The statement caused a stir in the hall—and a bigger one backstage. Hope was furious that Schneider had used the Oscar podium to deliver what Hope considered a propaganda message from America’s enemies. He told Howard Koch, the show’s producer, that the Academy should issue its own statement disavowing Schneider’s remarks. “Don’t you dare!” cried Shirley MacLaine, a prominent opponent of the war. But Hope scrawled out a statement on his own, gave it to Frank Sinatra, who was about to start his portion of the evening, and insisted that he read it on the air. “If you don’t read it, I will,” said Hope.
Sinatra, a former Kennedy pal turned Nixon supporter, obliged. Appearing onstage a few minutes later, he told the audience, “I’ve been asked by the Academy to make the following statement regarding a statement made by a winner. The Academy is saying, ‘We are not responsible for any political references made on the program and we are sorry they had to take place this evening.’ ”
Backstage, Shirley MacLaine tore into Sinatra: “You said you were speaking on behalf of the Academy. Well, I’m a member of the Academy and you didn’t ask me!” (Her brother, Warren Beatty, later chided Sinatra from the podium: “You old Republican, you.”) The controversy percolated for days. Hope denounced Schneider’s statement as a “cheap, cheap shot” and said he wrote his response after getting telegrams backstage saying that “millions of viewers and the parents of fifty-five thousand American boys did not appreciate the Academy being used as a platform for propaganda from Hanoi.” Yet even some of those critical of Schneider’s remarks objected that Hope and Sinatra had taken it upon themselves to deliver a statement on behalf of all three thousand members of the Academy. Finally the Academy issued a statement endorsing the Hope-Sinatra reply, pointing out that Koch, as the show’s producer, was “the Academy’s authorized representative,” and quoting bylaws stating that the “Academy is expressly prohibited from concerning itself with economic, political or labor issues.”
The fracas was a vestigial reminder of the country’s still-raw Vietnam wounds. But it soon died down, and so, eventually, did the passions. “Bob Hope’s so mad at me he’s going to bomb Encino,” Shirley MacLaine joked after the ceremony. But she bore no lasting ill will toward Hope, who had helped her raise money for charities and whom she genuinely admired. “So he was screwed up about the war,” she said years later. “Who wasn’t?” Still, for the folks who put together the annual Oscar telecast, Hope was proving to be something of a liability. He would not be asked back as host for another three years.
• • •
By the mid-1970s, some of Hope’s oldest friends, colleagues, and support people were starting to pass from the scene. In December 1974, Jack Benny, Hope’s friend and onetime radio rival, died of pancreatic cancer. “He was stingy to the end,” said Hope, in a eulogy written for him by Mort Lachman. “He only gave us eighty years, and it wasn’t enough.” Jimmy Saphier, the agent who had negotiated all of Hope’s radio and TV deals since 1937, suffered a stroke in his office and died in April 1974, of what was later diagnosed as a brain tumor. (Louis Shurr, Hope’s first movie agent, had died of cancer in 1968.) Marjorie Hughes, Hope’s loyal assistant for thirty-one years and the linchpin of his superefficient office operation, retired in 1973. (Hope Enterprises left her with no pension, and she had to pester her former boss for months about it. Hope wound up writing personal checks to support her in retirement.) Bob’s elder brother Jim, who oversaw the ranch Bob owned near Malibu dubbed Hopetown, died in August 1975—leaving Fred, back in Cleveland, the only one of Hope’s six brothers still alive.
And just before the start of the fall 1975 TV season, Hope had to say good-bye to many of the people who had worked with him for decades. He blamed it on his sponsor.
Hope had been shopping for a new corporate partner since 1973, when Chrysler ended its sponsorship of his TV shows (while continuing to sponsor his golf tournament). For two seasons Hope signed up sponsors on a show-by-show basis, among them Gillette, Timex, and Ford. Then, in early 1975, he negotiated a lucrative new deal with Texaco. The oil company agreed to pay $3.15 million for seven hours of specials in each of the next three seasons, plus another $250,000 annually to Hope for commercials and other duties as corporate spokesman. In return, however, Texaco wanted Hope to make a thorough housecleaning of his creative staff. His shows had clearly fallen into a rut, and the demographics of his audience were skewing older and older. Texaco thought the shows needed fresh blood.
