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A Piece of Lace. New York discovered Danny Kaye the same night he discovered himself. A song written by Sylvia was the catalyst. Called Stanislavsky, it kidded the great entrepreneur of the Moscow Art Theater, whose "method," according to Sylvia's lyric, consisted of teaching drama students to:
Be a tree, be a sled,
Be a purple spool of thread.
Be a storm, a piece of lace,
A subway train, an empty space.
Danny sang it for the first time one night in February 1940, in La Martinique, a Manhattan basement nightclub. He was an immediate hit, not only because he was funny singing in Russian dialect, but also because he puckishly suggested that he, too, could be a tree, a sled, or anything his comic imagination wanted.
Broadway Playwright Moss Hart heard Stanislavsky, promptly signed Danny for the role of the swishy photographer in Lady in the Dark. More than once. Danny stopped the show. More than once he came close to stealing it from Gertrude Lawrence. After Let's Face It, Hollywood was inevitable. Danny signed a five-year contract with Sam Goldwyn, promised to make a picture a year for $150,000.
But he found Hollywood stifling, tiring and dull; and he missed the quick reactions of an audience. Up In Arms and Wonder Man were neither the best cinema nor the best Kaye. They mixed some old and new numbers by Sylvia with some old and older tricks by Goldwyn. But they had some wonderful, isolated Kaye routines (Bali Boogie, Lobby Song) and they were smash box office. Kaye's new picture, The Kid from Brooklyn, a remake of Harold Lloyd's The Milky Way, is due for release in mid-April.
"Oh, Really?" Better seen than heard, Danny Kaye is never at his best on radio. Listeners miss the virility of his clowning, the humor of his mugging. Not a good straight man, Danny flounders as he lugs the weight of dull dialogue. His weekly show (CBS, Fri., 10 p.m., E.S.T.) is principally known for its variations of:
"My sister married an Irishman."
"Oh, really?"
"No, O'Riley."
Danny pays $3,500 a week to Goodman Ace, one of radio's top scripters, for such related versions of this gag as: "We have potatoes." "Oh, really?" "No, au gratin." Or, "My sister came from the southwest." "Oh, really?" "No, Oklahoma." Now, hardly a word beginning with "O" is safe.
Nevertheless, the popularity of Kaye's show has come up faster than any other new program's. On the air for little more than a year, he tied Veteran Jimmy Durante for fifth place in the Radio Daily popularity poll.
For this, as for most of Kaye's success, Sylvia Fine shares the credit. Few collaborators work so well together. Danny's sparkle and titanic energy inspire—and force—Sylvia to work; Sylvia's dry, coruscating wit keeps Danny from falling into the banalities and cliches of overworked comedians.
Slapstick & Surgery. In private life, many comedians are sad sacks. Not Danny. Friends who telephone his Hollywood home or his twelve-room Park Avenue apartment often hear the answering voice of a Japanese houseboy, an Italian cook, a Negro valet, an English butler or a Russian piano teacher, patiently wait for Danny to call himself to the phone.