“Behind every great man, there is a great woman.” How many biographical articles have opened with that trite old aphorism? It acknowledges—quite rightly—that many of the great scientific and cultural achievements of the ages would not have been possible without a supportive spouse or sibling keeping geniuses clean and fed.
But there is a glaring problem with this well-worn idiom (which is at least a century old now, its original author unknown). It obviously ignores every great scientific or cultural achievement ever made by a woman alone, as well as those achievements in which man and woman worked side by side. The work of Sylvia Fine sits neatly in the second of these categories.
Never heard of her? I imagine many people haven’t—myself included, until relatively recently. But I was already a fan of her husband, Danny Kaye: the actor, comedian, singer and dancer, star of 23 movies including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), The Inspector General (1949), Knock on Wood (1954) and many more.
Despite winning many plaudits and accolades, Kaye was never nominated for an Academy Award (other than the honorary Oscar he won in 1955). Do you know who was nominated in 1954, and again in 1960? I’ll give you a clue: the same woman who contributed songs to all the films listed above and more, earning a Peabody Award, a Daytime Emmy, a Primetime Emmy nod and the two aforementioned Oscar nods—Mrs Danny Kaye, more properly known as Sylvia Fine.
Born in Brooklyn, NY during 1913, Fine was the youngest of three children. According to documents held in the Danny Kaye and Sylvia Fine Collection at the Library of Congress, she began piano lessons at the age of six. She then attended Thomas Jefferson High School, whose alumni include other notable twentieth-century composers like Jack Lawrence and Roy C. Bennett. Kaye also attended, but the pair apparently did not meet until long after Fine graduated, aged just fifteen. (Kaye did not graduate, dropping out to become a soda jerk and later a dentist’s assistant.)
Fine went on to study music at Brooklyn College, after which she worked at a summer camp in Pennsylvania, composing songs to accompany comedy skits—including a Yiddish version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. It was around this time that Fine and Kaye finally met, discovering that the dentist he had briefly worked for (until being fired for doing woodwork or vandalising the furniture—sources differ—with the dental tools) was actually Fine’s father.
The pair went on to work together on The Straw Hat Review which starred Kaye and featured music, lyrics and piano accompaniment by Fine. This led both to work at NYC nightclub La Martinique, where Kaye was scouted for his breakout role in hit Broadway comedy Lady in the Dark. After a whirlwind romance, Fine and Kaye were married in 1940, twice—once at an expedited civil ceremony in January, following a telephone proposal and again in February, with the happy couple’s families present.
As readers will no doubt know, Kaye went on to a stellar Hollywood career, earning no fewer than three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. What fewer may appreciate is that Fine was an inseparable element of that success, writing many of the tongue-twisting “patter songs” which made her husband famous—see “Symphony For Unstrung Tongue” from The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (1947), “Soliloquy for Three Heads” from The Inspector General (1949) or, perhaps most brain-meltingly, “Melody in 4-F” from Up in Arms (1944).
Fine was an incredibly versatile composer and lyricist, penning everything from Baltic-sounding folk ballads to Balinese-flavored dance numbers—but many of her works drew inspiration from the popular jazz styles of the age. Sometimes these influences were obvious, even acknowledged in titles like “Lullaby in Ragtime” (The Five Pennies, 1959) and “Bali Boogie” (Wonder Man, 1945). Other times, they were more subtle—take the gently swinging “The Moon Is Blue” (The Moon Is Blue, 1953) or the strikingly syncopated “D-O-D-G-E-R-S Song,” for instance.
One of her most critically acclaimed musical contributions was a rewrite of—if such a thing could be said to exist—the national anthem of jazz. For The Five Pennies, a 1959 Red Nichols biopic starring Kaye, Fine crafted a version of “When the Saints Go Marching In” to be sung as a duet between her husband and Louis Armstrong. And Cole Porter himself called “All About You,” penned for Kaye film Knock on Wood (1954), “a perfect love song.”
Fine once guessed that she had written about a hundred songs for her husband, during a collaboration which lasted almost four decades. She also forged a separate career as a Peabody-winning television producer (having guided most of Kaye’s films), as well as teaching musical comedy at the University of Southern California and Yale. Her Peabody was for producing and narrating the CBS series Musical Comedy Tonight (1979, 1981, 1985), which spotlighted the music of contemporary stars like the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Berlin and Kern.
Perhaps the “behind every great man…” quote is appropriate, given that Fine apparently never sought the limelight in the way her husband did. But it seems more apt, to me, that the word “behind” is replaced with “alongside” in this case, so pivotal to Kaye’s career were his wife’s talents. (So well regarded were they that JFK appointed her to his Advisory Committee on the Arts in 1962.) I feel that Kaye would agree—he was quoted in 1945 as admitting, “It’s her words in my mouth that have made me what I am today,” and, he reportedly never took a curtain call without acknowledging Fine as “someone without whose help I wouldn’t be here.”
Kaye died in 1987; Fine followed him just four years later, in 1991. At the time of her death, she was working on a book about their lives called Fine and Danny, which was sadly never published. The word order seems appropriate not just as a clever pun, but as an acknowledgment that without Fine working by his side—and not in his shadow—one of history’s greatest comic actors wouldn’t have been half the star he was.
Oh, an addendum: It should perhaps be noted that it was Kaye who did the cooking at home—he had a Chinese restaurant kitchen called Ying’s Thing built into the family home. So it was in fact the movie star who kept his genius wife fed…
Dave Doyle is a swing dancer, dance teacher, and journalist based in Gloucestershire, England. Write him at davedoylecomms@gmail.com. Find him on Twitter @DaveDoyleComms.
