Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  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 a
nd 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 Ang
eles, 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.”