Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  Bob Hope was well outfitted for this glamorous scene: a dapper, good-looking, twenty-nine-year-old entertainer with an eye for the ladies and a budding career on Broadway. In those days Hope drank as much as he ever would (which was never much), chain-smoked cigarettes (until it began affecting his singing voice and he gave them up on doctor’s orders), and had an apartment on posh Central Park West, just blocks away from the Broadway theaters where he introduced great American standards by Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin. In later years, Hope would come to epitomize the golf-playing, leisure-suited, suburban-Republican lifestyle of Southern California. But New York gave him a big-city edge and pace that would set him apart when he finally made his move to Hollywood.

  Ballyhoo of 1932, his fourth Broadway show but the first in which he had a major role, was a musical revue inspired by a popular humor magazine called Ballyhoo, known for its cheeky parodies of popular advertising. The show was written by Norman Anthony, the magazine’s editor; featured songs by Tin Pan Alley veteran Lewis Gensler and lyricist E. Y. (“Yip”) Harburg (whose “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” written that same year, became a Depression-era anthem); and boasted a cast filled with well-known vaudevillians, most notably the comedy team of Willie and Eugene Howard.

  When Hope arrived for rehearsals and two out-of-town tryouts, the show was something of a mess. Scenes were being added, dropped, and moved around so fast that the technical crew couldn’t keep up. In Atlantic City, the electricity failed in the middle of a performance. “Actually it was rather frightening,” recalled Hope’s agent, Lee Stewart. “There was a blazing short circuit and the theater went dark. The management feared that the audience was ready to panic and rush the door.” One of the producers, Lee Shubert (of the theater-owning Shubert family), grabbed Hope backstage and told him to go out front and keep the crowd calm until power could be restored.

  He did it so well that Shubert called on him again two weeks later in Newark, when a new opening production number was being added to the show and the dancers weren’t ready in time for the opening curtain. Hope again had to vamp for time, and he drew on all his experience as a vaudeville emcee. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the first time I’ve ever been on before the acrobats,” he cracked. He called out to someone in the box seats—“Hello, Sam!”—and then turned to the audience: “That’s one of our backers up there. He says he’s not nervous, but I notice he’s buckled his safety belt.”

  Shubert suggested making the bit a permanent opening for the show. Hope balked, saying the device would seem too forced night after night. But he and writer Al Boasberg came up with another idea, which Shubert went for. To start each show, Hope would be discovered sitting in the box seats and would introduce himself as head of the show’s Complaint Department. With the help of stooges planted in the crowd, he then poked fun at the show’s well-publicized pre-Broadway troubles:

  BOB: “Ladies and gentlemen . . .”

  STOOGE: “My God, is this show really going to open?”

  BOB: “Well, if we waited a couple of weeks longer, that tuxedo of yours would be in style again.”

  STOOGE: “I hope your gags are as new.”

  BOB: “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we are inaugurating a new idea in the theater . . . the Complaint Department. Of course, we know there’ll be no complaints because this show is as clean and wholesome as the magazine.”

  STOOGE: “Well, so long.”

  BOB: “You leaving?”

  STOOGE: “Yeah, I’m going over to Minsky’s.”

  After a few minutes, Hope turned to the orchestra and asked them to start the overture. He got no response. “Hey, fellas, wake up!” he shouted. All he got was snores. He fired a pistol in the air. More snores. Finally he rang a cash register. Suddenly the conductor and his team jumped to attention and began to play.

  It was obvious vaudeville shtick, but it set the irreverent, self-mocking tone for the show, which otherwise was a so-so mix of songs and sketches: a Hollywood actress training like a boxer for a big role, the Howard brothers as a pair of Columbus Circle rabble-rousers, Hope and Vera Marshe as a couple of nudists (a sketch lost, alas, to history). Reviews were mixed, and Hope, billed sixth, got only passing attention. (“An agreeable but far from brilliant master of ceremonies,” noted Howard Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune.) The show, which opened in early September, ran into money problems, missed a payday for the cast and crew, and closed at the end of November after ninety-five performances. But it was a win for Hope, proof that the cocky vaudeville comedian could hold his own on a Broadway stage.

