“Peroxide made Danny Kaye a star”

The Bulletin – Sep. 4, 1957

It was a bottle of peroxide that made Danny Kaye a film star. The most natural and genuine entertainer in the world had to dye his hair to get his Hollywood break, says Kurt Singer in “The Danny Kaye Saga,” published today by Robert Hale at 18s.

Danny was a night-club and musical comedy star of Broadway when early in 1944 Sam Goldwyn summoned him to Hollywood. It was the opportunity that Kaye and his wife, Sylvia Fine, had been waiting for, but at first it seemed that nothing could possibly come of it.

All his screen tests were fiascos—his nose was too long, his hair photographed queerly, and he was as funny as a wet tea-bag.

Kaye was in despair and Goldwyn—“I don’t get ulcers, I give them”—was furious. But then the old movie master thought of peroxide—and Hollywood had a new star.

It is quite a journey that David Daniel Kaminsky has made since he was born of Russian immigrant parents in Brooklyn in 1913.

Crazy Talk

He always wanted to be on the stage, so he spent summers entertaining at holiday hotels and winters looking for work. He toured the Far East with a revue called “La Vie Paree,” run by a sturdy individualist named A. B. Marcus, whose opinion of the carrot-topped comic was, “I don’t think he’s funny and in my estimation he never will be a funny man.”

Years later, when Kaye had become an international star, Mr. Marcus saw his show and visited his dressing-room. “Danny,” he said, “I still don’t think you’re funny.”

But that spell of playing to non-English-speaking audiences did much for Kaye. It improved his pantomime and it encouraged him to experiment with crazy double-talk which, through his remarkable gift of mimicry, sounded like Japanese or Chinese or something.

Back in the States he snapped up any work that was offered to him; then Henry Sherek brought him to play in cabaret at the Dorchester in London. It was a disaster—he died the death and was glad to settle back to America. (His next visit, after the war, topping the bill at the Palladium, earned a very different reception.)

Home again he met Sylvia Fine, who became his wife, his lyric-writer, and, it must be said, an agonizing trial.

She steered him to success, channeling his extraordinary talents, first in night clubs then in shows. She was determined he would get to the top, and especially in Hollywood, she would fight, command, and bully him and others’ enthusiastically and tactlessly.

She was, he admitted, “the head on my shoulders,” but when he began to talk of himself as a wife-made man the marriage seemed to be on the point of breaking up.

They had a temporary parting, but came together again, and now for the Kayes everything appears to be “Fine and Danny.”

Poor Soul

But this man who has made the world laugh and whose greatest pleasure is being Ambassador at Large for the United Nations’ Children’s Fund and whose greatest regret is that he didn’t become a doctor is a many-faceted creature—moody, hilarious, serious, zany.

There was a day the phone kept ringing until Danny snarled into it, “See here, dis is da hangout of Marblehead Moe . . . and I’m warning ya, lay off callin’ here or I’ll get da mob to take ya for a ride—unnerstand? I got da wires tapped and I know where y’are.”

Sylvia looked up, “That poor soul will never call us again. Who was it?”

“Your mother,” said Mr. Kaye gently.

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