In overhauling his show, Hope also streamlined his working process. His staff of writers was downsized from a dozen to just six, working in three teams. There was more division of labor: rather than having each team write a draft of every sketch (Hope would then mix and match the best material), each sketch was now assigned to just one writing team. All the writers still contributed to the monologue, which drew the lion’s share of Hope’s attention. Every week he would suggest five or six topics, and each writing team would turn out a dozen jokes or more for each. Hope would then assemble the writers in his wood-paneled office—now located in a new office wing, which was added to the Toluca Lake house in 1948—and go through the resulting pile of a couple of hundred jokes. He would put a check next to his favorites; read over them a second time and put a cross through the check for the ones he liked best; and, on a third read-through, draw a circle around the best of those. The final selections would then literally be cut into strips and spread out on the floor or a pool table, so they could be put in final order.
“He was trying something quite novel for him,” said Larry Gelbart, one of the new writers who joined the staff in 1948. “He was used to having a platoon of writers and didn’t enjoy a particularly good reputation among writers. But he was terrific with us. He was a great editor. He knew what he should do and knew what he shouldn’t do. He cared about the rest of the show, but nothing received the personal attention and that kind of involvement that the monologue did.”
Despite his reputation for cheapness, Hope paid his top writers well. Gelbart and his partner Larry Marks, who had worked together previously on the radio show Duffy’s Tavern, started out at $750 a week and worked their way up to $1,250. If Hope could get away with less, he did. Mort Lachman, an aspiring journalist from Seattle who joined the staff as an apprentice in 1947, started at just $75 a week. The writers were on call for anything Hope needed—monologues for his personal appearances, newspaper and magazine articles that carried Hope’s byline, punching-up duty on his movie scripts. At almost any hour of the day or night Hope might call with a request for a new joke—“I need a bigger kid for the finish”—or to summon them for a meeting in the morning: “Ten o’clock. Tomorrow. My house. Bring your own orange juice.”
Hope kept a close eye on every aspect of the show, and that included the freebies that the writers often got from companies in return for plugs on the air. “In those days there were product payoffs,” said Si Rose, another young writer who joined the staff in 1948. “We’d get a General Electric gag on, and one of us would get a refrigerator. Bob found out and got in on the deal. Or a script would have a line about a hotel, and he would make it a line about a specific hotel in Palm Springs. He didn’t need any of this stuff. But he was greedy. He wanted in on everything.”
For all his demands, he was not a difficult boss, and most of the writers enjoyed working for him. But his ego needed tending. “He was demanding, but not temperamental,” said Gelbart. “He only got angry with me twice. Once I made a joke about his nose. That was personal, and he took it as such. Then one day we were writing a monologue for the opening at Santa Anita racetrack, and I wrote three lousy jokes: ‘My horse is so old, they’re betting him to win, place, and live.’ Hope picked ’em, and I said, ‘You’re kidding! It’s gonna sound like a goddamn Hope monologue!’ He really got pissed.”
Day, his new singer, found Hope a “joyous man to be around. He radiated good cheer.” But she was bothered by the sycophantic treatment by his underlings. After each broadcast, she wrote in her memoir:
Bob’s staff would circle around him and tell him what a dynamite show it was. Week after week they’d squeal with delight after every show and Bob preened in the glow of their hyperbole. . . . I knew very well that some of those shows were quite awful. Allegedly funny lines that weren’t funny at all. And I couldn’t believe that Bob, wise about show business as he is, didn’t know it—but I guess it was easier for him to defer his judgment to the uncritical accolades of his aides.
As the ego got puffed up, so did the sense of entitlement, especially when it came to women. The writers had to tolerate Hope’s many sexual escapades, which he felt little need to hide. “When we traveled on the road, we’d always see a gal with him,” said Rose. “We’d laugh because she often didn’t even have a bedroom; she’d be in a cot. Or we’d see her riding on the train when we were going on a radio tour. The miracle of the century is how he never got caught.”
