Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  “I only gave her the whole idea! I packed her bag and put her on the bus!”

  “Yeah, but I was the menace, I was the heavy in the whole piece.”

  “I had my whip, right there, I just gave it to her like that!”

  “I was the man who really accomplished the final brush-off.”

  BOB’s exasperation turning to sarcasm: “Oh, you want the bow? Take a bow.”

  BING, obliging with a flourish: “A little light bow—ta-da.”

  BOB, now spent, giving up and settling back into a chair: “That’s fine, that’s fine—you did it all!”

  “I think so.”

  “I’m snookered again.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Thank you. Good night.”

  “Leave a call.”

  The exchange is propelled by nothing but the momentum of two performers feeding off each other, like riffing jazz musicians. None of the dialogue is in the film’s shooting script—it was apparently improvised on the set. Crosby is hilariously smug, but Hope’s exasperation is the real engine for the comedy. Dressed in a long-sleeved black T-shirt—which flatters his fit, five-foot-eleven-inch frame—he paces frantically, bends insistently over Crosby, uses his hands to italicize points (poking Bing in the chest, miming the cracking of a whip). The lines aren’t funny in isolation. Often they don’t even make much sense (“Leave a call”?). But it is character comedy of a high order.

  There had been comedy teams in movies before, of course, and fast-paced dialogue, but this was something new. The interplay between Groucho and Chico Marx, say, or George Burns and Gracie Allen, had an abstract, almost surreal quality. The witty repartee of 1930s screwball comedies such as My Man Godfrey or Bringing Up Baby was too polished and stylized to be mistaken for anything but movie dialogue. Hope and Crosby seemed like ordinary guys—like Hope and Crosby, in fact—perfectly attuned to each other’s thoughts, moods, obsessions, and vulnerabilities. In later Road pictures they would loosen up even more, breaking down the fourth wall and talking to the camera. But even here, still hemmed in by the conventions of 1930s romantic comedy, they are a breath of fresh air, with a spontaneity and intimacy that the movies had never before seen.

  Road to Singapore opened nationally in March of 1940 and broke two-year box-office records in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami. Hope helped out by plugging the film constantly on his radio show. By April, Paramount was already planning a sequel, reuniting the trio in a film originally called Blue Lagoon, before someone realized the obvious and retitled it Road to Zanzibar. Road to Singapore wound up earning $1.6 million at the box office—Hollywood’s highest-grossing movie of 1940. The teaming of Hope and Crosby was a smash.

  Their real-life relationship was a little more complicated. Hope and Crosby got along well, enjoyed working together, and shared a passion for golf. (Crosby was the better golfer—a three-time winner of the Lakeside club championship—though Hope could occasionally beat him.) But they were not close friends. Though they lived near each other in Toluca Lake, the families rarely socialized. (Bing and his wife, the former actress Dixie Lee, had four sons before Bob and Dolores adopted their first child.) The two men were, moreover, sharp contrasts in temperament. Hope loved being a Hollywood star, enjoyed socializing, and was a workaholic who got antsy on vacations. Crosby seemed more ambivalent about his fame, was often lackadaisical about work, and enjoyed getting away from the Hollywood scene—with his racehorses at Del Mar or, in later years, in Northern California, where he moved with his second wife and family. “Bing loved to hunt and fish, and Bob wouldn’t be caught hunting or fishing anything but a golf ball. Bob had no interest in horses,” Dolores told Crosby biographer Gary Giddins. “They lived entirely different lives, but they respected each other and loved working together.”

  Many in Hope’s entourage did not like Crosby, finding him cold and standoffish. Hope, though hard to get close to, at least had a superficial bonhomie. Crosby kept his distance from all but the closest friends. “Bing was a cold tomato,” said Sherwood Schwartz. “He was aloof. Bob was friendly. He’d say hello to everybody. I saw many people come up and put an arm around Bob, say, ‘How you doing?’ I never saw anybody touch Bing.” Once, when they were leaving their hotel in New York City after an appearance together to promote Road to Singapore, Crosby saw Hope stuffing some fan mail into a pillowcase. “What the hell are you doing that for?” he asked. Hope said he was taking the letters back home so that his secretary could answer them. “I’ll show you what I do with my fan mail,” said Crosby. He felt through some envelopes, found a quarter in one that had been enclosed by a fan for postage and photos, pocketed the change, and tossed the letter into the wastebasket.

