September 15, 1924– Bobby Short:

“Life is tough and if you’re creative, it’s tougher.”

He was born Robert Waltrip Short, and he began performing as a child in Danville, Illinois. Self-taught on the piano, he was just 9 years old when he began playing in a saloon, but also played at church and at school. On weekend nights, if he had no other engagement, a family friend would take him from tavern to tavern where Short passed the hat as he played and sang.

At 10 years old, he played and sang for a private party at the Palmer House in Chicago. This gig got him an agent and more work in Chicago hotels and supper clubs. When he was 13 years old he moved to NYC after he began he receive offers from Manhattan clubs. Always a natty dresser, even as a kid Short was named on best-dressed lists. As a teenager, he had custom made white tails and an almost ankle-length wraparound camel’s hair coat.

At 14 years old, he was signed to appear at Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater. He bombed He was told that the crowd didn’t care that he was short and young; they were interested only in hearing the hit songs of Harlem. Short changed his repertoire and his act improved, but he ran into trouble with child labor laws. His manager arranged to get the birth certificate of a 16 year old boy who had died. The authorities were told Bobby Short was a stage name. By the time he was 18 years old, he was sharing a bill with the great Nat King Cole, who remained his friend for life.

He is a favorite of mine. I am feeling quite old, but never more so than when I am trying to explain pop culture from the 20th century to young people. Despite the fact that I am able to reference Rhianna, Taylor Swift and Drake, theses kids today just stare dumbly, vacant eyed and with a touch of disgust if I try to explain to them the impact of Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, Iggy Pop, or even N’Sync had on our cultural history. I am truly old hat, old fashioned, out-of-date, outmoded and worn out.

I am not really dismayed that the kids don’t know Bobby Short. I didn’t expect them to. I am sure that few in my very own circle of friends know of Short. Still, I just can’t seem to get the kids to wrap their heads around the notion of nightclubs, supper clubs, or Manhattan’s Café Society.

Short called himself a saloon singer, a moniker I would have been happy to have lived with. His was my first choice for an avocation. His saloon, from 1968 until his final bow in 2005, was one of the most elegant in the country, the intimate Cafe Carlyle tucked in the Carlyle Hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. For six months each year, in a room where he was only a few feet from his audience, Short sang and accompanied himself on the piano. I saw him perform there seven times in the mid-1970s. I couldn’t get enough.

Short was so much more than just cabaret entertainer. He was a NYC institution and an ultimate symbol of civilized Manhattan culture. In Woody Allen‘s films, a visit to the Café Carlyle became an essential stop on a characters’ cultural tour. Short actually appeared, as himself, in Allen’s film Hannah And Her Sisters (1986). Allen later used Short’s recording of Cole Porter’s I Happen To Like New York for the opening title of Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). In 1972, he performed the theme song to Merchant/Ivory’s terrifically odd film Savages. In 1976, Short sang and charmingly appeared in a popular commercial for Revlon’s new scent, Charlie.

Short attracted a chic international fan base that included royalty, film stars, sports figures, socialites and jazz fans. Short’s place as entertainer for high society overshadowed his significance as a jazz pianist, singer and popular song scholar. He dedicated himself to spreading an awareness of the African-American contribution to NYC musical theater. In Short’s roster of Greatest American Songwriters you find: Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn and Eubie Blake, along with Cole Porter, who wasn’t a black man, but who preferred black men. Short is often identified with the compositions of Fats Waller, the great African-American songwriter who wrote Guess Who’s In Town, Short’s signature song.

Short had a bout of notoriety in 1980 when Anderson Cooper’s artist/designer mother Gloria Vanderbilt sued River House, a co-op building on the East Side of Manhattan, which had refused to sell her a million dollar apartment. She accused the management of racial bias because of her close association with Short. The landmark building’s board said it wanted to avoid any “unwanted publicity”, a barely disguised reference to “those people”. Later that year, Vanderbilt dropped the law suit. Short generally stayed out of the fray but he did say:

“I’m old enough to be sophisticated about these things.”

This phrase is my new motto.

Short never publicly came out of the closet, but it was known among his friends, fellow cabaret performers, and even among of his fans that he was gay. When asked why he hadn’t taken part in any of the Gay Pride parades, Short’s response was:

“I have a living to make! I can’t afford to march in any Gay Pride Parade.”

Short wrote about his life in two books: a memoir, Black And White Baby (1971), where he says nothing about being gay, and a biography by Robert Mackintosh, Bobby Short: The Life And Times Of A Saloon Singer (1995), where he does. In the memoir Short writes about living as a child among many white people “on a pleasant street, in a pleasant neighborhood where the houses had front and back yards”:

“I am a Negro who has never lived in the South, thank God, nor was I ever trapped in an urban ghetto. There was a total absence of any kind of overt prejudice in those years, and it was kept that way by my teachers, which I was not aware of then. I never expected to be treated differently than my classmates. I didn’t know that colored children anywhere could be given a bad time at school.”

Short took that final bow in 2005, taken by Leukemia at 80 years old. I wonder if he was a rather lonely man. My research shows me nothing of a boyfriend or lover. At Shorts request, there were no memorial services.

 “I felt I had a gift and I enjoyed performing. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now how well or how badly I sing and play the piano but I knew that I was a good performer.”