He didn’t. After a few weeks NBC moved the show from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m., where it hoped more stations would pick it up. But Hope’s daytime show never rose above a modest 3 or 4 Nielsen rating and couldn’t challenge the formidable Godfrey. In July 1954, after two seasons on the air, NBC pulled the plug, ending this odd, forgettable cul-de-sac in Hope’s career.
Hope continued his nighttime show for another season, but his radio career was stumbling to an end. In March 1953 the ratings for his prime-time show sank to a lowly forty-fourth place in the Nielsens. That fall General Foods dropped out as Hope’s sponsor, replaced by the American Dairy Association, and NBC moved the show yet again, to Thursday nights. Still, Hope plodded on, with Margaret Whiting joining as regular singer and Bill Goodwin, a charter member of the original Pepsodent Show crew, back as announcer.
On his last show of the 1954–55 season, Hope’s guest was his old sidekick Jerry Colonna. In the featured comedy sketch, Hope has a meeting with a snooty NBC executive, played by Jim Backus, who breaks the news that Hope’s show has been canceled. (The punch line is that Colonna is replacing him.) It was meant to be a joke, but Hope’s sign-off on April 21, 1955—“Thanks from all of us for the memory of a grand season, and good night”—were the last words he would ever speak as the host of a network radio show. When the season was over, American Dairy dropped his program, and this time no new sponsor was waiting to pick him up.
After seventeen years, without a whimper or a formal good-bye, Bob Hope’s radio career was over. Jack Benny’s show ended its twenty-three-year run that same spring. Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy lasted just one more season. The golden age of radio had faded years earlier, and now even its last relics were gone.
• • •
Nothing gave Hope’s TV profile a bigger boost in the early 1950s than the night of March 19, 1953, when he was host for the first televised Academy Awards ceremony. He had emceed the Oscar show six times before, but not since 1946—a reflection, most likely, of the movie studios’ unhappiness over Hope’s plunge into television. (Danny Kaye and Jack Benny were among the hosts in the interim.) But when NBC offered to pay $100,000 for the rights to televise the 1953 awards, the Academy decided it was time to make peace with television—and with Bob Hope too.
It was an ambitious broadcast for the young medium. Nine tuxedo-clad cameramen were stationed at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, while another crew was dispatched to the International Hotel in New York City, where Conrad Nagel hosted the East Coast segments of the show. (Several nominees were appearing on Broadway, including Shirley Booth, who won the Best Actress award for Come Back, Little Sheba.) The broadcast, marking the Oscars’ twenty-fifth anniversary, opened with a clip from the first Best Picture winner, Wings, followed by shots of modern jets in flight. “Like the streaking jet plane,” announcer Ronald Reagan intoned, “the Academy Award ceremony itself has been streamlined, has become a major news event, originating tonight on two coasts of a great continent and beamed around the globe.”
Rain was falling in Los Angeles as the live broadcast began with a few quick shots of the red carpet arrivals. “We’re having some unusual California weather,” noted Reagan, before handing off to the orchestra, which opened the show with “The Continental,” winner of the first Oscar for Best Song. Academy president Charles Brackett made some introductory remarks, and then came Hope.
Dressed in dinner jacket, white vest, and white tie, he was the picture of Hollywood elegance. Glancing down at a script in front of him (no cue cards yet), he opened with jokes about television: “I want to thank all the wrestlers for relinquishing their time. Just shows you, there’s nothing that one group of actors won’t do for another.” He was a little patronizing to the new medium—“Television, that’s where movies go when they die”—but also eager to call a truce in the industry feud. “This is indeed a wedding of two great entertainment mediums, motion pictures and television. And with Oscar twenty-five years old, it’s high time he got married. While it’s true he has a child bride, it’s a comfort to note the kid is loaded.”
Hope then reverted to his usual barrage of Hollywood jokes, tailored for the new TV audience: “Keep your eyes on the losers tonight as they applaud the winners. You’ll see great understanding. Great sportsmanship. Great acting.” He harped, as usual, on his favorite running gag, getting passed over for his own Academy Award: “There was a rumor going around last year that I might win an Oscar. But nobody paid any attention, so I stopped spreading it.”
