Volume 16–1.pdf

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Danny with a handful of love.
FAMILIES TO REMEMBER
He didn't tell jokes. He wasn't really a vocalist, a dancer,
or a genuine mime. But when Danny rattled off one of
his tongue-twister songs, when he parodied an opera star
with hay fever, a crazed cossack dancer, a shlemiel cowboy,
when he spouted streams of nonsense syllables in
perfect Japanese, French or German intonations, mascara
flowed and grown men wept with laughter. And
when, with manic frenzy, he conducted a symphony
orchestra in The Flight of the Bumble Bee with a fly swatter,
he so convulsed the musicians they could barely read
their scores or blow their horns. He made children giggle,
and he charmed the royal family of England into beating
time and singing along with him.
Danny Kaye was one of those born entertainers who
comes our way once in a lifetime. And working alongside
him—writing his musical material and guiding his career
for 40 years—was his partner and wife, Sylvia Fine.
Danny and Sylvia first worked together at a summer
resort where Sylvia, an accomplished pianist, helped
whip material together for the weekend entertainment.
ILLUSTRATIONS 1988 WILLIAM BRAMHALL
AYE &FINE &
Aside from playing the piano, she was a sophisticated lyricist
with a sassy wit and style in the Gilbert and Sullivan
mode. Danny's expressive face and gymnastic tongue
made him the perfect vehicle for her scintillating patter
songs. Their professional affinity soon blossomed into a
personal partnership; they were married in 1940.
One year later, Danny, who had been trotting his act
around from clubs, to cabarets, to the Borscht Circuit, to
vaudeville for nearly ten years, became an overnight star.
In the 1941 Broadway production of Lady in the Dark he
stopped the show at every performance with his rendition
of Tchaikovsky, a song in which he reeled off 49
polysyllabic Russian composers' names in 38 seconds.
Before long, Hollywood beckoned, and he starred in a
succession of hit movies; The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
(1947), The Inspector General (1949), Hans Christian
Andersen (1951), among others.
In the course of his career, Sylvia wrote more than 100
songs especially for him which he performed on stage,
screen, radio, television, in night clubs and recording studios.
She was his mentor, severest critic and enduring
security blanket.
When their little girl Dena was born, Danny became
acutely sensitized to the needs and pleasures of children.
In the mid-1950s, he took a holiday from Hollywood and
committed himself to make a film for UNICEF (United
Nations International Children's Emergency Fund) to
help raise funds to immunize third world children against
killer diseases. The project took him on a 40,000 mile trek
through India, Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong,
Africa, Turkey, Israel and Italy. The film documented
the ravages of leprosy, tuberculosis and other preventable
illnesses, and also demonstrated Danny's intuitive
gift for entertaining children. He clowned, charmed
them and eased the sting of the vaccinating needle.
Though Danny continued his UNICEF activities for
the next 30 years, he also found time to become a master
Chinese cuisine chef, an expert golfer, a pilot and a baseball
statistician. Television, too, gobbled up his talents. In
addition to his own TV variety show, he also appeared in
the children's specials, Peter Pan and Pinocchio . Later, in
a total turnabout he played an unrelieved dramatic role
as a Holocaust survivor in Skokie. In 1981, when Sylvia
Fine produced and narrated a TV special on the history
of the American musical theatre, it was the first time she