Hope: Entertainer of the Century (9 page)

The show was another mélange of sketches, songs, and dance numbers, with Hope playing leading roles and character parts, singing in a quartet with Maley and two others, and joining Byrne for a featured dance spot.
The team added bits of comedy to their act—mostly corny, secondhand vaudeville gags, with Les typically playing the straight man. George, for example, might walk across the stage with a woman’s dress on a hanger.

HOPE:
“Where are you going?”

BYRNE:
“Down to get this filled.”

Or George would come in carrying a plank of wood.

HOPE:
“Where are you going now?”

BYRNE:
“To find a room. I’ve already got my board.”

But their dancing, not their comedy, drew the most attention.
“The most versatile couple of eccentric dancers who have ever been seen at the Victoria,” wrote a reviewer in Wilmington, Delaware. In Newport, Kentucky, “they stopped the show with their numbers and were called back for two encores.” They were a smash in Newport News, Virginia. “For the premier honors of the entire bill, Hope and Byrne came through with flying colors in the eccentric dance,” wrote the
local critic. “Friends, it was a regular knockout. There has never been anything any better in this house of this kind.”

Hope and Byrne traveled with
Smiling Eyes
for the entire 1925–26 season. At breaks between engagements, they would stop in Cleveland and practice dance routines in front of the big mirror above the fireplace in the Hopes’ living room.
“I taught myself to play ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’ on an upright piano, while George stood on top of the piano, plucking a banjo strung like a uke,” Hope recalled. On the road, their adventures were not always so homespun. Once, in Braddock, Pennsylvania, they hitched a ride to Pittsburgh with a stranger outside the theater and found themselves in a highway car chase with the cops. The driver ditched the car in a gulley and ran off into the bushes, leaving Hope and Byrne to get hauled off to jail. The car had been reported stolen. They were released after a night in jail when the driver was identified as a doctor’s chauffeur who had taken his boss’s car for a spin without asking.

Their act caught the eye of Gus Sun, the theater-circuit owner, who thought Hope had possibilities as a single. But Fred Hurley was more skeptical and told a reporter covering the show in Springfield, Ohio, not to give Hope “any big puff.” “Why not?” the reporter asked.
“Because it’ll go to his head,” said Hurley. “Next thing he’ll be wanting a raise, and I’m already paying him more than he’s worth.”

When
Smiling Eyes
’ season was over in the spring of 1926, Hope and Byrne decided to strike out on their own. They billed themselves as “Dancemedians” and put together an act that featured as much comedy as dancing.
One of their models was the vaudeville team of Duffy and Sweeney, a comedy duo known for wacky stunts: taking out a frying pan and making eggs onstage, for example, or lying underneath a piano sucking lollipops. Their shenanigans would often continue offstage. After one performance they staged a shouting match in their dressing room, climaxed by a gunshot and a thud—followed by Duffy stalking out of the room alone. When company members nervously opened the dressing-room door to see what had happened, they found Sweeney calmly removing his makeup.

Hope and Byrne brought some of this madcap spirit to their act.
“Our act opened with a soft-shoe dance,” Hope recalled in his memoir. “We wore the high hats and spats and carried canes for this. Then we changed into a fireman outfit by taking off our high hats and putting on small papier-mâché fireman hats. George had a hatchet and I had a length of hose with a water bulb in it. We danced real fast to ‘If You Knew Susie,’ a rapid ta-da-da-da-da tempo, while the drummer rang a fire bell. At the end of this routine we squirted water from the concealed bulb at the brass section of the orchestra in the pit.”

The act was good enough to get them two weeks at the
State Theater in Detroit for $175 a week, with a late show at the Oriole Terrace for an additional $75—a nice raise from the $100 a week they were getting from Hurley. They squandered most of their first week’s pay at a gambling joint down the street from the theater. But the reviews were good and helped them get a few more gigs in Detroit. Then they moved on to Pittsburgh for a stint at the Stanley Theater for $300 a week, on a bill with Tal Henry and His North Carolinians, a popular swing band.

