Hope: Entertainer of the Century (11 page)

Hope, the cocky Midwesterner, bristled at the advice. But it registered. “I did slow down for the next show (as much as my stubbornness would let me) and the audience warmed up a little,” he recalled. “I slowed down even more for the next show, and during the last show of the night, I was almost a hit. Before I moved on to Dallas, I was a solid click.” If the Stratford Theater was where Hope developed his new, more spontaneous style of stand-up comedy, his Fort Worth experience showed him the importance of tailoring his act to each specific audience and locale. For a comedian who would go on to become the greatest grassroots entertainer of his era, it was a crucial lightbulb moment.

Still, he was playing mostly small-time theaters. His goal, ever since the Hope and Byrne days, was to crack the big-time houses that were part of the Keith circuit—the chain of vaudeville theaters founded by B. F. Keith and Edward F. Albee, encompassing most of the biggest and most prestigious venues east of the Mississippi (and after a merger with the West Coast–based Orpheum chain in 1927, across the country as well). For a vaudeville performer, playing “Keith time” meant you had made it.

Hope’s breakthrough came in the fall of 1929, when he got a wire
from a New York agent named Lee Stewart, who had heard about him from Bob O’Donnell. Stewart wanted to set up a showcase for Hope in New York—a tryout engagement where the Keith-circuit bookers could see his act. Bob grabbed Louise, hopped in his new yellow Packard, and sped to New York.

As Hope recalled the events, Stewart first offered to put him on a bill at the Jefferson Theatre on Fourteenth Street. But Hope balked at the downtown venue, which was known for its boisterous audiences, and held out for a classier uptown theater. A few days later Stewart called back with a theater more to Hope’s liking: Proctor’s 86th Street, on Eighty-Sixth and Broadway. Hope prepared for the engagement by testing out his material in a smaller tryout theater in Brooklyn. Stewart came to see one of Hope’s shows there and on the subway ride back to Manhattan seemed to have doubts. “Proctor’s Eighty-Sixth Street is a pretty big theater, you know,” said Stewart. “Look, Lee,” Bob replied. “I open there tomorrow, and if I don’t score, we won’t talk to each other again, okay?”

That’s Hope’s version. A slightly different account comes from Dolph Leffler, who worked in the Keith office and recalled the events in a letter to Hope years later. No mention of Hope’s rejecting the Jefferson Theatre. Indeed, the young performer appears all too eager to take whatever he can get.
“I offered Lee Stewart $35 (all I had left of my budget) for your five-person act,” recalled Leffler. (Along with Troxell, Hope had added several other comic foils, or “stooges,” to his act.) “He almost fainted but decided to wire you the offer. We never expected you to accept, as $35 wouldn’t buy your transportation from Cleveland—but you wired back accepting.”

The Keith bookers arranged Hope’s tryout in Brooklyn, and Leffler was there, along with Stewart, for the first, sparsely attended matinee. Despite the small crowd, Leffler liked what he saw, and he gives a lively firsthand account of Hope’s zany vaudeville act at the time:

When you introduced your world famous International Orchestra which had just returned from playing before the Crown Heads of Europe—“and mind you, we are just getting rid of our sea legs before
going to the Palace”—then the curtain went up and that joker sat on a beer keg in overalls playing a muted trumpet, no scenery, just the heating pipes, I fell off my seat. Then when the two boys started fishing from the balcony boxes I flipped. . . . One could never be sure, but I felt we had found something good. So we brought you into the Proctor’s 86th Street the following week and raised you to $50 for three days.

His engagement at Proctor’s 86th Street was Hope’s big shot, and he was uncharacteristically nervous. When he arrived at the theater on the night of the show, he asked the doorman,
“How’s the audience here?” He replied, “Toughest in New York.” Hope walked around the block twice to calm himself down.

He knew he needed something to win over the crowd right away. Just preceding him on the bill was Leatrice Joy, a silent-film actress who had recently been in the headlines for her divorce from screen idol John Gilbert. With typical resourcefulness, Hope used that as the springboard for his opening salvo. After Joy finished her act, Hope walked out on the stage, waited until his musical intro was done, turned to a woman in the front row, and cracked:
“No, lady, this is not John Gilbert.” The audience roared.

