“Found at Last: A Happy Comedian”
The Milwaukee Journal – Sep. 23, 1956
By: Margaret MeManus
NEW YORK—Danny Kaye sat on a floral chintz sofa in the living room of his suite at
the Sherry-
“I adopted this from the Bulgarians,” said Kaye, maintaining a dead pan pose. “Bulgarians eat sunflower seeds. Very nutritious. I’ve been eating them for years. Remember the way we drove the director crazy when we were making ‘Hans Christian Andersen’?” he asked a companion, in an aside. “I had the whole cast and the crew cracking these things on the set. The director was annoyed. Had some notion it was untidy.”
Here for some work with Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly on the special show he will do on Murrow’s “See It Now,” around Thanksgiving time, Kaye said it marks his television debut.
So far, Danny has resisted all television offers, even those with the most dizzily rewarding fees. He is doing the “See It Now” show in behalf of UNICEF, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund.
Too Busy for TV
“I have come to the rather unoriginal conclusion that television is going to be around awhile,” he said, “and since I figure that I’m going to be around awhile, too, what’s the rush? I like making movies. I like the theater. I like traveling around making personal appearances. Since I can’t do everything at once, television can wait.
“This Murrow show is a special thing. It just happens that I’m very interested in UNCIEF and I don’t know a better way to get across UNICEF’s cause.”
Kaye will receive no money for this show, which will be a 90 minute film of a seven week tour he recently made to entertain UNICEF children in Europe, the Mediterranean countries, Africa and the near east.
As an unofficial ambassador for UNICEF, Kaye was accompanied on this trip by two “See It Now” camera and sound crews. The film includes such action as Kaye conducting the Israeli philharmonic in “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and leading a Belgrade concert audience in a community sing of “Wilhelmina.”
“I don’t operate exactly in the classic tradition of an ambassador,” he said. “Most of the time these people couldn’t understand a word of what I was saying and I certainly couldn’t understand them. But there’s a universality about my kind of nonsense. Their faces show they were getting the message.
“My diplomatic costume is a pair of slacks and a sports shirt, just like I’m wearing now. For my formal occasions, I put on a dark sports jacket. Any day I expected to be recalled.
“I have no desire to play Hamlet. I’m not trying to prove anything to the world and there’s no bleeding heart beneath this merry façade. I’m doing what I want to do and I enjoy it all the time. I’m notorious, you know, for having a better time than the audience.”
Brooklyn born, Kaye, the world traveler, said he has two brothers still living in his home borough, but other than his family ties, he has little association with the scene of his childhood.
“Even in rosy retrospect, there is nothing about today that isn’t a lot better than those days,” he said. “I don’t go back and stand on a street corner and yearn for the old days. They were miserable. And the house where I grew up gets smaller each time I see it. It’s so small, I don’t see how we all grew up in it.”
Loves to Roam
Married to the former Sylvia Fine, who writes much of his material, they have one child, a daughter, Dena, 9 years old. Their home is in Beverly Hills, but actually this is just a base for the wandering Kaye, who has traveled some 100,000 miles in country after country in the interest of UNICEF.
He has also done considerable traveling in the interest of his own career, making personal appearances in cities here and abroad, among them at the Palladium in London, where he did a command performance for the queen, and also at the Palace here.
Most recently he has appeared in Washington D.C. and in Chicago, and next month he and his family return to Hollywood, where he will remain a prisoner until he makes two motion pictures.
“I guess I think of the west coast as home now,” he said, “if I really have a home. I would not like to think that I have to spend the rest of my life in any one place, no matter where, I like to have a base of operation, but I like to know that I can take off anywhere, any time.
“I travel light. It takes most people a week to get ready for the short trip to Pasadena from Beverly Hills. If I needed all that equipment, I’d never move. I can be ready to go to Europe in half an hour. All I need is a little duffel bag and I’m off.”