Free Hope: Entertainer of the Century by Richard Zoglin Page A

went on the road with their act in the fall of 1924, vaudeville was dying. But then it had been dying for years, and it would continue dying for many years to come, as movies and radio plundered its audience and lured away its star performers. Still, enough life was left in those old Olympic and Palace and Hippodrome theaters, which brought live stage entertainment to towns big and small across America, to give a young hoofer from Cleveland a chance to make his mark.
    Vaudeville was Hope’s irreplaceable school of show business. He loved his time there, and it instilled the qualities that would define him as an entertainer for the rest of his career: his love for stage performing, his ability to adapt to audiences of all kinds, his tireless work ethic. He came into vaudeville a novice, but he was smart and resourceful, doing whatever it took to survive—borrowing jokes, finding new partners, latching on to fads, even dancing with Siamese twins. But in that survival-of-the-fittest world, he evolved into something original, a fresh stage personality perfectly pitched to the changing times.
    Vaudeville, even in its waning days, was still a great adventure for a young performer, a unique, if relatively short-lived, chapter in American entertainment. It was born in the 1880s, an outgrowth of the rambunctious, often racy variety shows that catered largely to men in the saloons and beer halls of post–Civil War America. A few prescient theater owners in New York City got the idea to clean up these shows, move them into larger and more respectable theaters (no liquor, no hookers), and market them to the family audience. These new family-friendly shows (“good clean fun” was the popular catchphrase) caught on almost immediately.In 1900 the United States had an estimated two thousand vaudeville houses; by 1912 the number had grown to five thousand. Giant theater chains sprang up with centralized booking so that acts could be mixed and matched and sent on nationwide tours efficiently. At one time, an estimated twenty thousand people were making a living—sometimes a handsome living—as vaudeville entertainers.
    A typical vaudeville bill featured eight to ten acts, carefully assembled to appeal to as broad an audience as possible: young and old, male and female, highbrow and lowbrow. In a vaudeville show you could see singers, dancers, comedians, jugglers, magicians, acrobats, ukulele players, trained animals, female impersonators, and an assortment of wacky comics loosely categorized as “nut” acts. Celebrated stage actors such as Sarah Bernhardt and Ethel Barrymore appeared on the vaudeville stage. So did sports stars, among them Babe Ruth, and tabloid newsmakers such as Evelyn Nesbit, the former Floradora Girl whose lover, the architect Stanford White, was murdered by her jealous husband, Harry K. Thaw. Harry Houdini, the famed illusionist and escape artist, was a big vaudeville star. Even Helen Keller did a turn in vaudeville.
    Vaudeville was America’s first form of mass entertainment. It grew to maturity as waves of immigrants were transforming American cities, and it was both a reflection of the melting pot and an agent of assimilation. Comedians often got laughs from broad ethnic stereotypes: there were funny Germans, funny Irishmen, funny Italians, funny Jews—and funny Negroes, played in blackface by white comics, a throwback to the minstrel shows that were an important forerunner ofvaudeville. Yet even as it spotlighted ethnic differences, vaudeville was helping draw the nation together—creating the first mass-audience entertainment stars, from Lillian Russell, the 1890s chanteuse who was called the most beautiful woman in the world, to such pioneers of early-twentieth-century show business as George M. Cohan, Al Jolson, Will Rogers, Sophie Tucker, and the Marx Brothers.
    For its performers, vaudeville wasn’t just a job but a way of life, with its own traditions, protocol, and lingo. There was “big-time”