He assembled a large outfit of seventy-five cast and crew members, including five sexy females: red-haired movie starlet Jill St. John, Italian actress Anna Maria Alberghetti, Hope-tour veterans Janis Paige and Anita Bryant, and the current Miss World, Ann Sydney. Colonna was back as well, along with Les Brown’s band. The cargo also included nearly a ton of thirty-by-forty-inch poster board, which Barney McNulty would lug around from show to show and turn into Hope’s cue cards.
The troupe stopped first in Guam and the Philippines, then paid another visit (Hope’s fourth) to Korea. A helicopter carrying some of the entertainers developed engine trouble and had to make a forced landing in a blizzard, causing a show in Bupyeong to be delayed while another chopper was sent to rescue them. From frigid Korea they flew to sweltering Thailand, where they were invited to a formal dinner by the king and did shows at US air bases in Udorn, Takhli, and Ubon. Then, on Christmas Eve, they flew into the combat zone of Vietnam.
Hope had never faced more danger. His arrival in South Vietnam was shrouded in secrecy “greater than that normally used to veil the movements of generals and cabinet officers,” UPI reported. His exact itinerary was kept under wraps until the last minute, and for each show a stage was set up in two different locations, to confuse the enemy and thwart any potential terrorist attacks. Director Jack Shea was told that for every five thousand men Hope entertained, another five thousand were on alert outside the perimeter to protect them. But when Hope walked onstage at Bien Hoa Air Base—dressed in shirtsleeves, his tie loosened, wearing a baseball cap to shield his eyes from the sun, and casually twirling a golf club (the first appearance of Hope’s favorite stage prop, two months before the first Bob Hope Desert Classic)—the response was tremendous.
“Hello, advisers,” Hope began, a sardonic reference to the euphemism for US troops, who were officially there only to advise South Vietnamese forces. He recycled a favorite line he used when venturing into hostile territory: “As we flew in, they gave us a twenty-one-gun salute. Three of them were ours.” He made jokes about the new kind of guerrilla war that was already confounding US military planners: “I asked Secretary McNamara if we could come here. He said, ‘Why not, we’ve tried everything else.’ ” Henry Cabot Lodge had just been replaced as US ambassador to South Vietnam. “We’re on our way to Saigon, and I hope we do as well as Henry Cabot Lodge,” said Hope. “He got out.”
From Bien Hoa they were supposed to travel to Saigon, twenty miles away, in a convoy of armed personnel carriers, but at the last minute the road was deemed too dangerous, and they were flown instead to Tan Son Nhut Air Base, just north of the city, and driven in from there. But as they inched their way through the clogged streets and neared the Caravelle Hotel, where Hope and the entertainers were to stay, they found a chaotic scene: billows of smoke, piles of rubble, people running, and sirens wailing. Minutes before, a massive explosion had gone off in the Brinks Hotel, a billet for US officers just a block away from the Caravelle. The blast killed two Americans and wounded another sixty-three people, both Americans and Vietnamese.
The shaken entertainers made their way to the hotel, where glass littered the lobby and the electricity was out. There was talk of canceling the tour. But after MPs searched the entire hotel for explosives and assured Hope they could provide security, he forged on. “We had no electricity all the time we were there and no water,” recalled Butch Stone, Les Brown’s saxophonist. “We just had candles. And all the glass from the windows had been blown into our beds. So before we could get in bed, we had to turn the beds over to get the glass out.”
Ambassador Maxwell Taylor had invited Hope and the cast to his house for cocktails that night, and the ones who weren’t too shaken by the bombing showed up with Hope. Afterward Hope, Colonna, and Brown were driven to a Navy hospital to visit servicemen who had been injured in the Brinks blast. To end the trying day (and keep a promise he had made to Dolores), Hope went to midnight mass. For safety reasons, it had been moved from the downtown cathedral to a small hotel nearby, where the service was conducted in a cramped single room and a priest heard confessions in the hallway.
The troupe spent two more days in South Vietnam, doing shows in Vinh Longh, a small base in the Mekong Delta; Pleiku, in the central highlands; Nha Trang, the seaside headquarters of the Green Berets; and the air base at Da Nang. The memory of their near-miss in Saigon dominated the trip. “Just as we got to town, a hotel went the other way,” Hope cracked. “If there are any Cong in the audience, remember: I already got my shots.” They returned to Tan Son Nhut Air Base for a show in front of ten thousand soldiers, their largest audience of the tour, and got an official welcome from General William C. Westmoreland, the new chief of operations in Vietnam.
