Hope: Entertainer of the Century by Richard Zoglin Page A

They were a smash in Newport News, Virginia. “For the premier honors of the entire bill, Hope and Byrne came through with flying colors in the eccentric dance,” wrote thelocal critic. “Friends, it was a regular knockout. There has never been anything any better in this house of this kind.”
    Hope and Byrne traveled with Smiling Eyes for the entire 1925–26 season. At breaks between engagements, they would stop in Cleveland and practice dance routines in front of the big mirror above the fireplace in the Hopes’ living room.“I taught myself to play ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’ on an upright piano, while George stood on top of the piano, plucking a banjo strung like a uke,” Hope recalled. On the road, their adventures were not always so homespun. Once, in Braddock, Pennsylvania, they hitched a ride to Pittsburgh with a stranger outside the theater and found themselves in a highway car chase with the cops. The driver ditched the car in a gulley and ran off into the bushes, leaving Hope and Byrne to get hauled off to jail. The car had been reported stolen. They were released after a night in jail when the driver was identified as a doctor’s chauffeur who had taken his boss’s car for a spin without asking.
    Their act caught the eye of Gus Sun, the theater-circuit owner, who thought Hope had possibilities as a single. But Fred Hurley was more skeptical and told a reporter covering the show in Springfield, Ohio, not to give Hope “any big puff.” “Why not?” the reporter asked.“Because it’ll go to his head,” said Hurley. “Next thing he’ll be wanting a raise, and I’m already paying him more than he’s worth.”
    When Smiling Eyes ’ season was over in the spring of 1926, Hope and Byrne decided to strike out on their own. They billed themselves as “Dancemedians” and put together an act that featured as much comedy as dancing.One of their models was the vaudeville team of Duffy and Sweeney, a comedy duo known for wacky stunts: taking out a frying pan and making eggs onstage, for example, or lying underneath a piano sucking lollipops. Their shenanigans would often continue offstage. After one performance they staged a shouting match in their dressing room, climaxed by a gunshot and a thud—followed by Duffy stalking out of the room alone. When company members nervously opened the dressing-room door to see what had happened, they found Sweeney calmly removing his makeup.
    Hope and Byrne brought some of this madcap spirit to their act.“Our act opened with a soft-shoe dance,” Hope recalled in his memoir. “We wore the high hats and spats and carried canes for this. Then we changed into a fireman outfit by taking off our high hats and putting on small papier-mâché fireman hats. George had a hatchet and I had a length of hose with a water bulb in it. We danced real fast to ‘If You Knew Susie,’ a rapid ta-da-da-da-da tempo, while the drummer rang a fire bell. At the end of this routine we squirted water from the concealed bulb at the brass section of the orchestra in the pit.”
    The act was good enough to get them two weeks at theState Theater in Detroit for $175 a week, with a late show at the Oriole Terrace for an additional $75—a nice raise from the $100 a week they were getting from Hurley. They squandered most of their first week’s pay at a gambling joint down the street from the theater. But the reviews were good and helped them get a few more gigs in Detroit. Then they moved on to Pittsburgh for a stint at the Stanley Theater for $300 a week, on a bill with Tal Henry and His North Carolinians, a popular swing band.
    But Hope was itching to go to New York, where the big-time bookers were. He bought the team Eton jackets with big white collars and spats and hired a top photographer in Chicago to take new publicity shots of them; even at this early stage, Hope was learning the value of marketing. In their boaters and bow ties, they looked like perfect 1920s dandies. Hope, with