After a few weeks at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the Hopes rented a house in Beverly Hills from Rhea Gable, Clark’s wife. Dolores was homesick for New York. But even before The Big Broadcast finished shooting, Paramount was lining up more projects for Hope. In November he stepped into a role originally intended for Jack Oakie in an all-star musical comedy called College Swing. In December the studio tapped him to costar with Martha Raye in The Wallflower (later retitled Give Me a Sailor), scheduled to start shooting in the spring. He was being eyed for a Damon Runyon story called Money from Home, and there was talk of teaming him in a musical with Dorothy Lamour. “Bob Hope, fine Broadway comic, has clicked big out here,” New York Daily News columnist Ed Sullivan reported in early January—still a month before Big Broadcast even opened.
Hope did his part to feed the buzz. He hired a publicist from New York named Mack Millar, a well-connected hustler who was close to the major newspaper columnists such as Sullivan and Walter Winchell. Millar planted Hope’s name in the columns and came up with publicity stunts, including a charity golf match between Hope and Bing Crosby—who had reconnected when Hope moved West—with the loser agreeing to work as a stand-in for one day on the winner’s next movie. (Hope lost, 76 to 72, and had to show up on the set of Crosby’s Dr. Rhythm.) The studio played up the friendship between Hope and Crosby, touting Bob as a new challenger to Bing as the “easiest-going actor in Hollywood”:
Hope, like Crosby, is just having a lot of fun out of life. He takes things as they come, worrying more about the size of his golf score than the size of his movie roles. . . . The bizarre clothing of Crosby is completely eclipsed by Hope. As a matter of fact, where Bing’s clothing is a rainbow, Hope’s clothing is an Aurora Borealis. He just can’t be bothered by such things as color ensembles. If he is dressing and needs a tie he picks up the nearest one and puts it on. The same is true in regard to everything from shirts to socks.
Hope’s visibility in Hollywood also got a boost from his radio work. When he moved West in early September, Hope was still a regular on Woodbury soap’s Rippling Rhythm Revue. The show was broadcast from New York on Sunday nights, but NBC agreed to let Hope do his opening monologue live from Hollywood, then feed it to New York via a transcontinental hookup.
But when Hope arrived at NBC’s Hollywood studios for his first show, he was dismayed to find that no studio audience was waiting for him. Insisting that he couldn’t do a monologue without one, he got the NBC ushers to rearrange the rope lines so that the audience leaving Edgar Bergen’s show, taped an hour earlier in the studio next door, would be funneled directly into Hope’s studio. Enough of the confused patrons stuck around to give Hope some live laughs, and the network had a full audience ready for him the following week. By the end of September, however, The Rippling Rhythm Revue was off the air, the latest in a growing trail of canceled Hope radio shows.
Eager to get his stop-and-start radio career on track, Hope hired a new agent back in New York, a young, cigar-smoking go-getter named Jimmy Saphier. “I found him a shrewd boy who knew the business, my kind of guy,” said Hope. Saphier had more connections than Shurr with the ad agencies that controlled most of the programming on radio, and Hope decided to split duties between the two agents: Saphier negotiating his radio deals, while Shurr continued to handle his movie and stage work. Shurr was somewhat dismayed at the newcomer’s taking away a chunk of his Hope business (though Shurr continued to get a share of Hope’s radio deals), but the two agents made an effective and loyal tandem. Both would remain with Hope for the rest of their lives.
Saphier felt strongly that Hope needed to make some changes in his approach to radio, putting less emphasis on sketches and more on his monologues. “I had watched Hope at the Capitol and had seen him in a Broadway musical before I heard him on radio, and I felt it was a shame the home listeners weren’t getting the best of him,” Saphier said. “Radio simply wasn’t using his talents properly. I knew this, and I sensed Bob knew it but didn’t yet know how to overcome it. His work with [his radio foils] was funny, but his strength seemed to me and also to him—eventually—to be centered in what he did best, the monologue.”
Hope took Saphier’s advice and began talking up his new emphasis in the press. “The monologue is now showing signs of being a main comedy trend,” he told Samuel Kaufman of the New York Sun. “I haven’t discarded dialogue and sketches, and I don’t expect to. But I intend giving short monologues prominent spots on all my programs.”
