When reporters first began to take notice of Bob Hope, a young comedian who was making a mark in radio and on Broadway in the mid-1930s, they learned some surprising things about the English-born entertainer. He was, early profiles of him reported, actually “Lord Hope, 17th baronet of Craighall, direct lineal descendant of that famous titled English family who at one time owned the ill-fated Hope diamond.” His mother was a celebrated music-hall artist (in some accounts) or operetta singer (in others), and her charming voice had “lured the aristocratic scion of the Hope family away from the ancestral castle. From one of them anyway—there are several in the family, all covering miles of territory and impossible to occupy.”
None of it was true. It’s hard to know whether the aristocratic folderol was a serious attempt by Hope at autobiographical revisionism, or simply a practical joke played on reporters by a cheeky young comic trying to get attention. In fact, he remembered little about his first four and a half years in England, and his family background could hardly have been more drably middle-class. His father was a hard-drinking stonemason who kept the family on the move in search of work; his mother, a shy Welsh girl with a sweet voice who may have sung in local village festivals when she was growing up, but never, as far as anyone has recorded, appeared on a professional stage—operetta, music hall, or otherwise.
She was Avis Towns (Bob took his middle name from her, but for some reason he and everyone else spelled it incorrectly as Townes for his entire life), and she grew up in the village of Borth, on the western seacoast of Wales. She was orphaned at an early age, and little is known about her parents, John and Sarah (or possibly Margaret) Towns. By her own account, the family moved from Borth when she was young, to escape the seawater that would often flood their home at high tide, and settled a few miles inland, near Llancynfelyn. Avis had fond memories of walking there with her governess down a long pathway of stone steps to a lake below, where she would play with a pet black swan she nicknamed Chocolate. She remembered little about her parents, who were often traveling (she thought, or imagined, that they were in the diplomatic service in India) and would make occasional grand appearances in a magnificent horse-drawn carriage. Then one day Avis was told her parents would not be coming back. There was talk of a shipwreck, but she never knew for sure what happened to them. In any event, she was taken in by a foster family, a retired sea captain named Abraham Lloyd and his wife, Mary, and they soon moved to Barry, a larger town on the southern Welsh coast.
Even these few, sketchy memories are, however, suspect. No birth certificate has been found for Avis, and later census records indicate she was born in London, not Borth. Her age too is a moving target. According to family lore, she was only fifteen or sixteen when she married in 1891, but her age in the 1891 census (not always definitive) is listed as seventeen. The records of the parish school in Borth, which she attended after transferring from the public school in 1882, give her birth date as June 3, 1872, which is probably more reliable—and would make her nearly nineteen when she married. No records have been found of her parents, or of a supposed older brother named Jack. Alan Blackmore, a retired schoolmaster in England who has done the most extensive research on the Hope genealogy, suggests that Avis was most likely taken as an infant to a London orphanage and (as was common at the time) boarded out to a foster family when the orphanage became overcrowded. By the time she appears in the 1891 census for East Barry, Avis was living with David Lewis, a deputy dockmaster, his wife, Jane, and their five-year-old son, Baisil—and described as a “general domestic servant.”
She was a shy, diminutive girl, no more than ninety pounds, with long brown hair and delicate, doll-like features. Her schooling was limited, but she learned to play the piano and the harp at an early age—suggesting an upbringing of some comfort and means. Still, the sheltered girl must have been excited, along with the rest of the girls in town, by the activity at the Barry waterfront in the winter of 1890–91, where the construction of new docks was under way. This major civic project drew workers from all over the surrounding area. Among them was a strapping twenty-one-year-old stonemason named William Henry Hope, known to everyone as Harry.
He had come from Weston-super-Mare, across the Bristol Channel, with his father, James, who was partner in a construction firm hired to work on the docks. A stonemason by trade, James Hope had worked on the Royal Courts of Justice in London as well as the Statue of Liberty when it was being carved in Paris. He had even spent some time working in America, but returned to England when his wife, Emily, refused to make the trip over and join him. They eventually settled in the southwest England resort town of Weston-super-Mare and raised ten children. Harry, the second oldest, was being groomed by his father to go into his trade, so when James moved to Barry for several months of work on the docks, he brought Harry along.
The father, a supervisor on the project, rented a room on Greenwood Street in town, while his son stayed in one of the sheds provided for the workers on the docks. There, young Harry was flattered by the attention paid him by pretty, little Avis Towns, and the two soon struck up a romance. His proud father didn’t think much of the “spindly-legged little floozy,” and he got Harry transferred to the other end of the docks, to keep the couple apart. Avis was heartbroken not to see him anymore. When Harry became ill and his father decided to send him home to convalesce, it looked as if she would never see him again.
Father and son were on the docks preparing for Harry’s departure when a heavy rainstorm broke out. Amid the downpour, they suddenly caught sight of Avis, scurrying for cover and falling flat on her face in the mud. Harry dropped his tools and rushed over to pick her up and carry her to safety inside a shed. While she was recovering, he confessed to his father that she was the girl he wanted to marry.
“Why, she’s just a baby,” James said—at least as Avis would tell the story years later. “What a man needs is a woman.”
Avis, gathering herself from her swoon, replied, “I am a woman, sir!”
The elder Hope soon realized his objections were fruitless. “Get on with it then, Son,” he said. “Marry her and be done with it. We’ve got work to do.” A few days later, on April 25, 1891, the couple traveled to Cardiff, the Welsh capital, just a few miles away, and got married in a small civil ceremony.
For an orphaned, poorly educated Welsh girl with few prospects, it was a promising match. Harry was a skilled craftsman, with hopes of becoming an architect or going into business for himself, like his father. But their life together, almost from the start, was itinerant and financially precarious. When the construction work on the Barry docks was done, Harry and Avis moved to Newport, a few miles up the coast, where there was more work. There a son, Ivor, was born in 1892. A second son, Francis James (Jim), arrived a year later, followed by a daughter named Emily in 1895. When he ran out of work in Newport, Harry moved with the family back to Barry, where a fourth child, Frederick, was born in 1897.
