With a greater role in producing his own films, Hope grew bolder in throwing his weight around. Just before he left for Korea in October, Paramount screened his just-completed film, The Lemon Drop Kid, which the studio wanted to have ready for a Christmas release. But Hope was unhappy with several scenes, and he insisted that Frank Tashlin, who had helped punch up Monsieur Beaucaire, be brought in again for rewrites. This time Tashlin was also allowed to direct the new scenes—infuriating director Sidney Lanfield, who never forgave Hope for taking the film out of his hands. “He was the worst egomaniac I ever worked with,” Lanfield told author Lawrence Quirk, “a back-knifing son of a bitch, mean as sin. His way was the only way. I tried to buck him, and he took it out on me.”
Another sign of Hope’s growing power was the openness of his philandering. A tacit acceptance of Hollywood stars’ extramarital activities was standard operating procedure in that prefeminism era. But the ability of Hope, along with his army of publicists and protectors, to keep his very open affairs out of the press was a real achievement. When rumors of his relationship with Marilyn Maxwell were rampant during the filming of The Lemon Drop Kid, Hollywood gossip doyenne Louella Parsons devoted a column to dismissing them. “In an exclusive interview with Dolores Hope,” she wrote, “I have learned that there is absolutely no truth to the current rumors that Bob Hope and his leading lady, Marilyn Maxwell, are serious about each other just because they have been seen together so much.”
Keeping Hope’s womanizing under wraps was part of the job description for members of his entourage. Frank Liberman, a former studio publicist who began working for Hope in 1950, recalled an early conversation with Hope’s longtime agent Louis Shurr. “Our mission in life,” Shurr told him, “is to keep all news about fucking and sucking away from Dolores.” Mark Anthony, an old friend from Cleveland who later took charge of arranging Hope’s tours, as well as many of his assignations, said, “The boss knew a number of people, including newsmen, who were wise to his playing around on the side, but he counted on their loyalty to keep it quiet. When I told him he was pushing his luck, he would say, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and I figured if he didn’t, I wouldn’t.” Still, many in his inner circle were shocked at how brazenly Hope chased women. “You didn’t know him in his frisky days,” Charlie Lee, an acerbic British writer who joined Hope’s staff in 1950, confided years later to a younger writer. “If the guy had any class, he’d commit suicide.”
Dolores almost certainly knew about his sexual escapades, but she played the role of good wife to perfection. On the rare occasions when a reporter got near the subject, she would dance around it gracefully—though with more candor as the years went on. “I think he’s a great man,” she told Life magazine in 1971. “No person living has the kind of unspotted life that is the perfect example of clean living.” “If he’s had romances, I don’t know about it,” she told a Washington Star reporter in 1978. “I have read it in the paper. The paper loves to print things like that.” Yet asked if she thought Bob was “one hundred percent true-blue,” Dolores replied, “I doubt it. I think he’s perfectly human and average and all that.” When John Lahr raised the subject of Hope’s womanizing in a 1998 profile of Hope for the New Yorker, Dolores gave this sweetly accepting response: “It never bothered me because I thought I was better looking than anybody else.”
Clearly, she did what was needed to keep together a marriage that offered many compensations and was, in most other ways, sincerely close. She knew Bob was a rover from the start, she would tell people in later years, and simply made the best of it. “You can do anything you want,” she told him, “as long as you don’t bring any of it home.” Said Linda Hope, “I’m sure that my mother knew what was going on. And she just decided that he was worth going through whatever she had to go through, to have the life and be Mrs. Bob Hope. But I don’t think any of [the other women] had the significance to him that she did and that the family did. The stability, coming from a large family himself, was sort of an anchor that allowed him to go and do the kinds of things that he did.”
If there were tensions in the marriage, they were kept well hidden from outsiders. Rory Burke, who as a child spent a good deal of time at the Hope house, caught a rare glimpse of discord—a sarcastic crack from Dolores, a snappish response from Bob, and quick orders for the children to leave the room. Most of the time, however, Dolores maintained a brave front. “She had grace under fire,” said Burke. “She turned away from it. The main message was, you make your bed, you stay in it. If you’re Catholic, you never get divorced.”
