Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  Yet Roberta ran for 295 performances, longer than any other book musical in the 1933–34 season. Much of the reason was its big song hit, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” which was quickly picked up on radio and by dance bands across the country. Yet Hope’s comedy also gave the mostly dreary script an important boost. “I’ve always said that Bob Hope had as much to do with Roberta being a hit as ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’ ” said George Murphy. “He made the difference between a hit and a flop.”

  Hope left the cast in June 1934, before the show closed (and lost out to Fred Astaire to costar in the 1935 movie version, retooled as a vehicle for the dance team of Astaire and Ginger Rogers). But he always had a special place in his heart for Roberta. He reprised his role as Huck Haines for the musical’s West Coast premiere at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium in 1938; again in 1958 at the Muny Opera in St. Louis; and one more time, age-defyingly, in an updated version staged at Southern Methodist University and telecast on NBC in 1969. Roberta was a milestone for Hope: a major role in a major musical by a major American composer. It made him a Broadway star.

  His lifestyle began to reflect it. Hope bought a ritzy Pierce-Arrow automobile and hired a chauffeur to drive him around in it. He got a Scottish terrier, named it Huck, and brought it to the theater to help him get girls. “I had Marilyn Miller’s old dressing room at the New Amsterdam, and Huck sat at the top of the stairs,” he recalled. “He was a great come-on, great bait. When the girls went by they stopped and petted him. As a result, I did a nice business with those beauties.”

  One beauty, however, was about to monopolize his time. After one show in December, Hope’s Roberta costar George Murphy and his wife, Julie, asked Bob to join them at the Vogue Club to see a singer named Dolores Reade. When they walked into the club, a tall, twenty-four-year-old brunette with a sultry contralto voice was singing “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” After finishing her set, she came over to sit at Murphy’s table and met Bob Hope for the first time.

  “I hadn’t caught his name and wasn’t the least interested,” Dolores later recalled, “but to make conversation I asked him if he wanted to dance.” Bob, equally blasé, turned her down, saying he did enough dancing in his Broadway show. But later, when the group moved to the Ha Ha Club and Murphy took Dolores out on the dance floor, Bob cut in. They ended the evening with a late-night sandwich together, and Hope invited her to come see him in Roberta.

  He got her tickets for a matinee just after Christmas, and she saw the show with a girlfriend. She was startled to discover that Hope had one of the leading roles. Two days later Hope went back to the Vogue Club to ask why she hadn’t come backstage to say hello. Dolores told him she was too embarrassed; she’d thought he was just a chorus boy. Hope then asked her to go out on New Year’s Eve, and the romance blossomed.

  Dolores De Fina was born in Harlem and grew up in a close-knit extended family in the Bronx. Her mother, Theresa, was one of seven daughters of Nora and Henry Kelly, who had emigrated from Ireland in the 1880s. Theresa married Italian-born John De Fina and had two daughters, Dolores and her sister, Mildred, fourteen months younger, and the family moved in with Theresa’s parents, in a three-bedroom brownstone in the Bronx. Dolores’s grandmother was the lively center of the family, a devout Catholic who would genuflect at any priest she passed on the sidewalk and regaled her grandkids with tales of Irish fairies and leprechauns. “Nana was the heart and soul and strength of our family,” Mildred wrote of her grandmother. “Her clothing spoke of her whole life. She wore black cotton dresses for the many funerals in and out of the family, and white cotton dresses for summer and visiting the sick. . . . After church, Nana would invite people over to eat, and we’d all end up in the parlor where we sang along with the player piano. Nana used to always say to us: ‘Dolores, you’re the singer and, Mildred, you’re the dancer in the family.’ ”

  Her father died when Dolores was just sixteen, and she quit school to help support the family. She worked for her seamstress aunt, then as a fashion model and a Broadway chorus girl, appearing in the road company of Honeymoon Lane and (along with Mildred) in the chorus of the 1929 Ziegfeld musical Show Girl. After a screen test with Richard Dix for Paramount failed to land her a movie contract, she concentrated on her singing, appearing with the George Olson and Jack Pettis bands, and on her own in nightclubs—without great success, though when she appeared at the Richmond Club in 1932, a columnist called her the female Crosby.

