Tuesday Afternoon in the Theater District: Kitty Carlisle Hart Memorial at the Majestic Theatre

At noon today, we stood on a long line outside the Majestic Theatre to get into the memorial service for Kitty Carlisle Hart, singer, actress, TV personality, (extremely) longtime chairwoman of the New York State Council on the Arts, and an icon of Broadway and NYC life from a different era. In the 1950s and early 1960s, we used to watch her on To Tell the Truth and sometimes What's My Line? and often saw her greatest movie role, as a supporting member of the cast (the young female romantic lead, though) in the Marx Brothers' funniest movie, A Night at the Opera. Broadway-loving kids like us idolized her late husband Moss Hart, playwright, director of My Fair Lady and many other hits (and plenty of flops) and author of perhaps the most fascinating theater memoir ever, Act One, which entralled us when we read it in junior high.

We sat up in the nosebleed section of the highest balcony -- but then again, it's about the same spot we were sitting our first time in the Majestic 43 years ago, watching Sammy Davis Jr. in Golden Boy. We could tell when our family walked into the Saturday matinee, the people around us looked nervous when they spotted three boys ranging in age from 13 to 3. But we were the kind of kids that sat quietly if not silently and didn't fidget. We started taking our youngest brother Jonathan to Broadway shows and museums when he was two -- even to the show at the Hayden Planetarium, where the people in charge expected a 2-year-old would cry in the dark. But Jonathan just sat there and looked up at the Christmas "Bethlehem star" show.

We met Ms. Hart only once, at an AIDS benefit at the 92nd Street Y sponsored by the writers' organization PEN in the fall of 1987. We were introduced by our friend Gregory Kolovakos, the late great translator who worked for Kitty as head of the Literature program at the Arts Council. (Gregory was the one that told us about her relationship with almost-U.S. President Thomas E. Dewey [and he also disabused us of the notion that Elizabeth Taylor was seeing Malcolm Forbes, who preferred younger guys].) The next summer, we got a letter from her saying we'd won a $3,750 Writer-in-Residence Award at the Rockland Center for the Arts in suburban West Nyack; in the fall and winter of 1988-89 we spent several months doing creative writing workshops with schoolkids (from third to twelfth grade) in Rockland County.

Anyway, Kitty's memorial - which we're sure the New York Times will cover so we don't have to, at least not in detail - was a terrific "show" and a great sendoff. The best speakers were her son and daughter, who told great stories about their irrepressible mother, who well into her mid-90s was running circles around people one-third her age. Barbara Walters told some good stories too, and others that spoke included Gerald Schoenfeld of the Shubert Organization and Mario Cuomo. Kristin Chenoweth and Michael Feinstein sang some of Kitty's songs, and they showed clips from her on the TV quiz shows, on a PBS documentary and from the movies.

Our personal favorite Kitty Carlisle song was the one she sang in Woody Allen's Radio Days, about the lack of eligible men in wartime, "They're Either Too Young or Too Old":

They're either too young, or too old,
They're either too gray or too grassy green,
The pickings are poor and the crop is lean.
What's good is in the army,
What's left will never harm me.

They're either too old or too young,
So, darling, you'll never get stung.
Tomorrow I'll go hiking with that Eagle Scout unless,
I get a call from grandpa for a snappy game of chess.

We know the feeling ourselves, but we imagine that in real life, Kitty Carlisle Hart never did.

Fiction International reviews Richard Grayson's WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK

Fiction International reviews Richard Grayson's With Hitler in New York in its current issue:


Fiction International



Issue 12 (1980)


pp. 284-285


Richard Grayson, With Hitler in New York

(Taplinger)

"If you have any complaints about With Hitler in New York," the author declares in his dust jacket copy, "address them to the anarchist whose bomb snuffed out the life of the Czar. I take no responsibility for this." This incident, according to Richard Grayson, "led to the Russian pogroms and to the anti-Semitic May laws of 1882." To these latter events, Grayson claims that we owe the myriad contributions of Jewish people to American culture: from Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce to Al Jolson and the Ziegfeld follies; from Nathanael West and Philip Roth to Father Coughlin; and from Mark Spitz to the condominium culture of southern Florida." And last, but presumably not least, to that sequence of events we can attribute this book of stories by Richard Grayson.