Soon they were on the move again, this time across the country to Lewisham, a few miles south of London. Here the Hopes had as comfortable a life as they would ever enjoy. They lived in a large stone house, complete with stables and a large, well-kept flower garden. When Harry came home from work, he would pick some bluebells and present them to Avis with a romantic flourish, singing, “I’ll be your sweetheart if you will be mine!” Harry raised gamecocks and played the horses, and he would take the family on weekend excursions, to the beach or Covent Garden or the racetrack at Epsom Downs. They had a gardener and a maid, and Avis would entertain guests by playing the dulcimer, or a harp that had been given to her (according to family lore) by the actress Ellen Terry. Avis would often be singing around the house, and all the boys picked up her love for music.
A fourth son, William John (known as Jack), was born in Lewisham in 1900. But just before his birth, the family suffered a terrible loss, when Emily, the only girl, contracted diphtheria and died, barely four years old.
The death of their only daughter, Avis always believed, started Harry on a downward path. Before Emily’s death, her older brother Jim remembered, Harry was a good-looking, well-read, charismatic man, with sandy hair and a handlebar mustache. “I still swear I have not seen a handsomer man than our dad in those days,” Jim wrote in an unpublished memoir of the family’s early life, “Mother Had Hopes.” “Immaculately dressed in the best of taste; five foot eleven [actually a bit shorter], 215 pounds of healthy flesh and muscle; full of confidence. And a gentleman in every way.” After Emily’s death, however, he began drinking more heavily (like many stonecutters, he justified it as needed to wash away the dust inhaled in his work), ignored his books, and started to pile up gambling debts.
In 1902, Harry moved the family yet again, this time to Eltham, a farming community southeast of London. The town was enjoying something of a boom, thanks to a railroad line that had been completed in 1895, connecting it to London and providing easy transportation for milk and produce from the area’s rich Kent farmland. The Scottish developer Cameron Corbett had begun to build houses on a 334-acre tract of farmland, and he hired the construction firm of Picton and Hope—James and his partner, Percy Picton—to help with the job. So, once again, Harry followed his father for work, moving into one of the brick row houses that Hope and Picton had built on Craigton Road.
The Eltham house (which still stands today, a plaque marking it as Bob Hope’s birthplace) was a comedown from Lewisham: a comfortable but far from luxurious row house in the middle of a gently upsloping block, a mile off the High Street. The tiled entryway led to a parlor to the right, and the three upstairs bedrooms each had a fireplace. The bathroom was outdoors—a plumbing setup that, amazingly, remained unchanged until the house changed owners in the 1990s. Harry had a greenhouse in the backyard, but had to dispense with the servants, due to the family’s financial straits.
Still, the Hope boys had a good time in Eltham. The town’s main attraction was (and still is) Eltham Palace, an eleventh-century manor house used as a royal residence through the time of Henry VIII. When the king would parade through town, the Hope boys would have front-row seats on a plot of land their grandfather owned at the foot of their street. For adventure, they rambled through a woodsy area to the northeast of their house dubbed the “wilds,” where they would join the neighborhood kids looking for wild donkeys or scouring the trees in search of wild birds’ eggs.
On May 29, 1903, while Harry was off at work, Avis told the boys she felt sick. Though pregnant, she thought she wasn’t due yet and claimed it was just a touch of flu. But they called for the doctor, and by the end of the day he had delivered the Hopes’ fifth boy. They named him Leslie—either for a famous soccer star of the day, or for a Hope relative who once served with “Chinese” Gordon, the British general killed by Sudanese rebels in Khartoum in 1885. Hope, typically, told it both ways.
• • •
Leslie Towns Hope missed the Victorian age by just two years. After the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, England was going through profound changes. The costly and debilitating Boer War in South Africa—one of the last gasps of the fading British empire—had ended in 1902. Liberal reform was on the ascent, with the passage of legislation that would provide the foundation for the modern welfare state, including guaranteed health care, free school meals, and unemployment benefits for workers. Yet the rapid industrial growth of the previous century had slowed, and Britain was losing its dominance in manufacturing to the United States and European countries such as Germany. Mass production, meanwhile, was rendering the old Victorian artisans increasingly obsolete. All of this was making it tough on people like Harry Hope.
With brick replacing stone on most buildings, jobs for specialists in stonework were growing scarce. Even the little stone used on the houses in Eltham was mostly precast and brought in from elsewhere. Harry had to spend more and more time away from home looking for work—or drowning his disappointments in liquor. Avis would often have to send the older boys into town to scour the pubs and bring their father home. Some nights she would sit up waiting for his return, listening to hear if he was bounding up the street on foot (often with a handful of flowers and a song for his sweetheart), meaning he was sober, or if his approach was heralded by the slow clop-clop-clop of a carriage, which usually meant he was coming home drunk.
One time, when Harry returned home after several days away, Avis emptied his pockets and found a woman’s photograph inside, with the inscription “With all my love, Maude.” Harry tried to deflect her rage with sweet talk: “You know you’re the only girl in the world for me.” Avis got so mad she broke a hairbrush over his head.
Though Bob adopted Eltham as his hometown (and years later raised money to restore the local theater, which was renamed for him), the town was one of the briefer stops on the Hope family’s sojourn in England. Before Leslie was five months old they were gone, moving back across the country to Weston-super-Mare, where Harry had grown up. They moved into a three-story house on Orchard Street; then, to save money, into a less expensive place on the last street in town, Moorland Road. Harry was still having trouble finding work, and Avis went to work as a cashier in a tea shop to help out. When a sixth Hope boy, Sidney, was born in 1905, she took the baby in her arms and worked as a housekeeper from eight until four.
Their plight got worse. After returning from a job-hunting trip, Harry wandered over to a playground to watch two of his sons playing soccer. When a ball rolled near him and he ran over to kick it back, he stumbled in a hole and broke his ankle. He got right back up and tried to run, turning the simple fracture into a compound one that left him unable to work for more than a year.
The oldest boys, Ivor and Jim, now had to help out, going to work at a dairy. Jim would bring home extra milk for the family and pick up day-old bread and cakes from a bakery where he made deliveries. His mother scrimped to make ends meet. At one dinner, Jim noticed that all she had on her plate was a small portion of potatoes. He asked why she was eating so little. “Mom’s not hungry,” she replied. Later, when he went into the kitchen to help clean up, he found her eating the leftovers from all the plates. There had been only enough for the boys.
Harry, meanwhile, was a sorry figure, trying to keep busy as he convalesced: repairing the boys’ shoes, cutting their hair, and tending to a small flock of caged canaries given to him by a neighbor. Much of the time he just wandered aimlessly around the house and garden. “When he would be in the house, he felt he was underfoot,” recalled Jim. “It was pitiful to watch him.” Even when he was well enough to look for work again, he had little luck. So once again the family picked up and moved, this time to Bristol, the large port city up the coast.
