Hope: Entertainer of the Century (10 page)

Fay was a key inspiration for Hope, introducing him to a comedy style that was more natural and spontaneous, a style that would allow Hope to showcase his quick wit and stage presence, rather than his
often mediocre material, and to establish a more intimate relationship with the audience. But it meant working alone.

By Hope’s account, the end of the Hope-Byrne partnership was amicable, and not unexpected. Near the end of 1927, as Hope told the story, he simply went to Byrne and said,
“I think I’ll try it alone for a couple of weeks. If it works, we’ll break up the trunk.” Byrne took the news in stride: “I don’t blame you. I’ll go back to Columbus and take it easy.” According to Jim Hope, Byrne’s father was ill, and George felt it was time to move home and get steadier work.

It may be a stretch to believe that the breakup of a relatively successful three-year stage partnership came with no more trauma than that, and some observers have seen it as an early example of Hope’s self-centered careerism. Lawrence Quirk, author of the gossipy, unfriendly, and only marginally reliable biography
Bob Hope: The Road Well-Traveled
, claims that the breakup was a cruel blow to Byrne, who was too weak a personality to put up much of a fight with his domineering partner. Quirk quotes director George Cukor, a friend of Byrne’s, describing a tearful phone call from Hope’s partner, who was distraught over the prospect of splitting up the team.
“Without him I’m nothing,” Byrne supposedly said. Quirk also cites Cukor and others to suggest that Byrne was gay and had an unrequited crush on Hope.

(Quirk also hints, more dubiously, that Hope himself had repressed homosexual urges. A single young man traveling the vaudeville circuit in the fast-and-loose 1920s may well have done some experimenting. Hope once told his radio writers of an encounter he had on the road with a cross-dressing performer known as Umqualia the Spanish Queen. The fellow knocked on Hope’s hotel room door one night and offered to service him. “Why not?” Hope responded. Still, the suggestion that Hope was bisexual is hard to take seriously.)

If there was any bitterness between Hope and Byrne over the breakup of their act, it didn’t last.
After the split, Byrne spent a few years as part of a comedy-dance quartet, then retired from show business and went to work for the Defense Supply Company in Columbus. He and Hope remained friends. On a stop in Columbus a few years
later, Hope invited Byrne to join him and his brothers for a family celebration at a local nightspot, and Byrne brought along his sister Mary. She hit it off with Hope’s youngest brother, George, and the two ended up marrying—thus establishing a permanent family link between the onetime vaudeville partners.

Byrne never talked publicly about his partnership with Hope or their breakup. But family members discounted any suggestion that Byrne felt badly treated by Hope.
“My mother told me that her brother George wanted to leave the act,” said Avis Hope Eckelberry, the daughter of George and Mary Byrne Hope. “He wanted to go home. He was done with being on the road. There were no hard feelings.” George Byrne died in 1966, at age sixty-two. Hope never had a bad word to say about him.

•  •  •

Once he split from his partner, Les Hope was in uncharted territory. He accompanied Byrne on the bus back to Columbus, then continued on to Cleveland, where he moved back home for a while to get his bearings. Avis was glad to have him back; his letters from the road had made his hand-to-mouth existence all too apparent.
“If I don’t get any work by Saturday,” he wrote in one, “I’ll be starting home on Shank’s pony.” Avis fortified him with home-cooked meals and lemon pie.

Les called up Mike Shea, the Cleveland agent who had booked Hope in New Castle, and asked if Shea could find any work for him as a single. Shea got him a spot on a “rotary,” a vaudeville show that moved around to different venues in town every night. For the first few days, Hope worked in blackface.
“I went out, bought a big red bow tie, white cotton gloves like Jolson’s, a cigar, and a small derby which jiggled up and down when I bounced onstage,” he recalled.

It was an odd choice for Hope, but it may have helped loosen him up, easing the pressure of doing a single for the first time.
“Audiences knew that white performers in blackface were not really blacks. But they associated blackface performers with a uniquely freer, more expressive style,” wrote Robert Snyder in
Voice of the City
, his history of vaudeville in New York City. “In blackface, white performers found a liberating mask.” But Hope’s blackface experiment didn’t last long. He
would take the trolley from home each night to his various gigs. On the fourth night, he missed the streetcar and arrived too late to put on the burned cork. So he went on without makeup, and the act went over just fine. Afterward Shea told him,
“Don’t ever put that cork on again. Your face is funny the way it is.”

