Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  Hope’s battles with the network got plenty of publicity, but didn’t do much to perk up a radio show that was beginning to sound a little tired. In the fall of 1946 Hope tried freshening up the old format with a new bandleader (Latin nightclub star Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball’s husband, who replaced Skinnay Ennis); a new sidekick, Vera Vague (another shrill, man-chasing spinster character, played by Barbara Jo Allen); and a few new comedy twists, such as a recurring bit in which Hope has conversations with his “conscience.” (It didn’t last long.) In a more important symbolic break with the wartime years, Hope said good-bye to the singer who had been identified with him for five years, Frances Langford, replacing her with a series of guest vocalists.

  But the following season even that mildly innovative spirit seemed to be gone. Arnaz was replaced by Les Brown and his more traditional big band, and the show’s formula was sounding increasingly stale and predictable: the weekly back-and-forth jousts with “Professor” Colonna; the man-chasing gags from Vera Vague; even the “Poor Miriam” musical jingles for Irium, the new whitening ingredient in Pepsodent—sung by a group called the Starlighters, which included a young Andy Williams.

  The critics were starting to grouse. “You could enjoy it if you had not heard it the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth times,” wrote the New York Times’ Jack Gould, reviewing the premiere of Hope’s ninth season, in September 1946. A year later, Variety was even more cutting. “Here’s the epitome of radio’s ‘sad saga of sameness,’ ” began its review of Hope’s season opener in 1947:

  Apparently it’s just too much to expect that Hope would veer an inch from his time-tested routine. His answer, it goes without saying, is: Why get out of the rut when there’s pay dirt in it? And top pay dirt at that! By Hooper’s count, too, Hope seems to be justified. His routine is apparently one of the things we fought the war for, like Ma’s apple pie. Question simply is: Who’s going to outlive the other: Hope or the listening public?

  Hope’s ratings were still strong (though no longer consistently No. 1), but he was encountering something he hadn’t since The Pepsodent Show first went on the air back in 1938: a growing sense that Hope was old hat.

  Hope’s relations with his sponsor were also deteriorating. Pepsodent chief Charles Luckman—now the president of Lever Brothers, the British conglomerate that had acquired the toothpaste company—was Hope’s original radio patron and considered himself a fan and a friend. But he and Hope were increasingly at odds—over Hope’s demands for more money (“I can tell the seasons of the year and the Crossley ratings just by the tone of Hope’s voice when he phones me for a raise,” Luckman said), his resistance to making changes in the show after the war, and more recently his constant traveling. Hope liked taking the show on the road, where he always got a great reception from the live audiences. But each location show cost about $25,000 more than a studio show, and Luckman thought it was getting too expensive.

  The travel issue came to a head in November 1947, when Hope was invited to attend the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth in London and to headline a gala for the royal family at the Odeon Theater. Luckman objected to the trip since it would take Hope away from the studio for three weeks. But Hope refused to cancel, promising to do his radio shows from London while he was away. Luckman’s fears were realized when the transatlantic crossing aboard the Queen Mary was delayed, and Hope had to miss the first week’s broadcast—the first time in ten years that Hope was a no-show on his own radio program. (Eddie Cantor replaced him, joined by an array of NBC guest stars, including Red Skelton, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Amos and Andy.)

  The London trip may have been a flash point for Pepsodent, but it was a triumph for Hope. He brought along Dolores, as well as three writers (among them Fred Williams, an alcoholic rapscallion who keeled over drunk in front of the royal family in the lobby of the Odeon Theater), and the Odeon show was a hit with the royal audience. Queen Elizabeth reportedly “laughed so hard at some of Bob’s cracking that she nearly split her seams.” After the show, Hope presented the royal family with a book of autographed photos of Hollywood stars.

  As Hope was leafing through the book, King George piped up, “Look at him. He’s hurrying to get to his own picture.”

  “Why not?” Hope replied. “It’s the prettiest.”

  “Is Bing’s autograph there too?”

  “Yes, but he doesn’t write. He just made three Xs.”

  The ad-lib session between Hope and King George made headlines around the world.

