Cabaret Performer Hildegarde Dies at 99

Early on, Hildegarde was a song plugger for Irving Berlin in New York. Hoping for better prospects, she and Sosenko went to Europe in 1933, and Hildegarde worked at the Cafe de Paris, a chic supper club where Broadway star Marion Harris was the headliner.

"I was dreadful, down the bill," Hildegarde later said. The man who ran Cafe de Paris "was very nice and said that it was a matter of learning more, so Anna and I went to Paris where we thought we could learn the art of cabaret."

Meanwhile, Sosenko said she "equipped myself with the biographies of the truly great artists in the theater. I absorbed the careers of Bernhardt, Duse, Anna Held and Flo Ziegfeld like a sponge. . . . I learned that illusion was an integral part of show business."

Sosenko crafted Hildegarde's transformation in appearance and reputation. They sacrificed a month's wages to pay for Hildegarde's wardrobe makeover. Hildegarde also honed her act in Paris and refined her singing voice in French, Russian, Italian and Swedish to give her the allure of an international woman of mystery. They considered it a coup when nightclub reviewers were unable to tell whether she was an American with a French accent or French with an American accent.

Finding American nightclub audiences rowdier than European ones, she mastered the use of dramatic lighting and such tricks as dancing with diners and kidding men in the audience. This charmed many, but one dissenting critic remarked that she "wears long gloves at the piano merely because she cannot play enough to keep herself warm."

Hildegarde's warm voice was especially good at such wartime favorites as "I'll Be Seeing You" and the English-language version of "Lili Marlene." She spent most of the 1940s on the NBC Radio program "Raleigh Room," sponsored by the cigarette company. Her annual salary reportedly was $150,000.

As musical tastes changed, she returned to dinner clubs and touring stage shows. Through a rigorous beauty and exercise regimen, she remained an energetic presence on stage through the 1990s.

She once described herself as "an incurable romantic. . . . I traveled all my life, met a lot of men, had a lot of romances, but it never worked out. It was always 'hello and goodbye.' "

She leaves no immediate survivors.