Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  BING: “We’ll have to storm the place.”

  BOB: “You storm, I’ll stay here and drizzle.”

  BING: “You got red blood, ain’t you?”

  BOB: “Yeah, but I don’t want to get it all over strangers.”

  BING: “I wanna have a talk with you, man-to-man.”

  BOB: “Who’s gonna hold up your end?”

  Road to Morocco is the wackiest and most anarchic Road picture yet. There are talking camels (“This is the screwiest picture I was ever in,” one says) and fourth-wall-breaking gags. In a scene near the end, for example, an exasperated Hope quickly recaps all the troubles that Bing has gotten them into. “I know all that!” says Bing after he finishes. “Yeah,” Bob replies, “but the people who came in the middle of the picture don’t.” (Bing’s retort: “You mean they missed my song?”) And the movie has one of the only truly ad-libbed moments in the entire Road series. In the middle of a scene with a camel they’ve found in the desert (the one they’ll hop onto for the “Road to Morocco” number), the beast suddenly spits in Hope’s face. As Hope reels back out of camera range, Crosby laughs and pets the animal: “Good girl, good girl.” The camel improvised the spit—but when director Butler saw the spontaneous reaction, he kept it in the film.

  The Morocco setting turned out to be unfortunately timed—Allied troops invaded North Africa just days before the film’s release—but that mattered little. Road to Morocco earned $4 million at the box office, the best ever for a Road picture and the fourth highest for any film of 1942.

  • • •

  By early 1943, the tide in the war had turned in the Allies’ favor. Starting with the Battle of Midway in June 1942, Japan’s advances in the Pacific were being steadily reversed. The German invasion of the Soviet Union had bogged down in the bitter Russian winter. The long-awaited Allied offensive in the European theater, the invasion of North Africa in November 1942, had succeeded beyond expectations, with Rommel’s forces driven out and Allied troops now securely in control of the region. So secure, in fact, that the USO was able to start sending entertainers there. Hope, tied up with his radio show until the summer, must have looked on enviously as stars such as Martha Raye and Carole Landis were in the first wave of entertainers to travel to North Africa in the early months of 1943.

  Hope did his bit back home, making a ten-week tour in the spring of military camps in the Midwest and South. His pace was unflagging, his energy almost uncanny. “There were never less than three telephones in our rooms, and all of them rang at the same time every second of the day and night,” said Barney Dean, who accompanied Hope on the trip. “And people, people, people. It was maddening. But Bob didn’t seem to mind.” When his exhausted troupe reached Atlanta, looking to rest up before the next day’s radio broadcast, Hope got a call from a Paramount wardrobe boy who had been drafted and was now stationed in Albany, Georgia. Hope grabbed Barney Dean and made a hundred-mile drive there, just to do a show for the fellow’s unit.

  Back in Hollywood, Hope made a cameo appearance in Star Spangled Rhythm, a flag-waving Paramount musical revue, and played a newspaper reporter in Washington who stumbles on a German spy plot in They Got Me Covered, his long-delayed picture for Goldwyn. On March 4 Hope emceed his fourth Academy Awards banquet, held at the Cocoanut Grove. The war once again took center stage. The evening began with privates Alan Ladd and Tyrone Power unfurling an American flag containing the names of 26,677 members of the Hollywood community who were in uniform, and ended with the Best Picture award going to Mrs. Miniver, the inspirational wartime drama about an English family during the German Blitz. In between, Hope made jokes about the many Hollywood leading men who were off fighting in the war. “Pretty soon,” he said, “we’ll see Hedy Lamarr waiting to be kissed while they put a heating pad on Lewis Stone”—Mickey Rooney’s screen father in the Andy Hardy films.

  Hope was about to become one of those missing Hollywood stars. For his summer radio hiatus in July and August of 1943, Hope made plans for his first overseas tour of military bases: a two-month trip to the British Isles and North Africa, under the auspices of the USO Camp Shows. He wanted to reassemble the same group he had taken with him to Alaska and managed to recruit both Langford and guitarist Romano. But Colonna had movie commitments and a family to support, and he had to beg off. In his place Hope brought along Jack Pepper, a pudgy former vaudeville entertainer (once married to Ginger Rogers), who was in the Army and stationed in Texas, where Hope reconnected with him while traveling on his spring tour.

