To the Manner Born

NEW YORK —  In her 84 years, Kitty Carlisle Hart has had many careers: in the 1930s and ‘40s as a mid-level star of stage (“Champagne Sec”) and screen (“A Night at the Opera”), in the ‘50s as a television personality unmasking frauds in “To Tell the Truth,” in the ‘60s through the ‘80s as a socialite and cultural czar, and in the ‘90s as a guest lecturer. But it is as “Mrs. Moss Hart,” wife and mother, that the former Catherine Conn of New Orleans has defined herself. This has been true since the day, in 1946, she married the great American playwright of such classic comedies as “You Can’t Take It With You” (1936)--which won a Pulitzer Prize--and “The Man Who Came to Dinner” (1939) (both in collaboration with George S. Kaufman), and who would go on to write “Light Up the Sky,” premiering in 1948. And since Hart’s death in 1961, shortly after directing the musical “Camelot,” his widow has gladly carried the banner of keeper of the flame.

“I thought he was a genius, and I was very happy to be with a genius,” Hart says in those familiar fluty tones bespeaking a lifetime of sophisticated social intercourse and travel. “He never left me out of anything, always pushed me forward. And I just wanted to make sure he was happy and doing well, productive.”

In anticipation of the opening tonight of the La Jolla Playhouse’s 50th anniversary production of “Light Up the Sky”--Moss Hart’s backstage satire of theater folk on the opening night of a Broadway tryout--Hart welcomed a visitor on a summer afternoon. Nearly four decades after his death, her spacious Park Avenue apartment remains something of an informal shrine to the mad social whirl the couple enjoyed together for 15 years, cluttered as the place is with memorabilia, family photos and paintings by the likes of Irving Berlin, Harpo Marx and Noel Coward. One can almost hear the ghostly chatter that once filled the Harts’ famous gatherings--ripostes and quips traded by, among others, Dorothy Parker, Richard Rodgers, Edna Ferber, Alexander Woollcott and Gertrude Lawrence.

Shortly after the appointed time, Hart enters her living room through French doors, imposing and crisply elegant in a bright pink suit set off by simple strands of pearls, her dark hair impeccably coiffed. Age may have slowed her gait and made her slightly hard of hearing, but her iron discipline and control are evident from first meeting.

Since a photo session is to precede our conversation, the photographer directs Hart to pose in an overstuffed chair. “I don’t have to pose,” she says, with a puckish glint in her eye. “I’ve been in the theater for 65 years.”

The actress summons her assistant, whom she asks to sit in a chair, then peers through the camera to look at the shot. “Hmmm, I’ll need a cushion,” Hart says and then turns to the photographer. She points to the lines around her mouth. “Can you do anything about these?”

When she is complimented on her slender, shapely hands, she says with pride, “I was a hand model once. I still play piano. I think that’s why they’re not gnarly as they might be.”

Hart’s vanity is as amusing as it is touching. The truth is that she looks extraordinary for her age--and she never tires of hearing it. “God, no,” she says with a laugh. “If I’m stuck in the apartment all day, I miss it: Nobody’s told me how good I looked.”

Kitty Carlisle, her adopted stage moniker, had only been married to Moss Hart for two years when he gave her the first draft of “Light Up the Sky.” It was a show that would go through furious rewrites during its out-of-town Boston tryout, a real-life parallel to the mercurial emotions that afflict the temperamental characters in the play, who are familiar, albeit from another era: the boorish producer, the egomaniacal, larger-than-life diva, the hopeful, naive young playwright and a high-strung director, who, as one character puts it, “cries at card tricks.”

Hart says that she thought the play was “utterly delightful” when she read it. But even if she had some criticisms, she wouldn’t have dared voice them. “I was scared of him in that sense,” Hart recalls. “I wasn’t on that basis with him yet; I wasn’t there to give advice. It took me five years, and then I began to speak up. I must say it wasn’t always happily received. Every once in a while he’d get that look: The nostrils would flare and he was this great thoroughbred stallion, rearing up. Then he’d calm down, begin to listen and I’d talk to him.”

Though Moss Hart had a lot of fun poking at the foibles and frailties of the neurotic show folk in “Light Up the Sky,” his wife says that he had a great affection for both actors and the audience. He had, in fact, wanted to be an actor, but considered himself too unattractive and thus fell back on writing, scoring his first big success in 1932 with “Once in a Lifetime,” the comedy that began his long and fruitful collaboration with Kaufman. He later directed, triumphantly, Lerner & Loewe’s “My Fair Lady” (1956) and wrote screenplays, including “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1947) and “A Star Is Born” (1954).

“Moss respected actors, he understood them, their temperament,” says Hart.

“He used to create an atmosphere, very quickly, of ‘us against the world’ with his company. They’d die for him and he for them.”

