When Les Hope and his partner Lloyd Durbin went on the road with their act in the fall of 1924, vaudeville was dying. But then it had been dying for years, and it would continue dying for many years to come, as movies and radio plundered its audience and lured away its star performers. Still, enough life was left in those old Olympic and Palace and Hippodrome theaters, which brought live stage entertainment to towns big and small across America, to give a young hoofer from Cleveland a chance to make his mark.
Vaudeville was Hope’s irreplaceable school of show business. He loved his time there, and it instilled the qualities that would define him as an entertainer for the rest of his career: his love for stage performing, his ability to adapt to audiences of all kinds, his tireless work ethic. He came into vaudeville a novice, but he was smart and resourceful, doing whatever it took to survive—borrowing jokes, finding new partners, latching on to fads, even dancing with Siamese twins. But in that survival-of-the-fittest world, he evolved into something original, a fresh stage personality perfectly pitched to the changing times.
Vaudeville, even in its waning days, was still a great adventure for a young performer, a unique, if relatively short-lived, chapter in American entertainment. It was born in the 1880s, an outgrowth of the rambunctious, often racy variety shows that catered largely to men in the saloons and beer halls of post–Civil War America. A few prescient theater owners in New York City got the idea to clean up these shows, move them into larger and more respectable theaters (no liquor, no hookers), and market them to the family audience. These new family-friendly shows (“good clean fun” was the popular catchphrase) caught on almost immediately. In 1900 the United States had an estimated two thousand vaudeville houses; by 1912 the number had grown to five thousand. Giant theater chains sprang up with centralized booking so that acts could be mixed and matched and sent on nationwide tours efficiently. At one time, an estimated twenty thousand people were making a living—sometimes a handsome living—as vaudeville entertainers.
A typical vaudeville bill featured eight to ten acts, carefully assembled to appeal to as broad an audience as possible: young and old, male and female, highbrow and lowbrow. In a vaudeville show you could see singers, dancers, comedians, jugglers, magicians, acrobats, ukulele players, trained animals, female impersonators, and an assortment of wacky comics loosely categorized as “nut” acts. Celebrated stage actors such as Sarah Bernhardt and Ethel Barrymore appeared on the vaudeville stage. So did sports stars, among them Babe Ruth, and tabloid newsmakers such as Evelyn Nesbit, the former Floradora Girl whose lover, the architect Stanford White, was murdered by her jealous husband, Harry K. Thaw. Harry Houdini, the famed illusionist and escape artist, was a big vaudeville star. Even Helen Keller did a turn in vaudeville.
Vaudeville was America’s first form of mass entertainment. It grew to maturity as waves of immigrants were transforming American cities, and it was both a reflection of the melting pot and an agent of assimilation. Comedians often got laughs from broad ethnic stereotypes: there were funny Germans, funny Irishmen, funny Italians, funny Jews—and funny Negroes, played in blackface by white comics, a throwback to the minstrel shows that were an important forerunner of vaudeville. Yet even as it spotlighted ethnic differences, vaudeville was helping draw the nation together—creating the first mass-audience entertainment stars, from Lillian Russell, the 1890s chanteuse who was called the most beautiful woman in the world, to such pioneers of early-twentieth-century show business as George M. Cohan, Al Jolson, Will Rogers, Sophie Tucker, and the Marx Brothers.
For its performers, vaudeville wasn’t just a job but a way of life, with its own traditions, protocol, and lingo. There was “big-time” vaudeville—the large theaters in the biggest cities where the top acts appeared, usually doing two shows a day, matinee and evening—and “small-time” vaudeville, the minor leagues, where less established acts worked, usually in continuous shows that were repeated four, five, or six times a day. Billing of the acts adhered to strict hierarchies and customs. The opening spot was the lowest in the pecking order—usually an acrobat or some other “dumb” act, to allow time for latecomers to get settled. The show’s headliner typically had the second-to-last spot (“next to shut,” in the argot of Variety, the show-business trade paper), leaving the finale for a lesser act whose primary job was to clear out the house for the next show (thus called the “chaser”). Performers traveled from town to town by train or bus and frequently stayed in run-down rooming houses or show-business hotels. It was a hard, exhausting life, which forever carried a kind of seedy romance for the performers who came of age in it.
Hope and Durbin’s first vaudeville job was strictly small-time. Hurley’s tab show Jolly Follies traveled the lowly Gus Sun circuit, a Chicago-based chain of some three hundred theaters that served small towns in the Midwest and South. The show’s headliner, Frank Maley, doubled as a performer (teaming with a partner in a blackface comedy act) and the company manager—handling the books, overseeing the scenery, and sometimes even taking the tickets.
For Les Hope, it was a great learning experience. “Tab shows were a special part of show business,” Hope wrote in his memoir. “There’s no dollars and cents way I can measure the seasoning, the poise, the experience that being with Hurley gave me.” Hope and Durbin started in the chorus and worked their way up to larger roles in sketches and musical numbers. Hazel Chamberlain, the company’s top-billed singer, recalled the first time she heard Hope get a laugh—in Bloomington, Indiana, when he filled in as emcee for a sketch called “Country Store Night.” “Frankly we had all thought Lefty Durbin was the more likely of the two to be a comic,” she said, “but that night Les Hope was as much surprised as the rest of us.”
The troupe of thirteen traveled together by bus, staying in cheap theatrical hotels and boardinghouses. When they arrived in a new town, Maley would often have to knock on doors to find lodgings that were willing to take “show folk.” The living conditions were often dicey: cramped rooms, suspect food, linens that rarely got changed. “By the end of the week the towels would be so dirty you would usually bypass them and fan yourself dry,” Hope said. As the junior members of the troupe, Hope and Durbin often got the worst of it. At a theater in Orangeburg, South Carolina, the two tiny dressing rooms (one for men and one for women) had no space for them, so they had to clean out the coal bin in the basement and do their makeup there amid the coal dust.
Life on the road had its pleasures too. Les began seeing a girl in the troupe named Kathleen O’Shay—the stage name of Ivy Shay, a pretty Irish girl from Morgantown, West Virginia. Their affair caused a bit of a stir in the straitlaced Jolly Follies troupe (Maley and several others were married and had their wives along). At a hotel in Bedford, Indiana, Les was visiting Kathleen’s room when the hotel manager knocked at the door and ordered him out. He had a gun to put the point across. Kathleen left the troupe not long after and moved back to Morgantown, where she opened a dress shop. Les continued to stop in and see her when he passed through town, sometimes bringing dresses for her shop from New York. According to one Morgantown friend, she broke off the relationship because she was too embarrassed by his loud clothes.
Hurley’s Jolly Follies toured for one season, closing in the spring of 1925. But the team of Hope and Durbin didn’t last that long, broken up prematurely by an unexpected tragedy. Hope’s partner died.
Hope always blamed it on a bad piece of coconut cream pie that Durbin had eaten in a restaurant in West Virginia. When he began complaining of stomach pains, a doctor told him he had food poisoning. But while Durbin was taking his bows after their last show in New Castle, Pennsylvania, he sank to the floor and began spitting up blood. “I’m sick,” he muttered. “Get me home.”
