X-Ray Marks the Spot

Danny Kaye knocked the audience out, and nearly himself, during his memorable 1949 engagement at the London Palladium.

Danny Kaye's visit with playwright George Bernard Shaw on May 3, 1949 may have made the papers, but it was the ride back from Ayot St. Lawrence that generated the headlines.

Danny had to hurriedly rush back to London to perform two shows that evening at the Palladium. To get to the theater on time, Danny’s publicity manager, Eddie Dukoff, had to speed back along the narrow, winding road. As Dukoff rounded one curve, he collided with a second car, the impact driving Kaye’s elbow into his own ribs.

Danny telephoned the Palladium to report the accident and to make sure there would be a doctor waiting in his dressing room. When he arrived at the theater, his side was quickly bandaged and he wobbled on stage and little late and in sever pain. But, about fifteen minutes into his act, Kaye, sure his ribs were cracked, excused himself into the wings as the band struck up “God Save the Queen.” Nevertheless, he returned and uncomfortably completed his performance with his arms hanging stiffly at his sides.

After the show, Danny rushed to Middlesex Hospital, where X-rays revealed that he had collected no broken bones, but serious bruises. Kaye once again returned to the Palladium that evening, in time to make the 8:00 performance. Taking the stage, he pulled open his shirt to expose his strapped chest and explained, “They told me that it was nothing serious, and that I’d just fractured all my ribs.”

Danny did his act without a break, but did ask the crowd if he could perform for a while from a low stool. He stood up again at the finish, but was practically knocked back down by the deafening applause.

Pianist Sammy Prager recalled, “Next night he told the story to the audience and apologized for what happened the night before. Then he took out his X-ray plates and went down into the audience with them. He spent ten minutes handing the X-rays around for people to look at. He’ll do anything. He’s a gambler.”

Over the next few weeks, whenever someone in the audience inquired about Kaye’s health, he would pull out his X-rays.

Kaye & Shaw

London's latest sensation, Danny Kaye, met celebrated George Bernard Shaw in 1949.

On May 3, 1949, a week after beginning his second triumphant run at the London Palladium, Danny Kaye took a Tuesday morning trip to Ayot St. Lawrence, to visit a group of friends who were hosting a tea party for their neighbor, acclaimed playwright George Bernard Shaw. Not long after Danny at the home, the 92-year-old Shaw came walking through the door, asking, “Anybody here I know?”

The neighbors introduced their two guests, after which Shaw remarked, “Seems to me I’ve read of you somewhere.” Kaye was a bit apprehensive before meeting the literary legend, but the two warmed up to each other immediately.

“How long are you staying, Danny?” Shaw asked.

“As long as Britain can take it, sir.”

“Well, they’re still taking me, Danny.”

Shaw later complimented him: “Young man, you don’t need make up. You’ve got it all in your face.”

The pair even made a short home movie, in which Shaw tiptoed out form a clump of bushes, tapped Kaye on the shoulder, and then flung his arms around him. “I shouldn’t like you,” Shaw said. “If you have your way, you’ll do away with authors. You do whatever comes into your head.”

“Now I know why you hate actors,” Danny replied. “You’re a better actor than all of us.”

After a long look, the elder admitted. “You’re probably right.”

The visit stretched into a pleasant two hours, but Kaye had to finally leave to do his two Palladium shows that evening. It was during his rushed drive back to the theater that disaster struck. Next week: the rest of the story...

The Practical Joker

Danny Kaye was never a practicioner of hand buzzers or whoopie cushions, but often he would try to break up the long hours on stage and soundstage by playing practical jokes on his co-stars—in the middle of their performances. Typically, his aim either to see if he could mess with the other actors' concentration or otherwise throw them into utter confusion.

During the making of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Virginia Mayo was concurrently filming the highly regarded drama The Best Years of Our Lives at the Goldwyn studio. She shared with me how, while filming her most serious scenes on Best Years, Danny would hide out of camera range and make silly faces at her, to try to get her to flub her lines.