Some in Hope’s entourage joined in the fun, but others were put off by it. On a trip to New York City with Hope, Rose once walked into the star’s hotel room and found an “orgy” under way. “Broads all over the place,” Rose recalled. “Some of the guys are participating. Bob’s eating ice cream. One of his assistants is on the floor boffing this girl. It was revolting. Ugly stuff.” Rose left and returned to his hotel room, joining his wife in bed. A few minutes later, the phone rang. Assuming it was Hope, Rose told his wife to answer and say he was out. She picked up the phone, heard the familiar voice, and said, “I thought he was with you, Bob.” Hope didn’t skip a beat: “Oh, he must be in one of the other rooms. I’ll find him.”
It became a famous anecdote in Hollywood comedy circles, repeated often—though with varying details, attributed to different writers, and with the orgy left out. But the point was always the same: Hope, hearing a wife say she didn’t know where her husband was, automatically assumed he was tomcatting around—and instinctively covered for him, as his writers so often did for him.
• • •
The Paleface was shot in the late summer of 1947, but Paramount waited more than a year to release it, until just before Christmas in 1948. The studio had come up with the idea of doing a Western comedy teaming Hope with Jane Russell, the buxom brunette who had made an R-rated screen debut in Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw. Russell—who had done only one other film, a bomb called Young Widow, also for Hughes—was forever grateful to Hope for giving her a chance to show off her comedy talents, and to escape the mercurial, director-devouring Hughes. His films took months to shoot; on Hope’s set, “they did one take, and if it worked, fine. If not they did two,” Russell recalled. “I thought I had died and gone to heaven.” Even Hope’s lackadaisical working style was refreshing. One afternoon, as director Norman Z. McLeod was getting ready to shoot a scene, Hope suddenly announced he was through for the day and left for a golf game. The soft-spoken McLeod waited until the star was across the soundstage and out of hearing, then commanded, in a voice barely above a whisper, “Bob, you get back here!” Russell and the crew cracked up.
The movie had a hit song before it even opened. Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, Paramount songwriters who had done the music for Monsieur Beaucaire and My Favorite Brunette, were asked to write a song for Hope, playing a frontier dentist named “Painless” Peter Potter, to sing to Russell, as Calamity Jane. They came up with the bouncy “Buttons and Bows,” a comic lament for the delights of the “civilized” East, set to the clip-clop of a horse-drawn wagon. Impatient over the long delay before the film’s release, Livingston and Evans got Dinah Shore to record it for Capitol, and the song was No. 1 weeks before the film opened. (It later won an Oscar for Best Song.) Hope’s rendition, tossed off in a mock-Western twang as he sits on a buckboard playing a concertina—“Don’t bury me on this prairie / Take me where the cee-ment grows . . .”—is understated and almost anticlimactic, but nonetheless charming.
The Paleface was a departure from Hope’s previous films. Shot in candy-colored Technicolor, it is bigger and broader, full of burlesqued gunfights and slapstick chases. Hope’s familiar nervous Nellie character seems quite at home in the land of cowboys and Indians, quaking in his boots one minute (“You’re not afraid are you?” “No, I can always get another scalp”), swaggering around town the next when he thinks he’s single-handedly fought off an Indian attack (Russell has done all the shooting). But The Paleface hits a few discordant notes that foreshadow a turn in Hope’s film comedy.
/> With a script by Edmund Hartmann (a Hope first-timer who had written for Abbott and Costello), Frank Tashlin (the former cartoon director who had worked on Monsieur Beaucaire), and Hope’s former radio writer Jack Rose, the laughs often depend on physical gags that are little particularized to Hope. In one running gag, for instance, Hope grabs the reins of his wagon and is yanked out when the horses bolt, dragged along the ground like a rag doll. It’s both jarring and a little unseemly; it could just as well come from a Three Stooges short. In another scene, Hope and Russell get married in a quickie ceremony. As they repeat their vows, the camera remains fixed on the couple’s hands—Bob fumbling with the ring, putting it on the wrong finger. After the minister pronounces them man and wife, he says, “And now the kiss.” There is a loud offscreen smooch. “Not me, you fool!” says the minister. It gets a laugh—but it’s pure, untethered nonsense. No matter how foolish or flustered a Hope character might be at the altar, he would never kiss the minister by mistake.
