Danny Kaye, 76 (1911-1987) US comedian/actor

I think I benefited from being born and raised in Brooklyn that was one of the most cosmopolitan neighborhoods and that was one of the great joys about it it's where you learned you didn't dislike anybody because he was an Italian a Jew or an Irishman or what else we also have on the other side of the coin we have a bad bunch of promise gangsters shootings chemistry my father Jacob Kaminsky was a simple tailor and pleased to be one when I was 13 my mother died Danny was a student at the same school with me we did our homework together you should know from it we never understood what the homework was who of laughing and laughing and laughing that's all we did which was a terrible twitch to ask how my future impressed her she took one look at me and cried he be better Chester Danny worked at a store that dispenses ice cream cones he put so much stuff into the class he couldn't get it out but he was doing it fired him he white for an insurance company and he made up lupa a real big mistake I don't think he worked here more than a day hot on his ass I ran away from home for the simple reason that I was bursting the curiosity about the world outside of Brooklyn I talked a pal of mine Lewis Eisen into going along both had an ear for music and love melodious tunes and we used to sing and what we sang we called ourselves the Harmony Kings also red and Blackie I was about 12 when Danny arrived with his pal Lou Eisen and they were a harmony team and when they came to my row they continued to sing together in addition to the tennis courts and the golf course and the horseback riding and the swimming and the boating in the evening they would all be treated to some sort of entertainment those kind of places were really the training ground for entertainers summer stock was great for actors but for entertainers singers dancers and comedians the borscht circuit was the best place the first time I ever saw Danny all the people in the camp were crowded under that front porch or around it and he was going insane just insane doing all these crazy crazy things and making them laugh so hard he was a tomar so they say at the edge of a pool they push him into the pool that sort of thing that's that table will fall into the water you know have his finger up his nose I think people thought he was discovered years later and that he'd suddenly gotten great but he was always great by 33 he was of course the leading act at the hotel he had a dance team and they thought it might be fun to include Danny and some of their numbers and realized that he was a natural dancer and they taught him to dance by the end of the summer they were good enough to be it signed up by the market show Marcus was getting ready to go to the Orient and he needed a dance team the act was called Harvey young and Kay and they started off as a serious act but then something happened that Danny fell or slipped and when the audience laughed then he was a comedian from then on every country we went into he had to learn something in their language so he could say it on stage and in the audience would always die laughing Danny had to be funny in Korea he had to be funny in Japan to audiences who didn't understand English so that man really learned his trade the way that he would talk and he was smart enough to know that he had to get out of waiting that show and we all had a big party for it and he left us is to kill himself on retirement and a gesture on the boy is nobody's Danny may have thought it is a budding star in the Orion when he got back to New York he was anything but fact he was a man without a job and without a dollar to because his father used to have to give him the odd dollar bill but he did get one job which was working with an exotic stripper called Sally Rand holding her fans in very strategic positions until one day a bluebottle settled on his nose and Danny lost his fans and then lost his job he was lucky though Henry sherek was a very well-known London impresario came to him said Horace I come to London play at the Dorchester Hotel he was working with a fella called Nick long but neither of them were much good in fact then he said I was a disaster it was pathetic it was incongruous it was pitiful it was shattering it was stunning it was debilitating it was thought-provoking it was bloody often one of the first times I ever worked with Danny was in Astoria where they made shorts before the big movie did be the newsreel and then accommodate haha shirt and this was about a dance hall come on Serena let history delight sarcastic please take it stop bothering me for tickets I can picture us both my down sliding down the river together music being played by gypsies by both men I must say I love doing they were fun they were fun to do and you did work with awfully good people and of course Danny it was marvelous the film cameos led nowhere and Danny was soon back in a small-time satirical review put together by a next borscht belt director net Lisbon and then one day he brought in this very she's kind of shy quiet lady who sat down at the piano and started to demonstrate this material and I was standing on the other side of the room and I'm not kidding and this is the absolute truth I saw Danny go I know you you used to work at my dad's dental practice when you were 14 then Silvia started to play this little song which it's called who killed Robin it was just a little pop song