  In many ways Hope looked up to Crosby. Bing was college educated, well read—on radio and in movies he often affected a comically erudite British accent. Bob was a high school dropout who read little but the sports pages and the show-business trades. Bing was a bigger star, and Hope envied his clout and his business savvy. “Bob wanted everything that Bing had, and more,” said Hal Kanter, who was a writer for Crosby before Hope hired him away. They ribbed each other like brothers—Crosby joked about Hope’s nose and his stinginess, Hope made cracks about Crosby’s broad hips and slow racehorses—but the jokes could touch a nerve. Once, when Hope was a guest on Crosby’s radio show in San Francisco, Crosby’s writer Bill Morrow, who got perverse enjoyment out of mocking Hope, wrote some jokes about Hope breaking out of his cage on the plane and being fixed up on a blind date with an ape from the zoo. Hope thought it was too insulting, and he exploded. “It was the only time I saw Bob really get mad,” said Kanter. “He threw down the script: ‘What are you doing to me?’ ” Crosby had to calm him down and tell Morrow to cool it.

  Yet they brought out the best in each other, both onstage and off. Hope loosened up Crosby, unleashed his sense of humor. Crosby gave Hope a role model, both as a businessman and as a manager of his own career. Crosby was arguably the greater artist. But Hope was more driven, more responsive to the changing entertainment landscape, and, in the end, had a broader and more lasting impact on the world of show business. He simply tried harder.

  • • •

  With two career-defining movies released in the space of four months and a radio show steadily climbing in the ratings, Hope’s career shifted into a new gear. His surging popularity was evident when he made an eight-week personal-appearance tour in the spring of 1940, taking his radio show on the road for the last five weeks of the season. His stage show—which also featured radio sidekicks Jerry Colonna, Brenda and Cobina, and the singer who was still billed as Dolores Reade—drew unprecedented crowds. On his first stop in Joliet, Illinois, two shows were scheduled, but a third had to be added to accommodate the overflow. At a Chicago theater, there were lines around the block, and Hope convinced the theater manager to cut a reel out of the featured movie, so they could squeeze in more performances. In Atlantic City, Hope broke a forty-four-year attendance record at the Steel Pier. He played to packed houses in Detroit, Boston, and New York City. With a guarantee of $12,500 a week (up from $4,500 just a year earlier) plus 50 percent of the gate over $50,000, Hope’s gross take was close to $20,000 a week.

  Variety, reviewing his show in Chicago, gave a vivid account of the rock-star frenzy Hope was stirring up:

  Bob Hope is blazing hot, and the king can do no wrong. He can come in with last year’s gags; can stall, forget his gags—and yet the audience laps it up. Comedian has a splendid manner; makes a great appearance and handles an audience with the assurance born of years of experience. The box office is whirling itself dizzy. Anything that Hope says or does seemingly is a howl for this mob. He only just started to introduce “two glamour girls” and the audience broke out into a roar before he could finish the introduction. The very mention of “Yehudi” rocked the house. It is a sample of spontaneous public exuberance that fires every gag, every bit of mugging, every gesture,
walk-on or walk-off into something that might be construed as brilliant.

  Even Hope was taken aback by the reception. “It was my first experience with the power of radio,” he wrote later. “I had no idea that the millions of numbers that made up the ratings every week were actually people.” He drank in the adulation. “This kind of success was brand-new to me, but I felt I could get used to it. I must have been pretty difficult to live with, because when somebody in the mob of autograph hounds outside the stage door asked Dolores if she was connected with Bob Hope, she replied, ‘No, I’m his wife.’ ”

  Just what it meant to be Bob Hope’s wife was becoming increasingly clear to Dolores. She still had the remnants of a singing career, thanks to Bob, who used her in his stage shows and occasionally on the radio. After a couple of radio appearances in the spring of 1940, Hope even tried to hire Dolores as the show’s regular singer, to replace the departed Judy Garland, but his sponsor nixed her. Yet Dolores was phasing out her show-business career and starting to put most of her energy into the job that would consume the rest of her life: being Mrs. Bob Hope.

