“Cat got your tongue?” the hostess says after he’s been quiet for too long. “You haven’t said very much. And I’ve put you between two of Miami’s most attractive women. Don’t you agree?”
Hope, sitting between two dowagers, turns to look at one—then swivels his head an extra half-turn, pricelessly, looking for the person the hostess might be referring to. He recovers quickly: “Why, you’re right. I haven’t said very much.”
You can see the wheels turning, as he tries to maneuver through each treacherous conversational pass with evasions and euphemisms. Finally, he gives up and lets loose a torrent of truth-telling—blurting out that one guest at the table “couldn’t pass for thirty unless she had a bag over her head.” Scandalized, the haughty hostess lectures him, “We should weigh our words very carefully before we speak.” Hope cries, “I do!” Indeed, no one in movies weighed them better.
• • •
Al Capstaff, a producer on The Pepsodent Show, was the first to suggest to Hope that he broadcast one of his radio shows from a military camp. Capstaff’s brother was stationed at March Field, the Air Force base in Riverside, California, and the men there needed entertainment, Capstaff said. Hope was initially cool to the idea: “Why should we drag the whole show down there?” But the appeal of a captive audience of a thousand bored servicemen—plus a chance to promote his upcoming movie, Caught in the Draft—helped change his mind.
On Tuesday, May 6, 1941, Hope and his radio troupe were bused to Riverside to do a remote broadcast from the base. Autograph seekers mobbed them as soon as they were inside the gates. Once they were onstage, nearly every joke was greeted with howls of laughter. “I want to tell you I’m thrilled to be here,” Hope said. “I came up to look at some of the sweaters I knitted.” And: “One of the aviators here took me for a plane ride this afternoon. I wasn’t frightened, but at two thousand feet one of my goose pimples bailed out.”
Hope recalled, “I got goose pimples myself from the roar that followed that one. Then I started to understand. What I said coincided with what these guys were feeling, and laughter was the only way they could communicate how they felt to the rest of the country. I was their messenger boy.” Hope returned to the studio the following week, but he missed the fired-up military crowds and went back on the road for several more troop shows—at the San Diego Naval Station, the Marines’ Camp Roberts in San Luis Obispo, and the Army’s Camp Callan in Torrey Pines—before the season ended in June.
To get a reaction from the men, Hope would send out an advance team of writers to find out the popular hangouts, names of commanding officers, and other local gossip so that he could plug them into the monologue. “It was our job to talk to the men, and anyone else, to find out which captain they didn’t like, or what terminology we could use,” said Sherwood Schwartz. “We were all civilians. We didn’t know about army stuff at the time.” A line on one show made a reference to the “head of the Navy,” and it got an unexpected laugh—Hope and company didn’t know that head meant “bathroom.” Even the term GI, standing for “government issue,” was not in common usage until Hope began using it to refer to the soldiers. For a nation being dragged reluctantly toward war, Hope’s shows played an important, if rarely acknowledged, role in getting Americans accustomed to the military mind-set, and providing a link to the servicemen who would soon be defending them on the battlefield—his own contribution to the war mobilization effort.
One member of Hope’s troupe who was a particular hit with the servicemen was his new singer—a pretty, petite brunette named Frances Langford. She had grown up in Florida and originally wanted to be an opera singer before a tonsillectomy changed her voice from soprano to contralto and she switched to pop. Langford began singing on radio and had appeared in a few movies, but she reached her career apotheosis when Hope began using her on his radio show in the spring of 1941 and made her a regular the following season. Langford had a mile-wide smile and a brassy, emotionally charged voice that could carry over an expanse of thousands of men. She was sexy, but had the openhearted wholesomeness of an older sister. Along with his other contributions to the war effort, Hope had discovered the iconic singing voice of World War II.
With a string of hit movies, a radio show that was moving up steadily in the ratings (The Pepsodent Show finished in third place for the 1940–41 season, trailing only Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen), and the start of his military-camp shows, Hope was riding higher than ever. But he didn’t rest. Even as his career was still in its formative stages, Hope set himself apart from nearly every other Hollywood star by the aggressive and creative ways in which he sought to promote himself and market his fame.
