Bobby Short Ending His Run at the Carlyle

[Lois Gilbert]

The article below from NYTimes.com

Bobby Short Ending His Run at the Carlyle

April 21, 2004
By FELICIA R. LEE

Bobby Short, whose name has become synonymous with a kind
of timeless New York elegance, has announced that on New
Year's Eve he will end his 36-year run at the equally
elegant Cafe Carlyle.

"I'm 79 years old, and I've had some serious thoughts about
pursuing other things," Mr. Short said in a telephone
interview. "More time for my friends, more time for things
I like to do." The Cafe Carlyle, on the East Side of
Manhattan in the Carlyle Hotel, "has been wonderful to me,"
Mr. Short added, but the life of a saloon singer can be
tough.

"I've had the pleasure, the privilege," he said, "of
working in the best saloon in the world."

Mr. Short has no plans to retire and will continue to tour
and perhaps play an occasional date at the Carlyle, said
his publicist, Virginia Wicks. On May 4 Mr. Short will
begin an engagement at the Carlyle that continues until
June 26; a series of autumn dates begins on Oct. 12, ending
on Dec. 31.

The dapper Mr. Short is such a city institution that chic
New Yorkers could mark their calendars by his appearances
at the Carlyle, where his bubbly cabaret act evoked what
Stephen Holden of The New York Times once called a "soigné
aura of Cole Porter and caviar."

A frequent escort of his good friend Gloria Vanderbilt, Mr.
Short is well-known in New York's social circles. Over the
years his name appeared on best-dressed lists and in the
Social Register. He played himself in Woody Allen's 1986
film "Hannah and Her Sisters."

The ninth of 10 children born to a coal miner and a maid in
Danville, Ill., Mr. Short was a self-taught piano prodigy
who began performing numbers like "Tiger Rag," in local
saloons when he was 10.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/21/ar...df07aa564492d7