Hope: Entertainer of the Century (7 page)

In the glow of nostalgia, Hope’s early Cleveland years sound like a quintessential early-twentieth-century Norman Rockwell idyll. Childhood friends would write him in later years to reminisce about their youthful exploits and hangouts—places such as Hoffman’s restaurant, with its famous ice cream (22 percent butterfat), where, as one neighborhood girl recalled,
“you and ‘Whitey’ fattened me up on ‘tin roofs,’ walked me home, down past Wade Park, past Superior, to my home, where you played our piano till I almost had to throw you both out.” Another neighborhood friend remembered,
“My father had a Buick touring car, which I used most every night. Some warm evenings, we would put the top down and pile in and ride slow from 105th to the square and back again, singing barbershop, till the cops chased us off the street. I guess we weren’t too hot.”

The gritty side of those years has largely been airbrushed out. Les was a tough kid who was no stranger to trouble. He dropped out of high school when he was a sophomore, for reasons that Hope and his biographers have always been vague about. In fact,
he was sent to reform school. Records of the Boys Industrial School, a state reformatory in Lancaster, Ohio, show that Lester Hope (in his teenage years
he changed his first name from the more effeminate-sounding Leslie), height five feet, weight 105 pounds, residing with his parents at 1913 East 105th Street, was admitted there on May 18, 1918, a few days before his fifteenth birthday. His infraction is not specified—his full juvenile court records have, significantly, been removed—but he was apparently arrested, given a hearing, and
“adjudged a delinquent” who was “in need of state institutional care and guardianship.”

In interviews over the years, Hope sometimes alluded to incidents of shoplifting during his adolescent years.
“I guess it’s no secret, but I have a record in Cleveland,” he said, only half-jokingly, at a Boys Club benefit in 1967. “They nabbed me for swiping a bike. . . . I pleaded for mercy, but the judge was an ugly, cruel, vindictive man. He turned me over to my parents.” In fact, the punishment, for that or a presumably similar incident, was considerably more serious. Les spent seven months at the Boys Industrial School, was paroled on December 21, and then
readmitted to the school on March 6, 1919, after violating his parole. The date of his final discharge is unclear, but he appears to have spent at least another year at the reformatory, before being discharged for good in April of either 1920 or 1921. There is no record that he ever returned to high school.

What’s most interesting about Hope’s stint in reform school is that he felt the need to keep it secret. Even his brother Jim, in his rosy but scrupulously detailed family memoir, doesn’t mention it. An arrest for shoplifting and a stretch in reform school are hardly the most scandalous things that can happen to a teenager growing up in a tough urban neighborhood. It might even have added some raffish color to Hope’s stories of his wayward youth. But his elimination of them from his personal history was another sign of Hope’s capacity for denial, of the need to distance himself from the more unpleasant realities of his early life, and of his effort to construct a new persona that the world would someday know as Bob Hope.

•  •  •

World War I, which the United States entered when Les was fourteen, did not leave the Hope family untouched. Two of the Hope brothers, Fred and Jack, enlisted in the Army and served overseas—Fred in a
field artillery unit and Jack in the infantry. Some tense days in the Hope household followed the news that Jack was missing in action. He turned up in a military hospital, suffering from shell shock. According to accounts given the family,
Jack was trying to rescue a fellow soldier when a shell exploded nearly on top of him. He recovered and returned home, but was again hospitalized and survived a near-fatal bout of what was described as trench fever.

In 1920 Harry Hope became a naturalized US citizen, which automatically made Les and his brothers US citizens as well. Harry’s work prospects, however, remained bleak. Just to keep busy, he would take on small jobs such as cutting stepping-stones or garden fountainheads from material left over from previous jobs. For Avis he carved a birdbath with a sundial in the center, and a crescent-shaped stone bench that she placed in the garden and would sit on for hours, admiring the flowers. The eldest Hope boys picked up much of the slack, often helping one another in getting jobs. When Jim went to work for an electrical-power-line construction company, for example, he hired Les and two other brothers to string wire.

