Kitty Carlisle Hart

Kitty Carlisle Hart emerges in Andy Warhol’s diary as both a familiar public performer and a newly appointed leader in New York’s arts world. At a dinner celebrating her appointment as head of the New York State Council on the Arts, she stood out as its most compelling speaker and made clear that she intended to keep working.

Public identity and appointment

Carlisle was known to Warhol through her television work: he described Arlene Francis and Peggy Cass as her sidekicks on To Tell the Truth. In December 1976, the guests gathered to honor her appointment by Governor Carey as the new head of the New York State Council on the Arts, placing a television personality at the center of the state’s cultural administration.

A dinner in her honor

The dinner took place at The Players Club on Gramercy Park. Warhol thought the gathering looked like a stag party, despite the presence of several women: Francis and Cass attended, as did Dena Kaye, Irene Selznick, and the evening’s chairwoman. Kaye had come without her husband, Danny, who was suffering from Concorde lag. Before dinner, Warhol’s doctor, Doc Cox, took him upstairs to see Edwin Booth’s bedroom, which he remembered as musty and dusty. The meal was rich and creamy, food Warhol was not supposed to eat because of his gallbladder; Cox was embarrassed to see him eating it, then let him enjoy the occasion without watching.

Work, means, and public image

After the meal, the guests gave speeches. Carlisle’s was the one Warhol singled out: dressed in black and pearls, she looked chic, and she said she still wanted to work a lot. Warhol connected that determination with an earlier remark from Diana Vreeland, who had described Carlisle’s need to work as a consequence of having relatively little money. In the diary, the appointment and the personal circumstances sit side by side: Carlisle is honored as a public figure, but her continued labor is presented not simply as ambition, but also as practical necessity. Warhol’s account thus preserves a brief but telling portrait of a woman whose polished appearance and professional standing did not erase the material pressures shaping her life.