Hope: Entertainer of the Century (6 page)

A working-class neighborhood bounded by opulence and higher education, Doan’s Corners was home to small tradesmen, steelworkers, salesmen, clerks—along with the cooks, chauffeurs, and other
household workers who helped tend the mansions on Millionaire’s Row. Like so many other urban residential neighborhoods at the time, it was shedding its quaint nineteenth-century trappings and being transformed by the technology of a new century. A hand-drawn map of the area around 1900, annotated by a longtime resident, gives a good snapshot of the neighborhood that likely greeted the Hopes when they arrived in 1908:

Euclid and Cedar had Brush arc lights. Other streets were faintly illuminated by artificial gas lamps on posts: lighted in evening and turned off in early morning by the lamp lighters. Homes of the rich had electric lights, those of the well-to-do artificial gas, while the poor burned coal oil lamps. . . . Coal was king, but furnaces were few. Hard coal base burners warmed the living rooms, while the cook stoves in the kitchens helped out with their smoky soft coal fires. In the summer much cooking was done on gasoline stoves. Ice boxes were had by some. A telephone was a luxury, and if you owned a bathtub you were rich. . . . Electric cars—four wheelers—ran on Euclid and on Cedar; cable cars on Hough. Those had stone block pavement. Doan was a sandy road, while many of the others were yellow clay with coal-ash crosswalks for wet weather.

When they arrived in Cleveland, the Hope family had to temporarily split up. Ivor and Jim stayed with Uncle Frank and Aunt Louisa, who lived above Frank’s plumbing and pipe-fitting business. Avis, Harry, and the rest of the boys moved in with Uncle Fred and Aunt Alice. It’s unclear how long that arrangement lasted. According to Jim Hope’s memoir, the family moved into their own home within a few weeks. But the August 1909 Cleveland City Directory still lists the family as living at 2227 East 105th Street—Fred and Alice’s place. At some point, however, Avis rented a three-bedroom house from a Welsh doctor named Staniforth for $18.50 a month, and the family was together again, in their first home in America.

After buying furniture and stocking up on groceries, their money was nearly depleted, and they didn’t have enough to pay for the second
month’s rent. Harry was no help: most days he came home with nothing in his pockets and liquor on his breath—much to the chagrin of Avis, who’d harbored some hope that his drinking problems had been left behind in England. Jim appealed to Uncle Frank for money, but he refused, saying the family shouldn’t have come to America unless Harry could support them.

The Land of Opportunity, it turned out, had not provided much opportunity for Harry Hope. Jobs for a stonecutter were nearly as hard to find in America as they were in England. Architects who had previously designed buildings with limestone were switching to terra-cotta, and there were ten men for every stonecutting job. The frigid Ohio winters were another problem, limiting the number of days when stonecutting could be done. Even at the relatively good wage of $12 a day, Harry could not generate enough steady income to do much more than cover his bar bill. As in England, the job of keeping the family solvent was left largely to Avis and the boys.

Bob Hope, at least in his public recollections, had warm memories of his father. A jovial English gentleman, whose figure varied from “medium stout to happy stout,” the man known in the neighborhood as ’Arry ’Ope was
“not only an artist with the stone-cutting tools, he was a happy man,” Hope wrote in his memoir
Have Tux, Will Travel
. “He loved to live it up. He was popular, and a great entertainer.” He wasn’t much for disciplining the kids, but would occasionally “take off his belt and salt us good.” Yet he was having a hard time in America:
“I remember Dad saying, ‘The United States is a fine place for women and dogs. It’s a poor place for horses and men.’ He had trouble adjusting himself to this country. I don’t think he ever did.”

His drinking was not constant, and never in front of the family. When he was working and sober, the older boys liked to stop by his jobs and just talk to him.
“For when he was sober he was so magnetic, he’d cause you to want to linger as long as possible,” wrote Jim. “Maybe we’d ask his opinion on some current topic. He’d explain it in such a way that you’d feel proud to discuss it with the next person you’d meet, who would in turn credit you with being well-informed.” He was a strong union man, popular among his fellow workers.
“I have
seen Harry in a great group of angry stonecutters debating and arguing in the most violent fashion,” recalled one fellow worker, “and after listening for a while to their remarks he would rise to the floor and with all the true marks of a born orator would calm them down and show them the proper and logical approach to their problem.”