It was another defining moment in Hope’s comedic evolution. The line wasn’t just a good ad-lib. It also, importantly, showed Hope’s willingness to break down the barrier between performer and audience, to cozy up to the crowd by gossiping with them about the backstage lives of the stars. The inside-Hollywood wisecracks that became such a staple of Hope’s comedy, his constant ribbing of Bing Crosby and other showbiz pals, the Oscar-night jokes about nervous nominees and jealous losers—all of it can be traced back to that single line.

Variety
’s reviewer was higher on the performer than the material:
“Hope, assisted by an unbilled girl [Troxell] appearing only in the middle of the act for a gag crossfire, has an act satisfactory for the time it is playing. If some of the material, especially where old gags are found, could be changed, chances are this would double strength of turn.” Yet the Keith folks were impressed enough to book him for a tour almost
on the spot. On November 7, 1929, Hope signed a contract with the B. F. Keith–Albee Vaudeville Exchange, guaranteeing him thirty-six weeks of work over the next year.
The salary: a hefty $475 a week for the first fifteen weeks, bumped up to $500 after that, with an option for two more seasons at a salary that would slide upward to $700. He had to pay Troxell out of that amount—
$100 a week, according to Hope.

It was a major boost in Hope’s earning power, especially striking in view of the timing. In between Hope’s arrival in New York for the audition with Keith and his signing of the contract, the stock market crashed.

•  •  •

The sudden end to the 1920s economic boom—splashed out on the front page of
Variety
with the memorable headline “Wall Street Lays an Egg”—was, strangely, something of a nonevent in Hope’s career. Recounting his breakthrough with the Keith circuit in his memoir
Have Tux, Will Travel
, he never even mentions it.

But for the vaudeville business, it was a devastating, and ultimately fatal, blow. With the onset of the Great Depression, people still needed (more than ever) an escape through entertainment. But alternatives such as movies and radio were cheaper. What’s more, vaudeville’s economic model (driven partly by escalating salaries like the one that Hope landed in 1929) was making it an unprofitable business. Hope, with uncanny timing, had caught the last gravy train.

Over the next nine months,
Hope crisscrossed the country on the Keith-Orpheum circuit. This classic vaudeville road trip was Hope’s whistle-stop introduction to America. He started with a couple of New York City dates (at the Jefferson, the theater he had first shunned, and the Riverside, on Ninety-Sixth and Broadway); moved upstate to Rochester and Syracuse; made a swing through the Midwest to Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, and St. Paul; traveled northwest to Calgary, Spokane, Seattle, and Vancouver; headed down the coast to Portland, Oakland, Los Angeles, and San Diego; veered back east through Salt Lake City and Omaha; then south to Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Charlotte; before a final Midwest swing, to South Bend, Indiana, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Rockford, Illinois.

His act was another knockabout mix of songs and gags. Hope opened by singing “Pagan Love Song” while getting razzed by the orchestra, did a rapid-fire monologue, and mixed it up with Troxell, before going out with a song and dance. The reviewers were less impressed with Hope’s “well-worn” material than with his showmanship and ingratiating personality. (It “sounded like a gagster’s catalog, from auto jokes to synthetic Scotch witticisms,” said
Billboard
, but
“socked in heavy on the laugh register.”) For much of the tour, he was on a bill headlined by Harry Webb and his orchestra, whom Hope would introduce and clown around with.
“This act flows right into Harry Webb’s turn,” reported
Variety,
“so that it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.”

As he moved from city to city, Hope would throw in jokes tailored to the local crowd. In Chicago, he and Louise repurposed an old gangster joke for one of the city’s more infamous residents:

BOB:
“I come from a very brave family. My brother slapped Al Capone in the face.”

LOUISE:
“I’d like to shake his hand.”

BOB:
“We’re not going to dig him up just for that.”

After the show, Hope recounted getting a call in his hotel room from a gruff-voiced thug, who asked if he was the comic doing the Al Capone joke. When Hope said he was, the fellow warned,
“Do us a favor, take it out.” Hope obliged—and lived to tell the tale, endlessly.

Even when his material faltered, Hope’s routines with Troxell usually got good reviews. She was a bigger asset to the act than he probably liked to admit. In November 1929, she got a mention in
Variety
’s “Clothes and Clothes” column, a survey of fashions onstage:
“Girl with Bob Hope makes a very neat appearance in a simple black transparent velvet frock, unadorned but for a buckle at the natural waist and a crystal choker necklace. It hung longer in back and fitted well, showing good taste seldom met in the unbilled girl.”