  She performed the job with flawless grace. Dolores gave Bob more than just a socially adept partner and a picture-perfect Hollywood home life. She was a stabilizing influence, providing a commonsense sounding board, anchored by her bedrock Catholic values. She was intelligent, opinionated, better read than Bob, more capable of conversing knowledgeably on a range of subjects, from the arts to politics. (She started out as a Democrat and only in later years tacked toward his conservative views.) She had a sense of humor, and she was one of the few who could tell him off—something that became more important as the years went on and the circle of sycophants grew larger and more insulating. Most of all, she was fully on board for his great life endeavor: building the brand known as Bob Hope. “He had his job, and she had her job,” said Dolores’s nephew Tom Malatesta. “They were both on the same page as to where they were going. And they were a hell of a team.”

  If she was bothered by his many absences, his sometimes dismissive treatment of her, the rumors of other women, she kept it to herself. On rare occasions there were glimpses of the frustration. “She longed for romance from this man, and he was cold as ice to her,” Elliott Kozak, Hope’s agent and producer in later years, told John Lahr in the New Yorker. “We were in London one time. Bob, Dolores, and I were walking at night. All of a sudden, out of the clear blue sky, she pushed him up against the wall and said, ‘Kiss me, Bob. Tell me you love me.’ I was so embarrassed I didn’t know what to say. I turned my back on it. . . . I never saw him go to her and give her a peck on the cheek. I was with him for twenty-five years.”

  Yet shows of affection of any kind were rare for Bob Hope. Whatever bond he and Dolores shared went beyond pecks on the cheek—and was never on display for outsiders, or even family members. She adored him, and he needed her. They had a partnership, an understanding, a marriage that neither ever seriously considered ending, maybe even a love affair. They endured.

  The family grew. After adopting Linda in the fall of 1939, the Hopes told the Cradle they wanted a son as well. In the spring of 1940 the agency said it had found a boy for them, and Bob stopped in to see the baby during a stop in Chicago. When he saw that the boy had a ski nose just like his, he was sold. They named him Anthony Jude, known as Tony.

  Along with a second child came another move: from their rented place on Navaho Street to a fifteen-room English Tudor–style house in Toluca Lake that they built on a former walnut grove on Moorpark Street—just a short drive from the Lakeside Golf Club and a few blocks away from St. Charles Borromeo Church, where Dolores would become a daily regular at mass. The unpretentious, tree-lined neighborhood was home to a small cadre of movie-industry people who preferred the relatively low-profile San Fernando Valley community to the showier, starrier neighborhoods in Beverly Hills and elsewhere. The Hopes would renovate and expand the house several times, buying up the lots around it, creating a five-acre compound with a one-hole golf course in the backyard (with two different tee boxes, so Bob could play it as two holes), indoor and outdoor swimming pools, and a separate four-thousand-square-foot office wing, added to the main house a few years later. Grand yet homey, decorated in Dolores’s tasteful all-American style (with a Grandma Moses painting among the artwork on the walls), the Toluca Lake house would remain the Hopes’ main residence and the nerve center of Bob’s working life for more than sixty years.

  • • •

  With a new home, a growing family, and an expanding retinue of writers, assistants, and other support people, Hope turned his attention to money. His phenomenally successful 1940 tour had opened his eyes to his drawing power. When the crowds were circling the block for him in Chicago, Hope called his agent, Louis Shurr, and told him to get on a plane and come see for himself. Hope told Shurr he wanted Paramount to boost his salary to $50,000 a picture. Shurr not only got him the raise, but went one better. When Samuel Goldwyn wanted to borrow Hope to star in a picture for his own independent studio, Shurr told him Hope’s price was $100,000.

  Goldwyn turned him down flat. But Hope took the negotiations public when the two found themselves on a stage together in Fort Worth, Texas. Hope was there to host the opening of The Westerner, a film that Gary Cooper had made for Paramount, on loan from Goldwyn. When Hope saw Goldwyn in the audience, he called him up onstage. The sixty-year-old Hollywood mogul announced proudly that he was about to make a film with Hope. “I haven’t made a comedy since Eddie Cantor left me,” he said. “I haven’t found a comedian I want to work with, but I think I’ve found one in Bob Hope.”

