Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  To read through Hope’s fan mail is to experience the sad drama of everyday human misfortune—illness, family problems, money troubles, disappointed dreams—and realize the beacon of inspiration, hope, and maybe even salvation that celebrities can represent. Hope must have understood this. He replied to an amazingly high proportion of his fan letters—with the help of a battery of assistants, to be sure, but with the kind of care and personal detail that only he could have supplied. Every letter from a serviceman who had seen him in World War II drew an attentive, individualized response—with a few jokes thrown in for good measure, something the letter writer could keep and cherish. A fan who sent a gift to Hope’s hotel room in Oklahoma City before a concert in 1974 got this charming response:

  This is just to thank you for the lemon pie you sent to the hotel and to let you know I really enjoyed it. It gave me energy to fight off the cold I had and to go ahead and do the Stars and Stripes show. There are several ways to make a lemon pie and you have the proper format because it was just tart enough to be good, almost like my Mother used to bake, which is high praise.

  For any other star the first sentence would have been enough, a pro forma thank-you that an assistant could easily have handled. But Hope himself had to add the details—his cold, the tartness—that doubtless earned him a fan for life, one of millions.

  In 1967 Hope got this letter from the friend of a seven-year-old Wisconsin girl, whom he had met a year earlier when she was a poster child for cystic fibrosis. Now, the letter writer told him, the girl was dying:

  She is in the hospital fighting for her life. The doctors give her about four months to live. She learned a few years ago that she was going to die, but the word “die” had no meaning to her. She recently began to understand what was going to happen. She is taking it hard, Mr. Hope, very hard. She falls apart at the word “die.” . . . It will help very much if you were to write a letter or note comforting her. I realize you are a very busy man and you don’t have time to answer every letter you get. But please, Mr. Hope. It might help so much.

  Hope wrote this to the girl in response:

  Dear Kelly:

  Remember me? I had my picture taken with you last year in West Allis. I just heard that you were in the hospital and so I wanted to send you a little letter to tell you I’m hoping that you’re coming along all right and that you’re putting on a good fight so you can get out of there very soon.

  I was in Madison, Wisconsin, the other night for a big show at the new auditorium. I did enjoy it and certainly wish I’d had a chance to see you. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know I’m thinking about you, hoping you will get a lot better and get out and enjoy the beautiful Wisconsin country.

  A lot of people are praying for you. I am, too.

  My best regards,

  Bob Hope

  It would take a hard-hearted celebrity to ignore a request like that, and an oafish one not to write a sensitive reply. But the delicacy of Hope’s response, its warmth and self-deprecating good humor (“Remember me?”), is a small work of art. Hope may have been a cold and driven man, a glutton for applause with an outsize ego. But he could also write a letter like that. In an era when stars routinely lament the tribulations of fame, complain about the loss of privacy, or lose their bearings to drugs and excess, Hope was one celebrity who loved being famous, appreciated its responsibilities, and handled it with extraordinary grace. His monumental role in our public life may have come at the expense of a private life that seemed, to many, stunted and incomplete. But for Hope, the sacrifice was worth it.

  I

  THE MAKING OF AN ENTERTAINER

  Growing Up, Learning the Trade, and Tasting Stardom

  Chapter 1

  OPENING

  “He was a big show-off since he was about nine.”

  When reporters first began to take notice of Bob Hope, a young comedian who was making a mark in radio and on Broadway in the mid-1930s, they learned some surprising things about the English-born entertainer. He was, early profiles of him reported, actually “Lord Hope, 17th baronet of Craighall, direct lineal descendant of that famous titled English family who at one time owned the ill-fated Hope diamond.” His mother was a celebrated music-hall artist (in some accounts) or operetta singer (in others), and her charming voice had “lured the aristocratic scion of the Hope family away from the ancestral castle. From one of them anyway—there are several in the family, all covering miles of territory and impossible to occupy.”

  None of it was true. It’s hard to know whether the aristocratic folderol was a serious attempt by Hope at autobiographical revisionism, or simply a practical joke played on reporters by a cheeky young comic trying to get attention. In fact, he remembered little about his first four and a half years in England, and his family background could hardly have been more drably middle-class. His father was a hard-drinking stonemason who kept the family on the move in search of work; his mother, a shy Welsh girl with a sweet voice who may have sung in local village festivals when she was growing up, but never, as far as anyone has recorded, appeared on a professional stage—operetta, music hall, or otherwise.

  She was Avis Towns (Bob took his middle name from her, but for some reason he and everyone else spelled it incorrectly as Townes for his entire life), and she grew up in the village of Borth, on the western seacoast of Wales. She was orphaned at an early age, and little is known about her parents, John and Sarah (or possibly Margaret) Towns. By her own account, the family moved from Borth when she was young, to escape the seawater that would often flood their home at high tide, and settled a few miles inland, near Llancynfelyn. Avis had fond memories of walking there with her governess down a long pathway of stone steps to a lake below, where she would play with a pet black swan she nicknamed Chocolate. She remembered little about her parents, who were often traveling (she thought, or imagined, that they were in the diplomatic service in India) and would make occasional grand appearances in a magnificent horse-drawn carriage. Then one day Avis was told her parents would not be coming back. There was talk of a shipwreck, but she never knew for sure what happened to them. In any event, she was taken in by a foster family, a retired sea captain named Abraham Lloyd and his wife, Mary, and they soon moved to Barry, a larger town on the southern Welsh coast.