  After Ballyhoo closed, Hope went back on the road in early 1933 with his vaudeville act, fulfilling his contractual obligations to the Keith-Orpheum circuit. He also continued to make frequent appearances at the Capitol and other New York City theaters that still booked live entertainment. And he dipped his toe into the medium that would provide the third component, along with Broadway and vaudeville, of his showbiz résumé during the New York years: radio.

  Commercial radio was barely a decade old, but it was quickly reaching critical mass. In 1932 one-third of American homes owned a radio, and two national networks had sprung up to supply them with programming—the National Broadcasting Company, created in 1926, and the Columbia Broadcasting System, formed two years later. Amos ’n’ Andy, which began in Chicago in 1928 and was picked up by NBC the following year, was riding high as radio’s first national hit show. Songwriters were discovering that radio airplay could turn their new tunes into instant chart-toppers. And comedians who saw work drying up on the vaudeville circuit were jumping into radio as a lifeboat. In 1932 alone, Ed Wynn, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, and the team of George Burns and Gracie Allen all made their network radio debuts.

  Hope was a step behind these better-established stars. His first appearances on radio were little more than simulcasts of his vaudeville stage act, on such shows as the RKO Theater of the Air and the Capitol Family Show, a Sunday-morning broadcast hosted by Major Edward Bowes, a dour but good-hearted impresario who insisted on the military title because of his service in World War I. (He later became better known as host of radio’s Original Amateur Hour.) Hope would give Bowes his script on the Friday before each Sunday show, then watch in dismay as the Major appropriated most of the good jokes for himself on the air. But Hope noticed that every time he appeared on the Capitol show, the audiences for his stage appearances would spike. Like a lot of vaudeville performers, he was learning that the route to mass-audience popularity now ran through those boxy Philcos and Crosleys that were becoming fixtures in nearly every living room in the country.

  Hope’s first appearance in a studio show came on June 8, 1933, when he was a guest on The Fleischmann Hour, a weekly variety show hosted by singer Rudy Vallee. Hope came on as a slick boulevardier, doing jokes about his clothes, his cigars, and his girlfriends, with Vallee as the stuffy straight man:

  BOB: “Here’s a picture of a girl I can marry tomorrow. She has ten thousand dollars. Isn’t she beautiful?”

  RUDY: “Yes, she is. She’s gorgeous.”

  BOB: “Here’s a picture of another girl I can marry. She has fifty thousand dollars. Of course, she’s not so pretty.”

  RUDY: “No, she’s not so pretty, but fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

  BOB: “But that’s nothing. I know a girl I can marry with a hundred thousand dollars.”

  RUDY: “Where’s her picture?”

  BOB: “Nobody’ll take her picture.”

  Hope didn’t much take to radio at first. “It all seemed so strange, talking into a microphone in a studio instead of playing in front of a real audience,” he said. “I got nervous on those first radio shows and the Vallee engineers couldn’t figure out why they heard a thumping noise when I did my routines until they found out I was kicking the mike after each joke.”

  On the stage, however, his self-confidence and popularity were growing. “Goofy, self-assured, ingratiating and welcome as the flowers that’ll be out
in six weeks,” Variety wrote of his show at Chicago’s Palace Theatre in March 1933. “Hope diverted the customers with as tasty a dish of comedy hash put together from odds and ends.” He was brash and irreverent, sometimes pushing the boundaries of vaudeville’s still stodgy standards of good taste. At the Capitol, for example, he did a parody of sentimental mother songs called “My Mom.” During the number, an old lady posing as his mother wandered onstage, pleading for food, only to be rudely pushed away by Hope:

  OLD LADY: “Son, I haven’t eaten in four days.”

  BOB: “Mom, I told you never to bother me while I’m working.”

  OLD LADY: “At least give me a few dollars to have my teeth fixed.”

  BOB: “You’re not eating, Mom, what do you need teeth for?”

  The bit didn’t go over well with the Capitol’s mostly older crowd, and Major Bowes himself asked Hope to take it out of his act. Hope, always worried about alienating any portion of his audience, obliged—and later chastised himself for the lapse of taste.

