Traveling Salesman

In London's Savoy Hotel last week, the staid Abraham Lincoln Room seethed with such important people as cabinet ministers, the Lord Mayor and U.S. Ambassador Lewis Douglas. They had all come to do homage to a national figure. Cried a scarlet-liveried herald, announcing the guest of honor: "Pray silence for Mr. Danny Kaye!"

Danny, the toomler* who came out of New York's borsch circuit to become a top Broadway and Hollywood comic, was riding his greatest triumph: he was the U.S. traveling salesman who had won the heart of Britannia. It was not just an entertainer's hit; visiting Americans thought that he had been funnier before. By simply being his uninhibited self, he somehow embodied for Britons all that was likable about the U.S., and all that was reassuring to grey socialist Britain.

Said Ambassador Douglas, who is not given to overstatement: "He has been a better and more effective and persuading ambassador of good will from my country to yours than all . . . of officialdom."

Kaye, born in Brooklyn 36 years ago, is mobbed by adoring throngs. So many fans phone him at his Savoy suite that a special office had to be set up to handle some 52 calls an hour. His London appearance last year brought 70,000 fan letters in seven weeks; this year the total ran over 100,000. For those who cannot see the real Kaye, there is a wax model in Madame Tussaud's gallery of the great.

Danny wows the people and the purple alike. In London and Manchester, crowds have queued up all night for his performances. He has held court for the royal family and Winston Churchill. "His dressing room," wrote the highbrow Sunday Observer, ". . . is now as crowded and as diversified as the anteroom of an 18th Century nobleman in the days of patronage."

Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, taking a hard look at his stricken countrymen, said: "His success . . . is almost entirely based on his personal appeal. To the English he is exotic, and since he is a foreigner who won't be around tomorrow, they let themselves be swept along by his personality. His appeal is emotional, and his openness and lack of shame are most welcome. He makes love to his audience."

Said Danny Kaye, who will be back in the U.S. next month: "I give the audience some emotion, then I can feel it coming up from them. It goes back & forth in waves."

* A tumult-creating Catskill resort entertainer who clowns around the clock to keep hotel guests amused.

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