Earl Wilson Column
Beaver Valley Times – Aug. 4, 1951
Up in Danny’s suite at the Hampshire House, there was so much noise that by comparison, the Shriner’s convention was quiet.
Three or four phones were ringing, six or 10 friends were waiting in another room and two or five bellboys were rushing in and out.
“Well, I’m a traffic cop again!” said Mrs. Kaye, opening doors and answering phones. “It was nice and quiet here while Danny was in England.”
Danny was on one of the phones screaming.
“For gosh sakes, don’t take a Nembutal!” Danny was telling somebody.
“How is that Danny is always such a terrific hit in England?” I asked Mrs. Kaye, the former Sylvia Fine.
She was sitting on a couch beside me, feeling her eyes. It seems they’d suddenly become puffed. She’d gone to a doctor. He’d told her to think back over everything she’d eaten and drunk for several days, and give him a list. An allergy test.
Danny was still talking to the mysterious somebody . . . loudly.
“I can’t sweetie,” Danny was telling the guy. “Probably when I get back.”
“The same thing will happen here,” Mrs. Kaye told me, “as happened in London, when he goes on his American tour.”
“When’ll that be?” I asked above the uproar.
“Probably when I get through with Hollywood,” replied Danny, who’d finished the phone call, “Maybe in the spring.”
“Mr. Kaye, Eddie Dukoff is calling from Los Angeles,” somebody said. (Eddie is his manager.)
“I’ll take it in here,” Danny said, en route to the bedroom.
Sylvia said he’ll do a big American tour for Sol Hurok, playing auditoriums of not more than 5,000 capacity, to show America what it is that England went delirious about.
“When’ll he go back to England?” I asked.
“At the inside it’ll be two years before I go back,” said Danny, reappearing from the bedroom.
“If you go back too often the kick will be lost. And besides, you have to gather a lot of new things.”
They said the tour will offer a two hour (or more) show, and that Danny wouldn’t even appear in the first half.
“In the first half we’ll try to get people as good or unusual in their acts as Danny is in his,” Sylvia said.
“I’ll probably have four or five acts,” Danny thought.
“Oh, I doubt if that many,”
Sylvia remarked.
Several more people came in. “There must be eight or ten people back there,” Danny shouted – “How many are there?” he asked me.
“I can’t count that high,” I said.
“I want to build the tour into the kind of a thing I can return to year after year,” said Danny, sitting down momentarily and stretching out his long legs.
“Does this rule out television?”
“No!” said Danny. “But where am I running? TV will be here for a while, I hope I’m going to be here for a while too.”
I said I’d better go.
“No hurry,” said Danny. He was taking an English friend and lots of other people to see the Giants play ball and he wanted the Englishman to meet his friend, Leo Durocher.
“Danny’s act,” Sylvia said, “will always be spontaneous, because he never rehearses.”
“I thought he rehearsed hard!”
“No, he just walks through it. He never rehearses facial gestures and those things.”
Danny agreed. “Some performers,” he said, “get in front of the mirror.” He himself got in front of a mirror and mimicked a guy in front of a mirror.
“This guy does it the same way every night. I, on the other hand, have to work the other way.
“That would be too dull for me if I had to do it the same every night!”
“Besides,” Sylvia told him, “you’re a rebel. I know. I used to play piano for you. I had to have eight ears to know what you were doing.”
The doorbell hadn’t rung for nine seconds. It did now. In came two more people, one large (the nurse), one small (Dena, the daughter, 4½) .
“How about a kiss for your crazy old man?” said Danny, leaning down to her. She climbed up onto his neck.
In another minute a dozen or so people trooped out to the ball game. I trooped off to Bellevue.