New York City, like the rest of the nation, was suffering through the worst year of the Great Depression when Bob Hope moved there in the summer of 1932. More than a quarter of all employable New Yorkers were out of work. The city’s public debt was nearly as large as that of all the forty-eight states combined. Hoovervilles—shantytowns of the homeless, named for the president who still promised that “prosperity is just around the corner”—had so overrun the Sheep Meadow in Central Park that police had to remove the sheep for fear they would be eaten.
Hoover himself would soon be gone, replaced by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Other icons of the Roaring Twenties were quickly passing from the scene as well. Jimmy Walker, New York’s flamboyant flapper-era mayor (whom Hope would one day portray in a movie), was forced out of office in September 1932, the target of a corruption investigation. Florenz Ziegfeld, producer of the lavish musical revues that were the epitome of Broadway extravagance in the 1910s and 1920s, died in July, financially ruined by the stock market crash. Prohibition, which lent the decade so much of its disreputable glamour, was on its way out too, its repeal ensured by the Democratic victory in November and officially ended by constitutional amendment in 1933.
In the midst of the hard times, however, a parallel world of glittery excess was thriving. The 1930s were the heyday of New York’s “café society,” a fashionable world of socialites and show-business celebrities, on display in such Manhattan nightspots as the Colony, El Morocco, and the Stork Club—a scene chronicled by newspaper gossip columnists such as Walter Winchell and romanticized in the ritzy, art deco settings of so many Hollywood musicals and romantic comedies of the era. “For most Americans, ‘café society’ immediately triggered images of women in smart gowns and men in satin-collared tuxedos, of tiered nightclubs undulating in the music of swell bands, of cocktails and cigarettes, of cool talk and enervated elegance,” Neil Gabler wrote in his biography of Winchell, “all of which made café society one of those repositories of dreams at a time when reality seemed treacherous.”
Bob Hope was well outfitted for this glamorous scene: a dapper, good-looking, twenty-nine-year-old entertainer with an eye for the ladies and a budding career on Broadway. In those days Hope drank as much as he ever would (which was never much), chain-smoked cigarettes (until it began affecting his singing voice and he gave them up on doctor’s orders), and had an apartment on posh Central Park West, just blocks away from the Broadway theaters where he introduced great American standards by Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin. In later years, Hope would come to epitomize the golf-playing, leisure-suited, suburban-Republican lifestyle of Southern California. But New York gave him a big-city edge and pace that would set him apart when he finally made his move to Hollywood.
Ballyhoo of 1932, his fourth Broadway show but the first in which he had a major role, was a musical revue inspired by a popular humor magazine called Ballyhoo, known for its cheeky parodies of popular advertising. The show was written by Norman Anthony, the magazine’s editor; featured songs by Tin Pan Alley veteran Lewis Gensler and lyricist E. Y. (“Yip”) Harburg (whose “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” written that same year, became a Depression-era anthem); and boasted a cast filled with well-known vaudevillians, most notably the comedy team of Willie and Eugene Howard.
When Hope arrived for rehearsals and two out-of-town tryouts, the show was something of a mess. Scenes were being added, dropped, and moved around so fast that the technical crew couldn’t keep up. In Atlantic City, the electricity failed in the middle of a performance. “Actually it was rather frightening,” recalled Hope’s agent, Lee Stewart. “There was a blazing short circuit and the theater went dark. The management feared that the audience was ready to panic and rush the door.” One of the producers, Lee Shubert (of the theater-owning Shubert family), grabbed Hope backstage and told him to go out front and keep the crowd calm until power could be restored.
He did it so well that Shubert called on him again two weeks later in Newark, when a new opening production number was being added to the show and the dancers weren’t ready in time for the opening curtain. Hope again had to vamp for time, and he drew on all his experience as a vaudeville emcee. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the first time I’ve ever been on before the acrobats,” he cracked. He called out to someone in the box seats—“Hello, Sam!”—and then turned to the audience: “That’s one of our backers up there. He says he’s not nervous, but I notice he’s buckled his safety belt.”
Shubert suggested making the bit a permanent opening for the show. Hope balked, saying the device would seem too forced night after night. But he and writer Al Boasberg came up with another idea, which Shubert went for. To start each show, Hope would be discovered sitting in the box seats and would introduce himself as head of the show’s Complaint Department. With the help of stooges planted in the crowd, he then poked fun at the show’s well-publicized pre-Broadway troubles:
BOB: “Ladies and gentlemen . . .”
STOOGE: “My God, is this show really going to open?”
BOB: “Well, if we waited a couple of weeks longer, that tuxedo of yours would be in style again.”
STOOGE: “I hope your gags are as new.”
BOB: “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we are inaugurating a new idea in the theater . . . the Complaint Department. Of course, we know there’ll be no complaints because this show is as clean and wholesome as the magazine.”
BOB: “You leaving?”
STOOGE: “Yeah, I’m going over to Minsky’s.”
After a few minutes, Hope turned to the orchestra and asked them to start the overture. He got no response. “Hey, fellas, wake up!” he shouted. All he got was snores. He fired a pistol in the air. More snores. Finally he rang a cash register. Suddenly the conductor and his team jumped to attention and began to play.
It was obvious vaudeville shtick, but it set the irreverent, self-mocking tone for the show, which otherwise was a so-so mix of songs and sketches: a Hollywood actress training like a boxer for a big role, the Howard brothers as a pair of Columbus Circle rabble-rousers, Hope and Vera Marshe as a couple of nudists (a sketch lost, alas, to history). Reviews were mixed, and Hope, billed sixth, got only passing attention. (“An agreeable but far from brilliant master of ceremonies,” noted Howard Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune.) The show, which opened in early September, ran into money problems, missed a payday for the cast and crew, and closed at the end of November after ninety-five performances. But it was a win for Hope, proof that the cocky vaudeville comedian could hold his own on a Broadway stage.
After Ballyhoo closed, Hope went back on the road in early 1933 with his vaudeville act, fulfilling his contractual obligations to the Keith-Orpheum circuit. He also continued to make frequent appearances at the Capitol and other New York City theaters that still booked live entertainment. And he dipped his toe into the medium that would provide the third component, along with Broadway and vaudeville, of his showbiz résumé during the New York years: radio.
Commercial radio was barely a decade old, but it was quickly reaching critical mass. In 1932 one-third of American homes owned a radio, and two national networks had sprung up to supply them with programming—the National Broadcasting Company, created in 1926, and the Columbia Broadcasting System, formed two years later. Amos ’n’ Andy, which began in Chicago in 1928 and was picked up by NBC the following year, was riding high as radio’s first national hit show. Songwriters were discovering that radio airplay could turn their new tunes into instant chart-toppers. And comedians who saw work drying up on the vaudeville circuit were jumping into radio as a lifeboat. In 1932 alone, Ed Wynn, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, and the team of George Burns and Gracie Allen all made their network radio debuts.
