But for many in the group, the most stressful part of the trip was dealing with the prima donna known as Zsa Zsa. Hope appreciated performers who could tough out the often harsh conditions, and he was usually lucky in finding them—troupers such as Frances Langford and Patty Thomas, who didn’t complain about the rough accommodations or having to do their hair and makeup on the fly. Even Jayne Mansfield, the blond bombshell who’d joined him on two previous trips, had her husband, Mickey Hargitay, along to buffer any diva behavior. But Gabor, a minor movie actress better known for her jewels, her accent, and her many husbands, was a high-maintenance problem, complaining about the accommodations, throwing tantrums in her dressing room, and monopolizing the hair dryer.
“Everybody hated Zsa Zsa,” said Andy Williams. “On the trip I got crabs from sitting on a toilet seat, and everybody signed a proclamation wanting me to sleep with Zsa Zsa, so I could give them to her.” Paige, the Broadway musical star who had top billing on the tour, was given the best quarters at Guantánamo, a small house on the base, while the rest of the troupe were assigned Quonset huts. Gabor flew into a rage when she found out, and assistant producer Silvio Caranchini had to plead with Paige to trade rooms with her. “He said, ‘Jan, she’s throwing hysterics. She demands that she has to have your quarters. I’m asking you to do this for Bob’s sake,’ ” Paige recalled. “So I stayed in a Quonset hut with bugs that looked liked B-17s on the ceiling. It was hot and miserable. And she slept in an air-conditioned house that night.”
Hope did two shows at Gitmo, on the day before Christmas and on Christmas night. “Guantánamo,” he began his monologue, “that’s a Navy term meaning ‘Hear you knocking but you can’t come in.’ ” In one sketch Hope and Williams played the husbands of two Waves (Paige and Bryant) who sneak them onto the base in violation of Navy orders. A few days after Hope’s return from his tour, outgoing president Eisenhower formally broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba, and Hope reedited the special to give even more time to the Guantánamo segments. The show, which aired on January 11, 1961, drew some of Hope’s highest ratings yet. Just a few days later John F. Kennedy took office.
The early 1960s, with a glamorous and youthful new president in the White House, were Camelot years for Hope as well. Kennedy and his circle gave Hope a rich new load of comedy material. He joked about the president’s wealth, his family, his hair, and his Ivy League brain trust. “There are so many professors in the cabinet,” Hope said, “you can’t leave the White House without raising your hand.” He took note of the president’s political battles, such as his face-off with the nation’s steelmakers over rising steel prices: “Kennedy is still mad,” Hope said. “He just ordered a plywood Chrysler.” When the president’s youngest brother, Ted Kennedy, won a Senate seat from Massachusetts, Hope told an audience overseas, “It’s been a slow year back home. Only one Kennedy got elected.” As Cold War flash points proliferated around the globe, Hope defused the tension with homegrown wisecracks: “There’s trouble in Cuba, Laos, Vietnam. Things are so bad, last week Huntley tried to jump off Brinkley.” When the Soviets launched their first cosmonauts into orbit and fears mounted that America was losing the space race, Hope tried to buck up morale with gallows humor: “It just proves one thing: their German scientists are better than our German scientists.”
He was more than a comedian; he was a national institution. NBC paid tribute to his life and work in an hour biographical special, featuring behind-the-scenes footage from his 1960 Caribbean tour, interviews with associates such as Mort Lachman and Jimmy Saphier, and reverent narration by the mellow-toned Alexander Scourby. It was Hope’s apotheosis as the nation’s comedian laureate. He narrated a TV documentary on Will Rogers, reinforcing his generational link to the beloved humorist. He continued his tours of military bases during the holidays—back up north to Labrador and Greenland in 1961, another swing through Korea and the Far East in 1962. One of the men who kidnapped Frank Sinatra Jr. in 1963 told an FBI agent that the gang had first considered snatching Hope’s oldest son, Tony, but opted for young Sinatra instead because “Bob Hope is such a good American and had done so much in entertaining troops.”