They would, however, be monologues of a new kind—filled not with generic vaudeville-style gags, but with fresh jokes, drawn from the news and from his own real-life experiences. “A comedian won’t be able to take the stage and rattle off story after story or spiel gags without especial point,” he told another reporter. “That’s gone forever. But the monologue in modern dress, clever and smart, is due for a comeback.” Radio columnist Edgar A. Thompson caught the essence of Hope’s new approach: “He had never been able to understand why he could get hearty laughs from the stage or at the banquet table and why his material seemed to fall short at the microphone. He remembered that big talks at parties went along smoothly without any gags or ‘he and she’ jokes. Many of them started out, ‘On my way over here from home I’–and then Hope realized. Every time he got a laugh it was from a situation and not from a gag.”
Hope explicitly invoked Will Rogers, the late monologuist beloved for his homespun commentary on politics and current events. “He took an old form and cloaked it with novelty, gave it vitality,” said Hope. “There was a performer. You get only one like him in a generation.” Yet Hope was Rogers’s logical heir. He adopted the humorist’s everyman approach and topical subject matter (“All I know is what I read in the papers,” went Rogers’s famous line), but added speed and moxie and a vaudeville gagster’s instinct for the laugh line. In doing so, he invented a new kind of monologue—the seeds of modern stand-up comedy.
Hope’s new approach evolved slowly, but it started to become apparent in his next radio job. In December 1937 Saphier convinced Albert Lasker, head of the powerful Chicago-based ad agency Lord & Thomas, to give Hope a couple of guest spots on Your Hollywood Parade, a one-hour variety show sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarettes, a Lord & Thomas client. Hosted by Hollywood musical star Dick Powell, the show was a leisurely mix of songs from new movies, “behind-the-scenes” features on moviemaking, and original playlets featuring Hollywood stars such as Edward G. Robinson. Hope’s role in the show was limited to a single comedy spot, with Powell serving as straight man. Hope hired a writer named Wilkie Mahoney to help him come up with material, and the two would spend two or three late nights a week together, working long after Hope’s day of shooting was done at Paramount.
Hope made his first appearance on Your Hollywood Parade on December 29, 1937, Powell introducing him as a “Broadway comedian exploring Hollywood with gagbook and funny bone.” Hope made jokes about Christmas shopping, tours of movie-star homes, and his own recent arrival in Hollywood. It was hardly Will Rogers material, but at least it was pegged to the real-life Hollywood scene and his own place in it. He was rewarded with a regular spot on the show, and the reviewers began to take notice. “Hope appears too adaptable a comic to be kept out of the general proceedings and tucked away for a few minutes of dialogue,” wrote Variety. The head of Lucky Strike, the show’s sponsor, even wanted Hope to replace Powell as the program’s host, but the movie star’s contract had him locked in.
Your Hollywood Parade lasted only thirteen weeks. But Hope’s stint there impressed Lasker, as well as another important person: Charles Luckman, the marketing wunderkind who had built Pepsodent toothpaste into the bestselling brand in America. Pepsodent, also a Lord & Thomas client, was about to end its nine-year sponsorship of Amos ’n’ Andy, once the top-rated show on radio but now a fading franchise, and the company was looking to shift its dollars to a new program for the fall. Saphier began negotiating to get Bob Hope the starring job.
• • •
The Big Broadcast of 1938 finally opened in February of 1938. Hope’s first feature film is a labored hodgepodge of comedy bits and musical numbers, linked by a silly plot about a transatlantic race between two mammoth ocean liners. Fields, playing a dual role as an ocean-liner magnate and his wastrel son, is at close to his worst, trudging through tired comedy bits (including variations on his pool-room and golf-course routines that he had done often before in films) and interacting little with the rest of the cast. Martha Raye turns up midway through the film, rescued from a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean, and gives it some spark with an acrobatic musical number, “Mama, That Moon Is Here Again,” in which she’s tossed about like a sack of potatoes by a bunch of sailors. There’s a perfunctory romantic subplot involving Dorothy Lamour and Leif Erickson; a Busby Berkeley–style production number celebrating the waltz; a Wagnerian solo from Metropolitan Opera star Kirsten Flagstad; and even an animated cartoon, to go with a musical number by Shep Fields and His Rippling Rhythm Orchestra.