one who killed Robin oh who killed Robin old uh and Danny loved the swing of it the next thing you know he is singing the song and doing his scat chorus which was brilliant and sylvia's eyes lit up and you could see that that was just a romance made in heaven just as their relationship was developing they were both offered a job performing at a place called Camp tenement which was a sort of force felt only more so for trade unionists mostly Jewish sort of people let the same sort of food in the borscht belt we've got a lot better shows the shows were so good that the New York impresarios the Schubert Brothers decided to take the best of the material and turn it into their own Broadway production called the straw hat revue Danny was a big success in in a straw hat revue he got marvelous notices lots of agents tried to get in touch with him I think that was his first look when it closed he was out of work in a state of I suppose depression he went to Florida and from there he dialed Sylvia's number he was going to propose marriage except that when she answered the phone he put it down he he funked it but Sylvia knew what was coming and took off for Florida herself if I asked my parents there would be objections discussions and arguments so we eloped and were secretly married the relationship I should say the symbiotic relationship between Silvia and Danny was fascinating to watch of course Danny leaned heavily on Sylvia's creativity would he have succeeded without Silvia my feeling is undoubtedly he would have succeeded without Silvia was it very important to him at that stage in his life to have Silvia behind them extremely important most of the materials she wrote was based on what Danny could do already and it's not detracting anything from Sylvia or I had a kind of radar for Danny I sensed very early that Danny was very elegant as a performer I am Anatole a size shriek with sheep my eighth of the week goes six the boss says three runaway upses a man a total of palace the outside sell make us bin shell is that the act of a two-room flat well also question Isabel bear Oh bundles at the letter where Paulo bedrooms baths let me get my boy on and it could be subscribe and wallah as Shippo at sixty bucks a troll it's how wypall lent you one I first met Danny Kaye when he exploded on the scene at Lamar Nick a club in Manhattan he did everything he sang he danced and the material is so wonderful and what was really most outstanding is how graceful he was with all of them and suddenly it spread all of them but this new guy on the block Danny Kate Moss went to see Danny Kaye at the Martinique in fact he brought Garbo with him and he thought he was wonderful and he recognized this extraordinary talent and when he wrote lady in the dark he had a park that he wrote I think he probably wrote it with Danny in mind he played the effete photographer the fashion photographer and he did it superbly so it was really a very classy show with Mosshart writing the book court viola the music Ira Gershwin the lyrics and Gertrude Lawrence who said to me one summer night I was so hot today I just had to take off my nail polish and it helped to create a new international star Danny came and he came forth at one point and sang song called Tchaikovsky in which in about one minute flat he rattled off with impeccable precision the names about 60 Russian composers there's mama suitable son and se and Tchaikovsky Japan you come to meet the deaf children cannot ski Goodall Scout the butcher Pony is kawaki Miko so won't be a pro coffee ft amp you gonna check out there's good about me ask you to accompany it's key never Balakirev Zola tour event christiansí and circle often couple of two cows can cannot see just accomplished border declared and overcome see there's a dolphin coming out of Malkovich panchenko there a miscarriage of skill above a cynical servants games because of Kawasaki and when he finish they couldn't stop abroad and they applauded and applauded and products I was smiling a saying Danny told me later he says as I was bowing to the applause the thought that went through my head was I'm out that's the worst thing I could have happened to me Gertrude Lawrence follows me in a moment singing the next number I brought the house down I'm sure to be cut out of the show when it was time for her to top Danny she got up and she did the bumps and the grinds and the kicks on the proscenium Jenny made her mind up when she was three she was on stage the audience was flabbergasted she'd never done the high kicks and the spins and all of the outrageous things she did with Jenny and of course she tore the house down now that was on a Monday night Wednesday afternoon at the matinee I had the sense that the audience really wasn't paying attention to me so I looked over on the side there was Gerty Lawrence in the swing with a great big red handkerchief going aha what do I do I can't go and complain to the management she's a big star I'm just the featured player that night she came out to do Jenny and she did Jenny made her mind up when she was three and there was a life where there hadn't been one before all I did was look at her and as she was singing I just watched my nose a little bit like this that's all I did and she looked at me and I bow to her and she bowed to me and she never did the red my father had made a couple of comedies with Bob Hope but he was always on the lookout for a comedian he came back