“Punctuality, food are Danny Kaye’s prime concerns”
The Calgary Herald – Dec. 3, 1976
By: John Camper (The Chicago Daily News)
CHICAGO—I know you readers think we TV columnists spend all our time hobnobbing with celebrities in fancy restaurants.
It’s true. We do. Why, just the other day I was invited to have lunch at Cricket’s, Chicago’s newest “in” restaurant, with Danny Kaye.
Boy, I thought Mrs. Camper’s kid has come a long way from the days when hobnobbing with celebrities meant being allowed to sit with the first string of the high school basketball team at Felbinger’s Grill in Genoa, Ohio.
Danny was here to promote the new production of Peter Pan that’ll be on NBC Dec. 12. He plays both Captain Hook and Mr. Darling opposite Mia Farrow’s Peter.
Hallmark Cards, the sponsor, was picking up the tab for the feed. A Hallmark man
said he likes to make the stars available for one-
Danny was kind of mad that not everyone was on time. I got off pretty easy because I was only a few minutes late, but he chided the two TV critics who got in about 15 minutes late from Indianapolis. They said they’d had trouble finding a place to park, which I could understand but which didn’t seem to cut much ice with Danny.
Danny has done a lot in life, he told us. He is, you know, quite a gourmet cook. Among the people he has cooked for (he specializes in Chinese food) are Paul Bocuse, the famous French chef; the King of Sweden (didn’t catch his first name) and Liv Ullman.
“If you stifle your curiosity about food, you’ll stifle it about everything in life,” he said. “I’ve always been very curious.”
“When you get interested in something, you have to know everything about it,” said his daughter, Dena, 29. “Remember when you got interested in cheese? You had to learn everything about cheese.”
“When I get curious about something, I like to go as far as I can into what made me curious about it from the beginning,” Danny said.
He ordered a grilled whitefish. “Don’t put any butter on it,” he said. “Just grill the fish and put the butter on the side.” I decided to try the seafood crepe.
Another columnist arrived 45 minutes late. That didn’t make Danny very happy. The columnist said, “I really didn’t come here to interview you, I came here to thank you for entertaining me so often.” And, “Every time you perform, it’s with the freshness of water coming out of a spring.” That seemed to make him happy.
Danny started talking about how he likes to put people on.
“I was at the Farmer’s Market one day and some women were looking at some sliced fruit in cellophane and wondering what it was,” he said. “I said it was chicken sliced to look like fruit, and they believed me.”
“Sometimes I call the house and he answers in an accent and I don’t even realize it,” Dena interjected. “I caught you the other morning, though.”
The conversation returned to cooking. “Remember the time you made French bread and you answered the phone and that resulted in its setting too long?” Dena asked.
The fish arrived swimming in butter. I mean it was dead but it had butter all over it.
“Will you look at that?” Danny said disgustedly. He sent it back. I poked at my seafood crepe, which was barely warm.
Danny shared some of his feelings about child raising with us. He believes parents don’t listen to their children and that we spend too much time imparting information to them and not enough time teaching them how to learn.
“You said something great to me yesterday,” Dena said. “You said I don’t need to have a child to please you.”
Danny hardly touched his whitefish, vowed never to have it again. If it was as bad as my seafood crepe, I can understand why.