Still, the Western burlesque was a good showcase for Hope, and most of the critics loved the film. “A triumphant travesty,” raved Howard Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune. “There could scarcely be a more joyful show for the Yule season.” The Paleface grossed $7 million at the box office, a new record high for Hope.
While he was gearing up for the Christmas release of The Paleface, Hope got a phone call that would alter the course of his career and revive his commitment to a mission that had seemingly ended with the war. Stuart Symington, secretary of the Air Force and a sometime golfing buddy, asked if Hope would make a Christmas trip to entertain US troops taking part in the Berlin airlift.
The former German capital—partitioned by the Allies after the war, but surrounded by Soviet-controlled East Germany—had been under a Soviet-imposed blockade since the spring, with all road and rail access cut off. In response, Britain and the United States launched a daily airlift to keep the city supplied with food and other essential supplies. Symington told Hope that President Truman thought a delegation of entertainers at Christmas would be an important morale boost and a show of support from back home.
Though he had been planning to take Dolores and the kids to Lake Tahoe for the holidays, Hope had little trouble saying yes. He quickly put together a troupe of entertainers, including most of his radio cast (minus Day, who had a film commitment), singer Jane Harvey, songwriter Irving Berlin, radio personality Jinx Falkenberg, and the Radio City Rockettes. Vice President–elect Alben Barkley and General Jimmy Doolittle also came along, courtesy of the US government, and so did Dolores—leaving the kids at home for Christmas.
They left a few days before Christmas, made a refueling stop at the US air base at Burtonwood, England, and then flew to Wiesbaden, West Germany, the embarkation point for planes carrying supplies into Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport. The group was scheduled to fly to Berlin on Christmas morning, but the weather looked bad, so Hope and a few members of his troupe were rushed onto an earlier flight there on Christmas Eve. The rest of the group (including Dolores, who went to Christmas mass at 5:30 a.m., driven there in an Air Force jeep) flew in the next morning on a series of cargo flights. “It was an adventure,” said Si Rose, one of three writers Hope brought along. “We were flying on a broken-down C-47. There was a board listing all the things that were wrong with the plane. We were standing up, not strapped in or anything, holding on to rods. We were all cargo.”
In frigid Berlin, Hope went to meet incoming airlift pilots, before doing a big show at the Titania Palast theater, an old vaudeville house. He talked about his flight through the tightly guarded air corridor: “Soviet planes started to buzz us, but the first Russian pilot took one look at me and said, ‘They’re okay—look at the hammerhead and sickle.’ ” Barkley, a former senator from Kentucky, told the airmen trying to outlast the Russian blockade that they were taking part in “the greatest filibuster of all times.” Irving Berlin closed the show by singing “White Christmas.”
General Lucius Clay had an after-party at his West Berlin quarters for Hope and visiting dignitaries, among them Walter Bedell Smith, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Riding back to the hotel with Dolores, Hope insisted on making one more stop. An Army sergeant who hosted a radio show in Berlin had asked if Hope would drop by the studio for an interview. Though it was after midnight, Hope asked his driver to find the radio station. With gasoline in short supply in Berlin, the car ran out of fuel a few blocks from their destination—forcing Bob, Dolores, and the driver, flashlight in hand, to trudge the last few blocks in the snow to the station, where Hope took over the mike from the startled DJ.
Hope and company returned to Wiesbaden and made stops in London and Paris before flying back to New York on New Year’s Eve. The following May the Soviets lifted the blockade, ending one of the first major confrontations of the Cold War. Hope had played his part.
• • •
Just a few days after returning from Berlin, Hope began a busy stretch of domestic travel. In January and February of 1949, he and his radio cast went on a thirty-three-day, thirty-four-city tour across the South, East, and Midwest, playing big venues such as the Boston Garden and the Orange Bowl in Miami. He was back on the road in April for another, even more jam-packed tour—twenty-one cities in just over two weeks. He and his troupe flew from city to city aboard a United Airlines DC-6. At the time such short-hop air travel was rare for entertainers, and United used Hope’s tour as a promotional tool. “Here is a perfect example of how air travel opens new opportunities for the entire show business,” read an ad in Variety, accompanied by a photo of Hope posing with United pilots.
