Hope: Entertainer of the Century (14 page)

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.

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. Hope 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.