DANNY KAYE: REVERIE ON A GREAT TALENT

It may be that Danny Kaye was always terrific, a great clown before he had long pants. The potential must always have been there, of course, and yet it seems likely that Kaye, who died on Tuesday at 74, became the matchless entertainer he was because he had had the opportunity to be bad.

He was one of a vanishing generation. Ray Bolger left us a bit ago; Red Skelton, Milton Berle and George Burns are thankfully still among us. All of them came out of a tough curriculum with highest honors.

Kaye polished his persona, sharpened his shtick, perfected his timing, learned his quick rapport with audiences, his graces of body and his unparalleled mobility of face and tongue, in the long, hard apprenticeship that began in front of the show-me audiences in Catskill resort hotels.

It grew a little more profitable, if not easier, in what was left of vaudeville and in those night clubs with the larcenous prices, the poisonous air and the ruinous food. By the time he made his Broadway debut at 26, Kaye was already a veteran who had had years of winning over audiences tougher than any Broadway could provide.

Young comedians still come along by the dozens, as durable as their last stand-up routine. It’s the clowns who grow scarce, in part because there are fewer places to try out the arts of clowning. Out of the rough and tumble demands of his early years, Kaye became one of the great clowns, a mimic, a mime, a singer, a dancer and an actor who could play anywhere on the scale, from drama to slapstick.

What made him unique even among the performers of his generation was that he evidently never contemplated the idea of retirement. He never stopped performing; all that changed were the venues and the goals.

He seems to have kept half the world’s symphonies afloat by his guest appearances, and his turn at the podium was a pleasure to watch because in its seeming spontaneity it was as skilled and honed as a high-wire act. It took a good deal of musicianship to make the performance look so chaotic as the baton grew shorter and shorter.

The same perfectionist zeal that created the Kaye persona also led to Kaye the demon Chinese chef and Kaye the multi-engine pilot.

It was certainly the pungent recollections of the hardships around him in his early days, combined with gratitude for having earned a good share of worldly goods, that led him to work so hard for the world’s children, through UNICEF.

A whole generation of the world’s young will in fact grow up remembering Kaye not as Walter Mitty or Hans Christian Andersen, but as the divinely silly person who emerged from a plane in their remote corner of the world and made them laugh.

Kaye’s passing sharpens a lot of remembrances, as of his Gatling-gun recitations of Russian composers and other verbal trickeries, and of his supremely mobile face. It is possible to regret not only the passing of an irreplaceable clown and useful world citizen, but also the passing of a era when it was possible for clowns to be nurtured--to find themselves and then, in the fullness of time and to our great enrichment, to find all of us cheering.