Many people who heard Anita Ellis sing believed her career could have been as significant as Ella Fitzgerald’s or Peggy Lee’s if she had pursued it. She didn’t, because formore than 25 years, she battled stage fright. “It wasn’t just stage fright,” Ellis explained. “It was more than that. It was truly crippling. It kept me away from my own gifts. It just stopped me cold. I didn’t sing.” Ellis sang on the radio, in commercials, dubbed voices in movies, and made a few very good records.

She was born Anita Kert in Montreal, the eldest of four children. Her younger brother, Larry Kert (1930–1991), an actor and singer, became best known for originating the role of Tony in the Broadway musical West Side Story in 1957. Ellis began her career in show business at the age of four, making her first public appearance in a piano recital in Montreal. Despite this early exposure, she remained a shy child. When the family moved to Hollywood when she was ten years old, her mother suggested singing lessons as a way to help her overcome her shyness. Later, she attended the College of Music in Cincinnati and majored in psychology and music at the University of California, Los Angeles.

At sixteen, Ellis auditioned for a radio program called Juvenile Revue and was named “Find of the Week” on her first attempt. Several other appearances on the show followed, leading to furtherwork on the radio and in nightclubs. Eventually, she became a featured vocalist at Hollywood’s Florentine Gardens. In 1941, she became a singer for WLW, a Cincinnati-based radio station.

In 1943, she married Frank Ellis, two weeks before he left for the Air Force. While she build a large listening audience on the West Coast, appearing at Hollywood Bowl, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, Hollywood Hotel. When her husband returned, their marriage faltered, and they divorced in 1946, although they remained friends until his death in 1957. After her divorce, Anita Ellis returned to the radio, singing on NBC Screen Guild Theater, and the CBS Abbott & Costello shows.

She also began working in Hollywood at MGM studios as a “ghost voice” for actresses in musical films. She dubbed Rita Hayworth in well-known movies such as Gilda (1946), Down to Earth (1947), and The Lady from Shanghai (1947); Jeanne Crain in Centennial Summer (1946); and Vera-Ellen in Three Little Words (1950), among others. Her performance dubbing Hayworth’s voice in Gilda, particularly in the iconic scene where she sang Put the Blame on Mame, became legendary in film history. According to Ellis, this began at a Hollywood party when a prominent studio executive asked her if she would sing behind a partition for Rita, who would mime the words in front. “You can figure out what I told him to do!” Ellis recalled. “Rita told me that was one song she wanted to sing herself. She tried, and they did about 192 takes, but it didn’t work. I felt sorry for her. I should feel sorry for Rita Hayworth!”

For her work in Gilda, Ellis’s role was greatly minimized and kept secret by the producers, who wanted fans to believe Hayworth was the singer. They even credited Hayworth on the soundtrack instead of Ellis. Hayworth reportedly resented the studio’s decision to prohibit her from singing her parts and the embarrassment it caused her when fans asked her to sing, believing her to be the voice of Gilda. While some claimed Hayworth sang the acoustic version of “Put the Blame on Mame”, this was false; Ellis dubbed Hayworth’s singing voice in all the film’s songs. While Hollywood perpetuated the fiction of its stars’ singing abilities, the American Federation of Musicians did not. “In Petrillo’s union, you had to get credit,” Ellis explained, “even if it was a donkey braying.”

Between 1947 and 1950, Anita recorded several tracks for the Mercury label, including songs such as The Old Lamplighter, Love for Love, and Golden Earrings. She also collaborated with MGM, recording Nevertheless by Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar, a song featured in the film Three Little Words. Additionally, she recorded Standard Transcriptions, including tunes like My Darling, My Darling.

Stage fright first appeared for Ellis in 1951 when she auditioned for Your Show of Shows in New York with Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, and Mel Brooks. “At the first rehearsal, I was terrific,” she said. “Then I walked out there for the dress rehearsal, and the theater was full of people. Nothing came out of my mouth. I didn’t know that would happen to me. Mel Brooks walked me around the block. There was another dress rehearsal the next day, but I still couldn’t sing.”

