Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  When dance marathons were sweeping the country in the early 1920s, Les even tried to hop on the bandwagon, starting his own contest at Sojack’s. Unfortunately he was a little late. The grueling marathons (dramatized so memorably in the novel and movie They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) had spawned a backlash across the country, and Cleveland was one of several cities weighing a ban on them. In a front-page story on April 17, 1923, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that the city council had decided to take no action on a proposed ban, allowing those marathons that were already under way to continue, but barring any new ones. Hope made it into the story’s last paragraph:

  Lester Hope, of 2069 E. 106th Street, started a new contest at Sojack’s Dancing Academy, 6124 Euclid Avenue, but the contest was called off after an hour, due to Dance Hall Inspector Johnson’s ruling against permitting any new contests to start.

  Les closed the school not long after. But he continued to work on his own dancing, competing in local amateur shows, first with Gibbons as a partner and then hooking up with Mildred Rosequist, a “cute little trick” he had met at Zimmerman’s dance hall.

  “Mildred was tall, blonde, willowy, graceful, and a slick dancer,” Hope said. “I thought she was beautiful. She looked as if she’d done her hair with an egg beater. But I loved it that way.” He would bring her sweetbreads from Fred’s meat market and flirt with her at the cosmetics counter at Halle’s department store downtown, where she worked. She became a frequent visitor at the Hope house, and the family liked her. “She worshipped Leslie,” remembered Jim. “For some time we were all sure it was a hopeless, one-sided affair, but eventually Leslie also succumbed to her charm.”

  Mildred remembered the romance a bit differently, describing Les as the pursuer, not to say something of a pest. “He would follow me home from work some nights,” she told Hope biographer William Robert Faith. “I mean, he would get on the same streetcar and I wouldn’t even know it. When I got off at Cedar, he’d be walking right behind me. Then I’d walk in the front door and my mother’d ask if he was with me and I’d say, ‘No,’ and then he’d stick his head around the hallway door and say, ‘Oh, yes I am.’ ” He said he wanted to marry her and even bought her an engagement ring. It was so small that she cracked, “Does a magnifying glass come with it?” Les didn’t appreciate the joke, and Mildred apologized for hurting his feelings.

  They were a smooth pair on the dance floor. They modeled themselves on Vernon and Irene Castle, the enormously popular husband-wife dance team who headlined in vaudeville in the midteens and sparked a national craze for social dancing. Les and Mildred won some amateur contests around the city and were good enough to get a few paying jobs, earning $7 or $8 for an evening. Hope said he split the money with her, but Mildred claimed that Les told her the performances were for charity and kept all the money himself.

  Their act had a homey touch. Hope described it in his memoir: “ ‘This is a little dance we learned in the living room,’ I’d tell the audience. Then we’d do that one, and I’d say, ‘This is a little dance we learned in the kitchen.’ Then we’d do that. We ended with, ‘This is a little dance we learned in the parlor.’ The parlor dance was a buck dance. We saved it for last because it was our hardest and it left us exhausted.”

  A little too exhausted for Mildred. She recalled one of their performances at a local social club: “When we came out to do the hard stuff, the buck and wings which were so fast, I just quit, and I said I was tired, and I walked off the stage. Les looked at me with kill in his eyes—he was furious, but he ad-libbed. . . . He picked out a little old lady in the first row and said, ‘See, Ma, you should never have made her do the dishes tonight.’ ” It is the first recorded Bob Hope joke.

  Les wanted to develop an act with Mildred and take it on the road. But her mother had no intention of allowing Mildred to travel with a man who clearly had more on his mind than dancing, and she nixed the idea. Les kept up a romance with Mildred, stringing her along for years to come as a hometown girlfriend. But for a professional partner, he had to look elsewhere.

  He settled on Lloyd “Lefty” Durbin, a kid from the neighborhood he had gotten to know at Sojack’s Dance Academy. Lloyd was a polished dancer, and together they came up with an act that mixed in a little comedy with their tap and soft-shoe routines. They made the rounds of amateur shows, played intermission spots at movie houses, and landed an occasional fill-in gig on local vaudeville bills. Then, in August 1923, an agent got them a spot at the Bandbox Theater, as part of a vaudeville show headlined by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.

  Arbuckle, the onetime silent-film comedian, was embarking on a comeback after one of the most sordid scandals in Hollywood history. In 1921, at the height of his popularity, the portly film star was implicated in the mysterious death of a starlet who had been partying with him and some friends in a hotel in San Francisco. Amid tabloid accusations that he had raped or murdered her, Arbuckle was put on trial for manslaughter. Though he was ultimately acquitted (in a third trial, after two hung juries), his film career was finished. Now he was trying to start over, as the star attraction in a touring variety show called Bohemia.

  Hope and Durbin worked up some fresh material for their spot in the show. They did soft-shoe and buck-and-wing dance routines, and closed with a comic Egyptian dance number. “We wore brown derbies,” Hope recalled. “We pretended to go down to a well near the Nile, dip some water in a derby and bring it back. The gag was that afterward we poured actual water out of the derby. It was real crazy and it fetched a boff.” By chance, it is one of the few Hope vaudeville routines that can actually be seen: Hope re-created it, with dancer Hal Le Roy as his partner, on his first TV special in April 1950. The two dancers strut around in stiff-armed, hunch-shouldered style, like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics come to life, and do some neatly synchronized physical shtick, one behind the other. If not quite a boff, it is a slick and amusing piece of comedy business.

  “The whole offering is built along familiar lines,” the unimpressed reviewer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote of the Arbuckle show, “with some better-than-ordinary costumes and settings standing out as the distinguishing feature. The comedians are found wanting in many instances, but the musical chorus numbers are well up to snuff.” Yet Arbuckle was impressed enough with Hope and Durbin to talk them up to Fred Hurley, a producer of vaudeville tabloid shows—musical-comedy revues that toured mostly small towns. These “tab shows” were considered the bottom rung of the vaudeville ladder, but they were a good place for newcomers to get a start. So, when Hurley a few months later offered Hope and Durbin parts in his new tab revue, Jolly Follies, which was set to begin a tour of the Midwest, they grabbed it.

  It was Hope’s first full-time show-business job. His mother was proud; his practical brothers skeptical that he could earn a living at it. But for Hope, at age twenty-one, it was a great opportunity. The job would give him a chance to travel and see if he could make it as an entertainer in front of more than just hometown crowds. It would pay him a decent salary of $40 a week, half of which he promised to send back home to his parents. What it wouldn’t give him was a quick road to stardom. Hope’s vaudeville apprenticeship would last for nearly a decade—longer than the ambitious young hoofer had probably anticipated. Yet it would give him plenty of time to learn the tools of his trade, discover how to survive in a changing show-business world, and invent Bob Hope.

  Chapter 2

  VAUDEVILLE

  “No, lady, this is not John Gilbert.”

  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 eatin
g 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.