Hope has more screen time than anyone else but Fields, and he’s considerably more lively. He opens the film in alimony jail: “I had a little trouble keeping a wife and the government on one salary,” he quips, looking stylishly disheveled in a suit jacket and open-collar white shirt. Actually, there are three ex-wives, none of whom will bail him out. Ross plays wife No. 3, and the caustic push-pull of their relationship is established right at the start. “Remember the last time we were in jail?” Hope asks. “Our wedding night,” she responds drily. “Did you ever manage to find the marriage license?” Hope: “Gee, that was about the maddest house detective I ever saw.”
Hope eventually gets sprung from jail and boards one of the ocean liners, serving as radio broadcaster for the race and emcee for the shipboard entertainment. He has some uninspired comedy business with a sidekick played by Ben Blue, does a comedy bit with his old radio foil Honey Chile, and shows off some steps in the big waltz number. But his duet with Ross in “Thanks for the Memory” is the film’s high point. Al Jolson had actually introduced the song on radio the previous December, predicting that it would be the “big hit tune of 1938.” But it took Hope and Ross’s lovely handling of it on-screen to make the prediction come true.
The movie got mixed reviews. “All loose ends and tatters, not too good at its best, and downright bad at its worst,” scoffed Frank Nugent in the New York Times. But nearly everyone singled out Hope and Ross’s number as the film’s bright spot. “You’ll rave over Bob Hope and Shirley Ross warbling ‘Thanks for the Memory,’ ” wrote Ed Sullivan. Hedda Hopper proclaimed, “Bob is our American Noël Coward.” The song spent ten weeks on radio’s Your Hit Parade, three weeks in the No. 1 spot. What may have put it over the top was a love letter from Damon Runyon, who raved about the song in his syndicated newspaper column, the Brighter Side, on March 13, 1938:
Our favorite gulp of the moment is something called “Thanks for the Memory.” A gulp is a song of the type that makes you keep swallowing that old lump in your throat. We have always been a dead cold setup for a good gulp. . . . Mr. Hope is no great shakes as a singer, though he is as good a light comedian as there is around. He sort of recites his lyrics, but he does it well, and that Miss Ross really can turn on when it comes to singing a gulp. If we had a lot of money we would hire the pair of them to go around with us singing “Thanks for the Memory” at intervals for the next month.
The Big Broadcast of 1938 was Paramount’s biggest box-office hit of the winter season—and the highest grossing of all the Big Broadcast films (though it would be the last). The studio publicity machine churned out stories by and about the film’s new star: Hope on the differences between Hollywood and Broadway, for example, or Hope’s guide to comedy slang. He became a hot attraction at benefit dinners around town: emcee for a Film Welfare League dinner in February, host of a Temple of Israel benefit in March, guest of honor at the Professional Music Men of America banquet in April, where he was made an “honorary crooner” for singing “Thanks for the Memory.” Hope was doing a monologue at the Turf Club Ball in Del Mar when Al Jolson turned to George Jessel and said, “Move over, boys.” It was the old guard acknowledging a new star had arrived.
On-screen, however, Hope had trouble following up his Big Broadcast success. His second film, College Swing, which opened in April, was another star-packed musical comedy, with Gracie Allen as a student at a fusty New England college who must pass her final exams to earn an inheritance. Hope’s part was originally so small that he went to producer Lewis Gensler—who had worked with him on Broadway in Ballyhoo of 1932—to get it beefed up. Cast as Gracie’s tutor and business manager (George Burns is also in the film, but on this rare occasion is not Gracie’s partner), Hope has mostly straight-man duty—“a pleasant comedian completely bested by bad material,” wrote Howard Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune. But Hope does get rewarded with the film’s best musical number: a peppy Burton Lane–Frank Loesser duet, “How’d Ya Like to Love Me,” which he sings with Martha Raye as they cavort around his office, tear through assorted props, and exit through a glass door, munching bananas.