  The four entertainers flew to New York in mid-June, to get their inoculations and await word on when they could depart. Dolores came along too, joining Bob for a few nights at the Waldorf Astoria. During the days, he went over material, which included some special songs written for the tour by Johnny Mercer. In the evenings he and Dolores would take in a nightclub or a Broadway show, including the hit new Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! Hope even squeezed in some last-minute reshoots for Let’s Face It, the movie version of Cole Porter’s Broadway musical that he had shot in the spring. Paramount had decided the film needed a better ending and sent second-unit director Hal Walker all the way to New York to get two new scenes on film before Hope left for Europe.

  After six days of waiting, Hope and company finally got the word to be at LaGuardia’s Marine Air Terminal at 1:00 a.m. There, Bob and Dolores had an anxious but subdued parting. A few months earlier, in February 1943, a similar USO flight headed for North Africa had crashed near Lisbon, killing Tamara, Hope’s former costar in Roberta on Broadway, and severely injuring singer Jane Froman, who had appeared with him on his early radio show The Intimate Revue.

  “Take care of yourself,” Dolores said, as Bob got ready to board the plane.

  “You know I will,” he replied. They kissed, and he was off.

  For Dolores the partings were becoming sadly familiar. In one of her few interviews around that time, with Screenland magazine, she put a typically upbeat face on it, praising Bob’s dedication and energy, and touting her own volunteer work during the war—as head of the Southern California chapter of the American Women’s Volunteer Services, in charge of agriculture. “I couldn’t let this exciting world fly by without doing my share, and I’m busy,” Dolores said. “You have no idea how many angles this involves. We spend days and nights rounding up workers, both men and women—thousands and thousands of them, to harvest the fruit and vegetable crops. Also, the vast vineyards. We have to work fast, you know, and it is a tremendous task. But we are so elated over our success that we forget to be tired.”

  She was circumspect, as always, about their marriage—though, in the coded language of 1940s Hollywood wives, one can detect hints of the accommodations she had to make: “It is the woman who makes the marriage, and like any career, one must work at it.” She laughed off any suggestion that she might be jealous over “all those beautiful movie girls” her husband worked with. But she added, “Marriage can become complicated. Nothing is stationary, least of all emotions. But when a couple has built up understanding and companionship, along with the love, they find little difficulty in bridging the various evolutions.” She was good.

  • • •

  Hope and his troupe were among the thirty passengers and crew aboard the Pan Am Clipper that took off from LaGuardia, lights blacked out for security reasons, early in the morning of June 25, 1943. They made a stop in Newfoundland and were on their way to Britain when they were forced to turn back because of high winds. Grounded for an extra day, the troupe did its first show of the tour at a Royal Canadian Air Force command station.

  The next day they flew to Foynes, Ireland, and from there to Bristol—the Hope family’s last home in England, before sailing for America in 1908. They caught a train to London, where they were greeted by a throng of fans, reporters, and newsreel photographers. Also in the welcoming party: William Dover, chief of the USO in England, and Hal Block, a radio gag writer supplied by the Office of War Information to help visi
ting entertainers with their comedy material. Seeing London for the first time since his trip there in 1939, Hope was startled at the damage wrought by the German bombing, and by the impact the war was having on everyday life. When he checked into Claridge’s Hotel, Hope called up room service and said there wasn’t any soap in the bathroom. “Sorry, sir,” came the reply, “there is no soap in the King’s bathroom either.”

  On his first day in London, Hope had a driver take him to Hitchin, forty miles away, to see his ninety-nine-year-old grandfather, James. The old man had slowed down considerably since the family get-together back in 1939, but he and his grandson still spent some time together talking about the family. “I was sorry I wasn’t able to tell him more about the children,” Bob noted. “I’d been traveling around the country so much that when I came home, it was just like doing another personal appearance, only with meals.” A week later, while Hope was still in England, his grandfather died, just a few weeks short of his hundredth birthday. “He finished out of the money,” said Hope.

  After a night of theater in London, the “Hope gypsies,” as Hope dubbed them, embarked on an eleven-day, thirteen-hundred-mile swing through the English countryside. They traveled in two cars, a 1938 Hudson and a 1938 Ford, with drivers supplied by the English Women’s Corps, navigating roads from which the road signs had been removed, a precautionary measure to thwart a potential German invasion. They entertained at air hangars, supply depots, and bomber bases, doing three or four shows a day, sometimes for pilots who were going out on bombing runs the next day. An advance truck would typically arrive at each location twenty minutes ahead of the performers to set up the sound system. When the shows were finished, the entertainers would spend the night at local inns, with and without plumbing, or private farmhouses.