“Leslie was a good worker, always trying to do a little more than his workmate,” Jim recalled. When they got weekend breaks, however, Les might not show up at work until Tuesday—typically with an outlandish explanation of why. One time, when he was high up in a tree trimming back some branches, one of them snapped and he plunged to the ground, smashing his face. In later years it was occasionally suggested that the mishap—or the plastic surgery that followed—was the cause of his ski-slope nose, but Hope denied it.
“It is not true my nose is the way it is as a result of having been broken in an accident,” he wrote in
Have Tux, Will Travel
. “It came the way it is from the manufacturer.”

Les bounced around to several other jobs in these years: selling shoes at Taylor’s department store, filling orders in the service department at the Chandler Motor Car Company. (He got fired from that job when he and some of his pals used the company Dictaphone after hours to practice their singing—and inadvertently left it for their boss to discover the next morning.) He worked at the butcher’s stall that his brother Fred had opened at the downtown Center Market.
“Bob
helped out weekends,” recalled Fred. “Plucked chickens, did some waiting on. He was a born salesman, but he never bothered to learn the different meats. One time I heard him trying to sell a customer a ham—and he was showing her a leg of lamb. Honestly, he didn’t know the difference. And he sold it to her too.”

He even tried boxing. Always a scrappy kid, Les worked on his fighting skills at Charlie Marotta’s Athletic Club on Seventy-Ninth Street. One day he found out that his friend Whitey Jennings had signed up to fight in the Ohio State amateur tournament, under the name Packy West. Hope decided to enter too—dubbing himself Packy East. In later years he would often joke about his brief boxing career (“I was the only fighter in Cleveland history who was carried both ways: in and out of the ring”), but he may have had more talent than he gave himself credit for.
“He was a good young fighter,” said Al Corbett, a local boxer who saw some of Hope’s early fights. “He needed training, but he had natural ability. He was well built and his prospects were good.” But for the state tournament he weighed in at 128 pounds, just missing the cutoff for the featherweight division, and was forced to battle fighters bigger than he.

Still, he won his first-round fight, got a bye in the second round, and found himself in the semifinals. There he was matched against a more experienced bruiser named Howard “Happy” Walsh.
“I probably outweighed Hope by six or eight pounds and I’d been boxing two or three years,” Walsh, who later became the state’s junior lightweight champion, told the
Cleveland Press.
“I sized him up when he entered the ring as a novice and decided to carry him along, make it look good for the fans. But in the second round he made me mad. I thought he was sneering at me, although I learned later he just unconsciously made faces. Anyhow, I had an exceptionally good right and I hooked him and he was counted out.”

Hope remembered it pretty much the same way, with gags:
“In the first round I played cozy,” he wrote in his memoir. “Happy examined me as if to see what was holding me together. When I found out I was still alive, my footwork got fancier. I pranced around on my toes. In the second round I threw my right. I never got my arm back. Happy hit me
on the chin. I fell in a sitting position, bounced and fell over. . . . Red [his manager] threw a bucket of water over me and carried me out.” That was the end of his career in the ring.

But not the end of his fighting days. When he was nineteen,
Les and Whitey were walking through Rockefeller Park when they got into a scuffle with some thugs who were harassing a girl from the neighborhood. When Jim and some friends found him, Les had cuts over his face and a knife wound in the shoulder, serious enough to require a blood transfusion and fourteen stitches. The incident made the
Cleveland Press
the next day.

For a teenager who couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble or keep a job, show business provided a welcome escape. He soaked up all the entertainment available to a kid growing up in World War I–era America. He frequented the local nickelodeons, a fan of swashbuckling silent-film stars like Douglas Fairbanks. His mother would take him to the neighborhood vaudeville house, Keith’s 105th Street, where they once saw the celebrated vaudeville star Frank Fay, a song-and-dance man who also did comedy monologues. After a few minutes of his act, Avis whispered to her son, loud enough so that everyone around them could hear,
“He’s not half as good as you.”

