Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  (The GIs weren’t the only problem for Thomas. She also had to fend off advances from Colonna, until Hope stepped in to help. “Bob would tell people, ‘This is my girl.’ I was not Bob’s girl, but he did that for my protection.” When she got back to the States, Thomas made a point of assuring Dolores that any rumors about them weren’t true. Dolores was satisfied. “Honey, I know what you’re like,” she said. “I’ve seen you in church.”)

  The few film clips from his Pacific tour show how confident and charismatic Hope was onstage—tanned, often chewing gum, hair slightly mussed, as deft a straight man as he was a gagster. He and Romano had an easy, bantering relationship, doing patter songs together or parodies of the Ink Spots along with Colonna. Hope matched dance steps with Thomas, whose skimpy outfits and knockout figure always got a big reaction. Said Hope, introducing her to the crowd, “I just want you boys to see what you’re fighting for.”

  The sex was never far from the surface, but Hope somehow made it seem innocent and wholesome. When Langford, who would close the show with some rewritten lyrics to “Thanks for the Memory,” got to the lines “I wish that I could kiss / Each and every one of you,” Hope stepped up to the microphone and cried, in mock-horror, “You want to get us trampled to death?” For men trying to survive grueling conditions in lonely outposts, sometimes days away from battle, it must have been marvelous.

  After six weeks of island hopping, the troupe flew to Australia for a few days of shows. There, they had their closest call of the trip. Flying from Brisbane to Sydney, Hope asked the pilot of the Catalina seaplane if he could take the controls. While the plane was on automatic pilot, one engine conked out and the plane began dipping. Patty Thomas was looking out the window and saw black smoke. “Hey, Dad, I think we’re in trouble,” she said to Hope. “We’re only working on one propeller!” The pilot hurried back to the cockpit and ordered the passengers to jettison whatever they could—luggage, souvenirs, cases of liquor. Barney Dean, who was petrified of plane flights even in the best of circumstances, told Hope to dump his wallet, since it was the heaviest thing on the plane.

  The pilot located a small body of water near the village of Laurieton and maneuvered the seaplane to an emergency landing, skidding to a stop on a sandbar. A fisherman saw them and rowed over to rescue them. The first thing he asked for was some American cigarettes. Hope and his troupe did a show that night at the local dance hall in gratitude. The crash landing made headlines all over Australia, as well as back in the United States. When Hope flew the next day to Sydney, a mob of thousands was there to greet him at the hotel, pressing in so hard that Hope had to be rescued by the military police.

  After Australia, Hope and his troupe continued on to Hollandia, New Guinea, recently recaptured from the Japanese. During the day they did a show for twenty thousand troops, the biggest crowd Hope had ever entertained in a war zone, and at night did a second show for five thousand Seabees. Then they hopped onto PT boats to entertain in the tiny Woendi islands. Among those in the audience, Hope learned years later, was a PT boat captain named John F. Kennedy.

  The Pacific tour generated nearly as much attention back home as Hope’s tour of Europe and North Africa had the year before. King Features, the Hearst newspaper syndicate, asked Hope if he would send back some dispatches from his trip, and midway through the tour (with help from a war correspondent, Frank Robertson, he met in Australia) Hope turned out several newspaper columns recounting his experiences. The War Department nixed Pepsodent’s request to let Hope broadcast his radio show from the trip. But on August 12, he hosted a special NBC broadcast from a naval hospital “somewhere in the South Pacific.” After joking about the bug-infested islands and harrowing plane flights (“It was so rough the automatic pilot bailed out”), Hope concluded with a sober tribute to the men he had visited, and an appeal to the nation to pull together for final victory:

  Sure, a lot of citizens in the States have it pretty tough, with the rationing of meat, shoes, gasoline, and other items. But we’ve been deprived of these things while at home. How’d you like to be deprived of these things while crouched in a foxhole, ducking that lead with your initials on it? Where a bottle of Coke or a beer is a luxury, and hot water and linen are a dim memory, and your bathroom just ain’t. . . . We’ve seen kids smile for the last time, and other boys spending long, monotonous, pain-filled hours fighting for their lives, after fighting for yours. Ladies and gentlemen, it might surprise you to know that these boys, who have made the sacrifice, are also buying bonds. Think it over.