Hope noticed how many fan letters he was getting, many with requests for bios and photos, and over the summer he came up with the idea of writing a humorous memoir, timed to come out at the start of his fall radio season. Pepsodent, seeing the promotional possibilities, agreed to back the project, and Hope’s writers spent the rest of the summer churning out a ninety-six-page, joke-filled paperback called They Got Me Covered. Pepsodent printed 4 million copies and sold them for ten cents apiece (plus a box top from a tube of Pepsodent toothpaste). Free copies were handed out to Hope’s studio audiences; Paramount distributed ten thousand more to the press to promote his fall movie Nothing But the Truth; and Hope flogged the book constantly on his radio show. It was a marketing masterstroke.
The book gave Hope not just his first brand extension, but an early opportunity to take control of his own life story. The accounts of his boyhood in Cleveland and early show-business career are lighthearted, gag-filled, and all but useless for anyone looking for real insights into Bob Hope:
I was such a beautiful baby. My parents had me kidnapped twice a week just so they could see my picture in the papers.
I remember my first appearance as a comedian. I had them rolling in the aisles. Then the usher came and took away the dice.
Fan mail is like bread and butter to an actor. That reminds me—we’re having postcards for dinner tonight.
Hope would write other, marginally more revealing memoirs in later years. But he was already constructing a wall around his private life and taking charge of his public image. In July 1941 he was the subject of a laudatory profile in Time magazine, but he was unhappy because of a few comments about his wealth and his reputation for cheapness. Asked by Time how much he earned in a year, Hope replied, “You can say it’s about a quarter of a million, and I don’t like it.” The magazine estimated his net worth at around $800,000 and noted, “Around the Paramount lot he is known as a ‘hard man with a dollar.’ ”
Nothing got under Hope’s skin more. He had his publicists feed stories to the press about his charitable donations (a reported $100,000 in 1940) and his busy schedule of benefit appearances. Crosby even wrote a letter to Time, identifying himself as the source of the “hard man with a dollar” crack, but insisting that the reporter had not recognized it as a joke. “It’s not very often that I get mad,” he wrote, “but to speak of the ‘appealing avarice’ of Hope, the one man in the business who does not deserve such snide reporting, is fantastic.” But the portrait stuck: Hope’s wealth and reputed tightness with money became touchstones for nearly every profile of him.
Hope’s fourth film of 1941, the year that vaulted him to the front rank of American entertainment stars, was Louisiana Purchase. It was a screen adaptation of Irving Berlin’s Broadway musical, with Hope playing a Louisiana businessman caught up in a graft investigation. Though a relatively big-budget production with a Broadway pedigree, it was Hope’s weakest film of the year—with one of Berlin’s most negligible scores, and the tedious Victor Moore taking up way too much screen time as a graft-investigating senator. But Hope gives the film his all, particularly in a climactic filibuster on the floor of the Senate (with its obvious echoes of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), and the movie, which opened on Christmas Day, earned $2.75 million at the box office, another record high for a Hope film.
It was an amazing year for Hope. He was Paramount’s No. 1 star and ranked fourth on Variety’s annual list of Hollywood’s top box-office draws—behind Gary Cooper, Abbott and Costello, and Clark Gable. According to SEC figures, he earned $294,000 for his movie work in 1941—second only to Bing Crosby, with $300,000. A poll of 450,000 radio listeners named him the top comedian on the air, beating out Jack Benny for the first time. Radio Daily gave him its “No. 1 Entertainer” award, and the Women’s Press Club even named him the “most cooperative star in Hollywood.” In December the Los Angeles Times ran an adulatory story on him, portraying an upbeat Hollywood star at the top of his game: “Other top-line funnymen either complain of overwork or feel that stage and screen have passed over their ‘real’ dramatic talents. Bob thinks his work is swell, life is grand, everything is hunky-dory. And he doesn’t want to play Hamlet.”