Hope was a step behind these better-established stars. His first appearances on radio were little more than simulcasts of his vaudeville stage act, on such shows as the RKO Theater of the Air and the Capitol Family Show, a Sunday-morning broadcast hosted by Major Edward Bowes, a dour but good-hearted impresario who insisted on the military title because of his service in World War I. (He later became better known as host of radio’s Original Amateur Hour.) Hope would give Bowes his script on the Friday before each Sunday show, then watch in dismay as the Major appropriated most of the good jokes for himself on the air. But Hope noticed that every time he appeared on the Capitol show, the audiences for his stage appearances would spike. Like a lot of vaudeville performers, he was learning that the route to mass-audience popularity now ran through those boxy Philcos and Crosleys that were becoming fixtures in nearly every living room in the country.
Hope’s first appearance in a studio show came on June 8, 1933, when he was a guest on The Fleischmann Hour, a weekly variety show hosted by singer Rudy Vallee. Hope came on as a slick boulevardier, doing jokes about his clothes, his cigars, and his girlfriends, with Vallee as the stuffy straight man:
BOB: “Here’s a picture of a girl I can marry tomorrow. She has ten thousand dollars. Isn’t she beautiful?”
RUDY: “Yes, she is. She’s gorgeous.”
BOB: “Here’s a picture of another girl I can marry. She has fifty thousand dollars. Of course, she’s not so pretty.”
RUDY: “No, she’s not so pretty, but fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money.”
BOB: “But that’s nothing. I know a girl I can marry with a hundred thousand dollars.”
RUDY: “Where’s her picture?”
BOB: “Nobody’ll take her picture.”
Hope didn’t much take to radio at first. “It all seemed so strange, talking into a microphone in a studio instead of playing in front of a real audience,” he said. “I got nervous on those first radio shows and the Vallee engineers couldn’t figure out why they heard a thumping noise when I did my routines until they found out I was kicking the mike after each joke.”
On the stage, however, his self-confidence and popularity were growing. “Goofy, self-assured, ingratiating and welcome as the flowers that’ll be out in six weeks,” Variety wrote of his show at Chicago’s Palace Theatre in March 1933. “Hope diverted the customers with as tasty a dish of comedy hash put together from odds and ends.” He was brash and irreverent, sometimes pushing the boundaries of vaudeville’s still stodgy standards of good taste. At the Capitol, for example, he did a parody of sentimental mother songs called “My Mom.” During the number, an old lady posing as his mother wandered onstage, pleading for food, only to be rudely pushed away by Hope:
OLD LADY: “Son, I haven’t eaten in four days.”
BOB: “Mom, I told you never to bother me while I’m working.”
OLD LADY: “At least give me a few dollars to have my teeth fixed.”
BOB: “You’re not eating, Mom, what do you need teeth for?”
The bit didn’t go over well with the Capitol’s mostly older crowd, and Major Bowes himself asked Hope to take it out of his act. Hope, always worried about alienating any portion of his audience, obliged—and later chastised himself for the lapse of taste.
The Capitol Theatre was also where Hope teamed up for the first time with an entertainer to whom he would be linked for the rest of his career. In December 1932, shortly after the close of Ballyhoo, Hope was asked to emcee a two-week show at the Capitol headlined by a young singer who was fast becoming a national sensation.
Harry Lillis Crosby was born in Tacoma, Washington, in May 1903, just a few weeks before Hope. He grew up in Spokane and got the nickname “Bing” in third grade, owing to his fascination with a newspaper humor column called the Bingville Bugle. In high school and later at Gonzaga University, the local college, he sang in student vocal groups, acted in school theater productions, and formed a singing duo with his friend Al Rinker. After developing an act in local clubs, the two piled their belongings into a Model T in October 1925 and drove to Hollywood to see if they could break into big-time show business. A year later—with the help of Rinker’s sister, the jazz singer Mildred Bailey—they landed a job with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, the most famous jazz band in America.
Unlike Hope, who plodded for years in the vaudeville trenches, Crosby’s career caught fire instantly. Recording with the Whiteman band, he had a No. 1 hit with “My Blue Heaven” in 1927, followed by popular recordings of “Ol’ Man River,” “I Surrender Dear,” and “Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day,” which became his theme song. He brought something new, almost revolutionary, to popular singing. Unlike the belters of vaudeville and Broadway, who sang to the rafters, Crosby had a relaxed, intimate, jazz-inflected style that was perfectly suited to that new recording innovation, the microphone.
Crosby and Hope first met on October 14, 1932, outside the Friars Club on Forty-Eighth Street in New York City. Crosby was a much bigger star at the time—not just a well-known recording artist, but host of his own radio show and about to star in his first Hollywood feature, The Big Broadcast. Hope was impressed by Crosby’s success, his easygoing self-confidence, and his willingness to play around onstage. For their appearance together at the Capitol, they came up with some vaudeville-style bits to liven up the show. They played two politicians who run into each other on the street; approaching each other from opposite sides of the stage, they would meet at the center and grope each other’s pockets. Or they would be two orchestra leaders, who conduct each other’s conversation with flourishes of their batons. In another bit, Hope would announce with a straight face that Crosby couldn’t make the show because “some cad locked him in the washroom,” at which point a fuming Crosby would emerge from the wings with a doorknob attached to a splintered piece of wood.
“The gags weren’t very funny, I guess,” Hope said, “but the audience laughed because Bing and I were having such a good time—and I guess it was clear that we liked each other. We would laugh insanely at what we dreamed up.” In between shows, they would trade showbiz stories at O’Reilly’s, a nearby bar, or over the billiards table at the Friars Club. They discovered a shared passion for golf—a sport that Hope had taken up during his downtime on the vaudeville road, and which Crosby played at close to a professional level. Living on different coasts, they wouldn’t get back together again for a few years, but it was the start of a partnership that would change both their careers.
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Hope was all over New York City in those days: on the radio, on the vaudeville stage, and on the dais for a growing number of charity benefits. Indeed, Variety made him exhibit A in a November 1933 article complaining about the overexposure of a few top performers on the withering vaudeville circuit. “One answer to what’s wrong with Vaudeville that can be traced to the booking offices is the startling number of repeats played in the remaining first-grade variety theaters by certain acts during the past year,” the trade paper wrote—noting that Hope had in just the past year played the State, the Paramount, the Roxy, and the Capitol twice. “In many instances they’re playing the few fans to death.”
One of the few entertainers who could rival Hope for ubiquity on the vaudeville-and-benefit circuit in those years was Milton Berle, the brash burlesque comic with whom Hope had a friendly, and sometimes not so friendly, rivalry. Berle even then had a reputation for stealing gags, and Hope was angry to find out that some of his best jokes were turning up in Berle’s act at the Strand Theater. Hope and Richie Craig, his pal and sometime writer, devised a revenge scheme that became part of Hope’s showbiz lore. On a Sunday night when Berle was scheduled to do four benefits back-to-back, Hope got himself booked at the same benefits earlier in the evening and delivered batches of Berle’s material even before he got there. Berle, perplexed to find his jokes falling flat, caught on midway through the evening and turned the tables, leapfrogging Hope at the final benefit and stealing his material.
Hope always denied that he had any serious beef with Berle. Elliott Kozak, Hope’s manager and producer in the later years, claimed Hope would always defend Berle against detractors, for one reason. In late 1933, when Berle was doing a show in Cleveland and Hope’s mother was dying of cancer, Berle visited her nearly every day, a kindness Hope never forgot. (Something else Berle and Hope shared was an affection for Richie Craig, who died of tuberculosis in November 1933, at age thirty-one. They helped organize a benefit at the New Amsterdam Theater to raise money for his widow and parents. Hope made the largest single contribution, paying $300 for a photo of Craig.)
