![]() Now the keeper of his flame was gone, too. Her longtime piano accompanist, David Lewis, played a Gershwin song and then turned to the audience to recall what Hart had told him about that melody: “When I die, I want you to play ‘The Man I Love’ in my key at the memorial service, and if I don’t walk out on that stage you’ll know I’m dead.” There was an eerie moment, one beat of silence, followed by laughter and applause. According to the archive records, Hart wrote the journal during “a period when he was apparently depressed and experiencing difficulty with his writing.”Īfter Kitty Carlisle Hart died in April 2007, her friends and admirers gathered at the Majestic Theatre to pay tribute to the grande dame. ![]() He and Kitty placed off-limits, until their deaths, the 156-page typewritten diary that Hart kept in 1953–54. Hart donated his papers to the Wisconsin Historical Society shortly before he died, with one tantalizing restriction. Few people were aware-until now-that at the very moment Hart was crafting his theatrical classic he was also keeping a secret diary revealing his real and embittered feelings about his life and Broadway. Moss Hart is remembered primarily for his perpetually best-selling memoir, Act One, a gauzy valentine to Broadway that chronicles his improbable rise from tenement-born Bronx boy to world-famous playwright. “But I loved Moss more than any beau I’ve ever had.”Įvery marriage has its secrets-the secrets that spouses keep from one another, and the secrets that they conspire to keep from the world. Given that Kitty Carlisle Hart was only 51 when she was widowed, surely she must have had many opportunities to remarry? “Oh, yes,” she replied. Yet by most accounts the Harts, a stylish, rags-to-riches Broadway couple, found hard-fought happiness and stability together. The relentlessly cheery Jewish southern belle Kitty Conn (who picked the Waspy-sounding Carlisle out of a phone book) was intimidated by her controlling stage mother and traumatized by a sexual attack by her voice teacher. The enormously talented and incessantly depressed Hart, the grandson of impoverished Jewish immigrants, had long been rumored to be gay and was so dependent on therapy that he often saw his analyst twice a day. Married for only 15 years, a union that produced a daughter, Cathy, now a doctor, and son, Christopher, a director, the Harts had been considered an unlikely match, two emotionally damaged souls who found each other. He’s wonderful.” But she kept bringing the conversation back to Moss Hart, who died at age 57 of a heart attack in 1961, as if the loss were much more recent. She confided to me on a warm fall afternoon that she was still dating, saying, “I have a beau who is 102. Her throaty rendition of “Here’s to Life” brought her a standing ovation. ![]() In her stage act at Feinstein’s, she told enchanting stories about starring with the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera and being courted by George Gershwin. As she perched on a sofa in the antique-filled living room, her phone rang constantly, and she happily complained of being over-scheduled. ![]() Hart in 2005-two years prior to her death-she was then 95 years old and still touring the country with her one-woman cabaret show. When I interviewed the irrepressible and elegant Mrs. Kaufman the plays You Can’t Take It with You and Merrily We Roll Along and collaborated with Cole Porter and Irving Berlin on popular musicals. The director of My Fair Lady and Camelot, he also co-wrote with George S. Kitty Carlisle Hart decorated her sprawling Park Avenue duplex with a half-century of theatrical mementos, including posters featuring the prolific output of her husband, Moss Hart. ![]()
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