and he said I've seen somebody who could be wonderful the only thing is I'm not sure he didn't look too Jewish I was doing a show across the street in Billy roses diamond horseshoe with my act I was backstage seeing Danny and I said guess what I'm going to Hollywood I've got a contract he said with whom I said with Samuel Goldwyn he said really so am i little did we dream we'd be stuck with each other for four pictures the first three things Sam Goldwyn said about me in a group of people was we have to be very careful how we handle this boy because he's not good-looking he can't act and he has no sex appeal they tried everything they tried photographing him putting makeup on and one day my mother suggested that often a person with a large nose by changing the color of their hair offsets it and so the decision was made to make Danny blond the picture was called up on arms and it came out at the time of the war and it was about a draftee in the army Danny played a hypochondriac in the picture one thing about Danny is he truly was there for he could play it very well it was young he had the bloom of Broadway which even though this town pretended to look down upon it that was a great thing to be coming from Broadway Danny's performance in motion pictures was a natural progression from the Danny Kaye that we knew at the Martinique who ever heard of a musical picture without Carol Malik that Papeete the bolivian bombshell I wish you could come with me to my little village believe me so peaceful there are the portable mound is really lovely least and the shinies I don't think anybody realized the true significance of Sylvia's contribution Sylvia was a bottomless pit and if something wasn't working Sylvia sensed it instantly and she would come in and revamp it and Danny would learn it like that she was not a spontaneous personality like Danny was but she appreciated humor and she would laugh and she could understand and also she had a great comic sense for the type of thing that made Danny famous you sense a kind of a feeling of resentment every once in a while because Sylvia really was always right and in a very quiet way that that little drive you crazy but I think of Danny Kate I think of a man whom you could ask anything of as far as the performers concerned and the more difficult it was the more fun he had doing it and the better he did at it I mean the Opera number in wonder man where's the resolution of the plot Danny is being chased by the Mafia of the period who had murdered his twin brother in order to escape he puts on the costume of the opera singer and runs out on the stage where the heavies can't follow him now the whole idea is Danny had to give the information to the district attorney without getting killed the lyric of the Opera must give the information to the district attorney and also saved Danny's life when Roosevelt died and Truman took over Truman okayed something called the loyalty order of 1947 and that loyalty order meant that if any member of the government would not answer the famous question are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party they could be dismissed without a hearing well I thought something had to be done about it Ira Gershwin felt the same way so did John Huston and we formed this committee and we did fly to Washington Danny Kaye was on the plane Gene Kelly Marcia and Richard Conte or when we got there the press started to attack us now for most of these people this was the first time they had ever been attacked by the press and a lot of them couldn't take it and the first one to cave in was Humphrey Bogart and Frank Sinatra dropped away Gene Kelly dropped away Marsha hunt dropped away Danny Kaye they all divorced themselves from us I certainly think Danny Kaye was sorry he got into this committee to defend the Hollywood ten he was in politics until the heat was on and then he found he couldn't take it many captain many yogurt it's nothing just a broken arm I think Danny Kaye really was a Walter Mitty I think that all of those characters that he played were he and more let's go suckster Spring Fling can cheese grater floor wax neither the number to thread and he really was a sort of doctor marking he was a man of many many parts and enormous interest I am luckier than most because I have been able in my real life to work out most of the fantasies that people have who become walter mitty there's Walter Mitty or Wilma Mitty in every lady and every gentleman here everybody has their own fantasies everybody has their own day being the pocket at the market at the park it's Walter Mitty I'm a lost fly it took him nine months at the kitchen table I've flown a dc-10 and I've flown a 707 a knife loan of dc-8 and a 737 and a 727 and you are a chameleon aren't you to make everybody laugh however when he was in a bad mood he was very sullen and he would go off by himself and pick at his fingers and just brood he was quite a brooder and he was also he was sort of starstruck I think at that point and then there was all that problem with Sylvia Sylvia knew in many respects more about Danny than you know about himself you could see this duality raging and Danny he was dependent upon her but resented being dependent upon her he wanted to be his own person that's Sylvia's creation 1947 should have been the most successful and happiest here Danny Kaye's life instead he left Sylvia and also split with his film mentor Sam Goldwyn in a bid for