In fact, Hope did get an Oscar that year—his third honorary award, for “his contribution to the laughter of the world, his service to the motion picture industry, and his devotion to the American premise.” Hope could even claim a tiny share of credit for the year’s winner for Best Picture. In a mild upset, the Oscar went to The Greatest Show on Earth, the Cecil B. DeMille circus extravaganza, in which Hope had a brief cameo, sitting in a circus audience next to Crosby, watching Dorothy Lamour on the trapeze.
The first Oscar telecast was a triumph for both television and the movies. “Seldom has the immediacy and actuality of television been used so advantageously,” said Jack Gould in the New York Times. “As a TV show,” cheered Variety, “it was socko almost all the way. . . . Certainly it dramatized the future course of show biz on how TV and pix must ‘go steady’ whether they like it or not.” The show was watched by nearly 50 million people, the largest audience for any TV show in the medium’s short history. For this vast audience, Hope would be the face of Hollywood, a guide to its glamour and a deflator of its pretensions, for the next two and a half decades.
He was Hollywood’s First Citizen, its most acclaimed goodwill ambassador, an entertainer who transcended mere entertainment. In February 1953, to mark his fifteenth anniversary at both Paramount and NBC, the Friars Club threw him a testimonial dinner at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Along with the usual Friars regulars—Milton Berle, George Jessel, Fred Allen (but again, no Crosby)—the dais was filled with the sort of dignitaries only Bob Hope could attract, among them Senator Stuart Symington, former vice president Alben Barkley, New York City mayor Vincent Impellitteri, and eighty-three-year-old former presidential adviser Bernard Baruch—who got out of his sickbed for the event.
What’s more, Hope now had a friend in the White House: his old World War II comrade Dwight D. Eisenhower. He played golf with the new president for the first time in April 1953, when Hope was in Washington for the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Hope and Eisenhower formed a twosome, playing against senators Stuart Symington and Prescott Bush. Hope shot an 85, and he and Ike lost $4 on the match. The next day they played again, this time on opposite sides—Hope paired with Bush, and Ike with General Omar Bradley. Hope shot a 75, and Eisenhower lost again. “Why didn’t you play this well yesterday?” Ike said. Recalled Hope, “He wasn’t laughing either.”
Even as Hope hobnobbed with the rich and powerful, he never stopped thinking of himself as a working stiff. In 1952 friends talked him into running as a write-in candidate for president of the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA), the union representing stage performers. He was elected by a landslide—though, at a time when the union was involved in several contentious labor disputes, Hope didn’t attend a single meeting and quit when his one-year term ended. Meanwhile, as he reached his fiftieth birthday in 1953, Hope made his most serious attempt at an autobiography, collaborating on a memoir with ghostwriter Pete Martin, who had just helped Bing Crosby write his autobiography, Call Me Lucky. When Hope’s book was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post beginning in February 1954, the first monthly installment (with a Norman Rockwell painting of Hope on the cover, the first time a Hollywood celebrity had ever been a Post cover subject) sold 5.2 million copies, a magazine record.
The book, published by Simon & Schuster the following December under the title Have Tux, Will Travel, was breezy, joke-filled, and only minimally revealing. But it was as candid as Hope would ever get in print. �
�That breezy Bob Hope—that Hope with a bounce you see on the screen or on your TV set—is me,” he wrote in the introduction. “I get peeved as easy as the next guy—unless the next guy is Donald Duck. Occasionally I’m disillusioned with people I’ve liked and trusted. But I don’t make a hobby of mental turmoil. . . . I know it’s hard for people to believe a man in my business is normal emotionally and mentally. If they don’t, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
• • •
The neglected stepchild in Hope’s extended family of show-business activities in these years was his movie career. His two releases for 1953 were both oddities, neither very successful nor very good. In Off Limits Hope plays a boxing trainer who enlists in the Army when his new champion is drafted—then gets stuck there on his own when the champ is rejected as psychologically unfit. He finds another young recruit (Mickey Rooney) to train, while falling for his aunt, a nightclub singer played by Marilyn Maxwell. Hope is engaged and energetic, but too old to be playing an Army recruit, and the film, with its familiar service gags, feels like a weary retread of Caught in the Draft.
