Kitty Carlisle (also known as Kitty Carlisle Hart; September 3, 1910 – April 17, 2007) was an American singer, actress and spokeswoman for the arts. She is best remembered as a regular panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth. Carlisle served 20 years on the New York State Council on the Arts. In 1991, she received the National Medal of Arts from President George H. W. Bush. Eight years later, in 1999, she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

Biography

Late 1933, Kitty Carlisle dated George Gershwin, "until George went to California," per Michael Feinstein's The Gershwins and Me (2012), p. 173. Carlisle married playwright and theatrical producer Moss Hart on August 10, 1946, the two having met as actors at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania. The couple had two children. Hart died on December 20, 1961, at their home in Palm Springs, California. Carlisle never remarried, but briefly dated former governor and presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey after the death of his wife.

Known for her gracious manners and personal elegance, Carlisle became prominent in New York City social circles as she crusaded for financial support of the arts. She was appointed to various state-wide councils, and was chair of the New York State Council of the Arts from 1976 to 1996. The New York State Theater, in Albany, New York is named the Kitty Carlisle Hart Theatre in recognition of this. In 1993, she was crowned Queen of the Beaux Arts Ball, an annual event run by the Beaux Arts Society. She also served on the boards of various New York City cultural institutions and additionally would make an appearance at the annual CIBC World Market's Miracle Day, a children's charity event at the former CIBC Center (300 Madison Avenue). She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Kitty Hart was the partner of diplomatic historian Ivo John Lederer, and their relationship lasted 16 years until Lederer's death in 1998. In her later years, she kept company with the financier and art collector Roy Neuberger. She also widely performed her one woman show in which she told anecdotes about the many great men in American musical theatre history whom she had personally known, notably George Gershwin who had proposed marriage (according to an interview in American Heritage magazine), Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill, Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Jay Lerner, and Frederick Loewe, interspersed with a few of the songs that made each of them famous.

In 2006, Carlisle performed at Feinstein's at the Regency in New York City; in St. Louis, Missouri; Phoenix, Arizona; Atlanta, Georgia; and at the famed Plush Room in San Francisco. According to her official website, her appearances in Atlanta in November 2006 were her last public performances. In December 2006, she made her final public appearance as the special celebrity guest for the annual Noël Coward Society birthday tribute in which she laid flowers in front of Coward's statue at The Gershwin Theatre in New York City.