Hope: Entertainer of the Century (15 page)

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.”