They lived for a time in a house on Church Road, then downsized to a smaller place on Whitehall Road, across the street from a woman who sold sweets through her window. But Harry again found little work, and Ivor and Jim picked up the slack with a variety of dreary and sometimes dangerous factory jobs. Meanwhile, Harry began thinking about a much more drastic move: to America.
Two of his brothers had already emigrated there and were living in Cleveland, Ohio. Frank, who had a successful plumbing business, had made the move in the 1880s; Fred, a steamfitter, had come more recently. When Harry wrote proposing that he join them, they both tried to dissuade him, warning him that jobs were scarce—you couldn’t even find work digging ditches. Avis too pleaded with Harry not to attempt the move. But Harry—impressed by literature that promised gold mines, wide-open spaces, and unlimited opportunity in America—made up his mind to go. He told Avis and the boys that he would send for them once he found work.
The family scraped together enough money for his fare and saw him off at the Bristol station, where he took the train to Southampton and, on April 10, 1907, boarded the USS Philadelphia for New York City. He arrived at Ellis Island a week later and made his way by train to Cleveland, to join his brothers and try to start a new life in America.
• • •
Not yet four years old, Leslie was surely unaware of the seriousness of his family’s financial plight. Still, it must have imprinted itself on him profoundly. Psychologists know that stable attachments in the first two years of a child’s life are crucial. Leslie lived those formative years in a household that was constantly on the move, with a father who was frequently absent or drunk, and a mother with five other sons and constant money worries that demanded her attention. Without an environment that provided him with the safety and security he needed, Leslie must early on have learned to protect himself by avoiding close attachments that could so easily be upended. He would retain that protective shell for the rest of his life.
He also learned to fight for what he wanted. Significantly, his one memory from his English childhood was of a neighborhood scuffle, when he got conked on the head by a rock thrown by some young toughs in St. George’s Park, near their house in Bristol. “I was defending my dogs from a gang of Bristol kids,” he recalled in his memoir Have Tux, Will Travel. “I’ve been leery of dog acts ever since.” His brothers’ early memories of Leslie also mostly involve mishaps and misadventures. His oldest brother, Ivor, once plucked Leslie from under a pier in Herne Bay, on the Kent seacoast, after the boy fell in the water and nearly drowned. Another time, Ivor and his uncle packed Leslie into the family’s pony cart for a ride to a local food joint. When they came out, the cart and the pony were gone. They walked home—only to find that the police had been sent on a frantic search because the pony had trotted home alone, with the cart turned upside down and empty.
In the bustling, itinerant household, Leslie found that performing was a way to get attention. Jim recalled that Leslie would hang out with his older brothers on a busy street corner, drop his trousers, and burst into tears, telling a sob story to get passersby to cheer him up with a few coins. Once they did, he’d start the act all over again for the next group of pedestrians. He would do imitations of fat people for his great-aunt Polly, who gave him cookies as a reward. He liked to dress up in his mother’s old clothes, shoes, and hats, delighting in the praise from neighbors: “Whose lovely little girl are you?” Ivor claimed that his precocious younger brother could recite an entire Irish poem, “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna,” at the age of four.
Without Harry, Avis was terribly lonely. For weeks after he left for America, Jim recalled, she did the housework almost in a trance. To save money, she moved the family to an even smaller and more dismal house on Cloud’s Hill Avenue, right next to St. George’s Park. She got sick, was diagnosed with abscessed teeth, and had to have all of them extracted. Jack came down with rheumatic fever and almost died.
Avis waited anxiously for Harry’s letters from America. When the postman had one, he would wave it at her from down the street, and Avis would run out to grab it before he even got to the house. Harry wrote newsy, romanticized accounts of the new country. The buildings in New York were so high, he said, they had to be lowered to let the moon pass by. All the women dressed like actresses and painted their faces like Indians on the warpath. Cleveland was on a lake as big as the Atlantic Ocean. “The very air in America is invigorating,” Harry wrote. “Why, Avis, I’ve been here only a month, but I feel like a different man already!” He would write special messages to the boys, telling them to take care of their mother: “Remember sons, since I can’t be there, I’m depending on you. You know, the Queen has an army of soldiers to protect her. It’s up to you guardsmen to guard our queen!”
Harry was having little luck finding work in America, but Avis made up her mind to bring over the family anyway. “We started planning and figuring, even though Dad said things were bad over there,” Jim recalled. “Mom decided it would be cheaper to maintain one home anyway. And we’d never starved yet.” The family began saving up money for the trip. Avis stopped buying the kids any new clothes or shoes. During an especially frigid winter, she scrimped on coal, and most of the children caught colds. Finally she sold off their furniture—including their cherished grandfather clock, the only thing Harry had asked his parents for when he and Avis got married.
In March 1908, Avis and her six boys—all dressed in double layers of shirts and underwear so they would have to pack less—trekked to the Bristol station to catch the train for Southampton. They left in a rainstorm, casting an extra pall on their departure. When they got to Southampton, Avis discovered they had inadvertently packed their boat tickets in one of the bags that had been sent ahead; she had to corral a steward to find their trunk in the pile of luggage waiting to be loaded, so they could rifle through it and find the tickets.
Finally, on March 21, 1908, the Hope clan boarded the USS Philadelphia, the same ship that had taken Harry to America nearly a year earlier. Back in Bristol, when the two eldest Hope boys didn’t answer the roll call at school for a few days, the teacher asked where they were. A student’s reply was entered in the logbook: “Gone to Canada.”
The family had two cabins in steerage—though, because Avis hated to be apart from any of the children, they often squeezed together into one. The trip was rough, with the heat and the clanging from the engine room making it especially noisy and uncomfortable. Once they left their cabin unattended and returned to find it had been ransacked by an intruder. Luckily, a watch was the only thing missing.
“Everybody on the ship was in sympathy with this tiny lady traveling with her brood of six sons, three of them larger than she—and as a result the boys fared exceptionally well,” recalled Jim Hope. “None of them were backward when encouraged to sing, usually to the accompaniment of someone’s concertina, mouth organ, or Jew’s harp, for the amusement of the passengers, who would in return often reward us generously.”