The plan was to cut back on the number of specials and to make them more “special,” hiring different producers for each. That meant saying good-bye to the man who had been producing all of them, Hope’s longtime writer and confidant, Mort Lachman. Hope also fired his entire writing staff—veterans who had been with him for years such as Charlie Lee, Gig Henry, Les White, and Norm Sullivan. “It had to be done,” Hope told UPI’s Vernon Scott, “because I thought that after twenty-five years it was time to get a fresh format, some new ideas, a new style.” In addition, with Texaco promising more PR support, Hope laid off his two longest-serving publicists, Frank Liberman and Allan Kalmus.
“Bob caved in,” said Elliott Kozak, Saphier’s former assistant, who had taken over his dealmaking duties. “It was too strong a deal. He didn’t stand up to it.” Kozak convinced Hope to rehire at least one writing team, Lee and Henry, to provide some continuity and veteran support for the newcomers being brought in. Both Liberman and Kalmus, too, were back working for Hope within a year. But the split with Lachman was unavoidable, and painful. Hope, always averse to confrontation, gave Kozak the job of breaking the bad news. Lachman was surprised and hurt, but he took it stoically. When Hope took him to play golf and tried to explain the decision, Lachman cut him off. “He was very sad, very close to a tear,” Lachman recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not interested in this whole conversation. Let’s play.’ We just played golf. And we left, and I told him we can still play golf anytime you call me. But it was a sad day.” (They remained friends and golfing buddies, and Lachman had a successful post-Hope career as executive producer of such sitcoms as All in the Family, Kate & Allie, and Gimme a Break!)
Hope’s first show under the Texaco banner, a belated season opener on October 24, 1975, was indeed more special, though hardly new: a two-hour compilation of highlights from his TV career, to mark his twenty-fifth anniversary on NBC. The three Hope specials that followed included a Christmas show, with guests Redd Foxx and Angie Dickinson; a concert special from Montreal, to raise money for the US and Canadian Olympic teams, with Bing Crosby among the guests; and a ninety-minute scripted show, in which Hope hosts a party at his home, where the guests (some fifty comedians, from Milton Berle to Freddie Prinze) are getting murdered one by one. The material was only marginally improved, but the shows at least had a fresher look, ratings were strong, and Texaco got its money’s worth: Hope did nearly all the commercials as well, touting the company’s oil-drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico, pitching Havoline motor oil, and singing the praises of the “owners of America’s oil companies”—stockholders like you and me.
The bicentennial celebration of 1976 gave Hope a chance to wave the flag once again, as host of a ninety-minute NBC special on July 4, Bob Hope’s Bicentennial Star-Spangled Spectacular. It was one of his better shows of the era, with Hope and Sammy Davis Jr. playing anchormen of a revolutionary-era newscast, a spoof of the comedy soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and a funny Hope takeoff of Johnny Carson as host of an 1876 version of the Tonight Show, making jokes about Custer and griping about the tough studio audience. (“Better warm up the buckboard, Ed, they’re getting hostile.”) Hope closed with a sentimental, Norman Rockwellian tribute to the real “heroes” of America: “the guy in the bleachers with his kid, rooting for his team between bites on a hot dog . . . the man who fights the traffic every morning to get to work . . . These most uncommon common people are the heart of America, its hope and its future.” It was Hope’s plea to move beyond the divisive years of Vietnam an
d Watergate, and a heartfelt justification of his own life’s work:
I like to hold up a mirror to our lives and see the fun in everything we do. Over the years I’ve gotten more than my share of laughs—about you and me and America and the way we live. But when the houselights dim and the cameras are turned off, I’m just like the rest of you. Kid America? You bet your life. Love America? All the way.
