Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

Comedy shorts were still common on movie bills in the 1930s—cheaply made vehicles for fading silent-film stars such as Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon, but also important early showcases for W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, and newcomers such as Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, and Bing Crosby. Hope’s shorts were pretty low-grade examples of the genre. In his first, Going Spanish, Hope and Leah Ray play a pair of newlyweds on their honeymoon, motoring through Mexico with her mother tagging along. They stop in a town called Los Pochos Eggos on the day of an annual festival in which anyone is allowed to insult whomever they please, so long as the insult is followed by a song. Various comic high jinks and romantic mix-ups ensue, including a sight gag in which people hop around after eating Mexican jumping beans.

  Hope, looking dandyish in a light-colored, double-breasted suit, with slicked-back hair parted high on his head, is crisp and self-assured in his film debut. But he can do little with the lamer-than-lame material. After a screening of the film at the Rialto Theater on Broadway, Hope ran into columnist Walter Winchell, who asked about Hope’s film debut. “When they catch Dillinger they’re going to make him watch it twice,” Hope cracked. When Winchell printed the remark in his column, an angry Jack Skirball, head of Educational Pictures, called up Shurr and said the last thing he needed was a star bad-mouthing his own film. After Hope tried in vain to get Winchell to retract the item, Educational canceled Hope’s contract.

  But Shurr quickly got Hope another deal, to star in six more shorts for Warner Vitaphone, at a salary of $2,500 for each. Produced by Sam Sax, they were shot at Warner’s studios in Astoria, Queens, on a rock-bottom budget. “Sam’s ability to squeeze a buck could make Jack Benny seem like Aristotle Onassis,” Hope said. “He made those shorts in three days, rain or shine. In fact, if a director got three sprocket holes behind schedule, Sam would stick his head into the soundstage and say, ‘What’s wrong?’ ”

  The Warner shorts were a step up from Going Spanish, but not by much. The first, Paree, Paree, released in October 1934, is probably the best, mainly because it provides a rare glimpse of Hope in his incarnation as a Broadway leading man. Adapted from Cole Porter’s 1929 show Fifty Million Frenchmen, it casts Hope as a rich American playboy in Paris who bets some friends that he can get the girl he met on board ship to marry him without revealing that he’s a millionaire. Though drastically truncated and ludicrously underpopulated, the film still squeezes in four Porter songs and two Busby Berkeley–style production numbers in just twenty minutes. Hope sings the lovely Porter ballad “You Do Something to Me” in a light, appealing tenor, before the girl he’s wooing (Dorothy Stone) turns it into a high-kicking dance number—as Hope, disappointingly, just watches from a chair. But Hope gets another fine Porter song, “You’ve Got That Thing,” all to himself, deftly managing Porter’s tricky rhythms and demonstrating his skill at lyrically intricate “list” songs, which he would make a specialty both on Broadway and later in feature films.

  The other shorts for Warner, released over the next two years, were straight comedies, most of them crude farces that show Hope developing his skills as both comedian and straight man. In The Old Grey Mayor, he has to win over his fiancée’s father, a gruff big-city political boss; in Watch the Birdie, he’s a practical joker on a cruise ship; in Double Exposure, a pushy celebrity photographer; and in Calling All Tars, he and a pal (the Stan Laurel–like Johnny Berkes) dress up as sailors to get girls and wind up dragooned into the real Navy. Shop Talk, the last and probably the best of the nonmusical shorts, features Hope as a spoiled rich kid who inherits his father’s department store. The comedy spins off his encounters with a string of wacky store employees, comic bits that both hark back to his vaudeville routines (dumb girl applying for a job asks, “Do you mind if I use your telephone?”—and then uses it to crack nuts) and anticipate the comic repartee between Hope and his sidekicks that would become a staple of his radio shows.

  But the movie shorts were just a diversion for Hope, who still considered himself primarily a Broadway star. After his success in Roberta, he landed a costarring role in the 1934 musical Say When. The show was conceived as a vehicle for Harry Richman, the veteran song-and-dance star of the 1920s who was looking for a Broadway comeback; he not only starred in the show but invested $50,000 of his own money in it. (Gangster Lucky Luciano was reputedly one of the other backers.) Richman and Hope play vaudeville hoofers who romance two bankers’ daughters aboard a transatlantic ocean liner. The songs were by Ray Henderson (composer of “Varsity Drag” and “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries”) and lyricist Ted Koehler (Harold Arlen’s collaborator on “Stormy Weather” and “I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues”), and the supporting cast included “Prince” Michael Romanoff, a flamboyant New York character who claimed to be a Russian royal (and later became a popular Beverly Hills restaurateur).

