Kitty Carlisle Hart, the New York arts and society doyenne, may have turned 94 on September 3, but her calendar is as booked as ever. She will commemorate her most recent birthday with a three-night stand at Feinstein’s at the Regency beginning on September 21.The act features Ms. Hart singing songs and telling stories. And if there’s anyone in Manhattan who has plenty of stories to tell, it’s Ms. Hart.

Stories about George Gershwin, who once proposed marriage, but died before she could give an answer. “We used to dance together at El Morocco,” she blithely recalled in a recent interview at her sprawling Upper East Side apartment, which is decorated with a well-considered and well-upholstered taste seldom seen anymore. It is the sort of place that should be adorned with orchids.

“George didn’t really love me,” she continued. “He thought it was time to get married, and I was suitable.”

There will also be stories about her late husband, playwright, director, and memoirist Moss Hart. “He was really larger than life, and when he went into a party, it was made.” And tales about Moss’s frequent collaborator, the sardonic dramatist George S. Kaufman, who once slapped her for spouting baby talk during a Gin Rummy game.

“Moss was standing next to me, and I thought, ‘If he doesn’t defend me, I can’t marry him.’ And Moss said, ‘In this house, Kitty can say anything she wants.’ And I thought, ‘That’s my man!’ I knew that it cost Moss something to do that, because he revered George.”

Asked which tunes she’ll be warbling, Ms. Hart unleashed one of those sentences that can set a listener blinking. “I’ll sing all the songs of the people who played for me at parties,” she replied nonchalantly. “Gershwin, Cole Porter, Dick Rodgers, etc.” Oh, yes – them. “So, you see,” she added with polished understatement. “I know how the songs should go.”

She will not, however, croon “Alone,” which she sang as the ingenue in “A Night at the Opera,” the 1935 Marx Brothers film – by far her most famous screen credit. “I hated that song. I always said it was a duet for one voice. It was very low and then very high. It was impossible to sing.”

Ms. Hart has filled her nine-odd decades with several lives. She was born Catherine Conn in New Orleans to an ambitious mother who had her educated in Europe. Ms. Hart became Kitty while attending a school in Switzerland. “They had too many Catherines,” she explained. The Carlisle moniker came from the New York phone book, after she began pursuing a livelihood on the stage. “I thought Kitty Carlisle was very euphonious. And my mother became Mrs. Carlisle overnight.” The final layer of her familiar triple-decker name arrived when she married Moss Hart in 1946.

Following Mr. Hart’s death in 1961, his widow became the most visible estate executrix in the theater world, carefully preserving her last husband’s legacy and nurturing the development – along with her best friend, Kaufman’s daughter Anne Kaufman Schneider – of every Kaufman and Hart revival. But the most influential chapter in her long career came in 1971, when Governor Rockefeller appointed her vice chairperson of the New York State Council of the Arts. She became chairperson in 1976 and served for 20 years.

“I did very well,” said Ms. Hart, still proud of her work. “People remember me still. When I got there, there were many 10 or 20 institutions that got most of the money. I was like Johnny Apple seed. Everywhere I went, a new organization sprung up. And they’re all mostly still there.”

Signs of Ms. Hart’s political connectedness – before and after her public service – litter her domestic domain. Here’s a photo of her with the Kennedy women, including Jackie, who used to send her antique pill boxes. There she is with Ed Koch, over there with the elder Bush. Poses with Presidents Reagan and Clinton stand side by side.

Elsewhere on her walls are other mementos of past friends: Paintings by Noel Coward and Harpo Marx; a photo collage included movie stills of her opposite Bing Crosby; framed sheet music by Irving Berlin. Is there anyone around today that can match those talents as sparkling company? “I wouldn’t answer that question,” answered politic Ms. Hart. “I wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. I’ve lived so long and survived so much that I know how to do these things.”

Also among the photos of the famous are snapshots of her children and grandchildren. They are the reason she is headlining at Feinstein’s. “I save all the money I make and take my children and their families on trips,” she explained. “We’ve been to Paris, London, Hawaii, all over. I want to go Naples, Fla. Last time we went we only had enough money for a week. They loved it so much, this time I want to go for two weeks. So I have to hustle my bustle.”

Following that trip she’ll begin preparations for birthday number 95. “I’m going to have a big blowout. We’re going to pick up the carpet and put a combo over there. And we’ll dance and have about 55 people for a sit-down dinner.” Only 55? “Well, that’s about all I can accommodate.”

In the months intervening there’ll be ample time to tidy up the old place – for instance, find whatever fell off that bare hook – the one just above the frame-laden upright piano. “Oh, that was the Pulitzer Prize,” she hastily noted. Moss Hart’s Pulitzer for “You Can’t Take it With You,” that is. “It fell down behind the piano.” This reporter, a bit pale at the thought of its gathering dust back there, offered to retrieve the trophy. She declined. “We’d have to move everything.”