Column: “Television and Radio” – “Danny Kaye Prepares For Debut”
The Portsmouth Times – Sep. 1, 1960
By: Marie Torre
Accustomed as all viewers are to Hollywood socialites who dabble in television with
gainful indifference (“Look, ma, I’m slumming!”), the sweetest words in antenna-
“A television show,” says Danny Kaye, “is not something you knock off in three days
and take off.” This is, of course, no guarantee that his TV debut show on CBS Oct.
30 will be sublime and glorious entertainment, but it is a guarantee that this Cassius-
True, this is no more than a captive viewer should expect—from any performer!—but a viewer’s due is a lost cause in a medium where financial solvency has come to supersede professional satisfaction as the prime objective.
Not that Kaye is taking the TV plunge for the sheer joy of it. He’ll be getting,
as a matter of fact, a considerable piece of Ft. Knox, reportedly three million dollars
for three one-
“Why television now?” Kaye asked, puckishness showing. “I’ve gotten over my fear of TV. I couldn’t stand the possibility of failing in television, couldn’t stand reading what all those nasty TV critics might say if I failed, because I have to be loved, you know.
“Yes, that’s what everybody said. That’s what all the TV writers said, and they ought to know. They got it from a reliable source.”
Kaye was indulging in one of his favorite pastimes, spiking myths, and when he’d had his fun, he told us:
“I never said I’d never do television. It would have been stupid and mulish of me to have made such a statement. What I did say was that I didn’t want to go on television at the moment I was asked, only because I hadn’t found out how I could work best on TV or how TV would work best for me.
“It’s as simple as that.
“I’m a performer who works on instinct, and I have a 'feel' for TV now. I think I could function in it with the same degree of emotional vitality as I do in picture work.”
As Kaye devotees know, it’s not so much what he does as the way he does it that has
made him the world’s highest-
“It won’t be a book show, or an original comedy,” put in Kaye. “I think it would be unwise to do something all new or offbeat for my first television show.
“There’ll be some new material, of course, but there’ll also be some of the numbers with which I’ve been identified over the years—things that may help me get acquainted with the TV audience. No doubt there’ll be a good number of people who’ll be seeing me work for the first time.”
Kaye, incidentally, will be coming to television directly—if you can discount a brief
Las Vegas engagement this month—from a one-
“Heck, no,” he rejoined. “I just decided to sit down and regroup my assets, emotions and attitudes!”