  Throughout the war, President Roosevelt had sought to convince the nation that the battles overseas and the war effort back home, from recycling rubber to buying war bonds, were inextricable, all part of the same great national crusade. Hope, with his blunt, no-nonsense wartime prose, brought that message home like no one else.

  The long trip back to the United States went through Wake Island and took fifty hours. In all, Hope’s Pacific tour had encompassed thirty thousand miles and 150 shows in eight weeks. Arriving in Burbank on Saturday, September 2, at the Lockheed Air Terminal, Hope was welcomed home by Dolores and the kids, along with a gaggle of reporters and photographers. His bags were filled with souvenirs of the trip—Japanese swords and guns, a native chieftain’s cane. Four-year-old Tony greeted his father, “Good-bye, Daddy.” Dolores had to explain: “He’s so used to seeing Bob going away, he can’t get used to his coming home.”

  • • •

  Though his wartime tours were a high point of his performing life and a mission he passionately believed in, they were a financial sacrifice for Hope. The USO paid its performers only a nominal amount, and by spending two months out of the summer entertaining the troops overseas, Hope was giving up a lot of potentially lucrative paydays. Still, he was one of Hollywood’s top earners in these years. He was making $100,000 per picture, and that, combined with his radio show, stage appearances, and other ventures, brought his income close to $1 million a year. But Hope was chafing under the three-picture-a-year pace that Paramount was keeping him on—and was dismayed that so much of the money he made was going to the government in taxes.

  His lawyer, Martin Gang, suggested a creative solution. Hope could improve his bottom line, Gang said, by setting up his own production company and, instead of getting a salary, taking a share of the profits from his films, thus allowing him to pay taxes at the lower corporate rate. Hope liked the idea and took Paramount chief Y. Frank Freeman to lunch to propose it. Freeman, a gentlemanly Southerner, listened politely, but refused flatly: “I don’t see how we can let you do that, Bob.”

  Hope responded by going on strike. He refused to do the next two films that Paramount had lined up for him: a cameo appearance in Duffy’s Tavern (an all-star screen version of the popular radio series) and a starring role, with Paulette Goddard, in a film called My Favorite Brunette. When Hope didn’t show up for the scheduled first day of shooting on Brunette, on Monday, November 6, 1944, the studio suspended him.

  Hope quickly took charge of the spin, claiming that he was suspending the studio. He was too busy with his war-related work, he said, to do three films a year for Paramount. “Just now I’ve been to Toronto, New York, Akron, Chicago, and Topeka—all war-benefit appearances,” he told a reporter. “In the next month I do six more shows—three in Chicago and one each in Atlanta, Cleveland, and Independence, Kansas. . . . And I’ve got five or ten wires on my desk, asking me to give shows at other service camps along the way. These things are important. There are thousands of kids waiting there.” In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he added, “I’m not underrating the importance of motion pictures to a career. But there is a big horizon to the present situation that has to be recognized. Now is the time above all others to give to the war effort, and if what entertainers do is helpful and morale building, then this is the time for them to concentrate on that sort of helpfulness.”

  It was a shrewd appeal to patriotism in what was essentially a contract dispute. For
six months there was a stalemate, as Hope refused to work. My Favorite Brunette was shelved. (Hope made a picture with the same title three years later, but with a different script and another costar, Dorothy Lamour.) Road to Utopia, which had finished shooting in February 1944, was held back from release, ostensibly because Paramount had a logjam of wartime films. Moviegoers were about to experience something they hadn’t since Hope made his feature-film debut in The Big Broadcast of 1938: after the release of The Princess and the Pirate in the fall of 1944, more than a year passed without a Bob Hope picture.

