• • •
On radio too Hope was blazing. Now one of the most popular stars on the air, he put the squeeze on Pepsodent over the summer to double his salary, to $8,000 a week—even threatening to quit radio for a year if he didn’t get it. He wound up settling for $6,000 and was back on the air in September.
The show was reaching a comfortable cruising speed. Hope would always open with a corny rhyming product plug for his sponsor (“If you’ve got preserves in the cellar, use Pepsodent and you’ll preserve what’s under your smeller”). There were weekly jokes about Skinnay Ennis’s beanpole frame, and back-and-forth insults with “Professor” Colonna. (Bob: “Colonna, this is the last straw.” Jerry: “All right, you use it—I’ll drink from the bottle.”) The monologue jokes were increasingly tied to the news, or the season, or anecdotes from what at least sounded like Hope’s own life—paying his income tax, for example, or fighting the crowds at the Motor Vehicle Department to get new license plates. “I wouldn’t say the line was long,” said Hope. “All I know is when I got to the end of the line, I had to buy Colorado plates.” Hope was having more fun now. He was so fast and sure-footed that on the rare occasions when he stumbled on a line, or a laugh didn’t come as fast as he expected, he got even bigger laughs with his self-mocking comebacks: “Go ahead, talk to each other while we rehearse, will ya?”
Part of Hope’s brilliance was to make these often scripted lines sound like ad-libs. The ruse was common in radio. “Everyone would write down their ad-libs and we wouldn’t tell each other,” said George Burns. “The way to become a star was to ad-lib without rattling your paper.” But Hope could improvise when he had to; his reactions were quick and his ability to roll with the punches impressive. When Chico Marx, a guest on one show, dropped his script in the middle of a bit, there was an awkward stretch of silence as he fished around for it. After a few seconds Hope broke in, “Who do you think you are—Harpo?” Close to a perfect ad-lib—and no one could have written it.
During the 1940 presidential campaign, with Roosevelt running for a third term against Republican candidate Wendell Willkie, Hope made a few tentative forays into political humor. It was the first presidential campaign to feature heavy political advertising on the radio, and that provided an obvious target. “I want to thank both political candidates for giving up their time so this program can be heard,” Hope began one show. “The Democrats really put on a demonstration last Tuesday night,” he said after Roosevelt’s election victory. “But you can’t blame them. It’s not every day that Roosevelt gets elected president. It just seems like it.” Even his few mild political jokes, however, were enough to raise concerns at the network. A telegram from an NBC executive on November 19, 1940, complained about Hope’s jokes on political topics, among them President Roosevelt’s plan to move up the Thanksgiving holiday by a week:
We are getting many protests about Bob Hope from both Democrats and Republicans—concerning his reference to the “Republicans waiting until a week from next Thursday to celebrate Thanksgiving, hoping by that time to have something to be thankful for” and his “Willkie button” crack. Each time he refers to things political, and that’s been pretty consistent for some weeks, we’ve had protests. Can’t we do something about it?
Still, political jokes were relatively rare for Hope in those days. Indeed, many of the headlines were too ominous for humor. At the end of 1940, fears that the United States would be drawn into the war overseas were mounting. President Roosevelt, in the face of isolationist opposition, launched a massive war mobilization effort and began sending arms to Britain under the Lend-Lease Act. In September 1940, Congress passed the nation’s first peacetime draft, requiring every American male between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five to register for military service. When Hope returned to host the Academy Awards dinner on February 27, 1941, the war took center stage. President Roosevelt had been invited to attend the event, but he begged off, saying the tense world situation demanded he remain in Washington. Instead, he delivered a six-minute address to the audience at the Biltmore Hotel, praising Hollywood for its role in supporting his mobilization efforts and for promoting “the American way of life.” Bette Davis followed him onstage to deliver the movie community’s response—“We thank you for the unique honor you have bestowed upon us”—and Judy Garland sang “America.”