  “That’s all fine, but let’s talk money,” said Hope, grabbing the microphone. The studio boss demurred. “Why don’t we just lie down and talk things over,” Hope said, pulling Goldwyn down on the floor with him. As Goldwyn protested, the crowd roared. After a whispered colloquy, the two got up, and Hope announced, “It’s going to be a pleasure making a picture with Mr. Goldwyn.” Whether or not the deal was actually consummated there, Hope ultimately got his $100,000.

  It would be nearly two years, however, before the Goldwyn film finally went into production. Paramount was keeping Hope too busy. After the success of The Cat and the Canary and Road to Singapore, the studio was dismayed to find that it had only one more Hope movie in the pipeline for the rest of 1940—The Ghost Breakers, due to open in June—thus wasting an opportunity to cash in on the buzz over Hope’s smash personal-appearance tour in the spring. Determined not to be caught short again, the studio put him on a nearly nonstop shooting schedule starting in the fall, teeing up four pictures in quick succession, all of which would be released in 1941.

  The Ghost Breakers did nothing to dampen the studio’s confidence in Hope. Another haunted-house comedy-thriller, the film is an obvious attempt to repeat the winning formula of The Cat and the Canary. But whereas Canary put Hope in the middle of an ensemble, in The Ghost Breakers he is the clear center of the action. He plays Larry Lawrence, a Winchell-like gossip columnist who comes to the aid of another frightened heiress—Paulette Goddard again—who is saddled with another spooky old house, this time a supposedly cursed castle in Cuba. Adapted, evidently quite freely, from a play by Paul Dickey and Charles Goddard and directed by George Marshall (a silent-film veteran who had recently directed Destry Rides Again, with James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich), the film probably has more laughs than The Cat and the Canary, but is a more scattershot effort, with a confused story line and tacky special effects, and thus less satisfying overall.

  Hope is fast, flip, and engaging as the reluctant hero, joking away his jitters in the face of malefactors ranging from mob thugs to an assortment of spooks, both real and imagined. He has a sidekick this time, a valet played by Willie Best, the quavering black comic actor whose exaggerated, bug-eyed fright takes actually make Hope look restrained by comparison. (Hope, getting ready to climb a spooky staircase, flashlight in hand: “If a couple of fellows come runnin’ down the stairs in a f
ew minutes, let the first one go. That’ll be me.”)

  The jokes sometimes step outside the film, puncturing the supernatural doings with abrupt references to the mundane real world. A stranger, for example, is warning Hope and Goddard about zombies: “A zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly, with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.” Hope’s retort: “You mean like Democrats?” (One out-of-context political joke per film, it seems.) On their boat trip to Cuba, Hope and Goddard run into a sinister passenger, played by the Hungarian-born actor Paul Lukas, who says he wants to buy Goddard’s castle, warning her about the curses and dead spirits that lurk there. Hope chimes in, greeting each gloomy warning with a cheeky wisecrack:

  LUKAS: “Are you the one who’s advising Miss Carter not to sell the castle?”

  HOPE: “No, my advice is to keep the castle and sell the ghosts.”

  LUKAS: “I myself have heard of only one ghost—the spirit of Don Santiago.”

  HOPE: “Does he appear nightly, or just Sundays and holidays?”

  The lines are trivial, but the psychological resonance isn’t. In mid-1940, with Nazi troops on the march in Europe, Hollywood was debating just how much of the real world ought to be reflected in its movies. While a few films, such as The Mortal Storm and Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, took note of the sobering headlines, far more common were escapist comedies such as The Ghost Breakers. And yet the laughs provided more than just escape. Hope’s breezy, self-confident mockery of the glowering villain—with a Middle European accent, no less—was a tonic for a nation on the verge of war against real foreign enemies: the triumph of the brash, irreverent, can-do American spirit in a world getting darker and more threatening by the day.

  “Its lightness and levity throughout, in these times of war, provide added impetus to bright biz prospects,” wrote Variety in its review. The Ghost Breakers was another box-office hit for Hope, and the trade paper noted that it was doing especially well with “the under-21 mob.” Hope wasn’t just hot; he was hip.