  While Hope was fighting with his movie studio, he was embroiled in a different sort of dispute over his radio program. In November 1944 an editorial in the Pilot, the weekly newspaper of Boston’s Roman Catholic archdiocese, raised objections to the sexually suggestive jokes that Hope was doing for his military audiences. The editorial called Hope’s material “artful filth,” claiming it encouraged promiscuity among married servicemen and put lewd thoughts into the heads of young, impressionable ones. “Some of the servicemen are boys barely past adolescence,” the Catholic paper said. “Their mothers knew that they were delivering their cherished sons to danger of death. They accepted that. But they never supposed that their boys would be exposed to ‘entertainment’ which might ruin their souls.”

  Battles over Hope’s allegedly lewd material had been going on for years, though mostly behind closed doors. Notes from a 1942 meeting of NBC executives revealed that serious consideration was given to pulling Hope’s show from the air after complaints from several New England stations about his off-color jokes. One NBC executive even proposed leaking news of the stations’ complaints to the press, to pressure Hope and other radio comics to tone down their material:

  I think if we came out with some publicity, stating that 11 New England stations threaten to cancel a certain program of a certain well-known comedian and give the reasons for it, you are not hurting the comedian and you are making four or five of them [radio comedians] sit up and take notice, why then you are drawing first blood in this and they are on the defensive. And I don’t know that [CBS] would be willing to take a show that we threw off the air or which we cancelled because we wouldn’t go for stuff which we regarded as being lewd.

  There’s no evidence NBC came close to acting on this rather outlandish suggestion. But the Catholic complaints, aired in public, presented a more delicate problem for Hope. “I think it is only fair to me to point out that if my shows were offensive,” he responded carefully, “I could hardly have reached the position of where a great nationwide audience hears my radio program regularly, considering what public taste means.” The controversy percolated for several weeks. Another Catholic paper, Chicago’s Novena Notes, published the results of a poll of ten thousand readers, who voted Hope the entertainer who “most consistently violates” Christian principles. (Milton Berle was second.) Both supporters and foes inundated Hope with letters. (“Risqué stories—phooey!” said one defender. “I’ll bet that editor loves them.”) Boxoffice magazine came to his defense, declaring the attacks “as unfair a charge against a great entertainer and a good American as has been treated to printer’s ink in many years.” In the end, the campaign made little dent in Hope’s enormous popularity. For the 1944–45 season, The Pepsodent Show finished first in the Hooper ratings by its biggest margin ever—drawing 34.1 percent of the radio audience, more than 3 points higher than the show in second place, Fibber McGee and Molly.

  The only thing that could possibly slow down the Bob Hope juggernaut was his health. In May 1944 he had to take off five days for an eye operation—its exact nature unclear, but possibly the first sign of the eye problems that would plague him in later years. In January 1945 Hope’s doctor, Hugh Strathearn, raised concerns about an electrocardiogram that, while in the normal range, “showed that you have been under a terrific strain, as far as your heart muscles are concerned.” In a letter to Hope, who was traveling, the doctor added, “I do not feel that this condition is serious at this time, but I do think that it would be wise for you to plan to cut down on some of the activities which keep you under a nervous tension, and take a good rest when you come back to California. . . . After all, no human being can stand the strain that you must have been under the past few years.”

  Yet he seemed incapable of cutting back. In January 1945, Hope traveled East for several war-related benefits and to accept the Gold Medal of Achievement from Philadelphia’s Poor Richard Club. He did more shows for Armed Forces Radio, including a celebrated musical parody of Dick Tracy for Command Performance, with an all-star cast that included Bing Crosby, Jimmy Durante, Judy Garland, and Dinah Shore (Hope played Flattop). He even became a newspaper columnist.

  After seeing the columns that he had sent back from his 1944 Pacific tour for the Hearst syndicate, William Randolph Hearst personally urged Hope to continue them when he returned. Now Hope (meaning his writers, of course) was turning out a five-day-a-week column called It Says Here, with breezy observations on everything from buying tires and picking out a Christmas tree to visiting a veterans’ hospital in Atlanta. More than seventy newspapers picked up the column, and Hope got 50 percent of the gross proceeds. At a time when several other Hollywood stars, such as Orson Welles and Gracie Allen, were experimenting with newspaper columns, Hope’s was, as usual, the most successful, and it continued for several years after the war, until he walked away from it in the early 1950s.