His stonecutting skills were also admired. He worked on some major construction projects in Cleveland, including the Church of the Covenant, a Gothic Revival Presbyterian church at 112th and Euclid, and the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, spanning the Cuyahoga River (and later renamed the Hope Memorial Bridge in his honor). Yet as a businessman he was fairly hapless. Once Harry and a fellow stonecutter formed a partnership and bid on a contract for the stonework on a high school. They won the job, but seriously underestimated the costs and wound up losing money.

Avis, as always, was the family rock, the diminutive, de facto head of the household, and her resourceful, can-do spirit, more than his father’s old-country ways, imprinted itself most strongly on young Leslie Hope. Generous, self-effacing, unfailingly upbeat, she put up with Harry’s misbehavior and took on the responsibility of managing the household finances. She was a painstaking shopper, carefully comparing prices at the city market and buying in bulk—butter, beans, several sacks of onions in the fall to last through the winter. She altered the boys’ clothes so they could be passed down the line to each successive kid. (A seventh, George, was born in 1909, the only Hope son to be born in America.) She kept the house bright with music, singing and accompanying herself on a secondhand piano she had saved enough to buy. She took the boys to services at a nearby Presbyterian church (after trying out an Episcopalian church that she found too uppity) and frowned on cardplaying, cigarettes, and public dancing. Unable to afford doctors except in dire emergencies, she treated every childhood malady, from measles to whooping cough, with a hot bath and a homemade brew. She kept their home immaculate, regularly scrubbing the floors, beating the rugs, and scouring the cooking stove. She always had fresh-baked pies and cakes ready for visitors, tradesmen, and the children’s friends, who would frequently stop by.

“She had the kind of skin you love to touch very much and as often as possible,” Jim Hope wrote lovingly in his memoir, “lustrous medium brown hair; beautifully smiling brown eyes with the light of the love of life shining through . . . a beautifully smiling mouth that had never uttered a harsh, unkind or inconsiderate word to or of anyone. With this, a perfectly proportioned body, with the carriage of a thoroughbred, down to a size three shoe.” His words are somewhat at odds with photos of her in later years—a slight, plain-looking woman, often lurking in the background of family pictures, or bowing her head as if she wanted to shrink from view—but understandable from an adoring son who watched his mother’s valiant efforts to keep the family afloat.

The family’s first two winters in Cleveland were “almost unbearable,” Jim recalled, colder than any they had experienced in England. None of the boys even had overcoats. They learned to dress in layers—stuffing newspapers between their underwear and their shirts and trousers for extra insulation. They had a gas fireplace in the living room, but
“unless we put our bare bottoms so close as to be dangerous, we’d not know the fire was lit,” said Jim. Avis would get up early in the morning and light every burner on the kitchen stove, so at least the kitchen would be warm when the boys raced downstairs from their freezing bedrooms.

To make money, Avis moved the family to increasingly larger houses, so they could take in boarders—three different houses on one block of 105th Street in five years. She was a soft touch with tenants, always susceptible to anyone with a sob story for why he couldn’t pay the rent. But the older boys worked at an assortment of jobs to help out: Jim and Ivor at the Van Dorn Iron Works, Fred and Jack at neighborhood stores such as Wheaton’s Market and Heisey’s Bakery. When one Hope boy would quit a job, another one would often step in and take his place. It got so that Avis couldn’t keep track of who was working where. When she sent Sid down to the bakery one day to look for one of his older brothers, the German woman who ran the place exclaimed,
“Ach! How many Hopes are there?”

“Looking back on my Cleveland boyhood, I know now that it was grim going,” Hope wrote in
Have Tux, Will Travel
. “But nobody told
us Hopes it was grim. We just thought that’s the way things were. We had fun with what we had.” It is a typically brisk assessment of what were certainly difficult times. Leslie, a grade-schooler during those tough early years in Cleveland, may well have been shielded from the worst anxieties of their hand-to-mouth existence. Still, he was clearly developing the tools for protecting himself from harsh realities: a thick skin, an ability to mask his feelings, and a relentlessly positive, can-do attitude in the face of precarious times.