In her memoir, Doris Day, who suffered from stage fright even in the best of circumstances, recalled the nerve-rattling flights and the hectic scenes on the ground when they landed:
We often flew through storms and turbulence that had me praying more than once. We made landings where I couldn’t see the airfield until I was on the ground; sometimes the pilot had to circle a few times to find the landing strip. Then when we thankfully got off the plane, there would invariably be a mob of people waiting at the bottom of the steps. Bob was first off and I was in back of him with my hands full of traveling gear; as his fans moved in and mobbed Bob, I’d always get clobbered by the backwash of his faithful, virtually shoved off the steps, and an hour or so later, still spooked by the harrowing airplane ride and the clobbering fans, I’d have to go out on the stage of whatever mammoth auditorium we were playing with my pipes in good condition and my personality bubbling. I really learned what the expression “tough it like a trouper” means.
Something else may have contributed to Day’s stress on the tour. Around the studio Hope liked to tease her with sexual banter—he called her “jut-butt”—but it may not have been entirely innocent. Hope claimed to a friend years later that he and Day had a brief romantic fling while they were touring together in 1949. If so, it was uncharacteristic of Hope, who usually avoided entanglements with his movie and radio costars, and it didn’t last long. When they returned home to Burbank, Dolores was at the airport to greet them, giving Bob an ostentatious welcome-home hug. According to Hope, Day saw the gesture as a wife’s symbolic marking of her territory, and she ended the relationship then and there. Day never commented on the alleged affair.
Not all of Hope’s extramarital activities were discreet. During a stop in Dallas in the spring of 1949, Hope met a blond twenty-one-year-old Universal starlet named Barbara Payton, and the two began a relationship that lasted for several months. According to Payton, one of Hollywood’s most notorious party girls, and her biographer, John O’Dowd, she followed Hope around the country, moved into a furnished apartment that he rented for her in Hollywood, and, when the affair ended in August, was paid off by Hope to keep quiet about it. If so, it didn’t stop Payton—whose film career was tainted by scandal and over by the mid-fifties—from selling her story to Confidential magazine in 1956, a rare breach in the wall of secrecy that surrounded Hope’s sex li
fe.
Hope’s 1949 personal-appearance tours were huge moneymakers for him, grossing a total of $870,000, of which Hope kept 75 percent. “You can’t make money like that on Broadway. You can’t make money like that anywhere,” Hope told John Crosby of the New York Herald Tribune. At a time when Hollywood was having anxiety attacks over the threat from television, Hope’s success was viewed as a heartening sign that movie stars could still be big draws with the public. “The Hope success should inspire some of our other better entertainers,” said the Hollywood Reporter, “to get a show together and go out, first, of course, to grab some good moola, but more important to hypo show business generally that now needs all the dynamite that can be blasted at the public to get them going back to the theaters.”
Between his radio show, his movie work, and his lucrative concert tours, Hope was probably earning more money than any other star in Hollywood. He was investing much of it in real estate. He also owned a stake in several broadcasting ventures, including DuMont Television and KOA radio in Denver. And in 1949, with his friend Crosby, he got into the oil business.
Years earlier, he and Crosby had met a Fort Worth oilman named Will Moncrief at a golf benefit in Texas. They stayed in touch, and in mid-1949 Moncrief cut them in on a deal to lease seventeen hundred acres of West Texas oil land. Hope put up $50,000, and another $50,000 when the first well came up dry, before they hit a gusher that was soon producing a thousand barrels a day. Hope, always a hands-on businessman, flew to Texas for a weekend in August to inspect the well. (Crosby, just as characteristically, stayed home fishing.) It was one of Hope’s shrewdest investments. When he and Crosby sold out in the early 1950s, each earned a windfall of $3.5 million.
Big money was still being tossed around in radio as well. In late 1948 and early 1949, CBS chairman William Paley launched a series of talent raids on rival NBC, offering lucrative contracts to lure away many of the network’s top comedy stars, including Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Red Skelton, and Burns and Allen. After he added Bing Crosby to his stable (hiring him away from ABC, where Bing had moved his radio show in 1946), Paley set his sights on Hope, envisioning a Hope-Crosby tandem airing back-to-back on CBS.
Hope: Entertainer of the Century Page 28