The living conditions were even rougher than usual for Hope’s traveling crew. In Pleiku, mirrors had to be specially brought in so the women could do their makeup. Janis Paige recalled arriving at her “tiny room, with one Coke bottle of water—for your teeth, drinking, everything—and a twin bed covered with mosquito netting. When I got in, it was still warm and covered with sand. Somebody had just gotten out of it. Believe it or not, I didn’t care. I got in and went to sleep.” The entertainers were impressed by the beauty of the country—and startled by the extent of the US presence there. “We supposedly had thirty thousand men there,” said Jill St. John. “But I saw thirty thousand men everywhere we went. It was clear we had been misinformed. It was a much bigger commitment than we had been told.” After they returned home, St. John tried to speak out during a press conference: “I started complaining. Suddenly there was no microphone in front of me. It was just removed.” Still, St. John saw Hope’s mission, at least at that early stage of a war she later opposed, as beyond politics: “He was definitely not a hawk. He was thinking of the servicemen.”
Footage from Hope’s twenty-three-thousand-mile tour was edited into a ninety-minute NBC special that aired on January 15, 1965. An evocative mix of documentary and variety show, it featured most of the elements that would become fixtures on his Vietnam specials. Hope narrates as the cameras show his entertainers boarding and exiting military planes, being greeted by generals, visiting with wounded men in military hospitals. There are clips of his stage shows, recorded by four cameras—three focused on the stage and a fourth handheld camera roaming the audience. The bug-eyed Colonna turns up in the crowd at each stop, dressed in a different costume or service uniform, for some back-and-forth with Hope. Each female guest star gets a musical number and some comedy shtick with Hope, and they appear onstage together for some banter at the star’s expense:
“How’d he get you to go on this trip?”
“He asked me to go on a walk in the moonlight.”
“He threatened me too.”
Anita Bryant closes the show by singing “Silent Night,” asking the men to join in—a sentimental moment that would be repeated on all of Hope’s Vietnam specials. For his studio shows Hope never wanted reaction shots of the audience; he felt they disrupted the timing of his gags. But in Vietnam the reaction shots are constant—men applauding and laughing wildly, often shirtless, cigarettes dangling from their lips, iconic faces of the GIs Hope felt so close to. He pays tribute to them at the end, offering support for a military mission that was still considered noble and necessary:
Even though they’re putting up a great fight against tremendous odds in this hide-and-seek war, they’re not about to give up, because they know if they walked out of this bamboo obstacle course, it would be like saying to the commies, “Come and get it.” That’s why they’re layin’ their lives on the line every day.
The NBC special chronicling Hope’s first Vietnam tour was seen in 24.5 million TV homes, according to Nielsen—the largest audience for any Hope show to date, and the fourth-most-watched special of the season. Hope had enough outtakes from the tour to put together a second hour-long special, which aired in late March. He even released a record album, On the Road to Vietnam, featuring highlights from the
trip—though its sales were disappointing.
A startling footnote to the trip came two years later. In March 1967, US troops captured a cache of secret Viet Cong documents, which revealed that the Brinks Hotel blast had, in fact, been directed at Hope and his group, but had detonated ten minutes too early. “Shortly after the explosion the cars of the Bob Hope entertainment group arrived,” the document recounted. “If the bomb exploded at the scheduled time, it might have killed an additional number of guests who came to see the entertainment. . . . Basically the results were not satisfactory.”
Looking back at their close call, members of Hope’s troupe recalled that, on the day of the bombing, they were held up for ten minutes at Bien Hua Air Base because of Barney McNulty. The cue-card stand had collapsed during their first show, and McNulty was hastily trying to put the cards back in the proper order before boarding the plane. McNulty’s ten-minute delay may have saved their lives.