In the summer of 1933 producer Max Gordon was casting a new Broadway musical called Gowns by Roberta. It was a much-anticipated new show from composer Jerome Kern, with a book by Otto Harbach, about a college football star who inherits his aunt’s dress shop in Paris. Gordon was looking for a comedian to play Huckleberry Haines, a bandleader and the football star’s best friend. He had run through several candidates (Rudy Vallee reportedly turned down the role) before he saw Hope performing at the Palace Theatre. He brought Kern—who was set to direct the musical as well—to see him, and with the composer’s assent signed Hope for the show that would be his Broadway breakthrough.
Roberta (as the musical was eventually retitled) had a cast studded with stars from Broadway’s past, present, and future. Fay Templeton, the turn-of-the-century star of George M. Cohan musicals, was lured back to the stage, at age sixty-eight, to play the dress shop owner. (She dies after warbling one song, “Yesterdays.”) The female lead was Lyda Roberti, a live-wire, Polish-born singer-comedienne of both stage and screen in the early 1930s, before her death of a heart attack in 1938, at age thirty-one. Also in the cast were Ray Middleton, who went on to costar in such Broadway hits as Annie Get Your Gun and Man of La Mancha; George Murphy, the future Hollywood song-and-dance man (and later US senator from California); and Fred MacMurray, who had a small role as a sax player and landed a Hollywood contract in the middle of the show’s run.
The show had troubles out of town. After it got bad reviews in a pre-Broadway tryout in Philadelphia, Gordon decided the show needed a more opulent production—and more comedy. To fix the former, he had the sets and costumes redesigned and brought in Hassard Short, a highly regarded Broadway hand, to replace Kern as director. To address the latter, he turned to Bob Hope. “Do whatever you can think of to get laughs,” Gordon told him.
Hope hardly needed the encouragement. As the show’s script was being tinkered with, he threw in gag lines wherever he could. “Long dresses don’t bother me—I’ve got a good memory,” he quipped in one scene. In another, an expatriate Russian princess (played by Tamara Drasin, a Ukrainian-born actress who went by the stage name Tamara), who has fallen for the football hero, sings the show’s big ballad, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” as Hope listens, straddling a chair. To set up the song, she tells him, “There’s an old Russian proverb: when your heart’s on fire, smoke gets in your eyes.” Hope suggested a new line as a comeback: “We have a proverb in America too: Love is like hash. You have to have confidence in it to enjoy it.” Harbach hated the line, claiming it would spoil the mood. But Hope appealed to Kern, who told him to give it a try. When it got a big laugh, the line stayed in. (Harbach apparently never forgave Hope. “An impossible, impossible man,” he told author Lawrence Quirk. “It was his way or no way.”)
Roberta opened at the New Amsterdam Theater on November 21, 1933, to disappointing reviews. “Extremely unimportant and slightly dead,” wrote John Mason Brown in the Evening Post. “The humors of Roberta are no great shakes,” sniffed the Times’ Brooks Atkinson, “and most of them are smugly declaimed by Bob Hope, who insists upon being the life of the party and who would be more amusing if he were Fred Allen.” Even Kern’s score (which also included such first-rate numbers as “I’ll Be Hard to Handle” and “Let’s Begin”) got only a lukewarm reception.
Yet Roberta ran for 295 performances, longer than any other book musical in the 1933–34 season. Much of the reason was its big song hit, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” which was quickly picked up on radio and by dance bands across the country. Yet Hope’s comedy also gave the mostly dreary script an important boost. “I’ve always said that Bob Hope had as much to do with Roberta being a hit as ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’ ” said George Murphy. “He made the difference between a hit and a flop.”
Hope left the cast in June 1934, before the show closed (and lost out to Fred Astaire to costar in the 1935 movie version, retooled as a vehicle for the dance team of Astaire and Ginger Rogers). But he always had a special place in his heart for Roberta. He reprised his role as Huck Haines for the musical’s West Coast premiere at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium in 1938; again in 1958 at the Muny Opera in St. Louis; and one more time, age-defyingly, in an updated version staged at Southern Methodist University and telecast on NBC in 1969. Roberta was a milestone for Hope: a major role in a major musical by a major American composer. It made him a Broadway star.
His lifestyle began to reflect it. Hope bought a ritzy Pierce-Arrow automobile and hired a chauffeur to drive him around in it. He got a Scottish terrier, named it Huck, and brought it to the theater to help him get girls. “I had Marilyn Miller’s old dressing room at the New Amsterdam, and Huck sat at the top of the stairs,” he recalled. “He was a great come-on, great bait. When the girls went by they stopped and petted him. As a result, I did a nice business with those beauties.”
One beauty, however, was about to monopolize his time. After one show in December, Hope’s Roberta costar George Murphy and his wife, Julie, asked Bob to join them at the Vogue Club to see a singer named Dolores Reade. When they walked into the club, a tall, twenty-four-year-old brunette with a sultry contralto voice was singing “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” After finishing her set, she came over to sit at Murphy’s table and met Bob Hope for the first time.
“I hadn’t caught his name and wasn’t the least interested,” Dolores later recalled, “but to make conversation I asked him if he wanted to dance.” Bob, equally blasé, turned her down, saying he did enough dancing in his Broadway show. But later, when the group moved to the Ha Ha Club and Murphy took Dolores out on the dance floor, Bob cut in. They ended the evening with a late-night sandwich together, and Hope invited her to come see him in Roberta.
He got her tickets for a matinee just after Christmas, and she saw the show with a girlfriend. She was startled to discover that Hope had one of the leading roles. Two days later Hope went back to the Vogue Club to ask why she hadn’t come backstage to say hello. Dolores told him she was too embarrassed; she’d thought he was just a chorus boy. Hope then asked her to go out on New Year’s Eve, and the romance blossomed.
Dolores De Fina was born in Harlem and grew up in a close-knit extended family in the Bronx. Her mother, Theresa, was one of seven daughters of Nora and Henry Kelly, who had emigrated from Ireland in the 1880s. Theresa married Italian-born John De Fina and had two daughters, Dolores and her sister, Mildred, fourteen months younger, and the family moved in with Theresa’s parents, in a three-bedroom brownstone in the Bronx. Dolores’s grandmother was the lively center of the family, a devout Catholic who would genuflect at any priest she passed on the sidewalk and regaled her grandkids with tales of Irish fairies and leprechauns. “Nana was the heart and soul and strength of our family,” Mildred wrote of her grandmother. “Her clothing spoke of her whole life. She wore black cotton dresses for the many funerals in and out of the family, and white cotton dresses for summer and visiting the sick. . . . After church, Nana would invite people over to eat, and we’d all end up in the parlor where we sang along with the player piano. Nana used to always say to us: ‘Dolores, you’re the singer and, Mildred, you’re the dancer in the family.’ ”
Her father died when Dolores was just sixteen, and she quit school to help support the family. She worked for her seamstress aunt, then as a fashion model and a Broadway chorus girl, appearing in the road company of Honeymoon Lane and (along with Mildred) in the chorus of the 1929 Ziegfeld musical Show Girl. After a screen test with Richard Dix for Paramount failed to land her a movie contract, she concentrated on her singing, appearing with the George Olson and Jack Pettis bands, and on her own in nightclubs—without great success, though when she appeared at the Richmond Club in 1932, a columnist called her the female Crosby.