The awards and honors poured in, growing ever more weighty and prestigious. The senior class at Notre Dame named him the 1962 Patriot of the Year. He was the first actor to get the Screen Producers Guild’s Milestone Award, in a ceremony beamed to US armed forces around the world and highlighted by a congratulatory phone call from President Kennedy. “If there is anybody who has, and still is, doing more to project a shining image of Hollywood,” said Variety, “and he doesn’t answer to the name Bob Hope, who could that party be?” After some initial resistance, the Senate voted to award him the Congressional Gold Medal, in recognition of his work entertaining the troops. But the measure got bottled up in the House Banking Committee, over concerns that singling out Hope (only the third show-business personality to receive the award, after George M. Cohan and Irving Berlin) would open the floodgates to too many other entertainers. Hope was the only comedian in America who could prompt a congressional fight.
As an entertainer, he was in a class by himself. Other comedians played nightclubs or the big Las Vegas showrooms. Not Hope. He preferred stadiums, civic auditoriums, state fairgrounds—venues more fitting for a comedian of the people. He did a week of shows at the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle, drawing crowds so big that an extra matinee had to be added and overflow spectators were seated in boats moored on a lagoon below the stage. In October 1962 he gave another command performance at the London Palladium, entertaining Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip with jokes about America’s own royal family: “We don’t have titles in the United States. No, sir, in America we have just two classes—the people and the Kennedys.” And Bob Hope.
Yet he was still the hardworking vaudeville trouper, traveling the country for one-nighters—both paid concerts and unpaid charity gigs, raising money for local hospitals and Boys Clubs, supporting the projects and worthy causes of friends. One of his favorite cities was Dallas, where his pals included Bob Bixler, a former vaudevillian who did PR for him, and Tony Zoppi, a columnist for the Dallas Morning News, who would take Hope on late-night jaunts to Jack Ruby’s nightclub. When Hope canceled a January 1962 concert at the Dallas Coliseum, Bixler prevailed on him to help bail out the local promoter who got burned, Iva D. Nichols of the Dallas Theater Guild, by doing a makeup concert in June. Hope did the show, unaware that Nichols was being pursued by the IRS and numerous angry creditors. On the night of his concert, federal marshals and sheriffs deputies were at the box office confiscating the ticket proceeds. Hope ended up getting only $4,500 of the $10,000 fee he was promised and found himself dragged into an embarrassing local scandal. “Let’s face it, Bob,” an executive for Neiman Marcus, another participant in the show, wrote him later, “both of us got had.”
As his sixtieth birthday approached, the life milestones were starting to accumulate. In June 1962, his son Tony graduated from Georgetown University, with plans to go to Harvard Law School in the fall. Hope gave the commencement address, accepting an honorary doctorate in front of three thousand graduates, family members, and friends gathered outdoors on the tree-lined campus. “I can’t wait till I get home and have my son read this to me,” Hope said of the Latin diploma. “I did recognize one word—something about ‘negligence.’ ”
Later that summer his brother Jack, a drinker who suffered from liver problems, went into a hospital in Boston for an operation to remove his spleen. After the surgery his organs began to fail and he fell into a coma. He died on August 6, 1962. His unexpected passing was a blow to Hope, who depended on his easygoing and well-liked brother, less for his titular role as producer of Bob’s TV specials than as an adviser, fixer, and all-around security blanket. “He was just a doll,” said Jack Shea, a director of Hope TV shows in those years. “He was the only person who could go in and tell Bob he was full of it.”
Three months later another key member of Hope�
��s inner circle, longtime publicist Mack Millar, died suddenly of a heart attack. Millar was an old-school hustler, pals with the veteran newspaper columnists who were rapidly being replaced by younger and less compliant TV journalists. Still, he was one of Hope’s most loyal and hardworking advocates, and a mainstay of his powerful publicity team since the early days in Hollywood. Unfortunately, he wasn’t around to see the culmination of one of his biggest projects: his campaign to get Hope the Congressional Gold Medal.
