“Kaye makes a mirth-stop in S.L.”

The Deseret News – Oct. 4, 1979

By William S. Goodfellow (Deseret News music writer)

It’s been this way for years, now. About the time the guessing games get under way at one of those all-night record bashes (“Who’s the singer—or the pianist? What’s the orchestra?”) I usually break out an old red-label Columbia recording of “Minnie the Moocher.” Nearly everyone spots the singer—the inimitable Danny Kaye. But no one ever guesses the conductor—Maurice Abravenal.

But actually they first met in 1940, when Abravanel was on Broadway conducting Kurt Weill’s “Lady in the Dark,” the show that made Kaye a star. The friendship endured, and now, as a favor to his old friend, the still-red-haired entertainer has agreed to conduct the Utah Symphony in a benefit performance Nov. 3 at Symphony Hall.

Wednesday he was in town to promote the event at a special news conference at the hall—a mirth-filled hour that left at least one fascinating question unanswered: This comic dynamo cum baseball team owner (the Seattle Mariners) cum children’s crusader—is he a zany with a serious streak, or a serious man with a zany streak?

Maybe only his wife (composer-lyricist Sylvia Fine) knows for sure. As for the rest of us . . . well, Fred S. Ball of the Salt Lake Area Chamber of Commerce remembers being in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco one night when Kaye marched in, commandeered the kitchen and cooked everybody’s meal, picking up the tab himself (“It was the best Chinese food I’ve ever eaten,” Ball adds).

The “wonder man” was just as much in control Wednesday, mugging for photographers, fielding questions with questions (“Why am I so driven by my schedule? Why are you so driven to ask questions?”) and touching in a freewheeling manner on everything from baseball to feminism to Salt Lake City (“How come there are no ashtrays here?” he quipped as he looked around the room).

But the serious side surfaced a few times as well, particularly when he talked about conducting orchestras. Leaning back in his blue-denim jacket and slacks, and looking amazingly young for a man who reports 1913 as the year of his birth, he made it plain even amid the unpredictable humor that here was something that means a lot to him. Maybe even as much as the children on whose behalf he’s logged those endless miles for UNICEF. In fact, even while he talks he conducts, those busy hands are moving in time to the speech (or are they setting the tempo?), hammering each point home with the dramatic flair and physical force of a Bernstein.

“I do this because I love doing it,” he said. “I have a better time than anybody in the audience. You see, I had a dream once…”

The dream in question began around 20 years ago when the Brooklyn-born comedian was playing a theater in Philadelphia and found himself sneaking out between shows to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra. Before long Eugene Ormandy approached him about making some kind of benefit appearance—the kind of offer, Kaye said, of which for professional reasons he’d learned to be leery. But he hadn’t bargained on what was coming next.

“The players in the orchestra are so crazy about you,” Kaye remembered Ormandy saying, “they’d play even if you conducted.” The entertainer was flabbergasted. “You mean I could conduct?” he asked. "Well, when I did it I realized that this was the greatest feeling of neurotic power in the world.

“I guess there’s a little Walter Mitty in everybody.”

Since then, he’s satisfied the craving by leading benefit concerts to the tune of $5 million, with orchestras all over the country, and just returned from The Netherlands where he led the famed Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam in a special benefit program for the Year of the Child.

And yet not only does he do it without a fee—he doesn’t even read music. (“He is crazy!” the late Jean Martinon was once overheard saying to fellow conductor Harry Ellis Dickson at a Boston Symphony program Kaye was directing. “We spend our whole life trying to get our head out of the score—that’s where he begins!”)

That hasn’t kept him from forming some pretty strong opinions on music in America and the arts in general, though, as his penetrating comments on the state of the New York Philharmonic (“Mehta will provide what they’ve been lacking—drama, excitement and the desire to play music.”) and government support (he’d like to see more) reveal.

And for a while at least he seems to be all business as he talks about the concert. (And who wouldn’t be with tickets ranging in price from $7.50 to $100 a seat?)

“I started years ago with two pieces,” Kaye recalled, “Strauss’s ‘Tritsch-Tratsch,’ Polka and Toscanini’s arrangement of ‘Stars and Stripes Forever.’ Now we perform anywhere from two hours to two hours and 30 minutes of Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Mahler and Beethoven.

“You see,” he emphasized with a twinkle (or was it a mock-twinkle?) deep in his eye, “this is going to be a very serious concert. If I catch anybody laughing in the audience, they are out!”

Maybe. But with Danny Kaye conducting—well, I wouldn’t be surprised to find Maurice Abravanel up there, only this time he’d be the one signing “Minnie the Moocher.” After all, maybe he has a dream, too.

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