But Hope was itching to go to New York, where the big-time bookers were. He bought the team Eton jackets with big white collars and spats and hired a top photographer in Chicago to take new publicity shots of them; even at this early stage, Hope was learning the value of marketing. In their boaters and bow ties, they looked like perfect 1920s dandies. Hope, with his slicked-back hair, lantern jaw, and hawklike gaze, was clearly the sharpie of the pair—lean, dapper, and good-looking,
“the thinnest man in vaudeville,” in Hope’s words. “I was down to 130 pounds. I was so thin I always made sure the dog act was over before I came onstage.”

The publicity shots apparently paid off. When Hope and Byrne got to New York and started pounding the pavement, they met with Abe Lastfogel of the William Morris Agency.
“If you’re only half as good as your pictures, you’ll do,” Lastfogel said. The job he had for them, however, was certainly the strangest of Hope’s career. He and Byrne were hired to play second fiddle to a pair of Siamese twins.

Daisy and Violet Hilton, joined back-to-back at the hip, were born in Brighton, England, in 1908, to a barmaid who gave them up to her
landlady shortly after birth. The twins’ foster parents turned them into a sideshow attraction in England, and later, after moving to San Antonio, on the American vaudeville circuit. (Today they’re best known for their featured roles in Tod Browning’s 1932 film
Freaks.
) Sideshow freaks were hardly unheard of in vaudeville, but there was nothing quite like the sensation caused by the Hilton sisters. When they played Newark, the lines around the theater blocked traffic. They set a house record in Cleveland.
Variety
pronounced them
“the greatest draw attraction and business getter that has hit vaudeville in the past decade.”

In their relatively skimpy twelve-minute act, the sisters talked about their lives as Siamese twins, played a duet on saxophone and clarinet, and performed a closing dance number with two male partners. That’s where Hope and Byrne came in—returning for the finale after their own featured dance number earlier in the show. Improbable as it seems, the act got good reviews. “The finish is a wow and a real novelty,” said
Variety.
“The routining of the dance steps shows it perfectly possible for the twins to dance all of the present type of dances with partners who are familiar with close formation.” Though the Hiltons were the obvious star attraction, Hope and Byrne got their share of attention.
“They have some fast dances and several novelties, even singing a little,” noted one reviewer. “Both Hope and Byrne stand out pleasantly on the program.”

Hope was a little nonplussed at the whole experience.
“At first it was a funny sensation to dance with a Siamese twin,” he wrote. “They danced back to back, but they were wonderful girls and it got to be very enjoyable—in an unusual sort of way.” But when the twins’ manager wouldn’t give Hope and Byrne a raise after six months, they quit the show in Providence and headed back to New York.

It was 1927, a pivotal year for show business. Hollywood’s first talking picture,
The Jazz Singer
with Al Jolson, opened in October, giving vaudeville another push toward oblivion. Movies had been encroaching on vaudeville’s turf since the early teens. At first, short silent films were added to vaudeville bills as a novelty—just another attraction, like a juggler or a comedy team. With the advent of feature-length films, however, more vaudeville houses began switching to
movies as a primary attraction, with live entertainment as merely a supplement.
By 1925, only a hundred all-live vaudeville theaters were left in the country. When talking pictures arrived, the trend accelerated, with more theaters adding movies and many dropping their stage shows altogether.

Vaudeville was also getting strong competition in 1927 from another quarter: Broadway.
More than 260 shows, at least 50 of them musicals, opened on Broadway during the 1927–28 season, including such classic musicals as the Gershwins’
Funny Face
(starring Fred and Adele Astaire), Rodgers and Hart’s
A Connecticut Yankee
, and Jerome Kern’s landmark
Show Boat
. It was also the heyday of the musical revue. These loosely structured shows (including such perennials as the Ziegfeld
Follies
,
George White’s Scandals
, and
Earl Carroll’s Vanities
) featured songs, sketches, and lavish production numbers—a kind of gussied-up vaudeville show—and provided a bounty of jobs for performers who might otherwise be touring in vaudeville, both well-known stars and up-and-comers.

Hope and Byrne were among those up-and-comers in the summer of 1927 when they landed parts in a Broadway show called
Sidewalks of New York.
With book and lyrics by Eddie Dowling and music by James Hanley—the team whose
Honeymoon Lane
had been a big hit the previous season—it was nominally a book musical, about a naïve girl from an orphanage who comes to the big city. But it had many revue-style elements, including topical jokes about current political figures such as New York governor Al Smith and New York City mayor Jimmy Walker, and a cast packed with veteran vaudevillians, among them the comedy team of Smith and Dale (the model for Neil Simon’s bickering vaudeville duo in
The Sunshine Boys
). One of the show’s female leads was a young dancer, soon to marry Al Jolson and move to Hollywood, named Ruby Keeler.