  Hope pursued her avidly. He would meet her each night at the Vogue Club when she was finished working and drive around with her in his Pierce-Arrow. At the end of the night he would park in front of her Ninth Avenue apartment, where she lived with her mother, and dismiss the chauffeur so they could talk and smooch.

  Dolores’s mother was doing what she could to discourage the romance. She was no fan of this Broadway sharpie who kept her daughter out until six in the morning and was non-Catholic, to boot. When Dolores went to Miami in mid-January for a nightclub engagement, Theresa came along too, hoping some distance would cool the relationship. Instead, Bob and Dolores talked by phone nearly every day. The romance hit a more serious snag when Dolores saw a newspaper gossip item suggesting Hope had another girlfriend. Bob smooth-talked his way out of that one. “I hadn’t seen that particular girl for six months, but it almost broke up our romance,” Hope wrote in his memoir. “It would have been finished if I hadn’t convinced Dolores that the whole thing was a columnist’s blooper.”

  Yet there was, in fact, a woman standing between Bob and Dolores. Hope was already married at the time—to his former vaudeville partner Louise Troxell.

  Hope’s first marriage was long kept secret, and much about it remains mysterious. But a few facts are clear. Bob and Louise were married in Erie, Pennsylvania, on January 25, 1933, in a civil ceremony that was obviously meant to be kept quiet. Their marriage license, on file in the Erie courthouse, identifies the couple as Leslie T. Hope, a “salesman,” and Grace L. Troxell (using her first name, which she dropped for the stage), described as a “secretary.” When the marriage license was unearthed by Arthur Marx for his 1993 biography, The Secret Life of Bob Hope, Hope’s publicists weakly suggested that the couple merely took out a license, but never actually married. Yet according to an Erie official, the document would not exist if the wedding had not taken place; an Erie alderman’s signed affidavit confirms that he presided over the ceremony.

  Just what prompted Hope to marry his vaudeville partner, after an on-again, off-again relationship that spanned more than four years, is hard to say. But it forced him to deliberately muddle the details of his subsequent marriage to Dolores. According to Bob and Dolores (and virtually all the profiles and official biographies of them, both during and after their lifetime), they were married on February 19, 1934—in, of all places, Erie, Pennsylvania. The town was accurate, but not the bride: there is no record of Bob’s marriage to Dolores in Erie—only his marriage to Troxell a year earlier. Nor is there any record of a marriage in New York City, where it would more likely have taken place, given that Bob was appearing on Broadway at the time. (Hope was always vague about why he and Dolores would travel to Erie to get married. “We picked Erie, Pennsylvania, for our wedding,” he wrote in Have Tux, Will Travel. “I can’t remember why. I was in a thick pink fog anyway.” When comedian Alan King, interviewing Hope on TV in 1992, asked him to explain why they got married in Erie, Hope tossed it off with a quip: “Because I couldn’t wait until I got to a bigger town.”)

  When were Bob and Dolores Hope married? Certainly not before August 4, 1934, when this item appeared in the New York Herald Tribune:

  Bob Hope, who played a comedy lead in Roberta last season, and Miss Dolores Reade, a nightclub singer, announced their engagement yesterday. They will be married about Thanksgiving.

  Moreover, they could not have been legally wed until after November 19, 1934—when a judge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County granted Hope a divorce. In the divorce petition, filed by Lester T. H
ope against Grace Louise Hope on September 4, Hope charged that his wife was “guilty of extreme cruelty and gross neglect of duty,” citing her “quarrelsome disposition” and claiming that she “habitually, during their married life, associated with other men in public and has caused plaintiff humiliation and embarrassment as a result thereof.” The judge found in Hope’s favor, granted the divorce, and denied Troxell any “claim for alimony, either temporary or permanent.”

