Danny Kaye

• Born: January 18, 1913
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: March 3, 1987
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Actor and entertainer

A popular entertainer from the 1940’s to the 1960’s, Kaye toured the world giving live performances and made a string of highly successful films. His later life was devoted to charitable causes, notably as ambassador at large for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Areas of achievement: Entertainment; philanthropy

Early Life

Danny Kaye (kay) was born in 1913 to Ukrainian Jewish parents. He was their third child and the only one born a United States citizen. Hoping for a career as an entertainer, Kaye left school at thirteen and went to Florida to find work. He returned to New York to work as a busboy in the Borscht Belt, a resort area that catered to a predominantly Jewish clientele. By the time he was in his middle teens, he was working as a “tummler,” an all-around entertainer, telling jokes, singing, dancing, and acting in comedy skits in hotels in the Catskills at primarily Jewish establishments. At twenty years of age, he joined a dance act with two other dancers. One night he accidentally tripped, and the audience howled with laughter. Kaye decided to incorporate a similar pratfall into the remainder of his performances with that troupe.

Hoping to become a star, Kaye left the Catskills and began his film career in 1935 in a comedy short, Moon over Manhattan. Then, in 1937, Educational Pictures signed a contract with him to do a series of two-reel comedies, to act the part of various Russian characters with Imogene Coca and June Allyson, also unknowns. However, the studio shut down within months, and nothing much came of this.

His first real break came in Broadway’s Straw Hat Revue (1939), in which he appeared for the first time as Danny Kaye, again opposite Coca. This role led to a featured song in Moss Hart’s Lady in the Dark (1941). The novelty number, “Tchaikovsky,” which required him to sing the names of about forty-five Russian composers in about fifty-five seconds, was a showstopper. This tongue-twisting, breakneck singing became a standard for Kaye, and the show opened the door to greater opportunities for him.

In 1940, he married Sylvia Fine, a writer and a lyricist; she became his manager and was responsible for many of his routines and songs for the rest of his career. Using material they worked on together, in the early 1940’s Kaye played cabarets and nightclubs, in performances featuring his gifts as a singer, a dancer, a comedian, and an impersonator.

Life’s Work

Kaye’s big break came in 1944 when Samuel Goldwyn cast him in the lead role in Up in Arms. Goldwyn, who thought Kaye looked too Jewish, asked him to get a nose job, which Kaye refused. Because the film was to be made in Technicolor, Goldwyn decided to alter Kaye’s ethnic look by dyeing his hair red, which Kaye maintained for the rest of his life as his trademark. Kaye was so successful in this film that some of his old educational films were edited into the film The Birth of a Star (1944).

Kaye’s career took off and he made seventeen films, including The Kid from Brooklyn (1946); The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947); The Inspector General (1949); Hans Christian Andersen (1952); White Christmas (1954); The Court Jester (1956); Merry Andrew (1958); and The Five Pennies (1959). The Court Jester includes the “vessel with the pestle” routine for which Kaye was renowned.

A short-lived radio show, The Danny Kaye Show, aired for about a year in 1945-1946, but it was not properly supported by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and never succeeded, despite its great cast and writing staff. It was one of Kaye’s only failures, and it left him bitter. However, one of Kaye’s greatest moments came during a performance at the London Palladium in 1948. The attending members of the royal family moved out of their box seats, for the first time, into regular orchestra seats in order to get a better view of Kaye’s performance.

For many years Kaye was considered one of the world’s most loved stars. He traveled around the globe giving one-man performances to sold-out audiences, and his films were worldwide successes. However, as the 1960’s progressed, Kaye was no longer in demand for films, and so he moved to television, hosting The Danny Kaye Show, an hour-long variety series from 1963 to 1967. As his popularity continued to wane through the 1970’s, he appeared only a handful of times on television. In 1981, however, he played one of the few dramatic roles in his career, in the fact-based television film, Skokie. In it he played a Holocaust survivor trying to stop a Ku Klux Klan march through Skokie, Illinois, a role for which he received great praise.

Kaye was honored with three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: one each for radio, recording, and motion pictures. He was nominated for five Golden Globe Awards and won two. He was also nominated for four Emmy Awards, winning one. In 1955, he received an honorary Academy Award for services to the motion picture industry, and in 1983 he was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Screen Actors Guild. On a less serious note, in 1986, at the Welcome Back to Brooklyn Festival, Kaye was crowned King of Brooklyn.

In the last years of his life, Kaye was a guest conductor with many orchestras. He was considered an excellent natural conductor, despite not being able to read music. He was also a great chef, a co-owner of the Seattle Mariners, a pilot, and a humanitarian.

His private life was not always so happy. His long marriage to Fine was tempestuous, and he had many affairs, most famously with Eve Arden. There were rumors of a homosexual affair with Laurence Olivier, which Kaye’s family denies but Olivier’s widow, Joan Plowright, hinted at as being true. Kaye died in Los Angeles in 1987 of a heart attack, a complication of hepatitis contracted from a blood transfusion. Since his death, a Broadway-style revue, The Kid from Brooklyn (2006), and a smaller cabaret-style show, Danny and Sylvia: The Danny Kaye Musical (2001), both designed to showcase Kaye’s enormous talents, have played in regional American theaters.

Significance

Kaye was a great entertainer and fascinating raconteur. He was so famous that people all over the world recognized him, and he was often accosted on the street by people quoting his “vessel with the pestle” routine. He used his extraordinary ability to sing at breakneck speeds and to mimic accents to great comic effect in films and in his stage performances. He used his fame to become the first celebrity spokesperson for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), a position he held until his death.

Bibliography

Freedland, Michael. The Secret Life of Danny Kaye. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Suggests that Kaye never lived up to his early promise as a performer; takes a negative view of Kaye’s career.

Gottfried, Martin. Nobody’s Fool: The Lives of Danny Kaye. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Looks at Kaye’s dark side, presenting him as a cold man, incapable of intimacy, driven, and unhappy.

Spoto, Donald. Laurence Olivier: A Biography. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001. Alleges that Olivier and Kaye had a ten-year love affair.