“Noah, the Ark Builder, Is Versatile Danny Kaye”
Youngstown Vindicator – Jul. 12, 1971
By: Rebecca Morehouse
NEW YORK – When Danny Kaye’s daughter, Dena, was a child, someone asked him what he wanted her to be when she grew up. He answered: “I profoundly hope she’ll be a woman, then she can decide what she wants do do.”
Dena is 23 now. She graduated from Stanford University in 1968, has her own apartment in New York, works for Saturday Review. Her mother is Sylvia Fine, the comedy writer and lyricist who has been Mrs. Danny Kaye since 1941. [This is incorrect. It is actually 1940. – J.N. Webmistress]
“Dena does research for Horace Sutton, the travel writer at Saturday Review,” Danny said. “Just recently, she wrote her first piece and her first byline in the magazine and she’s absolutely hysterical.
“We’re very close but I don’t try to impose restrictions or rules upon her. She is a total human being and she has to live her own life. She shouldn’t be living her life to please me.”
Noah
Danny plays Noah the ark-
“I love doing the show, I enjoy it when I’m out there onstage,” he said. “But I mind the confinement. This is the longest I have been in one place for 30 years. I’ve been in New York a year now, since last July, except for the weeks we were on the road. I miss my California home and I miss my kitchen—oh, Lord, yes!”
He was in dressing room No. 1, just off stage to the left, before a matinee.
“When we were doing ‘Let’s Face It,’ there were two tiny dressing rooms in this space,” he said. “Eve Arden had one and I had the other, with a john in between. I came back after 29 years and it was exactly the same. So I said it would be nice if they would turn the two of them into one, which they nicely did.”
Magical Danny
Time does not weary, fatten or deplete Danny Kaye. He still has a magical way with an audience and, at 58, he is slim and vital, his hair stubbornly blond, his eyes buoyantly blue. A few days after a stage mishap, which tore the ligament in his left ankle, he returned to work on crutches and in a leg cast.
“A torn ligament is really worse than a break,” he said. “It’s more painful and takes longer to heal.”
He knows quite a lot about the human body and sometimes wishes he had been a doctor. He is an honorary member of the American College of Surgeons.
If adults respond to him, children are made for him; and he is at his most winning
when he is talking with, or performing for, small fry. Those who watched his television
show, 1963-
Ad Libbed
“We never rehearsed that spot,” he said. “She didn’t really know she was on TV, she was only 2 or 3. I still see Vickie. We have tea or lunch together and she’s coming to New York to see the show.
“Children are the greatest magnifying glasses in the world; they know whether you like them or merely pretend to like them. Most adults find it difficult to communicate with a child because they’re inhibited and embarrassed to act like a child. I don’t have those inhibitions.
“I have dealt with children all over the world. Sometimes I don’t understand one word they’re saying and they don’t understand what I’m saying but we understand each other perfectly. You have to deal with them on an emotional level, you have to play with them. They behave the same all over the world.”
Danny is ambassador-
He is expert in Chinese cookery and a licensed airplane pilot with instrument, commercial and jet rating.
“I sold my jet about five months ago, but I keep going to school to keep up my efficiency. I like going upstairs alone. At 40,000 feet you are removed from everything on earth, there’s a detachment, a separateness.”