  The Capitol Theatre was also where Hope teamed up for the first time with an entertainer to whom he would be linked for the rest of his career. In December 1932, shortly after the close of Ballyhoo, Hope was asked to emcee a two-week show at the Capitol headlined by a young singer who was fast becoming a national sensation.

  Harry Lillis Crosby was born in Tacoma, Washington, in May 1903, just a few weeks before Hope. He grew up in Spokane and got the nickname “Bing” in third grade, owing to his fascination with a newspaper humor column called the Bingville Bugle. In high school and later at Gonzaga University, the local college, he sang in student vocal groups, acted in school theater productions, and formed a singing duo with his friend Al Rinker. After developing an act in local clubs, the two piled their belongings into a Model T in October 1925 and drove to Hollywood to see if they could break into big-time show business. A year later—with the help of Rinker’s sister, the jazz singer Mildred Bailey—they landed a job with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, the most famous jazz band in America.

  Unlike Hope, who plodded for years in the vaudeville trenches, Crosby’s career caught fire instantly. Recording with the Whiteman band, he had a No. 1 hit with “My Blue Heaven” in 1927, followed by popular recordings of “Ol’ Man River,” “I Surrender Dear,” and “Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day,” which became his theme song. He brought something new, almost revolutionary, to popular singing. Unlike the belters of vaudeville and Broadway, who sang to the rafters, Crosby had a relaxed, intimate, jazz-inflected style that was perfectly suited to that new recording innovation, the microphone.

  Crosby and Hope first met on October 14, 1932, outside the Friars Club on Forty-Eighth Street in New York City. Crosby was a much bigger star at the time—not just a well-known recording artist, but host of his own radio show and about to star in his first Hollywood feature, The Big Broadcast. Hope was impressed by Crosby’s success, his easygoing self-confidence, and his willingness to play around onstage. For their appearance together at the Capitol, they came up with some vaudeville-style bits to liven up the show. They played two politicians who run into each other on the street; approaching each other from opposite sides of the stage, they would meet at the center and grope each other’s pockets. Or they would be two orchestra leaders, who conduct each other’s conversation with flourishes of their batons. In another bit, Hope would announce with a straight face that Crosby couldn’t make the show because “some cad locked him in the washroom,” at which point a fuming Crosby would emerge from the wings with a doorknob attached to a splintered piece of wood.

  “The gags weren’t very funny, I guess,” Hope said, “but the audience laughed because Bing and I were having such a good time—and I guess it was clear that we liked each other. We would laugh insanely at what we dreamed up.” In between shows, they would trade showbiz stories at O’Reilly’s, a nearby bar, or over the billiards table at the Friars Club. They discovered a shared passion for golf—a sport that Hope had taken up during his downtime on the vaudeville road, and which Crosby played at close to a professional level. Living on different coasts, they wouldn’t get back together again for a few years, but it was the start of a partnership that would change both their careers.

  • • •

  Hope was all over New York City in those days: on the radio, on the vaudeville stage, and on the dais for a growing number of charity benefits. Indeed, Variety made him exhibit A in a November 1933 article complaining about the overexposure of a few top performers on the withering vaudeville circuit. “One answer to what’s wrong with Vaudeville that can be traced to the booking offices is the startling number of repeats played in the remaining first-grade variety theaters by certain acts during the past year,” the trade paper wrote—noting that Hope had in just the past year played the State, the Paramount, the Roxy, and the Capitol twice. “In many instances they’re playing the few fans to death.”

  One of the few entertainers who could rival Hope for ubiquity on the vaudeville-and-benefit circuit in those years was Milton Berle, the brash burlesque comic with whom Hope had a friendly, and sometimes not so friendly, rivalry. Berle even then had a reputation for stealing gags, and Hope was angry to find out that some of his best jokes were turning up in Berle’s act at the Strand Theater. Hope and Richie Craig, his pal and sometime writer, devised a revenge scheme that became part of Hope’s showbiz lore. On a Sunday night when Berle was scheduled to do four benefits back-to-back, Hope got himself booked at the same benefits earlier in the evening and delivered batches of Berle’s material even before he got there. Berle, perplexed to find his jokes falling flat, caught on midway through the evening and turned the tables, leapfrogging Hope at the final benefit and stealing his material.

