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Most precious part of the Hope homestead is a stoutly bolted chamber adjoining his workroom. There, under lock and key, rests his joke file—insured for $25,000. Only Hope has the key. A long, bulky cabinet, it is divided into "accepted jokes," ready for use; "possible jokes," which need another rechecking before becoming accepted; and a miscellaneous category of wheezes as yet unscrutinized.
Each accepted joke is judiciously filed under such topical heads as "Easter Parade," "Mother's Day," "Bing Crosby," etc. This card-index Joe Miller has been invaluable in establishing Hope's reputation as an ad lib artist.
Often on the serious side off stage, Hope's suave tongue is pretty much the result of painstaking rehearsal. At the moment, he has a phalanx of six gagmen preparing his routines. They do his radio scripts, and most of his movie dialogue, although he himself polishes off the final copy. They rewrite the picture as it is filmed. When a Paramount writer popped in one day to see how Crosby & Hope were doing with his script, he departed moaning: "All they left was the scene of the action." To another cinema scripter who appeared on the set of Road to Singapore, Hope hollered: "If you hear any of your dialogue, yell 'Bingo.' "
As Don Gilbert, the cinema star, in Caught in the Draft, Hope remarks: "It's terrible what you have to go through to make a fortune." He meant it. Born Leslie Townes Hope, at Eltham, Kent, England, he was the fifth of seven sons of a stonemason who moved his family to Cleveland when Hope was four. There the youngster ran around with a tough gang of moppets sold newspapers, sang in a choir until his voice changed, left high school to clerk in a butcher shop, took up amateur boxing and "was knocked into a dancing career."
In 1925 the discredited comedian Fatty Arbuckle hired Hope and a friend to fill out his solo vaudeville act in a Cleveland theater. That sent Hope hoofing through the sticks until the manager of a frayed vaudeville house in New Castle, Ind. asked him to announce the next week's bill. He did it so comically that he promptly became a monologuist. From that time on, it was the rise of a typical hoofer.
Pinned down on the matter of his earnings last year, Hope barked: "You can say its about a quarter of a million and I don't like it." Now worth an estimated $800,000 (principally in annuities), he removes $6,000 weekly from Pepsodent's treasury (Crossley rating 26.5) and $100,000 to $150,000 a picture from the Hollywood mint. As if that were not enough, he found time last summer for an eight-week personal-appearance jaunt. His gross: about $20,000 a week.
Blossoms in the Dust (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) will acquaint most cinemaddicts with the fact that the late Cardinal Hayes, Lloyd George, Stonewall Jackson, Billy Sunday, Booker T. Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Presidents Andrew Jackson, Rutherford B. Hayes and James A. Garfield were orphans. Orphans are what Blossoms in the Dust is all about.