Free Hope: Entertainer of the Century by Richard Zoglin

clearly had more on his mind than dancing, and she nixed the idea. Les kept up a romance with Mildred, stringing her along for years to come as a hometown girlfriend. But for a professional partner, he had to look elsewhere.
    He settled on Lloyd “Lefty” Durbin, a kid from the neighborhood he had gotten to know at Sojack’s Dance Academy. Lloyd was a polished dancer, and together they came up with an act that mixed in a little comedy with their tap and soft-shoe routines. They made therounds of amateur shows, played intermission spots at movie houses, and landed an occasional fill-in gig on local vaudeville bills. Then, in August 1923, an agent got them a spot at the Bandbox Theater, as part of a vaudeville show headlined by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.
    Arbuckle, the onetime silent-film comedian, was embarking on a comeback after one of the most sordid scandals in Hollywood history. In 1921, at the height of his popularity, the portly film star was implicated in the mysterious death of a starlet who had been partying with him and some friends in a hotel in San Francisco. Amid tabloid accusations that he had raped or murdered her, Arbuckle was put on trial for manslaughter. Though he was ultimately acquitted (in a third trial, after two hung juries), his film career was finished. Now he was trying to start over, as the star attraction in a touring variety show called Bohemia.
    Hope and Durbin worked up some fresh material for their spot in the show. They did soft-shoe and buck-and-wing dance routines, and closed with a comic Egyptian dance number.“We wore brown derbies,” Hope recalled. “We pretended to go down to a well near the Nile, dip some water in a derby and bring it back. The gag was that afterward we poured actual water out of the derby. It was real crazy and it fetched a boff.” By chance, it is one of the few Hope vaudeville routines that can actually be seen: Hope re-created it, with dancer Hal Le Roy as his partner, on his first TV special in April 1950. The two dancers strut around in stiff-armed, hunch-shouldered style, like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics come to life, and do some neatly synchronized physical shtick, one behind the other. If not quite a boff, it is a slick and amusing piece of comedy business.
    “The whole offering is built along familiar lines,” the unimpressed reviewer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote of the Arbuckle show, “with some better-than-ordinary costumes and settings standing out as the distinguishing feature. The comedians are found wanting in many instances, but the musical chorus numbers are well up to snuff.” Yet Arbuckle was impressed enough with Hope and Durbin to talk them up to Fred Hurley, a producer of vaudeville tabloid shows—musical-comedy revues that toured mostly small towns. These “tabshows” were considered the bottom rung of the vaudeville ladder, but they were a good place for newcomers to get a start. So, when Hurley a few months later offered Hope and Durbin parts in his new tab revue, Jolly Follies , which was set to begin a tour of the Midwest, they grabbed it.
    It was Hope’s first full-time show-business job. His mother was proud; his practical brothers skeptical that he could earn a living at it. But for Hope, at age twenty-one, it was a great opportunity. The job would give him a chance to travel and see if he could make it as an entertainer in front of more than just hometown crowds. It would pay him a decent salary of $40 a week, half of which he promised to send back home to his parents. What it wouldn’t give him was a quick road to stardom. Hope’s vaudeville apprenticeship would last for nearly a decade—longer than the ambitious young hoofer had probably anticipated. Yet it would give him plenty of time to learn the tools of his trade, discover how to survive in a changing show-business world, and invent Bob Hope.

Chapter 2
VAUDEVILLE
“No, lady, this is not John Gilbert.”
    When Les Hope and his partner Lloyd Durbin