Danny Kaye

The Brooklyn Word Machine Gun

Danny Kaye did not walk across the stage; he devoured it. He had a lung capacity that defied logic and a tongue capable of articulating fifty words in just five seconds without losing clarity. In the 1940s, nobody in Hollywood quite knew what to do with that red-haired kid from Brooklyn who seemed to have an electric motor under his skin.

But his wife, Sylvia Fine, knew it perfectly well. She wrote the impossible lyrics he fired off like a machine gun on Broadway stages. Fine understood that Kaye's talent lay not in the easy joke but in the mathematical precision of rhythm and the tongue twister.

And the experiment worked.

Samuel Goldwyn paid a fortune to bring him to California in 1944. The producer wanted Kaye to be the new Eddie Cantor, but the actor insisted on keeping his anarchic style. In Up in Arms, audiences discovered that this man wasn't just funny; he could carry an entire film on his shoulders with an exhausting energy for the average viewer.

In 1947, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty arrived, and the world realized that physical comedy had evolved. Kaye played a chronic daydreamer who escaped a gray reality through heroic fantasies. The film earned more than four million dollars at the time and made him the studio's most valuable asset.

The Clown Who Couldn't Read Music

It wasn't all vocal technique, either, because his body moved with the fluidity of a cartoon. In The Court Jester from 1955, he performed the famous goblet-with-poison routine. It was a choreography of crossed dialogue that required weeks of rehearsal so he wouldn't miss a single syllable during a shoot that cost nearly four million dollars.

That film was the most painful financial failure of his early career. Despite being a masterpiece of its genre, audiences of the time didn't turn out at the box office, and Paramount lost money. But Kaye didn't stop, because his mind was always on the next project or his latest personal obsession.

He never accepted a script that didn't have the frantic rhythm he himself imposed.

Away from the spotlight, his life was a tangle of interests that had nothing to do with film. He was an expert cook in Chinese cuisine and earned a commercial pilot's license so he could fly his own private jets. In 1954 he began his relationship with UNICEF and traveled the globe raising funds without taking a single dollar for his appearances.

By the late seventies, his presence in film had become a footnote. He preferred to conduct symphony orchestras around the world, even though he couldn't read a single musical note. He did it purely on instinct and through his ability to connect with musicians using humor and a mime technique that bordered on technical perfection.

In 1982, he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his charitable work.

He died in Los Angeles on March 3, 1987, from hepatitis C contracted through a blood transfusion during coronary bypass surgery performed in 1983.