  On March 15, 1945, Hope returned to host the Academy Awards ceremony, after a year off. (Jack Benny had replaced him for the 1944 awards, explaining, “I’m here through the courtesy of Bob Hope’s having a bad cold.”) The event was no longer a banquet, but now took place at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and for the first time it was broadcast nationally, by ABC radio. Hope, who took over the show after director John Cromwell handled some of the early awards, was in fine form throughout. When eight-year-old Margaret O’Brien was given a special Oscar, Hope lifted her up so she could reach the radio microphone. After holding her for a few seconds, he quipped, “Would you hurry and grow up, please?” When Paramount’s production chief Buddy DeSylva came up to accept the Best Picture award for Going My Way, Hope got down on his hands and knees, pulled out a handkerchief, and started shining DeSylva’s shoes—a reference to the star’s well-publicized dispute with the studio. When his friend Bing Crosby won the Best Actor award for Going My Way, Hope cracked that Crosby winning an Oscar was “like Sam Goldwyn lecturing at Oxford.” But Hope got an award too—his second honorary one, a life membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, presented to him by Walter Wanger. “I guess I get the consolation prize,” Hope said.

  The impasse with Paramount came to an end on May 6, 1945, when Hope signed a new seven-year contract that allowed him to set up his own production company. Hope Enterprises, the new company, was allowed to produce one film a year on its own and to partner with Paramount on the rest. A few stars—notably James Cagney and Bing Crosby—had already set up similar production companies. But Hope’s very public victory in his battle with Paramount was considered a watershed. “When a star of Hope’s stature announces he doesn’t want to work for nothing, who can blame him?” wrote Florabel Muir in the New York Daily Mirror. “Which is why we are going to see more and more top stars going as independent as they can.” And they did. Over the next decade more top actors such as Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas started their own production companies, and by the 1980s nearly every major star in Hollywood had a production deal modeled on the one that Hope set up in 1945.

  Before returning to the Paramount lot, however, Hope had more war work to do. World events were moving swiftly. On April 12, President Roosevelt died suddenly from a brain hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia. Hope gave up five minutes of airtime on his show the following Tuesday for an address to the nation by the new president, Harry Truman. On April 30, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, and a week later Germany surrendered unconditionally, ending the wa
r in Europe. Yet Hope pressed on. On May 12 he was in Washington to host a three-hour NBC radio show kicking off another war bond drive. Afterward, Hope got a tour of the White House from President Truman and did a show for the new first family. Hope finished his radio season on the road, then prepared for one last wartime tour—to entertain the American troops still in Europe, now an occupying force itching to come home.

  One familiar companion was missing. Frances Langford had parlayed her wartime popularity into a summer radio show of her own (after a legal battle with Pepsodent, which claimed she was exclusively bound to Hope’s show) and couldn’t join him on the tour. In her place, Hope brought along a pinup-pretty, redheaded singer named Gale Robbins, along with Colonna, Romano, Patty Thomas, and Jack Pepper. With fewer restrictions on the size of his troupe, Hope also added two more singer-musicians, June Bruner and Ruth Denas, and even a writer, Roger Price.

  They took the slow route to Europe this time, sailing aboard the Queen Mary—the ship Hope had last taken in 1939, when the first guns of World War II were sounding. They visited air bases in England and did a show for ten thousand GIs at London’s Albert Hall, then went to Paris, which was crawling with American entertainers, from Mickey Rooney to Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Hope entertained the 438th Troop Carrier Group in Amiens, near the site of the Normandy landing, then headed south to Arles and Marseille. He was emceeing an all-star benefit at a soccer park in Nice when he spotted Maurice Chevalier in the audience. The French star had drawn harsh criticism for cooperating with the German-backed Vichy government during the war. But when Hope called him to the stage, the former Paramount star got a warm reception and sang a medley of his songs. Chevalier never forgot Hope’s kindness.