The company members quickly checked train timetables, while Les tried to reach Lloyd’s parents. Jim Hope—who, by odd chance, was there, having dropped in to catch his brother’s act while traveling—carried Lloyd four blocks to the station and put him on a midnight train, entrusting him to the care of the attendant in charge of the baggage car. (By some accounts, Les traveled back to Cleveland with him, but Jim’s recollection seems more reliable.) Lloyd’s parents were at the station to meet him when the train arrived, and they took him to the hospital. He died three days later.
The cause, it turned out, was tuberculosis, an illness Durbin had apparently either ignored or managed to hide. Hope remained convinced the culprit was food poisoning; forever afterward, he was wary of eating at greasy spoons on the road, and he usually opted instead for the relatively safe home cooking of local tearooms.
In later years, when reminiscing about his vaudeville days, Hope didn’t like to dwell on, or even mention, Lloyd Durbin’s death. He glosses over it in one paragraph in his memoir Have Tux, Will Travel. Some chroniclers of Hope’s career have suggested that he willfully ignored his partner’s deteriorating health, reluctant to jeopardize his big break in show business. That is probably unfair. Still, what might have been a traumatic blow to another entertainer, or at least a sobering interruption in a budding career, was little more than a hiccup for Les Hope. Within days of Durbin’s death, he was back on the road with Hurley’s show. Fred Hurley had found him a new partner.
• • •
George Byrne was a soft-spoken, slightly built, angel-faced hoofer from Columbus, Ohio—like Durbin, a mild-mannered counterpoint to the more driven and outgoing Les Hope. “George was pink-cheeked and naïve,” Hope said. “He looked like a choir boy. He was real quiet. Real Ohio. He was a smooth dancer and had a likeable personality. We became good friends.”
Hope and Byrne finished out the Jolly Follies season together, doing well enough to move up to third billing, dubbed “Dancers Supreme.” Next, Frank Maley put them in a blackface revue called The Blackface Follies. As Hope tells it, on their first night in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, they blacked up with greasepaint instead of the usual burned cork and had to work all night trying to get it out. “After that we told Maley we thought we’d skip the blackface,” said Hope. Instead, Fred Hurley cast them in a new tab show he was readying for the 1925–26 season, called Smiling Eyes.
The show was another mélange of sketches, songs, and dance numbers, with Hope playing leading roles and character parts, singing in a quartet with Maley and two others, and joining Byrne for a featured dance spot. The team added bits of comedy to their act—mostly corny, secondhand vaudeville gags, with Les typically playing the straight man. George, for example, might walk across the stage with a woman’s dress on a hanger.
HOPE: “Where are you going?”
BYRNE: “Down to get this filled.”
Or George would come in carrying a plank of wood.
HOPE: “Where are you going now?”
BYRNE: “To find a room. I’ve already got my board.”
But their dancing, not their comedy, drew the most attention. “The most versatile couple of eccentric dancers who have ever been seen at the Victoria,” wrote a reviewer in Wilmington, Delaware. In Newport, Kentucky, “they stopped the show with their numbers and were called back for two encores.” They were a smash in Newport News, Virginia. “For the premier honors of the entire bill, Hope and Byrne came through with flying colors in the eccentric dance,” wrote the local critic. “Friends, it was a regular knockout. There has never been anything any better in this house of this kind.”
Hope and Byrne traveled with Smiling Eyes for the entire 1925–26 season. At breaks between engagements, they would stop in Cleveland and practice dance routines in front of the big mirror above the fireplace in the Hopes’ living room. “I taught myself to play ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’ on an upright piano, while George stood on top of the piano, plucking a banjo strung like a uke,” Hope recalled. On the road, their adventures were not always so homespun. Once, in Braddock, Pennsylvania, they hitched a ride to Pittsburgh with a stranger outside the theater and found themselves in a highway car chase with the cops. The driver ditched the car in a gulley and ran off into the bushes, leaving Hope and Byrne to get hauled off to jail. The car had been reported stolen. They were released after a night in jail when the driver was identified as a doctor’s chauffeur who had taken his boss’s car for a spin without asking.
Their act caught the eye of Gus Sun, the theater-circuit owner, who thought Hope had possibilities as a single. But Fred Hurley was more skeptical and told a reporter covering the show in Springfield, Ohio, not to give Hope “any big puff.” “Why not?” the reporter asked. “Because it’ll go to his head,” said Hurley. “Next thing he’ll be wanting a raise, and I’m already paying him more than he’s worth.”
When Smiling Eyes’ season was over in the spring of 1926, Hope and Byrne decided to strike out on their own. They billed themselves as “Dancemedians” and put together an act that featured as much comedy as dancing. One of their models was the vaudeville team of Duffy and Sweeney, a comedy duo known for wacky stunts: taking out a frying pan and making eggs onstage, for example, or lying underneath a piano sucking lollipops. Their shenanigans would often continue offstage. After one performance they staged a shouting match in their dressing room, climaxed by a gunshot and a thud—followed by Duffy stalking out of the room alone. When company members nervously opened the dressing-room door to see what had happened, they found Sweeney calmly removing his makeup.
Hope and Byrne brought some of this madcap spirit to their act. “Our act opened with a soft-shoe dance,” Hope recalled in his memoir. “We wore the high hats and spats and carried canes for this. Then we changed into a fireman outfit by taking off our high hats and putting on small papier-mâché fireman hats. George had a hatchet and I had a length of hose with a water bulb in it. We danced real fast to ‘If You Knew Susie,’ a rapid ta-da-da-da-da tempo, while the drummer rang a fire bell. At the end of this routine we squirted water from the concealed bulb at the brass section of the orchestra in the pit.”
The act was good enough to get them two weeks at the State Theater in Detroit for $175 a week, with a late show at the Oriole Terrace for an additional $75—a nice raise from the $100 a week they were getting from Hurley. They squandered most of their first week’s pay at a gambling joint down the street from the theater. But the reviews were good and helped them get a few more gigs in Detroit. Then they moved on to Pittsburgh for a stint at the Stanley Theater for $300 a week, on a bill with Tal Henry and His North Carolinians, a popular swing band.
But Hope was itching to go to New York, where the big-time bookers were. He bought the team Eton jackets with big white collars and spats and hired a top photographer in Chicago to take new publicity shots of them; even at this early stage, Hope was learning the value of marketing. In their boaters and bow ties, they looked like perfect 1920s dandies. Hope, with his slicked-back hair, lantern jaw, and hawklike gaze, was clearly the sharpie of the pair—lean, dapper, and good-looking, “the thinnest man in vaudeville,” in Hope’s words. “I was down to 130 pounds. I was so thin I always made sure the dog act was over before I came onstage.”
The publicity shots apparently paid off. When Hope and Byrne got to New York and started pounding the pavement, they met with Abe Lastfogel of the William Morris Agency. “If you’re only half as good as your pictures, you’ll do,” Lastfogel said. The job he had for them, however, was certainly the strangest of Hope’s career. He and Byrne were hired to play second fiddle to a pair of Siamese twins.