After a few weeks in Cleveland, Les was ready to make the move to Chicago. The country’s second-biggest entertainment center after New York, the city offered plenty of opportunities for a vaudeville performer—with lavish downtown theaters such as the Palace, Majestic, and State-Lake, along with many neighborhood movie houses that also offered live entertainment. But in early 1928, with no contacts and little money, Les Hope got a cold welcome.

“I couldn’t get in anybody’s door,” he recalled. “I was living at a hotel on Dearborn Street and sharing a bathroom with a man who had a cleanliness complex. He only came out to eat. I couldn’t get a date, and I owed four hundred bucks cuffo for coffee and doughnuts.” Years later, while traveling through Chicago with his granddaughter Miranda, he would point out the street corner where he used to gaze in the window of a fancy restaurant and watch the rich people dining.
“I used to dance on that corner for tips,” he said. It was probably the low point of Hope’s career.

When spring came and there was still no work, he was about to give up. Then he ran into Charlie Cooley, a vaudeville hoofer he knew from Cleveland. Sorry to see his brash Cleveland pal down on his luck, Cooley took him into the Woods Theater Building to meet his friend Charlie Hogan, who booked vaudeville acts in movie theaters around town. Hogan told Hope an emcee spot was open on Memorial Day weekend at the West Englewood Theater, on the city’s southwest side. The pay was only $25, but Les, hungry for anything, snapped it up.

He did well, and before the weekend gig was over, Hogan had lined up another emcee job for him: two weeks at the Stratford Theater, a popular neighborhood movie house at Sixty-Third and Halstead. The Stratford had just lost its longtime emcee, Ted Leary, and was trying out replacements.
“Late of
Sidewalks of New York
Co.,” read the ad in the
Chicago Tribune
on June 25, 1928, announcing Hope’s debut
there (on a bill with the Wallace Beery movie
Partners in Crime
). The ad was a notable milestone. For the first time, he was billed as Bob Hope.

The name change was fairly arbitrary, if euphonious.
“I thought Bob had more ‘Hiya, fellas’ in it,” Hope said. The name took awhile to catch on. Hope loved telling the story of a theater in Evansville, Indiana, that
billed him on the marquee as “Ben Hope.” When he complained, the theater manager shrugged and said, “Who knows?” Hope kept a photo of the marquee for the rest of his life.

At the Stratford, Hope made friends with a pint-size song-and-dance man named Barney Dean, who talked up Hope’s act with Charlie Hogan, and his two-week run was extended to four weeks. But the neighborhood regulars were a tough crowd. Harry Turrell, the Stratford’s manager, reminded Hope in a letter years later of “the very unfair reception given you when you tried so hard to follow Ted Leary, who had been a fixture there for many years”; after six weeks
“I had to tell you that you didn’t make it.” After his Stratford gig ended, Hope (who had kept his connections in the New York theater world) landed the small role of Screeves the butler in a short-lived Broadway musical called
Ups-a Daisy.
But on New Year’s Eve he was back in Chicago,
signing a contract with the Stratford for another stint as emcee, at $225 a week. This time Hope stayed for sixteen straight weeks, and the engagement was a turning point in his career.

At the Stratford, Hope had to develop a comedy act on the fly. A vaudeville comic who traveled the road, appearing in a new city every week, could recycle material over and over. But the emcee of a neighborhood movie house faced many of the same patrons week after week, as the movie bills changed. That meant he had to keep coming up with new material. Hope scrounged for new gags anywhere he could. He mined vaudeville jokebooks and magazines such as
College Humor
. He stole bits from more established vaudeville comics like Frank Tinney. He begged new acts that came through town to throw a couple of extra jokes his way.

He improvised material, playing off the acts he had to introduce—such as the Great Guilfoil, who juggled cannonballs. He danced and
sang, wading into the audience for numbers like “If You See Me Dancing in Some Cabaret, That’s Just My Way of Forgetting You.” He threw in some Duffy-and-Sweeney-style stunts: there would be a loud crash offstage, after which Hope would walk on, dust off his clothes, and straighten his tie as if he’d just finished a fight, snarling, “Lie there and bleed.” He would poke fun at himself when his jokes bombed—“I found that joke in my stocking; if it happens again, I’ll change laundries”—to disarm the crowd and get them on his side.

