(4 of 10)
John D. What they are trying to tell him, says a friend, is that "Bob wasn't born—he was woven by Betsy Ross." Actually, she only adopted him. Bob was born Leslie Townes Hope in a London suburb in 1903. Hope's own statement notwithstanding, his great-grandfather was not "a lookout for Lady Chatterley." His father, though, was a stonemason who took his family to Cleveland when Leslie was four.
For a time, it looked as if the kid was headed for trouble. He and his pals raised quite a bit of hell, hanging around pool parlors (where Bob became a pretty good hustler), swiping things from the local stores. He straightened out soon enough, and for a while sold newspapers on a street corner. John D. Rockefeller used to come by in his chauffeured car every day to pick up his 20 paper. One rainy afternoon the old millionaire handed Bob a dime. Hope had no change, so he offered to trust Rockefeller for the money. "He wouldn't hear of it," recalls Bob, "and so I had to run about 50 yards through the rain to a grocery store to break the dime. When I gave him his change, he thanked me and said, 'Always deal in cash, son,' and drove off."
Thigh-Slappers. Hope gave up journalism for a succession of other careers. As a soda jerk he was just a squirt. He laid an egg as a chicken plucker. As for boxing—well, as he says, "that's where I learned to waltz."
Perhaps that's what made him try show biz. He had won money in the Charlie Chaplin impersonation contests that were the craze at local vaudeville houses. Midway in his junior year at East High School, he dropped out to become a dancer at Cleveland's Bandbox Theater. His partners in subsequent years included a pair of Siamese twins and a neighborhood girl, Mildred Rosenquist. Years later, Hope said that "we would make seven or eight bucks, and I would split it with her." Mildred, now a California housewife, challenges that claim to this day. "Bob told me that we were playing for charity," she says. "He kept the money." The two were engaged for a few years, but Mildred broke it off. Her mother had said: "Don't marry him; he'll never amount to anything."
And who could dispute it? Hoofer Hope seemed to be going nowhere. At one desperate point, he took an ad in Variety: LES HOPE AVAILABLE. SONGS,
PATTER AND ECCENTRIC DANCING. Little by little he began to work comedy into his act. Straight man: "Where do the bugs go in the wintertime?" Hope: "Search me." Such thigh-slappers somehow emboldened him to try it as a single, and soon he turned up as a blackface emcee. Before he was 30, Bob (a name he thought sounded more "hiya fellas" than Les) was playing the Palace. Later, he was billed with another vaudeville hopeful, Bing Crosby. In his first Broadway show, Roberta, in 1933 (with Fred MacMurray and George Murphy), Hope played a Joe College-type bandleader. His best line was pure Hope: "Long dresses don't bother me; I've got a good memory." It was also in that year that Murphy took Hope around to a nightclub to hear New York City-born Singer Dolores Reade. They dated, and were married in 1934. Says Bob today: "George Murphy introduced me to my wife, but I voted