Hope pursued her avidly. He would meet her each night at the Vogue Club when she was finished working and drive around with her in his Pierce-Arrow. At the end of the night he would park in front of her Ninth Avenue apartment, where she lived with her mother, and dismiss the chauffeur so they could talk and smooch.
Dolores’s mother was doing what she could to discourage the romance. She was no fan of this Broadway sharpie who kept her daughter out until six in the morning and was non-Catholic, to boot. When Dolores went to Miami in mid-January for a nightclub engagement, Theresa came along too, hoping some distance would cool the relationship. Instead, Bob and Dolores talked by phone nearly every day. The romance hit a more serious snag when Dolores saw a newspaper gossip item suggesting Hope had another girlfriend. Bob smooth-talked his way out of that one. “I hadn’t seen that particular girl for six months, but it almost broke up our romance,” Hope wrote in his memoir. “It would have been finished if I hadn’t convinced Dolores that the whole thing was a columnist’s blooper.”
Yet there was, in fact, a woman standing between Bob and Dolores. Hope was already married at the time—to his former vaudeville partner Louise Troxell.
Hope’s first marriage was long kept secret, and much about it remains mysterious. But a few facts are clear. Bob and Louise were married in Erie, Pennsylvania, on January 25, 1933, in a civil ceremony that was obviously meant to be kept quiet. Their marriage license, on file in the Erie courthouse, identifies the couple as Leslie T. Hope, a “salesman,” and Grace L. Troxell (using her first name, which she dropped for the stage), described as a “secretary.” When the marriage license was unearthed by Arthur Marx for his 1993 biography, The Secret Life of Bob Hope, Hope’s publicists weakly suggested that the couple merely took out a license, but never actually married. Yet according to an Erie official, the document would not exist if the wedding had not taken place; an Erie alderman’s signed affidavit confirms that he presided over the ceremony.
Just what prompted Hope to marry his vaudeville partner, after an on-again, off-again relationship that spanned more than four years, is hard to say. But it forced him to deliberately muddle the details of his subsequent marriage to Dolores. According to Bob and Dolores (and virtually all the profiles and official biographies of them, both during and after their lifetime), they were married on February 19, 1934—in, of all places, Erie, Pennsylvania. The town was accurate, but not the bride: there is no record of Bob’s marriage to Dolores in Erie—only his marriage to Troxell a year earlier. Nor is there any record of a marriage in New York City, where it would more likely have taken place, given that Bob was appearing on Broadway at the time. (Hope was always vague about why he and Dolores would travel to Erie to get married. “We picked Erie, Pennsylvania, for our wedding,” he wrote in Have Tux, Will Travel. “I can’t remember why. I was in a thick pink fog anyway.” When comedian Alan King, interviewing Hope on TV in 1992, asked him to explain why they got married in Erie, Hope tossed it off with a quip: “Because I couldn’t wait until I got to a bigger town.”)
When were Bob and Dolores Hope married? Certainly not before August 4, 1934, when this item appeared in the New York Herald Tribune:
Bob Hope, who played a comedy lead in Roberta last season, and Miss Dolores Reade, a nightclub singer, announced their engagement yesterday. They will be married about Thanksgiving.
Moreover, they could not have been legally wed until after November 19, 1934—when a judge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County granted Hope a divorce. In the divorce petition, filed by Lester T. Hope against Grace Louise Hope on September 4, Hope charged that his wife was “guilty of extreme cruelty and gross neglect of duty,” citing her “quarrelsome disposition” and claiming that she “habitually, during their married life, associated with other men in public and has caused plaintiff humiliation and embarrassment as a result thereof.” The judge found in Hope’s favor, granted the divorce, and denied Troxell any “claim for alimony, either temporary or permanent.”
Hope was represented in the divorce by a Cleveland attorney named Henry B. Johnson. Years later Johnson wrote Hope a letter that suggests the lengths to which the Broadway star went to keep the whole affair quiet. “It was in the early 1930s that you walked into my office in the Standard Building Cleveland,” Johnson recalled:
I was to represent you in the litigation which you later referred to as the “Troxell deal” and apparently in driving to Cleveland you had to change a tire or perform some other mechanical chore which left your hands, face and clothing very much in need of freshening. This service we were able to furnish, and on subsequent visits and in Court you were then as now the acme of sartorial elegance.
I recall that you requested that there be no publicity about the matter; I was perhaps a year or two older than you with no compunctions then about lying to reporters, and I did lie brazenly to the reporters that called. [One] inquired whether you were the Bob Hope who was appearing in Roberta. . . . I assured him that there was no connection whatever, that you were Lester Townsend Hope and would certainly not be nicknamed “Bob,” and that while you were an actor, you were a minor figure on the stage and probably out of work.
If Hope had any concerns about Johnson’s unearthing this skeleton from the closet, he hid them well in his sanguine reply to the lawyer: “It was great hearing from you again, and you took me back a few years when you were talking about the ‘Troxell case.’ ”
No marriage license for Bob and Dolores Hope has ever turned up. One person who claimed to have attended their wedding, Milton Berle, told Arthur Marx that it took place in a New York City church sometime in late 1934 or early 1935. In an interview with American Weekly magazine in 1958, Dolores said she and Bob got married “a year after we met,” which would put the wedding around the same time. Yet there was never a wedding announcement, and when Dolores appeared with Bob onstage over the next couple of years, she was never identified as his wife. For an entertainer who rarely missed an opportunity for self-promotion, the notion that Hope would keep his marriage to a glamorous nightclub singer secret is hard to believe.
The lack of any record of the Hopes’ marriage (not even a wedding photo) led some Hope family members to speculate over the years that a wedding may never have taken place. It seems farfetched that Dolores, a devout Catholic, would not at some point have dragged Bob into a church to exchange formal vows. By then, presumably, it would have been too late for announcements. Hope had already fudged so many details of his marital status that trying to untangle the web of untruths would have been all but impossible.
As for Louise Troxell, she stayed in vaudeville for at least another year, doing Dumb Dora routines with a new partner, Joe May. She later moved back to her hometown of Chicago and married Dave Halper, owner of the Chez Paree nightclub. In 1952 they had a daughter, Deborah, and, after the nightclub closed in 1960, moved to Las Vegas, where Halper worked for the Riviera Hotel until his death in 1973. Bob and Louise stayed in touch, and Hope quietly sent her money in her later years. In two letters written to Hope in 1976, Louise complained about her declining health and the difficulties she was having with her daughter: “When Deb went away . . . I had a sinking feeling that I would never see her alive again. A beautiful life, self-destroyed. It is so sad.” Troxell died in Las Vegas in November 1976, at age sixty-five. Her daughter, Deborah, apparently still troubled, died in San Diego of a drug overdose in 1998.
Just how much Dolores knew about all this is unclear, but probably more than she ever revealed. On the San Diego County death certificate for Deborah Halper, the “informant”—the person who supplies information about the deceased—is listed, intriguingly, as “Dolores Hope—Godparent.”