Catholicism was Dolores’s refuge and solace. She attended mass once a day, sometimes more, at St. Charles Borromeo Church, down the street from their house in Toluca Lake. She raised money for Catholic charities and surrounded herself with men of the church (like another family, the Kennedys, whose friendship with Catholic prelates seemed a way of atoning for family indiscretions). She had a passion for decorating and channeled her energies into the Toluca Lake house, undertaking a series of renovations, which she would typically have carried out while Bob was traveling. He joked that he hated to go away because he never knew what the house would look like when he came back.
But he did go away, often. In the spring of 1951 he spent a full two months abroad, on a personal-appearance tour that took him to London, Ireland, France, and Germany. Dolores had gone with him on his three previous non-wartime trips to Europe—in 1939, 1947, and his 1948 Christmas trip to Berlin. But this time she stayed home. His traveling companion, instead, was his costar on the tour Marilyn Maxwell.
Hope’s intimate relationship with Maxwell was well-known to most of the people who worked with him. Writers traveling with Hope would find Maxwell in his hotel room when they met him there for meetings. On the road for a military-camp show, publicist Frank Liberman once saw Hope and Maxwell check in for the night at a cheap motel decorated with tepees and a neon sign reading SLEEP IN A WIGWAM TONIGHT. The two were together so often that people on the Paramount lot began referring to Maxwell as Mrs. Hope. For a time, according to some, she thought she might be.
Just how serious Hope was about Maxwell is hard to say. Twice married (she and her second husband, Andy McIntire, split in early 1951) and a former girlfriend of Frank Sinatra’s (who was said to be jealous when Hope took up with her), Maxwell was unusual among Hope’s girlfriends in being a high-profile leading lady, rather than one of the lesser known chorus girls, beauty queens, and showbiz wannabes he more typically hooked up with. Liberman, the publicist who helped cover up his affairs for many years, called Maxwell the second most serious of Hope’s many girlfriends. (First place went to Rosemarie Frankland, a British-born beauty queen Hope was involved with in the 1960s.) Maxwell was one girlfriend who could hold her own with him onstage: until their relationship ended in 1954 (when Maxwell married her third husband, TV writer Jerry Davis), she and Hope appeared together, on radio, TV, and the stage, nearly two hundred times.
Hope’s 1951 trip was the first of four visits he would make to England in four successive years. He felt a bond with the country of his birth, where he was nearly as popular as he was in the United States. (A Motion Picture Herald poll ranked him as Britain’s No. 1 box-office star of 1951, followed by Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne.) London also had a great music-hall tradition, and Hope longed to play the Palladium, the last outpost for full-time vaudeville entertainment on either side of the Atlantic. But when the dates he wanted in April were already promised to Judy Garland, he agreed instead to a two-week engagement at the smaller Prince of Wales Theatre.
He gave himself a televised going-away party: a TV special for Frigidaire on April 8, 1951, that featured an all-British cast of guest stars, including Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, the husband-wife acting couple then appearing on Broadway in Bell, Book and Candle. In a sketch with Arthur Treacher, Hope shops for clothes for his trip, and in a big finale an all-star parade of “surprise” visitors—among them Ed Wynn, Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, Sid Caesa
r, Jimmy Durante, and Frank Sinatra—drop by Hope’s stateroom to wish him bon voyage.
He sailed for London aboard the Queen Mary and did three one-nighters—in Manchester, Blackpool, and Dudley—before making his way to London for the Prince of Wales engagement. On the bill with him were British comic actor Jerry Desmonde and an array of vaudeville acts, including a trick cyclist, a juggler, and a one-legged dancer named Peg-Leg Bates. Some of the London critics griped that Hope went on too long and that his material “had lapses into feebleness, surprising in a man who travels with a small army of gag men.” But the two-week run was a sellout, and the Brits were impressed with his vaudeville pluck. “If little that Hope gave us was either inimitable or dazzling,” said the Guardian, “much in the act was delightfully funny and as truly the stuff of the music hall as any film star has yet offered us.”