Hope, emceeing his second Oscar show, lightened the mood with another batch of Hollywood jokes. He harked back to the previous year’s sweep by Gone With the Wind, pointing to the table filled with Oscar statuettes: “What’s the matter, did Selznick bring them back?” (Producer David Selznick would, in fact, get one of them back, when his film Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, won for Best Picture.) Hope joked about the secrecy surrounding the winners, whose names were now guarded in sealed envelopes by Price Waterhouse: “When the last envelope was sealed, Price Waterhouse had to open it again to let [columnist] Sidney Skolsky out.”
Hope got his own award that year: a plaque in recognition of his “unselfish services for the motion picture industry” and for being the “man who did the most for charity in 1940.” He was taken by surprise and fumbled for words (“I don’t feel a bit funny,” he said) as the audience of fourteen hundred applauded wildly for nearly a minute. In a year that saw two popular stars, Jimmy Stewart and Ginger Rogers, win the top acting awards (for The Philadelphia Story and Kitty Foyle respectively), Hope got the biggest ovation of the night.
It was testimony to the stature he had achieved in Hollywood after just three years. Other stars, such as Eddie Cantor, were well-known for their charity work and frequent benefit appearances. But no one was as tireless as Hope. In two years he entertained at a reported 562 benefits, raising money for domestic charities such as the March of Dimes and the American Red Cross, but also, as the war in Europe spread (and his home country of England was fighting for survival), for such war-related causes as the Greek War Relief Committee and Bundles for Britain.
Altruism, to be sure, was only one of Hope’s motivations. Entertaining at charity events provided him with the enthusiastic live audiences that he craved, and it was also—as the Academy honor validated—great for his image. But Hope also recognized, more acutely than any other star of his day, the power of his celebrity and felt a calling to use it. The rest of Hollywood would learn from him.
• • •
A long ten months passed between The Ghost Breakers and the release of Hope’s next film, Road to Zanzibar, in April 1941. The second Road picture reunited most of the same creative team from Road to Singapore. Screenwriters Frank Butler and Don Hartman again took an old script, originally titled Find Colonel Fawcett, and repurposed it for Hope, Crosby, and Lamour. Director Victor Schertzinger was back too, along with lyricist Johnny Burke—though teamed this time with a new composer, Jimmy Van Heusen.
The film was shot in November and December of 1940, and the set was the usual mix of chaos and camaraderie. The impish Barney Dean would shuttle back and forth between the stars, feeding them new lines. Lamour (whom Bob and Bing nicknamed Mother because of her habit of adopting young actresses on the set) tried to keep up with the mayhem, getting a makeup man to black out two of her teeth and startling Hope and Crosby with a gap-toothed smile in the middle of one scene. A studio press release claimed that when the film was screened for its first test audience, it got too many laughs—and seventy-two of them had to be removed, “so that the spectators would be able to follow the story.”
Road to Zanzibar was, indeed, a more rollicking trip than the first Road film—one of the best of all the Road pictures and the one that firmly established the winning format of the series. There is no cumbersome backstory for Crosby this time; he and Hope are a team of equals (Hope has moved up to second billing, ahead of Lamour) and are plunged into their adventures from the very first frame. Even before the first frame: over the opening credits we hear Crosby singing a Burke–Van Heusen ditty called “You Lucky People, You.” When the credits finish,
he is revealed to be singing on a carnival stage somewhere in Africa, trying to entice the locals to plunk down their money for a daredevil act called the Living Bullet.
That would be Hope. Dubbed Fearless Frazier, he has been stuffed inside a giant cannon, wearing a dorky crash helmet with a skull and crossbones on it. “I don’t mind being drafted, but not as ammunition,” Hope gripes when Crosby comes over to check on him. Scoffing at Hope’s fears, Bing fires off the cannon, sending Bob flying through a ring of fire. Actually, he’s hiding in a secret compartment inside the cannon, but the flaming dummy fired in his place sets the carnival tents ablaze, forcing Crosby and Hope to make a fast getaway, pursued by the police.