In 1942, Eddie Cantor was appearing on Broadway in Banjo Eyes at the Hollywood Theatre, just down the street from the Imperial Theatre, where his pal Kaye was starring in Let’s Face It. One evening Danny dropped in on Eddie backstage, not long before the curtain was supposed to go up. Cantor had no time for his guest, explaining, “Sorry, Danny, but we’re kind of busy right now. One of the chorus boys didn’t show up, and we’re trying to figure out what we can do with the drill number without him.”

“Sure, pal,” Danny smiled, seeming to take the quick brush-off well. “I know how it is. See you later.”

Cantor was appropriately nervous when it came time for the drill routine, but surprised when the act was greeted with tremendous laughter from the audience and from the orchestra pit. He was surprised, that is, until he looked down the short chorus line to see Danny decked out in the ill-fitting costume, deliberately out of step.

In 1959, Danny took his stage revue to Australia, appearing with—among others—expert juggler Francis Brunn. During one of Brunn’s demonstrations, when he had several objects flying through the air, a pair of old socks suddenly floated down from the catwalk. His concentration shattered, the performer stopped cold. Brunn continued his juggling, until he was greeted by a pair of red flannel underwear. When he was next treated to a flurry of falling odds and ends, he stopped a third time and huffed off the stage.

Kaye hurriedly threw on an old raincoat and hat and managed to pass Brunn as he stalked to his dressing room. “Hello, Francis. How goes things?” the comedian smiled as he casually walked on.

Brunn turned to stop him. “Where were you just now?” he demanded. Kaye looked at him curiously, glanced down at his raincoat and shrugged. The juggler frowned in disbelief.

Danny the Swinger

Kaye was deadly serious about golf, even though his home course was the Hillcrest Country Club, home of the infamous comedians' roundtable that included Groucho Marx, Jack Benny, George Burns, et. al.

With his amazing concentration, perfectionism and athleticism, Danny Kaye was a natural at golf. Yet he didn’t pick up a golf club for the first time until he was in his 30s, during his first trip to Hollywood in 1942.

“When I first came to California,” Kaye recalled to a reporter, “I had never seen a golf course in my life. But I went out one day with (agent) Abe Lastfogel, and he talked me into hitting just one ball. It went 200 yards straight down the middle. I told Abe there was nothing to it. Golf was a game for old men. A few weeks later, I went out on the golf course again and hit the ball only six feet. So I hired a teacher, bought some clubs, and spent six hours a day practicing for five weeks. The first time I played eighteen holes I broke a hundred.”

Actor Benny Baker, whom Kaye brought along from his Broadway show Let’s Face It to play a similar GI role in his first movie, Up in Arms, recalled a typical afternoon with Kaye on the golf course: “I’d call him, he’d say, ‘I’m going to Hillcrest. Want to walk around with me?’ I said, ‘Sure, I’ve got noting else to do.’ He was playing golf with Jack Benny and a couple of other people, but he didn’t hear anything. Jack Benny was complaining something happened with the program he was unhappy with, and Danny was just playing the golf. He couldn’t hear anything. He couldn’t see anything. He just saw that ball and where he wanted to put it. That’s the difference. That’s a drive that makes anybody a success.”

Kaye was golfing in his typically silent nature another afternoon with Jack Benny, who finally said, “Please talk—it’s so boring!” So Danny gabbed nonstop for the next three holes, until Benny finally yelled, “Oh, shut up!”

One day in Palm Springs, Kaye was playing golf with Benny, Bob Hope, and Charlie Resnick. Danny had been playing terribly that day and was cursing every shot, using only the filthiest words of his vocabulary. Benny tried to quiet him, but Kaye continued with his outbursts. When they arrived at the seventh hole, the group had caught up with a pair of little old ladies and asked if they might play through. With the women waiting, Danny stepped up to tee off. He hit a lousy shot and turned to see his friends watching him with worried looks “Oh, dear!” Danny sighed, as Jack ran away in hysterics. The two women remained confused.