Leslie, as usual, was the most troublesome of the brood. When all the kids on board were lined up for their smallpox vaccinations, the four-year-old bolted free and led the ship’s crew on a mad chase around the deck before they found him hiding behind a ventilator and forced him to face the needle. Later his mom tried to calm him down with a bath, but he raised such a fuss that his bandage was dislodged and some of the vaccine inadvertently rubbed off on Avis’s thumb, leaving a vaccination scar there for the rest of her life.
The ship docked at Ellis Island on March 30, after an eighteen-hour delay in New York Harbor because of fog. Leslie is the fifth of six Hopes listed on the ship’s manifest (his age incorrectly recorded as two years old); their destination is given as Cleveland, to join “husband and father, William H. Hope,” at 2227 East 105th Street—where Uncle Fred and his wife, Alice, were living. The manifest notes that their train fare to Cleveland was already paid for, and that they carried $50 in cash.
The immigrant train to Cleveland was slow, forced to give up the right of way to every freight train in its path. With no food on board, the family had to wolf down meals during the brief stops at stations along the way. With little clean water on the train, mothers would use the station stops to wash their children’s clothes, then hang them out to dry on baggage racks or out the window once the train got going. A pair of Leslie’s pants got snagged by a passing post and were ripped away, and Avis had to search through their luggage to find him another pair, to stop his crying.
After a two-day trip, they arrived at Cleveland’s Erie Depot on the evening of April 1. Harry and his older brother Frank were there to meet them, and Avis cried with joy as she embraced her husband. “I’ll swear she looked as though she had shed twenty years,” said Jim. The motley crew of three adults and six children then straggled with their luggage, much of it held together with string or wire and breaking at the seams, to the public square downtown, where they caught a Cedar Avenue streetcar and rode all the way out to Uncle Fred and Aunt Alice’s house, on East 105th Street. Though it was the middle of the night, a feast was waiting for them at the dinner table, their first meal on solid ground in more than ten days.
• • •
Cleveland was not a bad place for an immigrant family to start life in the United States in 1908. In the waning months of Theodore Roosevelt’s vigorous presidency, and despite the lingering effects of the panic of 1907, the American economy was thriving. And Cleveland—then the sixth-largest city in the United States, with a population of 560,663 in the 1910 census—was home to many of the industries that were making it hum. Until Detroit overtook it a few years later, Cleveland was the nation’s No. 1 manufacturer of automobiles. It was among the leaders in iron and steel production, shipbuilding, and the manufacture of machine tools. Thirty-two banks were founded in Cleveland between 1900 and 1903 alone. The city was enjoying a construction boom, with new downtown office buildings, bridges, colleges, churches, and fine homes in the well-to-do residential neighborhoods along Euclid Avenue to the east of downtown. True, automobile exhaust was starting to befoul the streets, and development was encroaching on the greenery that had earned Cleveland its nickname the Forest City, but the metropolis was enjoying an economic heyday.
The booming city drew plenty of immigrants. At the turn of the century, fully one-third of Cleveland’s population was foreign-born; another 40 percent had foreign-born parents. Most of them came from Western Europe—at least half from either Great Britain or Germany, followed in order by those from Sweden, Russia, Austria, and Italy. The Hopes, like many of these newcomers, settled in a neighborhood on the eastern fringe of the city known as Doan’s Corners. The bustling area (named for Nathaniel Doan, from whose farm the area had been carved up, before being annexed by the city of Cleveland in 1872) was becoming known as Cleveland’s “second downtown,” and its vibrant center was the corner of Euclid Avenue and 105th Street, dominated by the four-story Cleveland Trust building. Just to the east were the adjoining campuses of Western Reserve University and the Case School of Applied Science (decades later to merge into Case Western Reserve). To the west, along Euclid, was so-called Millionaire’s Row, a stretch of mansions where Cleveland’s richest industrialists and business leaders lived, among them Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, mining magnate Samuel Mather, and Charles F. Brush, inventor of the arc light.
A working-class neighborhood bounded by opulence and higher education, Doan’s Corners was home to small tradesmen, steelworkers, salesmen, clerks—along with the cooks, chauffeurs, and other household workers who helped tend the mansions on Millionaire’s Row. Like so many other urban residential neighborhoods at the time, it was shedding its quaint nineteenth-century trappings and being transformed by the technology of a new century. A hand-drawn map of the area around 1900, annotated by a longtime resident, gives a good snapshot of the neighborhood that likely greeted the Hopes when they arrived in 1908:
Euclid and Cedar had Brush arc lights. Other streets were faintly illuminated by artificial gas lamps on posts: lighted in evening and turned off in early morning by the lamp lighters. Homes of the rich had electric lights, those of the well-to-do artificial gas, while the poor burned coal oil lamps. . . . Coal was king, but furnaces were few. Hard coal base burners warmed the living rooms, while the cook stoves in the kitchens helped out with their smoky soft coal fires. In the summer much cooking was done on gasoline stoves. Ice boxes were had by some. A telephone was a luxury, and if you owned a bathtub you were rich. . . . Electric cars—four wheelers—ran on Euclid and on Cedar; cable cars on Hough. Those had stone block pavement. Doan was a sandy road, while many of the others were yellow clay with coal-ash crosswalks for wet weather.
When they arrived in Cleveland, the Hope family had to temporarily split up. Ivor and Jim stayed with Uncle Frank and Aunt Louisa, who lived above Frank’s plumbing and pipe-fitting business. Avis, Harry, and the rest of the boys moved in with Uncle Fred and Aunt Alice. It’s unclear how long that arrangement lasted. According to Jim Hope’s memoir, the family moved into their own home within a few weeks. But the August 1909 Cleveland City Directory still lists the family as living at 2227 East 105th Street—Fred and Alice’s place. At some point, however, Avis rented a three-bedroom house from a Welsh doctor named Staniforth for $18.50 a month, and the family was together again, in their first home in America.
After buying furniture and stocking up on groceries, their money was nearly depleted, and they didn’t have enough to pay for the second month’s rent. Harry was no help: most days he came home with nothing in his pockets and liquor on his breath—much to the chagrin of Avis, who’d harbored some hope that his drinking problems had been left behind in England. Jim appealed to Uncle Frank for money, but he refused, saying the family shouldn’t have come to America unless Harry could support them.