• • •
On January 22, 1934, in the midst of Hope’s whirlwind courtship of Dolores, his mother died of cervical cancer. Despite radium treatments, little could be done, and Avis had largely been bedridden for months. When Hope last saw her at Christmas, she was clearly failing, her already-frail body down to seventy-five pounds. He flew to Cleveland for the funeral, bringing along opera singer Kirsten Flagstad, who sang “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere,” one of Avis’s favorite hymns, at the service. His brother Jim, the family romantic, writes achingly of Avis’s last days, silently mouthing the names of each of her boys as she lay near death. Bob couldn’t muster quite the same sentiment, though the death of his mother, in the midst of his great success on Broadway, was clearly a blow. “It was murder,” he wrote in his memoir, “that this should happen just when I was really able to take care of her.”
Dolores, meanwhile, moved into Bob’s apartment at 65 Central Park West, with its elegant, green-and-white living room overlooking the park, and they embarked on their life together in New York. They played golf together at Green Meadows, a golf club in Westchester County, or, when they couldn’t get out of the city, at a driving range under the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. They took a cruise to Bermuda, Bob doing a show for the passengers en route. Dolores’s dinner parties got mentioned in the gossip columns. Yet she was already learning how to fend for herself on the many nights that Bob was working, organizing weekly card games with a small group of friends and cousins. She desperately wanted children, but had no luck getting pregnant.
She continued to pursue her singing career, at least for a couple of years. When Bob, after leaving Roberta, took his vaudeville act back on the road in the summer of 1934, Dolores was on the bill as featured singer. After his monologue, Bob would introduce her and let her do one number straight. Then, during her second song, he would come back onstage and clown around while she sang—mooning over her, lying on the ground and staring at her adoringly, stroking and nibbling her arm. “Don’t let me bother you,” he’d crack.
Like his other stage partners, going back to Mildred Rosequist, Dolores found that she had to be on her toes when teaming with Bob Hope. “What he expected was perfection,” she said. “He never let down for a moment onstage, and heaven help me if I did. . . . Sometimes my mind would wander and that was fatal. Bob would get very angry, and right there in the middle of the act he’d crack, ‘What’s the matter with you, tired?’ ”
When Bob went to Boston for tryouts of his next Broadway show, Dolores came along and was booked for a solo engagement at the Loews State Theatre. But unaccustomed to a large vaudeville house, as opposed to the more intimate nightclubs where she usually worked, she had a difficult time. After her first show, she called Bob at their hotel in a panic.
“Come right over,” she sobbed. “I’m going to quit. They didn’t like me. The band played too loud and the lights were wrong. Everything was wrong.” Hope went over and took charge. “They gave her a little more production and her act pulled together beautifully. Give her any kind of decent staging and my girl was good,” he recalled gallantly.
Her regal good looks and alluring voice drew some admiring reviews when Hope featured her in his act. (“A likely picture bet, if she can speak on a par with her torching and looks,” Variety wrote.) But as a solo, she had trouble registering. “On song values she’s in the same category as many another femme warbler with any of the radio-dance bands extant, and actually suffers comparatively with Joy Lynne, who’s merely a featured songstress with the Bestor combo,” Variety’s critic wrote after her appearance at New York’s State Theater in December 1934. Soon, except for sporadic appearances in Bob’s tours or on his radio show, Dolores would stop singing professionally, devoting herself instead to the man whose career was proving to have considerably more upside.
That career was tooling along nicely on all three tracks: Broadway, radio, and vaudeville. To manage all of it, Hope had acquired a new agent: Louis “Doc” Shurr, who signed him up as a client while Hope was appearing in Roberta and would become one of his most effective and loyal advocates for the next three decades.
Shurr was a colorful New York showbiz character: a short, bald man who propped up his height with elevator shoes and wore a homburg over his fringe of dyed-black hair. He spent practically every night out on the town, impeccably dressed in a suit, tie, and crisp white handkerchief, reeking of Charbert cologne and with a buxom showgirl on his arm—usually towering over him and wearing a white fur coat, one of three (in sizes small, medium, and large) that Shurr supposedly kept for his dates. Called Doc because of his reputation for fixing troubled Broadway shows, Shurr was a hard-driving agent of the old school, with an office in the Paramount Building on Broadway, where he was all but hidden behind rows of framed photos and a baby grand piano. His clients included such well-known stage stars as Bert Lahr, Victor Moore, and George Murphy, many of whom he was getting into motion pictures. He thought he could do the same with Bob Hope.
Hope was wary of Hollywood, still smarting from his failed 1930 screen test at Pathé. In 1933 he turned down an offer from Paramount to costar with Jack Oakie in a comedy called Sitting Pretty, reasoning that the money—$2,500 for four weeks’ work—was less than the $1,750 a week he was making on Broadway and thus wasn’t worth the move to Hollywood. But when Shurr got him an offer from Educational Pictures, to star in six comedy shorts—to be shot in Brooklyn during the day while he continued appearing in Roberta at night—Hope decided it was a relatively low-risk proposition and said yes.
Comedy shorts were still common on movie bills in the 1930s—cheaply made vehicles for fading silent-film stars such as Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon, but also important early showcases for W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, and newcomers such as Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, and Bing Crosby. Hope’s shorts were pretty low-grade examples of the genre. In his first, Going Spanish, Hope and Leah Ray play a pair of newlyweds on their honeymoon, motoring through Mexico with her mother tagging along. They stop in a town called Los Pochos Eggos on the day of an annual festival in which anyone is allowed to insult whomever they please, so long as the insult is followed by a song. Various comic high jinks and romantic mix-ups ensue, including a sight gag in which people hop around after eating Mexican jumping beans.
Hope, looking dandyish in a light-colored, double-breasted suit, with slicked-back hair parted high on his head, is crisp and self-assured in his film debut. But he can do little with the lamer-than-lame material. After a screening of the film at the Rialto Theater on Broadway, Hope ran into columnist Walter Winchell, who asked about Hope’s film debut. “When they catch Dillinger they’re going to make him watch it twice,” Hope cracked. When Winchell printed the remark in his column, an angry Jack Skirball, head of Educational Pictures, called up Shurr and said the last thing he needed was a star bad-mouthing his own film. After Hope tried in vain to get Winchell to retract the item, Educational canceled Hope’s contract.
But Shurr quickly got Hope another deal, to star in six more shorts for Warner Vitaphone, at a salary of $2,500 for each. Produced by Sam Sax, they were shot at Warner’s studios in Astoria, Queens, on a rock-bottom budget. “Sam’s ability to squeeze a buck could make Jack Benny seem like Aristotle Onassis,” Hope said. “He made those shorts in three days, rain or shine. In fact, if a director got three sprocket holes behind schedule, Sam would stick his head into the soundstage and say, ‘What’s wrong?’ ”
The Warner shorts were a step up from Going Spanish, but not by much. The first, Paree, Paree, released in October 1934, is probably the best, mainly because it provides a rare glimpse of Hope in his incarnation as a Broadway leading man. Adapted from Cole Porter’s 1929 show Fifty Million Frenchmen, it casts Hope as a rich American playboy in Paris who bets some friends that he can get the girl he met on board ship to marry him without revealing that he’s a millionaire. Though drastically truncated and ludicrously underpopulated, the film still squeezes in four Porter songs and two Busby Berkeley–style production numbers in just twenty minutes. Hope sings the lovely Porter ballad “You Do Something to Me” in a light, appealing tenor, before the girl he’s wooing (Dorothy Stone) turns it into a high-kicking dance number—as Hope, disappointingly, just watches from a chair. But Hope gets another fine Porter song, “You’ve Got That Thing,” all to himself, deftly managing Porter’s tricky rhythms and demonstrating his skill at lyrically intricate “list” songs, which he would make a specialty both on Broadway and later in feature films.