By the late 1950s, Kaye was a five-handicap, regularly shooting in the low 70s. But then he discovered flying and, suddenly, lost all interest in golf. He said it just wasn't mentally challenging enough.

Two Sides of Danny Kaye

Tommy Grasso became a well-regarded PBS television director, but paid his dues in the early 1960s as a cue-card holder at CBS, working on The Danny Kaye Show and The Judy Garland Show. Grasso thought the heavy demands of an hour-long weekly variety show took their toll on Kaye (“He turned into a schmuck”). But, years later, Grasso would reevaluate his opinion.

An April 1964 cooking accident left Danny with a severely burned foot—and a cranky disposition.

As Grasso recalled, “I was a very young kid then. I was working with Barney McNulty, cue cards. One week I’d either work on Kaye or I’d work on Judy Garland. I liked working on Judy Garland, because I got paid more, because in those days she would go til 3:00 or 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, which was a ludicrous thing.

“They always rehearsed across from each other. Kaye was a very hard show to do because everything was on cue cards. The cue cards would be so heavy for all the skits they used to do.

“One night Kaye was cooking spaghetti at (choreographer) Tony Charmoli’s house. The pot boiled over, went onto his foot, and burned it very badly. They couldn’t rehearse at the studio, so we rehearsed up at (Danny’s) house on that show. I went up to his house a—I’m 20, 21 years old—and showed up at his house early. So the houseboy puts me in this, not their living room, but their music room/den-type of situation. I’m sitting there and Danny comes out walking on crutches and smoking a pipe, which he at that particular time started smoking a pipe because that’s when the cancer thing came in with cigarettes, so everybody switched to pipes. And this humungous pipe comes walking out. I was very nervous and very shy, because I didn’t have that much to do with him. I kind of hid anyway. And he stopped, and I stood up and I said, ‘Mr. Kaye, I hope you’re feeling better.’ And he says, ‘What the hell do you care for?’ I was embarrassed.

“The funny thing is almost 17 years later, I was doing a thing for PBS called The Warner Bros. Musical Movies, and I somehow I talked Sylvia Fine into doing it. So I go back up to their house, now 17 years later. Go in. The houseboy puts me in the same room. I swear to God not one piece of furniture was changed, nothing. Out comes Danny, the same bathrobe, and I break out in a cold sweat because I figure, ‘Jeez, he’s gonna get ornery with me again,’ and I hopped right up again and I said, ‘Hello, Mr. Kaye, how are you?’ And he said, ‘Oh, fine.’ Very, very nice. He asked, ‘What are you driving?’ I said, ‘Well, I have a rental car,’ because at that time I was back East working for PBS. He said, ‘Well, you take my wife’s car, because it’s special built for her. She has a bad back.’ I said, ‘Sure, fine.’ He was very, very nice and said, ‘Yes, excuse me, because I have a chef over from France, and I’m in the kitchen…’ Very, very, extremely nice.

“Now I had to take Sylvia down to KOCE (in Huntington Beach). We had a nice studio where we did the thing, and through the course of the evening, I tell her the same story, and she said, ‘Well, that’s Danny. Sometimes he’s a schnook and sometimes he’s not.’ He was a very temperamental man.”

Danny & The Censors

Danny Kaye was a notoriously G-rated comedian. Although he was known to use colorful language off-stage, he refused to perform any blue material in front of an audience. In fact, for years he turned down lucrative offers to take his one-man stage show to Las Vegas nightclubs, out of fear that his fans would think he was up to something not fully wholesome.

His screenwriters, however, occasionally tried to slip racier material into his movies. Yet, every script and every song lyric first had to make it past the censors at the Production Code Administration.