  Richman was unhappy with the show almost from the start, distressed that he didn’t have an obvious hit song, and that Hope was getting most of the laughs. Hope offered a sympathetic ear when Richman, on the train back to New York after the Boston tryouts, lamented, “I’m the star, and if I’m weak, it won’t help any of us.” Hope was grateful that Richman didn’t go behind his back and steal his good lines, but the ambitious young costar didn’t exactly shy away from the chance to hog the spotlight. “Harry was one of Broadway’s greatest stars, but he was playing an unsympathetic lover and his part was thin,” said Hope. “If he’d had a good score, he’d be all right, but he had no big songs. I was shortsighted and hamola enough to enjoy the situation.”

  Say When opened on November 8, 1934, and got surprisingly good reviews. Walter Winchell called it the “merriest laugh, song and girl show in town,” and Hope’s contribution was duly noted. “Mr. Hope, as usual, was amiably impudent, never offensive and a likable and intelligent clown, equal to all the emergencies of Broadway operetta,” wrote Percy Hammond in the Herald Tribune. None of this assuaged Richman, who quit the show after eight weeks, forcing Say When to close prematurely in January.

  That was enough time for Hope. In December, before the show closed, Hope landed an audition for his first weekly radio job: as emcee of The Intimate Revue, a Friday-night variety show on NBC sponsored by Bromo-Seltzer. Worried that he didn’t have enough material for the audition, Hope got Richman to drive him out to his Long Island estate and let him go through Richman’s extensive joke file and pilfer what he wanted. Hope got the job and for years afterward credited Richman as “the guy responsible for my success in radio.”

  The Intimate Revue lasted only thirteen weeks, and Hope’s uneasiness with the new medium was apparent. It was primarily a music program, featuring the classically trained songstress Jane Froman and Al Goodman’s mellow-toned orchestra. “Every week at this time, we present a show as sparkling and as easy to take as Bromo-Seltzer,” went the show’s weekly sign-off. The easy-to-take part usually trumped the sparkle. Hope carried most of the comedy, which consisted of weak sketches (Hope as a South Pole explorer, or the head of a travel agency, or Sergeant Hope of the Mounted Police) and strained banter with his on-air companions on topics such as the best way to dunk a doughnut. In one recurring bit, Hope delivered jokey “society notes” in a fast-paced, Winchell-like staccato: “Flash! Miami Beach! Young Puppy Wellington, missing for three days, lost his trunks while bathing and was forced to keep running in and out with the tide.” Hope didn’t yet have the confidence or the technique to recover when the jokes fell flat; often the only titters heard in the studio were those coming nervously from Hope himself. “Hope is intermittently very funny,” said Variety. “At other times either his material falters or his delivery is a bit too lackadaisical. . . . Hope is easy to take but hard to remember.”

  The best thing to come out of The Intimate Revue for Hope was a new comedy sidekick—a Southern-fried Dumb Dora by the name of Honey Chile. She was played by a sixteen-year-old Macon, Georgia, beauty named Patricia Wilder. Bob had met her in Louis Shurr’s office and was taken with her dark-haired good l
ooks and “thick, spoonbread Southern accent.” He tried her out in his act at the Capitol Theatre and liked the way she won over the crowd with her first line—wandering out to center stage and drawling, “Pahdon me, Mistah Hope. Does the Greyhound bus stop heah?”

  He brought her on The Intimate Revue, playing straight man to her goofy non sequiturs. (“Where you from?” “The South.” “What part?” “All of me.”) Wilder’s laid-back, countrified insouciance made her an audience favorite, even outshining Hope. “Bob Hope is a likeable fellow personally, and I’m sorry to say he hasn’t clicked so well on the air,” noted the New York Radio Guide on March 30, 1935, predicting that Hope would “be off the program soon. At this writing, the new talent hasn’t been selected, but I’d like to suggest they keep Honey Child and give her some good material.”