Next came Here Come the Girls, Hope’s only full-scale movie musical. Set in turn-of-the-century New York, it cast him as Stanley Snodgrass, the “world’s oldest chorus boy,” who is given the starring role in a Broadway musical (opposite diva Arlene Dahl) as a decoy to catch a serial killer. Despite a couple of bright Livingston-Evans tunes—including “Ya Got Class,” which Hope sings with Rosemary Clooney—the script is ludicrous, and Hope again seems too old for the part (he’s living with his parents!). His bulging schedule of TV, radio, and personal appearances may have been taking its toll. He didn’t rehearse much, and Arlene Dahl was most impressed with his ability to take catnaps between scenes. “He told me he starts with his feet and tells them to relax,” she said. “Then his calves and thighs, up his body, gets to his head, and he’s asleep. Very yoga-like.” Rosemary Clooney recalled, “Bob was doing about twelve other things at the same time. It seemed to me that he would show up for about an hour a day and we would shoot around him the rest of the time.” Clooney called Here Come the Girls “one of the world’s worst pictures”; coming in the midst of the early-fifties heyday of the movie musical, it was certainly one of the most forgettable.
Casanova’s Big Night, his next film, was at least an improvement, a return to one of his most successful genres, the costume swashbuckler. As in Monsieur Beaucaire, Hope dons period garb, playing a tailor’s apprentice who poses as the famed eighteenth-century lover. Directed by Norman Z. McLeod, the film is another glossy production with an impressive supporting cast that includes Joan Fontaine, Basil Rathbone, and an unbilled Vincent Price as the real Casanova. Though less winning than Beaucaire, the film has its pleasures. Hope is in top form as a commoner with pretensions, sharp-tongued and physically graceful (when he bows low, his hat falls off his head and drops effortlessly into his waiting hand), and there’s a clever, tongue-in-cheek double ending. Just before the guillotine is about to fall on Hope, he stops the action and replays it with his own alternate happy ending—then asks the audience to vote on which one it wants, his or the studio’s. Hope loses.
Yet Casanova’s Big Night, released in March 1954, got a surprisingly sour reception from the critics. Variety said the film “misses as often as it clicks,” and the Hollywood Reporter complained, “Aside from a few scattered laughs, which come from Hope’s wonderful gift for clowning rather than any wit in the script, there is little entertainment.” Though it earned a respectable $3 million at the box office, better than most other Hope films of the period, it was a sign that Hope’s formula was starting to wear thin.
Unhappy at the slump in his film career, Hope decided to break out on his own. In October 1954 he announced that he was leaving Paramount, the studio that had brought him to Hollywood and where he had spent seventeen successful if sometimes stormy years. After one final film, all his future movies would be produced by Hope Enterprises, giving him the right to peddle them to any studio for distribution. He wanted more leeway to pick his projects, set his schedule—and, he hoped, keep more of the profits. He played down the breakup the next day in an interview with columnist Hedda Hopper, saying he’d be happy to continue working with Paramount for another seventeen years, but was “only asking for good stories through my own company, Hope Enterprises. That’s the kid I want to fatten up.”
Hope was showing his independent streak with his TV network as well. In the fall of 1954, Hope accepted an invitation for another command performance for the royal family at the London Palladium. Because of the trip, he told NBC he would have to skip his regularly scheduled special for November. The network bosses objected, since it meant losing General Foods’ sponsorship of the hour. But Hope refused to cancel the trip, telling Jimmy Saphier, “Let them sue me if they want.”
In place of his November special, Hope told NBC, he would put together a big event for December: an international variety special featuring entertainers never before seen on American television. He arrived in London on October 15, two weeks before his Palladium appearance, and began lining up stars for the show. He hired the 182-member Cologne Choir after hearing them at Festival Hall. He flew to Paris (almost getting thrown in jail because he left his passport in London) and recruited Maurice Chevalier to make his American TV debut. While there he also signed up twenty-one-year-old ballerina Liane Dayde, whom he saw at the Paris Opera Ballet, and later added his old cohort Bea Lillie, traveling all the way to Glasgow to do rehearsals with her.