“I learned a lot about getting laughs and about ways of handling jokes of different types at the Stratford,” he said. “I’d lead off with a subtle joke, and after telling it, I’d say to the audience, ‘Go ahead; figure it out.’ Then I’d wait till they got it. One of the things I learned at the Stratford was to have enough courage to wait. I’d stand there waiting for them to get it for a long time. Longer than any other comedian has enough guts to wait. My idea was to let them know who was running things.”

He was brash, sophisticated, modern. Unlike so many of the vaudeville comics who preceded him, he didn’t do accents or play an ethnic type. (“I simply can’t tell a dialect joke,” he often said.) He was an all-American wise guy, accessible to everyone. For the critic John Lahr—the son of actor Bert Lahr, a former vaudeville comic of the same era—Hope represented a clean break with the physical clowns and ethnic (often Jewish) comics who came before.
“He was a bright package of assimilated poise and pragmatism—the all-American average guy,” wrote Lahr. “In their manic bravado, the older generation of funnymen gave off a whiff of immigrant desperation and sadness at what had been left behind. Hope was all future. The wrinkles had been pressed out of his suits and out of his personality. He was an anxiety-free, up-to-the-minute, fast-talking go-getter on holiday.”

With his urbane, fast-paced style, Hope also exemplified the racier, more freewheeling comedy that was becoming popular at the Palace Theatre, the New York City showplace that opened in 1913 and quickly became the premier vaudeville house in the country. The entertainers who starred at the Palace blew away the last vestiges of Victorian prudishness—the era of “good clean fun,” variety entertainment for
the whole family. The Palace was “the focal point of
a new twentieth-century aesthetic of shazz and pizzazz, of (as
Variety
abbreviated it) ‘show biz,’ ” wrote D. Travis Stewart (under the pseudonym Trav S.D.) in his lively vaudeville history,
No Applause—Just Throw Money.
“This quality permeated every aspect of the era’s entertainment. The breezy new spirit was perhaps embodied most successfully in the personality of Bob Hope—wisecracking, confident, comfortable. Here was the future.”

•  •  •

Bob Hope’s own future became clearer with his successful run at the Stratford Theater. Armed with a fresh load of material and a new comedy style, he set out in the spring of 1929 to try his act on the road. Charlie Hogan got him some bookings around the Midwest, mostly small-time theaters in such places as South Bend, Indiana, and St. Paul, Minnesota. He sported a brown derby and cigar and had the confidence of a headliner—and pretty soon he was one.

He also had a new partner in the act: a pretty, blond aspiring actress from Chicago named Louise Troxell. He began using her onstage at the Stratford in “Dumb Dora” routines, popular vaudeville bits in which a male comic is constantly flummoxed by his daffy female companion. Their material was a pretty standard example of the genre:

LOUISE:
“The doctor said I’d have to go to the mountains for my kidneys.”

BOB:
“That’s too bad.”

LOUISE:
“Yes, I didn’t even know they were up there.”

BOB:
“What have you got in your bag?”

LOUISE:
“Mustard.”

BOB:
“What’s the idea?”

LOUISE:
“You can never tell when you’re going to meet a ham.”

Louise quickly became a fixture in Hope’s act, as well as in his life, in ways that would cause him some problems in the years to come.

Hope put together an act he called “Keep Smiling” and toured
on the Interstate Vaudeville Circuit, moving through the Midwest and then into the South. There he hit a speed bump. The fast-paced Chicago personality who played so well up North seemed to befuddle his Southern audiences. In Fort Worth, Texas, Hope felt totally lost.
“When I walked out before my first Fort Worth audience with my fast talk,” he recalled, “I might as well have kept walking to the Rio Grande. Nobody cared. I couldn’t understand it. I came offstage, threw my derby on the floor and told the unit manager, ‘Get me a ticket back to my country.’ ”

Bob O’Donnell, head of the Interstate circuit, was in the audience that night, and he came backstage after the show. “What seems to be the matter, fancy pants?” he said. When Hope complained about the audience, O’Donnell suggested, “Why don’t you slow down and give them a chance? This is Texas. Let them understand you. Why make it a contest to keep up with your material?”