“Now He Revels In TV Role”

Edmonton Journal – Oct. 8, 1966

By: Harold Heffernan

HOLLYWOOD (NANA) – It wasn’t too many years ago, as television history goes, that Danny Kaye was telling anyone who bothered to ask that he would never do television on a regular series basis.

Hated the thing. Wanted no part of it!

This week the same Danny Kaye aired his 100th show here in these early weeks of his fourth consecutive year on CBS with a weekly hour-long program.

Today, Kaye will tell anyone who bothers to ask that he finds television “the most rewarding, stimulating work I have ever done.”

ABOUT-TURN

So what happened to bring about this 180-degree change in attitude?

“Simple,” according to one of Danny’s closest associates, who has made something of a study of the complex Kaye personality. “In almost everything Danny does, he is like a man who gingerly puts his big toe in the water, insists that it is too cold and doesn’t want to go in. When he finally does go in – or, as sometimes happens – gets gently pushed in – he finds it’s the greatest thing that ever happened.

“Danny is not a man who likes change simply for the sake of change. On the other hand, he’s a man who likes patterns. To get him out of one pattern and into a new one is a job that calls for patience and diplomacy. But once he gets into the new pattern, he revels in it, shapes it to his own needs and, nine times out of ten, makes a smashing success of it.

“Eventually, of course, it becomes a tried and true pattern and the job of getting him out of it and into a new one begins all over again.”

Back in November of 1959, for example, Kaye almost walked out of his very first ground-school flying class.

“They were talking a language I knew nothing about,” he recalls, “using words I had never heard of—vectors, back azimuths, co-ordinates. I was scared to death.”

But there’s a bulldog quality about Kaye that never permits him to let go once he decides to sink his teeth into something. Today he holds every pilot’s ticket it is possible to acquire, including an instrument rating, and he is now, among other aerial credits, a working vice-president (as opposed to the “image” variety) of the Lear Jet Corp.

ACTOR-CHEF

As for another Kaye accomplishment and how he acquired his fame as Hollywood’s greatest actor-chef, there is no evidence to indicate that he was first shoved into a kitchen and told to cook or else before becoming addicted to food-grooming.

Danny himself hints it started out as matter of self-defense and, like all the others, he eventually fell in love with his culinary role.

It’s a toss-up whether he likes flying or cooking best. He’s never been injured by a plane, but he did suffer serious burns while making spaghetti sauce in his kitchen two years ago.

MILESTONE

Back to TV, Kaye says he feels that his first 100 shows have sped by in a matter of weeks. For the milestone 100th, he has lined up Ella Fitzgerald and turned her, along with Buddy Greco, into a singing emcee—a not inconsiderable feat considering that Ella, a basically shy person, likes only to sing her own songs and go home.

Kaye works on four different shows at once and had no idea the 100th was coming up. Neither did anyone else for that matter, until somebody happened to notice the production number on the script itself.

“This is the 100th?” was Kaye’s only comment. “Interesting. What are we doing for the 101st?”

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