The bill to award Hope the medal was finally extricated from committee and passed by Congress in June 1962. President Kennedy promptly signed it into law. But it hit yet another snag when Congress failed to pass an appropriations bill that included $2,500 for the medal. That left the award hanging for months. Hope was on a fishing trip with his family in British Columbia in September 1963 when a call came that the medal would finally be presented to him at the White House in two days. He hurried to Washington with the family and was at the White House for the ceremony on September 11.
President Kennedy made the presentation before a crowd of two hundred congressmen and other dignitaries on the White House lawn, reading an inscription that praised Hope for his “outstanding service to the cause of democracy throughout the world.” “This is one of the only bills we’ve gotten by lately,” the president joked, getting a big laugh before handing off to the comedian being honored. Hope noted that Kennedy had seen him entertain in the South Pacific when the future president was a PT boat captain during World War II. “The president was a very gay and carefree young man at that time,” Hope said. “Of course, all he had to worry about then was the enemy.” After the ceremony, Milton Berle, who was there for a White House lunch, playfully grabbed the award from Hope and exchanged a few quips with him, giving reporters some fodder for their morning stories. It was a great day for Hope, who cherished the award as the highest recognition of his achievement as a humanitarian and entertainer. “I feel very humble,” Hope said, “although I think I’ve got the strength of character to fight it.”
• • •
Hope was well past humility. In the 1950s, despite his success in movies and radio, he was still something of a comedian on the make, trying to prove himself in the new medium of television. By the early sixties, his dominance in TV was no longer in doubt. He was NBC’s biggest ratings powerhouse and most indispensable star. In 1961 Variety did an analysis of the ratings for the sixty-eight Hope specials since his first one aired in April 1950. Hope won his time period fifty-seven times—a level of consistency that no other TV star could match over such a long stretch. “Hope is the closest anybody has come to batting 1000, over a more-than-decade span in walloping the competition,” the trade paper marveled.
On camera he was thicker around the middle, a little graying at the temples. The posture was more regal (always a half turn to the right, so the camera would highlight the curling-up-to-the-left smile), the pauses longer and more defiant, almost daring the audience not to laugh. His shows took on a more formalized, almost institutional quality: Hope’s annual presentation of the Hollywood Deb Stars, for instance (a selection of up-and-coming movie starlets that Hope began featuring back in the mid-1950s), or, beginning in the 1960s, the college football all-American team, with a Hope one-liner for each player as he trotted onstage to be introduced. The old variety-show format was starting to look a little stodgy. Well after most other NBC shows had switched to color, Hope’s remained in black and white, probably because it was cheaper. (He finally made the changeover in December 1965.) His humor too was sounding more middle-aged, with smug, older-generation quips about rock ’n’ roll fads such as the twist (“the only dance I know where you wear out your clothes from the inside”) or sketches about those crazy, nonconformist beatniks, always with Hope in his fake goatee, doing hepcat jive talk.
His production team was stocked with people who had been with him for years: prop man Al Borden, who first worked with Hope on his Broadway show Roberta; assistant producer Silvio Caranchini and sound technician John Pawlek, who did the advance production work for his overseas tours; cue-card man Barney McNulty and longtime talent coordinator Onnie Morrow. The writing staff too congealed into a tight-knit group that remained remarkably unchanged: Mort Lachman, Hope’s confidant and house intellectual, and his writing partner, Bill Larkin; Les White, who started out writing jokes for Hope in vaudeville, and his partner, Johnny Rapp; Charlie Lee, a corpulent, acid-tongued Englishman whom Hope nicknamed Lipton (because he drank tea), and Gig Henry, a former US intelligence officer in World War II; and Norm Sullivan, a crew-cut member of Hope’s original Pepsodent Show radio team and the only writer who worked solo.
The writers complained a lot, but they mostly enjoyed their indentured servitude with Hope. He was a demanding boss, insatiable for material and possessive of their time. But he always appreciated their skills, credited their work, and knew he couldn’t do without them. “This is all the talent we have, fellas,” he once said, pointing to a script. Said Lachman, “When things go wrong, Hope takes the whip. He’ll work you like a dog. But when the show’s over, he doesn’t get down on his guys. And he won’t let anyone else do it either.”