  Both were off the air in April, when The Intimate Revue was canceled. But Hope wisely brought back Honey Chile when he landed his next radio job the following December, as emcee for a CBS variety show sponsored by the Atlantic Oil Company.

  On the Atlantic Family Show, Hope played second fiddle to the program’s ostensible star, tenor Frank Parker. Sketches were often built around the straitlaced Parker’s courtship of his on-air fiancée, Sue Fulton—Frank and Sue are weekend guests at a colonial mansion, for example, or Frank shops for Sue’s Christmas present, with Hope as a wisecracking store clerk. (Parker: “Would you help me around the store?” Hope: “Why, are you drunk again?”) When the show was renewed in the spring, Parker left to take a job on orchestra leader Paul Whiteman’s program, and Hope inherited the starring spot. He brought in three writers to help improve his material, added a couple of supporting players, and gave Honey Chile more to do. And he began to develop a more distinctive radio personality.

  His pace was faster now, his voice brittle and smart-alecky, drawing out the end of his punch lines like a carnival huckster. As in vaudeville, he tried to build up his pompous character so that others could cut him down to size. One of his sidekicks, for instance, a rube character named Skunky, brings a horse into the studio. Hope asks why. Skunky replies, “He figures if you’re a radio comedian, he’s wastin’ his time pullin’ that plow around.” In his routines with Honey Chile, Hope’s ripostes to her nonsense (“You know, Honey Chile, a mind reader would only charge you half price”) were usually topped by her sucker-punch comebacks:

  BOB: “I wish you’d be careful. Anything you say will be held against you.”

  HONEY: “Anything I say will be held against me?”

  BOB: “That’s right.”

  HONEY: “Mink coat.”

  Wilder became so popular as Honey Chile that she was soon gone, leaving for Hollywood in the summer of 1936 when RKO offered her a movie contract. Hope kept the character but replaced the actress, hiring a Dallas beauty named Margaret Johnson as the new Honey Chile, and then (when Johnson also left for the movies) replacing her with Claire Hazel. Hope and Wilder reunited later in Hollywood, when she made a couple of guest appearances as Honey Chile on his radio show and in two of his early movies. But her film career didn’t go anywhere, and in the early 1940s Wilder returned to New York, where she became a flamboyant, Holly Golightly–style fixture on the Manhattan nightclub scene. Later she moved to Europe, married an Austrian prince, and became a well-known international hostess. Wilder denied that she and Bob were ever romantically involved, but they remained lifelong friends; Bob and Dolores would pay occasional visits to her home in Marbella, Spain, or attend parties she threw in the South of France, and she continued to write him long, effusive letters—always signed “Honey”—nearly until her death in 1995.

  The Atlantic Family Show had a nine-month run on CBS, Hope’s longest radio stint to date. He turned up frequently in the radio columns, which chronicled his show’s changing cast and time slots, repeated his best jokes, and fed his reputation as the hardest-working comic on radio. “It’s all right for the established comedians to take ‘time out’ for the summer to relax,” he told an interviewer, explaining why he wasn’t taking a summer vacation, as most radio stars did. “They’ve captured their listening public and merit a rest. But I’m a comparative newcomer to the airwaves and am glad I have the opportunity to keep plugging.”

  He worked hard to court the press and cultivate his image—which didn’t always bear much resemblance to the real Bob Hope. First he made up bogus details about his supposedly titled English background. Then he gave himself an Ivy League makeover. For a Radio Stars profile in September 1936, Hope greeted the interviewer in his Central Park West apartment dressed in a yellow sweater, with two Scottie dogs on his lap and a fat book called Education Before Verdun on the coffee table. “He just doesn’t look like a comedian,” the reporter observed. “He’s still in his twenties [actually thirty-three] and his cheeks are rosy and a couple of boyish cowlicks keep his brown hair from being the plastered cap he has tried to make it. He might be a tennis pro or a Yale undergrad or even a young doctor—but never a zany of the mikes.”

  He was getting some buzz as a radio up-and-comer. “Before 1940, don’t be surprised if Bob Hope turns out to be the ace comic of radio,” wrote one prescient radio columnist, Dick Templeton, in March 1936. “That may sound like a long shot and a long time prediction, but if it does happen, then Bob will have realized his ambition.”

