“Kaye’s Daughter Not Interested In Acting”
Waycross Journal-
HOLLYWOOD—You have every right to assume that Dena Kaye is, or will shortly be, in show business. Why not? She is an attractive blonde, young, bright and possessed of that certain something that makes it easy to become a star—to wit, a family of stars.
Her father is Danny Kaye. Her mother is Sylvia Fine, who wrote much of the material Danny used over the years.
But, curiously, you will probably never see the name Dena Kaye up in lights. Maybe someday you will see it up there as a writer of something, but even that is doubtful. She writes, but, at the moment, she has no interest in writing for the theater or for motion pictures.
Dena is that curiosity, a child of a star who is really NOT interested in showbiz at all. Her parents never pushed her into it…or out of it. They just weren’t very pushy at all.
In fact, she says, maybe her father bent over backward not to influence her. He was
strictly a hand-
“When it came time for me to go to college,” Dena says, “I said, ‘I think I’ll go to Stanford.’ And he said, ‘That’s great.’ Then I said, ‘No, maybe I’ll go to Michigan.’ And he said, ‘That’s great.’ He just didn’t want to influence me.”
As it turned out, she went to Stanford, where she majored in history. But it is not as a historian that she is currently making her mark. It is as an author of a travel book.
For five years, she was Horace Sutton’s assistant, when he was travel editor of The Saturday Review. She got her feet wet and her passport heavily stamped in those five years. She has put much of what she learned, plus other things she researched, into a book called “The Traveling Woman.”
It is full of tips for the woman traveler—not specifics, such as which hotel is the best in Zanizibar—but necessary generalities, such as how to pack and what the weather is going to be like and what to do about money and tipping and tickets and all that.
Since she left The Saturday Review, she has been a free-
She has, for example, done a definitive article on the diamond industry (modestly, she says it has been appraised as one of her best ever done on that tricky business) and another, upcoming, deals with women in politics.
Somehow, she says, show business simply never turned her on. She was exposed to it as a child as a matter of course.