Daisy and Violet Hilton, joined back-to-back at the hip, were born in Brighton, England, in 1908, to a barmaid who gave them up to her landlady shortly after birth. The twins’ foster parents turned them into a sideshow attraction in England, and later, after moving to San Antonio, on the American vaudeville circuit. (Today they’re best known for their featured roles in Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks.) Sideshow freaks were hardly unheard of in vaudeville, but there was nothing quite like the sensation caused by the Hilton sisters. When they played Newark, the lines around the theater blocked traffic. They set a house record in Cleveland. Variety pronounced them “the greatest draw attraction and business getter that has hit vaudeville in the past decade.”
In their relatively skimpy twelve-minute act, the sisters talked about their lives as Siamese twins, played a duet on saxophone and clarinet, and performed a closing dance number with two male partners. That’s where Hope and Byrne came in—returning for the finale after their own featured dance number earlier in the show. Improbable as it seems, the act got good reviews. “The finish is a wow and a real novelty,” said Variety. “The routining of the dance steps shows it perfectly possible for the twins to dance all of the present type of dances with partners who are familiar with close formation.” Though the Hiltons were the obvious star attraction, Hope and Byrne got their share of attention. “They have some fast dances and several novelties, even singing a little,” noted one reviewer. “Both Hope and Byrne stand out pleasantly on the program.”
Hope was a little nonplussed at the whole experience. “At first it was a funny sensation to dance with a Siamese twin,” he wrote. “They danced back to back, but they were wonderful girls and it got to be very enjoyable—in an unusual sort of way.” But when the twins’ manager wouldn’t give Hope and Byrne a raise after six months, they quit the show in Providence and headed back to New York.
It was 1927, a pivotal year for show business. Hollywood’s first talking picture, The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, opened in October, giving vaudeville another push toward oblivion. Movies had been encroaching on vaudeville’s turf since the early teens. At first, short silent films were added to vaudeville bills as a novelty—just another attraction, like a juggler or a comedy team. With the advent of feature-length films, however, more vaudeville houses began switching to movies as a primary attraction, with live entertainment as merely a supplement. By 1925, only a hundred all-live vaudeville theaters were left in the country. When talking pictures arrived, the trend accelerated, with more theaters adding movies and many dropping their stage shows altogether.
Vaudeville was also getting strong competition in 1927 from another quarter: Broadway. More than 260 shows, at least 50 of them musicals, opened on Broadway during the 1927–28 season, including such classic musicals as the Gershwins’ Funny Face (starring Fred and Adele Astaire), Rodgers and Hart’s A Connecticut Yankee, and Jerome Kern’s landmark Show Boat. It was also the heyday of the musical revue. These loosely structured shows (including such perennials as the Ziegfeld Follies, George White’s Scandals, and Earl Carroll’s Vanities) featured songs, sketches, and lavish production numbers—a kind of gussied-up vaudeville show—and provided a bounty of jobs for performers who might otherwise be touring in vaudeville, both well-known stars and up-and-comers.
Hope and Byrne were among those up-and-comers in the summer of 1927 when they landed parts in a Broadway show called Sidewalks of New York. With book and lyrics by Eddie Dowling and music by James Hanley—the team whose Honeymoon Lane had been a big hit the previous season—it was nominally a book musical, about a naïve girl from an orphanage who comes to the big city. But it had many revue-style elements, including topical jokes about current political figures such as New York governor Al Smith and New York City mayor Jimmy Walker, and a cast packed with veteran vaudevillians, among them the comedy team of Smith and Dale (the model for Neil Simon’s bickering vaudeville duo in The Sunshine Boys). One of the show’s female leads was a young dancer, soon to marry Al Jolson and move to Hollywood, named Ruby Keeler.
Getting cast in the show was a big break for Hope and Byrne: just months after playing dance partners to a pair of Siamese twins, they were on Broadway. But their roles were minimal; except for a small dance bit in the opening production number, they were mostly lost in the gigantic cast of eighty. During the show’s pre-Broadway tryout run in Philadelphia, a new number was written that featured them and Keeler, but it never made it into the show.
Sidewalks of New York opened at New York’s Knickerbocker Theater on October 3, 1927, and got reasonably good reviews. But to keep the show running, the producers had to cut costs. Hope and Byrne were just one of two male dance teams in the show, and as the less experienced pair, they got the ax. Sidewalks of New York went on to have a respectable run of 117 performances, but the Broadway career of Hope and Byrne was over in eight weeks. By the end of 1927, they were back on the street, scrounging for vaudeville jobs.
They rented rooms in a series of theatrical hotels, sometimes sharing the same lumpy bed and filling their substantial downtime by trading stories with other out-of-work vaudevillians. They kept working on the act—Hope pushing, as always, to add more comedy. They landed the No. 2 spot at the B. S. Moss Franklin Theater to showcase their act for bookers, but it didn’t go well. After a while they had trouble getting bookers to even come see them. A top agent at William Morris, Johnny Hyde (later famed for his role in launching the career of a young Marilyn Monroe), gave them a blunt assessment: “You ought to go West, change your act, and get a new start.”
Beaten down, Hope and Byrne decided to make a strategic retreat to Chicago and try to rethink their act there. Hope called an agent in Cleveland named Mike Shea, who found them a job along the way: a three-night weekend engagement in New Castle, Pennsylvania, third on a three-act bill, for a salary of $50. It would turn out to be an important stop for Hope.
Before their first show, the theater manager asked Hope if, at the end of his closing spot with Byrne, he would stay onstage to announce the next week’s show. Hope, grabbing the chance for a little more stage time, ad-libbed a joke about the coming headliner, Marshall Walker. “Marshall is a Scotsman,” said Hope. “I know him. He got married in the backyard so the chickens could get all the rice.”
The wisecrack, playing on the stereotype of the frugal Scotsman, got a laugh, and the manager told Hope to keep it up for the next show. The following night Hope threw in a few more jokes. By the end of the weekend, an orchestra member told him he ought to drop the dancing act altogether and try to make it as an emcee.
Emcees were a relatively new phenomenon in vaudeville. In contrast to British music halls—where the performers were introduced by a host, or “chairman”—vaudeville acts traditionally just trooped onstage, announced only by a title card on an easel at the side of the stage. But that began to change in the 1920s, thanks largely to the success of a suave comedian named Frank Fay, vaudeville’s best-known master of ceremonies. If anyone in vaudeville can be singled out as Hope’s creative role model, it is Fay.
He first became popular as a vaudeville monologuist in the late teens. By the mid-1920s he was the most popular emcee at New York’s Palace Theatre, once appearing there for an unprecedented ten straight weeks. His job was to introduce the performers, fill the spaces between acts with banter, and generally keep the show moving—or slow it down if there was a delay backstage. This required a new style of comedy. In contrast to most vaudeville comics, with their exaggerated stage personas, loud checked suits, and well-honed routines, Fay came onstage as himself and joked around in a casual, seemingly off-the-cuff manner.
Fay was a handsome Irishman, with a velvety manner and an aloof, almost aristocratic bearing—very different from the brash, fast-paced style that Hope developed. Fay’s humor was often cutting, even mean. (Girl: “I just came back from the beauty parlor.” Fay: “And they didn’t wait on you?”) He was, moreover, reputed to be something of a bastard offstage; anecdotes about his contemptuous behavior toward fellow performers abounded. (He later had a stormy marriage to the actress Barbara Stanwyck.) Though he appeared in several movie musicals in the early 1930s and starred in the original Broadway production of Mary Chase’s hit 1944 play, Harvey, his later career never came close to the heights it reached in vaudeville.
