“Life with My Zany Father—Danny Kaye”

Rome New-Tribune – Jan. 19, 1969

Family Weekly

By Dena Kaye

I was dressing to go out, and I asked Daddy to please, if the phone rang, take an accurate message for once and not just tell me that “someone called.”

Just then the phone rang. My father picked it up and asked who was calling. Then he asked, “What’s your blood type?” “Have you had any childhood diseases?” “Is this an emergency or a social call?”

After a fruitless attempt at getting the phone away from him, I settled back and enjoyed the interrogation. I hoped my friend on the other end of the line was enjoying it, too. That’s the way life is in the zany, unpredictable home of Danny Kaye—my father.

Life is never dull there because Daddy is as much a comedian at home as he is on the stage. And he combines this comedy talent with a total involvement in whatever he does—particularly cooking and flying, his two pet hobbies.

Take, for example, his penchant for cooking, a hobby that has led him on the road to disaster more than once. One day Daddy suddenly got a tremendous yen for French sourdough bread, for example. He flew to San Francisco to an exclusive French restaurant for the recipe. Getting it, he flew back home and raced into the kitchen, where he spent hours baking the bread. When I asked him how it turned out, he simply said, “Watch.” He banged a loaf of the bread on the kitchen table and chipped it—not the bread, the table. And all he did was laugh.

Daddy’s interest in food, foreign food especially, started when he was young, traveling all over the world with a show called “La Vie Paree.” While other members of the cast went shopping, Daddy was seeking out obscure native restaurants, trying to communicate with waiters in his now-famous pantomime. In a restaurant in China, Daddy recalls trying to order chicken by flapping his arms around and making clucking sounds. The waiter nodded knowingly and returned some time later with two eggs. That probably accounts for Daddy’s reluctance for making omelets even today.

Besides his hobbies, Daddy also is totally involved with his family. I know I’ve learned many important lessons from him. The year I made my high-school drill team, for instance, I practiced strutting around the house, and Daddy would strut right after me, doing wild imitations of my routines. It was his way of telling me not to get a swelled head and not to take myself too seriously.

Daddy started me on an allowance very young—and at a nickel a week. I remember making a pitch for a raise by telling him my room was neat and clean. He said, “Fine. I’ll raise your allowance not because of that—after all, if it’s filthy, you have to live in it—but because you deserve it.” It was my first lesson in values—what’s important and what’s not. Daddy’s way always has been to teach by clowning and joking, but the lesson is there.

No matter how far apart we are geographically—and Daddy’s work takes him to far-off places sometimes—we are as close as the nearest phone. Last spring while making a movie in France, Daddy called and asked Mom and me if we would like to have dinner in his favorite Chinese restaurant, “Ying’s Thing.” That’s his pet name for our kitchen. We said yes, and, sure enough he flew in that evening for dinner. Like I said, he’s unpredictable.

But that’s the way life is when your father is Danny Kaye—and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

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