“Composer Sylvia Fine Can Write Anywhere Anytime”
The Sunday News-
By: Hal Boyle
NEW YORK (AP) – “Everybody has a desire to know the future,” said Sylvia Fine.
“Most people read their astrological charts in the morning. I wait and read mine in the evening—to find out what kind of day I had.”
Sylvia, wife of Danny Kaye, is a woman of brilliant wit and talent and unconventional ways. She is a gifted composer who has written a hundred songs, and the music for eleven films.
She isn’t the kind of artist who finds her inspiration in an atmosphere of moonlight and roses.
“I write to order mostly,” she said. “And I can write anywhere, anytime.”
Grew Up Together
Sylvia, daughter of a dentist, and Danny, son of an immigrant tailor, were both born in Brooklyn and grew up there only a few blocks apart. But they never met until 1939. They were married the next year, and climbed the heights of show business together.
“A lot of people are under the impression that I handle the business, and do most of Danny’s thinking for him,” she says.
“That’s not true. He has one of the quickest, brightest, most instinctively intelligent minds I’ve ever met.”
“I believe in inspiration, of course,” she said. “But inspiration is merely the difference between a creative and a noncreative mind.”
One thing Sylvia doesn’t share with her husband—his hobby.
“Danny has many doctor friends and on his days off likes to watch them perform operations,” she said.
5 Doctors in Family
“I’m interested in medicine—there were five doctors in our family—but I’m not an operation watcher.”
“It is enormously important to do everything the best you can,” she says. “Never consciously to give less than your best in anything, in human relations as well as your work.
“It is important, too, to remember that every day is a new day, and to make the best of it and enjoy it. The happiest people I know do that.
“I can’t always do it. I worry too much.”