The Land of Opportunity, it turned out, had not provided much opportunity for Harry Hope. Jobs for a stonecutter were nearly as hard to find in America as they were in England. Architects who had previously designed buildings with limestone were switching to terra-cotta, and there were ten men for every stonecutting job. The frigid Ohio winters were another problem, limiting the number of days when stonecutting could be done. Even at the relatively good wage of $12 a day, Harry could not generate enough steady income to do much more than cover his bar bill. As in England, the job of keeping the family solvent was left largely to Avis and the boys.
Bob Hope, at least in his public recollections, had warm memories of his father. A jovial English gentleman, whose figure varied from “medium stout to happy stout,” the man known in the neighborhood as ’Arry ’Ope was “not only an artist with the stone-cutting tools, he was a happy man,” Hope wrote in his memoir Have Tux, Will Travel. “He loved to live it up. He was popular, and a great entertainer.” He wasn’t much for disciplining the kids, but would occasionally “take off his belt and salt us good.” Yet he was having a hard time in America: “I remember Dad saying, ‘The United States is a fine place for women and dogs. It’s a poor place for horses and men.’ He had trouble adjusting himself to this country. I don’t think he ever did.”
His drinking was not constant, and never in front of the family. When he was working and sober, the older boys liked to stop by his jobs and just talk to him. “For when he was sober he was so magnetic, he’d cause you to want to linger as long as possible,” wrote Jim. “Maybe we’d ask his opinion on some current topic. He’d explain it in such a way that you’d feel proud to discuss it with the next person you’d meet, who would in turn credit you with being well-informed.” He was a strong union man, popular among his fellow workers. “I have seen Harry in a great group of angry stonecutters debating and arguing in the most violent fashion,” recalled one fellow worker, “and after listening for a while to their remarks he would rise to the floor and with all the true marks of a born orator would calm them down and show them the proper and logical approach to their problem.”
His stonecutting skills were also admired. He worked on some major construction projects in Cleveland, including the Church of the Covenant, a Gothic Revival Presbyterian church at 112th and Euclid, and the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, spanning the Cuyahoga River (and later renamed the Hope Memorial Bridge in his honor). Yet as a businessman he was fairly hapless. Once Harry and a fellow stonecutter formed a partnership and bid on a contract for the stonework on a high school. They won the job, but seriously underestimated the costs and wound up losing money.
Avis, as always, was the family rock, the diminutive, de facto head of the household, and her resourceful, can-do spirit, more than his father’s old-country ways, imprinted itself most strongly on young Leslie Hope. Generous, self-effacing, unfailingly upbeat, she put up with Harry’s misbehavior and took on the responsibility of managing the household finances. She was a painstaking shopper, carefully comparing prices at the city market and buying in bulk—butter, beans, several sacks of onions in the fall to last through the winter. She altered the boys’ clothes so they could be passed down the line to each successive kid. (A seventh, George, was born in 1909, the only Hope son to be born in America.) She kept the house bright with music, singing and accompanying herself on a secondhand piano she had saved enough to buy. She took the boys to services at a nearby Presbyterian church (after trying out an Episcopalian church that she found too uppity) and frowned on cardplaying, cigarettes, and public dancing. Unable to afford doctors except in dire emergencies, she treated every childhood malady, from measles to whooping cough, with a hot bath and a homemade brew. She kept their home immaculate, regularly scrubbing the floors, beating the rugs, and scouring the cooking stove. She always had fresh-baked pies and cakes ready for visitors, tradesmen, and the children’s friends, who would frequently stop by.
“She had the kind of skin you love to touch very much and as often as possible,” Jim Hope wrote lovingly in his memoir, “lustrous medium brown hair; beautifully smiling brown eyes with the light of the love of life shining through . . . a beautifully smiling mouth that had never uttered a harsh, unkind or inconsiderate word to or of anyone. With this, a perfectly proportioned body, with the carriage of a thoroughbred, down to a size three shoe.” His words are somewhat at odds with photos of her in later years—a slight, plain-looking woman, often lurking in the background of family pictures, or bowing her head as if she wanted to shrink from view—but understandable from an adoring son who watched his mother’s valiant efforts to keep the family afloat.
The family’s first two winters in Cleveland were “almost unbearable,” Jim recalled, colder than any they had experienced in England. None of the boys even had overcoats. They learned to dress in layers—stuffing newspapers between their underwear and their shirts and trousers for extra insulation. They had a gas fireplace in the living room, but “unless we put our bare bottoms so close as to be dangerous, we’d not know the fire was lit,” said Jim. Avis would get up early in the morning and light every burner on the kitchen stove, so at least the kitchen would be warm when the boys raced downstairs from their freezing bedrooms.
To make money, Avis moved the family to increasingly larger houses, so they could take in boarders—three different houses on one block of 105th Street in five years. She was a soft touch with tenants, always susceptible to anyone with a sob story for why he couldn’t pay the rent. But the older boys worked at an assortment of jobs to help out: Jim and Ivor at the Van Dorn Iron Works, Fred and Jack at neighborhood stores such as Wheaton’s Market and Heisey’s Bakery. When one Hope boy would quit a job, another one would often step in and take his place. It got so that Avis couldn’t keep track of who was working where. When she sent Sid down to the bakery one day to look for one of his older brothers, the German woman who ran the place exclaimed, “Ach! How many Hopes are there?”
“Looking back on my Cleveland boyhood, I know now that it was grim going,” Hope wrote in Have Tux, Will Travel. “But nobody told us Hopes it was grim. We just thought that’s the way things were. We had fun with what we had.” It is a typically brisk assessment of what were certainly difficult times. Leslie, a grade-schooler during those tough early years in Cleveland, may well have been shielded from the worst anxieties of their hand-to-mouth existence. Still, he was clearly developing the tools for protecting himself from harsh realities: a thick skin, an ability to mask his feelings, and a relentlessly positive, can-do attitude in the face of precarious times.
He was a mischievous kid, a daredevil, small for his age—the size of a six-year-old at age ten, Jim recalled. (His father liked to joke that when he was being born and the doctor said, “Grab him,” Leslie thought he said, “Stab him,” and slipped back inside, thus retarding his growth.) His brothers called him “banana legs” because of his habit of moving so fast his legs couldn’t catch up and falling on his face. He seemed to be constantly in motion. “You sat in front of me in one class,” a schoolmate recalled in a letter years later, “and you never could sit still. I hit you on the head one time and asked if you had worms!” He and his younger brother Sid once found a giant umbrella and tried to use it as a parachute, leaping off the roof of the Alhambra Theater building into a pile of sand below, nearly breaking their necks. Leslie even walked in his sleep. One night a policeman found him two blocks away from home, knocking at the door of the neighborhood drugstore. After that, Avis would tie his feet to his older brother Jack at night to make sure he didn’t wander.