independence he accepted an invitation to visit the one city way he'd been a dismal failure London the London Palladium under veil Parnell was the top variety Theatre in the forties because of its policy of importing the best American talent when Danny arrived in February 1948 Mickey Rooney was headlining but he was proving a dismal failure Rooney cancelled a matinee and didn't appear for the rest of the run that was the point that the posters went up advertising Danny Kaye at the London Palladium the box office was a disaster Val Parnell started giving tickets away because he wondered what Danny would say if he saw empty seats in the house well if Parnell was worried Danny was petrified in fact he had to be pushed onto this stage here in the Palladium by Ted ray and then something quite remarkable happened the orchestra struck up Danny faced the audience he moved out his hands keyboardist Jackie he minute is moocher and then something very very unusual he moved to the center of the stage and sat down his legs dangling and then he started talking to the audience no songs no patter just talk to them the place was an absolute uproar don't think that had ever happened before neither of this to quieten them down he put a finger to his lips I said chiku Cheers she was the roughest and the toughest prayer but many had a heart as big as it was the kind of fantastic success and within the space of five or six weeks I had been thrown together with people that well you know only the kind you would imagine in your fantasy famous people in all walks of life two very famous people George Bernard Shaw and Danny Kaye met recently at a tea party given by one of mr. Shaw's neighbors in half a truck and when mr. Shaw now nearly 93 offered to show how film character should make their entrances he took these silent pictures and these two great comedians then went on to delight their friends with their antics Danny Kaye fans were in full force had met him two shows for the special ceremony there there was a surprise in store for Danny who kept trying you take a man like my father you take a woman like my mother who has also been called brilliant you put the two together in a working relationship in a marriage and it's those talents are highly combustible a band a giant reception committee a small army of photographers and thousands of worshipping admirers give Danny and wife Sylvia the welcome of a conqueror never been so thrilled in my entire life I never wanted to do anything so badly I'm extremely happy to be here and I hope everything goes off well one of the things was wonderful about Danny was this sense of composure that he would do is he would take the audience spin them around and then stop and he would have the audience totally in the palm of his hands the thing that Danny Kaye had was a kind of antic intelligence and of the ability to to be real and then to just sort of lose it I mean he was just he was so out of control and yet totally in control he had class lots of class first you put you to need some time you swing him to the left and then you swing him to the right step around you didn't make me laugh class has nothing to do about where you come from I've known people who come from all the right sides of the tracks and have no class I've known a lot of people who were born dead poor they had all the class in the world I don't think that I've really realized how famous he was until basically I was an adult and I remember my mother telling me stories when I was nuts about the Beatles and she said but that's what it was like when your father was at the Palladium I think he owned it in a way forever Hans Christian Andersen who had been a longtime dream of my father's he was fascinated by the subject that this incredibly ugly incredibly unhappy man who created all these lovely legends for children and he started working on it in the 30s I remember his first choice he tried to get Chaplin to do the part and then somebody suggested Danny Jewish peon in Brooklyn was going to play their national hero was very difficult he knew what he wanted and I knew it without knowing it because it was each time an adventure in knew where he wanted to go but he didn't know how to go there so you realize it was hell for everybody it was my first pitcher and I had the great difficulties to speak because I was not speaking English I had a teacher all day long following me everywhere to teach me my head was like that was terrible but then he was helping a lot it is possible isn't it could you do it yes yes I can do it Danny took on the tutorial chores of teaching her how to speak properly like a no to people which of years it goes quite quickly them daddy was a dog to people in it and he would say he would accentuate each foul we are the most unusual couple no two people have ever moons such a moon June so as my Mac there's a different softer Danny and no song there's a whole emotional quality which wasn't in the early pictures a swan me a swan he said yes you were smart take a look at yourself in the lake and you'll see look he saw and he said definitely no feathers oh stubby and brown for in fact these birds in so many words the best the best the best didn't town not a quack not a quack not a waddle or a quack but a glide and a whistle and a snowy wad bag and head so noble and ha say who duck thing not ah to me it was very introvert and he was doing the clown he was incredible he was rehearsing whatever