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

vaudeville—the large theaters in the biggest cities where the top acts appeared, usually doing two shows a day, matinee and evening—and “small-time” vaudeville, the minor leagues, where less established acts worked, usually in continuous shows that were repeated four, five, or six times a day. Billing of the acts adhered to strict hierarchies and customs. The opening spot was the lowest in the pecking order—usually an acrobat or some other “dumb” act, to allow time for latecomers to get settled. The show’s headliner typically had the second-to-last spot (“next to shut,” in the argot of Variety , the show-business trade paper), leaving the finale for a lesser act whose primary job was to clear out the house for the next show (thus called the “chaser”). Performers traveled from town to town by train or bus and frequently stayed in run-down rooming houses or show-business hotels. It was a hard, exhausting life, which forever carried a kind of seedy romance for the performers who came of age in it.
    Hope and Durbin’s first vaudeville job was strictly small-time. Hurley’s tab show Jolly Follies traveled the lowly Gus Sun circuit, a Chicago-based chain of some three hundred theaters that served small towns in the Midwest and South. The show’s headliner, Frank Maley, doubled as a performer (teaming with a partner in a blackface comedy act) and the company manager—handling the books, overseeing the scenery, and sometimes even taking the tickets.
    For Les Hope, it was a great learning experience.“Tab shows were a special part of show business,” Hope wrote in his memoir. “There’s no dollars and cents way I can measure the seasoning, the poise, the experience that being with Hurley gave me.” Hope and Durbin started in the chorus and worked their way up to larger roles in sketches andmusical numbers. Hazel Chamberlain, the company’s top-billed singer, recalled the first time she heard Hope get a laugh—in Bloomington, Indiana, when he filled in as emcee for a sketch called “Country Store Night.”“Frankly we had all thought Lefty Durbin was the more likely of the two to be a comic,” she said, “but that night Les Hope was as much surprised as the rest of us.”
    The troupe of thirteen traveled together by bus, staying in cheap theatrical hotels and boardinghouses. When they arrived in a new town, Maley would often have to knock on doors to find lodgings that were willing to take “show folk.” The living conditions were often dicey: cramped rooms, suspect food, linens that rarely got changed.“By the end of the week the towels would be so dirty you would usually bypass them and fan yourself dry,” Hope said. As the junior members of the troupe, Hope and Durbin often got the worst of it. At a theater in Orangeburg, South Carolina, the two tiny dressing rooms (one for men and one for women) had no space for them, so they had to clean out the coal bin in the basement and do their makeup there amid the coal dust.
    Life on the road had its pleasures too. Les began seeing a girl in the troupe named Kathleen O’Shay—the stage name of Ivy Shay, a pretty Irish girl from Morgantown, West Virginia. Their affair caused a bit of a stir in the straitlaced Jolly Follies troupe (Maley and several others were married and had their wives along).At a hotel in Bedford, Indiana, Les was visiting Kathleen’s room when the hotel manager knocked at the door and ordered him out. He had a gun to put the point across. Kathleen left the troupe not long after and moved back to Morgantown, where she opened a dress shop. Les continued to stop in and see her when he passed through town, sometimes bringing dresses for her shop from New York. According to one Morgantown friend,she broke off the relationship because she was too embarrassed by his loud clothes.
    Hurley’s Jolly Follies toured for one season, closing in the spring of 1925. But the team of Hope and Durbin didn’t last that long, broken up