The special was filmed over two nights, November 7 and 8, by a BBC crew at the Empire Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush. “In television in America we’ve got to such a difficult state with these big commercial shows that you see the same stars on four or five shows in the same week,” he told the audience. “It’s become impossible to do anything new. That’s why we are over here.” The show was edited in the United States and telecast on December 7, accompanied by a network publicity campaign heralding it as “the first truly global television show.”
The ratings were only fair, and the critical response polite at best. “As an evening’s entertainment, it should have been received in good grace if not with screams of joy,” said Variety. But Hope was proud of the show, which gave him a chance to reaffirm his status as an international star and champion of global understanding. “Entertainment will continue to be the common denominator expressing mutual comprehension among the world’s peoples,” he told a reporter. “There’s only one world for television.”
Yet Hope was restless, making noises about slowing down. He turned down lucrative offers from Texaco and General Motors to sponsor his TV shows for the 1955–56 season, saying he wanted to take a break from television. He may simply have been playing hard to get in advance of negotiations for a new contract with NBC. But it’s possible he was also feeling a whiff of mortality. In January 1955 his pal Charlie Yates, an agent who had helped Hope in his early vaudeville days, dropped dead of a heart attack while playing golf with Hope in Palm Springs. “It didn’t really affect me for three days,” Hope told the AP’s Bob Thomas. “Then the shock set in. I was terribly upset. I began to feel all sorts of pains and things wrong in my body.” Even after the doctor gave him a clean bill of health, Hope decided he should take it easier. “The gang at Lakeside will tell you that Bob Hope is dead serious about slowing down,” reported Variety. “Too many of his friends have crossed the border and, while still in his early 50s, he feels that the grueling pace of past years may catch up with him too.”
In mid-1955 Hope agreed to a new five-year contract with NBC, which called for a scaled-back schedule of only six specials a year. Hope may well have wanted to slow down, but he also realized that the key to survival on TV was limiting his exposure, and making his fewer appearances as special as possible. It was a shrewd calculation that would pay off in the years ahead.
• • •
In early 1954, Mel Shavelson and Jack Rose, two of Hope’s favorite writers,
came to see him in Toluca Lake, bringing along a quart of ice cream as a peace offering. They told him about a movie they wanted to do: a biography of Eddie Foy, the turn-of-the-century vaudeville star who created an act with his seven children after their mother, an Italian dancer he had met and married in vaudeville, died of cancer. They wanted Hope to star as Eddie Foy.
Hope liked the idea. He had seen the Foys in vaudeville and welcomed a chance to do a challenging, semidramatic role. Then the writers told him their conditions. Shavelson wanted to direct the film himself (he had never directed a movie before), and Rose wanted to produce it (he had never produced a movie before). “That’s okay,” said Hope. “My last picture was so lousy, you guys can’t possibly do one lousier.” There was one more condition: Paramount agreed to back the film, but only if Hope took no money up front, just a share of the profits. After some consideration, Hope agreed to that as well—the first time he had ever done a movie for no salary—and the film was produced jointly by Paramount, Hope Enterprises, and the partnership of Shavelson and Rose.
The Seven Little Foys was the first film in which Hope played a real-life character, and he did some homework for it, reading up on Foy and watching old silent movies of him. He also brushed up on his dancing, especially when James Cagney agreed to a cameo in the film as George M. Cohan—reprising his Oscar-winning role in Yankee Doodle Dandy—for a scene in which he challenges Foy to a dancing contest at the Friars Club. (Cagney took no salary for the part. When he was a starving Broadway chorus boy, he explained, the Foys would invite him to their house in Westchester County for Sunday dinner. Often it was the only good meal he got for a week. This was his payback.) The filming took place in August and September of 1954. During it, Hope paid a visit to his friend Barney Dean, who was in the hospital dying of cancer—sad motivation for the dramatic scenes he was in the midst of shooting.
Hope: Entertainer of the Century Page 33