Motherhood Quote by Kitty Carlisle

It lands like a scandalous postcard from a bygone America: Hollywood as both magnet and moral hazard, a place your mother warned you about because she half-believed it was real. Kitty Carlisle isn’t just repeating a parental opinion; she’s distilling an era when the movie industry was still new enough to feel like a loophole in the social order. The phrase "den of iniquity" is deliberately old-fashioned, almost biblical, and that’s the point. It signals the worldview of respectable families who saw celebrity not as a profession but as exposure: to sex, to gossip, to outsiders, to the loosening of the rules that kept class and gender in their places.

The second clause sharpens the knife. "People came to terrible bad ends there" has the cadence of a cautionary tale, the kind told to keep daughters close to home. It’s melodramatic by design, echoing the morality plots Hollywood itself churned out and the real-life headlines that fed them: starlets chewed up by studio power, addictions hidden behind fan-magazine gloss, reputations demolished overnight. Carlisle, as a musician and performer who moved within that world, lets us hear the irony without spelling it out. The mother’s fear is sincere, but it’s also a cultural script - one that paints ambition as danger and independence as punishment.

What makes the line work is its double vision: Hollywood as myth factory and moral panic engine, accused in the same breath of inventing sin and merely staging it too convincingly.