A small scene with Goddard in the middle of the film shows how far he’s come. Hope is in her bedroom, fighting off nerves while assuring her that he’ll protect her. “You always did fight for me, didn’t you, Wally?” she says gratefully. “Even back there in Whitford. Remember when you used to carry my books to school? And the time Big Jim Bailey pulled my hair? And you flew at him, and what a terrible beating—”
“—he gave me? I’ll never forget it,” says Hope, jumping in and timing the turnabout perfectly. “Seems I always got licked fighting for you,” he adds, his tone shifting. “Well, maybe it was worth it.”
There’s a commotion outside the room, and Hope’s bluster/fear response kicks in. He grabs her by the arms and says he’ll go outside to investigate. “If there’s a rumpus or anything, don’t come out. You just sit tight and yell like the devil.”
“Well, what will you do?”
“Why I’ll”—clenching his fists and setting his jaw for an instant, then relaxing them just as suddenly—“I’ll run and get help. Don’t worry.”
She, affectionately: “I don’t worry when you’re around, Wally.”
He, touched and taken a little aback: “Oh, really? Thanks.” He turns tentatively to leave. “Good night.” He goes out the door, then suddenly reopens it and repeats, more tenderly now, “Good night.” She blows him a kiss.
With both delicacy and humor, Hope lets us feel every twinge of the inner battle between his manly duty and his cowardly instincts, all while conveying his emerging feelings for the woman in his care. (Since everyone in the house is related, it’s not clear how the two can be kindling a romance—but never mind.) Little of this is in the actual dialogue; Hope accomplishes it with small gestures, subtle shifts in tone, posture, and facial expression. No need for Mitchell Leisen’s advice anymore; Hope has learned how to act.
Chills and laughter were a potent combination with a long movie tradition. But Hope’s constant comic chatter (“Don’t you ever stop babbling?” someone exclaims) wasn’t just a way of defusing the tension in a spooky old house. It also had resonance for an audience facing an increasingly scary world outside. It was no accident that The Cat and the Canary opened in theaters and became a hit just a few weeks after the outbreak of World War II in Europe, when the country was facing terrors of a more sinister, real-world kind. Hope’s brash wisecracks were both a release and a coping mechanism for a stressed-out nation.
The Cat and the Canary was Hope’s biggest box-office success yet and, despite his two duds earlier in the year, single-handedly boosted him into tenth place on the list of the top box-office stars of 1939. He would remain in the top ten—with a one-year interruption, when he was preoccupied by a world war—for more than a decade.
Chapter 5
ACTOR
“Go ahead, talk to each other while we rehearse.”
The Cat and the Canary was an important film for Hope, but it was overshadowed in 1939 by an unprecedented bounty of Hollywood classics. It was the year of The Wizard of Oz and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; the definitive John Ford Western, Stagecoach; and the classic Kipling adventure tale Gunga Din. Garbo laughed in Ninotchka, Olivier brooded in Wuthering Heights, and a slew of Hollywood’s top leading ladies traded bons mots in Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women. Towering above them all was Gone With the Wind, producer David O. Selznick’s epic screen version of Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War bestseller. Fittingly, the Oscar ceremony that commemorated what would become known as Hollywood’s greatest year was the first one hosted by the entertainer who would do more than anyone else to make that annual event Hollywood’s greatest night.
When Hope was asked to emcee the twelfth annual Academy Awards dinner, held at the Cocoanut Grove on February 29, 1940, it was still primarily a film-industry event, with no national radio coverage and, that year at least, little suspense. The names of the winners, which were typically given out to the press in advance under an embargo, had prematurely been revealed by the Los Angeles Times, which published the results in an early edition of the newspaper at 8:45 p.m., well before the 10:00 p.m. ceremony. The gaffe led the Academy to change its policy the following year: for every Oscar night thereafter, the names of winners would be kept inside sealed envelopes, guarded by the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse.