The other shorts for Warner, released over the next two years, were straight comedies, most of them crude farces that show Hope developing his skills as both comedian and straight man. In The Old Grey Mayor, he has to win over his fiancée’s father, a gruff big-city political boss; in Watch the Birdie, he’s a practical joker on a cruise ship; in Double Exposure, a pushy celebrity photographer; and in Calling All Tars, he and a pal (the Stan Laurel–like Johnny Berkes) dress up as sailors to get girls and wind up dragooned into the real Navy. Shop Talk, the last and probably the best of the nonmusical shorts, features Hope as a spoiled rich kid who inherits his father’s department store. The comedy spins off his encounters with a string of wacky store employees, comic bits that both hark back to his vaudeville routines (dumb girl applying for a job asks, “Do you mind if I use your telephone?”—and then uses it to crack nuts) and anticipate the comic repartee between Hope and his sidekicks that would become a staple of his radio shows.
But the movie shorts were just a diversion for Hope, who still considered himself primarily a Broadway star. After his success in Roberta, he landed a costarring role in the 1934 musical Say When. The show was conceived as a vehicle for Harry Richman, the veteran song-and-dance star of the 1920s who was looking for a Broadway comeback; he not only starred in the show but invested $50,000 of his own money in it. (Gangster Lucky Luciano was reputedly one of the other backers.) Richman and Hope play vaudeville hoofers who romance two bankers’ daughters aboard a transatlantic ocean liner. The songs were by Ray Henderson (composer of “Varsity Drag” and “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries”) and lyricist Ted Koehler (Harold Arlen’s collaborator on “Stormy Weather” and “I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues”), and the supporting cast included “Prince” Michael Romanoff, a flamboyant New York character who claimed to be a Russian royal (and later became a popular Beverly Hills restaurateur).
Richman was unhappy with the show almost from the start, distressed that he didn’t have an obvious hit song, and that Hope was getting most of the laughs. Hope offered a sympathetic ear when Richman, on the train back to New York after the Boston tryouts, lamented, “I’m the star, and if I’m weak, it won’t help any of us.” Hope was grateful that Richman didn’t go behind his back and steal his good lines, but the ambitious young costar didn’t exactly shy away from the chance to hog the spotlight. “Harry was one of Broadway’s greatest stars, but he was playing an unsympathetic lover and his part was thin,” said Hope. “If he’d had a good score, he’d be all right, but he had no big songs. I was shortsighted and hamola enough to enjoy the situation.”
Say When opened on November 8, 1934, and got surprisingly good reviews. Walter Winchell called it the “merriest laugh, song and girl show in town,” and Hope’s contribution was duly noted. “Mr. Hope, as usual, was amiably impudent, never offensive and a likable and intelligent clown, equal to all the emergencies of Broadway operetta,” wrote Percy Hammond in the Herald Tribune. None of this assuaged Richman, who quit the show after eight weeks, forcing Say When to close prematurely in January.
That was enough time for Hope. In December, before the show closed, Hope landed an audition for his first weekly radio job: as emcee of The Intimate Revue, a Friday-night variety show on NBC sponsored by Bromo-Seltzer. Worried that he didn’t have enough material for the audition, Hope got Richman to drive him out to his Long Island estate and let him go through Richman’s extensive joke file and pilfer what he wanted. Hope got the job and for years afterward credited Richman as “the guy responsible for my success in radio.”
The Intimate Revue lasted only thirteen weeks, and Hope’s uneasiness with the new medium was apparent. It was primarily a music program, featuring the classically trained songstress Jane Froman and Al Goodman’s mellow-toned orchestra. “Every week at this time, we present a show as sparkling and as easy to take as Bromo-Seltzer,” went the show’s weekly sign-off. The easy-to-take part usually trumped the sparkle. Hope carried most of the comedy, which consisted of weak sketches (Hope as a South Pole explorer, or the head of a travel agency, or Sergeant Hope of the Mounted Police) and strained banter with his on-air companions on topics such as the best way to dunk a doughnut. In one recurring bit, Hope delivered jokey “society notes” in a fast-paced, Winchell-like staccato: “Flash! Miami Beach! Young Puppy Wellington, missing for three days, lost his trunks while bathing and was forced to keep running in and out with the tide.” Hope didn’t yet have the confidence or the technique to recover when the jokes fell flat; often the only titters heard in the studio were those coming nervously from Hope himself. “Hope is intermittently very funny,” said Variety. “At other times either his material falters or his delivery is a bit too lackadaisical. . . . Hope is easy to take but hard to remember.”
The best thing to come out of The Intimate Revue for Hope was a new comedy sidekick—a Southern-fried Dumb Dora by the name of Honey Chile. She was played by a sixteen-year-old Macon, Georgia, beauty named Patricia Wilder. Bob had met her in Louis Shurr’s office and was taken with her dark-haired good looks and “thick, spoonbread Southern accent.” He tried her out in his act at the Capitol Theatre and liked the way she won over the crowd with her first line—wandering out to center stage and drawling, “Pahdon me, Mistah Hope. Does the Greyhound bus stop heah?”
He brought her on The Intimate Revue, playing straight man to her goofy non sequiturs. (“Where you from?” “The South.” “What part?” “All of me.”) Wilder’s laid-back, countrified insouciance made her an audience favorite, even outshining Hope. “Bob Hope is a likeable fellow personally, and I’m sorry to say he hasn’t clicked so well on the air,” noted the New York Radio Guide on March 30, 1935, predicting that Hope would “be off the program soon. At this writing, the new talent hasn’t been selected, but I’d like to suggest they keep Honey Child and give her some good material.”
Both were off the air in April, when The Intimate Revue was canceled. But Hope wisely brought back Honey Chile when he landed his next radio job the following December, as emcee for a CBS variety show sponsored by the Atlantic Oil Company.
On the Atlantic Family Show, Hope played second fiddle to the program’s ostensible star, tenor Frank Parker. Sketches were often built around the straitlaced Parker’s courtship of his on-air fiancée, Sue Fulton—Frank and Sue are weekend guests at a colonial mansion, for example, or Frank shops for Sue’s Christmas present, with Hope as a wisecracking store clerk. (Parker: “Would you help me around the store?” Hope: “Why, are you drunk again?”) When the show was renewed in the spring, Parker left to take a job on orchestra leader Paul Whiteman’s program, and Hope inherited the starring spot. He brought in three writers to help improve his material, added a couple of supporting players, and gave Honey Chile more to do. And he began to develop a more distinctive radio personality.