Hope’s next film, Give Me a Sailor, teamed him with Raye again. He and Jack Whiting play a pair of brothers in the Navy who battle over two sisters: one a good-looking prima donna (Betty Grable), the other a plain-Jane homebody (Raye). It is mainly Raye’s picture, with Hope doing his best to make sense of a frantic and convoluted plot that culminates with Raye’s winning a “beautiful legs” contest (in a movie with Betty Grable!). Hope shows some spirit, and even a little emotional depth, as a guy who discovers that the ugly duckling is really a swan. But it was another slapdash B-picture, which got a tepid reception and did little for Hope’s prospects.
In the spring, Paramount was dithering on whether to pick up Hope’s option for another year. There was talk that studio executives thought he was too similar to Jack Benny, or that his sashaying walk (which seemed modeled on Benny’s) made him look too fey. Shurr tried to shop Hope to other studios, but all he got was an offer from Universal for $10,000—just half of what he was getting at Paramount—to costar in a picture with Loretta Young. And Young vetoed him in favor of David Niven.
“Thanks for the Memory” saved Hope again. Paramount had the rights to a play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett about a bickering married couple called Up Pops the Devil. To get some more mileage out of the song that had launched Hope in movies, someone had the bright idea to retool the story as a vehicle for Hope and his Big Broadcast costar Shirley Ross and retitle it, shamelessly, Thanks for the Memory. In June of 1938 the studio gave the film a green light and picked up Hope’s option at the same time.
Secure in his future at the studio, at least for a while, Hope got set for a busy summer. In June he reprised his Broadway role as Huck Haines in the West Coast premiere of Roberta at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. As soon as the ten-day engagement was finished, he flew to New York to headline a stage show at the Loews State Theatre, with former child actor Jackie Coogan as his featured guest star. Hope basked in his return to the New York vaudeville stage, sprinkling his monologue with cracks about his budding movie career (“Paramount signed me in one of my weaker moments—I was starving”) and his new Hollywood surroundings (“Everyone goes to bed at nine o’clock out there—with each other”).
Most notably, he closed the show with new lyrics for what had become his signature song:
Thanks for the memories
Good audience of the State, your welcome has been great
I hope I can return again on some near future date
I thank you so much
It was the first of thousands of renditions of “Thanks for the Memory” that Hope would use to close his TV, radio, and stage shows for the rest of his career. Only a few months after introducing the song in The Big Broadcast of 1938, Hope had discovered its amazing adaptability, as well as its value as a branding tool. Robin’s delicately ironic lyrics would be replaced time and again by gr
eeting-card sentiments, syrupy tributes, and outright plugs. But “Thanks for the Memory” proved to be the most enduring and versatile theme song in show-business history. And it was all Hope’s.
• • •
Back in Los Angeles, Bob and Dolores were settling into their new life. Bob joined Lakeside, the golf club in Toluca Lake that Crosby had introduced him to, and whose members also included many other golf-playing (non-Jewish) Hollywood celebrities, among them Douglas Fairbanks, Wallace Beery, W. C. Fields, and Oliver Hardy. The Hopes rented a house on Navaho Street, just a few blocks from the club, while they looked to build a permanent home in Toluca Lake, just over the hill from Hollywood.
To help manage his expanding career, Hope gave a call to his brother Jack, who was back in Ohio working in their brother Fred’s meat business. Three years older than Bob, Jack was the sibling he felt the closest to. They had shared a bedroom as kids and once stayed together in the same New York City hotel room when both were looking for work. (They had only enough money for one pair of dress pants, so they would trade off wearing it for job interviews.) Jack, an affable, blond-haired ladies’ man, who was in between two of his eventual five marriages, quit his job, hopped in his 1937 Pontiac, and drove out to Los Angeles. Bob put him to work in various roles—producer, advance man, consigliere, and all-purpose assistant, another member of Hope’s growing entourage who would remain with him for life.
Hope: Entertainer of the Century Page 14
