Are you sure? Well after seeing a photo of his Chinese kitchen it got me thinking, "Wow, do I really know Danny Kaye?"
Once I began reading I realized there's a lot I didn't know about him. For instance, he's an original owner of the Seattle Mariners baseball team. Before that he was a lifelong fan of the Brooklyn/LA Dodgers and recorded a song called The D-O-D-G-E-R-S Song.
He left school at 13 to pursue a career in acting.
He also had a longstanding interest in medicine and was permitted to observe surgery on several occasions.
Over the course of his career he raised over $5,000,000 in support of musicians pension funds.
It is rumored that he had an affair with Sir Laurence Olivier in the 50s, while both were married, that spanned 10 years .
He was infected with Hepatitis C from a blood transfusion while undergoing heart bypass surgery in 1983. Four years later he died of a heart attack.
The theater and demonstration kitchen underneath the library at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York is named for him.
He loved cooking.
“My father’s Chinese kitchen was his private theater,” wrote Danny Kaye’s daughter, Dena Kaye, about the room her father loved most in the family’s Beverly Hills residence. “He was the same entertainer at the stove as he was on stage. Audrey Hepburn said it was like watching a great ballet dancer. Rudolf Nureyev described him as ‘a balletic matador.’ Everyone got up to watch him cook (he never sat down until dessert), and once he’d carefully plated a dish and put it on the table, he’d bellow, like a drill sergeant, ‘Don’t look at it! Eat it!’”
And he had a gorgeous dining room in which to eat all that yummy food with guests like Shirley MacLaine, Cary Grant, Michael Caine, and Itzhak Perlman...
I love how all of the greenery outside continues inside with the wallpaper and green chairs.
He lived a rich life.
