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Bobby Short: The Life and Times of a Saloon Singer
They call Bobby Short the quintessential New Yorker, the Astaire of saloon singers, an international icon of style and glamour. As he enters into his 27th year at the Hotel Carlyle in New York City, Short shares his life story with his fans in a memoir that is as entertaining as any live performance given by this charming musical legend. Black-and-white photographs.
265 pages, Hardcover
First published September 26, 1995
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April 23, 2021
In what we would now call the Old New York, the New York of the 1970s and 1980s, the ravaged city, battered but unbeaten, still a proud old gal with its quaint charms and shopworn edges, the pre-Giuliani, pre-gentrified town gutted on the outskirts and sleazy at the center in the XXX district where legit theater co-mingled with semen-soaked peek-a-booths, the NYC of Woody Allen, the perfect embodiment of respectable corruption, there was the elegant, swell-agant, Carlyle Hotel. The place is still there, serving Dover Sole and Lobster Bisque, as if the Twenties never left, but the old girl lost something when its most famous entertainment denizen, Bobby Short, the consummate cabaret cafe singer of the American Tin Pan Alley songbook, left us in 2005. Short sang and played in his impeccable tux to the well-coiffed set and tourists of New York in the hotel's Cafe Carlyle bar-restaurant for decades. It was often said that if you hadn't staked out the place on a night when Short was tinkling out the suave songs of Cole Porter or George Gershwin on his Steinway Grand to the accompaniment of a two-man rhythm section, then you hadn't seen New York. He had become as essential to the place as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building.
I first saw Bobby Short as a youth on television, in a commercial for the brand new fragrance, Charlie, by Revlon, around 1973, a product that took the perfume world by storm, largely, I think, on the strength of this wonderful commercial. A pre-Charlie's Angels Shelley Hack, showing all her model moves, sweeps into a Carlyle Cafe-type place in her Rolls, wows the admiring doormen, then whirls in like the boss she is for her date night. In the midst of it, is Bobby Short, extolling her as "kinda free, kinda wow, Charlie, kinda young kinda now, Charlie." The commercial kinda shows you Bobby Short's own romanticized view of life in the Big City. It's my favorite commercial of all time, and here it is on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl2p7...
Short acknowledges the racism that he faced as a young black man trying to make his way amid the obstacles of mid-century America, but he doesn't dwell on it. Tales of having to room in the black-only accommodations circuit, a major inconvenience, are part of a history that many white Americans have no clue about. Short gives us a portrait of himself as a Midwestern kid who had a passion, growing up in slightly better circumstances than most black Americans in the days of the Depression, with an angelic mother who supported his passion for music and scrimped and saved as best she could to help him out. From there, he was catapulted into the grand hubbub that was World War II-era American nightclub entertainment, and this is where Short's book is best; a vivid, colorful, loving portrait of the places and people of that glittery world. As a historical show-biz chronicle, it's pretty OK. Name-dropper fans will swoon at all the personages Short rubbed elbows with. Like Will Rogers, there doesn't seem to have been anyone that Short didn't like. There's a fun bit in here about a group he was touring with wanting to sport Zoot suits and he said, in essence, aw hell no, "that's clown stuff." lol.
This is a book by a gracious man, being gracious and classy as all get-out. A man who would never kiss and tell or grace us with introspection or the wisdom of a life gleaned as a closeted gay black man in a time when those things were not to be aired. What we get, instead, is a generalized love letter, to song, to the city, to the people of his time, ever generous and non-judgmental. It's not the kind of flavorful autobiography that we've come to expect, although it's probably the kind of autobiography we could expect from Bobby Short. Short sang songs of idealized loves, and idealized times. He saw his life and the world that way, and that's what we get. Short believed in the romance of that world, and believed it was his raison d'etre to embody it.
He was a class act, maybe too classy to write an autobiograhy.
Rest in peace, my good man.
EG-KR@KY 2021
I first saw Bobby Short as a youth on television, in a commercial for the brand new fragrance, Charlie, by Revlon, around 1973, a product that took the perfume world by storm, largely, I think, on the strength of this wonderful commercial. A pre-Charlie's Angels Shelley Hack, showing all her model moves, sweeps into a Carlyle Cafe-type place in her Rolls, wows the admiring doormen, then whirls in like the boss she is for her date night. In the midst of it, is Bobby Short, extolling her as "kinda free, kinda wow, Charlie, kinda young kinda now, Charlie." The commercial kinda shows you Bobby Short's own romanticized view of life in the Big City. It's my favorite commercial of all time, and here it is on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl2p7...
Short acknowledges the racism that he faced as a young black man trying to make his way amid the obstacles of mid-century America, but he doesn't dwell on it. Tales of having to room in the black-only accommodations circuit, a major inconvenience, are part of a history that many white Americans have no clue about. Short gives us a portrait of himself as a Midwestern kid who had a passion, growing up in slightly better circumstances than most black Americans in the days of the Depression, with an angelic mother who supported his passion for music and scrimped and saved as best she could to help him out. From there, he was catapulted into the grand hubbub that was World War II-era American nightclub entertainment, and this is where Short's book is best; a vivid, colorful, loving portrait of the places and people of that glittery world. As a historical show-biz chronicle, it's pretty OK. Name-dropper fans will swoon at all the personages Short rubbed elbows with. Like Will Rogers, there doesn't seem to have been anyone that Short didn't like. There's a fun bit in here about a group he was touring with wanting to sport Zoot suits and he said, in essence, aw hell no, "that's clown stuff." lol.
This is a book by a gracious man, being gracious and classy as all get-out. A man who would never kiss and tell or grace us with introspection or the wisdom of a life gleaned as a closeted gay black man in a time when those things were not to be aired. What we get, instead, is a generalized love letter, to song, to the city, to the people of his time, ever generous and non-judgmental. It's not the kind of flavorful autobiography that we've come to expect, although it's probably the kind of autobiography we could expect from Bobby Short. Short sang songs of idealized loves, and idealized times. He saw his life and the world that way, and that's what we get. Short believed in the romance of that world, and believed it was his raison d'etre to embody it.
He was a class act, maybe too classy to write an autobiograhy.
Rest in peace, my good man.
EG-KR@KY 2021
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