Lachman was the closest to him. They would play golf together in the afternoons; when Hope would call and bark into the phone, “Now,” Lachman would rush over to meet him at Lakeside. Lachman was typically the last one left in Hope’s dressing room before a show, after everyone else had cleared out and Hope was making final edits to the script and maybe a last-minute change in his wardrobe. Waiting backstage to go in front of the cameras, Bob would sometimes squeeze Mort’s arm until it was black-and-blue—before striding out in front of the audience, the picture of cool. Their relationship was not always smooth. After Jack Hope’s death, Lachman inherited many of the producing duties on Hope’s TV shows. But when Hope didn’t give him the title of producer (it went instead for a time to Hope’s youngest brother, George), Lachman was miffed and quit to work for Red Skelton. Hope quickly made amends, and Lachman tore up his Skelton contract and went back to Hope.
Hope’s sponsors weren’t quite so loyal. As production costs for TV shows increased during the 1950s and early 1960s, it was becoming harder to find sponsors willing to take on one show for an entire season. Hope’s show was one of the costliest on TV—around $350,000 per hour, plus another $50,000 that Hope demanded the sponsor kick in for publicity. That was too steep for Buick, which ended its sponsorship of Hope’s shows in 1961 (switching instead to Sing Along with Mitch, which was cheaper). Hope shopped around for another company willing to sponsor him for the entire season. When he couldn’t find one, he relented and began making deals on a show-by-show basis. His first special of the 1961–62 season (which didn’t air until Christmas) was sponsored by Revlon, and later ones by Beech-Nut, Timex, and even, during the 1962–63 season, his old radio sponsor Pepsodent.
Then, in early 1963, Hope negotiated a major sponsorship deal with Chrysler. The automaker not only agreed to sponsor Hope’s entire 1963–64 season; it wanted to put him on the air every week, as host of a dramatic anthology series, Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre. Hope would film introductions for each of the weekly dramas and star himself in two scripted comedies during the season, along with six of his usual variety specials. The $14 million deal also made Hope Chrysler’s spokesperson and “image man,” the start of a fruitful, decade-long association with the automaker.
Hope’s Chrysler Theatre, which aired on Friday nights during the 1963–64 season, was one of several new network shows (along with The Richard Boone Show and Kraft Suspense Theater) that augured a brief comeback for the dramatic anthology series, in eclipse since the passing of the 1950s golden age of live TV drama. Hope had little to do with the dramatic hours, which were produced at Revue Studios (later Universal Television) and overseen by writer-producer Dick Berg. But they included such notable programs as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a TV adaptation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel, starr
ing Jason Robards; an original teleplay by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright William Inge; and new work by such top writers as Rod Serling and Budd Schulberg. The scripted comedies that Hope starred in were negligible—laugh-track farces such as Have Girls, Will Travel, with Hope playing a frontier marriage broker, and Her School for Bachelors, in which he’s the editor of a Playboy-style girlie magazine. But with his name on one of TV’s most prestigious dramatic series—the winner of three Emmy Awards in its first season—Hope’s TV profile was never higher.
• • •
Coping with enormous fame can be a challenge for any Hollywood celebrity. The adulation, the loss of privacy, the reluctance of underlings to tell you bad news, the shell that forms to protect against the onslaught of people who want favors or money—all can make it difficult, if not impossible, to stay grounded, human, in touch with the world outside of your own narcissistic bubble. In some ways, Bob Hope handled his fame better than most. He wasn’t insecure or uncomfortable in the limelight; he wasn’t a temperamental monster to work for; he didn’t turn to drink or drugs. He played around with women, but never broke up his family. He had a relatively unpretentious lifestyle: a house in Toluca Lake that was spacious but not flashy, pet German shepherds, utilitarian American cars (usually supplied by his sponsors) that he liked to drive himself. He was always happy to greet fans who approached him on the street or in airports, chatting with them and signing autographs.
Hope: Entertainer of the Century Page 38