The next few minutes deftly establish the modus operandi of these carnival hucksters. There’s a quick travel montage, punctuated by town signposts and newspaper headlines: Hope as the Human Dynamo, dressed in superhero tights and holding a lightbulb in his mouth, as a jolt of electricity is pumped through him; Hope as the Human Bat, wearing the same dumb outfit but now with giant bat wings attached, getting ready to leap off a hundred-foot cliff. Finally, back in their tent—Hope now nursing a broken arm—Crosby has a giant fish tank carted in, with an octopus inside. His latest idea: Hope will put on a diver’s suit and wrestle the beast, “like you did with Bonzo the Bear.” Hope goes ballistic, and what follows is another of their bristling comedy duets:
BOB: “That thing’s got eight arms! I only got one little hand!”
BING: “What’s the matter with that?”
“I don’t like the odds.”
“Well, if it bothers you, we’ll snap a couple off him.”
“Those things are murderous! That ain’t spaghetti he’s wavin’. Besides, they’re poisonous. They spit ink!”
“All the better. You can wrestle him and write home at the same time.” (Then switching tacks, taunting.) “You’re really slippin’. I’m trying to make a big fellow outta you! A famous man! They’ll write books about you.”
“Yeah, and I know three words that won’t be in ’em: ripe old age.”
“Why, it’s a cinch, we’ll train him.”
“Train him? I’d look fine runnin’ around with a chair and a whip. You can’t train an octopus. They only know one thing: grab you quick and suck the blood outta you. How would I look goin’ around with no blood?”
After peering into the octopus tank, the pair turn toward each other and deliver the kicker in perfect unison: “Just the same.”
It’s a brilliant scene, capturing the essence of their comic relationship: always at odds, yet perfectly in sync; Hope the panicked prey, Crosby the cool predator. In Singapore, there was still a distance between them: Crosby the rich kid chafing under family obligations, Hope the gadabout friend who lures him to the South Seas. Now Crosby is the schemer, and Hope the one who wants to go home to Birch Falls. There’s a sadistic streak in Crosby’s cavalier treatment of his friend. When Hope convinces him to take the money they’ve earned and buy ship’s passage back home, Crosby instead squanders it on a phony diamond mine. Hope is so angry that he wants to end the friendship for good. “I’ve stood plenty from you,” he says, sincerely hurt, “but now we’re through, know what I mean?”
“Now look here, Junior,” says Crosby, a bit chastened and using the diminutive nickname that symbolizes their relationship. “We’ve been through a lot together since we were kids. We’ve been through thick and thin. I never figured it was your dough or my dough. I always thought it belonged to both of us. It was share and share alike.”
Hope, who has started to soften, suddenly perks up: “What about that blonde in Brooklyn?”
“Oh, you didn’t want a share in her. You wanted to be the whole corporation.”
“Yeah, and you wound up as the holding company.”
All the actors up their game in Road to Zanzibar. Lamour, cast as a meek native girl in the previous film, is funnier here, more integrated into the comedy action, playing an American who is running her own con game—posing as a girl about to be sold in a slave auction and then, after Hope and Crosby shell out to save her, splitting the proceeds with her friend (Una Merkel) and the bogus slave trader. Crosby too seems energized by the more sharply defined relationship with Hope and a more equal romantic partner in Lamour.
Hope is better than ever: faster, more animated, with a broader repertoire of double takes and panic reactions—true to his character even as the farcical shenanigans grow more outlandish. As they plunge deeper into the jungle, the boys are captured by cannibals and put inside giant birdcages to be eaten. (The stereotypical Hollywood treatment of African natives, alas, has to be overlooked.) Then Hope, to win his freedom, is forced to wrestle a gorilla, in a ludicrous but very funny slapstick climax: Bob and the beast trade wrestling holds while Bing distracts the ape by lighting matches and the gorilla keeps running over to blow them out.
The film introduces another signature element of the Road pictures: the first of Hope’s out-of-character, self-mocking asides to the camera. When two thugs barge into Hope and Crosby’s quarters, looking to reclaim the money Hope has bilked from them (by reselling the phony diamond mine), Bob and Bing do a reprise of their patty-cake routine from Road to Singapore. But just as they are about to throw their punches, the chief muscleman conks them both on the head. Hope, on the floor, looks up dazed: “He musta seen the picture!”