Fay was a key inspiration for Hope, introducing him to a comedy style that was more natural and spontaneous, a style that would allow Hope to showcase his quick wit and stage presence, rather than his often mediocre material, and to establish a more intimate relationship with the audience. But it meant working alone.
By Hope’s account, the end of the Hope-Byrne partnership was amicable, and not unexpected. Near the end of 1927, as Hope told the story, he simply went to Byrne and said, “I think I’ll try it alone for a couple of weeks. If it works, we’ll break up the trunk.” Byrne took the news in stride: “I don’t blame you. I’ll go back to Columbus and take it easy.” According to Jim Hope, Byrne’s father was ill, and George felt it was time to move home and get steadier work.
It may be a stretch to believe that the breakup of a relatively successful three-year stage partnership came with no more trauma than that, and some observers have seen it as an early example of Hope’s self-centered careerism. Lawrence Quirk, author of the gossipy, unfriendly, and only marginally reliable biography Bob Hope: The Road Well-Traveled, claims that the breakup was a cruel blow to Byrne, who was too weak a personality to put up much of a fight with his domineering partner. Quirk quotes director George Cukor, a friend of Byrne’s, describing a tearful phone call from Hope’s partner, who was distraught over the prospect of splitting up the team. “Without him I’m nothing,” Byrne supposedly said. Quirk also cites Cukor and others to suggest that Byrne was gay and had an unrequited crush on Hope.
(Quirk also hints, more dubiously, that Hope himself had repressed homosexual urges. A single young man traveling the vaudeville circuit in the fast-and-loose 1920s may well have done some experimenting. Hope once told his radio writers of an encounter he had on the road with a cross-dressing performer known as Umqualia the Spanish Queen. The fellow knocked on Hope’s hotel room door one night and offered to service him. “Why not?” Hope responded. Still, the suggestion that Hope was bisexual is hard to take seriously.)
If there was any bitterness between Hope and Byrne over the breakup of their act, it didn’t last. After the split, Byrne spent a few years as part of a comedy-dance quartet, then retired from show business and went to work for the Defense Supply Company in Columbus. He and Hope remained friends. On a stop in Columbus a few years later, Hope invited Byrne to join him and his brothers for a family celebration at a local nightspot, and Byrne brought along his sister Mary. She hit it off with Hope’s youngest brother, George, and the two ended up marrying—thus establishing a permanent family link between the onetime vaudeville partners.
Byrne never talked publicly about his partnership with Hope or their breakup. But family members discounted any suggestion that Byrne felt badly treated by Hope. “My mother told me that her brother George wanted to leave the act,” said Avis Hope Eckelberry, the daughter of George and Mary Byrne Hope. “He wanted to go home. He was done with being on the road. There were no hard feelings.” George Byrne died in 1966, at age sixty-two. Hope never had a bad word to say about him.
• • •
Once he split from his partner, Les Hope was in uncharted territory. He accompanied Byrne on the bus back to Columbus, then continued on to Cleveland, where he moved back home for a while to get his bearings. Avis was glad to have him back; his letters from the road had made his hand-to-mouth existence all too apparent. “If I don’t get any work by Saturday,” he wrote in one, “I’ll be starting home on Shank’s pony.” Avis fortified him with home-cooked meals and lemon pie.
Les called up Mike Shea, the Cleveland agent who had booked Hope in New Castle, and asked if Shea could find any work for him as a single. Shea got him a spot on a “rotary,” a vaudeville show that moved around to different venues in town every night. For the first few days, Hope worked in blackface. “I went out, bought a big red bow tie, white cotton gloves like Jolson’s, a cigar, and a small derby which jiggled up and down when I bounced onstage,” he recalled.
It was an odd choice for Hope, but it may have helped loosen him up, easing the pressure of doing a single for the first time. “Audiences knew that white performers in blackface were not really blacks. But they associated blackface performers with a uniquely freer, more expressive style,” wrote Robert Snyder in Voice of the City, his history of vaudeville in New York City. “In blackface, white performers found a liberating mask.” But Hope’s blackface experiment didn’t last long. He would take the trolley from home each night to his various gigs. On the fourth night, he missed the streetcar and arrived too late to put on the burned cork. So he went on without makeup, and the act went over just fine. Afterward Shea told him, “Don’t ever put that cork on again. Your face is funny the way it is.”
After a few weeks in Cleveland, Les was ready to make the move to Chicago. The country’s second-biggest entertainment center after New York, the city offered plenty of opportunities for a vaudeville performer—with lavish downtown theaters such as the Palace, Majestic, and State-Lake, along with many neighborhood movie houses that also offered live entertainment. But in early 1928, with no contacts and little money, Les Hope got a cold welcome.
“I couldn’t get in anybody’s door,” he recalled. “I was living at a hotel on Dearborn Street and sharing a bathroom with a man who had a cleanliness complex. He only came out to eat. I couldn’t get a date, and I owed four hundred bucks cuffo for coffee and doughnuts.” Years later, while traveling through Chicago with his granddaughter Miranda, he would point out the street corner where he used to gaze in the window of a fancy restaurant and watch the rich people dining. “I used to dance on that corner for tips,” he said. It was probably the low point of Hope’s career.
When spring came and there was still no work, he was about to give up. Then he ran into Charlie Cooley, a vaudeville hoofer he knew from Cleveland. Sorry to see his brash Cleveland pal down on his luck, Cooley took him into the Woods Theater Building to meet his friend Charlie Hogan, who booked vaudeville acts in movie theaters around town. Hogan told Hope an emcee spot was open on Memorial Day weekend at the West Englewood Theater, on the city’s southwest side. The pay was only $25, but Les, hungry for anything, snapped it up.
He did well, and before the weekend gig was over, Hogan had lined up another emcee job for him: two weeks at the Stratford Theater, a popular neighborhood movie house at Sixty-Third and Halstead. The Stratford had just lost its longtime emcee, Ted Leary, and was trying out replacements. “Late of Sidewalks of New York Co.,” read the ad in the Chicago Tribune on June 25, 1928, announcing Hope’s debut there (on a bill with the Wallace Beery movie Partners in Crime). The ad was a notable milestone. For the first time, he was billed as Bob Hope.
The name change was fairly arbitrary, if euphonious. “I thought Bob had more ‘Hiya, fellas’ in it,” Hope said. The name took awhile to catch on. Hope loved telling the story of a theater in Evansville, Indiana, that billed him on the marquee as “Ben Hope.” When he complained, the theater manager shrugged and said, “Who knows?” Hope kept a photo of the marquee for the rest of his life.
At the Stratford, Hope made friends with a pint-size song-and-dance man named Barney Dean, who talked up Hope’s act with Charlie Hogan, and his two-week run was extended to four weeks. But the neighborhood regulars were a tough crowd. Harry Turrell, the Stratford’s manager, reminded Hope in a letter years later of “the very unfair reception given you when you tried so hard to follow Ted Leary, who had been a fixture there for many years”; after six weeks “I had to tell you that you didn’t make it.” After his Stratford gig ended, Hope (who had kept his connections in the New York theater world) landed the small role of Screeves the butler in a short-lived Broadway musical called Ups-a Daisy. But on New Year’s Eve he was back in Chicago, signing a contract with the Stratford for another stint as emcee, at $225 a week. This time Hope stayed for sixteen straight weeks, and the engagement was a turning point in his career.
