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The war didn’t deter a record crowd of sixteen hundred from packing into the Biltmore Bowl for the annual Academy Awards banquet on February 26, 1942. But it cast a sobering light on the affair. In keeping with the national mood of austerity, the Academy urged attendees to avoid fancy formal wear (though several actresses came in evening gowns anyway). The guest of honor was former presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, author of a new bestselling book urging international cooperation called One World, whose speech was broadcast nationally on CBS radio.
Hope, emceeing the event for the third year in a row, revealed a Willkie button under his lapel. “I haven’t given up yet,” he joked. “And there’s one for Hoover under it.” The wartime anxieties didn’t deter him from his usual Hollywood wisecracks. About a recent air raid in Los Angeles: “That was no air raid; that was John Barrymore coming home from W. C. Fields’s house.” When Hope presented a fake Oscar to Jack Benny, for impersonating a woman in Charley’s Aunt, Hope quipped, “Benny will no longer play any of these female roles because the government’s taking his rubber girdle away from him.”
Hope’s own movie career, meanwhile, was rolling along. He was developing a consistent screen character—the wisecracking, girl-chasing, blustering coward—but the movies themselves had a pleasing variety: service comedies, buddy movies, comic horror films, retro-thirties romantic comedies. With My Favorite Blonde—which began shooting just before Pearl Harbor, finished up in January and was released in April—he discovered a new genre that showed him off especially well: the comedy spy caper.
The movie had its origins in Hope’s radio show. His obsession with the glamorous, blond British actress Madeleine Carroll became a running gag on the show, and one day Carroll, a fellow Paramount star, telephoned to thank Hope for all the publicity. She suggested they ought to do a picture together, and Paramount liked the idea. As a vehicle, the studio chose a script by two of Hope’s former radio writers, Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, rewritten by Don Hartman and Frank Butler, the Road picture team. Sidney Lanfield, a comedy veteran working with Hope for the first time, got the director’s assignment. The result was one of Hope’s best films of the early forties.
He plays a small-time vaudeville song-and-dance man who does a cheesy act with a roller-skating penguin. Carroll is a British secret agent who shows up at his dressing-room door (“Too late, sister, I’ve already got an agent,” he tells her) and drags him into a Hitchcockian spy plot. The MacGuffin is a brooch with a secret code, needed to launch a fleet of British bombers from an air base in California. Carroll surreptitiously plants the brooch on Hope, then accompanies him on a cross-country train trip to deliver it, with enemy spies in hot pursuit. (The silly premise was close enough to reality to disturb some British military officers, who complained about the film’s suggestion that the launching of an RAF fleet would be dependent on such a harebrained scheme.)
My Favorite Blonde puts a comic twist on a familiar Hitchcock formula: the average Joe drawn unwittingly into life-or-death intrigue. Some of the scenes consciously echo The 39 Steps, the 1935 Hitchcock film in which Carroll raced around the Scottish countryside with Robert Donat, trying to foil an enemy spy ring. Hope does an amusing parody of their stiff-upper-lipped derring-do: he’s a quavering, reluctant hero who wants no part of the adventure but is too moonstruck by Madeleine to avoid it. Their first encounter in his dressing room is Hope at his babbling, glassy-eyed best:
MADELEINE: “Do you know what it feels like to be followed and hounded and watched every second?”
BOB: “Well, I used to. Now I pay cash for everything.”
MADELEINE (urgently): “Look at me.”
BOB (hypnotized): “I’m looking.”
MADELEINE: “You’ve got to trust me.”
BOB: “I’m not through looking.”
Hope gets the most out of every gag line, even the most obvious ones. Being dragged away by the authorities: “They can’t do this to me! I’m an American citizen! I pay taxes!” Beat. “Well, I’m an American citizen.” But the film also shows off his skills as a physical comedian as never before. Riding the train in one scene, he hides behind a newspaper as a trio of threatening characters silently join him in the compartment. Hope fidgets, peeks timidly from behind the paper, fans himself nervously with his hat, opens his cigarette case, and spills all of them on the floor. It’s Hope’s version of a classic comic archetype—the childlike naïf, flustered by an intimidating adult world—harking back to Chaplin and ahead to Jerry Lewis.
