Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  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.

  Fay was a key inspiration for Hope, introducing him to a comedy style that was more natural and spontaneous, a style that would allow Hope to showcase his quick wit and stage presence, rather than his often mediocre material, and to establish a more intimate relationship with the audience. But it meant working alone.

  By Hope’s account, the end of the Hope-Byrne partnership was amicable, and not unexpected. Near the end of 1927, as Hope told the story, he simply went to Byrne and said, “I think I’ll try it alone for a couple of weeks. If it works, we’ll break up the trunk.” Byrne took the news in stride: “I don’t blame you. I’ll go back to Columbus and take it easy.” According to Jim Hope, Byrne’s father was ill, and George felt it was time to move home and get steadier work.

  It may be a stretch to believe that the breakup of a relatively successful three-year stage partnership came with no more trauma than that, and some observers have seen it as an early example of Hope’s self-centered careerism. Lawrence Quirk, author of the gossipy, unfriendly, and only marginally reliable biography Bob Hope: The Road Well-Traveled, claims that the breakup was a cruel blow to Byrne, who was too weak a personality to put up much of a fight with his domineering partner. Quirk quotes director George Cukor, a friend of Byrne’s, describing a tearful phone call from Hope’s partner, who was distraught over the prospect of splitting up the team. “Without him I’m nothing,” Byrne supposedly said. Quirk also cites Cukor and others to suggest that Byrne was gay and had an unrequited crush on Hope.

  (Quirk also hints, more dubiously, that Hope himself had repressed homosexual urges. A single young man traveling the vaudeville circuit in the fast-and-loose 1920s may well have done some experimenting. Hope once told his radio writers of an encounter he had on the road with a cross-dressing performer known as Umqualia the Spanish Queen. The fellow knocked on Hope’s hotel room door one night and offered to service him. “Why not?” Hope responded. Still, the suggestion that Hope was bisexual is hard to take seriously.)

  If there was any bitterness between Hope and Byrne over the breakup of their act, it didn’t last. After the split, Byrne spent a few years as part of a comedy-dance quartet, then retired from show business and went to work for the Defense Supply Company in Columbus. He and Hope remained friends. On a stop in Columbus a few years later, Hope invited Byrne to join him and his brothers for a family celebration at a local nightspot, and Byrne brought along his sister Mary. She hit it off with Hope’s youngest brother, George, and the two ended up marrying—thus establishing a permanent family link between the onetime vaudeville partners.

  Byrne never talked publicly about his partnership with Hope or their breakup. But family members discounted any suggestion that Byrne felt badly treated by Hope. “My mother told me that her brother George wanted to leave the act,” said Avis Hope Eckel
berry, the daughter of George and Mary Byrne Hope. “He wanted to go home. He was done with being on the road. There were no hard feelings.” George Byrne died in 1966, at age sixty-two. Hope never had a bad word to say about him.

  • • •

  Once he split from his partner, Les Hope was in uncharted territory. He accompanied Byrne on the bus back to Columbus, then continued on to Cleveland, where he moved back home for a while to get his bearings. Avis was glad to have him back; his letters from the road had made his hand-to-mouth existence all too apparent. “If I don’t get any work by Saturday,” he wrote in one, “I’ll be starting home on Shank’s pony.” Avis fortified him with home-cooked meals and lemon pie.

  Les called up Mike Shea, the Cleveland agent who had booked Hope in New Castle, and asked if Shea could find any work for him as a single. Shea got him a spot on a “rotary,” a vaudeville show that moved around to different venues in town every night. For the first few days, Hope worked in blackface. “I went out, bought a big red bow tie, white cotton gloves like Jolson’s, a cigar, and a small derby which jiggled up and down when I bounced onstage,” he recalled.

  It was an odd choice for Hope, but it may have helped loosen him up, easing the pressure of doing a single for the first time. “Audiences knew that white performers in blackface were not really blacks. But they associated blackface performers with a uniquely freer, more expressive style,” wrote Robert Snyder in Voice of the City, his history of vaudeville in New York City. “In blackface, white performers found a liberating mask.” But Hope’s blackface experiment didn’t last long. He would take the trolley from home each night to his various gigs. On the fourth night, he missed the streetcar and arrived too late to put on the burned cork. So he went on without makeup, and the act went over just fine. Afterward Shea told him, “Don’t ever put that cork on again. Your face is funny the way it is.”