“Injured After Visiting Shaw, Danny Kaye Goes On with Show”
Youngstown Vindicator – May 3, 1949
By: Henry Tosti Russell (United Press Staff Writer)
London, May 4 – Danny Kaye, the kid from Brooklyn who has become the current comedy
sensation of British vaudeville, was painfully bruised today because he held a mutual
admiration session with George Bernard Shaw.
Five minutes after leaving Shaw’s home at Ayot St. Lawrence, outside London, Tuesday, Kaye was injured in an automobile accident. But he went on stage at London’s Palladium Theater twice Tuesday night to “wow them as usual” in the greatest performances of his career.
During the first performance, with doctors waiting in his dressing room, Kaye suddenly turned white with pain while before the audience, and the curtain was rung down to the strains of “God Save the King.”
Taken to Middlesex Hospital examination, including X-
Wound in tape from neck to waist, he was permitted to go on stage a second time. One veteran British theater critic commented:
“If he was in pain, then his performance was certainly a classic of the show-
Interviewed backstage, Kaye said:
“You’ll never know what a relief it was to learn I was all right.”
Then, using something akin to the double-
“I’ve never been so thrilled in my life—to meet Shaw, I mean—not to get smashed up in that accident.
“That hurt—I mean the accident—not meeting Shaw. That was wonderful. He’s the most wonderful man I’ve ever met.”
To prove the feeling was mutual, Shaw, who had retired for the night, left word with his housekeeper to say that “Danny Kaye is one of the most handsome men Mr. Shaw has ever met.”
“Is that your appraisal or Mr. Shaw’s?” she was asked.
“Oh, his, of course,” the housekeeper replied. “I wouldn’t think of misquoting Mr. Shaw. Not even for that charming Danny Kaye.”
Kaye was injured while riding in the back seat of a car driven by his representative, Ed Dukoff. It collided with another vehicle on a narrow, winding road near the Shaw home.
“When we hit,” Dukoff said, “it drove Danny’s elbow right into his ribs and he almost fainted with pain.”
Dukoff telephoned the Palladium, where Kaye has been drawing the biggest crowds in British theatrical history, and told the personnel to have a doctor waiting in the comedian’s dressing room.
Wincing with pain, Kaye went onstage with his left hand hanging limply at his side. For more than an hour, he ran through songs, dances, and patter. Then suddenly in the middle of a number he winced and his face blanched. When the curtain dropped and the orchestra struck up “God Save the King,” the theater audience thought it another Kaye gag and refused to rise and stand at attention. But then a theater spokesman announced Kaye had been injured in an automobile accident.