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 Bobby Short, Appearing Nightly At the Cabaret Of Our Dreams
 
 By Wil Haygood
 
  "Hannah  and Her Sisters" didn't do much for me. But the singer in the movie  --  appearing at the Cafe Carlyle on-screen, as he did in real life  --  exuded so much style, so much class and taste. He fairly floated from the screen. The voice was breathy, tender and, oddly, a little hoarse  --  which gave it all its magic. His name was Bobby Short, and for decades, before and after that movie, he did as much as one voice could to keep cabaret and Cole Porter and Harold Arlen and 1940s music alive. 
 
 "People flocked to the Carlyle to be transported for an hour or so to a more civilized and dignified time," says Robert Nahas, who knew Short for four decades and is executor of his estate.
 
 Short, who died yesterday at age 80, was as old-fashioned as a cigarette case, as a walking stick. Not cane; walking stick. He was ever and always the man in the tuxedo. Accompanying himself on piano, he was an elegant vessel for a half-century's worth of mighty fine music.
 
 He had announced last year that he was retiring from the Carlyle, the swank and intimate Upper East Side boîte that had been his room for more than 35 years. Time was, as it does, gaining on Short. He mentioned Paris, the countryside. Many couldn't believe it. He heard their lamentations and reversed course, said he'd do his Carlyle thing for a couple more years.
 
 But he died.
 
 I will tell you in a moment about my time at the Carlyle, listening to Bobby Short. But first this:
 
 Born in Danville, Ill., in 1924, he had a precocious bent and pleaded with his parents to allow him to go into vaudeville. Those sunny Cole Porter lyrics aside, it was sometimes sad, sometimes lonely, being on the road for weeks. 
 
 Short wrote a memoir, quite good, called "Black and White Baby," published in 1971. "Sometimes on a weekend night at a roadhouse on the outskirts of town," he wrote, "I'd go to sleep at the piano during a lull, my head on my arms. When the lights of approaching cars were seen around the bend, they'd wake me, and before the customers got to the door, I'd be sitting up and playing 'Nobody's Sweetheart Now,' full tilt."
 
 That's a shatteringly lovely memory. So is this  --  little Bobby Short realizing that as much as he loved music, it had become a job: "One day when you're in show business and are a child, something clicks and you realize what you do is important to a lot of adults around you. You are emboldened, and your childhood is over. It's not a happy circumstance. If you don't go on, you're going to hurt a lot of people."
 
 He had made enough to buy a dinner jacket for himself at the age of 14.
 
 A famous pop music singer by the name of Margaret Whiting is on the phone. She lives in Manhattan. For decades she has been faithful in voice to the kinds of tunes Short so loved.
 
  "I met him in the early 1940s, when he worked in Los Angeles," she recalls. "This man, Johnny Walsh, had been a singer. He started a club in L.A. called Cafe Gala. Bobby came from Danville and performed. In three days he became a sensation in L.A. People would hear him sing songs from Broadway."
 
 They became friends. She says he would talk about his family back in Illinois. "He told me they'd bring records home for him to listen to. And sheet music."
 
 He was self-taught. She goes on: "He brought a touch of sophistication to L.A. Those of us in L.A. at the time dreamed of New York. He brought all of that to us. I don't know what the word 'foxy' means to you. But Bobby Short was the first foxy man I ever met. He was charming, funny. He'd call me up and say, 'I've found a new Cole Porter song, at least one that not many people are familiar with.' And he'd sing it to me over the phone."
 
 A singer who went by one name, Hildegarde, had touched him immensely. It was her style, her manner at the piano. She was blond, beautiful, a little kitschy, sang for high society in Manhattan. She wore white gloves and gave roses away while performing. She was known to chat during shows. As Short did.
 
 Having traveled America in his youth, Bobby Short dashed abroad during the 1950s. His act played well there  --  London, Paris  --  but he got homesick and returned stateside by the end of the decade.
 
 "Bobby was this wonderful little colored boy who had traveled all over Europe and wanted to come back home," Evelyn Cunningham said yesterday. Cunningham, herself black, worked for many years as a New York-based writer for the Pittsburgh Courier. "We all fell in love with him. Many of us really wanted to know more about him. I don't think, up until that time, I had ever heard of him. But everything I had read about him from London had been so good." 
 
 Short also wrote this in his memoir: "I am a Negro who has never lived in the South, thank God, nor was I ever trapped in an urban ghetto."
 
 Cunningham remembers a wonderful evening when Short was welcomed back to the States with a dinner party on 139th Street in Harlem: "Bobby played and sang and was so charming and sweet. I would bet that rarely had he been with such a large group of blacks in London."
 
 Which makes her want to say something about Short and race. "His music wasn't what I'd call black music. It was highly sophisticated white music. But he connected that evening with everybody." 
 
 Short, who lived in Manhattan for years, would ring up Cunningham often. "He gave wonderful parties at his home. He had a huge table that took up the entire dining room. He also had two or three bedrooms that he made into sitting rooms. I was wandering through one evening and ran into Gloria Vanderbilt. They were very close, as you know."
 
 There would, through the years, be White House appearances, appearances with symphony orchestras. Some wildly successful TV commercials for Charlie perfume.
 
 It was in 1986 that I  persuaded an editor to send me to Manhattan following the release of "Hannah," Woody Allen's movie. I wanted to write about Bobby Short. I wanted to see his show at the Carlyle. (The price of the expense-account dinner  --  not to mention the sorbet!  --  at the Carlyle made me gulp. But, alas, one's gotta eat.) 
 
  During my interview with Short before his show, I asked  what were the most difficult times of his life. The '60s, he said, were awful. It was rock music. "I barely kept the wolf from the door!" he said, nearly crying the words out. He seemed, still, grief-stricken that he, Bobby Short, had had to fight to keep his lovely music, his Cole Porter standards, alive. 
 
 At the show at the Carlyle that evening  --  he had seemed to glide into the room, a man light as smoke  --  he sat and began playing. Soon enough, he swayed into "I'm in Love Again," and his voice tenderly soared. 
 
 I'm in love again
 
 And the spring is coming,
 
 I'm in love again,
 
 Hear my heartstrings humming . . .
 
 He threw a glance my way during the song and grinned wildly. 
 
 The wolf at the door. Bless his heart.
 
   

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