His pace was faster now, his voice brittle and smart-alecky, drawing out the end of his punch lines like a carnival huckster. As in vaudeville, he tried to build up his pompous character so that others could cut him down to size. One of his sidekicks, for instance, a rube character named Skunky, brings a horse into the studio. Hope asks why. Skunky replies, “He figures if you’re a radio comedian, he’s wastin’ his time pullin’ that plow around.” In his routines with Honey Chile, Hope’s ripostes to her nonsense (“You know, Honey Chile, a mind reader would only charge you half price”) were usually topped by her sucker-punch comebacks:
BOB: “I wish you’d be careful. Anything you say will be held against you.”
HONEY: “Anything I say will be held against me?”
BOB: “That’s right.”
HONEY: “Mink coat.”
Wilder became so popular as Honey Chile that she was soon gone, leaving for Hollywood in the summer of 1936 when RKO offered her a movie contract. Hope kept the character but replaced the actress, hiring a Dallas beauty named Margaret Johnson as the new Honey Chile, and then (when Johnson also left for the movies) replacing her with Claire Hazel. Hope and Wilder reunited later in Hollywood, when she made a couple of guest appearances as Honey Chile on his radio show and in two of his early movies. But her film career didn’t go anywhere, and in the early 1940s Wilder returned to New York, where she became a flamboyant, Holly Golightly–style fixture on the Manhattan nightclub scene. Later she moved to Europe, married an Austrian prince, and became a well-known international hostess. Wilder denied that she and Bob were ever romantically involved, but they remained lifelong friends; Bob and Dolores would pay occasional visits to her home in Marbella, Spain, or attend parties she threw in the South of France, and she continued to write him long, effusive letters—always signed “Honey”—nearly until her death in 1995.
The Atlantic Family Show had a nine-month run on CBS, Hope’s longest radio stint to date. He turned up frequently in the radio columns, which chronicled his show’s changing cast and time slots, repeated his best jokes, and fed his reputation as the hardest-working comic on radio. “It’s all right for the established comedians to take ‘time out’ for the summer to relax,” he told an interviewer, explaining why he wasn’t taking a summer vacation, as most radio stars did. “They’ve captured their listening public and merit a rest. But I’m a comparative newcomer to the airwaves and am glad I have the opportunity to keep plugging.”
He worked hard to court the press and cultivate his image—which didn’t always bear much resemblance to the real Bob Hope. First he made up bogus details about his supposedly titled English background. Then he gave himself an Ivy League makeover. For a Radio Stars profile in September 1936, Hope greeted the interviewer in his Central Park West apartment dressed in a yellow sweater, with two Scottie dogs on his lap and a fat book called Education Before Verdun on the coffee table. “He just doesn’t look like a comedian,” the reporter observed. “He’s still in his twenties [actually thirty-three] and his cheeks are rosy and a couple of boyish cowlicks keep his brown hair from being the plastered cap he has tried to make it. He might be a tennis pro or a Yale undergrad or even a young doctor—but never a zany of the mikes.”
He was getting some buzz as a radio up-and-comer. “Before 1940, don’t be surprised if Bob Hope turns out to be the ace comic of radio,” wrote one prescient radio columnist, Dick Templeton, in March 1936. “That may sound like a long shot and a long time prediction, but if it does happen, then Bob will have realized his ambition.”
It would happen. But first he had a couple more stops on his Broadway tour.
• • •
In the fall of 1935, Hope signed on for his fourth Broadway show in as many seasons. This time he was cast in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, a new edition of the lavish, showgirl-studded revues staged by Florenz Ziegfeld every season from 1907 to 1925 and sporadically after that. The 1936 show was the second to appear since Ziegfeld’s death in 1932 and was produced by his widow, Billie Burke, along with Lee and J. J. Shubert. The show’s main attraction was Fanny Brice, the longtime Follies star, and it also featured Josephine Baker, the celebrated chanteuse just returned from Paris; singer Gertrude Niesen; the dancing Nicholas Brothers; and a statuesque young singer-comedienne named Eve Arden. George Balanchine choreographed the ballet sequences, Vincente Minnelli designed the scenery, and Vernon Duke and Ira Gershwin wrote the songs. The show was so jam-packed with talent that some cast members had to be dropped during the Boston tryouts, among them ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy.
Even in this heady company, Hope was a standout. He had two numbers with Brice, one in which he played a Hollywood director to her famous Baby Snooks character, the other a send-up of British snobs called Fancy, Fancy. Best of all, he was handed what would be the show’s biggest hit song, “I Can’t Get Started.”
He sings it to Eve Arden, the two playing a posh New York couple saying good night after an evening on the town. In Gershwin’s wistful-witty lyrics, Hope laments his inability to make any romantic headway with her: “I’ve flown around the world in a plane, I’ve settled revolutions in Spain/ The North Pole I have charted, still I can’t get started with you.” Arden ignores his entreaties, trying to hail a cab as he moons over her. When Hope starts panting, she quips, “What’s the matter? Have you been running?” (Hope said he gave Arden the line after the doorman at the Winter Garden Theater suggested it.) When Hope finishes the song, she finally succumbs and they embrace—after which Hope straightens up, briskly adjusts his cuffs, and puts a comic button on the number: “That’s all I wanted to know. Well, good night.”
The number impressed two visitors from Hollywood, producer Harlan Thompson and director Mitchell Leisen, who came to see the show one night. A year later they cast Hope in his first Hollywood feature, The Big Broadcast of 1938. His performance of “I Can’t Get Started” was surely on their minds when they handed him another wistful-witty romantic list song, the one that would launch his movie career, “Thanks for the Memory.”
Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, after some delays and out-of-town tinkering, opened on January 29, 1936, at the Winter Garden Theater, to mostly excellent reviews. “A jovial and handsome song-and-dance festival, glorifying the Broadway tempo and style,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in the Times. Though Brice got most of the praise, Atkinson noted that she “has a capital partner in Bob Hope, who is gentleman enough to be a comrade and comedian enough to be funny on his own responsibility.”
Hope loved his time in Follies. The Winter Garden Theater was right in the middle of the Broadway action. Bob would get haircuts across the street at the Taft Hotel, from a barber who shaved Walter Winchell and would give Hope all the theater gossip. He walked to the theater each night from his Central Park West apartment. “It was a kick, whipping down to the theater and saying ‘Hi’ to the traffic cops and to people on the avenue and to the people in the show when you got there,” he wrote. “That was really living. There was always something going on.”
The show, however, ran into trouble because of Brice’s fragile health. During a performance in Philadelphia, she took an overdose of sleeping pills—supposedly mistaking them for cold medication—and forgot the words to one of her numbers. The curtain had to be unceremoniously brought down on her, as the cast cringed in the wings. The Shuberts decided to close the show in June and give her the summer to recover, then reopened in September. But Hope, along with Arden and several other cast members, decided not to stick around. He already had another Broadway show waiting in the wings.
It was a new Cole Porter musical, the composer’s much-anticipated follow-up to his 1934 hit Anything Goes. Originally titled But Millions! the show came from the same team of writers, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, and was intended to reunite the same three stars, Ethel Merman, William Gaxton, and Victor Moore. But Gaxton, a popular Broadway leading man at the time, backed out when he felt that Merman’s part was being elevated above his, and the role went to Hope instead. When Victor Moore also bowed out, his part was given to another, even bigger comedy star, Jimmy Durante.
