She was no more than three, but already aware of Danny Kaye because her maternal grandmother had a mint 10-inch vinyl copy of Danny at the Palace (1957). I didn’t discover his masterwork, The Court Jester (1955), until my daughter, Rebecca, born 30 years after the film was released, was old enough to watch with me. For the next three decades, I forgot about Kaye.
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Of one of his movie appearances, Pauline Kael wrote, “If he uses that Irish impersonation again, even the infants may crawl out for a cigarette.” At camp, my bunkmates were now singing Allan Sherman’s and Tom Lehrer’s timelier parodies. He then went to Hollywood, where he specialized in playing lovable dreamers - schlemiels with rich fantasy lives.ĭuring my adolescence, I began to wince at Kaye’s patented awestruck expressions and foreign accents. Born Daniel David Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1913, he’d gone from musical revues in New York and London, where he dazzled audiences with rapid-patter songs written for him by his wife Sylvia Fine, to Broadway musicals.
In fact, Kaye had been a star since my parents’ childhood. At summer camp, if I heard a bunkmate wail, “Mommy, gimme a drinka water,” I knew that we owned the same Danny Kaye record. My classmates and I knew the songs from Hans Christian Andersen (1952), even if we boys didn’t always admit it.
When I was growing up in the 1960s, the entertainer Danny Kaye seemed to be everywhere - today traveling the world on behalf of UNICEF, tonight hosting his own CBS variety show.
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