Hope: Entertainer of the Century (12 page)

When Bob caught sight of her in the crowd, he gave her a big shout-out: “There she is, folks! There’s my mom! With the lilies of the valley on her hat!”

Though Avis was a fan, Hope’s brothers had long been skeptical of his show-business career. When he was still struggling to find work in New York, his brother Fred and Johnny Gibbons, Fred’s brother-in-law and Bob’s old dance partner,
went there on a rescue mission, trying to talk him into coming home. He refused, saying he wanted to stick it out a little longer. His eldest brother, Ivor, still doubted that Bob would ever make a decent living in show business. When Bob showed him the paycheck for a week of shows in Cleveland, Ivor’s eyes popped. Indeed, Bob was doing well enough to buy a new home for his parents, moving them from their aging place on Euclid Avenue to a smaller but more modern house on Yorkshire Road, a few blocks away in the more upscale neighborhood of Cleveland Heights.

Except for Jim—who was in Hollywood now, trying to get into the movie business—the brothers were all settled in Ohio, leading the kind of solidly middle-class, midwestern lives that Hope, while not looking down on them, was happy to have left behind. Fred, the most successful of the family, had turned his butcher shop into the United Provision Company, which supplied meat to most of the major hotels in the area. Ivor had a metal-products business, while Sid had moved to a farm near Ridgeville Corners, in the western part of the state, where he raised a family and dabbled in various small businesses. Only George, Bob’s good-looking youngest brother, seemed interested in joining his brother in show business. Bob didn’t see a lot of talent there, but at Mom’s urging, he gave George a spot in his act.

He teamed George with an old friend from Toledo named Toots Murdock and used them as stooges in his “Antics” shows. They would
sit in the audience boxes and heckle Hope and the other performers:
“What’s going on behind the curtain?” one would call out. “Nothing,” Bob would reply. “Well, there’s nothing going on in front of it either!” When Hope brought on a singer who did a parody of the popular crooner Rudy Vallee, the hecklers interrupted with insults. Hope snapped, “Don’t you boys know you can be arrested for annoying an audience?” Their comeback, in unison: “You should know!”

This was more than just random silliness. Hope was slowly developing, if not a comic persona, at least a comic strategy: the self-assured wise guy who is continually cut down to size.
“A part of my new idea was for my stooges to come out and start whipping at me,” Hope said. “I figured it would be a great device for them to tear down this character on the stage who’d been so cocky, brash and bumptious.” It was another step in Hope’s transformation from generic vaudeville gagman to a much more distinctive, fully formed stage comic—a modern comedian.

Bob and George were sometimes at odds. Bob tried teaching his brother to dance, but
“I had to pound his eardrums to get him to do it.” Once they had a fight and George walked out. He turned up at home in Cleveland, and Mom had to patch things up between them. George remained in the act (billed as “George Townes,” evidently to disguise the family connection), as Bob toured through 1931, on a bill with a brother-sister roping act and twenty trained monkeys. (The monkeys got loose behind a theater in Minneapolis one night and caused a near panic in the audience before they were finally rounded up.)

Despite his success on the Keith-Orpheum circuit, Hope still had a big gap in his résumé: he had not yet played the Palace Theatre, still deemed the pinnacle of vaudeville success. When he appeared in New York, he found himself stuck mostly with movie-theater gigs—twice, no less, he was forced to follow the grim World War I drama
All Quiet on the Western Front
. Then, in February 1931, while he was appearing in Cleveland, he got a surprise call from Lee Stewart, telling him to scoot back to New York in a hurry: a spot at the Palace had opened up on a bill headlined by Beatrice Lillie.

“He almost kissed me,” Stewart recalled. “I never saw such a
happy and excited guy in my life.” The engagement meant a lot to Hope, and it put him in self-promotional overdrive. On the day of his Palace opening, he arranged for a band of picketers to show up at the theater with protest signs:
BOB HOPE IS UNFAIR TO STOOGES
. The publicity stunt got him some ink, but
Hope later disowned it, claiming it was “too much.”

His Palace debut, on February 21, 1931, didn’t go so well either.
“I was numb,” he recalled. “Not just scared, numb. I did my act mechanically.” The reviews were only mixed. He was especially hurt by one slam in the
Daily Graphic
:
“They say that Bob Hope is the sensation of the Midwest. If so, why doesn’t he go back there?” The saving grace of his weeklong run was the chance to emcee the Palace’s Sunday “celebrity night,” where stars would often show up in the audience, and he got to banter with two of vaudeville’s top comics, Ted Healy and Ken Murray.

On the road, however, his polish and crowd appeal were growing. When Boasberg got too busy with his film work, Hope hired another writer, a highly regarded young comic named Richie Craig. The sketches got tighter; the gags popped. In one routine, credited to Craig,
Bob played a hotel desk clerk:

MAN:
“Can you give me a room and bath?”

HOPE:
“Well, I can give you a room, but you’ll have to take the bath yourself.”

MAN:
“Is the elevator still broke?”

HOPE:
“Aren’t we all?”

MAN:
“The last time I was here the elevator used to fall halfway down the shaft.”

HOPE:
“Oh, we had that fixed. It falls all the way down now.”

