Kitty Kallen

Katie "Kitty" Kallen was born on May 25, 1921, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Russian Jewish immigrants Samuel and Fannie Kalinsky, later Kallen, and was one of seven children. Her birth name has at times been erroneously reported as Katherine Kalinsky. As a child, she won an amateur contest by imitating popular singers, returning home with a camera as her prize — an object her father initially assumed she had stolen, only accepting the truth after neighbors arrived to offer their congratulations.

Kallen began performing at an early age, singing on The Children's Hour, a radio program sponsored by the Horn & Hardart automat chain, and later hosting her own radio program on Philadelphia's WCAU. As a preteen, she sang with the big bands of Jan Savitt in 1936, Artie Shaw in 1938, and Jack Teagarden in 1939. With Teagarden's band she cut her first records, eight sides in total. While with Teagarden, she also married the band's clarinet player, Clint Garvin; when Teagarden fired Garvin, Kallen departed as well and later annulled the marriage. On May 5, 1942, shortly before her twenty-first birthday, she sang vocals for "Moonlight Becomes You" with Bobby Sherwood and His Orchestra at the second-ever recording session for what was then still called Liberty Records, a label that would soon be renamed Capitol Records. That session was her only one for the label.

At twenty-one, Kallen joined the Jimmy Dorsey band, replacing Helen O'Connell. Her recording of "They're Either Too Young or Too Old" with Dorsey reached number two on the Billboard charts in 1944, and that same year she sang vocals on Dorsey's number-one hit "Besame Mucho." Most of her work with Dorsey came in duets with Bob Eberly, and when Eberly entered military service toward the end of 1943, she moved to Harry James's band. Between January and November 1945, she placed two songs with the Harry James Orchestra at number one: "I'm Beginning to See the Light" and "It's Been a Long, Long Time," the latter becoming closely associated with the end of World War II and the return of American troops. During that same period, six additional recordings with James reached the top ten and two more entered the top twenty.

Following the war, Kallen pursued a solo career, recording briefly for Musicraft in 1946, then spending three years at Mercury from 1949 to 1951, followed by stints at Columbia and a reunion with Harry James. Despite recording covers of songs that had been hits for other artists, she did not produce a major chart success during this period. After signing with Decca in 1953, she achieved the breakthrough that defined her career. Her 1954 recording of "Little Things Mean a Lot" spent nine consecutive weeks at number one on the U.S. Billboard chart, charted in the United States for nearly seven months, reached number one on the UK singles chart, and sold more than two million copies. The song was ranked the number-one song of the year for 1954, and Kallen was voted the most popular female singer of that year in polls conducted by both Billboard and Variety. She followed the hit with "In the Chapel in the Moonlight," another million-selling record, and a version of "True Love" for Decca.

In 1947, Kallen appeared on Broadway in Finian's Rainbow. She also starred in the 1955 film The Second Greatest Sex and performed on numerous television programs, including The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, American Bandstand, The Big Beat with singer-host Richard Hayes, and Fred Allen's Judge for Yourself. Her live performance venues included Manhattan's Copacabana, Morris Levy's Versailles, the Capitol Theater, the Maisonette Room at the St. Regis, the Cafe Rouge at the Hotel Pennsylvania, and the Plaza Hotel's Persian Room.

At the height of her popularity, Kallen lost her voice while performing at the London Palladium in 1955 and stopped singing before audiences for four years. She subsequently tested her voice under a pseudonym in small-town venues before returning to performing. In 1959, she recorded "If I Give My Heart to You" for Columbia, and in 1963 she recorded a top-selling version of "My Coloring Book" for RCA Victor. Her final album, Quiet Nights, was a bossa nova–flavored release for 20th Century Fox Records, after which she retired from recording permanently. Over the course of her career she accumulated thirteen top-ten hits.

In 1948, Kallen married Bernard "Budd" Granoff, a publicist, agent, and television producer who later became a pioneering television syndicator. The marriage lasted more than forty-five years, until Granoff's death in 1996. The couple had one son, Jonathan Granoff, who became President of the Global Security Institute and Adjunct Professor of International Law at Widener University School of Law.

On February 8, 1960, Kallen received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, located on the north side of Hollywood Boulevard at number 7021. In 1977, she sued her dermatologist, Norman Orentreich, after he prescribed the estrogen drug Premarin for small facial wrinkles; she subsequently suffered blood clots in her lungs caused directly by the drug and was awarded $300,000 by a court. In 2008, she joined a group of artists and estates in a suit against Universal Music Group alleging the company had cheated them on royalties. In 2009, she was inducted into the Hit Parade Hall of Fame. During the height of her fame, three imposters billed themselves as Kitty Kallen; when one of them, Genevieve Agostinello, died in 1978, it was incorrectly reported that Kallen herself had died.

Kallen maintained homes in Englewood, New Jersey, and Cuernavaca, Mexico. By the end of her life she resided full-time in Cuernavaca, where she died on January 7, 2016, at the age of ninety-four. A compilation of her recordings across multiple labels remains available on the Sony CD set The Kitty Kallen Story.