social butterfly going to parties and giving parties. And Elsa Maxwell was a great friend who brought people to his parties and so forth. And as far as I’m concerned, I was in one of his plays, but I didn’t know him then at all. I was Kiss Me Kate, which I loved, but that was at City Center. Moss, I remember, brought Noel Coward to see it. It was a great moment in my life when Noel Cowart came to see the play I was.

Michael Kantor: Would you say Cole Porter was a snob?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Yes, he probably was. He came from that world, but he wasn’t a snob as far as his work was concerned. He only cared about the best, and he adored Moss, who, you know, they got along terribly well. I think he was a snub, sure. I think anybody coming from that word in those days was.

Michael Kantor: What was his accident and how did it change it?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Well, he was a horseback rider.

Michael Kantor: Culpoid.

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Cole Porter was horseback riding and a horse threw him and fell on him and broke his leg in a thousand pieces and he wouldn’t have it amputated. He had maybe 50 or 60 operations and his mother was still alive and his wife and mother both decided that if they amputate his leg it would kill him. And so they tried in every way to save it but in the end they couldn’t. They had to amputate at the end. But he wasn’t working anymore.

Michael Kantor: What was your favorite song that Cole Porter wrote for Broadway? Why?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: I think my favorite song is Night and Day that Cole Porter wrote. I think it’s the most dramatic, it’s the one that is the most felt. It suits my voice as well. Singers like to sing songs that suit their voices.

Michael Kantor: When did you first meet Frederick Lowe, and what did he promise you?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Oh, Frederick Lowe was one of my dearest friends. I first met him and we called him, well I didn’t call him, well I think I did even in those days. We called him Fritzi. We called Frederick Lough Fritzie and I met him in my very first show on Broadway in Champagne Sec and he was the pit pianist. He played the piano in the pit and every evening he would climb up two flights of stairs to my dressing room. And he would stand behind me while I got made up. And I remember him imitating me. I mean, once in a while, you go like that. And he’d say the same thing every night. He would say, someday. It was Austrians. They had an accent. He would someday, I am going to write the best musical on Broadway. And I’d think, you and who else? Because in those days, there were 70 musicals running. And So, lap dissolve, as they say in the movies. Many, many years later, I’m standing backstage at the opening of My Fair Lady, and Moss and Alan are pacing in front of me, back of the auditorium, and it’s about the middle of the first act, and Fritzi came over to me, and he whispered in my ear, and he said, well, he said… I wrote the best musical on Broadway, and indeed he had. And then he said to me, why are you so nervous? Let’s go have a drink.

Michael Kantor: My Fair Lady with Moss Director was a musical adaptation. Wasn’t the idea greeted with skepticism? Hadn’t others tried and failed?

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Oh yes, there were an awful lot of versions. In fact, one had been presented to Mary Martin, who turned it down saying it was a big mess. She didn’t think that was going to make anything. There would be any, you know, any success on Broadway. Lots of people had tried. Thank you. By the time they brought it to Mars, we heard it originally in a little seaside resort called Beach Haven, New Jersey, where we had a beach house, but no piano. It was our first year there. We got a piano later on. Fritz and Alan had said to Mars, Mars was writing a play, another play entirely at that point, with Harold Rhoam and Jerome Shartaroff. And it was all about the cosmetic industry. It was called In the Pink. And it gonna be very good. Well, Alan and Fritz called and said, could they come down and play a new musical that they had? They’d like Mars to hear it. And Mars was always interested in hearing new musicals. And so he said, sure. Well, I had to find a piano. So I ran around the neighborhood and I discovered that right behind our house, across these terrible weeds, there was a kindergarten, which functioned in the winter for the locals. It had in the basement a broken down piano, an upright, with a few keys missing, but never mind. And so that’s where we went to hear, for the first time, I could have danced all night. And Why Can’t the English? And a song that was cut out called Take Me to the Ball. I think that was the title of it. Anyway, it was so overwhelmingly lovely. It was so beautiful. It swept everything in front of it, so Morse agreed to do it as the director and to shell for the moment in the pink. And his collaborators were more than kind. They really were very understanding and very sweet. And they understood, and we all went on to glory.

Michael Kantor: In the casting, it seemed as though you had a 19-year-old Julie Andrews. Tell me, how did, you know, Moss cast a very young Lady Liza tell me about

Kitty Carlisle Hart: Well, Eliza Doolittle was played by Julie Andrews, and she tells this story on herself, so it’s not tales out of school. She was very young. She had had a long career, however, as a child star. She sang, you know, in vaudeville, and she had had only one experience on Broadway in The Boyfriend, I think it was. So she was, she was. In experience as far as Broadway was concerned, but she was a performer. And so, Marsh always let me come to rehearsals and to the readings. And so the first three days of the show, she was just awful, really awful. She was nowhere. So we came uptown in a taxi that evening after the third rehearsal. And Marsh said to me, what do you think? And I said, oh, Marsh, you’ve got a lot of work to do. And he said, I know. He said, you know, if I were Belasco, who was a famous director, an earlier director, he said I would take Julie Andrews, and I would hire a hotel suite, and I would stash her away for the weekend. And I would just coach her and paste the part on her. And he swears. I said, why don’t you? But I didn’t. And so instead of doing that, however, he dismissed the for one whole day. And just worked with her alone. And she became Eliza Doolittle. And it was interesting because he said to me after that, he said he could hear his readings for the first two weeks in her lines. And after that she’d made it her own.