• • •
Hope had no way of knowing, when he made his first trip to Vietnam in December 1964, that the battle against a stubborn Communist insurgency in the remote jungles of Southeast Asia would become the longest war in American history, or that he would return there every Christmas for nine straight years and become embroiled in the most divisive political fight of a generation. The country’s, and Bob Hope’s, Vietnam nightmare didn’t begin in earnest until 1965, when President Johnson, in response to mounting Communist attacks on US bases in the region, sent combat troops there for the first time and began a rapid buildup of forces. The US military presence in Vietnam grew from less than thirty thousand troops at the beginning of 1965 to nearly two hundred thousand by year’s end. The escalation sparked antiwar protests back home, and opposition from such public figures as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a foretaste of the convulsive political battles ahead.
A political, social, and cultural revolution was brewing in the country, but for Hope it was simply more comedy material. He joked about long hair on men (“It’s very confusing; everybody looks like Samson and talks like Delilah”), and protests on college campuses (“The Defense Department gave me a choice of either combat zone—Vietnam or Berkeley”), and those crazy mop-tops from England, the Beatles (“Aren’t they something? They sound like Hermione Gingold getting mugged”). In his one movie released in 1965, I’ll Take Sweden, Hope played the father of a very now teenager (Tuesday Weld), whom he transplants to Sweden to get her away from her motorcycle-riding boyfriend (Frankie Avalon), only to run headlong into the swinging Swedish sex scene. The ham-handed sex farce (an “altogether asinine little romp,” said the New York Times) placed Hope firmly on the Geritol side of what would soon be called the generation gap.
For the Defense Department, however, Hope was still the go-to guy as a morale booster for the troops, wherever they might be. Near the end of April 1965, President Johnson sent fourteen thousand marines to the Dominican Republic to help quell a left-wing uprising that some feared might result in “another Cuba” close to US shores. Three months later, after order had been restored, Hope arrived with a troupe of entertainers, headed by his I’ll Take Sweden costar Tuesday Weld. He did six scheduled shows and three impromptu ones in three days. When he saw signs on the streets of Santo Domingo saying YANKEE DOGS GO HOME!, he opened his show with “Hello, Yankee dogs!” and got a big laugh. In those days, it was still a joke.
With the buildup of US forces in Vietnam, there was little doubt that Hope would return there for his 1965 Christmas tour. He again assembled a big cast packed with pulchritude, including Carroll Baker, the sexy, blond star of Harlow and The Carpetbaggers; Joey Heatherton, a miniskirted go-go dancer from the Dean Martin Show; Anita Bryant, the former Miss Oklahoma returning for her sixth Hope Christmas tour; Kaye Stevens, a redheaded comedienne who did a faux striptease to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”; and the new Miss USA, Diana Lynn Batts. Also along on the tour: singer Jack Jones, the dancing Nicholas Brothers, perennial sidekick Jerry Colonna, Les Brown and his band, twenty-six production people, three writers, two hairdressers, a makeup artist, a publicist, and Hope’s trusty masseur, Fred Miron.
They took off aboard a Lockheed C-141 transport plane and made a refueling stop on Wake Island, before landing in Bangkok, Thailand. It was a rough trip from the start. Les Brown’s band members, onstage for hours in the broiling sun without protection, got terrible sunburns. Trumpeter Don Smith’s lips swelled so badly he couldn’t touch his mouthpiece, and Joey Heatherton had to cut her performances short because of sun blisters. Hope had a nasty accident just before a show in Korat, Thailand, when he was jostled off a narrow, overcrowded stage and tumbled backward five feet to the ground. Though his fall was broken by a security man standing nearby, he tore two ligaments in his left ankle and was hobbling for the next several days.
The already worn troupe flew into South Vietnam’s Tan Son Nhut Air Base on Christmas Eve, the plane doing a steep dive into the landing strip—a routine security precaution that always rattled Hope and his gang. After a press conference and lunch with General Westmoreland, they did a show for ten thousand troops on a nearby soccer field, with a temporary stage set up on the bed of a military truck-trailer. In his monologue, Hope captured some of the cynicism already building over a war that was proving to be more complicated than advertised: “The situation’s improved; things couldn’t be better.” Beat. “Well, who am I gonna believe—you or Huntley and Brinkley?” He told the troops, “Last year you were all advisers. And now that you see where it’s gotten us, maybe you’ll keep your trap shut.” Nor did he ignore the antiwar demonstrations that were getting more attention back home: “You men have a very important job: making the world safe for our peace pickets.”