Though Hope stays admirably committed to character, he steps outside of the film at several points, with self-mocking references to his offscreen life and career—a device that would become common in his films. At one point he turns on the radio and hears an announcer introducing The Pepsodent Show. He quickly switches it off. “I can’t stand that guy,” he snaps. And Crosby turns up for the first of many unbilled cameos in Hope films, as a truck driver who gives Hope directions to a Teamsters picnic. After getting the directions and giving Bing a light for his pipe, Hope walks away, then stops and does a double take. “Couldn’t be,” he mutters, before moving on.
“Not only the funniest Bob Hope picture, but the funniest comedy within memory—that is the verdict of New York critics (and of New Yorkers) on My Favorite Blonde,” reported the Los Angeles Times when the film opened in April. “Unless everybody hereabouts is wrong, this is an almost perfect feature.” It broke records for its four-week run at the Paramount Theater in New York and outdrew Hope’s previous hits Caught in the Draft and Nothing But the Truth at theaters around the country. Once again, it was an escapist comedy with potent echoes of the real world. Though conceived before the United States was drawn into the war, Hope’s comic face-off with the vaguely identified (but obviously German) spies was a welcome release for a nation now fighting real-life foreign enemies.
The early months of 1942 were the darkest of the war. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan’s war machine moved with frightening speed—overrunning Hong Kong, Burma, Thailand, Singapore, and the Philippines in a matter of weeks. American merchant ships, speeding across the Atlantic to supply the European Allies with war matériel, were being sunk by German submarines faster than new ships could be built. With America’s war-production efforts still gearing up, a much-anticipated counteroffensive by the Allies was many months away.
Hollywood’s first efforts to bring entertainment to the troops were, by necessity, confined to the home front. The United Service Organizations (USO), created in 1941 by six nonprofit groups to provide recreation and entertainment for America’s men in uniform, set up clubs near military camps around the country where soldiers could eat, drink, and dance with local volunteer girls. Later, through its Camp Shows subsidiary, run by Abe Lastfogel, head of the William Morris talent agency, the USO began sending stars such as Al Jolson, Mickey Rooney, and Martha Raye on entertainment tours of domestic military bases.
Armed Forces Radio also began producing radio variety shows expressly for the troops and broadcast overseas via shortwave. Hope was a frequent host of one of them, Command Performance, a weekly show that featured top Hollywood guests supposedly picked by its GI listeners—“the greatest entertainers in America as requested by you, the fighting men of the United States armed forces throughout the world.” Hope hosted his first broadcast for the troops on July 7, 1942, and did two more that year, sending along jokes from back home and motivational pep talks for the job they were doing over there: “This is Bob rubber-drive Hope, telling you guys out there that we’re all gonna keep turning in our rubber suspenders till we’ve caught the Axis with their panzers down.” And: “Hitler’s always talking about his spring offensive, but, brother, that guy’s offensive all year round.” He could be a little racier than he could on NBC, where his jokes were closely monitored by the censors. One example was his notorious crack about the rubber shortage and Kate Smith, the amply proportioned singer whose theme song was “When the Moon
Comes over the Mountain.” “Kate Smith finally turned in her girdle,” said Hope. “You should see the moon come over the mountain now.” NBC censors nixed the line, but the troops got to hear it.
In the summer of 1942, one of Hope’s former movie stand-ins, now an army sergeant, dropped by the Paramount lot and suggested that Hope pay a visit to the US troops stationed in Alaska, guarding the Aleutian Islands against a possible Japanese attack. A few entertainers, among them Joe E. Brown and Edgar Bergen, had already traveled to that frozen territory, and Hope was eager to join them. He told his brother Jack to arrange a trip there during the one small window of time he had on his busy schedule—after his current film, They Got Me Covered, finished shooting on September 5, and before his first radio show of the season, on September 22.