Les and Whitey would earn money for the rides at Luna Park by singing for pennies on the bus ride over, and Les sang in a quartet with some neighborhood kids who would perform outside of Schmidt’s Beer Garden. His most promising talent, however, was dancing. He practiced steps with his friend Johnny Gibbons, who worked with him at his brother Fred’s meat market. (Fred later married Johnny’s sister LaRue.) Les took dance lessons from King Rastus Brown, a former vaudeville hoofer, and later from Johnny Root, another ex-vaudevillian, who ran Sojack’s Dance Academy, behind Zimmerman’s dance hall. Then Root left town, and Les, not yet twenty, took over Root’s dance classes and tried to run the school himself. He made up business cards advertising his services:
“
Lester Hope will teach you to dance—Buck and Wing, Soft Shoe, Eccentric, Waltz, Clog.”

When dance marathons were sweeping the country in the early 1920s, Les even tried to hop on the bandwagon, starting his own
contest at Sojack’s. Unfortunately he was a little late. The grueling marathons (dramatized so memorably in the novel and movie
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
) had spawned a backlash across the country, and Cleveland was one of several cities weighing a ban on them. In a front-page story on April 17, 1923, the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
reported that the city council had decided to take no action on a proposed ban, allowing those marathons that were already under way to continue, but barring any new ones. Hope made it into the story’s last paragraph:

Lester Hope, of 2069 E. 106th Street, started a new contest at Sojack’s Dancing Academy, 6124 Euclid Avenue, but the contest was called off after an hour, due to Dance Hall Inspector Johnson’s ruling against permitting any new contests to start.

Les closed the school not long after. But he continued to work on his own dancing, competing in local amateur shows, first with Gibbons as a partner and then hooking up with Mildred Rosequist, a “cute little trick” he had met at Zimmerman’s dance hall.

“Mildred was tall, blonde, willowy, graceful, and a slick dancer,” Hope said. “I thought she was beautiful. She looked as if she’d done her hair with an egg beater. But I loved it that way.” He would bring her sweetbreads from Fred’s meat market and flirt with her at the cosmetics counter at Halle’s department store downtown, where she worked. She became a frequent visitor at the Hope house, and the family liked her.
“She worshipped Leslie,” remembered Jim. “For some time we were all sure it was a hopeless, one-sided affair, but eventually Leslie also succumbed to her charm.”

Mildred remembered the romance a bit differently, describing Les as the pursuer, not to say something of a pest.
“He would follow me home from work some nights,” she told Hope biographer William Robert Faith. “I mean, he would get on the same streetcar and I wouldn’t even know it. When I got off at Cedar, he’d be walking right behind me. Then I’d walk in the front door and my mother’d ask if he was with me and I’d say, ‘No,’ and then he’d stick his head around the hallway door and say, ‘Oh, yes I am.’ ” He said he wanted to marry her and
even bought her an engagement ring. It was so small that she cracked, “Does a magnifying glass come with it?” Les didn’t appreciate the joke, and Mildred apologized for hurting his feelings.

They were a smooth pair on the dance floor. They modeled themselves on Vernon and Irene Castle, the enormously popular husband-wife dance team who headlined in vaudeville in the midteens and sparked a national craze for social dancing. Les and Mildred won some amateur contests around the city and were good enough to get a few paying jobs, earning $7 or $8 for an evening. Hope said he split the money with her, but
Mildred claimed that Les told her the performances were for charity and kept all the money himself.

Their act had a homey touch. Hope described it in his memoir:
“ ‘This is a little dance we learned in the living room,’ I’d tell the audience. Then we’d do that one, and I’d say, ‘This is a little dance we learned in the kitchen.’ Then we’d do that. We ended with, ‘This is a little dance we learned in the parlor.’ The parlor dance was a buck dance. We saved it for last because it was our hardest and it left us exhausted.”

A little too exhausted for Mildred. She recalled one of their performances at a local social club:
“When we came out to do the hard stuff, the buck and wings which were so fast, I just quit, and I said I was tired, and I walked off the stage. Les looked at me with kill in his eyes—he was furious, but he ad-libbed. . . . He picked out a little old lady in the first row and said, ‘See, Ma, you should never have made her do the dishes tonight.’ ” It is the first recorded Bob Hope joke.

Les wanted to develop an act with Mildred and take it on the road. But her mother had no intention of allowing Mildred to travel with a man who clearly had more on his mind than dancing, and she nixed the idea. Les kept up a romance with Mildred, stringing her along for years to come as a hometown girlfriend. But for a professional partner, he had to look elsewhere.