NOBODY’S FOOL: THE LIVES OF DANNY KAYE. Martin Gottfried. Simon & Schuster. $24. 352 pp.
He was a clown, a comedian, a singer, a dancer – he was more than the sum of his talents. He was Danny Kaye. It took 10 years for Brooklynite Kaye to find his niche, but when he did, he rocketed across the heavens as bright as any shooting star.
Biographer Martin Gottfried is sprightly in recounting a life of contradictions and contrasts. Kaye had no stage training. “Elfin and warm” onstage, he was also a tortured star. As fame and fortune grew he became more remote and withdrawn offstage.
Created by his wife, Sylvia Fine, Kaye abandoned her in their home. She entertained at one end of their California house; he cooked Chinese with Tommy Lasorda or Prince Philip at the other.
He romanced comedienne Eve Arden, singer Benay Venuta and dancer Gwen Verdon; dark hints involved Lawrence Olivier; he was even linked romantically to Princess Margaret but, being Jewish, “Sylvia Fine’s prince was … Princess Margaret’s frog.”
Kaye quit high school in 1930 rather than be punished for piling manure on the lap of a statue at school. Winters, he played Miami Beach bars and clubs; summers, the Borscht Belt.
Sylvia, whose strength was in composing, writing and managing, developed Danny’s act. They met in 1939 and became the perfect team – she wrote the material and made the bookings, he performed. Audiences loved his git-gat-giddle double-talk songs.
Kaye reached Broadway in 1940 in Lady in the Dark; his big song was Tchaikowsky, with the names of 49 Russian composers which he rattled off in 38 seconds. Let’s Face It! with Eve Arden followed. They were in love, Gottfried says.
Kaye’s first film was Up in Arms in 1944. Most remembered are title roles in Hans Christian Andersen and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Kaye worked several years with UNICEF; he connected with children in ways that he never could with adults.
Kaye stepped on other performers’ material. Cab Calloway, who died in November, introduced Minnie the Moocher long before Kaye used it. At London’s Palladium in 1948, his run was followed by Red Skelton. On Kaye’s closing night, with Skelton waiting to be introduced, he used Skelton’s drunk act, then closed without the customary introduction of the next star.
For all Kaye’s fame and fortune, his repertoire would be exhausted in a year or less of today’s television. At the end in the ’80s he was still singing his first songs: Anatole of Paris, Tchaikowsky, Deenah and Minnie the Moocher.
Gottfried reflects the bouyancy of Kaye onstage, making it all the more disappointing to know that his private persona was so different.
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Jules Wagman, last book editor of the old Cleveland (Ohio) Press, now reviews books from Jacksonville.
