Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  In the meantime, Hope finally got the break he had been waiting for in radio. Early in the summer of 1938 Saphier closed a deal to give Hope the starring role in a new comedy-variety show sponsored by Pepsodent and scheduled to air Tuesday nights on NBC starting in September.

  Pepsodent and its ad agency, Lord & Thomas, had considered Milton Berle and Fred Allen for the job, and they were taking something of a risk with Hope. They thought he would appeal to a young audience, but feared that his cocky, fast-talking radio persona might be too abrasive for Middle America. They told Saphier that Hope needed to be more self-deprecating—that he should make himself the butt of jokes, the way Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen did. Saphier relayed this in a letter to Hope, stressing that he should take care “to prevent your being a smart aleck . . . as only sympathetic comedians have a chance for long life on the air.”

  In launching his new show, Hope had a daunting task. Most comics in radio came equipped with an established character or familiar running gags: Jack Benny’s cheapskate, or the comic sparring matches between Edgar Bergen and his monocled dummy, Charlie McCarthy. Hope had no such crutches; he had to build his show practically from the ground up, with jokes drawn, not from the comedian’s self-contained radio community, but from the outside world.

  To do that, he needed writers, and he hired more of them than anyone else in radio. They were mostly young guns, writers who were hungry and not too expensive. He paid them as little as $50 or $100 a week—low for the time, but a sacrifice for Hope, since it all came out of his starting salary of $1,500 a week. “No comic had ever tried to maintain a staff that size, especially not out of his own end,” Hope said. “But I wanted to be number one, and I knew that jokes were the key. . . . All these comedy minds were necessary if I was to carry out my plan, which was almost unheard of at that time. It was to go on the air every week with topical jokes written right up to airtime. And some even after.”

  Hope’s charter staff of writers included Wilkie Mahoney, his Hollywood Parade cohort; Al Schwartz, who had written gags for Walter Winchell in New York; and the team of Milt Josefsberg and Melville Shavelson, who had impressed Hope with some material they wrote for his stage show at the Loews State. A few weeks into the season he added Sherwood Schwartz, Al’s younger brother, who was studying for a master’s degree in biological sciences at the University of Southern California; Norman Sullivan, another New York radio writer; and Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, two aspiring playwrights from Chicago who had written for Milton Berle. The staff would grow and evolve over the years, as some left and others replaced them, but this was the founding core of the biggest and most storied writing crew in all of radio.

  For his new show, Hope also knew he needed a strong supporting cast. He looked first for a bandleader with some personality who could also serve as a comedy foil. After coming close to hiring Ozzie Nelson, Hope settled on Edgar Clyde “Skinnay” Ennis, a drawling, rail-thin North Carolina native who had appeared in Hope’s film College Swing. As announcer, Hope chose honey-voiced Bill Goodwin, who could also banter with him and take part in sketches. For more comic support, he hired Jerry Colonna, a former trombone player who looked like a refugee from Mack Sennett silent comedies, with bulging eyes, a walrus mustache, and a sirenlike voice that could hold notes for longer than most opera singers. Colonna used to do Nelson Eddy parodies at parties, and Bing Crosby once brought him on his radio show, introducing him as a famous Italian tenor making his US debut and even inviting prominent music critics to the show. (Some of them apparently thought he was for real.) Colonna had done a funny bit in College Swing, playing a zany professor of music who does a florid rendition of the Crosby song “Please,” and he was one of Hope’s most inspired additions. Rounding out the team of regulars was a close-harmony singing group, Six Hits and a Miss, who did backup vocals, an occasional featured song, and the commercials on the show (which, as was common in radio, were all performed live).

  The Pepsodent Show debuted on Tuesday night, September 27, 1938, broadcast live from a rented NBC studio on Sunset Boulevard, at seven o’clock Pacific time—10:00 p.m. eastern time, following NBC’s popular comedy Fibber McGee and Molly. For his theme song, Hope had originally intended to use a rewritten version of “Wintergreen for President,” a song from the Gershwin musical Of Thee I Sing. But when he found out the rights would cost him $250 a show, he opted instead for the cheaper, and more obvious, alternative, “Thanks for the Memory.” The vocal group opens the show:

  We bid you all hello, and welcome to our show

  May we present for Pepsodent, a guy you ought to know.