At Fairmont grade school, where he arrived on the first day dressed in an Eton jacket and stiff white collar, his classmates flipped his name, Les Hope, and dubbed him Hopeless. He was never a very good student. The one subject he liked was music: he was the pet of his singing teacher, Miss Bailey, sang in a church choir, and joined his musical family in songs at the annual Welsh picnic at Euclid Beach.
Performing came easy to him, and early. “He was a big show-off since he was about nine,” his brother Fred recalled. At age twelve, when Charlie Chaplin–imitating contests were the rage, Les would dress up as the silent-film tramp and walk like Chaplin past the local firehouse. Egged on by his brothers, he entered a Chaplin contest at Luna Park, the amusement mecca a mile away from their home. His brothers packed the audience with neighborhood kids to cheer him on, and he won either first prize (Bob’s recollection) or second (Jim’s version). According to Bob, he used the prize money to buy a new stove for his mom.
One of his first jobs, at age twelve, was selling newspapers on the corner of 105th and Euclid. He and three brothers—Fred, Jack, and Sid—would each take a corner of the busy intersection, valuable turf that they would often have to defend from rival newsboys in the neighborhood. One of Les’s regular customers was an old gentleman in a chauffeur-driven limousine, who would stop by for a paper on his way home in the evenings. One day he rolled down the window and gave Les a dime for the penny paper. Les didn’t have change and told the gentleman he could pay tomorrow. The man said no, he would wait for his change, so Les scurried into a nearby grocery store to get it.
When he returned, the old man gave the boy some advice: “If you want to be a success in business, trust nobody. Never give credit and always keep change on hand. That way you won’t miss any customers while you’re going for it.” After he left, someone told Les the old gentleman was John D. Rockefeller.
It was one of Hope’s favorite stories from childhood, repeated often. It may even have been true. Rockefeller, the philanthropist and founder of Standard Oil, was in his late seventies at the time, and dividing his retirement years between his Cleveland home and an estate in upstate New York. “As his leisure increased,” noted Grace Goulder in John D. Rockefeller: The Cleveland Years, “he frequently had his chauffeur stop during afternoon automobile rides so that he might chat with farmers, tradesmen, and anyone who caught his attention.” One of them could well have been a young newsboy named Les Hope.
He graduated from Fairmont and went on to East High School. He had a variety of after-school jobs—soda jerk, taffy puller, delivery boy, flower-stand attendant at Luna Park. He spent much of his free time at the Alhambra poolroom, above Dye’s restaurant, with his pal George “Whitey” Jennings. Les became a sharpie at three-cushion billiards, good enough to make a few bucks hustling the newcomers, and entertaining the rest with his wisecracks. “We would hang around the corner of Euclid and East 105th Street,” one neighborhood kid recalled, “until someone suggested that we go up and watch the ‘funny kid’ shoot pool.” Aunt Louisa admonished Avis that her son was spending too much time in the poolroom, but Avis dismissed her concerns: “Don’t worry about Leslie. He’ll turn out fine.”
Les and Whitey hung out together, coming up with new schemes for making money. They competed for cash prizes in the footraces held at the big company picnics every summer at Euclid Beach and Luna Park. When two races were scheduled at the same time, they would try to get one rescheduled so they could compete in both: one of them would call the organizers and pose as a newspaper reporter, saying the race would get covered in the paper if it could just be moved earlier or later. Then, once entered in the race, the two boys would work together, plotting for one of them to bump the fastest runner, so the other could speed ahead to victory.
In the glow of nostalgia, Hope’s early Cleveland years sound like a quintessential early-twentieth-century Norman Rockwell idyll. Childhood friends would write him in later years to reminisce about their youthful exploits and hangouts—places such as Hoffman’s restaurant, with its famous ice cream (22 percent butterfat), where, as one neighborhood girl recalled, “you and ‘Whitey’ fattened me up on ‘tin roofs,’ walked me home, down past Wade Park, past Superior, to my home, where you played our piano till I almost had to throw you both out.” Another neighborhood friend remembered, “My father had a Buick touring car, which I used most every night. Some warm evenings, we would put the top down and pile in and ride slow from 105th to the square and back again, singing barbershop, till the cops chased us off the street. I guess we weren’t too hot.”
The gritty side of those years has largely been airbrushed out. Les was a tough kid who was no stranger to trouble. He dropped out of high school when he was a sophomore, for reasons that Hope and his biographers have always been vague about. In fact, he was sent to reform school. Records of the Boys Industrial School, a state reformatory in Lancaster, Ohio, show that Lester Hope (in his teenage years he changed his first name from the more effeminate-sounding Leslie), height five feet, weight 105 pounds, residing with his parents at 1913 East 105th Street, was admitted there on May 18, 1918, a few days before his fifteenth birthday. His infraction is not specified—his full juvenile court records have, significantly, been removed—but he was apparently arrested, given a hearing, and “adjudged a delinquent” who was “in need of state institutional care and guardianship.”
In interviews over the years, Hope sometimes alluded to incidents of shoplifting during his adolescent years. “I guess it’s no secret, but I have a record in Cleveland,” he said, only half-jokingly, at a Boys Club benefit in 1967. “They nabbed me for swiping a bike. . . . I pleaded for mercy, but the judge was an ugly, cruel, vindictive man. He turned me over to my parents.” In fact, the punishment, for that or a presumably similar incident, was considerably more serious. Les spent seven months at the Boys Industrial School, was paroled on December 21, and then readmitted to the school on March 6, 1919, after violating his parole. The date of his final discharge is unclear, but he appears to have spent at least another year at the reformatory, before being discharged for good in April of either 1920 or 1921. There is no record that he ever returned to high school.
What’s most interesting about Hope’s stint in reform school is that he felt the need to keep it secret. Even his brother Jim, in his rosy but scrupulously detailed family memoir, doesn’t mention it. An arrest for shoplifting and a stretch in reform school are hardly the most scandalous things that can happen to a teenager growing up in a tough urban neighborhood. It might even have added some raffish color to Hope’s stories of his wayward youth. But his elimination of them from his personal history was another sign of Hope’s capacity for denial, of the need to distance himself from the more unpleasant realities of his early life, and of his effort to construct a new persona that the world would someday know as Bob Hope.
