“Danny Kaye’s daughter leads happy, normal life in N.Y.C.”
Tucson Daily Citizen – June 24, 1972
NEW YORK – Even when it’s raining, the sun shines in Dena Kaye’s little apartment.
“Wow, it’s like California,” her friends often say when they open the door to the grass green rug, the couch and comfortable chairs covered in a bright red and white fabric from Marimekko and the flower pots on the window sill.
“That’s the feeling I wanted to get,” says Dena, daughter of Sylvia and Danny. “I was careful about what I spent, because I know it won’t be forever.”
An outdoorsy type who grew up in an aura of swimming pools and tennis courts, she can’t imagine living in the city for the rest of her life.
Right now, though, she’s getting plenty of fresh air in her work, which is traveling, writing about and photographing what she sees.
She’s staff correspondent for the new bi-
“I worked with Horace Sutton in the travel department of The Saturday Review and he asked me to come with him. I sensed it was a place where I could grow.”
In the magazine she has a small piece about Sardinia, where she spent her two vacation weeks this summer.
“My parents are old friends of the Aga Khan and I stayed in his brother’s house, but I was something of a gypsy. I fell into other groups of young people to whom the Aga Khan’s name didn’t mean a thing.”
Though her fluent French and Italian are a great help, Dena’s whole life from her earliest memories has geared her to getting along with people and to slipping with great facility from one kind of world to another.
When she was in school in Europe, she would go to Kensington with her family and to have tea with Princess Margaret in the afternoons.
While she was working on Vogue one summer she lived with her parents in an elegant
apartment at the Sherry Netherland. It seemed so incongruous that she moved into
a one-
People often ask Dena what it was like to grow up with Sylvia and Danny Kaye. “We had a lot of laughs,” Dena says. “My father is very spontaneous. He is also very considerate.”
Her parents were always giving big parties. When she was seven she used to hide on the staircase and watch.
“One night Edna Ferber was the first to arrive. When mother and father came down they found the two of us playing jacks.”
She literally grew up slipping in and out of Margot Fonteyn’s dressing room. “She’s so strong and cheerful. She’s a good friend of my mother.”
Later as a teenager she remembers covering her face with acne goo one night, putting her hair in rollers and running downstairs to find Cary Grant. “Even then I was enough of a woman to know that it wasn’t the way to meet Cary Grant.”
Dena, who was named for a Hebrew song her father used to sing, is the Kaye’s only child. Now in her early 20s, though she still looks like a fresh, natural little girl, she admits she had every chance to become a spoiled brat.
“But actually I learned a lot. I’ve found that people who have accomplished a lot are just people and you can learn by talking to them.”
Her best friends are her parents, and it’s a good relationship.
“When I went to visit them recently, my mother kept me up all night talking. She’s a night person. My father is a day person, so he woke me up in the morning to talk to me. I was worn out in the end.”
Sometimes her friends say she reminds them of Danny Kaye.
“They think I’m funny. I’m quick-
If Dena ever leaves her present apartment it will be for one with a larger kitchen. Like her father, she adores cooking. It’s nothing but sheer joy for her to prepare curried lamb for 30 with her own special addition of kumquats, currants and slivered almonds.
Danny is a famous Chinese chef, and her interest in cooking started when he set a plate of food in front of her and she wouldn’t touch it. “Don’t ever say you don’t like it if you haven’t tried it once,” he said.
It’s a good attitude, according to Dena, as long as you don’t carry it far enough to include drugs.
She likes to entertain eight or nine in her little apartment, where the menu once was a boiling Mongolian pot of broth and Chinese vegetables into which guests dipped pieces of raw meat and chicken.
Her dessert was a cold strawberry soufflé.
Dena has no steady beau and no plans for marrying in the near future. She goes out with lots of people and with lots of different groups. It’s the same story of liking to dip into many worlds.
There’s nothing she likes better than a quiet evening at home.
“I go to the market and buy a steak and make a wonderful salad. Then I curl up with a book in one of these chairs. I don’t do needlepoint or sew. In cooking there’s more room for experimentation.”
This is Dena Kaye’s first interview, she says, but it’s hardly likely to be her last.