  Hope then chimes in:

  Ah, thank you, so much . . .

  Tonight is the night and I hope you will tune in on us every Tuesday

  Let’s make it your chase-away-blues day

  By listening in, when we begin . . .

  “Well, here we are,” Hope begins his first monologue, “with a brand-new sponsor, a brand-new program, a brand-new cast, and ready to tell some . . . jokes.” The pause is the first sign that Hope has taken his sponsor’s advice to make himself the self-deprecating butt of gags. (It’s also accurate; few of the jokes in the first show are new, or very good.) The show follows the usual format for comedy-variety shows of the era: an opening monologue, followed by a musical number from the house band (Ennis and his group do Irving Berlin’s “Change Partners”) and then Hope’s introduction of the week’s guest star—Constance Bennett, of the popular Topper films, on the opener. There are two comedy sketches: Bob and Connie go to a girls’ baseball game, and Bob plays the head of a detective agency assigned to find a little girl’s lost basket (a play on Ella Fitzgerald’s hit song “A-Tisket, A-Tasket”). Colonna gets a featured spot, trading quips with Hope and then launching into a song with his trademark hyperextended opening wail—“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, sweet mystery of life . . .” The only topical joke is a throwaway gag in the baseball sketch. “Who’s that girl going around and around without stopping at home?” asks Bill Goodwin. “That’s Mrs. Roosevelt,” says Hope—a reference to Eleanor Roosevelt’s peripatetic travel schedule. Hope closes with a slower-tempo reprise of “Thanks for the Memory,” and that’s the show.

  Variety was impressed: “That small speck going over the center-field fence is the four-bagger Hope whammed out his first time at bat for Pepsodent. If he can keep up the pace he’ll get as much word-of-mouth for 1938–39 as Edgar Bergen got for 1937–38. He sounded like success all the way.” But Hope knew that the show needed to improve. In succeeding weeks, as he and the writers grew more comfortable, the material got better, as well as more current. When California had a lot of rain, there were rainstorm jokes: “Cop gave me a ticket for crossing a street against the tide.” During Christmas shopping season, Hope talked about the crowds at the post office: “Somebody shoved me, I went right through the parcel post window. Cost me sixty dollars to get back to Hollywood.” When he went to the racetrack at Santa Anita, he joked about his pokey horses: “I should have known better when I saw the jockey carrying an overnight bag.”

  The gag lines had more snap than wit, but Hope delivered them with crisp self-assurance, and faster than anybody else on the air. Soon they were calling him Rapid Robert. “My idea was to do [the monologue] as fast as I could and still have the listeners at home get it and let the live audience in the studio laugh too,” said Hope. “Unless the live audience took the play away from me with their laughter, I raced.” Hope was a good editor, with a sure sense of the quickest path from setup to laugh. “When you wrote for Hope, you learned not to put one word extra in,” said Sherwood Schwartz. “Electronic sound, radio, was a new medium, and Hope was the smartest guy in it. He knew how to pack it in, pace it, and fill it. You had to write all bone and make a great joke in twenty-four words or less.”

  Everything about him was fresh and modern. Benny had the slow pace and fussy manners of your old spinster aunt, with gags about his underground money vault and antique Maxwell car. Radio�
�s popular comedy teams—Bergen and McCarthy, Burns and Allen—sounded as if they might still be doing two-a-days at the Palace Theatre in New York. Fred Allen, probably the most brilliant radio wit of the era, was a more pointed satirist than Hope would ever be, but he was an acquired taste, too cerebral for the mob. Hope was brash but chummy, in the know but available to all.