• • •
World War I, which the United States entered when Les was fourteen, did not leave the Hope family untouched. Two of the Hope brothers, Fred and Jack, enlisted in the Army and served overseas—Fred in a field artillery unit and Jack in the infantry. Some tense days in the Hope household followed the news that Jack was missing in action. He turned up in a military hospital, suffering from shell shock. According to accounts given the family, Jack was trying to rescue a fellow soldier when a shell exploded nearly on top of him. He recovered and returned home, but was again hospitalized and survived a near-fatal bout of what was described as trench fever.
In 1920 Harry Hope became a naturalized US citizen, which automatically made Les and his brothers US citizens as well. Harry’s work prospects, however, remained bleak. Just to keep busy, he would take on small jobs such as cutting stepping-stones or garden fountainheads from material left over from previous jobs. For Avis he carved a birdbath with a sundial in the center, and a crescent-shaped stone bench that she placed in the garden and would sit on for hours, admiring the flowers. The eldest Hope boys picked up much of the slack, often helping one another in getting jobs. When Jim went to work for an electrical-power-line construction company, for example, he hired Les and two other brothers to string wire.
“Leslie was a good worker, always trying to do a little more than his workmate,” Jim recalled. When they got weekend breaks, however, Les might not show up at work until Tuesday—typically with an outlandish explanation of why. One time, when he was high up in a tree trimming back some branches, one of them snapped and he plunged to the ground, smashing his face. In later years it was occasionally suggested that the mishap—or the plastic surgery that followed—was the cause of his ski-slope nose, but Hope denied it. “It is not true my nose is the way it is as a result of having been broken in an accident,” he wrote in Have Tux, Will Travel. “It came the way it is from the manufacturer.”
Les bounced around to several other jobs in these years: selling shoes at Taylor’s department store, filling orders in the service department at the Chandler Motor Car Company. (He got fired from that job when he and some of his pals used the company Dictaphone after hours to practice their singing—and inadvertently left it for their boss to discover the next morning.) He worked at the butcher’s stall that his brother Fred had opened at the downtown Center Market. “Bob helped out weekends,” recalled Fred. “Plucked chickens, did some waiting on. He was a born salesman, but he never bothered to learn the different meats. One time I heard him trying to sell a customer a ham—and he was showing her a leg of lamb. Honestly, he didn’t know the difference. And he sold it to her too.”
He even tried boxing. Always a scrappy kid, Les worked on his fighting skills at Charlie Marotta’s Athletic Club on Seventy-Ninth Street. One day he found out that his friend Whitey Jennings had signed up to fight in the Ohio State amateur tournament, under the name Packy West. Hope decided to enter too—dubbing himself Packy East. In later years he would often joke about his brief boxing career (“I was the only fighter in Cleveland history who was carried both ways: in and out of the ring”), but he may have had more talent than he gave himself credit for. “He was a good young fighter,” said Al Corbett, a local boxer who saw some of Hope’s early fights. “He needed training, but he had natural ability. He was well built and his prospects were good.” But for the state tournament he weighed in at 128 pounds, just missing the cutoff for the featherweight division, and was forced to battle fighters bigger than he.
Still, he won his first-round fight, got a bye in the second round, and found himself in the semifinals. There he was matched against a more experienced bruiser named Howard “Happy” Walsh. “I probably outweighed Hope by six or eight pounds and I’d been boxing two or three years,” Walsh, who later became the state’s junior lightweight champion, told the Cleveland Press. “I sized him up when he entered the ring as a novice and decided to carry him along, make it look good for the fans. But in the second round he made me mad. I thought he was sneering at me, although I learned later he just unconsciously made faces. Anyhow, I had an exceptionally good right and I hooked him and he was counted out.”
Hope remembered it pretty much the same way, with gags: “In the first round I played cozy,” he wrote in his memoir. “Happy examined me as if to see what was holding me together. When I found out I was still alive, my footwork got fancier. I pranced around on my toes. In the second round I threw my right. I never got my arm back. Happy hit me on the chin. I fell in a sitting position, bounced and fell over. . . . Red [his manager] threw a bucket of water over me and carried me out.” That was the end of his career in the ring.
But not the end of his fighting days. When he was nineteen, Les and Whitey were walking through Rockefeller Park when they got into a scuffle with some thugs who were harassing a girl from the neighborhood. When Jim and some friends found him, Les had cuts over his face and a knife wound in the shoulder, serious enough to require a blood transfusion and fourteen stitches. The incident made the Cleveland Press the next day.
For a teenager who couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble or keep a job, show business provided a welcome escape. He soaked up all the entertainment available to a kid growing up in World War I–era America. He frequented the local nickelodeons, a fan of swashbuckling silent-film stars like Douglas Fairbanks. His mother would take him to the neighborhood vaudeville house, Keith’s 105th Street, where they once saw the celebrated vaudeville star Frank Fay, a song-and-dance man who also did comedy monologues. After a few minutes of his act, Avis whispered to her son, loud enough so that everyone around them could hear, “He’s not half as good as you.”
Les and Whitey would earn money for the rides at Luna Park by singing for pennies on the bus ride over, and Les sang in a quartet with some neighborhood kids who would perform outside of Schmidt’s Beer Garden. His most promising talent, however, was dancing. He practiced steps with his friend Johnny Gibbons, who worked with him at his brother Fred’s meat market. (Fred later married Johnny’s sister LaRue.) Les took dance lessons from King Rastus Brown, a former vaudeville hoofer, and later from Johnny Root, another ex-vaudevillian, who ran Sojack’s Dance Academy, behind Zimmerman’s dance hall. Then Root left town, and Les, not yet twenty, took over Root’s dance classes and tried to run the school himself. He made up business cards advertising his services: “Lester Hope will teach you to dance—Buck and Wing, Soft Shoe, Eccentric, Waltz, Clog.”
