Hello, Kitty

MAYBE SOMEBODY ELSE could try explaining Paris Hilton to Kitty Carlisle Hart. It's not easy. I'm stumbling over polite ways to capture the vulgarity and idiocy of the young socialite. My wife helpfully adds that Paris is, surprisingly, a legitimate offspring of the famed Hilton hoteliers. However, that makes it more difficult to truly capture the breakdown in the gene pool.

Throughout all this, Mrs. Hart politely smiles as if she's listening to a plodding anecdote. The lady's certainly not bewildered. She recently turned 94, but Hart's in total possession of her faculties. I'm the one who's gone senile while attempting to capture a meaningless fragment of pop culture.

It's a waste of time and conversation in Hart's gorgeous home on the Upper East Side. Kitty Carlisle Hart simply comes from another world-she's the type who has the authority to complain about people wearing shorts to the theater, the type who won't accept thank-you notes via email. Yet Hart's enough of a broad to laugh when a maid brings over her hearing aids on a dainty silver tray.

She's also a veteran late-bloomer. Hart didn't make her Metropolitan Opera debut until she was 57. She's also making her New York City nightclub debut with a series of birthday concerts this week at Feinstein's.

"At this age, I thought I'd still be earning a living for my mother and me. We lost all our money in 1929. My mother said to me, 'You're not the prettiest girl I ever saw. You're not the best singer I've ever heard. But if we put them all together, we'll find the husband you're looking for on the stage.' So off I went on the stage to find a rich husband, and I did."

Hart's too modest to note that she didn't land her rich husband until the age of 35, when she married famed writer/director Moss Hart. She'd become a star of the Broadway stage by then, which is why she kept her maiden name while becoming a television personality in the 1960s. She had also enjoyed a brief detour in Hollywood during the 30s, where the film industry failed to build on her talents.

"They didn't know what to do with me," Hart agrees, "but I swear, I wasn't very good. I was very good as the dean's daughter in She Loves Me Not, and I was good in A Night at the Opera. I don't know why. Maybe because George Kaufman was partially directing the film, and understood actors. Furthermore, the studio fired me after A Night at the Opera. I went home on the train-because we didn't have planes in those days-and cried all the way home because my life was over."

Of course, Hart was soon welcomed back to many Broadway productions. Maybe you're lucky enough to have a grandfather who can tell you about all those. Hart's work is sort of lost to time-or, more accurately, lost to the lack of good recordings. I'm stumped again as I try to find a polite way to note that Hart's most acclaimed stage moments are kinda, well, um?

"?gone," Hart intones. "I'm perfectly happy with that. People ask me what was my favorite thing, and my favorite thing is always what I'm doing now. I'm doing a nightclub act at Feinstein's, and so that is my favorite thing. I've always wanted to sing in a nightclub in New York. I've sang in Chicago at the Chez Paree, and in Cleveland, but never in New York. It's sold out, and I'm so surprised. I walk past Feinstein's quite often, and there's my picture outside the Regency, and that's such a thrill."

At least Hollywood came through with immortalizing Hart with a musical sequence in A Night at the Opera, although that required taking a stand when she realized that the studio was asking her to lip-sync to another vocalist.

"So I walked off the set," she recalls. "The bravest thing I ever did. I went to my dressing room and I called my agent. He said for me to stay in my dressing room until he came to get me. Well, I stayed there for three days. I held up production. Mr. Thalberg finally called me into his office. I cried on his desk, I cried on his papers, I cried on the top of his head. But when I hear the music therein, that high C is mine!"

Maybe you'd have to be a real film geek to enjoy hearing an actress speak casually of crying all over Irving Thalberg. Hart would go on to cultivate a celebrity that went beyond being a theater legend and socialite. She would bring glamour and sophistication into living rooms all over America as a pioneering television personality-most notoriously for her long stint on the panel show To Tell the Truth.

"I've never told this to anybody," she says, "but they fired me after three months. I was invited to lunch. I thought, 'I'm doing so well, they're taking me to lunch! They're taking me to a grand place, and we're going to have such fun!' And they fired me. They said I was too old. So they hired young chicks who were ravishingly beautiful. It was as if the Lord had turned every eyelash personally-but they didn't know anything. So they hired me back three months later, and I stayed on."

Hart would be a regular on several incarnations of the popular game show-and even return to the big screen via a computer-generated recreation in Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can. Her initial stint was back when a tv celebrity panel was more like a cocktail party full of gifted improv talents. Hart's appearances would spawn a nation full of cats that shared her name.

She also brought international couture into America's living rooms. Hart couldn't walk onto a soundstage in the 50s or 60s without a camera panning her glamorous bod-often lingering on her legs for the husbands at home.

"I always dressed myself," Hart notes with rightful pride. "I borrowed clothes from all my friends. I always fitted into anything. If they were tall and skinny, I'd fit it. If they were short and plump, I'd fit it. I never borrowed clothes from designers or stores. I was afraid I'd spill something on it."

Ask what she's planning to wear at Feinstein's, and she's quick to reveal that she still plays to her strengths. "I'm going to show my legs," she smiles.

Those gams aren't going to waste, either: "Yes, I've got three beaus. My love life is very good. I have one beau who's 101, and he's sharp as a tack. We'll be going off on the Queen Mary in two weeks. They hired me to entertain on the ship. We'll be bringing our children, and our grandchildren, and two nurses. Well, he's 101."

Kitty Carlisle Hart performs Tues.-Thurs., Sept. 21-23 at Feinstein's at the Regency, 540 Park Ave. (61st St.), 212-339-4095; 8:30, $60, $40 min.