As Hope’s confidence grew, so did his daring. The Keith-Orpheum theaters were notorious for their prudish resistance to any racy material. (In the old days signs would be posted backstage listing the slang terms that performers were forbidden to use, such as
slob
and
son of a gun
.) Hope’s material was considered borderline, and the censors
kept a close eye on him. As early as 1929, in a review of Hope’s tryout act for the Keith circuit,
Variety
had warned,
“The sting of some of his gags stand a chance of being taken out if the Keith office feels badly the day they are heard or reported.” By May 1933, Hope’s risqué material was raising eyebrows at the Bureau of Sunday Censorship in Boston. A report on his act listed with disapproval such suggestive lines as “Had breakfast with an English girl and did she have a broad ‘A.’ ” The report also noted, “Hell and God used quite a lot . . . men in boxes have cross talk and get very unruly.” Its recommendation:
“Act needs a lot of watching.”

Hollywood was watching too. With the advent of sound, the movies were busy scouring vaudeville for new comedy talent. By 1930, the Marx Brothers had already adapted two of their Broadway hits,
The Cocoanuts
and
Animal Crackers
, for the screen; vaudeville comics such as Eddie Cantor and Joe E. Brown were starring in features; and W. C. Fields, Jack Benny, and Burns and Allen were all making comedy shorts. So it wasn’t surprising that a West Coast agent named Bill Perlberg, who had heard about Hope from Boasberg, contacted Hope in the summer of 1930 and asked him to come in for a screen test.

Hope was on his West Coast swing for the Keith-Orpheum circuit, and he scheduled the test for the break between his bookings in Los Angeles and San Diego. He took a cab with Louise out to the Pathé lot in Culver City, where he did his vaudeville act for the cameras. He got laughs from the crew and was sure his Hollywood break was imminent. But after he and Louise continued on to San Diego and didn’t hear anything for days, he called Perlberg to find out what the reaction had been.

Perlberg invited Hope to come see the test for himself. Hope stopped back in LA before his return East and found his way to the screening room on the Pathé lot by himself. He cringed as he watched the screen test, all alone in the darkened theater.
“I’d never seen anything so awful,” he said later. “I looked like a cross between a mongoose and a turtle. I couldn’t wait to get out.”

There’s no telling how bad Hope’s test really was. He had a habit of exaggerating his mistakes and missteps, both for comic effect and
to cover up the pain of rejection. But his failure to get snapped up for the movies was certainly a blow to the ambitious vaudeville comic. It soured him on Hollywood for years and forced him to shift his focus back East. If he was to graduate from vaudeville, it now appeared, he had better concentrate on the entertainment center at the other end of the country: Broadway.

Since his debut in
Sidewalks of New York
in 1927, Hope had kept his ties to the Broadway theater. In addition to his brief stint in
Ups-a Daisy
in the fall of 1928, Hope got another small part in the chorus of
Smiles
, a Ziegfeld-produced revue, with a cast that included Fred and Adele Astaire, that opened in November 1930 and ran for two months. (Both roles were apparently so negligible, at least to Hope, that he omitted them from his résumé and never mentioned them in any of his reminiscences of his Broadway years.) But in the summer of 1932 he landed his most substantial Broadway part yet, in a musical revue called
Ballyhoo of 1932.
Hope was in the middle of his three-year contract with Keith, but the vaudeville circuit was perfectly willing to give him a leave of absence, on the promise that he would satisfy his touring obligations later. (The Broadway credit would only make him a bigger draw.) Hope, for his part, was happy to keep one foot in vaudeville, and he continued to tour sporadically, in between his Broadway gigs, for several more years.

Broadway came to Hope’s rescue at just the right time. In November of 1932 the Palace Theatre, after reducing its admission price and boosting its number of daily shows to try to stay afloat, finally caved to the inevitable and switched over to showing movies—a milestone usually cited as the final curtain for vaudeville. Film palaces such as the Roxy and Radio City Music Hall (and the Palace itself, from time to time) would continue to offer vaudeville-style stage shows along with their movie presentations for years to come. But as a viable, autonomous business, vaudeville was all washed up.

Hope spent the next five years in New York, getting major roles in five Broadway shows and launching a radio career. Yet the vaudeville experience left an indelible imprint on him. It gave him all the tools—singing, dancing, sketch acting—that he would need as a performer.
Some of the people he met, such as Charlie Cooley and Barney Dean from the Chicago days, became lifelong friends and members of his entourage. Vaudeville taught him the value of hard work, made him a nimble and inventive performer, and gave him a solid grounding in the
business
of show. His years on the vaudeville circuit also ingrained in him a basic insecurity as a performer. To survive the vaudeville grind you had to be resourceful, vigilant, watchful of money, always on the move. They were qualities Hope would never lose.

He was, moreover, the great ambassador of vaudeville to a new generation of entertainment consumers. Gags from his vaudeville days were recycled as wisecracks on his radio and TV shows for the next six decades. In the
Road
pictures, he and Crosby typically played small-time vaudevillians, reprising the cheesy routines and repartee of a bygone entertainment era. Like other ex-vaudevillians who became TV stars (but for longer than any of them), Hope kept the vaudeville format alive in his television specials: an emcee doing an opening monologue, introducing a series of variety acts, chatting with guest stars. “When vaudeville died,” Hope once joked, “television was the box they put it in.”

After nine years, Hope had wrung all that he could out of vaudeville. Broadway would give him the finishing-school polish that completed his show-business education. It would also, for the first time, give him a taste of stardom.

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.”