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He likes practical jokes. One time in Hollywood, he wore a false beard home, begged for food at his own back door, was promptly kicked out by his stern cook.
Apart from the theater, his greatest interest is surgery. Whenever he has time and a doctor's permission, he watches delicate operations in Manhattan or Hollywood hospitals. For more active relaxation, he plays golf (in the low 80s) or travels with the Brooklyn Dodgers. A close friend of Leo Durocher, the Bums' manager, he was the Lip's battery mate on a U.S.O. tour to the Orient. Periodically, Kaye frets about his health—which is phenomenally good—and gulps vitamins galore or retreats to an upstate New York health farm, where he hikes ten miles before breakfast.
Like many a self-made man, he is pleased with his new-won splendor. He accepts Hollywood's lavish attention as a matter of course; surveys his Hollywood home and his Manhattan apartment, richly decorated in antiques and colonial furniture, with a satisfied eye. He seldom slips into his custom-made, monogrammed shirts, or expensive, tailor-made suits, without the triumphant recollection that once he was a kid from Brooklyn.
Last week he left Manhattan for Hollywood to begin work on his new picture, an adaptation of James Thurber's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and play out his radio program from the West Coast. In all his work, new or old, he never forgets how he got where he is.
"Sylvia has a fine head on my shoulders," he says.
* Copyright MCMXLI by Chappell & Co., Inc., N.Y.C.