With or without the spoiler, Gone With the Wind was widely expected to be the big winner, and it was naturally the evening’s hot topic. Walter Wanger, the Motion Picture Academy’s new president, introduced Hope, the evening’s master of ceremonies, as “the Rhett Butler of the airwaves.” Hope began his monologue by echoing the handicappers—“What a wonderful thing, this benefit for David Selznick”—before turning his attention to other stars and trends of Hollywood’s year: Bette Davis’s Oscar collection (again), the ubiquitous teenage star Mickey Rooney (“the ten best actors of the year”), and the current vogue for big biographical dramas, such as The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, starring Don Ameche. “MGM plans to star Mickey Rooney in a super-epic,” said Hope, “portraying Don Ameche as a boy.”
Gone With the Wind made its expected sweep, hauling in ten awards, including Best Picture. “David, you should have brought roller skates,” quipped Hope on one of Selznick’s trips to the podium. Clark Gable was a surprise loser for Best Actor (to Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr. Chips), but Hattie McDaniel was in tears accepting her award for Best Supporting Actress, the first African-American performer to win an Oscar. “Over the Rainbow” won for best song, and Judy Garland got a miniature Oscar for “outstanding performance as a screen juvenile.” Hedda Hopper, recapping the show in her column, criticized some of the boring acceptance speeches, but noted that “Bob Hope, as usual, was his lifesaving self.”
He was the ideal Oscar host: a movie star who could also tell jokes; a Hollywood insider with the irreverence of an outsider; a suave, elegantly dressed ambassador for Hollywood to the rest of the world. When the Oscar shows began to be covered live on radio a few years later, his monologues played an important, often overlooked role in shaping the image of Hollywood for the American moviegoing public. It was a glamorous world, filled with people who were richer and more beautiful than you and I, but Hope brought it down to earth—reporting its gossip, popularizing its jargon, satirizing its mores and morals. Hollywood stars had storybook love affairs, but their marriages didn’t last. They were charming in public, but jealous and backbiting in private. They lived in lavish homes with big swimming pools, but this glittering gated community had a small-town camaraderie, where everybody seemed to know one another. Over the next thirty-five years, Bob Hope, who went on to host or cohost the Oscar show a record nineteen times, provided our annual peek inside it.
Hope’s role at the Oscars in demystifying Hollywood—ribbing its stars and puncturing its pretensions—was paralleled by an evolution that was taking place in his movie roles. He was developing a new kind of comedy, one that helped redefine the relationship between ordinary moviegoers and those remote figures on the silver screen. That evolution, which began with The Cat and the Canary, took a giant leap forward in Hope’s next movie, which opened just a few weeks after his inaugural stint as Oscar host. It was the first of the famous Road pictures, costarring his friend and most enduring show-business partner, Bing Crosby.
After their first appearance on stage together in 1932, at the Capitol Theatre in New York, Hope and Crosby returned to separate coasts and didn’t see much of each other for five years. But they reconnected when Hope arrived at Paramount in the fall of 1937. They would meet for lunch on the studio lot and play golf together at Lakeside, the club where Crosby belonged and Hope soon would join too. Crosby had Hope as a guest on his popular radio show, The Kraft Music Hall, and invited Bob and Dolores down to Del Mar, the racetrack near San Diego that Crosby owned a large share of.
On Saturday night, August 6, 1938, Bing was master of ceremonies for a special Hollywood night at Del Mar when he called Bob to join him onstage. The two horsed around together, rehashing so
me of the bits they had done at the Capitol Theatre six years before. Their chemistry so impressed William LeBaron, Paramount’s production chief, who was in the audience, that he suggested putting the two of them together in a movie.
The idea took more than a year to come to fruition. The studio may have had second thoughts about teaming Crosby, one of its biggest stars, with Hope, who in mid-1938 was still an unproven quantity. But the project was assigned to screenwriters Frank Butler and Don Hartman, who had written for both Hope (Never Say Die) and Crosby (Waikiki Wedding). They dusted off a script they had done years earlier for Crosby called Follow the Sun and had refashioned for Jack Oakie and Fred MacMurray, with the new title The Road to Mandalay. When Oakie and MacMurray bowed out, the screenwriters retooled it once again for Hope and Crosby and changed the title to Road to Singapore, supposedly because the new locale sounded more sinister.