he was getting in shape for what he was going to perform and then suddenly what trust finish and he was he was not with you I mean he was awake he was trench and special and and sad in a way I think it was a very happy incident that Danny Kaye was going to Europe on an airplane and the sitting next to him was more is paid at first executive director of UNICEF and they got to be talking and the interest of Danny in children was very obvious when you're talking to people like these will you just keep talking and hope your ignorance isn't showing mr. pate told him the problems of children the third-world countries - how many of them time from the age of two or three in fact even the first year the infant mortality was so high in some of the countries as high as 150 per thousand and that I think stirred that Danny into doing something he was given that un less a passe in which he was identified a UN goodwill ambassador for UNICEF he was the first of these so-called ambassadors at large or goodwill ambassadors and he was probably the most effective to us Danny was a major star but for the children in a village in Thailand he was just a foreigner redhead with funny-looking shoes jumping around they didn't even pass on the game down can you say we unicast he gave a UNICEF these aren t even gone again you say we gotta get a heart of the place and a hypodermic we began to say it's good for you good for you good for you come on sweetheart come on baby little cynical German journalist came up to me the other day and said don't you think that work for UNICEF is a little bit like a raindrop on a hot stone which is a German saying and I said no I'm an optimist I think it's a drop in the ocean children automatically flock to him he was very good with them and there was something of the child in his nature anyway there was a feeling of fundamental helplessness he managed to retain knowingly some of the childlike naivete with which youngsters approached the world all these boats on my boat there's the cruiser there's the destroyer there's the mobile there's the bar oh and over in a corner by my big toe is the msot the only trouble is they all shanked all except one that's summary as if he was connected to his instincts which made him open to other people are their children and made him able to respond in whatever the appropriate way was for the occasion I was shocked to hear about the Duchess what did you do button but you what about you do the Duke - yes and what about the dude do the doors do mr. Duggal well uh the doors did with the dough's dance oh when the doors there's a duty to a Duke that is huh what's that oh it's very simple sir when the doors did his duty and the Duke didn't that's when the Duchess did the dirt to the Duke with the doors how would you like to have to be funny you must love it a great deal and I think Danny loved it a great deal just as he loved standing up in front of a Symphony Orchestra the thing that Danny enjoyed most about show business was conducting the New York Symphony because that was to him comedy in a way that nobody else was doing Danny had never studied music he couldn't read a musical score we mean nothing to him he pick up any page and one would look like another he would listen through a very complicated piece of music and it'd be able to sing back the most complex rhythms imaginable he would sing the complicated parts for example Stars and Stripes forever and unfailingly bring in each member of the officer right on cue alright let's begin and Toby began to play oh that Richard tuber snapped the violins kill disgraces the trombone stuck out his tongue and the trumpet snickered tubby said senior pizzicato Toby I've never heard a tuba player melody before would you play the rest of it oh we did quite a few children's records one very well-known one was tubby the tuba why how perfectly wonderful set the strings please tubby may we sing your tune too poor Toby who never gets a chance to play her solo he just plays oompah oompah in the background toby is given a solo and source for I met Danny the first time when I was cooking at the evolution hotel and afterwards he came into the kitchen said where's the chef let me know let me see him and he was really very excited Danny became interested in Chinese cooking now when Danny became interested in something there were no half measures taken he went the whole way he spent lots of time in the kitchens of the superb top Chinese restaurants in San Francisco Chinatown he put for any weight of the Benihana chain to shame by throwing the knife higher and catching it in a more dangerous manner than any other meat cleaver of the Orient I think if Danny Kaye would have become a cook or a chef in his early days he would be one of the greatest ever the animals - bye - it was in 1970 something very strange happened for the first time thirty years Danny Kaye was back on Broadway in a new show by Richard Rodgers called two by two it was the Noah's Ark story as though were happening to a lower middle-class Bronx family well it was predictable the reviews were terrific and the show was his son up it's wonderful going boating with our trouble didn't really start until Danny one night in his jumping around on stage fell off a plank that he already walked down and if if he didn't break his leg he came very damn near to it and he was in a cast and he was immediately put into New York Hospital and had announced that he was going