  Even these few, sketchy memories are, however, suspect. No birth certificate has been found for Avis, and later census records indicate she was born in London, not Borth. Her age too is a moving target. According to family lore, she was only fifteen or sixteen when she married in 1891, but her age in the 1891 census (not always definitive) is listed as seventeen. The records of the parish school in Borth, which she attended after transferring from the public school in 1882, give her birth date as June 3, 1872, which is probably more reliable—and would make her nearly nineteen when she married. No records have been found of her parents, or of a supposed older brother named Jack. Alan Blackmore, a retired schoolmaster in England who has done the most extensive research on the Hope genealogy, suggests that Avis was most likely taken as an infant to a London orphanage and (as was common at the time) boarded out to a foster family when the orphanage became overcrowded. By the time she appears in the 1891 census for East Barry, Avis was living with David Lewis, a deputy dockmaster, his wife, Jane, and their five-year-old son, Baisil—and described as a “general domestic servant.”

  She was a shy, diminutive girl, no more than ninety pounds, with long brown hair and delicate, doll-like features. Her schooling was limited, but she learned to play the piano and the harp at an early age—suggesting an upbringing of some comfort and means. Still, the sheltered girl must have been excited, along with the rest of the girls in town, by the activity at the Barry waterfront in the winter of 1890–91, where the construction of new docks was under way. This major civic project drew workers from all over the surrounding area. Among them was a strapping twenty-one-year-old stonemason named William Henry Hope, known to everyone as Harry.

  He had come from Weston
-super-Mare, across the Bristol Channel, with his father, James, who was partner in a construction firm hired to work on the docks. A stonemason by trade, James Hope had worked on the Royal Courts of Justice in London as well as the Statue of Liberty when it was being carved in Paris. He had even spent some time working in America, but returned to England when his wife, Emily, refused to make the trip over and join him. They eventually settled in the southwest England resort town of Weston-super-Mare and raised ten children. Harry, the second oldest, was being groomed by his father to go into his trade, so when James moved to Barry for several months of work on the docks, he brought Harry along.

  The father, a supervisor on the project, rented a room on Greenwood Street in town, while his son stayed in one of the sheds provided for the workers on the docks. There, young Harry was flattered by the attention paid him by pretty, little Avis Towns, and the two soon struck up a romance. His proud father didn’t think much of the “spindly-legged little floozy,” and he got Harry transferred to the other end of the docks, to keep the couple apart. Avis was heartbroken not to see him anymore. When Harry became ill and his father decided to send him home to convalesce, it looked as if she would never see him again.

  Father and son were on the docks preparing for Harry’s departure when a heavy rainstorm broke out. Amid the downpour, they suddenly caught sight of Avis, scurrying for cover and falling flat on her face in the mud. Harry dropped his tools and rushed over to pick her up and carry her to safety inside a shed. While she was recovering, he confessed to his father that she was the girl he wanted to marry.

  “Why, she’s just a baby,” James said—at least as Avis would tell the story years later. “What a man needs is a woman.”

  Avis, gathering herself from her swoon, replied, “I am a woman, sir!”

  The elder Hope soon realized his objections were fruitless. “Get on with it then, Son,” he said. “Marry her and be done with it. We’ve got work to do.” A few days later, on April 25, 1891, the couple traveled to Cardiff, the Welsh capital, just a few miles away, and got married in a small civil ceremony.

  For an orphaned, poorly educated Welsh girl with few prospects, it was a promising match. Harry was a skilled craftsman, with hopes of becoming an architect or going into business for himself, like his father. But their life together, almost from the start, was itinerant and financially precarious. When the construction work on the Barry docks was done, Harry and Avis moved to Newport, a few miles up the coast, where there was more work. There a son, Ivor, was born in 1892. A second son, Francis James (Jim), arrived a year later, followed by a daughter named Emily in 1895. When he ran out of work in Newport, Harry moved with the family back to Barry, where a fourth child, Frederick, was born in 1897.

  Soon they were on the move again, this time across the country to Lewisham, a few miles south of London. Here the Hopes had as comfortable a life as they would ever enjoy. They lived in a large stone house, complete with stables and a large, well-kept flower garden. When Harry came home from work, he would pick some bluebells and present them to Avis with a romantic flourish, singing, “I’ll be your sweetheart if you will be mine!” Harry raised gamecocks and played the horses, and he would take the family on weekend excursions, to the beach or Covent Garden or the racetrack at Epsom Downs. They had a gardener and a maid, and Avis would entertain guests by playing the dulcimer, or a harp that had been given to her (according to family lore) by the actress Ellen Terry. Avis would often be singing around the house, and all the boys picked up her love for music.

  A fourth son, William John (known as Jack), was born in Lewisham in 1900. But just before his birth, the family suffered a terrible loss, when Emily, the only girl, contracted diphtheria and died, barely four years old.