Bob got two of his radio costars, Frances Langford and Jerry Colonna, to join him. With no room for a band, Langford suggested that Hope bring along a guitarist named Tony Romano, who had worked with Morey Amsterdam on the radio and as Dick Powell’s vocal arranger at Warner Bros. A small, wiry Italian-American from Fresno, California, known as one of the top arrangers in Hollywood, Romano signed on as the fourth member of Hope’s first troupe of wartime entertainers.
The trip was almost scrubbed before it got started. Just as the quartet was getting ready to leave from San Francisco, Hope got a telegram from the military brass in Alaska calling off the tour. The weather looked dicey, they said, and they couldn’t guarantee that Hope would be back in time for his radio show. Hope wired back quickly, all but begging to come: “Four thespians, bags packed with songs and witty sayings, ready to tour your territory. Have been informed, due to lack of time, trip is off. Please let us make trip and will take our chances.” Twelve hours later he got a reply from Major General Simon Buckner, overall commander of US troops in Alaska: “You leave Tuesday.”
Hope and his entertainers flew first to Fairbanks, where they were assigned a Lockheed Lodestar aircraft and two pilots to ferry them around the territory. Their first stop was Nome, the remote town nicknamed Devil’s Island by the GIs stranded there. Hope entertained in Quonset huts for men jammed inside and standing on tiptoes to see. He did a show for three thousand troops in the rain on Unimak Island in the Aleutians and for thirteen hundred mud-caked construction engineers working on the Canadian-Alaskan Highway in the Yukon Territory. At a refueling stop in Northway, he did an impromptu show for forty men, using a tree stump as a stage. With communications spotty in these forlorn outposts, the arrival of a troupe of Hollywood entertainers often came as a surprise and prompted some emotional reactions. At one show in the Aleutians, when Langford was singing “Isn’t It Romantic,” a general nudged Hope and pointed to two airmen listening to her in the crowd. One had his arm around his buddy, who was silently crying.
Hope and his little band grew close on the trip, as they endured the below-zero weather, bare-bones accommodations, and often treacherous plane flights. Their two pilots, Marvin Setzer (the younger, whom Hope nicknamed Junior) and Bob Gates (the tall one, dubbed Growing Pains), became part of the family too, especially after a perilously close call on a flight from Cordova to Anchorage. The troupe was supposed to be in Anchorage by evening, but with darkness falling—and flying at night in Alaska considered too dangerous—the pilots wanted to wait until morning. But Hope and Langford, intent on getting to Anchorage in time for a welcoming party that had been planned for them, prevailed on the pilots to leave that night.
A few minutes after taking off, the plane was enveloped in fog and sleet. As they headed toward Anchorage, the right engine conked out, and so did the radio. The plane was losing altitude at a rate of two hundred feet a minute and couldn’t find the airport. Back in the main cabin, Hope and company knew something was wrong when they heard shouting from the cockpit. The crew chief came back and told them to put on their parachutes and “Mae West” life vests.
As he watched Langford being outfitted, Hope felt a wave of guilt: he had prevailed on her husband, actor Jon Hall, to let Frances take the trip. Colonna nervously stroked his mustache and quipped drily that the station wagon probably wouldn’t be there. It was a reference to a joke Hope told, about a nervous recruit making his first parachute jump. The sergeant instructs him to pull the rip cord and ride the parachute to the ground, where a station wagon will be waiting to pick him up. But when the recruit pulls the cord, the parachute doesn’t open. Hurtling toward the earth, he grumbles, “I’ll bet the station wagon won’t be there either.”
“It was a pretty scary night,” Gates, the copilot, recalled years later. “Bob came up to the cockpit, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, ‘They’re all on their knees praying back there.’ I said, ‘Tell ’em to keep going, ’cause we’re gonna need all the help we can get.’ ” The ground crew at Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage, learning of the plane’s troubles, turned on all their searchlights, in violation of security rules. The plane had dropped to about two thousand feet when Gates and Setzer finally caught sight of the beams and headed the plane toward the airport.