At the Stratford, Hope had to develop a comedy act on the fly. A vaudeville comic who traveled the road, appearing in a new city every week, could recycle material over and over. But the emcee of a neighborhood movie house faced many of the same patrons week after week, as the movie bills changed. That meant he had to keep coming up with new material. Hope scrounged for new gags anywhere he could. He mined vaudeville jokebooks and magazines such as College Humor. He stole bits from more established vaudeville comics like Frank Tinney. He begged new acts that came through town to throw a couple of extra jokes his way.
He improvised material, playing off the acts he had to introduce—such as the Great Guilfoil, who juggled cannonballs. He danced and sang, wading into the audience for numbers like “If You See Me Dancing in Some Cabaret, That’s Just My Way of Forgetting You.” He threw in some Duffy-and-Sweeney-style stunts: there would be a loud crash offstage, after which Hope would walk on, dust off his clothes, and straighten his tie as if he’d just finished a fight, snarling, “Lie there and bleed.” He would poke fun at himself when his jokes bombed—“I found that joke in my stocking; if it happens again, I’ll change laundries”—to disarm the crowd and get them on his side.
“I learned a lot about getting laughs and about ways of handling jokes of different types at the Stratford,” he said. “I’d lead off with a subtle joke, and after telling it, I’d say to the audience, ‘Go ahead; figure it out.’ Then I’d wait till they got it. One of the things I learned at the Stratford was to have enough courage to wait. I’d stand there waiting for them to get it for a long time. Longer than any other comedian has enough guts to wait. My idea was to let them know who was running things.”
He was brash, sophisticated, modern. Unlike so many of the vaudeville comics who preceded him, he didn’t do accents or play an ethnic type. (“I simply can’t tell a dialect joke,” he often said.) He was an all-American wise guy, accessible to everyone. For the critic John Lahr—the son of actor Bert Lahr, a former vaudeville comic of the same era—Hope represented a clean break with the physical clowns and ethnic (often Jewish) comics who came before. “He was a bright package of assimilated poise and pragmatism—the all-American average guy,” wrote Lahr. “In their manic bravado, the older generation of funnymen gave off a whiff of immigrant desperation and sadness at what had been left behind. Hope was all future. The wrinkles had been pressed out of his suits and out of his personality. He was an anxiety-free, up-to-the-minute, fast-talking go-getter on holiday.”
With his urbane, fast-paced style, Hope also exemplified the racier, more freewheeling comedy that was becoming popular at the Palace Theatre, the New York City showplace that opened in 1913 and quickly became the premier vaudeville house in the country. The entertainers who starred at the Palace blew away the last vestiges of Victorian prudishness—the era of “good clean fun,” variety entertainment for the whole family. The Palace was “the focal point of a new twentieth-century aesthetic of shazz and pizzazz, of (as Variety abbreviated it) ‘show biz,’ ” wrote D. Travis Stewart (under the pseudonym Trav S.D.) in his lively vaudeville history, No Applause—Just Throw Money. “This quality permeated every aspect of the era’s entertainment. The breezy new spirit was perhaps embodied most successfully in the personality of Bob Hope—wisecracking, confident, comfortable. Here was the future.”
• • •
Bob Hope’s own future became clearer with his successful run at the Stratford Theater. Armed with a fresh load of material and a new comedy style, he set out in the spring of 1929 to try his act on the road. Charlie Hogan got him some bookings around the Midwest, mostly small-time theaters in such places as South Bend, Indiana, and St. Paul, Minnesota. He sported a brown derby and cigar and had the confidence of a headliner—and pretty soon he was one.
He also had a new partner in the act: a pretty, blond aspiring actress from Chicago named Louise Troxell. He began using her onstage at the Stratford in “Dumb Dora” routines, popular vaudeville bits in which a male comic is constantly flummoxed by his daffy female companion. Their material was a pretty standard example of the genre:
LOUISE: “The doctor said I’d have to go to the mountains for my kidneys.”
BOB: “That’s too bad.”
LOUISE: “Yes, I didn’t even know they were up there.”
BOB: “What have you got in your bag?”
LOUISE: “Mustard.”
BOB: “What’s the idea?”
LOUISE: “You can never tell when you’re going to meet a ham.”
Louise quickly became a fixture in Hope’s act, as well as in his life, in ways that would cause him some problems in the years to come.
Hope put together an act he called “Keep Smiling” and toured on the Interstate Vaudeville Circuit, moving through the Midwest and then into the South. There he hit a speed bump. The fast-paced Chicago personality who played so well up North seemed to befuddle his Southern audiences. In Fort Worth, Texas, Hope felt totally lost. “When I walked out before my first Fort Worth audience with my fast talk,” he recalled, “I might as well have kept walking to the Rio Grande. Nobody cared. I couldn’t understand it. I came offstage, threw my derby on the floor and told the unit manager, ‘Get me a ticket back to my country.’ ”
Bob O’Donnell, head of the Interstate circuit, was in the audience that night, and he came backstage after the show. “What seems to be the matter, fancy pants?” he said. When Hope complained about the audience, O’Donnell suggested, “Why don’t you slow down and give them a chance? This is Texas. Let them understand you. Why make it a contest to keep up with your material?”
Hope, the cocky Midwesterner, bristled at the advice. But it registered. “I did slow down for the next show (as much as my stubbornness would let me) and the audience warmed up a little,” he recalled. “I slowed down even more for the next show, and during the last show of the night, I was almost a hit. Before I moved on to Dallas, I was a solid click.” If the Stratford Theater was where Hope developed his new, more spontaneous style of stand-up comedy, his Fort Worth experience showed him the importance of tailoring his act to each specific audience and locale. For a comedian who would go on to become the greatest grassroots entertainer of his era, it was a crucial lightbulb moment.
Still, he was playing mostly small-time theaters. His goal, ever since the Hope and Byrne days, was to crack the big-time houses that were part of the Keith circuit—the chain of vaudeville theaters founded by B. F. Keith and Edward F. Albee, encompassing most of the biggest and most prestigious venues east of the Mississippi (and after a merger with the West Coast–based Orpheum chain in 1927, across the country as well). For a vaudeville performer, playing “Keith time” meant you had made it.
Hope’s breakthrough came in the fall of 1929, when he got a wire from a New York agent named Lee Stewart, who had heard about him from Bob O’Donnell. Stewart wanted to set up a showcase for Hope in New York—a tryout engagement where the Keith-circuit bookers could see his act. Bob grabbed Louise, hopped in his new yellow Packard, and sped to New York.