  The death of their only daughter, Avis always believed, started Harry on a downward path. Before Emily’s death, her older brother Jim remembered, Harry was a good-looking, well-read, charismatic man, with sandy hair and a handlebar mustache. “I still swear I have not seen a handsomer man than our dad in those days,” Jim wrote in an unpublished memoir of the family’s early life, “Mother Had Hopes.” “Immaculately dressed in the best of taste; five foot eleven [actually a bit shorter], 215 pounds of healthy flesh and muscle; full of confidence. And a gentleman in every way.” After Emily’s death, however, he began drinking more heavily (like many stonecutters, he justified it as needed to wash away the dust inhaled in his work), ignored his books, and started to pile up gambling debts.

  In 1902, Harry moved the family yet again, this time to Eltham, a farming community southeast of London. The town was enjoying something of a boom, thanks to a railroad line that had been completed in 1895, connecting it to London and providing easy transportation for milk and produce from the area’s rich Kent farmland. The Scottish developer Cameron Corbett had begun to build houses on a 334-acre tract of farmland, and he hired the construction firm of Picton and Hope—James and his partner, Percy Picton—to help with the job. So, once again, Harry followed his father for work, moving into one of the brick row houses that Hope and Picton had built on Craigton Road.

  The Eltham house (which still stands today, a plaque marking it as Bob Hope’s birthplace) was a comedown from Lewisham: a comfortable but far from luxurious row house in the middle of a gently upsloping block, a mile off the High Street. The tiled entryway led to a parlor to the right, and the three upstairs bedrooms each had a fireplace. The bathroom was outdoors—a plumbing setup that, amazingly, remained unchanged until the house changed owners in the 1990s. Harry had a greenhouse in the backyard, but had to dispense with the servants, due to the family’s financial straits.

  Still, the Hope boys had a good time in Eltham. The town’s main attraction was (and still is) Eltham Palace, an eleventh-century manor house used as a royal residence through the time of Henry VIII. When the king would parade through town, the Hope boys would have front-row seats on a plot of land their grandfather owned at the foot of their street. For adventure, they rambled through a woodsy area to the northeast of their house dubbed the “wilds,” where they would join the neighborhood kids looking for wild donkeys or scouring the trees in search of wild birds’ eggs.

  On May 29, 1903, while Harry was off at work, Avis told the boys she felt sick. Though pregnant, she thought she wasn’t due yet and claimed it was just a touch of flu. But they called for the doctor, and by the end of the day he had delivered the Hopes’ fifth boy. They named him Leslie—either for a famous soccer star of the day, or for a Hope relative who once served with “Chinese” Gordon, the British general killed by Sudanese rebels in Khartoum in 1885. Hope, typically, told it both ways.

  • • •

  Leslie Towns Hope missed the Victorian age by just two years. After the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, England was going through profound changes. The costly and debilitating Boer War in South Africa—one of the last gasps of the fading British empire—had ended in 1902. Liberal reform was on the ascent, with the passage of legislation that would provide the foundation for the modern welfare state, including guaranteed health care, free school meals, and unemployment benefits for workers. Yet the rapid industrial growth of the previous century had slowed, and Britain was losing its dominance in manufacturing to the United States and European countries such as Germany. Mass production, meanwhile, was rendering the old Victorian artisans increasingly obsolete. All of this was making it tough on people like Harry Hope.

  With brick replacing stone on most buildings, jobs for specialists in stonework were growing scarce. Even the little stone used on the houses in Eltham was mostly precast and brought in from elsewhere. Harry had to spend more and more time away from home looking for work—or drowning his disappointments in liquor. Avis would often have to send the older boys into town to scour the pubs and bring their father home. Some nights she would sit up waiting for his return, listening to hear if he was bounding up the street on foot (often with a handful of flowers and a song for his sweetheart), meaning he was sober, o
r if his approach was heralded by the slow clop-clop-clop of a carriage, which usually meant he was coming home drunk.

  One time, when Harry returned home after several days away, Avis emptied his pockets and found a woman’s photograph inside, with the inscription “With all my love, Maude.” Harry tried to deflect her rage with sweet talk: “You know you’re the only girl in the world for me.” Avis got so mad she broke a hairbrush over his head.

  Though Bob adopted Eltham as his hometown (and years later raised money to restore the local theater, which was renamed for him), the town was one of the briefer stops on the Hope family’s sojourn in England. Before Leslie was five months old they were gone, moving back across the country to Weston-super-Mare, where Harry had grown up. They moved into a three-story house on Orchard Street; then, to save money, into a less expensive place on the last street in town, Moorland Road. Harry was still having trouble finding work, and Avis went to work as a cashier in a tea shop to help out. When a sixth Hope boy, Sidney, was born in 1905, she took the baby in her arms and worked as a housekeeper from eight until four.

  Their plight got worse. After returning from a job-hunting trip, Harry wandered over to a playground to watch two of his sons playing soccer. When a ball rolled near him and he ran over to kick it back, he stumbled in a hole and broke his ankle. He got right back up and tried to run, turning the simple fracture into a compound one that left him unable to work for more than a year.