Danny Kaye's Stomping Grounds: Then & Now, Part I

Unfortunately, there aren’t many people around today who grew up knowing or working with Danny Kaye dating back to his early years in New York. But many places survive that we can visit to see where he began.

(1) Danny’s Boyhood Home: 361 Miller Ave., Brooklyn, NY
During his boyhood in the 1910s, Danny lived with his parents, two brothers, and grandmother in a small apartment on Miller Avenue in Brooklyn. Today, there’s a four-story building at that address, crammed with 20 tiny apartment units, but city records show that structure was built in 1925, after the Kaminskys had moved out. Perhaps the construction is why in the early 1920s, the family relocated to the next block, Bradford Street.

(Top) Danny about age 3 with an unidentified friend, possibly in front of his first home, at 361 Miller Ave. in Brooklyn. (Lower) Here's the site today. If building records are correct and this four-story apartment complex wasn't built until 1925, Danny and family moved shortly beforehand. 

(2) Danny’s Elementary School: 700 Sutter Ave., Brooklyn, NY
Danny was schooled through eighth grade at Public School 149, a five-minute walk from his family’s apartment. The facility, later renamed in his honor as PS 149 The Danny Kaye School, now teaches grades pre-K through fifth. (In 1952, Kaye recorded the school’s fight song, “Good Old 149,” as part of a medley with “I Belong to Glasgow” and “Tchaikovsky.”)

Danny's elementary school, PS 149, has been renamed in his honor.

Danny's home from adolescence through adulthood, at 350 Bradford St. in Brooklyn.

(3) Danny’s Longtime Home: 350 Bradford St., Brooklyn, NY
From the early 1920s through the late 1930s, Kaye listed his home address as 350 Bradford Street. The lease was in his father, Jacob Kaminsky’s, name. But since Danny was an itinerant show business performer, he “moved out” dozens of times, only to keep returning to Poppa until Danny married Sylvia Fine at age 29. The snug two-story brownstone, built in 1901, survives to this day.

Danny's home from adolescence through young adulthood, at 350 Bradford Street in Brooklyn, still stands.

(4) Danny’s High School: 400 Pennsylvania Ave., Brooklyn, NY

Thomas Jefferson High School was just a few years old when Danny enrolled. He dropped out shortly before graduation to pursue a show biz career. In 2007, the school was closed due to poor performance and the campus was given over to four smaller, specialized schools (performing arts/technology, nursing, civil rights, fire/life safety).

Danny's high school, Thomas Jefferson High School, is now four vocational schools in one.

(5) Danny’s Catskills Resort: White Roe Lake Rd., Livingston Manor, NY
In 1929 at age 18, Danny was hired as a “tummler” at the White Roe Lake House in the Catskill Mountains. Meyer Weiner had purchased the property in 1919 from Emory Keene, who had been operating it as a farm and boarding house. Weiner transformed it into a summer camp for young Jewish singles. Kaye was among the hired hands who made sure all the guests were constantly entertained, so they wouldn’t want to check out.
The main house offered lodging (with overflow guests and staff living out of tents), plus courts for tennis, basketball and handball, a baseball diamond, riding stables, boathouse, and private lake, three-quarters of a mile long, for swimming and boating. In all, Danny would spend six summers at White Roe, but brand new during his first was a gorgeous two-story Social Hall down by the lake. Topped by a gabled roof and faced with wood shingles and white trim, the elegant structure featured a recreation hall on the main floor, as well as an auditorium with a professionally equipped, 50-foot-wide stage. Every night it would come alive with dancing to a live orchestra or a stage production.
White Roe Lake continued as a Jewish singles resort through the 1950s. In the 1960s, the Weiners sold the property to the Hebrew Institute of Long Island, to use as a youth retreat called Camp HiLi International. The site was later purchased for a private residence, by a party who tore down all structures from Kaye’s days. Only a couple of reminders survive: an abandoned concrete pad where the tennis courts once sat and the entry road running the near-identical dogleg path that it always has, ending at the former site of that glorious Social Hall. In the exact spot sits a modern residence featuring a similar gabled roof.

White Roe Lake, Danny's first show biz home. The first real stage he ever appeared on was in the Social Hall (lower left).

Danny (back row, second from right), his arm around his mentor Nat Lichtman, with his 1935 castmates in front of White Roe's Social Hall.

All buildings have been torn down along White Roe Lake to make room for a private residence built on the site of the old Social Hall.

Next Time: In Part II, our travels will take us to five more historic Danny Kaye landmarks in New York.

Prelude to Valentine's Day: Danny Kaye the Romantic

One unfortunate misconception that has arisen over the last 20 years is that Danny Kaye was perpetually remote, dispassionate, uninterested in love, and sexually confused.