As Hope recalled the events, Stewart first offered to put him on a bill at the Jefferson Theatre on Fourteenth Street. But Hope balked at the downtown venue, which was known for its boisterous audiences, and held out for a classier uptown theater. A few days later Stewart called back with a theater more to Hope’s liking: Proctor’s 86th Street, on Eighty-Sixth and Broadway. Hope prepared for the engagement by testing out his material in a smaller tryout theater in Brooklyn. Stewart came to see one of Hope’s shows there and on the subway ride back to Manhattan seemed to have doubts. “Proctor’s Eighty-Sixth Street is a pretty big theater, you know,” said Stewart. “Look, Lee,” Bob replied. “I open there tomorrow, and if I don’t score, we won’t talk to each other again, okay?”
That’s Hope’s version. A slightly different account comes from Dolph Leffler, who worked in the Keith office and recalled the events in a letter to Hope years later. No mention of Hope’s rejecting the Jefferson Theatre. Indeed, the young performer appears all too eager to take whatever he can get. “I offered Lee Stewart $35 (all I had left of my budget) for your five-person act,” recalled Leffler. (Along with Troxell, Hope had added several other comic foils, or “stooges,” to his act.) “He almost fainted but decided to wire you the offer. We never expected you to accept, as $35 wouldn’t buy your transportation from Cleveland—but you wired back accepting.”
The Keith bookers arranged Hope’s tryout in Brooklyn, and Leffler was there, along with Stewart, for the first, sparsely attended matinee. Despite the small crowd, Leffler liked what he saw, and he gives a lively firsthand account of Hope’s zany vaudeville act at the time:
When you introduced your world famous International Orchestra which had just returned from playing before the Crown Heads of Europe—“and mind you, we are just getting rid of our sea legs before going to the Palace”—then the curtain went up and that joker sat on a beer keg in overalls playing a muted trumpet, no scenery, just the heating pipes, I fell off my seat. Then when the two boys started fishing from the balcony boxes I flipped. . . . One could never be sure, but I felt we had found something good. So we brought you into the Proctor’s 86th Street the following week and raised you to $50 for three days.
His engagement at Proctor’s 86th Street was Hope’s big shot, and he was uncharacteristically nervous. When he arrived at the theater on the night of the show, he asked the doorman, “How’s the audience here?” He replied, “Toughest in New York.” Hope walked around the block twice to calm himself down.
He knew he needed something to win over the crowd right away. Just preceding him on the bill was Leatrice Joy, a silent-film actress who had recently been in the headlines for her divorce from screen idol John Gilbert. With typical resourcefulness, Hope used that as the springboard for his opening salvo. After Joy finished her act, Hope walked out on the stage, waited until his musical intro was done, turned to a woman in the front row, and cracked: “No, lady, this is not John Gilbert.” The audience roared.
It was another defining moment in Hope’s comedic evolution. The line wasn’t just a good ad-lib. It also, importantly, showed Hope’s willingness to break down the barrier between performer and audience, to cozy up to the crowd by gossiping with them about the backstage lives of the stars. The inside-Hollywood wisecracks that became such a staple of Hope’s comedy, his constant ribbing of Bing Crosby and other showbiz pals, the Oscar-night jokes about nervous nominees and jealous losers—all of it can be traced back to that single line.
Variety’s reviewer was higher on the performer than the material: “Hope, assisted by an unbilled girl [Troxell] appearing only in the middle of the act for a gag crossfire, has an act satisfactory for the time it is playing. If some of the material, especially where old gags are found, could be changed, chances are this would double strength of turn.” Yet the Keith folks were impressed enough to book him for a tour almost on the spot. On November 7, 1929, Hope signed a contract with the B. F. Keith–Albee Vaudeville Exchange, guaranteeing him thirty-six weeks of work over the next year. The salary: a hefty $475 a week for the first fifteen weeks, bumped up to $500 after that, with an option for two more seasons at a salary that would slide upward to $700. He had to pay Troxell out of that amount—$100 a week, according to Hope.
It was a major boost in Hope’s earning power, especially striking in view of the timing. In between Hope’s arrival in New York for the audition with Keith and his signing of the contract, the stock market crashed.
• • •
The sudden end to the 1920s economic boom—splashed out on the front page of Variety with the memorable headline “Wall Street Lays an Egg”—was, strangely, something of a nonevent in Hope’s career. Recounting his breakthrough with the Keith circuit in his memoir Have Tux, Will Travel, he never even mentions it.
But for the vaudeville business, it was a devastating, and ultimately fatal, blow. With the onset of the Great Depression, people still needed (more than ever) an escape through entertainment. But alternatives such as movies and radio were cheaper. What’s more, vaudeville’s economic model (driven partly by escalating salaries like the one that Hope landed in 1929) was making it an unprofitable business. Hope, with uncanny timing, had caught the last gravy train.
Over the next nine months, Hope crisscrossed the country on the Keith-Orpheum circuit. This classic vaudeville road trip was Hope’s whistle-stop introduction to America. He started with a couple of New York City dates (at the Jefferson, the theater he had first shunned, and the Riverside, on Ninety-Sixth and Broadway); moved upstate to Rochester and Syracuse; made a swing through the Midwest to Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, and St. Paul; traveled northwest to Calgary, Spokane, Seattle, and Vancouver; headed down the coast to Portland, Oakland, Los Angeles, and San Diego; veered back east through Salt Lake City and Omaha; then south to Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Charlotte; before a final Midwest swing, to South Bend, Indiana, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Rockford, Illinois.
His act was another knockabout mix of songs and gags. Hope opened by singing “Pagan Love Song” while getting razzed by the orchestra, did a rapid-fire monologue, and mixed it up with Troxell, before going out with a song and dance. The reviewers were less impressed with Hope’s “well-worn” material than with his showmanship and ingratiating personality. (It “sounded like a gagster’s catalog, from auto jokes to synthetic Scotch witticisms,” said Billboard, but “socked in heavy on the laugh register.”) For much of the tour, he was on a bill headlined by Harry Webb and his orchestra, whom Hope would introduce and clown around with. “This act flows right into Harry Webb’s turn,” reported Variety, “so that it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.”
As he moved from city to city, Hope would throw in jokes tailored to the local crowd. In Chicago, he and Louise repurposed an old gangster joke for one of the city’s more infamous residents:
BOB: “I come from a very brave family. My brother slapped Al Capone in the face.”
LOUISE: “I’d like to shake his hand.”
BOB: “We’re not going to dig him up just for that.”
After the show, Hope recounted getting a call in his hotel room from a gruff-voiced thug, who asked if he was the comic doing the Al Capone joke. When Hope said he was, the fellow warned, “Do us a favor, take it out.” Hope obliged—and lived to tell the tale, endlessly.
Even when his material faltered, Hope’s routines with Troxell usually got good reviews. She was a bigger asset to the act than he probably liked to admit. In November 1929, she got a mention in Variety’s “Clothes and Clothes” column, a survey of fashions onstage: “Girl with Bob Hope makes a very neat appearance in a simple black transparent velvet frock, unadorned but for a buckle at the natural waist and a crystal choker necklace. It hung longer in back and fitted well, showing good taste seldom met in the unbilled girl.”
The unbilled girl, however, was getting restless. Louise pressed Hope to give her billing and even threatened to quit. Hope’s response, astonishingly, was to contact his old girlfriend in Cleveland, Mildred Rosequist, and ask if she wanted to replace Louise in the act. According to Rosequist, he accompanied the offer with a marriage proposal. She wired back to say that she was sorry, but she was engaged to someone else. Hope then made up with Troxell—and promised to marry her.
