Danny Kaye - Personal Life

Personal Life

Kaye and his wife, Sylvia, both grew up in Brooklyn, living only a few blocks apart, but they did not meet until they were both working on an off-Broadway show in 1939. Sylvia was an audition pianist at the time. Danny and Sylvia discovered that the dentist whose office he had been hired to watch was Sylvia's father, Samuel Fine. They were married on 3 January 1940. Kaye, working in Florida at the time, proposed on the telephone; the couple was married in Fort Lauderdale. Their daughter, Dena, was born on 17 December 1946.

Both Kaye and his wife raised their daughter without any parental hopes or aspirations for her future. Kaye said in a 1954 interview, "Whatever she wants to be she will be without interference from her mother nor from me." When she was very young, Dena did not like seeing her father perform because she did not understand that people were supposed to laugh at what he did.

During World War II, the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated rumors that Kaye dodged the draft by manufacturing a medical condition to gain 4-F status and exemption from military service. FBI files show he was also under investigation for supposed links with Communist groups. The allegations were never substantiated, and he was never charged with any associated crime.

After Kaye and his wife became estranged, he was allegedly involved with a succession of women, though he and Fine never divorced. The best-known of these women was actress Eve Arden.

There are persistent claims that Kaye was homosexual or bisexual, and some sources assert that Kaye and Laurence Olivier had a ten-year relationship in the 1950s while Olivier was still married to Vivien Leigh. A biography of Leigh states that the alleged relationship caused her to have a breakdown. The alleged relationship has been denied by Olivier's official biographer, Terry Coleman. Joan Plowright, Olivier's third wife and widow, has dealt with the matter in different ways on different occasions: she deflected the question (but alluded to Olivier's "demons") in a BBC interview. She is reputed to have referred to Danny Kaye on another occasion, in response to a claim that it was she who broke up Olivier's marriage to Leigh. However, in her own memoirs, Plowright denies that there had been an affair between the two men. Producer Perry Lafferty reported: "People would ask me, 'Is he gay? Is he gay?' I never saw anything to substantiate that in all the time I was with him.” Kaye’s final girlfriend, Marlene Sorosky, reported that he told her, "I've never had a homosexual experience in my life. I've never had any kind of gay relationship. I've had opportunities, but I never did anything about them."