Hope got an extra round of applause for donating the proceeds from the engagement to charity. A year earlier, on the Paramount lot, he was introduced to a diminutive Anglican priest named James Butterfield, who ran a center for underprivileged boys in South London called Clubland. The building had been badly damaged during the war, and Butterfield was trying to raise enough money to rebuild it. Hope impulsively promised that the next time he came to London he would do a benefit for the club. True to his word, he donated the bulk of the $50,000 he was paid for the Prince of Wales engagement, handing over a check personally on a visit to the club in its seedy South London neighborhood. One of the reformed delinquents who accepted Hope’s gift talked years later about how much the gesture meant. “Bob was really great to us kids,” said actor Michael Caine. “You can always send money. But to leave the West End and come right down to the Walworth Road, which isn’t the Beverly Hills of London, takes a really charming man.”
Hope finally made it to the Palladium a year later, headlining a two-week engagement in August 1952 with singer Betsy Duncan, and again in September 1953, with Gloria DeHaven. He built up a loyal support staff in London—a publicity team, two writers to help him tailor his material for his British audiences, and an agent, Lew Grade, who arranged British and European bookings. Hope’s visits were widely covered in the British press and his London shows were nearly all sellouts.
There were some bumps, however. During his 1951 trip, Hope played in the British Amateur Golf Championship in Porthcawl, Wales, a year after Crosby had entered the same event. But Hope didn’t play well, and the following year a columnist for the London Star publicly urged him not to come back: “Last year Hope never looked like a serious contender. His first match was a nightmare of gagging and tomfoolery. He departed leaving behind many sighs of relief.”
Hope responded with jokes (“How hard can you hit a wet tea bag?”), while friends such as David Niven and golfer Jimmy Demaret wrote letters in his defense. But Hope skipped the tournament in 1952 and instead played a benefit match with Crosby against two British entertainers, Donald Peers and Ted Ray, at the Temple Golf Club in Maidenhead. That evening Crosby made an unbilled guest appearance with Hope at a benefit he was emceeing at London’s Stoll Theatre—the first time Crosby had ever appeared on a London stage.
• • •
Hope’s movies in the early 1950s were a mixed bag. Some harked back to his modest black-and-white comedies of the 1940s; others were more lavishly produced Technicolor farces, replete with sight gags typical of his broad, increasingly degraded later comedies. Fancy Pants, his 1950 Western comedy, was an unfortunate example of the latter, with Hope out of his comfort zone playing a British butler in the old West, Lucille Ball miscast as a frontier gal, and a lot of people getting hit over the head with crockery. The Lemon Drop Kid, released in April 1951, was a middling example of the former: another Damon Runyon story, featuring Hope as a racetrack tout who claims to get his tips directly from the horses, but with more farce and less warmth than Sorrowful Jones.
The Lemon Drop Kid does, however, boast one classic sequence: Hope and Maxwell’s performance of “Silver Bells,” the pretty, waltz-time Christmas song that Livingston and Evans had written to order for the movie. (It was originally called “Tinkle Bells,” before someone thought better of it.) Hope was unhappy with the original staging of the number—he and Marilyn Maxwell sang it in a gambling parlor, with the gamblers providing choral accompaniment—and got his rescue man, Frank Tashlin, to totally reconceive it. Hope’s instincts were right. The new scene, with the camera following the couple as they stroll along a snowy, movie-set re-creation of the New York City streets at Christmastime, has a lovely, nostalgic glow, and “Silver Bells” soon became a holiday standard, a perennial feature of Hope’s Christmas TV specials, and a close second to “Thanks for the Memory” as Hope’s great contribution to the American popular songbook.
My Favorite Spy, released in December 1951, was another throwback to Hope’s classic style: the third in the My Favorite series, but actually an improvement over the last one, My Favorite Brunette. Hope has a role that is right in his wheelhouse—a cheesy burlesque comic named “Peanuts” White, who is a look-alike for an enemy spy from Tangier—and costar Hedy Lamarr, the Vienna-born beauty whose movie career was on the wane, shows a surprising flair for comedy. But Hope’s next film, Son of Paleface, was a more significant harbinger of things to come. A sequel to his hit 1948 Western spoof, the movie did a robust $3.4 million at the box office (one of the top-ten grossing films of the year), tickled most of the critics (“95 minutes of uninhibited mirth,” said Variety), and remains one of the most popular Hope films of the fifties. Yet it doesn’t hold up well and marks another step in the dumbing down of Hope’s movie comedy.
