Hope: Entertainer of the Century by Richard Zoglin Page B

his slicked-back hair, lantern jaw, and hawklike gaze, was clearly the sharpie of the pair—lean, dapper, and good-looking,“the thinnest man in vaudeville,” in Hope’s words. “I was down to 130 pounds. I was so thin I always made sure the dog act was over before I came onstage.”
    The publicity shots apparently paid off. When Hope and Byrne got to New York and started pounding the pavement, they met with Abe Lastfogel of the William Morris Agency.“If you’re only half as good as your pictures, you’ll do,” Lastfogel said. The job he had for them, however, was certainly the strangest of Hope’s career. He and Byrne were hired to play second fiddle to a pair of Siamese twins.
    Daisy and Violet Hilton, joined back-to-back at the hip, were born in Brighton, England, in 1908, to a barmaid who gave them up to herlandlady shortly after birth. The twins’ foster parents turned them into a sideshow attraction in England, and later, after moving to San Antonio, on the American vaudeville circuit. (Today they’re best known for their featured roles in Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks. ) Sideshow freaks were hardly unheard of in vaudeville, but there was nothing quite like the sensation caused by the Hilton sisters. When they played Newark, the lines around the theater blocked traffic. They set a house record in Cleveland. Variety pronounced them“the greatest draw attraction and business getter that has hit vaudeville in the past decade.”
    In their relatively skimpy twelve-minute act, the sisters talked about their lives as Siamese twins, played a duet on saxophone and clarinet, and performed a closing dance number with two male partners. That’s where Hope and Byrne came in—returning for the finale after their own featured dance number earlier in the show. Improbable as it seems, the act got good reviews. “The finish is a wow and a real novelty,” said Variety. “The routining of the dance steps shows it perfectly possible for the twins to dance all of the present type of dances with partners who are familiar with close formation.” Though the Hiltons were the obvious star attraction, Hope and Byrne got their share of attention.“They have some fast dances and several novelties, even singing a little,” noted one reviewer. “Both Hope and Byrne stand out pleasantly on the program.”
    Hope was a little nonplussed at the whole experience.“At first it was a funny sensation to dance with a Siamese twin,” he wrote. “They danced back to back, but they were wonderful girls and it got to be very enjoyable—in an unusual sort of way.” But when the twins’ manager wouldn’t give Hope and Byrne a raise after six months, they quit the show in Providence and headed back to New York.
    It was 1927, a pivotal year for show business. Hollywood’s first talking picture, The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, opened in October, giving vaudeville another push toward oblivion. Movies had been encroaching on vaudeville’s turf since the early teens. At first, short silent films were added to vaudeville bills as a novelty—just another attraction, like a juggler or a comedy team. With the advent of feature-length films, however, more vaudeville houses began switching tomovies as a primary attraction, with live entertainment as merely a supplement.By 1925, only a hundred all-live vaudeville theaters were left in the country. When talking pictures arrived, the trend accelerated, with more theaters adding movies and many dropping their stage shows altogether.
    Vaudeville was also getting strong competition in 1927 from another quarter: Broadway.More than 260 shows, at least 50 of them musicals, opened on Broadway during the 1927–28 season, including such classic musicals as the Gershwins’ Funny Face (starring Fred and Adele Astaire), Rodgers and Hart’s A Connecticut Yankee , and Jerome Kern’s landmark Show Boat . It was also the heyday of the musical revue. These loosely structured shows (including such perennials