Kitty Carlisle — Very Different, Off Screen (1935) 🇺🇸
Kitty Carlisle’s life is as glamorous and exciting as the crown jewels of Russia. Just listen to this!
Winters in Paris, summers on the Riviera at her mother's villa, finishing school at the Princess Mestchersky's in Paris, a year in Rome — simply because she wanted to learn Italian — smart holidays in Switzerland, winter sports at St. Moritz. That's an extremely brief and kaleidoscopic glance at Kitty's activities before she came to Hollywood.
And, hearing this, what would you expect a girl with that background to be like? Elegant? Smart? Chi-chi? Just too, too divine, my deah, and will you have cream or lemon in your tea?
As a matter of fact, Kitty Carlisle is just a nut, but she's swell. And she's the only person in Hollywood who doesn't take the place seriously. She used to sit in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel thinking she was going quietly insane. Now she sits in her garden and reads and wonders when they will come and take her away.
"You see," she explained, "I don't know anyone here. Mummy and I didn't know we were going to stay long so we didn't bother getting letters of introduction."
Letters of introduction in Hollywood! In a place where all you have to do to get acquainted is to say.
"Hi, pal, what picture are you working in now?"
All this, as you can see, is a holdover from the Chateau Mont Choisi at Lausanne where Kitty went to school when she was a child, a breath of swank from the American colony in Paris. Letters of introduction in Hollywood! My word!
"It's a border town," she laughed, "simply a border town. What does everyone do?
"My mother is no help. She's never seen anything like it before. When people come up to me and ask for my autograph as if I were some great celebrity, my mother just giggles and runs away from me."
"And you?" I asked. "What do you do?"
She opened her eyes very wide, "Why I just put my head down and run, too."
The picture of the statuesque Kitty Carlisle butting through a crowd of autograph seekers as if she were an All-American halfback bucking the line is one I can conjure up and laugh over in moments of stress. I tell you, the girl is nuts!
"I never wanted to come here. I really didn't. When I was singing on the stage in New York strange people used to walk up to me and say, 'You ought to be in pictures.' But I always answered,
'Go away, go away, I'm too tall.' Of course, I'm still too tall but here I am."
Obviously these people, whoever they were (and probably they were the most important executives), didn't go away, for Kitty had a screen test.
"I screamed when I saw it," she said. "I mean I screamed with laughter. It was all too fantastic, my going to Hollywood. My mother..."
Ah, I thought, here comes the parental objection story. It was, too, and because it had happened to Kitty it had a different angle.
They knew a lot of musicians in Paris. Kitty thought she had a voice. She took lessons with Connelli and it suddenly occurred to her that she would like to sing on the stage. She made an appointment with an impressario.
Her mother was in Paris at the time. She picked up her dainty boudoir telephone and got the impressario on the wire. "I'm calling about my daughter, Kitty," she announced. "She's conceived the most fantastic notion. She thinks she wants to go on the stage. Now when you hear her sing this morning you will, of course, tell her that she hasn't a voice and that it's quite stupid of her to persist in this bizarre idea. I can trust you?"
"I'm afraid not," the voice over the wire it came back. "You see, madame, your daughter has just sung for me. And I have told her the truth — as I should have told her in any case — that hers will be a marvelous professional career."
"Poor mother," Kitty sighed, "she didn't know, of course, that all that would lead to Hollywood. She simply doesn't understand it. And it's really awfully embarrassing when she comes to the studio and my director or someone is kind enough to introduce her to the stars and she looks them straight in the face and repeats their names — sometimes incorrectly because she doesn't know who they are at all for she doesn't go to the movies."
Kitty's mother looked at the divine Marlene and said, "It is so nice to meet you, Miss Deetman," without at all meaning to be rude, but honestly not getting the name.
In Paris, on the Riviera, at St. Moritz, in Switzerland they knew plenty of celebrities, mostly great musicians. But these people, whose faces were not projected from thousands of silver screens could walk the boulevards or stroll along the beach without ever being followed by autograph seekers, without ever being mobbed by fans, yet they were great artists. Why then, both Kitty and her mother wonder, must picture people disguise themselves if they are to accomplish an hour's quiet shopping?
Kitty has slightly more ideas about it than her mother. She was born in New Orleans and went to school there for a time and, perhaps, in school got something of the "fan" feeling.
Kitty loved watching movies and used to go in Paris, but she saw them only when they were two or three years old and only the films which could be appreciated and understood by a foreign audience. Her mother never went at all.
In Hollywood Kitty is a complete anachronism. In a town where boys and girls, men and women have struggled, have sacrificed, have worked to attain their ambitions, in Hollywood where the heart of almost every star is scarred by the pain of defeat and bitterness and disappointment — here in Hollywood is Kitty Carlisle who never had to struggle to achieve a goal and to whom stardom is not important.
She did work hard at her singing lessons. She studied with the best and most difficult taskmasters. And then, when she thought she was ready, she came to New York and got an agent who got her a job singing in a miniature version of "Rio Rita." It was as simple as that. And when that show closed the agent got her a job in Champagne Sec, where she was a great success and where people were always saying, "You ought to go into pictures." Then she had a test made. Paramount gave her a contract to sign. It was as simple as that.
No struggle, no heartache, no defeats. She giggled. Her giggle is the herald which announces her entrance on the set. "Oh, I do wish I'd been in a railroad accident, in an awful fire, where I just barely escaped with my life. I wish something had happened to me."
You see? I told you she was a nut because she thinks winters in Paris, summers on the Riviera and Paramount contracts are nothing.
"I work — oh, don't make me laugh. Honestly, I work twice as hard as if it had been difficult for me to get jobs. I feel as if I should make up for not having had to struggle for jobs. I do work at my singing — that's important. I think that's more important than pictures, don't you?"
But I didn't have a chance to answer. She was giggling again. Such a nutty giggle.
"I'm worried," but she didn't look it. "You've got me worried. Do you suppose people really want me to write my name in their autograph books? I thought it was just a joke. Maybe it was wrong of me to run away.
"But I don't know. Someone told me once that anything could happen in Hollywood."
Anything can and does happen in Hollywood. And I believe it, since Kitty Carlisle came to town. If she is bewildered by Hollywood, just imagine what Hollywood must be!
Kitty Carlisle, after apprenticeship in two Bing Crosby pictures, will appear in "Rose of the Rancho."
Collection: Modern Screen Magazine, May 1935