NYC Municipal Archives, WNYC Collection
January 18, 1911 – Danny Kaye
“When what’s left of you gets around to what’s left to be gotten, what’s left to be gotten won’t be worth getting whatever it is you’ve got left.”
In the mid-1970s, to make ends meet, I worked a second job, a part-time gig in the box-office at the Metropolitan Opera House. At the time, Danny Kaye had a series of concerts for children to introduce them to classical music and opera. At one point in the performance, Kaye would speak about how many people it took to present an opera. The curtain would rise on the staff, crew, and all the performers that could be spared from their work or rehearsals, 200+ bodies simply standing on the stage, and then a quick bow before a curtain dropped. For years I presented my acting resume with a credit: Appeared in the Danny Kaye Concerts For Children at the Met.
Thinking about Kaye, I was reminded that in so many of his films Kaye’s character splits in two. In Wonder Man (1945), The Kid From Brooklyn (1946), The Court Jester (1956), On The Double (1961), On The Riviera (1951), Knock On Wood (1954), and especially The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (1947), Kaye played characters with a more butch, more traditionally manly, more heroically heterosexual alter-ego than his primary character. Why was his masculinity constantly being reconfigured? Hmmm…
Laurence Olivier looked to women for love and to men for sex. In Hollywood, 1940, he met Kaye and they started a long, fairly open for the times, flamboyant relationship. Noël Coward was appalled to witness Olivier and Kaye openly exchanging deep kisses at Hollywood parties. Coward despised Kaye and he referred to him as “Randy Dan” (Daniel Kaminski was Kaye’s real name).
Kaye was Brooklyn born. His parents were Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. His father worked as a tailor while Kaye and his two brothers were growing up. When Kaye was 13 years old, he dropped out of school. He worked as a soda jerk and an office clerk, failing miserably at a string of odd jobs. Kaye:
“I became an entertainer not because I wanted to but because I was meant to.”
Still in his teens, Kaye found employment as a comic and worked his way through the “Borscht Belt” of Jewish resorts in The Catskills.
Throughout the 1930s, Kaye kept at it. He began collaborating with songwriter Sylvia Fine, developing silly songs for his act. In 1939, he made his Broadway debut in The Straw Hat Revue, with songs by Fine and a cast of young performers that included Alfred Drake, Imogene Coca, and Jerome Robbins.
In 1941, he became a sensation with his performance of the nonsensical song Tchaikovsky in the daring Lady In The Dark with music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Ira Gershwin and book and direction by Moss Hart. With Tchaikovsky, he managed to rattle off 50 polysyllabic Russian names in 39 seconds. Besides glowing reviews and standing ovations, he also married Fine and she became his manager.
Photo from Amazon Music via YouTube
During World War II, Kaye supported the troops by performing overseas. In the Japanese port of Osaka, a typhoon struck and doused the lights during a performance, but Kaye imperturbably carried on, lighting his own face with two flashlights and singing song after song for the sailors.
In 1944, he was offered a contract with Samuel Goldwyn and appeared in a string of popular Technicolor comedies and musicals. Goldwyn built his film debut, Wonder Man, around Kaye’s personality. He played those dual roles, a flamboyant nightclub entertainer and his bookworm twin brother. Providing a comely counterpoint as the bookworm’s girlfriend was Virginia Mayo, who played similar parts in several Kaye films.
In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Kaye played seven roles: a mild-mannered commuter and six heroes of his fantasies. The musical extravaganza Hans Christian Andersen (1952) with Kaye in the title role is probably the film he is best remembered for today.
He also starred in his own wildly popular variety show on CBS Radio from 1945 to 1946.
Kaye made more films in the 1950s, including everyone’s favorite, White Christmas (1954) with Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, but Kaye and his kind of films fell into disfavor with movie fans by the end of the decade. In the 1960s, he successfully transitioned to television specials and, eventually, his own series, The Danny Kaye Show, which ran from 1963 to 1967. The show won an Emmy Award and a Peabody Prize.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Kaye made occasional television appearances, including a made-for-television film about a holocaust survivor, Skokie (1981), one of the few dramatic roles that he ever played.