Catherine Conn, on the other hand, a product of Swiss boarding schools and an iron-fisted German Jewish mother, had no burning ambition to go on the stage. Hortense Conn--on whom Hart would model the character of the card-playing mother in “Light Up the Sky”--was determined that her daughter would make “a brilliant match.” And thus, when 11-year-old Catherine’s father, a doctor, died, the indomitable Hortense carted her daughter around Europe, staying, according to Hart, in the “worst rooms of the best hotels,” given their relatively meager resources.

“When we lost whatever money we had” in the stock market crash of 1929, Hart recalls, “mother came to me the next day and said, ‘Well, you’re not the prettiest girl I ever saw, you’re not the best actress I’ve ever seen either, and you’re certainly not the best singer I’ve ever heard, but if we put them all together, we’ll find the husband we’re looking for on the stage.’ I didn’t even know anybody who’d ever been in theater, but it never occurred to me to say, ‘no.’ And later, when I was cast as Rose in “Trelawny of the Wells” at RADA [the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] in London, I remember going onstage for the first time, and my heart felt, as the Italians say, ‘A Posto!’ I was in my element. Those boards under my feet were my home.”

Still, the objective to find a rich, powerful, well-connected husband remained elusive even after Kitty Carlisle met Moss Hart for the first time in 1935. She was filming “A Night at the Opera” with the Marx Brothers, and he, along with Cole Porter, visited the set as they were looking for a star for their new show, “Jubilee.” She says she fell at his feet, in semi-serious worship of his burgeoning Broadway legend; he scarcely took notice of her.

Through the war years, she evolved into a nightclub chanteuse and complained to her mother that she was sure to end up a spinster, singing Sophie Tucker’s “One of These Days” in a saloon in Montana. Then, in 1946, she met Hart again and impressed him with her ability to keep up with his witty, intellectual circle of friends. He was 42, she was 32. All those years of studies and lessons paid off.

“I wasn’t pretty, so I had to cultivate my brains,” Hart recalls with a laugh. “I’m better looking now. I got better looking as I got older.” Hart starred in many of her husband’s productions, including creating the role of Maggie in “Anniversary Waltz” on Broadway and touring extensively through the years as Irene in “Light Up the Sky.” On the domestic front, he chose her clothes, decorated the apartment and oversaw their glamorous parties.

But though she served as his muse and nurse and bore him two children, Hart says that she never inspired any of his characters, nor did she feel a particularly personal resonance with any of them. The flamboyant and emotionally extravagant Irene was actually modeled on Gertrude Lawrence, though the character’s relationship with her domineering mother was along the Catherine-Hortense emotional axis. “I never felt like Irene did,” Hart says. “I thought of myself in those years as a very nice lady who did her job and tried to raise her children and entertain.”

While Hart maintains that her husband always wanted her to work, she says in the same breath that he resented any time she spent away from him. They lived in each other’s pockets for the years they had together, and though she turned down plays to be with him, that did not necessarily mean that she did not keep her ambitions on a low boil.

“It’s funny, but every time the phone rang, I would wonder if it was a job for me,” she says rather wistfully. “I never told him that, of course, but I did. And, of course, it was always for him.”

Though Hart claims never to have been hamstrung in her role as wife and mother, she came into her own after Moss died and she finished raising her two children--Chris, now 50, is a Los Angeles theater producer and director, and Catherine, now 49, is a doctor. She had her share of suitors, including onetime Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey, but she brushed them off. It was Nelson Rockefeller, then-governor of New York, who called and urged her to run for Congress (against Ed Koch, of all people) in the mid-1960s. When she turned him down and suggested an appointed office instead, he named her vice chairman of the State Council of the Arts, an organization she was later asked to head when Hugh Carey became governor. From 1976-96, Hart, an indefatigable culture czar, crisscrossed the state, establishing satellite councils to ensure a more equitable distribution of funds.

Hart thrived in the position (“I was useful, I was like Johnny Appleseed”), and she was an effective advocate, going to bat against some of the more conservative members of the legislature, who were either out to cut spending on the arts or looked askance at some of the more outrageous projects funded by the organization.

“It was a tough job because there were some things that I didn’t think were very good either,” she admits. “But I always had the philosophy that I’m not a censor because I really don’t know what’s going to be considered art in 50 or 100 years. ‘Carmen’ was considered total trash when it premiered in Paris, and now it’s the mainstay of opera houses all over the world. I didn’t feel I was smart enough to be able to judge that kind of thing, so we did a lot of things that were pretty silly.

“I must tell you,” she adds, “that I’m glad I’m not chairman anymore. Congress is trying to restrict more and more, and there are some very outrageous things that are being done in the commercial as well as nonprofit arena. And I was called on the carpet more than a few times, and I’d go up to Albany in fear and trembling to answer for something we had funded. But I always managed to win the case.”

And how, exactly, did she manage to defang her critics?

