The Chuck McCann version beats all.

Donald O'Connor FTW.

By being on hand at the psychological moment, when a major studio was actually “over a barrel” in its quest of a quick replacement for Donald O’Connor in “White Christmas,” Danny Kaye managed to close what will go down in Hollywood annals as one of the sharpest deals in the town’s modern history. Here’s how it happened.

With Irving Berlin’s already much-jinxed movie ready to roll and unable to face any further delay, Paramount was notified by doctors one night that Donald O’Connor’s continued fever would prevent his scheduled start as one of the four leading performers. Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen were the others. Fred Astaire previously had bowed out.

This was a shattering blow and would have proved disastrous from a financial standpoint had the studio been unable to replace suitably O’Connor within a matter of hours.

Don Hartman, production manager of Paramount, remained up all that night trying to think the thing out. At breakfast he had resolved to put the substituting proposition up to Danny Kaye, who just then was finishing “Knock on Wood” on the same lot.

Kaye replied that he had made commitments for several personal appearances. He advised Hartman the sacrifices he would be forced to make to clear his schedule for “White Christmas” would run into a lot of money—too much, he thought.

“How much?” asked Hartman. The reply came back.

“I want $250,000 for playing the part and 10 per cent of the film’s net profits.”

Hartman finally pulled himself together and dashed off to consult Berlin and Crosby. Each had agreed to take one third of the profits as his reward for making the picture. The studio was to get the other third. Berlin was on the lot, Crosby at his ranch.

Berlin immediately agreed to sacrifice 5 per cent of his potential earnings and Bing, on the telephone, agreed to do the same. This made up the 10 per cent profit arrangement required by Kaye. Kaye’s $250,000 salary was much more than the price of O’Connor, but there was no other way out. Something had to be done at once, not next week, or even tomorrow.

So, Danny Kaye, who probably never dreamed his boxcar proffer would be accepted, found himself, in a matter of eight hours, tied to one of the most profitable deals any movie star has engineered since the dawn of television.

I love that sequence. He makes it look so easy. Why did he need three days of bed rest, I wonder?

O’Connor was 27 years old when he performed in “Singin' in the Rain”, and he was smoking 4 packs of cigarettes a day while shooting the film. After successfully completing the “Make ‘Em Laugh” dance routine in one day, on a concrete floor, it was discovered that the camera aperture had not been checked and the film was unusable. They had to film the entire dance sequence over again despite the fact that O'Connor was sore and bruised from the first shoot.

Arthur Freed, the producer responsible for most of the MGM musicals of the 40s and 50s, began his career as a songwriter. "Singin' in the Rain" was part of Brown and Freed's score for MGM's first "all talking, all singing, all dancing" musical, The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (the song has since been used in five other films, counting A Clockwork Orange).

In 1952, Freed decided to use his songbook as the basis for an original musical, as he had done with Jerome Kern's songs in 1946 (Till the Clouds Roll By) and George Gershwin's in 1951 (An American in Paris). Freed assigned Betty Comden and Adolph Green to build a screenplay around the available material, with Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly to direct. When the time came to shoot, Donen decided that Donald O'Connor needed a solo number, and couldn't find anything that worked in the Freed catalog. Donen suggested that Brown and Freed write a new song, pointing to Porter's "Be a Clown" as the sort of thing he thought would fit in at that point in the script. Brown and Freed obliged--maybe too well--with "Make 'Em Laugh." Donen called it "100 percent plagiarism," but Freed was the boss and the song went into the film. Cole Porter never sued, although he obviously had grounds enough. Apparently he was still grateful to Freed for giving him the assignment for The Pirate at a time when Porter's career was suffering from two consecutive Broadway flops (Mexican Hayride and Around the World in Eighty Days).

I met him once. He was a very nice man.

But, did he make you laugh?