Her psychiatrist suggested she try again, so she partnered with pianist Luther Henderson and booked a performance at La Vie en Rose, a
small, red-velvet club in New York. “The day I opened, I started with Someone to Watch Over Me—a Freudian slip of a choice,” Ellis recalled. “I began singing the verse, but I couldn’t go on stage. Larry—my brother, who is like the Rock of Gibraltar—jumped up from the audience, waited until the chorus, and pushed me on. People thought it was a dramatic, brilliant way to open.” She could sing with technical personnel around her, but it was the audience—even just thinking about an audience—that, as she described, “left her in total tension.” She had never sung with a band.

Ellis became a naturalized United States citizen in 1950. In the early part of the decade, she visited a psychiatrist to overcome her stage fright. However, she abandoned therapy to continue dubbing songs for Vera-Ellen in The Belle of New York (1952), which included duets with Fred Astaire, and later for Jeanne Crain in Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1955).

In addition, she sang on numerous radio programs, including The Red Skelton Show for two years, Tommy Riggs for a year and a half, and a full season with Jack Carson. In New York, she performed in supper clubs such as the Blue Angel, the Bon Soir, and La Vie en Rose, as well as inmany other venues throughout the country.

In 1956, for the Columbia subsidiary label Epic, she recorded her first album, I Wonder What Became of Me, a musical biography—
not her own—under the direction of Luther Henderson. The album told the story of a lost girl, blending musical monologues and nightclub-style acts with songs and brief narration to create a dramatic and musical portrait.

A year later, also for Epic, she recorded a second album titled Hims, arranged and conducted by pianist Hal Schaefer. Schaefer, a veteran of Hollywood studios who had worked as a voice coach for stars like Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, had relocated to New York in 1955. There, his activities extended beyond performances in clubs to include freelancing as a recording artist, composer, orchestrator, and
performer in various contexts.

Jazz critic Whitney Balliett described Ellis’s voice as “a muscular soprano, capable of endless colors and timbres: beautiful pianissimo phrases capped with silken vibratos; sudden sustained fortissimos that take on a reedy, breaking quality; brave jubilant middle notes; high clarion tones and low reverential asides. Her crystalline diction says, ‘These words are important—listen.’ When she finishes, her songs don’t end—they subside.”

Club work never became easier for Ellis. In 1958, Oscar Hammerstein persuaded her to audition for Flower Drum Song. She tried out as an understudy for the two female leads. “I was very frightened, but I accepted my fate. I was learning about theater. After a while, it wasn’t as frightening. You sang the same way every night; you did the same thing; the other people became like family. It was almost impossible to forget anything. You had to be there every night, and there were rehearsals twice a week.”

In the summer of 1959, Anita signed with Elektra Records. Peter Matz, who arranged and conducted the band for the album The World in My Hands, demonstrated his rare talent for conveying others’ ideas while preserving originality. His arrangements often swung beautifully, complementing Ellis’s expressive and intelligent performances.

Since 1960, when she married Dr. Mortimer Shapiro, a New York neurologist, Anita Ellis had taken refuge in not needing tomake a living from performing.

In 1974, a friend—a reporter who had urged her to return to singing—passed away. Later that year, in his memory, she sang live for the first time since 1960, performing an eight-week engagement at Michael’s Pub in New York.

She made her 1979 comeback primarily for that friend, for her mother, who had passed away the previous March, and because she had used being “very married” as an excuse not to sing for 19 years. Her husband had never pressured her, though he preferred classical music to jazz.

Miss Ellis reflected, “I think it would have been more honest if I’d been singing all the time. But I’ve liked my life. I liked the rules I had. I don’t think every minute is supposed to be happy. I have a gift. I just feel very fortunate.”

She ultimately retired from her career in 1987, her life long struggle with stage fright having taken its toll. A widow, Anita Ellis spent her later years in Manhattan, battling Alzheimer’s disease from 2000 until her passing on October 28, 2015, at the age of 95. As part of her legacy, her estate generously donated $1 million to the neurology department at Mt. Sinai Hospital to support its strategic priorities.

—Jordi Pujol (Taken from the inside liner notes of FSR V144 CD)