After a long pause, she smiles, “Well, I think they just said, ‘Well, we all know Kitty and we don’t think she’d ever do anything that was really all that bad.’ ”

When Mario Cuomo was defeated in the governor’s race in 1994, Hart finished the last two years of her term and then was shunted aside with the face-saving title of “chairman emeritus.” She went into an uncharacteristic funk. She says that she mooned around her apartment feeling sorry for herself, until a lightbulb went off.

“I said to myself, ‘Don’t be such a damn fool; you’ve got another string to your bow,’ ” she recalls, referring to a lecture that she’d given to great success at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the topic of the American musical theater. After all, she’d either participated in or observed some of musical theater’s most glorious moments in a period from 1922-72, and she devised a lecture of anecdotal stories about the likes of Kern, Berlin, Gershwin, and Rodgers and Hart, interspersed with her own renditions of theater songs.

“I let it be known that I’d do this thing I’d done for the Met all over the country, and I’ve had more success with it than I’ve ever had in my whole career,” she says. “And I’m getting quite a lot of money for it.” (She will perform her solo show, titled “My Life on the Wicked Stage,” at the Audrey Skirball Cultural Center on Sept. 23, as a benefit for the West Coast Ensemble.)

While Hart maintains that American drama is quite healthy, she bemoans the state of American musical theater. She registers admiration for the current “Ragtime” and “The Lion King,” but contends that they are not truly representative of the only indigenous American art form other than jazz. “One is rather stately, the other is gorgeously inventive spectacle, but they’re not musical comedy,” she says. “It’s gone. They don’t know how to do it anymore, or they don’t want to do it. There are moments in history when certain art forms flourish--opera in 19th century Italy--and I was just lucky to be around when the American musical theater was in its glory, and that is what I celebrate in my one-person show.”

The sunny optimism of the American musical is a good fit for Hart. “I’m a happy person,” she says. “I like people, I love people. My mother used to say, I’d talk to the bellboy if there was nobody else to talk to, and I did.” And like Hortense (Moss would call her “Hydrangea”), Hart also seems to have been blessed with an iron-willed discipline, which airbrushes anything that doesn’t fit into the rosy picture. She is politic as well. Whenever she is about to make a really juicy observation, she points at the tape recorder and says, “Turn that thing off.”

In a lengthy 1993 profile of Hart in the New Yorker, writer Marie Brenner described her as “a woman who suffers blows in silence, who leaves unsaid much of what she is really about. Facade takes precedence over inner feelings: In talking of the past, Hart glides over her mother’s sulks and rages, as well as over Moss Hart’s manic-depressive torments. Like many women of her generation she unquestionably assumes that such deceptions about her life are benign.”

When this portion of the article is read to her, Hart listens attentively and then says, somewhat coolly, “It wasn’t deception. You don’t tell people that life was very tough at times. Nobody wants to hear that. It’s good manners and not washing your dirty linen in public. Not that, with Mossie, there was ever any dirty laundry to wash. Poor Mossie, he did have these terrible depressions.” Hart, for the first time in the afternoon, trails off, somewhat at a loss for words.

Since she has been intransigent about allowing any writer access to her husband’s private papers, one wonders whether she worries about what might come out in any biography of Moss Hart--not only his black moods, but also his rumored homosexuality. “No,” she says, “I asked him about that before the marriage, and he denied it. And I have always said that he wrote his own [“Act One”] and it was the best theatrical biography ever written. That was good enough. I didn’t think it was necessary to do another.

Indeed, “Act One” is a classic, dedicated “For My Wife, Kitty.” But if a biography of Moss Hart should be written, perhaps after her death, what aspects of her husband’s life, and her participation in it, is she most concerned that the author should get right? Or, at least, not wrong?

Hart thinks for a while and responds, “I hope they get right what a man of the theater was like, because that was the core of the man. And what he was like as a family man. He was very, very good. When he had all those terrible depressions, he never brought them home; he never brought them into the life we shared.”

Hart winces, briefly. “I knew how he was feeling, and he’d come home, and I’d say to him, ‘Oh, Mossie, darling, you feel so down and we have to go to a party tonight and it’s a tent party.’ It was Hollywood, and everybody was entertaining like crazy, and he’d have to wear a white dinner jacket, and I’d have to get into a gown. And I’d say, ‘Well maybe this one time, we don’t really have to go. They’d understand.’ But Moss would just turn to me and say, ‘No, Kitty, you don’t escape from life, you escape into it. I want to be a part of the world. I don’t want to withdraw.’ ”

Kitty Carlisle Hart looks at her guest intently and says: “My husband was very wise in that way. Very wise.”

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“Light Up the Sky,” La Jolla Playhouse, Mandell Weiss Theatre, La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla. Opens tonight, 7 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Sept. 27. $21-$39. (619) 550-1010.

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Kitty Carlisle Hart performs “My Life on the Wicked Stage” on Sept. 23 at 8 p.m., Skirball Cultural Center, $35-$50, (323) 525-0022.