![]() There were no more films until 1943 when she made Larceny With Music and was among the artists playing themselves in Hollywood Canteen, about the centre for American troops manned by film stars serving coffee and doughnuts and dancing with the servicemen. This was like going up to see someone's etchings." He later asked her to marry him, but nothing came of it. The second time he called me up to sing it, I caught on. I'd sing and he'd fiddle with the accompaniment. "He was a wonderful dancer, full of enthusiasm and he asked me up to his apartment and to work on a song called Summertime. She was squired to nightclubs by Gershwin right up to his death in 1937. Before that, other big names courted her. She did not get the part, but in 1946, she did get, and married, Moss Hart. Porter and Moss Hart, nevertheless, asked her to audition for their show Jubilee. I began to run and tripped over one of those cables and landed flat in front of him." ![]() ![]() He was the kind of person that people told stories about. I'd sung some of Cole's songs, but I hadn't ever met Moss Hart. It was while making that film that Moss Hart came on the set and introduced her to Cole Porter. She went to Hollywood in 1934 as Kitty Carlisle and made three films before making her name the following year as the female lead in the Marx Brothers' most famous movie, A Night at the Opera. The pianist was Frederick Loewe, who told her he was going one day to write the best musical on Broadway: 25 years later, he and Alan Jay Lerner came up with My Fair Lady. She got a job in a Broadway show, Champagne Sec, based on Die Fledermaus. She said: "You're not the prettiest girl I ever saw, and you're not the best singer I ever heard, and you're certainly not the best actress I ever hoped to see, but if we put them all together, we'll find the husband we're looking for on the stage." "My mother was hoping I'd meet a rich European prince or, failing that, an impoverished baron." But in 1929, her mother lost all her money in the Wall Street crash, so Kitty went into the theatre "to catch a rich husband". She was educated at various schools in Paris and later at the London School of Economics in London. The family moved to Paris soon afterwards and it was at Versailles that she met Valentino, but said she was disappointed by his pointed shoes and his tasteless polo coat. Later, when she became an actor, the glasses were replaced by contact lenses. ![]() It was to a nickleodeon and she said the Chaplin film shown that day changed her life - because she could not see a thing and it was agreed she needed glasses. "My mother thought, in order to take my mind off the terrible experience I had been through, she decided to take me to the movies." "One day, our cook went mad and tried to kill us all and we had the police in the house," she remembered. It was a traumatic event that launched her fascination with the cinema. It was considered oh, not proper for children to go to the movies." So, from the age of seven, she was taken to concerts instead. Kitty was born Catherine Conn, the daughter of a Jewish doctor in New Orleans. In the early days of television, when it was localised in New York, and thus the elite filled the screens with themselves and their friends, she was an original panellist on To Tell the Truth, and What's My Line?, two game programmes that were formatted all over the world. She had danced on the Broadway stage, met Rudolph Valentino, filmed with the Marx Brothers, been a close friend of Berlin, Gershwin and Cole Porter and the mistress of a man who twice tried to become US president. In her 90s, perfectly made up with the kind of legs to be envied by women 50 years her junior ("I'm very proud of my legs," she declared in 2001), she would appear on stage, recalling the good old days.
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