The show, eventually retitled Red, Hot and Blue, had another rough voyage to Broadway. Merman and Durante had a famous battle over billing. Neither wanted the other to have the most prominent spot in the show’s advertising, listed either on top or on the left. A compromise was worked out in which both their names were printed diagonally, like a railroad crossing sign. (Hope settled for a line of his own underneath.) In its first tryout performances in Boston, the show ran more than three hours. Porter walked out in a huff when the music director criticized one of his songs, “Ridin’ High.” Durante, the big-schnozzed, raspy-voiced ham, was a loose cannon onstage. One night he appeared to forget his lines, walked to the orchestra for help, then finally called into the wings, “Trow me da book!” Hope admired Durante’s chutzpah, even after discovering that the bit was entirely planned.
Butting up against two Broadway egos even bigger than his own, Hope had to fight for stage time. Lindsay and Crouse were having trouble coming up with an ending to the first act and after several tries finally settled on one that featured only Durante and Merman. This rankled Hope, and he got Doc Shurr to argue his case with the writers. “I’ve been with Bob a long time,” Shurr said. “He’s going to feel bad about this. He’ll go on depressed, and if he’s not in that finale, maybe he won’t be able to give a good performance.” The writers relented and shoehorned Hope into the scene as well.
Like Anything Goes, Red, Hot and Blue had a madcap plot involving gangsters and society swells. Merman played “Nails” Duquesne, a former manicurist now a rich widow, who teams up with an ex-con (Durante) to stage a national lottery aimed at finding Hope’s old hometown sweetheart—a girl whose identifying feature is a waffle-iron brand on her rear end. The show continued Hope’s streak of good luck with musical numbers, teaming him with Merman on the song that became the show’s most enduring standard, “It’s De-Lovely.” His light touch and crisp articulation got the most out of Porter’s fizzy lyrics and provided a nice counterpoint to Merman’s voice and bombastic stage presence. (The two made a recording of the number—the only one that remains of Hope’s Broadway work.)
Merman had her problems with Hope. She hated improvising onstage and was thrown off when he would clown around during their numbers. Once, during “De-Lovely,” she turned around to find him lying down on the stage. “He lay down by the footlights, with me standing behind him,” Merman recalled in her autobiography. “I controlled myself with an effort that almost busted my stay strings, but afterward I had a heart-to-heart talk with [producer Vinton] Freedley. ‘If that so-called comedian ever does that again,’ I said, tight-lipped but ladylike, ‘I’m going to plant my foot on his kisser and leave more of a curve in his nose than nature gave it.’ ” Asked about the incident later, Hope admitted, “I probably kidded around with her too much,” but claimed the lying-down incident came not in “De-Lovely” but in another number, “You’ve Got Something,” a weaker song that “needed some help.”
Yet Hope admired Merman as a performer—and possibly as more than that. He used to walk her home from the Alvin Theater on Fifty-Second Street, dropping her off at her parents’ apartment at 25 Central Park West, before continuing on to his place a couple of blocks up. Hope’s longtime publicist Frank Liberman, in an unpublished memoir of his time with Hope, recalled: “In a rare moment of introspection, he told me that he and Ethel, both in their early thirties [Merman actually wasn’t yet thirty] and with raging hormones, would walk home and make love standing up in darkened doorways on Eighth Avenue. They’d then proceed to their separate apartments.” Of all Hope’s reported liaisons, it surely ranks as one of the unlikeliest.
Red, Hot and Blue, which opened on October 29, 1936, had a bumpy ride with the critics, who found the book idiotic and the score a comedown from Anything Goes. Yet the stars won praise, and Hope got his share of it. Time found him “coyly engaging”; the Times “generally cheering”; and the Evening Journal “urbane, sleek, and nimble of accent. He knows a poor joke when he hides it and he can out-stare more of them.” A few brief clips of his performance exist—silent footage shot by a young theater enthusiast from Jacksonville, Florida, named Ray Knight, whose home movies constitute the only filmed record of many Broadway shows from the 1930s. Hope is dapper and handsome, if a bit more filled out than in his vaudeville days (“the roly-poly Bob Hope,” Time described him), prancing across the stage in a double-breasted suit with chin tucked in, a tight smile on his face, and the confident, wide-swinging gait that would later become a trademark.
The show lasted for most of the season, closing in April 1937, after 183 performances. The producers reopened it for a two-week run in Chicago, then it expired for good, bringing down a final curtain on Hope’s Broadway career.
It was a great run, lifting Hope out of the vaudeville trenches and turning him into a front-rank Broadway star. But Broadway, in some ways, was an aberration for Hope: a high-style interlude on the way from vaudeville to the more informal, naturalistic, and personal comedy style he would develop on radio and in films. “I was an entirely different fellow on Broadway,” he told an interviewer. “I was very chic and very subtle. I wouldn’t do a double take for anything.” More important, in terms of his comedy evolution during the New York years, were his many appearances at charity events (of the 125 major benefits in New York City during the 1936–37 season, Hope appeared, either as emcee or a performer, in fully half of them) and on the radio, where he was finally gaining some traction. In May 1937, just after Red, Hot and Blue closed, he landed another weekly radio gig, as host of a new NBC Sunday-night show called The Rippling Rhythm Revue, sponsored by Woodbury soap and featuring Shep Fields and His Rippling Rhythm Orchestra. By that time, however, Doc Shurr was already negotiating for Hope’s next big career move: into the movies.
For most of his time in New York, Hope had maintained at least a pretense of disdain for Hollywood. The memory of his failed screen test in 1930 still burned, and he took the pragmatic approach that even a lucrative Hollywood contract would bring in less than the $5,000 a week he was making in his peak New York years. “Hollywood was for peasants, I decided. New York was my town,” Hope said. “The New Yorkers were sophisticated enough to understand and enjoy my suave, sterling style. Hollywood was Hicksville.”
But in July, Shurr got an offer from Paramount to cast Hope in The Big Broadcast of 1938, a musical-comedy revue starring W. C. Fields. Hope’s part, as a radio broadcaster on an ocean liner embarked on a transatlantic race, had originally been offered to Jack Benny, who turned it down because he thought it was too similar to one he had played in another film, Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round. Shurr had to work hard to get Hope to accept, making his case in a telegram from Hollywood to his brother Lester, who worked with him back in New York: “Please advise Bob this is the great opportunity he has been waiting for, and we shouldn’t let money stand in the way, as we can’t afford to lose this proposition on account of a few thousand dollars.”
In a follow-up telegram a day later, Shurr pressed the case: “Advise Bob Hope part Paramount has for him in Big Broadcast is light comedy lead and will give him every opportunity to show his ability as comedian and chance to sing several songs. . . . Zukor, LeBaron and Harlan Thompson [the studio chief, head of production, and the film’s producer, respectively] most enthusiastic in Bob’s future and will give him every opportunity to score.”
Hope eventually agreed to the deal, signing a contract with Paramount for three pictures a year at $20,000 per film, with an option for seven years. But the option deal meant little since the studio could essentially drop him at any point. So when he and Dolores boarded the Super Chief for the cross-country train trip to California in early September 1937, he was not at all sure the move to Hollywood would be for good. “We’ve always hated the idea of leaving New York,” Hope told a reporter before he left. “And this may not be permanent—probably won’t be.”
But it was.