Danny Kaye at 100 — a Daughter's View

The centennial anniversary of Danny Kaye's birth on Jan. 18, 1913, will be celebrated by events throughout 2013. His only child, Dena Kaye, 66, shares with AARP photos and memories of her father, beginning with this, her favorite. She says, "It captures his unfettered exuberance, shows his graceful hands and his trademark nonchalant but elegant way of dressing."

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., my father was the youngest of three brothers and the only one born in America. (Mac and Larry were born in Russia.) His given name was David Daniel Kaminsky, and long after he became Danny Kaye, his family still called him Davie.

A quiet moment on the set of White Christmas. "Danny made Bing Crosby laugh the way everybody wishes they could have made Bing laugh," Clooney once said about their costar in the iconic movie. "More than Bob Hope ever did."

My father appreciated Bing Crosby. He admired his voice and his sense of timing, and he loved to make him laugh. In the "Sisters" number in the movie White Christmas, my father kept swatting Crosby in the chest with his boa fan. Crosby couldn't help laughing, and though they did many takes, the scene that appears in the movie is my father breaking up the implacable Mr. Crosby.

Grant and my father were true friends. They shared the same Capricorn birth date and love of baseball; here they are at a Dodgers game in L.A. Once, our front doorbell rang and I ran to answer it wrapped in an oversize bathrobe, wearing furry slippers, my hair set in rollers encased in a blue hairnet. And whom did I see when I opened the door? Cary Grant.

One of my father's great joys was singing. "I'm crazy about being a group singer," he used to say. On one of his CBS shows with the great Ella Fitzgerald, he was a group of two. He practiced so he could spontaneously scat with her. You could feel his abandon when he did up-tempo songs, and his tenderness when he sang ballads.

Everyone in my inner circle knew I loved Frank Sinatra. For a high school graduation party my parents gave me, my mother casually asked if there was anyone besides my friends whom I'd like to invite. "What about Frank Sinatra?" I joked. To my shock and delight he actually came, and asked me for the last dance of the evening.

"She was a force of nature," my father said of Hepburn when he returned home after shooting The Madwoman of Chaillot in the south of France. He played the ragpicker, a true departure from the familiar zany, though often touching, bumbler or musical "Danny Kaye" roles. It revealed his gifts as a dramatic actor.

The two redheads. Lucy and Desi Arnaz lived in our neighborhood, next to Jack and Mary Benny. But no one in Beverly Hills walked over and knocked on neighbors' doors, dropped in for tea or asked to borrow a cup of sugar.

I didn't know many other "children of." Liza Minnelli, at left, was really the only one, and we often shared our birthday parties. At this age probably the only point of discussion was the cake. We don't see each other much as grownups, but when we do, we are full of big hugs for each other.

The year 2013 is actually a double centennial. My mother would have celebrated her 100th birthday, too. Nominated for two Academy Awards for best song, and awarded a Peabody for her PBS special Musical Comedy Tonight, my mother wrote many of the sophisticated songs my father performed in movies, on stage and in nightclubs (where she accompanied him on the piano).

There is much ado about the curtsy when one is presented to the queen. So my mother rehearsed before she and my father were to meet the young Queen Elizabeth. I remember my mother getting dressed, complete with purse and gloves, and standing in front of her dressing room mirror, practicing the requisite curtsy, over and over.

My father, at left, and his contemporaries — from left to right: Phil Silvers, Judy Garland and Gene Kelly — rehearse for a USO show. 

Fans slept outside the theater in order to buy tickets when the box office opened for my father's one-man show in London. Local papers called him "our" Danny. Laurence Olivier and his wife, Vivien Leigh (pictured far right with Bette Davis), were great friends. I still have the gold earrings they gave my mother. Kitty Carlisle Hart, at my father's left, and my mother met when they shared a dressing room at a Chicago nightclub; Hart later became my godmother.