Danny’s writers first tangled with the PCA on his second movie, Wonder Man (1945). The movie was originally supposed to end in two bridal suites (Edwin and Ellen’s, Monte and Midge’s) on their wedding nights, when the ghost of Buzzy appears. The censors objected to the actors’ wardrobe (negligees and pajamas), location (hotel bedrooms), and three words of dialogue by Ellen (“... maybe even tonight.”). They insisted the actors be fully dressed, the action moved outside to the balconies, and the suggestive line deleted. The writers refused and resubmitted the scene with no changes. Again, the censors objected. In the end, the writers cut Monte and Midge, and softened Ellen’s line—although she remained in a nighty, in the bedroom.

The PCA also protested with an early draft of The Kid from Brooklyn (1946) contained the word “jerk”—which was on the group’s list of forbidden words. The writers had figured it was okay, because Danny performed it in a heavy Swedish accent. They ended up cutting the whole bit.

One version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947)—freshly rewritten by James Thurber—incorporated a “firing squad daydream,” with dialogue straight from Thurber’s original short story. The PCA deemed unacceptable Mitty’s scornful command to his executioners—“to hell with the handkerchief.” In the end, the filmmakers would cut not only the line, but the entire firing squad sequence, all the other dreams Thurber added, and basically everything else Thurber had tried to work into the script.

For The Inspector General (1949), Sylvia Fine wrote a song called “Sililoquy for Three Heads,” in which Kaye seeks counsel from three visages—an arrogant Danny (Russian), an elegant Danny (Englishman), and a smart Danny (Viennese). The censor board, however, misunderstood one of her lyrics for flipping off the audience. Sylvia had to explain that “Give ’em the finger!”—as the Viennese Danny delicately extended his index finger to the side of his nose—represented his thoughtful attitude.

The censor battles came to a head during On the Riviera (1951), as detailed more fully in the new book Danny Kaye: King of Jesters. The film was designed as an adult romantic comedy, built around infidelity, so conflict was inevitable. The writers filled their scripts with so many double entendres that some of them made it through to the final film.

Starting with Danny’s very next film, Hans Christian Andersen (1952), the notes from the PCA stopped. Perhaps by this time, as Danny began to be more closely identified with children, he and Sylvia had themselves begun to self-police the scripts? Or maybe times were changing, as the situations in On the Double (1961) were every bit as racy as those of On the Riviera.

Walter Mitty's Weirdest Dream

In dreaming up The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), producer Sam Goldwyn's screenwriters sketched out a number of daydreams for Danny Kaye that never made it to the screen:  the infamous filmed-but-deleted Irish fugitive dream, the firing squad dream, the courtroom dream, the Dutch dike dream, the Inspector Mitty of Scotland Yard dream, the submarine pilot dream, the medieval knight dream (featuring a swordfight between the dashing Sir Walter Mitty and villain Boris Karloff that foreshadows the climax of The Court Jester), an Austrian psychiatrist dream—all detailed in that amazing new book Danny Kaye: King of Jesters.

All of these dreams would have made fascinating set pieces for Kaye, although there was one more unused dream that has always struck me as peculiar:  a “serial hero” dream. Inspired by the Saturday matinee action serials that ended each week with an over-the-top cliffhanger, the sequence was included in the first full screenplay by Everett Freeman and Ken Englund (November 14, 1945), after the scene where Walter and Rosalind return to Uncle Peter’s house to hand over the black book.

But when Uncle realizes Rosalind is on to him, he gives Walter a spiked drink. Our hero is knocked out and begins dreaming...

... he’s an Indiana Jones-type adventurer, who finds himself battling little green space aliens in the jungle. He narrowly escapes, and sprints down a forest path, crashing through a hidden passageway and into a dungeon. There, a black-cowled figure has Rosalind tied up and sets a pack of gorillas loose on our hero. The villain then is about to administer a deadly hypodermic needle to Rosalind ...

… just as Walter awakens in Van Hoorn’s home, who informs two henchman, pretending to be cops, that this young man burst into his home looking for his niece—but he has no niece.

And this sequence must have had next to no chance of being filmed. Goldwyn promptly contacted James Thurber to try to get his writers back on track.