Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  “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.

  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.”