For all the heat he had taken, Hope still saw himself as a unifying figure, an entertainer above partisanship—and, it seemed, above criticism. He hated bad reviews, and frequently got his writers and other staff members to write letters responding to them, often in the guise of ordinary readers or viewers, the voice of the people. During the bicentennial summer, he entertained at a state dinner in Washington for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, hosted by President Ford and the first lady. A few days after the event, which was televised on public TV, the Los Angeles Times ran two letters to the editor criticizing his performance. “I was shocked, disappointed and dismayed by the whole miserable mess, which has most certainly damaged the cultural image and prestige of our country,” wrote one viewer. “Bob Hope should fire his writers, or, better still, retire gracefully.”
A week later the Times printed three letters in response. One reader, identifying himself as one of Hope’s writers (it was signed Charles Liebleck, evidently Charlie Lee), said that Hope “has entertained and brought the gift of laughter to more people in more places than any other single performer of our time” and pointed out that writing comedy is “much harder than writing bitchy letters to a newspaper.” A second letter came from Geoffrey Clarkson—the pianist in Les Brown’s band—who reported that he was at the state dinner and that “the Queen and Prince Philip enjoyed the entertainment immensely.” A third letter asserted that Hope’s “humanitarianism and talent are unquestionable, and to have such a great man as Bob Hope belittled is abominable.” It was signed by Mark Antonio of Burbank, California—almost surely Hope’s crony and longtime assistant Mark Anthony.
Hope was especially eager, in the post-Vietnam years, to repair his image on college campuses, to show that he could still communicate with the young people who had turned against him because of his support for the war. His April 1975 special, Bob Hope on Campus, consisted mostly of a live performance at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, where the audience was friendly and most of the gags were about the school’s basketball team (John Wayne played Coach John Wooden in one sketch). But the show also included clips of Hope talking informally with small groups of students on other college campuses, such as Vassar and Columbia—awkward encounters, with Hope posing prepared questions such as “Is pot passé?” and “Who would you sooner be, Jonas Salk or Catfish Hunter?” (One student’s reply: “Jonas Salk. Because he made it possible for more people to be Catfish Hunters.” Right answer.)
Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976 marked a new and unfamiliar challenge for Hope. A friend to every president since Truman, Hope was now faced with a president he had never met—one who didn’t even play golf. The former peanut farmer from Georgia, who came from nowhere to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, provided Hope with plenty of gag material. He joked about Carter’s Southern roots (“When he prays, he calls God by his first name–Y’all”), his toothy smile (“He went to the dentist today to get his teeth cleaned; should be out by August”), and his colorful brother, Billy, the first presidential sibling with his own beer. But Hope, for the first time in many years, was left off the invitation list for the president’s inauguration.
Not that Hope needed the extra activity. He was doing fewer specials now (four per season, down from six or seven), but working even harder to promote them. Before each one, he would do a round of phone interviews with TV columnists; make guest appearances on other variety shows; sit for interviews with talk show hosts such as Mike Douglas and Phil Donahue; and make his now-ritual drop-in appearance on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Hope continued to develop movie projects, commissioning a script for the Walter Winchell biopic from writer Sidney Boehm, which he found too “negative,” and then a second one from Art Arthur, which came in at an unwieldy three hundred pages. Plans were announced for a Bob Hope Museum, to house Hope’s voluminous collection of memorabilia—which he first wanted to build on fifty acres of his Malibu property, then on a plot of land in Burbank that he owned adjacent to NBC headquarters. Like so many other Hope projects, it never got off the ground. “The problem with Dad is that he would have these ideas,” said Linda Hope. “And he would call you from Peoria, Illinois, and say, ‘I think we’ve got to get on this thing and start developing this or doing that.’ And then he would be gone for a week or two weeks, and he’s home for a few days, and in the meantime he had to do his real TV work, and he really had no time to develop the kinds of things that he may have dreamed of. He didn’t have time.”
