Elmer was instrumental in getting Danny invited to the Brazilian Song Contest in Rio De Janeiro in 1969. Phil Coulter wrote an original
song for him, Roundstone River, and Danny and Phil both flew off to Brazil.
"It was an experience I'll never forget. We performed
for six nights in a stadium that held 50,000 people. We had a sixty five piece orchestra plus a choir and when we sang, the Brazilians,
the most demonstrably passionate people, just roared and shouted with joy. Elmer had warned us to include at least one key change
in the song. When we got to the key change, all hell broke loose. They went mental with excitement. There were 47 countries competing
and Phil's song came in sixth."
Danny expressed strong regrets that Elmer and he never got to make the album they worked on together
and planned to record. Bernstein's soaring career and Danny's incessant wanderings intervened, and the album never got made. Bernstein's
favourite Irish song was The West's Awake. "What wouldn't I give," Doyle says, "to hear his arrangement of that stirring piece."
"Lovely people. They treated me as if I was the most important person in the room. On another occasion Elmer brought me to a party at Nancy Sinatra's place. Various film stars were there in groups discussing the movie business amongst themselves. I wandered down the hall to the music room where I found a guitar and began singing and playing to myself. After a while people started drifting in and soon I was singing Irish ballads for Ms. Sinatra, Robert Stack, Henry Mancini, James Coburn and others. Robert Mitchum requested Finnegan's Wake, and as I sat there teaching them the chorus, I suddenly thought, 'what the hell am I doing here, I'm Danny Doyle, a coal-man's son from the back lanes of Dublin.' All I could do was laugh."
Elmer Bernstein and Danny became great friends. He spent many weeks as Elmer's guest on his ranch in the Ventura hills above Hollywood, riding Bernstein's Arabian horses across the hills all the way to the Pacific Ocean. "Elmer was as down to earth as one could possibly be. He had been heavily involved in the labour movement of the 1930's and '40s in the United States and was black-listed for it back then. He was a true democrat; class and status were utterly irrelevant to him." The celebrated composer brought Danny to dinner at Gregory Peck's house, another time to Burt Lancaster's home, where Danny discovered that the acrobatic Lancaster was also astute and intellectual.
