“Danny Kaye To End His TV Holdout With Sunday Show”
Ocala Star-
By: Erskine Johnson (NEA Staff Correspondent)
HOLLYWOOD—(NEA)—Television’s most celebrated holdout and the most talented entertainer
of them all—Danny Kaye—shrugged his short-
“Where are you going to go?”
It was at the first onstage camera rehearsal of “An Hour With Danny Kaye,” the redhead’s capitulation to the electronic medium about which he once said, “Who needs it?” The pretaped “live” show comes to home screens Sunday evening Oct. 30.
With Danny’s shrug came a smile and the words:
“I would be delighted to tell you where I’m going to go—if I knew. But I don’t know. If something happens I’ll be there so just follow me.”
That’s what the camera crew did—and it was like following an egg-
The rays of the morning sun high in the Beverly Hills burnished Danny’s yellow bathrobe, his sandy hair and his freckles and he pulled the Venetian blind cord before returning to his coffee—and his first words about “Television and Me.”
For 10 years the offers had been fabulous. For 10 years Danny’s answer added up to “No.” At times he said, “Who needs it?” But it was never the word “Never.”
“I’ll do TV when the time is right.”
The time, obviously, was right and he said:
“I’d like to give you a great, dramatic, fabulous story about why the time is right. But I don’t have one. I knew TV was here to stay. I just wanted to wait. I’ll be watching on Oct. 30. I may like it. But one show a year is enough. (He’s signed for one a year for three years.).
“I’ve never been married to motion pictures. I’ve spread out my activity: movies,
one-
Why the time is right for Danny Kaye to appear on TV may have been answered when
he explained that his first show will be, like his one-
Because he waited (money he doesn’t need) Danny Kaye almost could be introduced as a fresh, new personality to those “millions” who have seen him on TV only in “The Secret Life of Danny Kaye.”
That wondrous film, last shown in 1957, was about his work with the world’s needy children for the United Nation’s Welfare Fund.
In the show, for which his wife, Sylvia Fine, resumed her role of the lyric writer
Danny likes best, he worked “exactly like I work on the stage.” Although he taped
in advance, the cameras caught the hour show in one full 60-
“I wanted to catch the spirit of a whole, uninterrupted show for its culminative effect. We have a few imperfections but we decided not to retape them. They are the imperfections of spontaneity and I like ‘em.”
The spontaneity, we might add, of that tumbleweek in a hurricane—and where Danny Kaye is going to go in Television no doubt will be where Fred Astaire went—to the Emmy counter.