He plays the son of his Paleface character, “Painless” Peter Potter—a snooty Harvard grad who has come West to claim his inheritance. Again Hope meets up with Jane Russell, this time playing the ringleader of a gang of gold thieves (a bigger star now, she has much more to do in this film, including a couple of musical numbers), as well as Roy Rogers, as a federal marshal on her trail. Playing a puffed-up “Harvard man,” sneering at the townspeople while they’re laughing behind his back, Hope is more effete and buffoonish than ever before. Russell, dressed in busty dance-hall outfits, looks ready to devour him. (Her steamy come-ons and revealing outfits prompted the Catholic Legion of Decency to slap the movie with an “objectionable” label, for “suggestive costuming, dialogue and situations.”) In one creepy scene, Hope even finds himself in bed with Trigger, Roy Rogers’s horse.
Son of Paleface was the first Hope film directed in full by Frank Tashlin, and the former cartoon director loads it with slapstick gags and camera gimmickry. When he first arrives in town, Hope loses control of his jalopy and sprays all the townspeople with mud. When he downs a strong drink, his body spins around like a top, steam blows out of his ears, and his head disappears into his torso. In a big chase scene, he trips the Indians by throwing banana peels in their path; in another he escapes by flying his car across a giant chasm, with the help of an umbrella. Some of this gets laughs, but it demeans Hope. Never before has he seemed so incidental to his gags.
“Let’s see ’em beat this on television!” says Hope in the movie’s last scene, as his car rears up on its hind wheels, like Trigger. And television, to be sure, was consuming most of Hope’s attention in these years.
His flirtation with the new medium did not sit well with Paramount, which feared that its No. 1 comedy star was damaging his value on the big screen by doing television. But Hope too was hesitant about fully embracing the new medium. Like other radio stars, he feared getting overexposed on TV, which had shown how quickly it could burn up material and burn out performers—even Milton Berle’s ratings were already slipping badly. In the 1951–52 season Hope hosted a couple of half hours for Chesterfield, his radio sponsor, including a December show from the deck of the USS Boxer, an aircraft carrier just back from Korea. But when Chesterfield wanted to put him on a more regular schedule, appearing once a month on Thursday nights (alternating with the popular police show Dragne
t), Hope turned it down and said he was going to lay off television, except for occasional guest shots, for the rest of the season.
In the spring he starred in two installments of TV variety shows with rotating hosts, the All-Star Revue and the Colgate Comedy Hour, one filmed at the Presidio in San Francisco and the other at a Douglas Aircraft plant. And in June he and Crosby, making his television debut, were cohosts of a fourteen-hour televised fund-raiser—one of the first nationwide telethons—for US athletes headed to the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki. The show was carried on two networks, CBS and NBC; attracted dozens of top stars; and toted up more than $1 million in pledges (though only $300,000 was actually raised, an embarrassing shortfall that forced the fund-raisers to scramble for more donors to get the athletes to the Olympics).
The show was most memorable, however, for the rare sight of Hope getting upstaged. The manic comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were at their peak of popularity—starring in hit movies, drawing top ratings on TV’s Colgate Comedy Hour, and attracting huge crowds for their nightclub appearances and stage shows. (Their week at New York’s Paramount Theater in July 1951 grossed $150,000—$30,000 more than the record Hope had set a year earlier.) Hope saw their potential early on, inviting them as guests on his radio show in 1948, before their first movie was even released. But when he introduced them on the telethon, Lewis’s frenetic, demented-child antics so unnerved Crosby that he fled backstage, leaving Hope to vainly try to get a word in, before he too gave up and left them alone onstage. The contrast between show-business generations—“It’s time for the old-timers to sit down!” cried Lewis—was hard to miss. Martin and Lewis brought a jolt of anarchic energy to TV. Hope and Crosby, with their easygoing japery, were starting to look a little tired.
Hope: Entertainer of the Century Page 31