To round out the team and provide a romantic interest for both Hope and Crosby, Paramount cast one of its top female stars, Dorothy Lamour. A native of New Orleans, Lamour (originally Lambour, before the b got dropped on a marquee) had moved to Chicago with her divorced mother and began her show-business career as a singer with Herbie Kaye’s big band. Following a short-lived marriage to Kaye, she moved to New York and worked solo in nightclubs—where Hope often used to see her when he was starring on Broadway. But she got the call from Hollywood first, and in 1936 moved west to costar in The Jungle Princess, playing a native girl who falls for Ray Milland. She was cast as exotic, scantily clad beauties in several more tropical adventures, among them John Ford’s Hurricane, as well as in the musical High, Wide, and Handsome and Hope’s debut film, The Big Broadcast of 1938. Her dark beauty, sultry voice, and trademark sarong had made her one of Paramount’s most recognizable stars, and she got second billing in Road to Singapore—after Crosby but before Hope.
Shooting began in October 1939 on the Paramount lot, with some location work at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden in Arcadia. The director was an old studio hand, Victor Schertzinger. A former concert violinist, Schertzinger had more experience with musicals than comedy (he even composed two of the movie’s four songs, with lyricist Johnny Burke). But no director could have been prepared for a comedy quite like this.
Hope and Crosby wanted to re-create the wisecracking spontaneity of their stage appearances together. So they treated the Butler-Hartman script as merely a jumping-off point. They brought in gag writers from their radio shows to add new jokes, tossing them in willy-nilly during rehearsals. “For a couple of days,” Crosby recalled, “when Hope and I tore freewheeling into a scene, ad-libbing and violating all of the accepted rules of movie-making, Schertzinger stole bewildered looks at his script, then leafed rapidly through it searching for the lines we were saying.” Lamour, who prided herself on knowing her lines, was nonplussed when Crosby and Hope kept departing from the script she had learned. “I kept waiting for a cue that never seemed to come,” she recalled, “so finally, in exasperation, I asked, ‘Please, guys, when can I get my line in?’ They stopped dead, broke up, and laughed for ten minutes.” She finally gave up trying to learn the script in advance. “I would read over the next day’s work only to get the idea of what was happening. What I really needed was a good night’s sleep to be in shape for the next morning’s ad-libs.”
Butler and Hartman were not happy when they saw the shambles Hope and Crosby were making of their lines. “If you recognize any of yours, yell bingo!” shouted Hope when the writers showed up on the set. They complained to the studio, but got nowhere; Hope and Crosby’s antics, unorthodox as they were, seemed to be working. Hope described the creative process that began on Road to Singapore and was honed in succeeding Road pictures: “I had a great staff [of writers] on radio . . . all these marvelous people. I would give them the script, and they would bring the jokes in, and I would edit them and call Bing into my room and say, ‘What do you think of this? What do you think of that?’ We’d go to the set, and the stagehands were waiting for us to do nutty stuff. We wouldn’t disappoint them.”
They were playing to the crew, the writers, and anyone else who was on the set. “The Road pictures had the excitement of live entertainment,” Hope said. “Some stars banned visitors, but Bing and I liked to have people around. New visitors sparked new gags.” One visitor was an ex-vaudeville song-and-dance man named Barney Dean, whom Bob had first met at the Stratford Theater in Chicago. A short, bald-headed Jewish immigrant from Russia, born Barnett Fradkin, Dean showed up on the set of Road to Singapore one day selling Christmas cards. He made Crosby and Hope laugh, and Crosby persuaded Paramount to hire him as a writer on the film. Dean did little actual writing, but he would kibitz on scenes, occasionally suggesting a line or bit of business and in general keeping Bob and Bing amused. Dean was legendary among Hollywood gagmen for his ad-lib wit. (Once a policeman stopped him for jaywalking across Hollywood Boulevard. “How fast was I going, Officer?” said Dean.) He became a regular member of the Road picture crew, and a frequent companion for Hope when he toured—writer, court jester, and all-purpose good-luck charm.