The Hope-Troxell relationship remains one of the murkiest parts of Hope’s life story. He had little to say about her, other than to give grudging credit to her skills as a comic foil. (“She was quick and intelligent,” Hope wrote in his memoir, “but I’d trained her to hide all that.”) They almost surely were romantically involved as they traveled together on the vaudeville circuit, with various interruptions, for more than three years. At least once he brought her home to Cleveland, to meet the family. The marriage proposal, however, would sit for a while.
• • •
After his successful 1929–30 tour, Hope signed a new three-year contract with the Keith circuit, at a salary that rose in steady increments toward $1,000 a week. But Hope realized that he needed to improve his material, and he had the foresight and the resources to hire a writer. No hack either, but Al Boasberg, one of the most respected gagmen in the business. A portly, Rabelaisian character who liked to think up jokes in the bathtub, Boasberg had written for Buster Keaton, Jack Benny, and Burns and Allen; a few years later he was credited with writing the famous cramped-stateroom scene for the Marx Brothers’ movie A Night at the Opera. “He was a great joke mechanic,” said Hope. “He could remember jokes, fix jokes, switch jokes around, improvise on jokes. He could even originate jokes.”
Hope and Boasberg would brainstorm together at Lum Fong’s, a Chinese restaurant in New York City, Hope jotting down lines on the back of the menu. Later, when Boasberg decamped to Los Angeles to work on movies, he would send suggestions to Hope by wire or letter. A typical Boasberg telegraphed pitch:
WHEN GIRL MAKES HER FIRST APPEARANCE YOU SAY WHERE WERE YOU ALL LAST WEEK IN NEWARK AND SHE ANSWERS MR. HOPE YOU TOLD ME NOT TO COME OUT UNTIL YOU GOT YOUR FIRST LAUGH STOP ASK ONE STOOGE WHAT SCHOOL HE WENT TO AND HE WON’T TELL AND YOU ASK HIM IF HE’S ASHAMED AND HE ANSWERS THE PRINCIPAL GAVE ME FIFTY DOLLARS NOT TO TELL STOP PLEASE RECORD HOW MATERIAL IS GOING.
With Boasberg’s help, Hope came up with a new “afterpiece” for his act. These were miniature comedy revues, tacked on at the end of many vaudeville shows, in which the top-billed comedian and other performers in the show would return for a fast-paced string of comedy bits to close the show on a frantic high note. Hope called his afterpiece “Antics of 1930” (and later “Antics of 1931”), and it showed off his freewheeling, ad-libbing style to good effect. “Bob Hope closing 28 minutes opens with Hope playing around with the spotlight,” Variety wrote of his show at Chicago’s Palace Theatre in February 1931. “His easygoing smooth way of razzing himself soon ingratiated him to the audience for plenty of healthy laughs.”
Hope brought his show to Cleveland in February 1931, playing the downtown Palace Theatre—a triumphal homecoming for the former scourge of Doan’s Corners. Some of the old neighborhood gang came to see him, buying up the front seats and needling him by ostentatiously taking out their newspapers and reading during his act. He made a second visit to Cleveland a few months later, for an engagement at Keith’s 105th Street, his old neighborhood theater. This time his mom came to see him.
Avis, Bob had learned, was sick with what would eventually be diagnosed as cervical cancer. But she was beside herself with excitement to see her boy on the stage where she had once taken him to see Frank Fay. Bob’s brother Jim accompanied her, and described the scene in his memoir, “Mother Had Hopes”:
From the moment she took her seat, she just trembled from head to toe. The tears ran uncontrollably down her beautiful cheeks, and her little fingernails were cutting my hand. I was afraid she would pass out on us momentarily. And when her son made his appearance, her entire body stiffened until I’m sure had I not held her hand, she would have automatically stood up. Then when she heard the reception accorded him by the audience acknowledging him as a neighborhood product, she seemed to relax and, as a coach might at the debut of a very promising student, she listened to every syllable, nodding her head as though in approval to every word.
When Bob caught sight of her in the crowd, he gave her a big shout-out: “There she is, folks! There’s my mom! With the lilies of the valley on her hat!”
Though Avis was a fan, Hope’s brothers had long been skeptical of his show-business career. When he was still struggling to find work in New York, his brother Fred and Johnny Gibbons, Fred’s brother-in-law and Bob’s old dance partner, went there on a rescue mission, trying to talk him into coming home. He refused, saying he wanted to stick it out a little longer. His eldest brother, Ivor, still doubted that Bob would ever make a decent living in show business. When Bob showed him the paycheck for a week of shows in Cleveland, Ivor’s eyes popped. Indeed, Bob was doing well enough to buy a new home for his parents, moving them from their aging place on Euclid Avenue to a smaller but more modern house on Yorkshire Road, a few blocks away in the more upscale neighborhood of Cleveland Heights.
Except for Jim—who was in Hollywood now, trying to get into the movie business—the brothers were all settled in Ohio, leading the kind of solidly middle-class, midwestern lives that Hope, while not looking down on them, was happy to have left behind. Fred, the most successful of the family, had turned his butcher shop into the United Provision Company, which supplied meat to most of the major hotels in the area. Ivor had a metal-products business, while Sid had moved to a farm near Ridgeville Corners, in the western part of the state, where he raised a family and dabbled in various small businesses. Only George, Bob’s good-looking youngest brother, seemed interested in joining his brother in show business. Bob didn’t see a lot of talent there, but at Mom’s urging, he gave George a spot in his act.
He teamed George with an old friend from Toledo named Toots Murdock and used them as stooges in his “Antics” shows. They would sit in the audience boxes and heckle Hope and the other performers: “What’s going on behind the curtain?” one would call out. “Nothing,” Bob would reply. “Well, there’s nothing going on in front of it either!” When Hope brought on a singer who did a parody of the popular crooner Rudy Vallee, the hecklers interrupted with insults. Hope snapped, “Don’t you boys know you can be arrested for annoying an audience?” Their comeback, in unison: “You should know!”
This was more than just random silliness. Hope was slowly developing, if not a comic persona, at least a comic strategy: the self-assured wise guy who is continually cut down to size. “A part of my new idea was for my stooges to come out and start whipping at me,” Hope said. “I figured it would be a great device for them to tear down this character on the stage who’d been so cocky, brash and bumptious.” It was another step in Hope’s transformation from generic vaudeville gagman to a much more distinctive, fully formed stage comic—a modern comedian.
Bob and George were sometimes at odds. Bob tried teaching his brother to dance, but “I had to pound his eardrums to get him to do it.” Once they had a fight and George walked out. He turned up at home in Cleveland, and Mom had to patch things up between them. George remained in the act (billed as “George Townes,” evidently to disguise the family connection), as Bob toured through 1931, on a bill with a brother-sister roping act and twenty trained monkeys. (The monkeys got loose behind a theater in Minneapolis one night and caused a near panic in the audience before they were finally rounded up.)