  While he was in London, Hope met with US Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who asked if Hope would make an impromptu trip to West Germany, to do some shows for US occupation forces there. Dolores objected that he was too exhausted, but Hope jumped at the chance to entertain his favorite audiences once again. He did several shows in Frankfurt and Bremerhaven for the troops, before his voice gave out and he had to cancel the last couple of appearances. He flew back to London, where he broadcast one more radio show before taking a flight back to New York. Dolores returned separately by ship.

  Hope was thrilled to be called into service by his country once again. Back in Los Angeles, he held a press conference to talk up his trip and urge more US aid to Europe. “The most important thing for us in America today is to maintain our friendship with the people of Europe,” he told reporters. “We have to support the Marshall Plan. This is a wonderful Shangri-la we’re living in over here, and we should share it with the Europeans before other forces move in and make them our enemies.”

  Hope’s political views were well in the mainstream internationalist spirit of the times. Though always a political conservative, Hope liked and admired President Truman—joking often about his fights with Congress, his Missouri roots, and his daughter Margaret’s musical ambitions. (The jokes about Margaret drew angry mail from some listeners, who thought Hope was disrespectful.) He was a strong anticommunist, but again hardly outside the mainstream in those early Cold War years, when fears of the Soviet threat were at a peak. “The Russians say they can’t do anything until they get international cooperation,” went a typical Hope joke. “International cooperation—that’s ‘Show us how to make the atom bomb and we’ll show you where New York City used to be.’ ”

  In the fall of 1947, when Congress was probing alleged Communist infiltration in Hollywood (an investigation that resulted in the blacklisting of the so-called Hollywood Ten), Hope took his show to Claremore, Oklahoma, the birthplace of Will Rogers. In paying tribute to the beloved political humorist, Hope did little to disguise his anti-Red sentiments: “The only sad thing about coming to Claremore,” he said, “is that Will Rogers isn’t here to say a few things about our troubled times with the tolerance and humor that made him an all-time great. ‘I see by the papers,’ he might have said, ‘they’ve uncovered a few Reds out in Hollywood. Personally I’ve never preferred my politics in Technicolor, and when boy meets girl in the movies, I like to have them riding on the Freedom Train.’ ”

  Hope was growing bolder in speaking out—cloaking himself in the unabashed patriotism of the war years, even as the world was growing more complicated. He was still groping for a role for himself in the postwar years, and fighting a perception that he and his radio show had not changed with the times.

  In one area, however, Hope’s audience was happy to see how little things had changed. Paramount had initially vowed that Road to Utopia, filmed in 1944 and released in early 1946, would be the last of the Road pictures. The movies were getting too expensive, and working around Hope’s and Crosby’s schedules too difficult. But the two stars wanted to continue, and they worked out a three-way coproduction deal with Paramount to film a fifth in the series, Road to Rio. Released at the end of 1947, it was another first-rate comedy, and one of the most successful of the whole series.

  With a financial stake in the film, Hope and Crosby were unusually businesslike on the set: no more extended lunch breaks or afternoons playing hooky on the gol
f course. “Bing and I hardly left the set, except to go to the men’s room,” said Hope. “At precisely sixty minutes after lunch was called, Bing would say, ‘All right, let’s get moving. What are we waiting for?’ ” Yet the film, directed by Norman Z. McLeod (whose comedy credits included two early Marx Brothers films and W. C. Fields’s masterpiece It’s a Gift), was a relatively elaborate production, with a large supporting cast that included the Andrews Sisters (who sing “You Don’t Have to Know the Language”) and the Wiere Brothers, doing a funny turn as a Brazilian street band impersonating American jazz musicians. Hope even threw in a part for his radio pal Colonna, who leads a cavalry charge that comes up empty in the film’s last reel.

  The boys, once again, are carnival entertainers, with Hope again conned by Crosby into performing a daredevil stunt, this time riding a bicycle across a high wire. (“You know, this picture could end right here,” he quips while hanging on for his life.) Bing and Bob stow away on a ship to Rio and meet Lamour, who shows a mysterious split personality: flirting with them seductively one minute and rejecting them coldly the next. Turns out she’s been hypnotized by her evil aunt (Gale Sondergaard) so that she will go through with an arranged marriage. “I found myself saying things I didn’t know why I was saying them,” she says, emerging from one of her hypnotic trances. Hope: “Why don’t you just run for Congress and leave us alone.”