In Saigon, Hope and the entertainers once again stayed at the Caravelle Hotel, while the rest of the crew were put up at the Meyercord, a new, fortresslike hotel with concrete abutments and armed guards on the balconies. Hope again attended midnight mass, which was conducted at the downtown cathedral by Frances Cardinal Spellman, the New York prelate who was also a frequent visitor to the troops in those years. With memories still fresh of the previous year’s hotel bombing, nerves were on edge. At five in the morning on their first night at the Meyercord, members of Hope’s troupe were jolted awake by the sound of an explosion. Fearing the worst, they burst from their rooms, half undressed—only to find out that the rope lowering a load of dishes from the rooftop garden had snapped, sending the dishes crashing to the concrete below.
Security precautions were high everywhere. On Christmas Day, Hope and company rode in helicopters to the First Infantry’s base at Di-An. With a Vietcong staging area just a mile away, a thousand soldiers were stationed around the base to protect it during the show. When Hope went to the latrine, an armed guard went with him; when Hope asked why, the guard told him the Vietcong were close and some “might even be in the audience.” Before the show got under way, an officer gave instructions to the crowd on evacuation procedures in case of a mortar attack. Jack Jones turned to bandleader Les Brown and said drily, “In case of an attack, you can cut my second number.”
As Hope’s troupe moved around the country, the massive buildup of US forces was unmistakable. The day after Christmas they did a show for seven thousand troops at Bien Hoa Air Base; a year before, at the same base, the crowd numbered fifteen hundred. The troupe flew to Cam Ranh Bay, where docks, roads, and airstrips were under construction, to create what would soon be the biggest port in all of Southeast Asia. They visited An Khe, which had been nothing but virgin jungle six months before, but now was home to sixteen thousand troops and 480 helicopters. In Da Nang, Hope’s troupe did a late-afternoon show in the rain for eight thousand men, many of whom had been waiting in torrential downpours since eight in the morning.
On the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga, the entertainers had to compete with the roar of fighter planes taking off and returning from combat missions. At night they watched as one F-8 Crusader trying to land missed its arresting wires, oversho
t the deck, and plunged in flames into the sea. They waited in horror as rescuers raced to find the pilot. “Tension became almost unbearable,” Hope wrote later. “I heard a sound behind me, looked around and saw Joey Heatherton sobbing uncontrollably. Kaye Stevens was hanging on desperately to an officer’s arm, her face registering shock and disbelief. And to tell the truth I felt pretty weak myself.” There were cheers when the pilot, who had ejected just before the crash, was pulled from the sea unhurt. Hope later visited him in sick bay. “I can’t tell you how glad we all are that you decided to stick around for the show,” Hope cracked. He was so keyed up that he couldn’t sleep that night and found himself wandering the deck at two in the morning.
Hope was hardly the only entertainer going to Vietnam in those early years of the war; on his 1965 trip he ran into another USO troupe headed by Martha Raye, Eddie Fisher, and Hollywood “mayor” Johnny Grant. But no one connected with the troops like Hope. On the ninety-minute special drawn from his 1965 tour, the frequent cutaways to Hope’s audiences—soldiers laughing, applauding, cheering—may well have been edited to Hope’s best advantage. But the live, raw sound of the tremendous response could not have been doctored. The men roared as Joey Heatherton did a frenetic Watusi onstage and brought up several GIs from the crowd to join her. They laughed at the corny sketch in which Hope played a wounded soldier being treated by Kaye Stevens’s officious nurse and Colonna’s nutty doctor. They hooted in all the right places at the leering banter between Hope and Carroll Baker:
BOB: “I loved you in Harlow.”
CARROLL: “I was a little hoarse when I made that movie, didn’t you notice?”
BOB: “I didn’t even know it was a talkie.”
The trip made a powerful impression on those who came along. “It was one of the most emotional experiences I ever had in my life,” said Jack Jones. “I was a dove when I left. I became a hawk when I was there. It took me about two weeks to calm down.” Jones later campaigned for antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy—and had a testy encounter with Hope over it when they ran into each other at a benefit in Washington, DC. But, like St. John and most of the other entertainers who traveled to Vietnam with Hope in the early years, he found the mission inspiring and Hope’s spirit uplifting. “What he was doing was nonpolitical,” said Jones. “He was a happy, positive force.”
Hope: Entertainer of the Century Page 41