Kitty Carlisle had a sensational figure.  And she was one, too - a peerless self-invention (aided, it's true, by a fairly poisonous mother, the high-society equivalent of Momma Rose).  She had a middling career as an operetta leading lady (at precisely the moment that the genre more or less died) and was something of a fizzle as a film star (too distinctive in her looks to be an ingenue, too young, in her early '30s go at the screen, to suit her temperament) before she made a highly advantageous (and apparently, however, unorthdox, quite entirely devoted) marriage, one that allowed her devote the subsequent six decades to the fine art of being Kitty Carlisle, Mrs. Moss Hart.

Watching her breeze on to the To Tell the Truth set - as here, again and again - it's striking how contemporary she still looks.  There's a lesson there: if you hone a style until it is indistinguishable from your own genuine persona, you can maintain it almost indefinitely.  Having perfected the art of looking perfect, she could then turn her attention to all the other things, from promoting the arts to maintaining her husband's legacy, that interested her.

Some people - and characters as diverse as Crawford and Madonna come to mind - use their style as a weapon, a kind of barricade to really knowing anything about them; Kitty's was a natural extension of her character.  Paradoxically, this both made her a character - the ultimate Great Lady, New York-division, which one would normally think would be a limiting thing, and gave her enormous freedom to exercise what was never, really, more than a limited talent (considered impartially on its own) on a far wider stage than would otherwise have been at her disposal.

By the end, she was an institution, through sheer force of personality, a phenomenon of charm and joy that seemed to draw strength from its contrast to the increasingly crass world outside its orbit.  Kitty Carlisle is on the very, very short list of people about whom I have never heard anyone whisper an unkind word. Insofar as she is camp, it's of a very knowing kind, in which she is wholly complicit - the joy of an ugly duckling having turned into the most exquisite, and appreciated, of swans.

Since we missed her birthday last Monday, I thought it might be nice to spend this week's SSCE in the always good company of dear Mrs. Moss Hart, née dear Miss Kitty Carlisle (well, actually née dear Miss Catherine Conn, but that's another story altogether).  We meet here here during her too-short stint in Hollywood, as one of the leads of 1934's Murder at the Vanities.

She's in an interrogative mood.  "Why am I puzzled?" she trills repeatedly, and one could argue that what should have been bewildering her isn't the not-all-that-mysterious origin and destination of show girls (Podunk and oblivion, mostly, respectively) as what's going with those sleeve/train/pompom things that have been attached to her Harlowische white bias-cut satin gown.  At one point it looks she's going to start using them as poi balls in a kind of tribute avant la lettre to Miss Dolores DeLago; pity she didn't, as it really could have classed things up... 

While the number does give a rather good idea of what a staged number at Broadway Vanities might have been like (complete with one of the oddest pieces of choreography I've ever seen at 3:13, right after, heaven help us, the lasso demonstration), I'm afraid the whole thing just kind of peters out, as if at some point all involved decided it was just easier to get on with telling the film's (too complicated, on the whole) story.  As the showgirl turntables go by, see who you can spy as one of the glorified stenographers, snapping gum as if she were born to it (I think she was).

Still, it's all great fun while it lasts.  And doesn't she have terrific diction?

In her Park Avenue drawing room, a kind of timeless monument to a very specific kind of New Yorkiness, Kitty Carlisle, Mrs. Moss Hart. The society lady as showbiz survivor who was there when it happened and lived to tell the tale.

Young Kitty Conn, freshly minted as Kitty Carlisle and setting out on Life Upon the Wicked Stage, the creation of a genteely (if not gentilely) poor, ravenously MammaRoseische social-climbing mother and a vague ambition to succeed, if only to escape her.

Sometimes the unlikeliest stories have happy endings...

Sometimes it catches me up short, how much I miss some people; people like Kitty Carlisle Hart.

As the very last of the pre-War generation leave us, the world is a dimmer place. Who today could carry off citrines, turquoise, and sable like that?

I don't know about you, but I like it when ladies of a certain age flash a little gam.

My grandmother would always, of certain of her acquaintances, observe "well, yes, she looks fine - but she's lost her ankles!" and then flash a demure glance down at her own dainty feet.

Marlene, of course, kept hers insured by Lloyds of London, and had them prominently on display when pitching Blackglama:


And it makes sense that a hoofer like Chita Rivera would keep hers in fine trim:

Elaine Stritch's trademark outfit seems designed to highlight her legs (in what I have long thought is the most calculatedly casual ensemble ever seen on stage):

I have to say it came as something of a surprise to find Mrs. Hart indulging in a bit of what Hollywood starlets once referred to as "Drape Art," but she carries it off:

It's even a pan-gender phenomenon, which in this case, at least, is a very good thing:

Those knees aren't getting older - they're getting better!