He was a mischievous kid, a daredevil, small for his age—the size of a six-year-old at age ten, Jim recalled. (His father liked to joke that when he was being born and the doctor said, “Grab him,” Leslie thought he said, “Stab him,” and slipped back inside, thus retarding his growth.) His brothers called him “banana legs” because of his habit of moving so fast his legs couldn’t catch up and falling on his face. He seemed to be constantly in motion.
“You sat in front of me in one class,” a schoolmate recalled in a letter years later, “and you never could sit still. I hit you on the head one time and asked if you had worms!” He and his younger brother Sid once found a giant umbrella and tried to use it as a parachute, leaping off the roof of the Alhambra Theater building into a pile of sand below, nearly breaking their necks. Leslie even walked in his sleep. One night a policeman found him two blocks away from home, knocking at the door of the neighborhood drugstore. After that, Avis would tie his feet to his older brother Jack at night to make sure he didn’t wander.

At Fairmont grade school, where he arrived on the first day dressed in an Eton jacket and stiff white collar, his classmates flipped his name, Les Hope, and dubbed him Hopeless. He was never a very good student. The one subject he liked was music: he was the pet of his singing teacher, Miss Bailey, sang in a church choir, and joined his musical family in songs at the annual Welsh picnic at Euclid Beach.

Performing came easy to him, and early.
“He was a big show-off since he was about nine,” his brother Fred recalled. At age twelve, when Charlie Chaplin–imitating contests were the rage, Les would dress up as the silent-film tramp and walk like Chaplin past the local firehouse. Egged on by his brothers, he entered a Chaplin contest at
Luna Park, the amusement mecca a mile away from their home. His brothers packed the audience with neighborhood kids to cheer him on, and he won either first prize (Bob’s recollection) or second (Jim’s version). According to Bob, he used the prize money to buy a new stove for his mom.

One of his first jobs, at age twelve, was selling newspapers on the corner of 105th and Euclid. He and three brothers—Fred, Jack, and Sid—would each take a corner of the busy intersection, valuable turf that they would often have to defend from rival newsboys in the neighborhood. One of Les’s regular customers was an old gentleman in a chauffeur-driven limousine, who would stop by for a paper on his way home in the evenings. One day he rolled down the window and gave Les a dime for the penny paper. Les didn’t have change and told the gentleman he could pay tomorrow. The man said no, he would wait for his change, so Les scurried into a nearby grocery store to get it.

When he returned, the old man gave the boy some advice:
“If you want to be a success in business, trust nobody. Never give credit and always keep change on hand. That way you won’t miss any customers while you’re going for it.” After he left, someone told Les the old gentleman was John D. Rockefeller.

It was one of Hope’s favorite stories from childhood, repeated often. It may even have been true. Rockefeller, the philanthropist and founder of Standard Oil, was in his late seventies at the time, and dividing his retirement years between his Cleveland home and an estate in upstate New York.
“As his leisure increased,” noted Grace Goulder in
John D. Rockefeller: The Cleveland Years
, “he frequently had his chauffeur stop during afternoon automobile rides so that he might chat with farmers, tradesmen, and anyone who caught his attention.” One of them could well have been a young newsboy named Les Hope.

He graduated from Fairmont and went on to East High School. He had a variety of after-school jobs—soda jerk, taffy puller, delivery boy, flower-stand attendant at Luna Park. He spent much of his free time at the Alhambra poolroom, above Dye’s restaurant, with his pal George “Whitey” Jennings. Les became a sharpie at three-cushion billiards, good enough to make a few bucks hustling the newcomers,
and entertaining the rest with his wisecracks.
“We would hang around the corner of Euclid and East 105th Street,” one neighborhood kid recalled, “until someone suggested that we go up and watch the ‘funny kid’ shoot pool.” Aunt Louisa admonished Avis that her son was spending too much time in the poolroom, but Avis dismissed her concerns:
“Don’t worry about Leslie. He’ll turn out fine.”

Les and Whitey hung out together, coming up with new schemes for making money. They competed for cash prizes in the footraces held at the big company picnics every summer at Euclid Beach and Luna Park. When two races were scheduled at the same time, they would try to get one rescheduled so they could compete in both: one of them would call the organizers and pose as a newspaper reporter, saying the race would get covered in the paper if it could just be moved earlier or later. Then, once entered in the race, the two boys would work together, plotting for one of them to bump the fastest runner, so the other could speed ahead to victory.