(3 of 5)
I am not so much amused as I am moved." British Cinema Producer Gabriel Pascal (Caesar & Cleopatra, etc.) wanted Kaye to play Macbeth. The Metropolitan Opera's director, Edward Johnson, proclaimed Danny the perfect Figaro—if only he had an operatic voice.
That is about the only stage talent Danny does not possess. Even his first performance, as a watermelon seed in a play at Brooklyn's P.S. 149, showed he had a clown's heart. He was 5½ years old.
Kid Scat to the Catskills. He was born David Daniel Kaminski, son of a Russian-born garment worker named Jacob Kaminski, on Brooklyn's Bradford Street. He soon learned that the only laughter in tenements is self-created, joined "social clubs" which put on amateur theatricals. Then he and a friend named Louis Eisen formed a harmony team.
At 17 he quit school, became a soda jerk, then an insurance investigator—until a slight mathematical mistake on his part cost his firm $40,000. Once a dentist hired him to mind his office during lunch hour; Danny busied himself making needlepoint designs in the woodwork with the dentist's drill. Eventually, he and Eisen took their harmony act to station WBBC, Brooklyn. At last Danny thought he was getting somewhere.
But two years later the team of Kaye & Eisen was still no farther than the borsch summer-resort circuit in the Catskills. Here, besides being straight entertainers, they were also what is known as "tumulers"—aides of the hotel manager who, on rainy days, were sent out to "make with the tumult" and, by distracting disgruntled guests, prevent them from checking out. Kaye & Eisen did their tumuling by chasing each other through the halls with meat cleavers, jumping into fish ponds.
Eisen left vaudeville to become a Brooklyn chiropractor, and Kaye joined a traveling vaudeville troupe, went to the Orient where, acting in front of non-English audiences, he was forced to master the high art of pantomime.
Fans for Rand. Back in the U.S., he stooged for other entertainers, even held fans for Sally Rand. In the spring of 1939, blue and busted, looking for something better, he turned up one night at Manhattan's Keynote Theater, where a group of earnest young theater people were casting a show to be called Sunday Night Varieties.
Seated at the piano was a trim, severe-eyed, V-chinned brunette. She had majored in music at Brooklyn College, had taught piano, worked in a music publishing house, written a few unpublished songs. That day, hoping to get on at the Keynote, she had left a job demonstrating soups in a grocery. Although grimly serious and painfully shy, she bristled with ideas for musical-comedy numbers. Her name was Sylvia Fine.
Sunday Night Varieties closed after one night, but it unwittingly fostered a new success: Danny and Sylvia. The next summer, working together at Camp Tamiment in the Catskills, they really discovered each other. They found that they had lived on the same street in Brooklyn, gone to the same schools, known the same people. (The dentist Danny had worked for as a kid turned out to be Sylvia's father, Dr. Samuel Fine.) They found that Sylvia's lyrics suited Danny, and that Danny's scatting inspired Sylvia. The following winter, they were married.
One month later Danny Kaye became a howling success.