In memoriam Beverly Sills

I believe that I only heard Beverly Sills sing live once, at the Metropolitan Opera about 1979 (or perhaps early 1980) in a new, beautiful production of Donizetti’s comic opera Don Pasquale. By that point in her career, her voice had faded, but she held the stage like no other. I still remember her first “entrance”, as she came into view rolling around on a stage turntable revealing her sitting on a wicker divan smoking a cigarette in a very long cigarette holder. There was an audible gasp of delight from the audience before the diva had even sung a note.

Beverly Sills was, as has been noted by the many tributes today, the embodiment of opera for American audiences. The New York Times obituary is typical. There is, of course, a whole generation of listeners too young to have heard her sing; they were born after she retired from singing in 1980. But they remember her as the plump lady with the bright red hair who appeared on countless TV cultural TV shows as the host. Even this past Spring she was still doing backstage interviews during the Met’s HD video broadcasts. There is no other opera singer of our era who comes close to the public popularity of Beverly Sills, other than perhaps Luciano Pavarotti. (Renee Fleming is giving it the old college try, but a lot of venues open to Sills–for example, the late night talk shows–are no longer options for the new generation.

Much has been made of Beverly Sills’s devotion to the New York City Opera, as her “home” company. After she retired from singing, she became the General Director of NYCO, before she moved on to be Chairwoman of Lincoln Center, and finally, Chairwoman of the Metropolitan Opera. All through her life she had a series of personal tragedies, including two seriously disabled children, who would have made another woman give up. She has stated that her work is what kept her going.

Of all of her roles, the one that will be in my mind as the ultimate “Beverly Sills role” was that of Baby Doe in Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe, so I was delighted to find this video clip of her singing the beautiful “Willow Song” in the prime of her career. The quality of the video itself is not that great, but you can get a glimpse of Beverly Sills’s artistry. That artistry and Beverly Sills’s indefatigable spirit were a blessing on the world.

Kitty Carlisle dies, the end of glamour as we once knew it

Kitty Carlisle Hart died on Tuesday, April 17, at the age of 96. The New York Times had an obituary for her on Thursday, April 19. The details of her life are well known: she was born in New Orleans of what appears to have been the prototypical Jewish stage mother wanting to marry her daughter off very well. She had a modestly successful career on screen and stage, was the Chair of the New York Council on the Arts and a doyenne of the New York social circuit. She will still performing as of last Fall. You’ve got to give her credit—she had persistence and stamina, as well as an easy smile and apparently a charming, if imperious, personality. (A friend who worked at the New York Council on the Arts during Mrs. Hart’s time there reported that everyone scurried around to get things in order when it was known that Kitty was coming into the office.)
But for me, as well as many of my baby-boomer generation, Kitty Carlisle was the glamorous lady in the fabulous gowns on “To Tell the Truth,” the 1950s and ’60s TV game show. Everyone else was in business suits or cocktail dresses, but Kitty was always dressed to the nines. And her accent (remember, this is a boy in the middle of Iowa): what kind of an accent was that, anyway? It wasn’t British, it wasn’t southern U.S., it certainly wasn’t Midwest or New York. It was “glamour/theatrical,” probably at one point totally affected, but by this time, all her own.

She was one of the last living memories of so many theatrical greats: Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, and, not least, her husband, the playwright and director Moss Hart. The anecdotes in her later cabaret performances were real.
I only saw her perform live once, in a revival of “On Your Toes” on Broadway in about 1983.

Kitty, we’ll miss you.