I met Danny a couple of times through the kind intervention of friends at the TV station where I worked; everybody knew I loved Danny, and I got to tag along a few times to interviews and tapings.  Like most accounts of the real Danny that I've read, he was a complex individual, maybe just a perfectionist but both times I saw him he was a tad on the cranky side — a slow cue-card puller got a ragging during a Bob Hope special taping, for instance — but when he was nice and in a good mood, he was wonderful.  How lucky I was, and I do have a very clear memory of the afternoon a crew of us spent at his home taping an interview the year he was the Rose Parade Grand Marshall.  Danny got along famously with the host, Tom Hatten (host of our Family Film Festival on KTLA at the time, and still a beloved entertainment reporter/performer in Los Angeles), and you could sense the relief and pleasure that it gave Danny to do some reminiscing with a fellow show business veteran.  And afterwards Danny gave us cookies in his kitchen, the famous Chinese kitchen he added onto his house, with the million-BTU gas range for his wok creations.  It was quite a few years ago, but you don't forget something like that.

My favorite Danny Kaye movies?  I love The Court Jester, of course, its color and great cast and general luscious hilarity.  And I also love The Inspector General, the one movie he made for Warner Bros.; this Henry Koster-directed very loose adaptation of Gogol's story is charming, and shows Danny's many sides, from clown to credible romantic lead.  Very underrated, and unfortunately the movie fell into public domain and is too available in lousy prints that don't do justice to the beautiful production.  And though it's not Thurber maybe, Danny is great in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and tell me any other comic who could play a variety of heroic scenes and look absolutely convincing and deadly handsome in all of them?  Is there a bad Danny movie?  Well, The Man from the Diner's Club is pretty lame, and A Song is Born doesn't live up to its premake Ball of Fire.  But watch Danny sing "Everything is Ticketyboo" in Merry Andrew, or "Ballin' the Jack" in On the Riviera, and you'll see why I fell in love with him.  And I still love him.

The photos I've chosen here are some of my favorites.  Danny looking pensive and vulnerable on Warner's backlot during The Inspector General, and something you've undoubtedly never seen before, stills from the deleted Irish informer dream sequence from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.  (I can't recall now if he was supposed to sing "Molly Malone" during the scene, but it would have been grand.)  If these stills exist, does the footage exist someplace?  Now that's something I'd love to see.  But at least now you can see the photos that I've loved for many years. 

Happy Birthday, Danny. You are missed.