By 1976 Linda was working for her father full-time. Her marriage to Lande (with whom she had a son, Andrew) had ended in divorce the year before—a split that took him by surprise. “I was in England writing a show,” said Lande. “I came home to an empty house. She left me a note. It was all calculated and all devastating.” (Linda later had a long-term gay relationship with TV producer-director Nancy Malone.) She always had an ambivalent relationship with her father; getting his attention was sometimes so frustrating, she told a friend, that she would purposely bounce checks, just so he would call her into his office to scold her. But after the divorce, she needed work, and her father put her in charge of program development for Hope Enterprises. She was paid little (only $600 a week at first), but she did a good job, overseeing the development of Joe & Valerie, the one series Hope’s company managed to get on the air.
Her brother Tony might have seemed the more logical Hope child to enter the family business. He worked for a while in business affairs at Twentieth Century–Fox and served as an associate producer on the TV series Judd, for the Defense and the 1971 Australian film Walkabout. His father depended on Tony for business advice, and some friends thought they recognized some of Bob’s comic genes. Hal Kanter liked to tell the story of an encounter with Hope on the Paramount lot in the early 1950s. Kanter was wearing a bright red tie with red socks, and when Bob passed by, he commented, “My God, Kanter, that’s the longest red tie I’ve ever seen.” Years later, Kanter was at the Twentieth Century–Fox studios, again wearing bright red socks with a red sweater. This time Tony Hope saw him and wisecracked, “That’s the longest red sweater I ever saw.” Tony insisted he had never heard his father’s line.
But Tony’s career in show business came to an abrupt and not very happy end. In 1973 he teamed up with Barney Rosenzweig, a TV producer who had worked with Tony at Fox, to produce an independent film called Who Fears the Devil? It was a strange movie, based on a series of fanciful folktales by Manly Wade Wellman about an Appalachian balladeer who is transported back in time. After Rosenzweig kept lowering the budget to try to get backers, Tony Hope agreed to finance the film with $400,000 of his own money.
The production was beset with problems. Arlo Guthrie was originally cast in the lead, but he didn’t work out and had to be replaced by an unknown. The dailies were not good, and the screenwriter pleaded for the director to be replaced. After it was finished, the film couldn’t find a distributor, and Rosenzweig began peddling it himself, booking it in college towns across the Southeast—a grassroots technique that had been used successfully by the 1971 independent hit Billy Jack. But the movie died quickly, and Tony Hope lost his entire investment.
He took it hard. “He felt he failed, and he became bitter,” said Rosenzweig. “We were having breakfast a year or two later. He said, ‘Barney, we can’t do this anymore. Because when I see you, I think of the movie, and when I think of the movie, I want to throw up.’ ” For the son of Bob Hope, the failure must have been especially difficult. “It had to be tough for Tony,” said Rosenzweig. “Bob Hope was a tough taskmaster. I’m sure his father was brutal to him about
it.”
The whole episode left Tony—then living in Malibu with Judy and their two young children—broke and in debt, with no bailout coming from Dad. “Bob and Dolores thought everyone could make it on their own,” said Judy Hope. She went back to work as a lawyer, making the long commute to downtown Los Angeles, while teaching part-time at Pepperdine University in Malibu. Then, in April 1975, a malfunctioning furnace in their home caught fire, and the house burned to the ground. Suddenly homeless as well as broke, Tony and Judy picked up and moved the family to Washington, DC.
Judy, who had connections in the Ford administration, went to work at the White House and became a partner in the law firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky and Walker. (She later worked on President Reagan’s Commission on Organized Crime and in 1988 was nominated for a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The nomination was blocked by Senate Democrats.) Tony, meanwhile, bounced around in various jobs with such companies as Mutual of Omaha and Touche Ross. In 1986 he moved back to California to run for Congress, but lost in the Republican primary to an opponent who branded him a carpetbagger. Later he became the first head of the Indian Gaming Commission under President George H. W. Bush. But there was a sense of potential never quite realized. “Bob called Tony a lot,” said Judy Hope. “When he wanted to buy a piece of property, Tony would go and look at it. When he had a radio station in Puerto Rico that had some problems, Tony worked them out. His dad trusted and relied on him. In a way, he shortchanged his own career for his dad.”
Hope: Entertainer of the Century Page 48