Earl Wilson Column: “Danny (O) Kaye for Weekly TV Series”
The Milwaukee Sentinel – Nov. 9, 1962
By: Earl Wilson
NEW YORK, N.Y.—“So now YOU’RE going to get an ulcer?” I said to Danny Kaye.
“Bet you $25 I won’t have the approximation of an ulcer!” he fired back across his teacup in his hotel suite.
“You were so happy doing one TV show a year. Why next year every week?”
“I wasn’t active enough for myself. I’m a performer. I should perform. And I can get more of the public through TV, which has replaced movies as THE medium. Oh, I have my flying machine . . . I do things for the UN . . . and movies . . . and Las Vegas, but . . .”
“Every week, though!” I said.
“Listen, I used to do seven shows a day!”
“What’s Danny Kaye really like now?”
“I fly my beautiful Beechcraft Queen up where Frank Sinatra and I have radio stations . . . Spokane, Portland, Seattle. There’s a separateness to flying. Michael Kidd got me into it.
“He used to be a menace driving a car. I heard he was a pilot. I said, ‘What IS this nonsense?’
“‘All you do,’ he told me, ‘is pass a simple little exam.’
“To pass the ‘simple little exam’ I went to school for months. But I was ready. And what an idiot! Fourteen people in the country took lessons in twin motors instead of single. I was one!
“Same with golf,” Danny said. “Abe Lastfogel asked if I played. I said, ‘Get away, that’s an old man’s game.’ Picking up a club, I hit a ball 200 yards.
“Months later, he asked me again. I picked up a club. I hit the first ball six feet, the second straight up in the air.
“I got a golf instructor. I was on the practice tee five weeks before I played. My first game I broke 100, my first year 90, my second year 80.”
That’s how he plans to prepare his weekly TV series—fact is, he’s been planning it for years, letting the other comics burn themselves out. This time it’ll be without his wife, Sylvia Fine, helping.
“A gifted, talented girl, but she’s committed to do a Broadway musical,” he said. “Writing for me tends to confine her sphere of creativity. Of course she is associate producer of this Sunday’s TV special.”
“What about that?”
“Just that it was with Lucille Ball and she was.”
I left without making the bet about the ulcer. What’m I gonna do with $25?