Hildegarde Loretta Sell, a cabaret singer of seven decades known for an elegant piano and vocal style, by a title bestowed by columnist Walter Winchell, died on Friday aged 99 at the New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Hospital. Perhaps the most famous “supper-club entertainers who ever lived", she combined flirty banter with a champagne smile, to become the icon of nightclub sophistication for 70 years just known as 'The Incomparable Hildegarde'.
Hildegarde, rose from obscurity to the highest-paid performers of the 1940s, specializing in wistful songs such as Jerome Kern's "The Last Time I Saw Paris" and Noel Coward's "I'll See You Again" giving her the nickname "The First Lady of the Supper Clubs" from none other than the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. Fellow entertainer Bobby Short would say that Hildegarde's act "produced down to the last sigh, even to the blue spotlight that brought out the color in the red roses that invariably sat by her piano”.
Hildegarde owed much of her image and refinement to her early manager, Anna Sosenko who wrote her signature song "Darling, Je Vous Aime Beaucoup" and tried to add the exotic to her allure, planting stories about her following.
At the peak of her career as an entertainer in the 1930s and '40s, Hildegarde was like a cine star, booked at least 45 weeks a year, earning as much as $17,500 a week. Her recordings sold in hundreds of thousands, even as she appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1939 and Revlon even introduced a shade of lipstick and nail polish named after her.
A trend-setter for all other entertainers, Hildegarde created showmanship, wearing elegant gowns, with roses and playing with white gloves on, literally commanding a red carpet welcome wherever she went. Her admirers ranged from army officers of the World War II to King Gustaf of Sweden and the Duke of Windsor. She also reinvented herself constantly evolving with the emerging mediums of entertainment, adding TV appearances from the 1950s through the '70s, in addition to her cabaret performances and record albums, besides touring with Stephen Sondheim’s Musical "Follies”.
A witty entertainer, she never lost her touch with age as in a 1993 performance at Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel, she said, "Wrinkle, wrinkle, leave me alone…. Go and sliver Sharon Stone”. Bobby Short the other cabaret legend once said of Hildegarde’s performance that hers was " the slickest night-club act of all time”. In one performance classic of Hildegarde’s risqué wit, she nestled up and waltzed with a dour senator, whispering for all to hear, "Oh, Senator, you're entrancing…you dance so beautifully…Darling, you're terrific…Why go back to the Senate…And where's your wife?"
The daughter of German immigrants, Hildegarde raised in Milwaukee, rose from playing piano for silent era to pay her way through Marquette University's music school to being the biggest entertainers right through her 70s. Rising beyond her dream of being a concert pianist, she was inspired by the 1926 act “Jerry and Her Baby Grands” featuring four women playing four baby grand pianos to bang out a hot rendition of "The 12th Street Rag" that got her into show business and out of Milwaukee. Her autobiography, "Over 50.... So What!" published by Doubleday in 1961 quoted her describing herself as an incurable romantic who traveled all her life, meeting a lot of men, having a lot of romances, with none of them ever working out. She said summing up the life of an entertainer, “it was always Hello and goodbye”. As she sang at the finale of her final performance in 1992 in hometown: "It's not where you start, it's where you finish”.