  Hope was represented in the divorce by a Cleveland attorney named Henry B. Johnson. Years later Johnson wrote Hope a letter that suggests the lengths to which the Broadway star went to keep the whole affair quiet. “It was in the early 1930s that you walked into my office in the Standard Building Cleveland,” Johnson recalled:

  I was to represent you in the litigation which you later referred to as the “Troxell deal” and apparently in driving to Cleveland you had to change a tire or perform some other mechanical chore which left your hands, face and clothing very much in need of freshening. This service we were able to furnish, and on subsequent visits and in Court you were then as now the acme of sartorial elegance.

  I recall that you requested that there be no publicity about the matter; I was perhaps a year or two older than you with no compunctions then about lying to reporters, and I did lie brazenly to the reporters that called. [One] inquired whether you were the Bob Hope who was appearing in Roberta. . . . I assured him that there was no connection whatever, that you were Lester Townsend Hope and would certainly not be nicknamed “Bob,” and that while you were an actor, you were a minor figure on the stage and probably out of work.

  If Hope had any concerns about Johnson’s unearthing this skeleton from the closet, he hid them well in his sanguine reply to the lawyer: “It was great hearing from you again, and you took me back a few years when you were talking about the ‘Troxell case.’ ”

  No marriage license for Bob and Dolores Hope has ever turned up. One person who claimed to have attended their wedding, Milton Berle, told Arthur Marx that it took place in a New York City church sometime in late 1934 or early 1935. In an interview with American Weekly magazine in 1958, Dolores said she and Bob got married “a year after we met,” which would put the wedding around the same time. Yet there was never a wedding announcement, and when Dolores appeared with Bob onstage over the next couple of years, she was never identified as his wife. For an entertainer who rarely missed an opportunity for self-promotion, the notion that Hope would keep his marriage to a glamorous nightclub singer secret is hard to believe.

  The lack of any record of the Hopes’ marriage (not even a wedding photo) led some Hope family members to speculate over the years that a wedding may never have taken place. It seems farfetched that Dolores, a devout Catholic, would not at some point have dragged Bob into a church to exchange formal vows. By then, presumably, it would have been too late for announcements. Hope had already fudged so many details of his marital status that trying to untangle the web of untruths would have been all but impossible.

  As for Louise Troxell, she stayed in vaudeville for at least another year, doing Dumb Dora routines with a new partner, Joe May. She later moved back to her hometown of Chicago and married Dave Halper, owner of the Chez Paree nightclub. In 1952 they had a daughter, Deborah, and, after the nightclub closed in 1960, moved to Las Vegas, where Halper worked for the Riviera Hotel until his death in 1973. Bob and Louise stayed in touch, and Hope quietly sent her money in her later years. In two letters written to Hope in 1976, Louise complained about her declining health and the difficulties she was having with her daughter: “When Deb went away . . . I had a sinking feeling that I would never see her alive again. A beautiful life, self-destroyed. It is so sad.” Troxell died in Las Vegas in November 1976, at age sixty-five. Her daughter, Deborah, apparently still troubled, died in San Diego of a drug overdose in 1998.

  Just how much Dolores knew about all this is unclear, but probably more than she ever revealed. On the San Diego County death certificate for Deborah Halper, the “informant”—the person who supplies information about the deceased—is listed, intriguingly, as “Dolores Hope—Godparent.”

  • • •

  On January 22, 1934, in the midst of Hope’s whirlwind courtship of Dolores, his mother died of cervical cancer. Despite radium treatments, little could be done, and Avis had largely been bedridden for months. When Hope last saw her at Christmas, she was clearly failing, her already-frail body down to seventy-five pounds. He flew to Cleveland for the funeral, bringing along opera singer Kirsten Flagstad, who sang “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere,” one of Avis’s favorite hymns, at the service. His brother Jim, the family romantic, writes achingly of Avis’s last days, silently mouthing the names of each of her boys as she lay near death. Bob couldn’t muster quite the same sentiment, though the death of his mother, in the midst of his great success on Broadway, was clearly a blow. “It was murder,” he wrote in his memoir, “that this should happen just when I was really able to take care of her.”