  Hope is fast, funny, and fully engaged, nailing every exasperated reaction and outshining Crosby almost every step of the way. (In their song-and-dance routines, Hope shows off some still agile hoofing, while Crosby merely goes through the motions.) The film is the most polished and least manic of the Road pictures, with more care taken in setting up the story and the running gags. If Road to Utopia was Hope and Crosby’s Duck Soup—their surreal high point—Road to Rio is their Night at the Opera, the Road film for everyone. It took in $4.5 million at the box office—the top-grossing movie for all of 1947.

  The only sour note involved Lamour, who was upset when she found out the three-way production deal did not include her. “They could have considered a four-way split, but no one ever asked me,” she wrote in her memoir. “My feelings were hurt. (And, as it would prove later, so would my pocketbook.)” It confirmed her growing feeling that she was an unappreciated third wheel on the Road picture express, and she nursed the resentment for the rest of her life.

  Her relations with Hope remained friendly, if hardly close. (She and her husband, Bill Howard, lived nearby in Toluca Lake—“two blocks from his garbage entrance,” she liked to say.) But Crosby was openly disdainful of her, barely acknowledging her when they met at public events. “Crosby’s attitude toward Dorothy Lamour was deplorable,” said Frank Liberman, Hope’s longtime publicist. “He didn’t even try to hide his feelings about her in public. Bing felt that he and Hope were the mainstays of the Road pictures and that Dorothy was just ‘a dumb, lucky broad.’ ”

  Yet Crosby was aloof with a lot of people, and even Hope could feel dissed by him. On November 2, 1947, the Friars Club threw an all-star roast for Hope, with Jack Benny, George Burns, Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, and George Jessel among the stars on the dais. Crosby was supposed to be there too, but he didn’t show up. When reporters pressed him about it later, Crosby defended himself coolly: “My friendship with Bob doesn’t depend on appearing at testimonials for him.” Some said that Hope was hurt by the no-show, and he may well have been. Though he always had words of affection for Crosby in public, in private he was less charitable. Many years later, shortly after Crosby died, Hope was sitting in an NBC editing room, looking over film clips for a TV special he was preparing on their screen work together. Associate producer Marcia Lewis was startled when Hope turned to her and made a blunt admission:

  “You know, I never liked Bing. He was a son of a bitch.” In all their years of working together, Hope said, “He never had Dolores and me to dinner.”

  • • •

  The year 1948 marked a turning point for Hope on several career fronts. In the fall, he finally made a major overhaul of his radio show, the first since it went on the air in 1938. He starred in just one feature film during the calendar year, but it was an important one: The Paleface, his biggest box-office hit to date and a film that signaled a new direction for him on-screen, both for good and ill. And at the end of the year he was called on to entertain US troops overseas during an international crisis, launching a Christmas tradition that would define the rest of his career.

  On his way back from London in November 1947, Hope met with Pepsodent’s Luckman, and the two at least temporarily patched up their differences. Hope agreed to cut back on the show’s traveling and to make major changes for the following season. He also promised to steer clear of any more controversy over his material. “Bob is very much worried about the bad press he has been getting of late, and means to do everything he can to keep himself above criticism from here on in,” Hugh Davis, an executive at Pepsodent’s ad agency, Foote, Cone & Belding (the former Lord & Thomas), wrote in a memo. The critics’ gripes about the show were finally starting to be reflected in the ratings, which had fallen from first place to fifth for the 1947–48 season. Lever Brothers was reportedly close to dropping Hope altogether (though other sponsors, among them Campbell’s soup, were ready to snap him up). In the end, Lever decided to stick with Hope for another season, but switched products on him. Instead of Pepsodent, the brand he had been associated with for a decade, Hope would in the fall be pitching Swan soap, which Lever was promoting hard in an effort to catch the market leader, Ivory.