  Hope always denied that he had any serious beef with Berle. Elliott Kozak, Hope’s manager and producer in the later years, claimed Hope would always defend Berle against detractors, for one reason. In late 1933, when Berle was doing a show in Cleveland and Hope’s mother was dying of cancer, Berle visited her nearly every day, a kindness Hope never forgot. (Something else Berle and Hope shared was an affection for Richie Craig, who died of tuberculosis in November 1933, at age thirty-one. They helped organize a benefit at the New Amsterdam Theater to raise money for his widow and parents. Hope made the largest single contribution, paying $300 for a photo of Craig.)

  In the summer of 1933 producer Max Gordon was casting a new Broadway musical called Gowns by Roberta. It was a much-anticipated new show from composer Jerome Kern, with a book by Otto Harbach, about a college football star who inherits his aunt’s dress shop in Paris. Gordon was looking for a comedian to play Huckleberry Haines, a bandleader and the football star’s best friend. He had run through several candidates (Rudy Vallee reportedly turned down the role) before he saw Hope performing at the Palace Theatre. He brought Kern—who was set to direct the musical as well—to see him, and with the composer’s assent signed Hope for the show that would be his Broadway breakthrough.

  Roberta (as the musical was eventually retitled) had a cast studded with stars from Broadway’s past, present, and future. Fay Templeton, the turn-of-the-century star of George M. Cohan musicals, was lured back to the stage, at age sixty-eight, to play the dress shop owner. (She dies after warbling one song, “Yesterdays.”) The female lead was Lyda Roberti, a live-wire, Polish-born singer-comedienne of both stage and screen in the early 1930s, before her death of a heart attack in 1938, at age thirty-one. Also in the cast were Ray Middleton, who went on to costar in such Broadway hits as Annie Get Your Gun and Man of La Mancha; George Murphy, the future Hollywood song-and-dance man (and later US senator from California); and Fred MacMurray, who had a small role as a sax player and landed a Hollywood contract in the middle of the show’s run.

  The show had troubles out of town. After it got bad reviews in a pre-Broadway tryout in Philadelphia, Gordon decided the show needed a more opulent production—and more comedy. To fix the former, he had the sets
and costumes redesigned and brought in Hassard Short, a highly regarded Broadway hand, to replace Kern as director. To address the latter, he turned to Bob Hope. “Do whatever you can think of to get laughs,” Gordon told him.

  Hope hardly needed the encouragement. As the show’s script was being tinkered with, he threw in gag lines wherever he could. “Long dresses don’t bother me—I’ve got a good memory,” he quipped in one scene. In another, an expatriate Russian princess (played by Tamara Drasin, a Ukrainian-born actress who went by the stage name Tamara), who has fallen for the football hero, sings the show’s big ballad, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” as Hope listens, straddling a chair. To set up the song, she tells him, “There’s an old Russian proverb: when your heart’s on fire, smoke gets in your eyes.” Hope suggested a new line as a comeback: “We have a proverb in America too: Love is like hash. You have to have confidence in it to enjoy it.” Harbach hated the line, claiming it would spoil the mood. But Hope appealed to Kern, who told him to give it a try. When it got a big laugh, the line stayed in. (Harbach apparently never forgave Hope. “An impossible, impossible man,” he told author Lawrence Quirk. “It was his way or no way.”)

  Roberta opened at the New Amsterdam Theater on November 21, 1933, to disappointing reviews. “Extremely unimportant and slightly dead,” wrote John Mason Brown in the Evening Post. “The humors of Roberta are no great shakes,” sniffed the Times’ Brooks Atkinson, “and most of them are smugly declaimed by Bob Hope, who insists upon being the life of the party and who would be more amusing if he were Fred Allen.” Even Kern’s score (which also included such first-rate numbers as “I’ll Be Hard to Handle” and “Let’s Begin”) got only a lukewarm reception.