“Kaye Has Ironic Day”

The Pittsburgh Press – Dec. 24, 1955

HOLLYWOOD – It isn’t, as Danny Kaye says, that he minds wearing a suit of armor weighing 175 pounds for a movie. All that Danny asks is that the guy who put him into it in the morning be around that night to get him out of it.

Danny wears the heavy, feudal costume for his newest comedy, “The Court Jester,” a comedy in which he portrays everything from a baby-sitter to the bravest knight who ever broke lance.

Recently his producers and directors, Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, came to the part in the script where Danny dons his armor and engages in deadly conflict over the hand of Princess Angela Lansbury with the Bad Knight, played by Robert Middleton.

It took the chief armorer about two hours to get Danny into the iron tuxedo. Then, for the next eight hours, Danny trudged this way and that across Stage 15 receiving instructions on how to engage in the joust. It was a cold day outside so of course the set was heated—over-heated in fact.

Manfully, Danny went about the deadly serious business of being funny. The suit weighed more with each passing hour. Finally, however, the day was over and Danny, exhausted, sank to a chair waiting to be unbuttoned, or unriveted, or whatever chief armorers do to un-do brave knights.

No chief armorer. He’d been ordered home with a bad case of the virus. His assistants apparently didn’t know the combination. For more than an hour with everyone else long gone, Danny sat waiting for someone to free him. Finally a studio metal worker arrived bearing cold chisels. Danny Kaye slept very well that night.


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