“Little Street That Wasn’t There, Isn’t”
The Miami News – May 6, 1943
HOLLYWOOD, Cal., May 6 – One street in Brooklyn keeps haunting Danny Kaye and it is making his life miserable. The street hasn’t a name because it isn’t any specific street. It’s just a fragment of a street, with no real existence outside his own mind.
“I saw it when I woke up this morning,” he told me dolefully, “and, boy, did it make me homesick. It was a piece of Brooklyn, all right. It couldn’t have been any other place.”
We were lunching on the terrace overlooking Sunset boulevard, and the soft warmth of the California sun was not so much an evidence of spring as was the fact that Danny Kaye’s fancy kept turning to thoughts of Brooklyn. You could hear the crack of a baseball bat in everything he said, particularly when he wasn’t talking about baseball. It was a wistful crack, in a minor key, and definitely out of the Hollywood world.
“What are you going to do when you finish your picture?” I asked naively. He regarded me as if I were completely insane.
“I mean after you get back to New York,” I said, correcting myself hastily, and he looked relieved.