It was the last time for a while that he could appear so carefree. The Times story appeared, by chance, on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. Hope was at home, having just finished working with his writers on his radio monologue, when Dolores came into his bedroom to tell him the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Hope thought it was a joke at first, and it still hadn’t quite sunk in when he went to a Hollywood Stars football game in the afternoon. At halftime an announcement was made for all men in uniform to report to their units. Hope went ahead with the usual Sunday night run-through of his radio show (“We were all too shocked to react normally by canceling it,” he said) and told jokes about Christmas shopping as if nothing had happened. “The audience laughed in little spurts,” he recalled, “on the edge of their seats in case they had to make a hasty exit.”
The show never aired. Hope’s Tuesday-night broadcast was preempted for an address to the nation by President Roosevelt, telling the country to get ready for war.
III
FINDING A MISSION
Hollywood’s Goodwill Ambassador, from the Battlefield to the Banquet Hall
Chapter 6
WAR
“He was speaking our language.”
Hollywood was a changed place after Pearl Harbor. For days following the attack, Los Angeles was on edge—fearful that the Japanese, having so brazenly attacked our naval base in Hawaii, might next target Southern California, where two-thirds of the nation’s aircraft production was located. There were rumors of Japanese planes buzzing California. Blackouts were ordered, and radio stations were shut down. Japanese Americans were rounded up, suspected of being potential saboteurs. The Army moved uninvited into the Walt Disney lot in Burbank so that it could stand watch over the huge Lockheed plant nearby. The studios, meanwhile, made contingency plans to pool their facilities in case of an enemy attack—“to ensure completion of films in event of loss of life during production of any important screen personalities,” Variety reported.
The start of the war didn’t mean a halt to making movies. On the contrary, Hollywood quickly reassured itself that continuing to make them was more important than ever. “Sacrifices will have to be made,” Daily Variety editorialized on the day after Pearl Harbor, “but the show industry must keep functioning, to preserve morale, to keep up the spirits of this country and its allies with top-rung entertainment and beneficial propaganda.” Yet, like the rest of the country, Hollywood had to adapt to the new wartime restrictions. All guns used on movie sets were confiscated. With rubber and gasoline strictly rationed, car chases were banned. For security reasons, shots of airports, harbors, or bridges were forbidden, as was the filming of battle scenes after 5:00 p.m., so as not to alarm civilians.
With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the national debate over whether the United States should get involved in a “foreign war” came to an abrupt end. Now was the time to band together in an all-out war effort, and Hollywood was eager to play its part. Many stars—Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, William Holden, Tyrone Power—enlisted in the service. Directors such as William Wyler, Frank Capra, and John Ford got officer commissions and went overseas to make war documentaries and propaganda films. Those who stayed home found other ways to contribute. John Garfield and Bette Davis helped set up the Hollywood Canteen, a former livery stable on Sunset and Cahuenga Boulevard converted into a recreation center for servicemen, where movie stars pitched in as waiters, dishwashers, and even dance partners for the boys getting ready to be shipped overseas. Clark Gable was recruited to head the actors’ division of the Hollywood Victory Committee, which lined up stars to travel the country selling war bonds. (Coming back from one of these tours in January 1942, Gable’s own wife, Carole Lombard, was killed in a plane crash.) Hollywood beauties such as Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner sold bonds by offering kisses in return for pledges of $25,000 or $50,000. Dorothy Lamour reportedly sold $30 million worth of bonds in just four days.
At thirty-eight, married, and the father of two, Bob Hope was safe from military service. (With the start of the war, the age of eligibility was raised from thirty-five to forty-five, but in practice no men over thirty-five were ever drafted.) And given his radio show’s many visits to military camps, no star had staked out a clearer role for himself on the home front. But Hope, surprisingly, took a little while to realize it. For the first few weeks after Pearl Harbor, his show remained in the studio, trying to conduct comedy business as usual. “We feel that in times like these, more than ever before, we need a moment of relaxation,” Hope said, opening his first show to air after Pearl Harbor. “All of us in this studio feel that if we can bring into your homes a little laughter each Tuesday night, we are helping to do our part.”