Certainly, I have no undercover video from Kaye’s bedroom. I never witnessed him out on a date. None of us can know for certain what he did with whom behind closed doors. But going by the testimony of his closest friends and co-workers, Danny had a deeply passionate, romantic side to complement his frequently withdrawn side.

Admittedly, over the last 50 years of his life, onlookers saw few public displays of romance. Although Kaye clearly loved his wife, there’s no evidence that he was ever in love with her. Best as I can tell, Danny cared for Sylvia Fine, he admired her talent, and he was indebted to her role in his career. Yet after they married, Kaye’s future wooing would involve Other Women and usually take place away from publicity cameras.

Danny's six-year affair with Eve Arden (clubbing with, at left, Humphrey Bogart) was one of Hollywood's worst kept secrets in the 1940s.

Most notably, within two years of marrying Sylvia, Danny began a torrid, six-year affair with Eve Arden. Eve eventually left her husband for Danny. Shortly thereafter, Danny left Sylvia for Eve, but returned home six months later. He vowed to never leave Sylvia again, but not to be faithful.

In the years before he met Sylvia, Danny was like the other young bucks employed by the White Roe Resort of the Catskills—he was expected to keep the guests entertained, particularly the young females. So, as Kaye’s skills as a performer improved, so did his reputation as a ladies’ man.

His first “head-over-heels” romance began in 1933 during a break from White Roe, on a cross-county-turned-Asian tour with the A.B. Marcus troupe. He met a tall, blonde, 23-year-old dancer named Holly Fine (no relation to Sylvia) and fell madly in love.

But even after Danny left the tour at the end of 1934 and then returned to White Roe in the summer of 1935, he continued writing to Holly on an almost daily basis—and calling her whenever he could commandeer the phone in his boss’s office.

The long-distance romance continued in fits and starts over the next several years, until Holly finally left the tour in 1939 and settled down in Florida, where she married a local grocery store owner. About the same time, Danny became permanent partners with Sylvia. But Holly would always treasure her letters from Danny and, after she died in 1998, her estate donated many of her papers to the University of Michigan.

On Valentine's Day, we’ll peek into some of those touching love letters…

A Catskills Farewell

Welcome to my new Danny Kaye blog, designed to contain the latest Danny Kaye news and even more fascinating tales and rare images than could be held in my new book Danny Kaye: King of Jesters. (The mere existence of this blog does not imply that the book isn't exhaustively comprehensive. The stories about Danny are endless; the book is not. It's 304 pages of sheer joy. Trust me. Check it out.)

But to kick off this new blog, let’s go back to the very end of the very beginning:  Danny’s final days as a “tummler.”

He spent six summers at White Roe Lake Resort in Livingston Manor, N.Y., entertaining the summer campers from sun-up till the wee hours of the morning. Although Danny grew to hate the unstructured, “social” requirements of his job (the constant “pepping up” of the guests, the impromptu “porch sessions,” the mandatory romancing of all the single women), he did seem to enjoy the more professional aspects of appearing in plays, concerts and revues.

Come September 1, 1935, he was determined to make it his final appearance at White Roe. The final revue of the season, called “Curtain Calls,” contained the best numbers of the year, and Danny was featured on the cover of the program. He began the show with his popular number “Black Coffee,” appeared in several other sketches and solos, and starred in the ambitious show-closing production number “Song of the Miners.” Danny’s biggest concern was performing well for his father, Jacob, who came up to the camp for the weekend.

As Danny recounted days later in a letter to his girlfriend, showgirl Holly Fine:

“My Dearest Baby-Doll,
Well, it’s all over and the summer is ended officially, although there are still a few people left.
My father was here over the weekend and he said he wouldn’t have taken a $1000 for the good time he had.

Every time he walked by, someone would say, that’s Danny Kaye’s father, and boy did he feel proud.
We did some marvelous shows over Labor Day and all the single numbers like “Black Coffee,” “Cheder,” and “Miners” and a new Russian song went over tremendously, and the shows as a whole, killed ‘em. I was really glad everything went well because he felt very proud of me.

There was a dramatic coach up here named John Hutchins who coached Ginger Rogers and a lot of other big people. He was very much impressed by my work in Accent on Youth, and he asked me to come and see him in the city. He said he wanted to talk to me…”

Danny, as always, had high hopes as the summer ended. He was determined never to return to the White Roe stage. He assembled a nightclub act, but two years later, he was back in the Borscht Belt, albeit playing master of ceremonies at the Presidents Hotel. He did lay down the lay: he would not tummle.