Bobby Short to Take Los Angeles--for a Night : Cabaret: The famed Carlyle Hotel pianist brings his quintessential New York saloon act to the Wiltern.

Maybe New York City’s Carlyle Hotel should charge royalties for the use of its performers. If they did, the Los Angeles payments for the last week in January would be a bonanza.

Tonight, Bobby Short--a 22-year veteran of the hotel’s Cafe Carlyle--will bring his incomparable repertoire of American songs to the Wiltern Theatre. And pianist Barbara Carroll, a newcomer with a mere 12 years residence at the Carlyle’s Bemelman’s Bar, is in the middle of a six-week engagement at the Westwood Marquee.

Both performers typify the elegant, classic New York style long typified by the Carlyle. Short, in fact, has been a principal creator of that style.

“When I first went to the Cafe Carlyle in 1968,” he said, “the corner of 76th and Madison was considered very far uptown. It’s still uptown, of course, but not so much as it once seemed to be.

“The Cafe was a second home to a lot of people who lived in the neighborhood. We had Finch College down the block and a lot of the girls came in with their parents or their boyfriends. It was the kind of place where you went for a very civilized evening of drinking and companionship. And, in that sense, I don’t think it’s changed very much at all.”

Short may be too modest. In the years he has held forth at the Carlyle, most classic Manhattan bastions of sophistication have taken it on the chin--blown away by discos, Perrier and a deflating dollar. That the Carlyle continues to be a serene temple of reverence for an image of New York City which barely exists any more is largely because of Short’s presence.

His real gift is the capacity to conjure up, in his performances, a full-blown, Brigadoonesque fantasy of the old, “civilized” New York--a madcap place, with rich men and beautiful women cavorting across a Gotham in which the only real problem is how to mend a broken heart.

“The requests I receive are the same now that they were years ago,” said Short. “I think my repertoire has changed, although I’m still singing many songs I learned back in California in the 1940’s.

“But there’s a great reluctance on the part of saloon singers’ audiences to allow too much change. And that’s one of the ironies: They don’t like it if you do too many new songs, yet they scorn you if you don’t do any.”

Short laughed. “I try to find a balance.”

It was a characteristic response. Balance, along with structure and reason, have played major roles in his career--reflections, perhaps, of the strikingly middle-class, Midwestern environment in which he was raised.

In his biography, the now out of print “Black and White Baby,” Short put it very succinctly: “Except for our color, we conformed in almost every degree to the image of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant--in our manners, our mores and our way of life. We were, in effect, WASPs. Colored--or black, if you will--WASPs.”

Short’s career has ranged from the vaudeville circuit (which he toured as the “miniature King of Swing” when he was 12) to jazz, cabaret and Broadway. He has performed with the Boston Pops and appeared as a quintessential New York icon, both in commercials (for Revlon and Murjani) and films (Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters”).

But Short has remained true to his past. The cover of his autobiography reveals a 12-year-old pianist wearing white tie and tails, smiling broadly into the camera. Add a few more years and a pound or two, and it would be a virtual facsimile of the Bobby Short who will arrive on stage at the Wiltern.

“I learned, very early on,” he explained, “that entertaining is one of the most draining things in the world that one can do. You have to draw upon all kinds of strengths. The fact that I grew up as I did has been one of the great stabilizing qualities in my life.”

It’s appropriate, therefore, that the Carlyle Hotel, with its solid, old line New York status, is the setting for a performer who has always placed primary value on the virtues of tradition and poise.

Short, never one to mince words, put it more simply: “I’ve made the best use I could of what I had.”