“We saw this big glow, circled, and landed,” said Gates. “We couldn’t taxi, because we only had one engine. There was ice all over the airplane. All the generals and base commanders came running out. Bob was one of the first ones out. I was the last one. He came over, put his arms around me, and said, ‘Okay, let’s go to the barracks and change our drawers.’ ”
Hope later gave each pilot a watch, with the inscription “Thanks for my life.” He wasn’t exaggerating the danger. Gates, who became a colonel in the Air Force and logged eighteen thousand hours of flying time (including several more overseas trips with Hope), said that of all the flights he made in his career, that was the worst.
Bad weather of a more benign sort nearly kept Hope from getting back in time for his first radio show of the season. Pepsodent had lined up Edgar Bergen and bandleader Kay Kyser to fill in for him, in case Hope didn’t make it. But the weather cleared just in time for Hope and company to fly to Seattle on Monday, and they did a show on Tuesday night from nearby Fort Lewis. Then they turned around and flew back to finish the Alaska tour, making a few final stops in the Aleutians before heading home to Los Angeles.
The Alaska trip made a powerful impression on Hope, and he talked soberly about it afterward. “I wouldn’t trade this trip for my last five years in show business—my lucky years,” he told a reporter. “I tell you, a guy gets to seeing himself in the proper focus in a setup like that. It’s touching to think that the visit of a mere human being can mean so much.” He promised to make another trip to Alaska, launched a drive to raise money for athletic gear and other recreational equipment for the men up there, and said he planned to go next to the British Isles. “Yes, Hollywood won’t see so much of Hope from here on out. I’ve got other plans.”
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Questions were occasionally raised as to why Hope, Hollywood’s greatest cheerleader for the troops, wasn’t in uniform himself. He batted away the criticism fairly easily, with the help of friendly newspaper columnists. Dorothy Kilgallen reminded her readers how much Hope had done for the war effort, entertaining the troops and selling war bonds, and reported that he had tried to enlist six times (unlikely). “He was rejected every time,” she wrote, “because the Army would rather have him doing what he is doing than carrying a gun.” Ed Sullivan, after a golf game with Hope and heavyweight champion Joe Louis, now a sergeant in the Army, quoted Louis as telling Hope that it was more important for him to stay out of the line of fire. “The greatest good you can do is by making soldiers and sailors laugh,” said Louis. “Us younger boys will take care of the fighting. You take care of the laughing.”
He was taking care of it quite well. His Pepsodent Show, riding high on Hope’s wartime gags, was now the No. 1 program in radio’s Hooper ratings, just ahead of Fibber McGee and Molly, the show that followed Hope on Tuesday nights. And in November 1942, Paramount released a third Road picture, Road to Morocco, probably the most fam
ous and fondly remembered (if not necessarily the best) of the entire series.
One reason is the film’s title number, sung by the boys while riding on the back of a two-humped camel—the iconic image of the raffish camaraderie that sparked the films. The two, who have washed up on a desert shore after their ship has exploded and sunk (thanks to a match tossed inadvertently by Hope into the engine room), look as good as they ever have: sailor caps perched jauntily on their heads, Crosby trimmer and more animated than usual, Hope looking fit and manly in a white T-shirt and stubble of beard. Johnny Burke’s lyrics, batted back and forth by the two stars, are a high point of the Road films’ self-parodying, in-joke humor:
Where we’re goin’, why we’re goin’, how can we be sure?
I’ll lay you eight to five that we meet Dor-o-thy Lamour . . .
[Bing] For any villains we may meet, we haven’t any fear
[Bob] Paramount will protect us ’cause we’re signed for five more years.
The entire Burke–Van Heusen score, which includes the standard “Moonlight Becomes You,” is probably the best of all the Road pictures. The comic plot—from another screenplay by Frank Butler and Don Hartman, directed by David Butler (replacing Victor Schertzinger, who had died unexpectedly in October 1941)—is a satisfying pile-on of schemes and counterschemes. First, to make some money, Bing sells Bob into slavery. When Bob winds up being pampered in a harem and engaged to marry a desert princess (Lamour, naturally), Bing tries to horn in on the action. Then, when Hope finds out that any man who marries the princess is cursed to die, he tries to con Bing into taking his place. The thrust and parry of their back-and-forth has been polished to a fine edge:
Hope: Entertainer of the Century Page 21