Despite his success on the Keith-Orpheum circuit, Hope still had a big gap in his résumé: he had not yet played the Palace Theatre, still deemed the pinnacle of vaudeville success. When he appeared in New York, he found himself stuck mostly with movie-theater gigs—twice, no less, he was forced to follow the grim World War I drama All Quiet on the Western Front. Then, in February 1931, while he was appearing in Cleveland, he got a surprise call from Lee Stewart, telling him to scoot back to New York in a hurry: a spot at the Palace had opened up on a bill headlined by Beatrice Lillie.
“He almost kissed me,” Stewart recalled. “I never saw such a happy and excited guy in my life.” The engagement meant a lot to Hope, and it put him in self-promotional overdrive. On the day of his Palace opening, he arranged for a band of picketers to show up at the theater with protest signs: BOB HOPE IS UNFAIR TO STOOGES. The publicity stunt got him some ink, but Hope later disowned it, claiming it was “too much.”
His Palace debut, on February 21, 1931, didn’t go so well either. “I was numb,” he recalled. “Not just scared, numb. I did my act mechanically.” The reviews were only mixed. He was especially hurt by one slam in the Daily Graphic: “They say that Bob Hope is the sensation of the Midwest. If so, why doesn’t he go back there?” The saving grace of his weeklong run was the chance to emcee the Palace’s Sunday “celebrity night,” where stars would often show up in the audience, and he got to banter with two of vaudeville’s top comics, Ted Healy and Ken Murray.
On the road, however, his polish and crowd appeal were growing. When Boasberg got too busy with his film work, Hope hired another writer, a highly regarded young comic named Richie Craig. The sketches got tighter; the gags popped. In one routine, credited to Craig, Bob played a hotel desk clerk:
MAN: “Can you give me a room and bath?”
HOPE: “Well, I can give you a room, but you’ll have to take the bath yourself.”
MAN: “Is the elevator still broke?”
HOPE: “Aren’t we all?”
MAN: “The last time I was here the elevator used to fall halfway down the shaft.”
HOPE: “Oh, we had that fixed. It falls all the way down now.”
As Hope’s confidence grew, so did his daring. The Keith-Orpheum theaters were notorious for their prudish resistance to any racy material. (In the old days signs would be posted backstage listing the slang terms that performers were forbidden to use, such as slob and son of a gun.) Hope’s material was considered borderline, and the censors kept a close eye on him. As early as 1929, in a review of Hope’s tryout act for the Keith circuit, Variety had warned, “The sting of some of his gags stand a chance of being taken out if the Keith office feels badly the day they are heard or reported.” By May 1933, Hope’s risqué material was raising eyebrows at the Bureau of Sunday Censorship in Boston. A report on his act listed with disapproval such suggestive lines as “Had breakfast with an English girl and did she have a broad ‘A.’ ” The report also noted, “Hell and God used quite a lot . . . men in boxes have cross talk and get very unruly.” Its recommendation: “Act needs a lot of watching.”
Hollywood was watching too. With the advent of sound, the movies were busy scouring vaudeville for new comedy talent. By 1930, the Marx Brothers had already adapted two of their Broadway hits, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, for the screen; vaudeville comics such as Eddie Cantor and Joe E. Brown were starring in features; and W. C. Fields, Jack Benny, and Burns and Allen were all making comedy shorts. So it wasn’t surprising that a West Coast agent named Bill Perlberg, who had heard about Hope from Boasberg, contacted Hope in the summer of 1930 and asked him to come in for a screen test.
Hope was on his West Coast swing for the Keith-Orpheum circuit, and he scheduled the test for the break between his bookings in Los Angeles and San Diego. He took a cab with Louise out to the Pathé lot in Culver City, where he did his vaudeville act for the cameras. He got laughs from the crew and was sure his Hollywood break was imminent. But after he and Louise continued on to San Diego and didn’t hear anything for days, he called Perlberg to find out what the reaction had been.
Perlberg invited Hope to come see the test for himself. Hope stopped back in LA before his return East and found his way to the screening room on the Pathé lot by himself. He cringed as he watched the screen test, all alone in the darkened theater. “I’d never seen anything so awful,” he said later. “I looked like a cross between a mongoose and a turtle. I couldn’t wait to get out.”
There’s no telling how bad Hope’s test really was. He had a habit of exaggerating his mistakes and missteps, both for comic effect and to cover up the pain of rejection. But his failure to get snapped up for the movies was certainly a blow to the ambitious vaudeville comic. It soured him on Hollywood for years and forced him to shift his focus back East. If he was to graduate from vaudeville, it now appeared, he had better concentrate on the entertainment center at the other end of the country: Broadway.
Since his debut in Sidewalks of New York in 1927, Hope had kept his ties to the Broadway theater. In addition to his brief stint in Ups-a Daisy in the fall of 1928, Hope got another small part in the chorus of Smiles, a Ziegfeld-produced revue, with a cast that included Fred and Adele Astaire, that opened in November 1930 and ran for two months. (Both roles were apparently so negligible, at least to Hope, that he omitted them from his résumé and never mentioned them in any of his reminiscences of his Broadway years.) But in the summer of 1932 he landed his most substantial Broadway part yet, in a musical revue called Ballyhoo of 1932. Hope was in the middle of his three-year contract with Keith, but the vaudeville circuit was perfectly willing to give him a leave of absence, on the promise that he would satisfy his touring obligations later. (The Broadway credit would only make him a bigger draw.) Hope, for his part, was happy to keep one foot in vaudeville, and he continued to tour sporadically, in between his Broadway gigs, for several more years.
Broadway came to Hope’s rescue at just the right time. In November of 1932 the Palace Theatre, after reducing its admission price and boosting its number of daily shows to try to stay afloat, finally caved to the inevitable and switched over to showing movies—a milestone usually cited as the final curtain for vaudeville. Film palaces such as the Roxy and Radio City Music Hall (and the Palace itself, from time to time) would continue to offer vaudeville-style stage shows along with their movie presentations for years to come. But as a viable, autonomous business, vaudeville was all washed up.
Hope spent the next five years in New York, getting major roles in five Broadway shows and launching a radio career. Yet the vaudeville experience left an indelible imprint on him. It gave him all the tools—singing, dancing, sketch acting—that he would need as a performer. Some of the people he met, such as Charlie Cooley and Barney Dean from the Chicago days, became lifelong friends and members of his entourage. Vaudeville taught him the value of hard work, made him a nimble and inventive performer, and gave him a solid grounding in the business of show. His years on the vaudeville circuit also ingrained in him a basic insecurity as a performer. To survive the vaudeville grind you had to be resourceful, vigilant, watchful of money, always on the move. They were qualities Hope would never lose.
He was, moreover, the great ambassador of vaudeville to a new generation of entertainment consumers. Gags from his vaudeville days were recycled as wisecracks on his radio and TV shows for the next six decades. In the Road pictures, he and Crosby typically played small-time vaudevillians, reprising the cheesy routines and repartee of a bygone entertainment era. Like other ex-vaudevillians who became TV stars (but for longer than any of them), Hope kept the vaudeville format alive in his television specials: an emcee doing an opening monologue, introducing a series of variety acts, chatting with guest stars. “When vaudeville died,” Hope once joked, “television was the box they put it in.”
After nine years, Hope had wrung all that he could out of vaudeville. Broadway would give him the finishing-school polish that completed his show-business education. It would also, for the first time, give him a taste of stardom.