The unbilled girl, however, was getting restless. Louise pressed Hope to give her billing and even threatened to quit. Hope’s response,
astonishingly, was to contact his old girlfriend in Cleveland, Mildred Rosequist, and ask if she wanted to replace Louise in the act. According to Rosequist,
he accompanied the offer with a marriage proposal. She wired back to say that she was sorry, but she was engaged to someone else. Hope then made up with Troxell—and promised to marry
her.

The Hope-Troxell relationship remains one of the murkiest parts of Hope’s life story. He had little to say about her, other than to give grudging credit to her skills as a comic foil. (
“She was quick and intelligent,” Hope wrote in his memoir, “but I’d trained her to hide all that.”) They almost surely were romantically involved as they traveled together on the vaudeville circuit, with various interruptions, for more than three years. At least once he brought her home to Cleveland, to meet the family. The marriage proposal, however, would sit for a while.

•  •  •

After his successful 1929–30 tour, Hope signed a new three-year contract with the Keith circuit, at a salary that rose in steady increments toward $1,000 a week. But Hope realized that he needed to improve his material, and he had the foresight and the resources to hire a writer. No hack either, but Al Boasberg, one of the most respected gagmen in the business. A portly, Rabelaisian character who liked to think up jokes in the bathtub, Boasberg had written for Buster Keaton, Jack Benny, and Burns and Allen; a few years later he was credited with writing the famous cramped-stateroom scene for the Marx Brothers’ movie
A Night at the Opera.
“He was a great joke mechanic,” said Hope. “He could remember jokes, fix jokes, switch jokes around, improvise on jokes. He could even originate jokes.”

Hope and Boasberg would brainstorm together at Lum Fong’s, a Chinese restaurant in New York City, Hope jotting down lines on the back of the menu. Later, when Boasberg decamped to Los Angeles to work on movies, he would send suggestions to Hope by wire or letter.
A typical Boasberg telegraphed pitch:

WHEN GIRL MAKES HER FIRST APPEARANCE YOU SAY WHERE WERE YOU ALL LAST WEEK IN NEWARK AND SHE ANSWERS MR. HOPE YOU TOLD ME NOT TO COME OUT UNTIL YOU GOT YOUR FIRST LAUGH
STOP ASK ONE STOOGE WHAT SCHOOL HE WENT TO AND HE WON’T TELL AND YOU ASK HIM IF HE’S ASHAMED AND HE ANSWERS THE PRINCIPAL GAVE ME FIFTY DOLLARS NOT TO TELL STOP PLEASE RECORD HOW MATERIAL IS GOING.

With Boasberg’s help, Hope came up with a new “afterpiece” for his act. These were miniature comedy revues, tacked on at the end of many vaudeville shows, in which the top-billed comedian and other performers in the show would return for a fast-paced string of comedy bits to close the show on a frantic high note. Hope called his afterpiece “Antics of 1930” (and later “Antics of 1931”), and it showed off his freewheeling, ad-libbing style to good effect.
“Bob Hope closing 28 minutes opens with Hope playing around with the spotlight,”
Variety
wrote of his show at Chicago’s Palace Theatre in February 1931. “His easygoing smooth way of razzing himself soon ingratiated him to the audience for plenty of healthy laughs.”

Hope brought his show to Cleveland in February 1931, playing the downtown Palace Theatre—a triumphal homecoming for the former scourge of Doan’s Corners.
Some of the old neighborhood gang came to see him, buying up the front seats and needling him by ostentatiously taking out their newspapers and reading during his act. He made a second visit to Cleveland a few months later, for an engagement at Keith’s 105th Street, his old neighborhood theater. This time his mom came to see him.

Avis, Bob had learned, was sick with what would eventually be diagnosed as cervical cancer. But she was beside herself with excitement to see her boy on the stage where she had once taken him to see Frank Fay. Bob’s brother Jim accompanied her, and described the scene in his memoir, “Mother Had Hopes”:

From the moment she took her seat, she just trembled from head to toe. The tears ran uncontrollably down her beautiful cheeks, and her little fingernails were cutting my hand. I was afraid she would pass out on us momentarily. And when her son made his appearance, her entire body stiffened until I’m sure had I not held her hand, she
would have automatically stood up. Then when she heard the reception accorded him by the audience acknowledging him as a neighborhood product, she seemed to relax and, as a coach might at the debut of a very promising student, she listened to every syllable, nodding her head as though in approval to every word.