  Hope was hardly the only radio personality feeling pressure in 1948, the breakthrough year for television. The new medium, whose development had been put on hold during World War II, was making rapid progress in the first years after the war. Hope was an early pioneer, serving as host on January 22, 1947, of Los Angeles’s first commercial television broadcast, over Paramount-owned station KTLA. “This is Bob First-Commercial-Television-Broadcast Hope,” he said, opening the show in front of a makeshift curtain, with an industrial-size bank of cameras and klieg lights pointed at him, “telling you gals who’ve tuned in, and I want to make this emphatic, if my face isn’t handsome and debonair, please blame it on the static.” Only about five hundred TV sets were able to pick up the crude broadcast, which was sponsored by a local Lincoln-Mercury dealer and also featured such Paramount stars as Dorothy Lamour, William Bendix, and director Cecil B. DeMille.

  Hope, like most of radio’s other top stars, was holding back from taking a full plunge into TV. Although the new medium was gaining viewers fast, radio still had the bulk of the audience and the advertising dollars. It took an entertainer who had enjoyed little success on radio and thus had little to lose to be the groundbreaker. On Tuesday night, September 14, 1948, Milton Berle made his debut as host of a new weekly variety series on NBC-TV, the Texaco Star Theater. The show was an instant hit, igniting the sales of TV sets and launching a scramble by the four major TV networks—NBC, CBS, ABC, and DuMont—to roll out full schedules of national programming.

  On the very same Tuesday night that Berle made his TV debut, Hope introduced his revamped radio show for Swan soap. He had done a thorough housecleaning over the summer, hiring an almost entirely new writing staff, and dumping his two main sidekicks, Jerry Colonna and Barbara Jo Allen, as Vera Vague. (Colonna, who had been with Hope for ten years, was ready to leave and strike out on his own, according to his son Robert, but the parting must have been difficult, both for him and for Hope, who genuinely liked Colonna and valued his contribution to the show’s success.) Only Les Brown and his orchestra were kept on. Brown’s Band of Renown was known for its high-quality players and clean-cut image—no drugs, no drinking—and they were one of the few traditional big bands to survive much beyond World War II. Hope would keep the group, and their easygoing, unobtrusive bandleader, close by his side for virtually the rest of his career.

  At Brown’s urging, Hope also added a new singer to the show: Dor
is Day, who had sung with Brown’s band during the war (they had a hit recording of “Sentimental Journey”) and who replaced the guest vocalists who had filled in ever since Langford’s departure in 1946. Several other newcomers were added to the show, including Irene Ryan, the latest incarnation of the shrill, wisecracking spinster character that Hope was so fond of; a young baritone from Cleveland named Bill Ferrell; and a new announcer, Hy Averback. Even Hope’s signature opening monologue had a fresh coat of paint. Now it was repackaged as “Bob Hope’s Swan’s Eye View of the News,” with announcer Averback introducing each news headline ticker-tape style—Truman campaigns for reelection, Detroit unveils its new cars, the Soviets blockade Berlin—followed by a string of Hope jokes on the subject.

  The newly revamped Bob Hope show debuted on September 14 and was marginally improved. The writing was a little sharper, and Day’s addition was a big plus: she had a fresh, girlish soprano—in contrast to the smoky contraltos (Frances Langford, Dolores Reade) that Hope seemed to favor—and was a lively companion for Hope in sketches. Some reviewers noted his efforts to avoid stirring any controversy: “He is definitely out to remove any basis for criticism of the ‘color’ of his material,” wrote one, “even if it means bending over backwards to do so.”

  He was still cautious about political material. Hope did surprisingly little, for example, on the 1948 presidential race between Harry Truman and New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. But after Truman’s upset victory, Hope had plenty of fun with the pollsters (George Gallup’s reaction to the results, said Hope: “That’s the last time I take a house-to-house survey; from now on I’m gonna ask people”) and the surprised first family. “Now Margaret Truman has to go back to the White House,” Hope said. “And she had it all set to be the fourth Andrews sister.” His most memorable postelection quip, however, was the one-word telegram he sent to the White House on the morning after Truman’s victory. It read, simply, “Unpack.”