Kitty Carlisle Hart

KITTY CARLISLE HART PHOTOGRAPHED IN 1977 BY JILL KREMENTZ

KITTY CARLISLE HART, doyenne of New York’s theater society but perhaps best known for her fifteen years as a panelist on the TV show To Tell the Truth, is dressed formally for Easter lunch when I meet her on a Sunday morning. The ninety-five-year-old answers her apartment door in a bright lime green suit, low black heels, a double strand of pearls, pink lipstick, and fingernails to match. With her proper appearance, patrician accent, and fancy name, Hart is not exactly the Jewish archetype.

“They changed my name when I went on the stage,” warbles Hart— formerly Katherine Conn—sitting primly on her velvet couch, a small black purse at her side as if she’s waiting for a bus. “I found the name in the phone book. I originally wanted ‘Via Delia,’ but I was persuaded against it.”

For all of her personal accomplishments as a singer and actress, Hart derived much of her early stature from her marriage to Broadway legend Moss Hart, director of My Fair Lady and Camelot, and coauthor—with George S. Kaufman—of The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can’t Take It with You. She was acting with the Marx Brothers in their 1935 classic film, A Night at the Opera, when she met her future husband for the first time. He was looking for a leading lady for his musical Jubilee , written by Cole Porter. “I didn’t get the part”—she smiles—“but I got the man.” Not easily, she adds. “It took me nine years!” She almost giggles. I kept thinking, “‘He’d be so perfect! He’s Jewish, I’m Jewish, I’ve seen all of his plays, I think they’re wonderful, he’s never been married, neither have I. Why doesn’t he think of marrying me?’”

They were wed in 1946 by a justice of the peace in a small ceremony. “Moss said if we had a big wedding, we’d have to invite a thousand people,” she recalls. She says he knew as little about being Jewish as she did. “He cared about it politically,” she says. “He cared about it in terms of a consciousness of injustice.”

They celebrated no Jewish holidays, except of course when they were invited to Passover at the home of a prominent fellow thespian. “I once went to George Gershwin’s for—what was it called where they read and put the matzos out?” she asks. “A seder,” I offer. “Yes,” she says with a nod. “Gershwin and Oscar Levant [the composer and actor] decided to do the whole seder in music. It was so wonderful! They sang and did the whole thing in jazz.” Who else was there? “I remember Robert Sherwood,” she muses, mentioning the playwright, “but I don’t remember anybody else.”

Hart was definitely aware of her religion being heavily represented in her profession. “Everybody in the theater was Jewish except Cole Porter,” she declares.

Looking back, does she make anything of that or feel it was pure coincidence? “I think there are times when a whole flowering of some kind of an art form occurs. It happened in Greece when they built the Parthenon; they never did anything great after that. It happened with the flowering of opera in Italy. Jews had the American musical theater. And people don’t know how to do it anymore.”

Hart was raised by a socially ambitious mother, Hortense Holzman Conn, who was cold and unaffectionate. In Hart’s 1989 autobiography, Kitty, she writes: “the moments of physical closeness were so rare that when I was fifty years old, I was still trying to crawl into her lap.” (Hart’s father, Joseph, a gynecologist, died suddenly in the 1938 influenza epidemic.)

Hortense was determined to obscure their Jewishness. She sent her daughter to Miss McGehee’s finishing school. “It’s the chicest school in New Orleans,” she says. “Very grand; they call me an ‘ alumna.’” She was conscious, as a child, of being different. “I felt peculiar at Miss McGehee’s,” she says. Her classmates knew she was the only Jew. “They didn’t want to eat lunch with me. They said it was because my mother sent my lunch with French bread.”

Hart says her mother wanted desperately to gain entrée into gentile society, and when they moved to Europe, Hortense managed to figure out how. “It was through music and bridge,” she explains. “Bridge in those days was ‘Open Sesame’ to society.”

And did Hortense successfully penetrate the upper crust? “Oh yes,” Hart assures me, her hands folded in her lap. “I came out in Rome and in Paris.”

But the party was short-lived. “We ‘passed’ as gentiles for years because it was easier to get up in society,” Hart says. “But then we lost what little money we had in 1929 and we came back to America. I had to get a job to support my mother. That was the best thing that ever happened to me; I was nineteen or twenty years old. I got a job in the Floradora Sextet—I was going to sing—” Hart sings in a fragile voice that trills with age: “Oh, tell me pretty ladies, are there any more of them like you?”

During the Second World War, she entertained the troops around the country—“I always sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’”—and she only gradually became aware of the hatred against Jewish people. “I went to a dinner party,” she begins. “In those days, everybody dressed up for dinner parties. And they were talking about the Jews in a way that was just awful. It was unbearable. And I got up in the middle of dinner and I said, ‘I am Jewish, and I won’t sit here and listen to this kind of talk for another five minutes.’ And I left. The bravest thing I ever did.”

Her stories are told in patchwork—with loose threads of Jewish identity dangling here and there. Another snippet: “I once got into a taxi in New York with my mother”—she’s laughing at the memory already—“and after she dropped me off, the driver turned around and said to my mother, ‘That’s Kitty Carlisle, right?’ And my mother said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Is she Jewish?’ and my mother said, ‘She may be, but I’m not.’” She laughs again.

One of the few times she went to synagogue was when her mother died. “My children were very small, and I wanted to give them a sense of finality. I didn’t want to have this poor lady just disappear out of their lives. So I decided to take them to Temple Emanu-El on a Friday for the service for the dead. And I said to my son, Chris, ‘This is the home of your forefathers.’ And he looked up at the rabbis and said, ‘I only see three of them.’”

Despite the fact that she raised her children with Christmas and without Hebrew school, she seems to have silently preferred that they marry Jews. “Catherine is married to an Episcopalian, and my son, Christopher, is married to a Catholic,” she says. I ask if she ever cared that they marry Jews—or told them she cared? “No,” she answers quickly. So she didn’t care? Hart pauses. “I’m not prepared to say,” she says.

Hart’s Jewish identity is obviously hard to pinpoint, but the strongest signpost of her connection comes in her sense of peril—a suspicion that Jews could be targeted again. “I always felt that the time would come when we would have our packs on our backs and be pushed out. I said to Moss one day, ‘Darling, where will we go when we get pushed out of this country? I have my pack on my back; are you ready?’ He said, ‘Well, let me think about it. I tell you what: We’ll go to the Gobi Desert. They have the best music, they have the best philosophers. Then again, who will fix the toilets?’ That made me laugh so hard, I forgot about my fears.”