Hope: Entertainer of the Century by Richard Zoglin

prematurely by an unexpected tragedy.Hope’s partner died.
    Hope always blamed it on a bad piece of coconut cream pie that Durbin had eaten in a restaurant in West Virginia. When he began complaining of stomach pains, a doctor told him he had food poisoning. But while Durbin was taking his bows after their last show in New Castle, Pennsylvania, he sank to the floor and began spitting up blood. “I’m sick,” he muttered. “Get me home.”
    The company members quickly checked train timetables, while Les tried to reach Lloyd’s parents. Jim Hope—who, by odd chance, was there, having dropped in to catch his brother’s act while traveling—carried Lloyd four blocks to the station and put him on a midnight train, entrusting him to the care of the attendant in charge of the baggage car. (By some accounts, Les traveled back to Cleveland with him, but Jim’s recollection seems more reliable.) Lloyd’s parents were at the station to meet him when the train arrived, and they took him to the hospital. He died three days later.
    The cause, it turned out, was tuberculosis, an illness Durbin had apparently either ignored or managed to hide. Hope remained convinced the culprit was food poisoning; forever afterward, he was wary of eating at greasy spoons on the road, and he usually opted instead for the relatively safe home cooking of local tearooms.
    In later years, when reminiscing about his vaudeville days, Hope didn’t like to dwell on, or even mention, Lloyd Durbin’s death. He glosses over it in one paragraph in his memoir Have Tux, Will Travel. Some chroniclers of Hope’s career have suggested that he willfully ignored his partner’s deteriorating health, reluctant to jeopardize his big break in show business. That is probably unfair. Still, what might have been a traumatic blow to another entertainer, or at least a sobering interruption in a budding career, was little more than a hiccup for Les Hope. Within days of Durbin’s death, he was back on the road with Hurley’s show. Fred Hurley had found him a new partner.
    •  •  •
    George Byrne was a soft-spoken, slightly built, angel-faced hoofer from Columbus, Ohio—like Durbin, a mild-mannered counterpoint to the more driven and outgoing Les Hope.“George was pink-cheeked andnaïve,” Hope said. “He looked like a choir boy. He was real quiet. Real Ohio. He was a smooth dancer and had a likeable personality. We became good friends.”
    Hope and Byrne finished out the Jolly Follies season together, doing well enough to move up to third billing,dubbed “Dancers Supreme.” Next, Frank Maley put them in a blackface revue called The Blackface Follies . As Hope tells it, on their first night in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, they blacked up with greasepaint instead of the usual burned cork and had to work all night trying to get it out.“After that we told Maley we thought we’d skip the blackface,” said Hope. Instead, Fred Hurley cast them in a new tab show he was readying for the 1925–26 season, called Smiling Eyes.
    The show was another mélange of sketches, songs, and dance numbers, with Hope playing leading roles and character parts, singing in a quartet with Maley and two others, and joining Byrne for a featured dance spot.The team added bits of comedy to their act—mostly corny, secondhand vaudeville gags, with Les typically playing the straight man. George, for example, might walk across the stage with a woman’s dress on a hanger.
    HOPE: “Where are you going?”
    BYRNE: “Down to get this filled.”
    Or George would come in carrying a plank of wood.
    HOPE: “Where are you going now?”
    BYRNE: “To find a room. I’ve already got my board.”
    But their dancing, not their comedy, drew the most attention.“The most versatile couple of eccentric dancers who have ever been seen at the Victoria,” wrote a reviewer in Wilmington, Delaware. In Newport, Kentucky, “they stopped the show with their numbers and were called back for two encores.”