home and that he was had to leave the show and I said Danny I think you're making a mistake in going back to California you are going to sit there in your kitchen and you're gonna stew why don't you come back and do the show in a wheelchair and then in crutches and then as a cane as you get better I will write you a set of ad-libs the show didn't exactly suffer from Danny being in the wheelchair of course it was the talker Broadway I got into all the newspapers and Peter stones ad-libs were so good that Danny of course and in his own I mean he rolled down a ramp in his wheelchair and he puts on the race last minute and he makes reference to the fact that if he had gone through the wall he would be in the show next door and he started doing it a lot very shortly thereafter he was sort of out of control Noah was now out of the window but Danny Kaye was in his element and so were the audience's they were laughing shouting screaming for a daddy case show just as they had done in the old days the only person who didn't like it was Richard Rodgers who from that moment on didn't speak to Danny again and when Danny left the show he folded because without him there was no show he never went back to Broadway and only made one more major film on the subject very close to his heart it was about the American Nazi Party doing a demonstration and Skokie was full of Jew Jews who were living there and particularly survivors from the Holocaust I think he really felt that that role from his soul in a different way perhaps than some of the other things you know he had done I mean after all he was Jewish he had a very powerful scene in a synagogue where he bares his arm you know what this is a tattoo a number viren's once it feels excellent AIESEC it's a concentration camp number do you know what that meant can you know what really happened can you know what the swastika was can you know what is a Nazi he felt unsure about the business of acting in the way he had to act he used to he did this the first time and I didn't know what it was after he said to me just hold it a minute that's hold it hold it and he stepped forward and addressed the crowd and said now if I hold up one finger you sing you lot here those three though bring are now two fingers you lot here oh and the three fingers uh and then he said they matter oh oh oh singing together Indian got a whole a whole sort of scene going with the thing and I believe it was something that you used to do in his act years ago but he did that for about five minutes and he got applause they applauded him for because they loved him for it and then he felt happy then he would go on acting I came here to sit to listen not to say anything but I don't want to hear about tactics and strategies did this is not a game I will not go home I will not pull down the window shades not this time not in my own town if the Nazi marches here in Skokie you can believe me I will be there I will be there with baseball bats with a gun with anything I will many people have felt he never fulfilled his potential I remember saying to him I wish he would do more more movies and he said you know I can't do those old I don't remember if he said Danny Kaye movies but you know the up in arms the wolterman he said I'm different than the times are different maybe it bored him having done having climbed that mountain yet outlived his his spot his place when your parent gets ill and you know they're gonna die you become a child again you're a combination of parent you know I managed to sit in the hospital and feed him and you become a combination of parent and child suddenly who should arrive while we're eating but Danny came and he came over to Silvia he wished her a happy birthday and he kissed her and he was in the hospital at the time he'd been brought by an ambulance until a week after that he was gone Danny was one of the great comedians of the cinema I think in his own way of course he's more verbal than a Keaton or a Chaplin but he certainly is right up there with in my opinion with with with the best of them as a performer and an artist I think he stands alone but did you put the pellet with the poison in the vessel with the person who the poison was in the flagon with the Dragon the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true with the poisons in the flagon with the Dragon the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true remember that thank you very much to tell it with the decathlete pellet with the poison is in the pathway with the chancel and just remember that he was my friend sometimes he was my Chinese cook sometimes he was my pilot but I don't feel that I really ever knew who Danny was he was so many different people I don't think Danny knew who he was himself I don't think anybody knew Danny really well and that's probably our fault as much as it would be Danny and I'm sorry that that I didn't get to know him better because I would like to have known him better and I hope he wasn't I hope he was shy I hope he wasn't sad

Channel: George Pollen

Views: 689,875

Rating: 4.778863 out of 5

Keywords: Danny Kaye

Id: 90smtgeUI3g

Length: 50min 38sec (3038 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 03 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I’ve seen the court jester more times than I can count.

[u/LordBaNZa]

He was George Carlin's Idol growing up

[u/ryceritops2]

Is Billy Crystal the Billy Crystal of the 80s and 90s?