Goodbye, Kitty.

Kitty Carlisle Hart has died: "the supremely elegant actress, singer, arts advocate and TV personality" was 96.

I remember seeing her all the time, back in the 1960s, on the TV show "To Tell the Truth." You can see a whole segment of the show here with the panelists -- including Kitty in her glory -- trying to guess which of three contestants is really the whale rider. (Embedding is disable, so you have to click over to see it. Kitty first appears at about 3:00.)

It was nice to see her, 20 years ago, in the fine Woody Allen movie, "Radio Days." "Radio Days" was a reverie about the past, and I feel a twinge seeing how long ago "Radio Days" itself was. Kitty sang "They're Either Too Young or Too Old," and I can't find a YouTube clip of that, but I can find the song, sung back in its original time, 1943, by Bette Davis. I hope it doesn't violate some rule to bring a superior diva into another's obit post:



ADDED: In the comments, Madison Man reminds me that Kitty played the ingenue --Rosa Castaldi -- in the great Marx Brothers movie "A Night at the Opera." You can see -- and hear -- quite a bit of her in this clip:



Alone with a sigh of romance!

Oh, there she is with both Chico and Harpo jumping up on her at the same time. That young woman must have been pretty strong. You could almost predict that she'd live to be 96.