  As the season went on, the show began to develop recurring comic themes—Hope’s cheapness, for example, and his obsession with Hollywood glamour girls such as Madeleine Carroll and Hedy Lamarr. Colonna became a big hit, opening his segments with a hearty “Greetings, Gate!”—an obscure bit of jazz-era slang that Colonna turned into a national catchphrase—and needling Hope with his insults, puns, and nonsensical stories. Hope joked easily with guest stars such as Olivia de Havilland, Chico Marx, and Betty Grable. He had a special rapport with Judy Garland, the sixteen-year-old MGM star best known (in her pre–Wizard of Oz days) for her schoolgirl love song, “Dear Mr. Gable.” In her guest appearance in March 1939, Garland confesses a crush on Hope. He gently tries to dissuade her. She asks if he’s “somebody else’s crush.” He replies, “I was, but she married me.” Disappointed, Judy laments that she’s “in between—not old enough to be a glamour girl, and too old to go around with dolls.” Hope’s retort: “I hope I’m never too old to go around with dolls.”

  Hope established a working routine with his writers that would change little through the years. For each week’s monologue, Hope would suggest several topics—his trip to Palm Springs, say, or the Rose Bowl game, or a Hollywood star’s wedding. Each writer or writing team (they worked mostly in pairs) would churn out a dozen or more jokes for each topic. Hope would then gather the writers in his living room and read all the jokes aloud, winnowing them down to his favorites and putting together a rough cut of the monologue. He would test out the jokes in a run-through of the entire show on Sunday night, done before a live audience and often running an hour or more—followed by a late-night session with the writers, in which he’d make the final selections for the monologue and do some more fine-tuning.

  Hope’s focus was intense and all-consuming. He was on the job 24/7, and he demanded the same from his writers. If he ran into one of them at a restaurant eating lunch, he’d ask why he wasn’t working. When Shavelson and Josefsberg came to see Hope on the afternoon they arrived in Los Angeles, “he seemed a little concerned that we had spent the whole morning of our arrival without writing a line,” Shavelson recalled. “Later in our career I learned that it was unwise to show up at a story conference with Hope sporting a tan, indicating a wasted day at the beach to his expert eye.”

  Hope could call at almost any hour of the day or night to suggest a new topic or ask for some new jokes, due first thing in the morning—or sooner. “He had no sense of time,” said Sherwood Schwartz. “Whenever he wanted something, he wanted it.” When they got together for meetings at his house, Hope wouldn’t even offer snacks. If he got hungry, he’d send out Schwartz, the junior writer on the staff, with thirty-five cents to buy him a pineapple sundae, then eat the whole thing himself. (Years later, when Schwartz was no longer working for Hope, he walked in on a Hope writing session in New York and as a gag brought along a pineapple sundae for him. Hope didn’t bat an eye. “What took you so long?” he said.)

  He was a genial, easygoing boss, but often self-absorbed and insensitive. On payday, Hope used to stand at the top of the circular staircase in his house, make paper airplanes out of the writers’ paychecks, and float them downstairs, forcing the writers to grovel on the floor for their wages. He joked that he wanted to give them some exercise. It was a gag, but some of the writers were offended, taking it as a sign of his disdain. (After the story got around, Hope stopped doing it.)

  Hope had other ways of lording it over his writers. On Shavelson’s first day on the job after arriving in California, he told Hope that he had just moved into an apartment and was waiting for his fiancée to come out from New York. Hope brightened and asked if he could borrow the key to his place that night. “I’ll leave it in the mailbox when I leave around midnight,” Hope said. The cowed young writer, in a real-life version of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, had to give up his apartment to his boss and wander the streets until midnight. When he returned, he found the key in the mailbox as promised, the bed unmade, and two sets of wet footprints leading from the shower to the bed.

  Hope’s sexual dalliances were well-known and discreetly ignored by his writers. “We’d go to a hotel, I swear to you, outside his room were three, four, five young, beautiful girls, waiting to be picked by him to come in,” said Schwartz. “That’s just how it was.” Hope would often call writers’ meetings for the evening, then arrive an hour or two late. “What we didn’t realize for a long time was that it was Bob’s excuse for getting out of the house,” said Shavelson. “So when he finished with the girl, he’d show up at the meeting and we would have all the jokes ready for him.” Such antics were taken for granted, regarded as a perk of fame. “It never occurred to us to be embarrassed or guilty,” said Shavelson. “This was show business. He was a star enjoying his stardom. All men would do the same with his charm and opportunities.”