He was given a special Academy Award in 1954, and he made a few movies in the late 1950s and 1960s. His final film was The Madwoman Of Chaillot (1969) with Katharine Hepburn and Charles Boyer.
The real-life Kaye was lean, six-foot and athletic, but much of his career was spent playing meek, little milquetoasty characters who somehow always triumphed in the end. Kaye:
”I wasn’t born a fool. It took work to get this way. I’m just an entertainer. All I want to be is funny. I never aspired to play Hamlet.”
Fine, a fine pianist, composer, lyricist and fellow Brooklynite, turned out patter songs and other material for his performances. She served as his coach and personal critic, and she contributed greatly to his success. Kaye:
”Hollywood. Loved it. Those were productive, rewarding years. And in a few of those pictures – I hate to use the word, but those were classic routines.”
Kaye knew that in his later years he was not the box-office draw he had been. In 1981, he noted:
”When I stopped making films, they were getting on to the more realistic films and the explicit films and all. They were depicting life as it is, and some of it was unpleasant. I gradually moved away from that.”
Kaye was an incredibly nimble performer, noted for his tongue-twisting rapid-fire patter and physical antics. He was a unique, gaunt, grinning figure, with manic eyes, red-blond hair and rubbery arms and legs. His charm was astonishingly durable. I adored him as a kid. Most kids did. He became noted for his comic appearances before children in many countries on behalf of the United Nations. He reveled in his UNICEF title of Ambassador-At-Large, although his approach to diplomacy was distinctly free-wheeling.
He also was known for his burlesque conducting of symphony orchestras around the world. Kaye raised millions of dollars for symphony musicians’ pension funds by performing his benefit concerts with epic zaniness. He conducted The Flight Of The Bumblebee with a flyswatter, and would do a tango up and down the concert-hall aisle while conducting Ravel’s Bolero. Improvisation and exaggeration were cornerstones of Kaye’s style. He would arrive on stage with bundles of batons, search for his favorite, give a vigorous upbeat, and then watch the baton fly into the audience.
He also had a reputation for being moody and difficult to work with. Kaye told an interviewer:
”When I get upset, I just go away for a little while.”
NYP Library Archives
He returned to Broadway in 1963, in a long-running one-man show. In 1970 he played Noah in the Richard Rodgers musical Two By Two. Reviews were mixed, and Kaye, unhappy with the script, began to improvise on a nightly basis. His ad-libbed shtick and comic asides to the audience were crowd-pleasers, and word-of-mouth helped business. When he broke his foot, Kaye continued with the show. Rodgers wrote:
“He appeared with his leg in a cast and either rode around the stage in a wheelchair in which he sometimes would try to run down the other actors, or hobbled around the stage on a crutch, which he used to goose the girls. In addition, he began improvising his own lines and singing in the wrong tempos. He even made a curtain speech after the performances in which he said: ‘I’m glad you’re here, but I’m glad the authors aren’t’. Apparently, there was a certain curiosity value to all this, because people actually went to see Two By Two as Kaye’s Vaudeville act.”
In 1976, he played Geppetto in a television musical of Pinocchio with Sandy Duncan in the title role, and Captain Hook opposite Mia Farrow in Peter Pan.
Kaye was awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award by the Academy in 1982. In 1984, he received the Kennedy Center Honor.
Kaye took that final bow in 1987. He was 76 years old, and was taken by complications of Hepatitis C. Kaye had quadruple bypass heart surgery in 1983; and he claimed he contracted Hepatitis C from a blood transfusion.
With Fine, via Wikimedia Commons
Fine and Kaye had separated in 1947. They blamed their separation on “two people working very hard”. They never divorced. Fine was taken by emphysema at 78 years-old in 1991. Their ashes are interred together in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, just 40 minutes by train from Grand Central Station.
