“Danny Kaye Worries Plenty While Becoming Comedy Hit”
The Miami News – Apr. 30, 1944
By: Erskine Johnson (Special to The Miami Daily News)
HOLLYWOOD, Cal., April 29.—This Danny Kaye, you’ll have to admit, is terrific in “Up in Arms.” People simply get hysterical when he impersonates Carmen Miranda or barks like a dog or does double talk or sets the hepcats rockin’ with his jive singin’. It looks like Danny is due to score the screen’s biggest personal triumph of the year.
Danny also does Russian dialect, sings sentimental Irish songs, dances a la Paul Draper, does a baby’s voice, impersonates a pompous concert singer and also a singer with a cold, does caricatures of politicians, Moscow Art theater actors and fussy French dressmakers.
“Why,” said Sylvia Fine, “there’s nothing Danny can’t do. He’s a wonderful mimic and a very fine actor. I once complained because he didn’t have a German dialect. So he spent a couple of nights with some German refugees and now he has a whole assortment of German dialects.”
Sylvia is Danny’s wife. She also writes his material and his music and his best press agent.
We had a lunch date with Danny and Sylvia, but Danny was a little late. “But,” said Sylvia, “I can tell you more about Danny than he can.”
If we thought Danny was funny on the screen, Sylvia said, we should see him in someone’s
living room, just clowning around. “He’s funnier in a living room than anywhere else,”
she said. “In fact, I get a lot of credit for writing his material. But the stuff
Danny makes up is a lot funnier. That Melody in 4-
Sylvia said Danny went to visit a doctor friend back in Brooklyn. It seems Danny has always had a secret yen to become a doctor. Well, they got to talking about anatomy. And Danny started putting it into verse and singing and that was the beginning of the number. Sylvia just polished it, that’s all.
“I play something on the piano,” Sylvia said, “and he picks it up from there.”
By this time Danny joined us. His hair was a little darker than it was in the picture. He had to bleach it, he said, for the Technicolor cameras. He was pretty happy about the way he had clicked in his first movie, but he hoped he didn’t get a reputation for being just a guy who can do screwy numbers. “I gotta have a story or it’ll ruin me,” he said. “I’d like a story in which the numbers are incidental. They’ll probably want me to do another jive number in my next film, but I don’t think I should.”
Danny takes his comedy very seriously, as all good comics do.
Danny began his career entertaining camps at $200 for the whole season. He tried to get stage jobs on Broadway, but producers couldn’t see him. So he joined a vaudeville troupe and toured the Orient. That’s where he learned his pantomime technique. No one in the Oriental audiences understood English. Danny had to put his gags across with gestures.
The he returned to the states and met Sylvia. It was love and they were married. Sylvia incorporated his jokes into numbers. The rest is history. Danny wowed the customers at a New York night club, La Martinique, in the Broadway production “Lady in the Dark,” and for 16 months in “Let’s Face It.”