Incomparable Hildegarde

The Incomparable Hildegarde, lived a long life full of glamour and excitement. Her career started in Milwaukee silent movie theaters as a musician, which led to the Vaudeville stage. By the 1930s, Hildegarde was singing and playing piano in the cabarets of Paris and London where she rubbed elbows with royalty, White Russians, and Josephine Baker. When she returned to the U.S., Hildegarde became the darling of the supper club scene in N.Y.C. and the U.S., breaking records in nearly every venue she played. Her name and style became synonymous with high-class entertainment like the Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel. Her biography, the first book to address her importance in American culture, covers her life from birth to death. It includes in-depth analysis of her twenty-six year intimate relationship with her manager, Anna Sosenko. Though her popularity and influence faded from American memory, her importance stands. She started fashion trends, had a signature Revlon nail and lip color, and was the first to have “hits” with many standards of the WW II era. The story of her seventy-year career is the story of American popular culture in the twentieth-century.