Fine, Sylvia

Sylvia Fine Kaye (1913-1987), the Brooklyn-born composer and lyricist, the daughter of a dentist, attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn. Her love of music developed at an early age: by the age of eleven, she was writing parodies of both pop songs and Gilbert and Sullivan for family parties. At Brooklyn College (class of '33), she majored in music. Ms. Fine sold her first song for $25.00 to a nightclub singer. She also wrote poems for the Brooklyn newspaper Spotlight bettween 1930 and 1933 under the heading of "Embryonuts, Music and Barking Doggerel". Ms. Fine began her career by performing skits at summer camp, where she met other entertainers like Imogene Coca and Danny Kaye,. She wrote a Yiddish version of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Mikado" especially for Mr. Kaye. The two were married in 1940 and she continued to write songs, but nearly exclusively for her husband-more than 100 songs during a forty year period. In addition, Ms. Kaye wrote the original college song for her alma mater, Brooklyn College, in 1933 (with lyrics by Robert Friend) as well as the rewritten lyrics for that original (viewed as "un-sing-able" by many) in the 1980s. She renamed it: On a Field in Flatbush. In the 1970's Sylvia Fine Kaye became a television producer and teacher. She taught musical comedy at the University of Southern California in 1971 and at Yale in 1975. She won a Peabody Award for her production (and narration) of a ninety-minute special on PBS titled "Musical Comedy Tonight". In 1975, she was executive producer for the television special, "Danny Kaye: Look in at the Met". She produced and edited "Assignment Children", a UNICEF film that starred her husband. Brooklyn Collge awarded Sylvia Fine Kaye an honorary doctorate in humane letters in 1985. She endowed the Sylvia Fine Chair in Musical Theater at her alma mater and financed the restoration of the 684 seat Playhouse at Hunter College. During her final years, Mrs. Kaye devoted much of her time to writing about life with her husband, "Fine and Danny". She was also writing a catalogue of show business material that she and her husband donated to the Library of Congress. Sylvia Fine Kaye died in 1987 at the age of 74 leaving behind a daughter Dina, a magazine and television journalist.

Lyricist.

Brooklyn College alumna.

Biographical Note