  Despite the indignities, the grueling hours, and the sometimes overbearing ego, most of the writers enjoyed working with Hope. Shavelson remained associated with him for years, writing and directing several of his movies and ghostwriting one of his books. (Yet he got bleeding ulcers while still in his twenties, and when asked what caused them, Shavelson would say, “Two things: Sam Goldwyn and Bob Hope.”) Sherwood Schwartz left Hope to go into the Army during World War II, and the star was not pleased when, on his return, Schwartz said he wasn’t coming back to work for him. (Schwartz went into sitcoms and later created Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch.) Still, Schwartz loved his time with Hope. “There was no separation, no wall,” he said. “He was detached, but you never had a feeling that he looked down on you just because you were a writer. He was really quite incredible.”

  No two writers had a more ambivalent attitude toward Hope than Norman Panama and Melvin Frank. They graduated together from the University of Chicago and intended to go to New York to write socially relevant plays. Instead, they moved to Los Angeles to see if they could make money writing for radio. After supplying gags for Milton Berle, they got hired by Hope at $50 a week, with a promised raise to $62.50 after three weeks. Frank, a left-wing political idealist who was attending Communist Party meetings at the time, scorned the radio show as “an amazing bit of capitalist excess” and had mixed feelings about his boss. “Hope is the ordinary actor type—and he’s not bad as such,” he wrote in his journal. “Spoiled, of course, and a complete egoist, he is inconsiderate of people close to him (he treats his older brother [Jack], a man shell-shocked in the war, with complete disdain) and has been working Norm and me 14 and 15 hours a day every day.”

  If Hope knew about their left-wing politics, it didn’t seem to bother him; they could turn out the jokes. Panama and Frank left Hope within a year, unhappy over their low pay. Yet they were back two years later writing a movie for him, My Favorite Blonde, and continued to work on Hope films through the 1950s. “My father really loved Hope,” said Frank’s daughter, Elizabeth Frank, an author and literature professor at Bard College. “He thought of him as his creative father, as the embodiment of everything that moved my father about certain aspects of American identity, that transcended ethnicity, the heat that melted the melting pot.”

  Hope’s own politics were largely undefined at this point: a conservative, but also a fan of President Roosevelt’s and a union supporter. He was hardly a corporate lackey, often tangling with his sponsor and the network over his suggestive material. “He still had a tendency to go overboard on the sexy innuendos,” recalled Wally Bunker, an NBC executive who was in the control room during The Pepsodent Show’s early years. “During rehearsals the NBC [censor] would say to Hope, ‘You can’t use that word.’ And Hope would snap back, ‘I
’m going to use it anyway.’ ” Once the offending lines were bleeped out a couple of times, Hope would usually relent. But he always bristled at interference from the corporate suits. Sherwood Schwartz recalled a writers’ meeting in which Tom McAvity, the ad-agency executive who oversaw The Pepsodent Show, suggested that Hope ought to downplay his girl-chasing gags and try to develop a more wholesome image. Hope exploded, according to Schwartz, pushing McAvity against the wall and telling him hotly, “This is what I do. I tell jokes. I’m not gonna sit down and invent a character because you think it’s better.”

  Whatever Hope was doing was working. A 1939 poll of radio critics ranked Hope fourth on a list of the best comedians on the air (behind Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and Edgar Bergen), quite an achievement for a relative newcomer. His ratings, while still well behind the more established hit shows, were moving up steadily. After a string of false starts and ill-suited vehicles, Hope finally had a radio show that looked as if it was going to stick. And it did, for seventeen years.

  • • •

  The fourth Hope film to be released in his breakthrough year of 1938, Thanks for the Memory, opened in November. Hope and Shirley Ross play New York newlyweds who are having trouble paying the rent on their improbably ritzy penthouse apartment. He’s a struggling writer trying to finish his novel, and she’s a former model who goes back to work to support him. The film is a curdled bit of late-thirties romantic fluff, with a parade of stock Depression-era comic characters: the wisecracking best-friend couple (the wife played by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who gave the film plenty of coverage in her newspaper column); a kept man and his rich battle-ax of a wife; and a tipsy swell in top hat and tails who keeps wandering in and out. Patricia “Honey Chile” Wilder, Hope’s old radio foil, even shows up as a flighty, flirty neighbor with bats in her apartment.