Getting cast in the show was a big break for Hope and Byrne: just months after playing dance partners to a pair of Siamese twins, they were on Broadway. But their roles were minimal; except for a small dance bit in the opening production number, they were mostly lost in the gigantic cast of eighty. During the show’s pre-Broadway tryout run
in Philadelphia, a new number was written that featured them and Keeler, but it never made it into the show.

Sidewalks of New York
opened at New York’s Knickerbocker Theater on October 3, 1927, and got reasonably good reviews. But to keep the show running, the producers had to cut costs. Hope and Byrne were just one of two male dance teams in the show, and as the less experienced pair, they got the ax.
Sidewalks of New York
went on to have a respectable run of 117 performances, but the Broadway career of Hope and Byrne was over in eight weeks. By the end of 1927, they were back on the street, scrounging for vaudeville jobs.

They rented rooms in a series of theatrical hotels, sometimes sharing the same lumpy bed and filling their substantial downtime by trading stories with other out-of-work vaudevillians. They kept working on the act—Hope pushing, as always, to add more comedy. They landed the No. 2 spot at the B. S. Moss Franklin Theater to showcase their act for bookers, but it didn’t go well. After a while they had trouble getting bookers to even come see them. A top agent at William Morris, Johnny Hyde (later famed for his role in launching the career of a young Marilyn Monroe), gave them a blunt assessment:
“You ought to go West, change your act, and get a new start.”

Beaten down, Hope and Byrne decided to make a strategic retreat to Chicago and try to rethink their act there.
Hope called an agent in Cleveland named Mike Shea, who found them a job along the way: a three-night weekend engagement in New Castle, Pennsylvania, third on a three-act bill, for a salary of $50. It would turn out to be an important stop for Hope.

Before their first show, the theater manager asked Hope if, at the end of his closing spot with Byrne, he would stay onstage to announce the next week’s show. Hope, grabbing the chance for a little more stage time, ad-libbed a joke about the coming headliner, Marshall Walker. “Marshall is a Scotsman,” said Hope. “I know him. He got married in the backyard so the chickens could get all the rice.”

The wisecrack, playing on the stereotype of the frugal Scotsman, got a laugh, and the manager told Hope to keep it up for the next show. The following night Hope threw in a few more jokes. By the end
of the weekend, an orchestra member told him he ought to drop the dancing act altogether and try to make it as an emcee.

Emcees were a relatively new phenomenon in vaudeville. In contrast to British music halls—where the performers were introduced by a host, or “chairman”—vaudeville acts traditionally just trooped onstage, announced only by a title card on an easel at the side of the stage. But that began to change in the 1920s, thanks largely to the success of
a suave comedian named Frank Fay, vaudeville’s best-known master of ceremonies. If anyone in vaudeville can be singled out as Hope’s creative role model, it is Fay.

He first became popular as a vaudeville monologuist in the late teens. By the mid-1920s he was the most popular emcee at New York’s Palace Theatre, once appearing there for an unprecedented ten straight weeks. His job was to introduce the performers, fill the spaces between acts with banter, and generally keep the show moving—or slow it down if there was a delay backstage. This required a new style of comedy. In contrast to most vaudeville comics, with their exaggerated stage personas, loud checked suits, and well-honed routines, Fay came onstage as himself and joked around in a casual, seemingly off-the-cuff manner.

Fay was a handsome Irishman, with a velvety manner and an aloof, almost aristocratic bearing—very different from the brash, fast-paced style that Hope developed. Fay’s humor was often cutting, even mean. (Girl: “I just came back from the beauty parlor.” Fay: “And they didn’t wait on you?”) He was, moreover, reputed to be something of a bastard offstage; anecdotes about his contemptuous behavior toward fellow performers abounded. (He later had a stormy marriage to the actress Barbara Stanwyck.) Though he appeared in several movie musicals in the early 1930s and starred in the original Broadway production of Mary Chase’s hit 1944 play,
Harvey
, his later career never came close to the heights it reached in vaudeville.