Perhaps Grayson should have included the Marx Brothers in his list, for it is their brand of zany humor which this collection frequently – though often unsuccessfully – endeavors to achieve. In the title story, a German character named Hitler visits friends in New York. Together, they do the ordinary things Americans routinely do, such as watch television, swim, and go out to dinner. In this anomaly lies the humor but also the failure of this story. It is amusing, certainly, to see Hitler as an ordinary tourist. Yet it is also disappointing, especially to the reader of Ishmael Reed, E.L. Doctorow, and other contemporary writers who have given us such memorable and outrageously hilarious treatments of historical figures in fictional settings. The mere title "With Hitler in New York" creates expectations which the story fails to satisfy.

It is worth noting that despite its title, this book does not belong on the growing list of works which have recently taken a serious interest in the personalities and/or victims of the Third Reich. (Aside from the countless popular novels on Third Reich themes, there have been such works by a number of highly regarded writers: Sophie's Choice by William Styron, The Führer Bunker by W.D. Snodgrass, and several poems from Ai's recent book, The Killing Floor, just to name a few.) It is certainly appropriate that serious writers are becoming concerned with the consequences of fascist thought and practice. This being he case, Grayson's deadpan treatment of Hitler comes across as, at best, cute.

Cuteness is frequently a shortcoming among these stories. Often, clever ideas are not adequately developed. Consequently, some stories such as "Chief Justice Burger, Teen Idol," "Classified Personal," and "The Finest Joe Colletti Story Ever Written (So Far)" seem facile.

Yet some of these pieces are successful. "Lincoln on the Couch" is a skillful portrait of the sixteenth President; and while it may be implausible as history, the story effectively presents an unexpected view of Lincoln as something other than epoch-making paradigm. "But In a Thousand Other Worlds" is perhaps the most successful of the humorous pieces. It is the story of a mediocre story that strives to be published. In the course of its odyssey, "But in a Thousand Other Worlds" is condemned as immoral by John Gardner. It retaliates by biting Gardner on the leg.

Despite his preoccupation with nihilist humor, Grayson is at his best in his serious pieces. "Wednesday Night at Our House," "The Princess from the Land of Porcelain," and "Kirchbachstrasse 121, 2800 Bremen" are the strongest stories in the book. All of them sensitively probe the dynamics of personalities and relationships.


David Lionel Smith

The Smudge Review reviews Richard Grayson's DISJOINTED FICTIONS

The current (Winter 1978-1979) issue of the Detroit-based magazine The Smudge Review has a review of Richard Grayson's Disjointed Fictions by Hank Malone on pages 11-12:


DISJOINTED FICTIONS
By Richard Grayson
Released as X - A Journal of the Arts #5
Printed by Lawson Press · First Rate Offset
$3.00 · 42 Pages · Write to editor George Myers, Jr.
P.O. Box 2648 · Harrisburg, PA 17105

Disjointed Fictions is a funny, very readable, collection of "short fictions" written by one Richard Grayson, a 26 year old, well-published MFA who teaches English in Brooklyn. Mr. Grayson's premise appears to be that since he cannot write a piece of sustained fiction, like a novel, that he will instead write a book-length manuscript, building it, piece by piece, with clever fictions, ramblings, and fragments, a form popular in South America and probably best known to American readers in the work of Jorge Luis Borges.

These literary morsels and tidbits suggest a very fine talent, capable of much larger work; so the premise of an inability to sustain a longer fiction is, I think, clearly contrived for the purposes of doing this sort of thing: just jogging along in print, writing one's heart out in a wide-ranging variety of styles and fictions, relating nearly everything and everyone (especially celebrities) to himself in some very intriguing ways. It is a wildly narcissistic narrative, on the surface: very bright, wise, very "Jewish," very "New York," and often very funny, if you enjoy "put-on" and a subtle kind of surrealism that bursts occasionally in all kinds of ironically wise ways.

Disjointed Fictions is full of fun for a literate reader (comix readers beware), with lots of puns and potshots at everyone and everything. And yet, it is a strangely haunting work a well. Grayson's sense of logic is both conventional and precise, ad with this book I have discovered another fine American talent whose future work should be more than a light entertainment. Grayson is both a philosopher and a class clown, and in Disjointed Fictions there is a lot of Talmudic wisdom showing up in the wisecrack format of the Marx Brothers.

This is not a book for everyone. Sometimes the cleverness turns to lead, and the fun and absurdity becomes merely frivolous detailing On the other hand, I laughed a lot with it, and I suspect others will as well. This would be a thrilling Good Friday present to a disjointed friend. - H.M.