  It would happen. But first he had a couple more stops on his Broadway tour.

  • • •

  In the fall of 1935, Hope signed on for his fourth Broadway show in as many seasons. This time he was cast in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, a new edition of the lavish, showgirl-studded revues staged by Florenz Ziegfeld every season from 1907 to 1925 and sporadically after that. The 1936 show was the second to appear since Ziegfeld’s death in 1932 and was produced by his widow, Billie Burke, along with Lee and J. J. Shubert. The show’s main attraction was Fanny Brice, the longtime Follies star, and it also featured Josephine Baker, the celebrated chanteuse just returned from Paris; singer Gertrude Niesen; the dancing Nicholas Brothers; and a statuesque young singer-comedienne named Eve Arden. George Balanchine choreographed the ballet sequences, Vincente Minnelli designed the scenery, and Vernon Duke and Ira Gershwin wrote the songs. The show was so jam-packed with talent that some cast members had to be dropped during the Boston tryouts, among them ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy.

  Even in this heady company, Hope was a standout. He had two numbers with Brice, one in which he played a Hollywood director to her famous Baby Snooks character, the other a send-up of British snobs called Fancy, Fancy. Best of all, he was handed what would be the show’s biggest hit song, “I Can’t Get Started.”

  He sings it to Eve Arden, the two playing a posh New York couple saying good night after an evening on the town. In Gershwin’s wistful-witty lyrics, Hope laments his inability to make any romantic headway with her: “I’ve flown around the world in a plane, I’ve settled revolutions in Spain/ The North Pole I have charted, still I can’t get started with you.” Arden ignores his entreaties, trying to hail a cab as he moons over her. When Hope starts panting, she quips, “What’s the matter? Have you been running?” (Hope said he gave Arden the line after the doorman at the Winter Garden Theater suggested it.) When Hope finishes the song, she finally succumbs and they embrace—after which Hope straightens up, briskly adjusts his cuffs, and puts a comic button on the number: “That’s all I wanted to know. Well, good night.”

  The number impressed two visitors from Hollywood, producer Harlan Thompson and director Mitchell Leisen, who came to see the show one night. A year later they cast Hope in his first Hollywood feature, The Big Broadcast of 1938. His performance of “I Can’t Get Started” was surely on their minds when they handed him another wistful-witty romantic list song, the one that would launch his movie career, “Thanks for the Memory.”

  Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, after some delays and out-of-town tinkering, opened on January 29, 1936, at the Winter Garden Theater, to mostly excellent revie
ws. “A jovial and handsome song-and-dance festival, glorifying the Broadway tempo and style,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in the Times. Though Brice got most of the praise, Atkinson noted that she “has a capital partner in Bob Hope, who is gentleman enough to be a comrade and comedian enough to be funny on his own responsibility.”

  Hope loved his time in Follies. The Winter Garden Theater was right in the middle of the Broadway action. Bob would get haircuts across the street at the Taft Hotel, from a barber who shaved Walter Winchell and would give Hope all the theater gossip. He walked to the theater each night from his Central Park West apartment. “It was a kick, whipping down to the theater and saying ‘Hi’ to the traffic cops and to people on the avenue and to the people in the show when you got there,” he wrote. “That was really living. There was always something going on.”

  The show, however, ran into trouble because of Brice’s fragile health. During a performance in Philadelphia, she took an overdose of sleeping pills—supposedly mistaking them for cold medication—and forgot the words to one of her numbers. The curtain had to be unceremoniously brought down on her, as the cast cringed in the wings. The Shuberts decided to close the show in June and give her the summer to recover, then reopened in September. But Hope, along with Arden and several other cast members, decided not to stick around. He already had another Broadway show waiting in the wings.

  It was a new Cole Porter musical, the composer’s much-anticipated follow-up to his 1934 hit Anything Goes. Originally titled But Millions! the show came from the same team of writers, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, and was intended to reunite the same three stars, Ethel Merman, William Gaxton, and Victor Moore. But Gaxton, a popular Broadway leading man at the time, backed out when he felt that Merman’s part was being elevated above his, and the role went to Hope instead. When Victor Moore also bowed out, his part was given to another, even bigger comedy star, Jimmy Durante.