Bobby Short, 80; Cabaret Performer Symbolized a Sophisticated Musical Era

Bobby Short, the celebrated Manhattan cabaret singer-pianist who reigned at the Cafe Carlyle for more than three decades and became the elegantly clad symbol of a bygone era in classic American popular music, died Monday. He was 80.

Short died of leukemia at New York Presbyterian Hospital, said longtime publicist Virginia Wicks. Short, thinking that he had diverticulitis, had gone into the hospital last week, Wicks said.

“He was feeling very sick, but he didn’t know it was more serious than that,” she told The Times on Monday.

Because of the increasing strain of performing regularly, Short had planned for this to be his final year at the Carlyle. But, Wicks said, he had no intention of retiring.

“If I don’t work,” Short told the Washington Times last September, “what will I do?”

A former child prodigy who began touring the vaudeville circuit as the “miniature King of Swing” in the mid-1930s when he was 12, Short has been described as “the world’s best-known cabaret singer.”

Short, who often referred to himself as a “saloon singer,” was praised for his excellent musicianship, his ebullience and his impeccable taste in songs -- the works of legendary composers such as Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Duke Ellington.

The dapper, boyish-looking Short had an inimitable, husky baritone voice that was once described by a New York Times writer as sounding like “liquid sandpaper.”

Short began his long run at the Carlyle, in the Carlyle Hotel on the Upper East Side corner of 76th Street and Madison Avenue, in 1968.

Leonard Feather, the late Times jazz critic, once called Short “the ideal antidote for the jeans generation.”

“I think of him as one of the last of the intimate entertainers,” writer Tom Wolfe, a longtime Short fan, told The Times on Monday. “In other words, he’s great on records and CDs, but the experience of being in the room with him at the Carlyle was the way to experience Bobby Short.

“He was a man who just takes over the room, and it’s the magnetism of his presence that makes it such a great experience.”

For many years, Short performed at the Carlyle six nights a week, eight months a year.

But he had cut back to five nights a week and twice on Fridays and Saturdays two seasons a year at the hotel, where he long ago had become a New York institution. Indeed, a sign on the corner of 76th and Madison reads, “Bobby Short Way.”

As a tribute to Short, the Carlyle remained dark Monday night.

“With his quintessential style and sophistication, Bobby Short captured the hearts of us all over the past 35 years at the Cafe Carlyle,” James McBride, the Carlyle’s managing director, said Monday. “He is an American treasure who will be greatly missed.”

Short once described the Carlyle as “the last bastion” of nighttime society.

“I’m very sentimental about it and I love being part of that milieu,” he told The Times in 1982. “I suppose there are enough people in many other cities that would come to see me in a similar setting, but there just aren’t any clubs of that kind around.”

Short’s admirers, many of whom became close friends, included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Gloria Vanderbilt, Jacqueline Onassis, Henry Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Stephen Sondheim.

“He single-handedly perpetuated and preserved American popular song in an era when it was quickly fading into oblivion,” singer and pianist Michael Feinstein told The Times on Monday.

As a performer, Feinstein said, Short “was dynamic and charming and sophisticated. That’s an overused word, but he did have sort of a royal aura about him. He was very commanding with his presence, and there was a certain sort of protocol when you went to see him. We as an audience always wanted to be well-dressed and be part of that era he preserved, so it was a whole experience.”

Merv Griffin, a friend who often saw Short perform at the Carlyle and had him as a guest on his talk show, remembered Short as “a thrilling singer.”

“He was so exciting; he never got caught up in any of the musical fads,” Griffin told The Times on Monday. “He knew every ... song written by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter and Jerome Kern.... “

Griffin said Short was a guest at a private party hosted by Nancy Reagan for Short’s good friend, Casey Ribicoff, widow of Sen. Abe Ribicoff, at the Beverly Hills restaurant Il Cielo about a month ago.

He introduced Short as “Mr. New York” and talked him into singing.

“He got up and the two of us sang five songs together,” Griffin said.

“He wasn’t playing the piano; he just stood there and sang. They all went crazy. Loved by everybody, that guy.”

Over the years, Short performed at the White House for presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan and Clinton.

Short recorded more than a dozen albums and received three Grammy nominations -- for “Late Night at the Cafe Carlyle,” “Swing That Music,” and “You’re the Top: Love Songs of Cole Porter.”

He gained national recognition singing in a long-running TV commercial for Revlon’s Charlie perfume in the 1970s, and appeared as himself in a number of films, including a sequence set at the Carlyle in Woody Allen’s 1986 comedy “Hannah and Her Sisters.”

Short also wrote two memoirs, “Black and White Baby” (1971) and “Bobby Short: The Life and Times of a Saloon Singer” (1995).

The ninth of 10 children in a musical family, he was born Robert Waltrip Short on Sept. 15, 1924, in Danville, Ill. By age 4, he was learning to play the piano by ear, picking up songs he heard on the radio.

At age 9, to help his family through the Depression, he began earning money playing in local saloons and at upper-class parties, where he sang songs such as Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady.”

Discovered by two booking agents at age 11, he was outfitted in white tails modeled after those worn by Cab Calloway and dubbed the “Miniature King of Swing.”

Appearances in vaudeville houses, hotels, cocktail lounges and bars followed. While performing in Denver, he recalled in a 2001 interview with the New York Times, he was castigated for singing ballads written by whites.

“A young man told me, ‘How dare you insult your race by not singing the blues?’ ” Short recalled. “I still get feedback about that. I’m a 76-year-old black man living in a white society; I’ve gone through the medley. I’d like to think my legacy included having done something positive to help eliminate the problems between races. I never let racism into the core of me.”

Moving to New York City in 1937, Short played more nightclub dates, as well as regular engagements such as those at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre.

But a year later, he recalled in a 1970 interview with the New Yorker, “I suddenly realized that there I was -- a kid with two years of show biz and all the mannerisms of an adult, and I didn’t like it, so I went back to Danville and stayed there four years, until I finished high school.”

A month after graduating from high school in 1942, Short opened at the Capitol Lounge in Chicago.

“The rage,” he told the New Yorker, “was boogie-woogie. I thought it was cheap.... I had heard Hildegarde on records, and of course she was the queen then. She would record whole Broadway scores, and she sang Vernon Duke and Cole Porter and the Gershwins and Noel Coward, and through her I became aware of the Broadway kind of score, of the mystique of the Broadway musical.”

His first big break came in 1948 when he began a three-year stint at the Cafe Gala, a chic club above the Sunset Strip.

“I consider my years [in Los Angeles] as the beginnings of my saloon career,” he told The Times in 1997.

The club, he recalled, “had a very intelligent, very sophisticated crowd, lots of movie stars, lots of socialites, people of all kinds and colors, both gay and straight. You learned a great deal with an audience that sophisticated.

“There I was, a black performer seated at the piano singing songs from Broadway shows. There were no do’s and don’ts. I had the freedom to be myself.”

Short, who never married, is survived by his adopted son, Ronald Bell, and his brother, Reginald Short.

At Short’s request, no funeral service will be held.