Yet he could hardly ignore the war. Hope’s radio monologues were now peppered with jokes about blackouts, gas rationing, and other wartime privations, such as the ban on women’s girdles to save rubber. Then, on January 27, Hope took his radio show to the San Diego Naval Base and followed it with six straight weeks of military-camp shows. After returning to the studio for one week, he went back on the road and continued to do shows for military audiences virtually nonstop until the end of the war. Jack Benny, Hope’s chief radio rival, did some shows at military bases too, but he found the raucous crowds too disruptive of his timing and carefully scripted material. For Hope, louder, looser, and faster on his feet, they were energizing. “I find these audiences of soldiers and sailors like a tonic,” he told a reporter. “They get so excited at times that they can’t resist trying to join in the performance themselves, which is okay with me because then you know you are getting audience response.”
The servicemen loved him. Hope spoke their language, sympathized with their gripes, and brought sexy movie stars for them to ogle. He would introduce himself by explicitly identifying with whatever group or base he was visiting—“This is Bob Soldier-in-the-Desert Hope,” or “This is Bob San-Diego-Naval-Base-Hospital Hope.” When he was entertaining marines, he’d make jokes about the Navy; in front of Navy men he’d take potshots at the marines. In front of everyone, he would dwell on topic A: sex. “I really don’t think there are enough girls around this base,” he joked in San Diego. “Today I saw twenty-six sailors in line to buy tickets to see a hula dancer tattooed on a guy’s chest.”
Offstage too Hope was at the front lines of Hollywood’s war effort. When the studios made plans in January for a Red Cross War Emergency Drive, Hope helped rally studio employees at Paramount. “We are all soldiers now,” he said at an organizing meeting. “It is the part of some of us to fight with dollars instead of guns.” He traveled with Crosby for a series of exhibition golf matches to raise money for war relief. For a match in Sacramento he formed a twosome with Babe Ruth, playing against Crosby and California governor Culbert Olson. In Houston, the crowds packed the fairways so tightly that Hope and Crosby barely had room to drive. One Hope shot hit a spectator standing in a sand trap and bounced onto the green. When he found his ball, Hope shouted, “Who do I pay? Who do I pay?”
At the end of April, Hope joined the Hollywood Victory Caravan, a star-packed variety show booke
d on a whistle-stop tour of thirteen cities in three weeks, to raise money for the Army and Navy Relief Funds. The all-star troupe—which included Cary Grant, Groucho Marx, Claudette Colbert, Merle Oberon, James Cagney, Betty Grable, and Laurel and Hardy, among others—set out by train from Los Angeles on April 26 and arrived in Washington three days later to start the tour. Hope, who was too busy with his radio show for the cross-country train ride, hopped a plane instead and met them in Washington, in time for a welcoming tea at the White House, hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Their first show, at Washington’s Capitol Theatre, was a little ragged and under-rehearsed, running nearly three hours long. But Hope, sharing emcee duties with Cary Grant, was a hit. “If anything it was Bob Hope’s Victory Caravan,” Variety said in its review. “As long as Hope was on the stage, the show had zest and lift. With his departure it dropped to varying levels of mediocrity.” The caravan continued on to Boston and Philadelphia, made a swing through the South and Midwest, and finished up in San Francisco on May 19. The trip was grueling enough for most of the Hollywood stars-turned-vaudeville vagabonds. But for Hope, typically, it was little more than a part-time job. He broadcast his radio show from various stops on the tour, played in more exhibition golf matches, and entertained at dozens of military bases along the way. And when the caravan was over, Hope kept on going—doubling back through the South and East, doing his radio show along the way and winding up the season at Mitchel Field on Long Island and the submarine base in New London, Connecticut. His camp-show broadcasts helped propel his radio show into first place in the Hooper ratings in June, the culmination of a remarkable four-year climb. The BBC picked up transcriptions of his show, and Hope became a radio hit in Britain as well.
After ten weeks of traveling and appearances at nearly a hundred military camps, Hope came home physically exhausted. His doctors warned him to slow down. But there was little chance of that. The rush of adrenaline that Hope got from being onstage was multiplied by the wild reception he got from the servicemen—and the feeling that he had found his role in the war effort.
Hope: Entertainer of the Century Page 20
