by Marc Carnegie
NEW YORK - Bobby Short, the pianist and cabaret singer who symbolised bygone New York style and glamour, died on Monday of leukemia, his publicist said. He was 80.
The tuxedo-wearing Short was a fixture for more than three decades at the city's Carlyle Hotel, where the martinis-and-pearls set came to hear his renditions of George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and other American masters.
Short epitomised the elegance of a New York gone by, and continued to play to a packed house long after popular taste in music gravitated from "Rhapsody in Blue" to the blue lyrics of modern rap.
"With his quintessential style and sophistication, Bobby Short captured the hearts of us all over the past 35 years at the Cafe Carlyle," said James McBride, the hotel's managing director.
"He is an American treasure who will be greatly missed," McBride said.
Celebrities, tourists and well-heeled New Yorkers alike flocked to see Short, smiling broadly behind his piano as he performed the standards of the American songbook with a grace and style that won him fans around the world.
As he told the New York Times in 2002, "A song has to be beautiful" -- an attitude that earned a loyal following from people like director Woody Allen, who gave him a cameo performance in "Hannah and Her Sisters."
Short also played at the White House for presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, recorded several albums and appeared in perfume adverts that he said paid for his house in the south of France.
He also came to enjoy the high-life himself, far away from his roots in the Great Depression. Short had his shirts custom-made in London, "summered" on the French Riviera and carried his microphone in a Louis Vuitton bag.
"I was brought up in the 1930s, so we knew about hard times," he once told the Washington Times. "But people back then always had class ... you dressed for the audience, and they dressed for you."
Born the ninth out of 10 children, with parents who worked as a coal miner and a maid in the American Midwest, Short started performing before he was 10, beginning in Depression-era vaudeville dubbed as "The Miniature King of Swing."
But the racial prejudice of the day meant that the young performer had to spend his lonely nights in a separate hotel room that of his white manager.
Despite his fame, race came up again in the 1980s, when heiress Gloria Vanderbilt claimed she was blocked from buying a Manhattan apartment because the building's directors feared she would marry the black entertainer.
Short began his stint at the Carlyle in 1968, right in the middle of the drug-taking heyday of hippies and acid rock. But as he told the Washington Times, his music never went out of style.
"I think music buffs have always supported me when you get right down to the bone of it," he told the paper. "I've stuck to my guns."
Publicist Virginia Wicks said Short had gone into a New York hospital on Wednesday complaining of stomach problems.
"He didn't know that he had leukemia," Wicks told AFP. "It was awful."
Short never married. He is survived by his brother and an adopted son.
03/21/2005 19:51 GMT