Time, using the film as the occasion for a cover story on Crosby, called it “some of the most uninhibited, daffy nonsense to hit the US screen since the heyday of Harold Lloyd.” Road to Zanzibar was another hit at the box office, and within weeks Paramount had announced plans for a third in the series: Road to Moscow. The politically charged destination would later be changed to the more benign Morocco, but Hope and Crosby clearly had a buddy act that could travel anywhere.
Hope’s next film, Caught in the Draft, was ginned up quickly, to capitalize on the vogue for military comedies in the wake of the reinstatement of the draft in September 1940. (Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates, released in January, beat Hope’s film to the theaters and was a big hit.) Based on an idea by producer Buddy DeSylva and a script by Harry Tugend, it casts Hope as Don Bolton, a vain Hollywood actor who stars in war pictures but is scared to death of gunshots. To evade the draft, he decides to get married and sets his sights on a gruff army colonel’s daughter, played by Dorothy Lamour. When she questions his patriotism, Hope concocts a scheme to “enlist” with a fake recruiting officer, played by an actor he’s hired. But the plan backfires when Hope enlists with an actual recruiting sergeant by mistake and winds up in the army for real.
As a pampered, self-centered movie star, Hope was playing more to type than he was probably ready to admit. Caught in the Draft was shot during January and February of 1941 and suffered many delays because of bad weather. When the skies finally cleared, director David Butler—a portly, easygoing veteran of Shirley Temple films, working with Hope for the first time—scheduled a key scene to be shot in the afternoon in Malibu. Driving to the location with his makeup man, Hope decided to stop off and see some property he was thinking of buying. They misjudged the time, and when Hope finally got to the set, the light was nearly gone and Butler was furious. “I thought David was going to knife me,” said Hope. They finished the scene with the help of lights, and Butler apparently forgave him—he did three more films with Hope and became one of his favorite directors—but he wasn’t the last director to learn that working around Hope’s schedule could be a challenge.
As a service comedy, Caught in the Draft is merely serviceable, putting Hope through a predictable gauntlet of army indignities: peeling potatoes, pulling guard duty, trying to overcome his nerves at the rifle range. But Hope gives the character some real dimension and empathy, as he sucks it up and tries to prove—to his fellow soldiers, to Lamour and her father, and most of all to himself—that he’s not a coward and a bumbler. After he loses control of a tank and crashes it into the colonel’s car, there’s something touching abo
ut the way Hope surveys the wreckage, smartly salutes, and issues a crisp apology: “I’m terribly sorry about the car, sir. I hope you haven’t kept up the payments.”
Caught in the Draft opened in June 1941 to terrific business. On July 4, it set an all-time box-office record for a matinee at New York’s Paramount Theater. With patriotic sentiment growing and broader slapstick comedies making a comeback, supplanting the more refined drawing-room comedies of the 1930s, Hope’s film was perfectly pitched to the mood of the country. It earned $2.2 million at the box office, more than any other Hope film yet.
Hope’s Hollywood winning streak continued with his next film, Nothing But the Truth, released in October. Directed by Elliott Nugent (who, after The Cat and the Canary, had taken a year off from Hollywood to star on Broadway in James Thurber’s The Male Animal), it gives Hope another chance to show off his maturing skills as a comic actor. Once again he gives a farcical character some human dimension, playing a shallow egotist who discovers unknown reserves of courage and moral fiber.
Hope plays a stockbroker who goes to work for a tony Miami brokerage firm. On his first day on the job he arrives in a dapper white suit, accompanied by a valet and looking forward to a cushy job. But he balks when his first assignment is to sell unsuspecting customers a worthless mining stock. After a debate with his colleagues over whether it’s okay to tell “necessary lies” to do business, Hope makes a bet that he can tell nothing but the truth for twenty-four hours. This puts him in a predictable series of tight spots. At a dinner party aboard the company yacht, he has to bite his tongue to avoid offending the high-society guests at the table, including his boss’s pretty niece (Paulette Goddard, for once unaccompanied by spooks). His jutting chin never looked so defiant, or so vulnerable, as he tries to navigate the polite conversation without losing the bet.
Hope: Entertainer of the Century Page 19