Hope's first, but short-lived marriage was to his vaudeville partner, Grace Louise Troxell, whom he married in January 1933. The following year in 1934, Hope married Dolores (DeFina) Reade, who had been one of his co-stars on Broadway. Both marriages were reported as to have taken place in Erie, but the only marriage license on file at the Erie County Courthouse for Bob Hope shows Hope was married in Erie on January 25, 1933, when he was 29 to his first wife Grace Louise Troxell. The license lists his given name Leslie T. Hope, and it lists his bride as Grace L. Troxell, a 21-year-old from Chicago who worked with Hope as a showgirl on vaudeville. An Erie alderman married them.
The New York Daily News listed that Dolores Reade and Bob Hope were married in Erie on February 19, 1934, but there is no record of the marriage in Erie. Hope was a secretive man, especially regarding his relationships with women, he most likely he wanted to keep the location of his marriage to Delores Reade a secret, so as to keep the availability of the marriage certificate out-of-reach of the press. Having been married in Erie once before, giving Erie as the location of his second marriage was most likely seen to be a plausible location that would be accepted without dispute at the time.
Hope had a reputation as a womanizer and continued to see other women in spite of his marriage. In 1949 while Hope was in Dallas on a publicity tour for his radio show, he met starlet Barbara Payton, a contract player at Universal Studios, who at the time was on her own public relations jaunt. Shortly thereafter, Hope set Payton up in an apartment in Hollywood. The arrangement soured as Hope was not able to satisfy Payton's definition of generosity and her need for attention. Hope paid her off to end the affair quietly. Payton later revealed the affair in an article printed in July 1956 in Confidential magazine. Hope was at times a mean-spirited individual with the ability to respond with a ruthless vengeance when sufficiently provoked; His advisers counseled him to avoid further publicity by ignoring the Confidential expose. Barbara's revelations caused a minor ripple and then quickly sank without causing any appreciable damage to Bob Hope's legendary career. According to Arthur Marx's Hope biography The Secret Life of Bob Hope, Hope's subsequent long-term affair with actress Marilyn Maxwell was so open that the Hollywood community routinely referred to her as Mrs. Bob Hope.
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| Bob Hope’s Marriage License Application (1933) |