Doty Hobart

Biography

Before the first trench whistle blew in France, Doty Hobart was already spinning stories—1914 found him in a drafty Hoboken loft drafting “The Mystery of the Sleeping Death” for Kalem and Alice Joyce. Two years later he swapped his typewriter for Signal Corps flags, but when the armistice fell he sprinted straight back to celluloid, rattling off scenarios for fifty silent pictures at seventeen different lots before the talkies stole the silence. While projectors clacked, he moonlighted: a slim, one-act farce titled That’s My Hat hit bookstores in 1927, and between October ’29 and March ’31 his voice crackled from newsstands via Radio Digest. Broadway beckoned next—three brisk comedies in three seasons: Thoroughbred (a fast foal that ran three weeks in fall 1933), Every Thursday (a spring fling that lasted into summer 1934), and Double Dummy (a card-sharp romp co-written with Tom McKnight, dealt by Edith Meisner and produced by Mark Hellinger and James R. Ullman, folding just after Christmas 1936). War returned, and so did Hobart’s yen for resurrection; in 194 he and Raymond Massey tried to raise Dr. Ephraim McDowell—Kentucky surgeon who plucked an ovarian tumor and history—from a forgotten drawer of scripts. The curtain never rose on that second act, leaving Hobart’s final fade-out an unshot frame, the doctor still waiting in the wings.