When dance marathons were sweeping the country in the early 1920s, Les even tried to hop on the bandwagon, starting his own contest at Sojack’s. Unfortunately he was a little late. The grueling marathons (dramatized so memorably in the novel and movie They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) had spawned a backlash across the country, and Cleveland was one of several cities weighing a ban on them. In a front-page story on April 17, 1923, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that the city council had decided to take no action on a proposed ban, allowing those marathons that were already under way to continue, but barring any new ones. Hope made it into the story’s last paragraph:
Lester Hope, of 2069 E. 106th Street, started a new contest at Sojack’s Dancing Academy, 6124 Euclid Avenue, but the contest was called off after an hour, due to Dance Hall Inspector Johnson’s ruling against permitting any new contests to start.
Les closed the school not long after. But he continued to work on his own dancing, competing in local amateur shows, first with Gibbons as a partner and then hooking up with Mildred Rosequist, a “cute little trick” he had met at Zimmerman’s dance hall.
“Mildred was tall, blonde, willowy, graceful, and a slick dancer,” Hope said. “I thought she was beautiful. She looked as if she’d done her hair with an egg beater. But I loved it that way.” He would bring her sweetbreads from Fred’s meat market and flirt with her at the cosmetics counter at Halle’s department store downtown, where she worked. She became a frequent visitor at the Hope house, and the family liked her. “She worshipped Leslie,” remembered Jim. “For some time we were all sure it was a hopeless, one-sided affair, but eventually Leslie also succumbed to her charm.”
Mildred remembered the romance a bit differently, describing Les as the pursuer, not to say something of a pest. “He would follow me home from work some nights,” she told Hope biographer William Robert Faith. “I mean, he would get on the same streetcar and I wouldn’t even know it. When I got off at Cedar, he’d be walking right behind me. Then I’d walk in the front door and my mother’d ask if he was with me and I’d say, ‘No,’ and then he’d stick his head around the hallway door and say, ‘Oh, yes I am.’ ” He said he wanted to marry her and even bought her an engagement ring. It was so small that she cracked, “Does a magnifying glass come with it?” Les didn’t appreciate the joke, and Mildred apologized for hurting his feelings.
They were a smooth pair on the dance floor. They modeled themselves on Vernon and Irene Castle, the enormously popular husband-wife dance team who headlined in vaudeville in the midteens and sparked a national craze for social dancing. Les and Mildred won some amateur contests around the city and were good enough to get a few paying jobs, earning $7 or $8 for an evening. Hope said he split the money with her, but Mildred claimed that Les told her the performances were for charity and kept all the money himself.
Their act had a homey touch. Hope described it in his memoir: “ ‘This is a little dance we learned in the living room,’ I’d tell the audience. Then we’d do that one, and I’d say, ‘This is a little dance we learned in the kitchen.’ Then we’d do that. We ended with, ‘This is a little dance we learned in the parlor.’ The parlor dance was a buck dance. We saved it for last because it was our hardest and it left us exhausted.”
A little too exhausted for Mildred. She recalled one of their performances at a local social club: “When we came out to do the hard stuff, the buck and wings which were so fast, I just quit, and I said I was tired, and I walked off the stage. Les looked at me with kill in his eyes—he was furious, but he ad-libbed. . . . He picked out a little old lady in the first row and said, ‘See, Ma, you should never have made her do the dishes tonight.’ ” It is the first recorded Bob Hope joke.
Les wanted to develop an act with Mildred and take it on the road. But her mother had no intention of allowing Mildred to travel with a man who clearly had more on his mind than dancing, and she nixed the idea. Les kept up a romance with Mildred, stringing her along for years to come as a hometown girlfriend. But for a professional partner, he had to look elsewhere.
He settled on Lloyd “Lefty” Durbin, a kid from the neighborhood he had gotten to know at Sojack’s Dance Academy. Lloyd was a polished dancer, and together they came up with an act that mixed in a little comedy with their tap and soft-shoe routines. They made the rounds of amateur shows, played intermission spots at movie houses, and landed an occasional fill-in gig on local vaudeville bills. Then, in August 1923, an agent got them a spot at the Bandbox Theater, as part of a vaudeville show headlined by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.
Arbuckle, the onetime silent-film comedian, was embarking on a comeback after one of the most sordid scandals in Hollywood history. In 1921, at the height of his popularity, the portly film star was implicated in the mysterious death of a starlet who had been partying with him and some friends in a hotel in San Francisco. Amid tabloid accusations that he had raped or murdered her, Arbuckle was put on trial for manslaughter. Though he was ultimately acquitted (in a third trial, after two hung juries), his film career was finished. Now he was trying to start over, as the star attraction in a touring variety show called Bohemia.
Hope and Durbin worked up some fresh material for their spot in the show. They did soft-shoe and buck-and-wing dance routines, and closed with a comic Egyptian dance number. “We wore brown derbies,” Hope recalled. “We pretended to go down to a well near the Nile, dip some water in a derby and bring it back. The gag was that afterward we poured actual water out of the derby. It was real crazy and it fetched a boff.” By chance, it is one of the few Hope vaudeville routines that can actually be seen: Hope re-created it, with dancer Hal Le Roy as his partner, on his first TV special in April 1950. The two dancers strut around in stiff-armed, hunch-shouldered style, like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics come to life, and do some neatly synchronized physical shtick, one behind the other. If not quite a boff, it is a slick and amusing piece of comedy business.
“The whole offering is built along familiar lines,” the unimpressed reviewer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote of the Arbuckle show, “with some better-than-ordinary costumes and settings standing out as the distinguishing feature. The comedians are found wanting in many instances, but the musical chorus numbers are well up to snuff.” Yet Arbuckle was impressed enough with Hope and Durbin to talk them up to Fred Hurley, a producer of vaudeville tabloid shows—musical-comedy revues that toured mostly small towns. These “tab shows” were considered the bottom rung of the vaudeville ladder, but they were a good place for newcomers to get a start. So, when Hurley a few months later offered Hope and Durbin parts in his new tab revue, Jolly Follies, which was set to begin a tour of the Midwest, they grabbed it.
It was Hope’s first full-time show-business job. His mother was proud; his practical brothers skeptical that he could earn a living at it. But for Hope, at age twenty-one, it was a great opportunity. The job would give him a chance to travel and see if he could make it as an entertainer in front of more than just hometown crowds. It would pay him a decent salary of $40 a week, half of which he promised to send back home to his parents. What it wouldn’t give him was a quick road to stardom. Hope’s vaudeville apprenticeship would last for nearly a decade—longer than the ambitious young hoofer had probably anticipated. Yet it would give him plenty of time to learn the tools of his trade, discover how to survive in a changing show-business world, and invent Bob Hope.