“What If Danny Had Become a Doctor”

The Day – Sept. 9, 1970

NEW HAVEN—“If I’d had my way a long time ago I might now be the greatest thing since Ben Casey.”

Danny Kaye smiled as he this during a break in rehearsals for “Two by Two,” which begins a two-week engagement at the Shubert Theater next Monday, but the rubber-faced comedian wasn’t wisecracking.

“Jack Benny is a frustrated musician. I’m a frustrated doctor of medicine,” he said.

As a youngster in Brooklyn, he recalled, he hankered to become a doctor. He has gone on to become a leading figure in show business, but he hasn’t completely gotten over his childhood ambition.

Even though he’s a comedian by trade, Kaye’s desire to be a doctor isn’t a farfetched idea. Not according to a man who should know, Dr. Charles W. Mayo of Minnesota’s famed Mayo Clinic.

“Dr. Danny Kaye isn’t as strange as it may sound,” says Dr. Mayo. “He would have made not just a good doctor of medicine but a great one.”

Actually, Kaye’s talents as an actor, singer, dancer, mimic, his quick memory and physical co-ordination, and his acute sense of rhythm and timing would have stood him in good stead in a number of fields, according to associates.

He could have become a top-flight symphonic orchestra conductor, for example, an airline pilot, perhaps even a major league baseball player, they say.

Kaye took up flying in November 1959, obtained his twin-engine license in five and a half months. He has several thousand hours in his logbook and has his instrument rating. He has impressed veteran fliers with his grasp of the intricacies of flying and technical detail.

“He has the fine touch of an artist,” says Mrs. Olive A. Beech, president of Beech Aircraft Corp.

Vin Scully, broadcaster of Los Angeles Dodgers baseball games, says, “Danny Kaye is a knowledgeable student of the difficult art of major league hitting.”

At various times, Kaye has stood in as a guest conductor of the Philadelphia and Boston Symphony orchestras, the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonic and Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra. His ability to memorize complicated scores rapidly has awed the professional musicians.

Eugene Ormandy of the Philadelphia Orchestras says, “Danny’s ability in the conducting field is such that if that were his special forte, he might have risen to great heights.”

At a rehearsal of the New York Philharmonic at which Danny was conducting, Dmitri Mitropoulos was moved to remark to a colleague: “You know this is not funny. This man is a great conductor.”

Is Danny Kaye sorry that he became a performer instead of, say, a doctor or a symphonic conductor?

“Not really, I guess,” he replied as he got ready to go back to rehearsing. “Every once in a while, everybody gets to wishing he’d done something else. It’s human nature. But I’m happy doing what I am doing. That’s what really matters.”

“Two by Two” marks Danny Kaye’s return to a stage musical after an absence of almost three decades. The musical has music by Richard Rodgers, a book by Peter Stone and lyrics by Martin Charnin. Joe Layton conceived and directed the production.

Based on Clifford Odets’ “The Flowering Peach,” “Two by Two” retells the story of Noah, his family, the building of the ark and its 40 day-40 night voyage through the great flood.

Also featured in the cast are Harry Goz, who plays Noah’s eldest son Shem, and Joan Copleand, who portrays Noah’s devoted wife, Esther.

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