  Dolores, meanwhile, moved into Bob’s apartment at 65 Central Park West, with its elegant, green-and-white living room overlooking the park, and they embarked on their life together in New York. They played golf together at Green Meadows, a golf club in Westchester County, or, when they couldn’t get out of the city, at a driving range under the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. They took a cruise to Bermuda, Bob doing a show for the passengers en route. Dolores’s dinner parties got mentioned in the gossip columns. Yet she was already learning how to fend for herself on the many nights that Bob was working, organizing weekly card games with a small group of friends and cousins. She desperately wanted children, but had no luck getting pregnant.

  She continued to pursue her singing career, at least for a couple of years. When Bob, after leaving Roberta, took his vaudeville act back on the road in the summer of 1934, Dolores was on the bill as featured singer. After his monologue, Bob would introduce her and let her do one number straight. Then, during her second song, he would come back onstage and clown around while she sang—mooning over her, lying on the ground and staring at her adoringly, stroking and nibbling her arm. “Don’t let me bother you,” he’d crack.

  Like his other stage partners, going back to Mildred Rosequist, Dolores found that she had to be on her toes when teaming with Bob Hope. “What he expected was perfection,” she said. “He never let down for a moment onstage, and heaven help me if I did. . . . Sometimes my mind would wander and that was fatal. Bob would get very angry, and right there in the middle of the act he’d crack, ‘What’s the matter with you, tired?’ ”

  When Bob went to Boston for tryouts of his next Broadway show, Dolores came along and was booked for a solo engagement at the Loews State Theatre. But unaccustomed to a large vaudeville house, as opposed to the more intimate nightclubs where she usually worked, she had a difficult time. After her first show, she called Bob at their hotel in a panic.

  “Come right over,” she sobbed. “I’m going to quit. They didn’t like me. The band played too loud and the lights were wrong. Everything was wrong.” Hope went over and took charge. “They gave her a little more production and her act pulled together beautifully. Give her any kind of decent staging and my girl was good,” he recalled gallantly.

  Her regal good looks and alluring voice drew some admiring reviews when Hope featured her in his act. (“A likely picture bet, if she can speak on a par with her torching and looks,” Variety wrote.) But as a solo, she had trouble registering. “On song values she’s in the same category as many another femme warbler with any of the radio-dance bands extant, and actually suffers comparatively with Joy Lynne, who’s merely a featured songstress with the Bestor combo,” Variety’s critic wrote after her appearance at New York’s State Theater in December 1934. Soon, except for sporadic appearances in Bob’s tours or on his radio show, Dolores would stop singing professionally, devoting herself instead to the man whose career was proving to have considerably more upside.

  That caree
r was tooling along nicely on all three tracks: Broadway, radio, and vaudeville. To manage all of it, Hope had acquired a new agent: Louis “Doc” Shurr, who signed him up as a client while Hope was appearing in Roberta and would become one of his most effective and loyal advocates for the next three decades.

  Shurr was a colorful New York showbiz character: a short, bald man who propped up his height with elevator shoes and wore a homburg over his fringe of dyed-black hair. He spent practically every night out on the town, impeccably dressed in a suit, tie, and crisp white handkerchief, reeking of Charbert cologne and with a buxom showgirl on his arm—usually towering over him and wearing a white fur coat, one of three (in sizes small, medium, and large) that Shurr supposedly kept for his dates. Called Doc because of his reputation for fixing troubled Broadway shows, Shurr was a hard-driving agent of the old school, with an office in the Paramount Building on Broadway, where he was all but hidden behind rows of framed photos and a baby grand piano. His clients included such well-known stage stars as Bert Lahr, Victor Moore, and George Murphy, many of whom he was getting into motion pictures. He thought he could do the same with Bob Hope.

  Hope was wary of Hollywood, still smarting from his failed 1930 screen test at Pathé. In 1933 he turned down an offer from Paramount to costar with Jack Oakie in a comedy called Sitting Pretty, reasoning that the money—$2,500 for four weeks’ work—was less than the $1,750 a week he was making on Broadway and thus wasn’t worth the move to Hollywood. But when Shurr got him an offer from Educational Pictures, to star in six comedy shorts—to be shot in Brooklyn during the day while he continued appearing in Roberta at night—Hope decided it was a relatively low-risk proposition and said yes.