Hope and Crosby were fortunate to have a director who indulged their loosey-goosey style. For one scene, Hope recalled, Schertzinger shot just one take, yelled, “Cut and print,” and started to move on. An assistant director pointed out that Hope had stepped out of the light for a few seconds and asked if Schertzinger didn’t at least want to reshoot part of it from other angles, to cover himself. “No,” said Schertzinger. “That scene was like a piece of music; it was well orchestrated and it flowed beautifully. Maybe the flutes were off-key or the cellos didn’t come in at the right time. But the total performance was great.”
No one knew that Road to Singapore would be the first of a series, and the film in some ways is atypical of the Road pictures that followed. Crosby is clearly the central character, with a conventional backstory. He plays Josh Mallon, the son of a shipping magnate (Charles Coburn), who chafes at going into the family business, spurns an engagement to his high-society fiancée, and escapes to a South Seas island with his free-spirited pal Ace Lannigan (Hope). His father’s efforts to bring Josh back home provide a framing device for the comic adventures—a plot obligation jettisoned by future Road pictures, in which Hope and Crosby were simply plopped down in an exotic setting and let loose.
But Road to Singapore introduces most of the key elements of the series’ successful formula. Hope and Crosby are usually hucksters or con men of some sort, trying to earn money by duping the locals. At some point they meet up with Lamour, who becomes both a partner and an object of romantic rivalry, with Crosby nearly always the victor. When danger threatens, Bob and Bing play a childlike game of patty-cake, distracting the villains just long enough to sucker punch them and make their escape. There are four or five songs, including at least one romantic ballad for Crosby and Lamour, and a buddy number for Hope and Crosby.
Most crucially, Road to Singapore establishes the contours of the Hope-Crosby screen relationship. They’re close friends, but always at odds. Hope is the patsy, Crosby the schemer. Hope is a worrier, brash but insecure, all nervous motion. Crosby is the cool customer: easygoing, self-possessed, unflappable. Hope is an overeager puppy with women, chasing but rarely catching them. Crosby merely has to take out his pipe and give them a bu-bu-boo, and the girls can’t resist.
Road to Singapore doesn’t have the comic highs of the later Road pictures; there’s too much plot and not enough nuttiness. Lamour plays a native girl rescued by Hope and Crosby from her bullwhip-wielding boyfriend (Anthony Quinn). She moves in with them as their (chaste) housekeeper, and the three try to make money by hawking a bogus cleaning solution to the locals, predictably ruining the suit of an unsuspecting customer (Jerry Colonna). In the farcical climax, they find themselves in the middle of a native wedding ceremony, where Bing is picked by one of the local girls for marriage and they must make a fast escape—not just from the natives but from Josh’s father and fiancée,
who turn up in the jungle looking for him.
The delights of Road to Singapore are in the margins: the fizzy, freestyle repartee between Hope and Crosby. There are relatively few actual jokes. (Trying to wrestle a sailfish into their fishing boat, Crosby shouts, “He won’t give up!” Hope responds, “Must be a Republican!”) The laughs come from the way they bounce off each other so effortlessly, in their idiosyncratic, jazzy slang—so natural that it sounds ad-libbed, but so fast and perfectly timed that it can’t be. After they arrive at their tropical isle destination, for example, the two travelers check their money supply in a few throwaway lines:
BING: “How much you holdin’ there, Bubbles?”
BOB: “We’re loaded, chum. A dollar twenty-eight.”
BING: “One-two-eight.”
BOB: “Net.”
BING: “Well, that should be enough to light a fire under a couple of short beers.”
Or, more elaborately, a scene in which the boys decide that Lamour’s overeager housekeeping is ruining their laid-back bachelor lifestyle, and they have to tell her to leave. Crosby forces Hope to break the bad news—and then, after Lamour has left and both of them are feeling remorseful, tries to take the credit:
BING, seated and puffing on his pipe: “You know, I thought I handled that pretty well, didn’t you?”
BOB, stopping short, in the midst of moving their furniture back in place: “You did what?”
“I handled the situation here pretty well.”
“What was I doin’ in there?”
“Well, you were weakening, I’ll tell you that. I had to back you up.”
Hope: Entertainer of the Century Page 17