  “I’ve just arrived from the States,” Hope would begin. “You know, that’s where Churchill lives.” Then after the laugh: “He doesn’t exactly live there. He just goes back to deliver Mrs. Roosevelt’s laundry.” He joked about the Brits and their customs (“They drive on the wrong side of the street here—just like in California”) and about barracks life: “Were the soldiers at the last camp happy to see me! They actually got down on their knees. What a spectacle! What a tribute! What a crap game!” He talked about the Hollywood stars who were now in uniform (one of them, Clark Gable, was stationed at an air base in England that Hope visited) and the pinup girls who were waiting back home. “We soon discovered you had to be pretty lousy to flop in front of those guys,” Hope said in his memoir of the trip, I Never Left Home. “They were so glad to see somebody from home that they yelled and screamed and whistled at everything. And for a little while, they were able to forget completely their own problems and what they’d been through, or what they might be expecting to go through.”

  Hope and his entertainers visited military hospitals nearly everywhere they went. “Don’t get up!” Bob would shout when he entered the wards. He would walk among the beds, making small talk with the men, dishing out wisecracks to cheer them up—“Did you see our show or were you sick before?” In one ward, Hope did a few quick dance steps, slipped on a wet floor, and sprained his wrist—an injury that bothered him the rest of the trip. He instructed his fellow entertainers to keep the mood light and their emotions in check, but sometimes it was hard. In one ward Langford began to sing “As Time Goes By,” but had only got through eight bars when a soldier with a head wound began to cry. She finished the song in a whisper and went outside, where she burst into tears.

  After their first eleven-day swing, Hope and his troupe returned to London to rest, before making several more hops around the country. They flew to Belfast for a tour of army camps, submarine bases, and aircraft plants in Northern Ireland. Hope returned to Bristol to take part in an international radio broadcast and, to cap off the tour, appeared in a gala variety show at London’s Odeon Theater, with other USO performers who were in the country, including Adolphe Menjou, Hal Le Roy, and Stubby Kaye. Afterward, with help from Senator Happy Chandler, who was in London with a group of visiting US dignitaries, Hope wrangled an invitation to a reception at 10 Downing Street, where he met Winston Churchill. The prime minister did a double take on seeing the Hollywood star, then autographed Hope’s “short snorter,” a five-pound note commonly used by travelers during the war to collect signatures as souvenirs.

  Hope spent a total of five weeks in Britain, covered five thousand miles, and gave nearly a hundred performances, not counting the hospital visits. No other USO performer moved as fast or left as big an impression. “The most wonderful thing about England right now is Bob Hope,” wrote Captain Burgess Meredith in a letter to Paulette Goddard. “The boys in camp stand in rain, they crowd into halls so close you can’t breathe, just to see him. He is tireless and funny, and full of responsibility too, although he carries it lightly and gaily. There isn’t a hospital ward that he hasn’t dropped into and given a show; there isn’t a small unit anywhere that isn’t either talking about his jokes or anticipating them.”

  Novelist John Steinbeck, covering the war for the New York Herald Tribune, saw Hope too and paid him a memorable tribute:

  When the time for recognition of service to the nation in wartime comes to be considered, Bob Hope should be high on the list. In some way he has caught the soldiers’ imagination. He gets laughter wherever he goes, from men who need laughter. . . . It is hard to overestimate the importance of this thing and the responsibility involved. The battalion of men who are moving half tracks from one place to another, doing a job that gets no headlines, no public notice, and yet which must be done if there is to be a victory, are forgotten, and they feel forgotten. But Bob Hope is in the country. Will he come to them, or won’t he? And then one day they get a notice that he is coming. Then they feel remembered.

  Other reporters, from Time and Esquire and Vogue, tagged along with Hope, documenting his trip and the extraordinary reaction to it. By the time he left Britain, he was America’s most celebrated wartime entertainer. And he was just getting started.

  Hope had just appeared on the screen in Road to Morocco, and his next stop, improbably, was Morocco. He and his troupe took off from Prestwick, Scotland (where Hope got in his only golf game of the trip—most of the courses in England having been covered with barbed wire to prevent enemy planes from landing on them), and landed in Marrakech. Hope’s wardrobe, geared for the blustery British weather, was too heavy for the North African heat, so an officer lent him a lightweight, green linen suit. Hope wore it for the rest of the trip.

  They flew first to Tunis, operational headquarters for the bomber groups that were preparing for an invasion of Sicily, and embarked on a fast-moving tour of the region, doing shows at every air base, tank corps, and military hospital they could reach. “Hiya, fellow tourists,” Hope would greet the crowds. “Isn’t this a great country, Africa? It’s Texas with Arabs.” No matter how corny or stale the jokes, the men roared.

  Though North Africa was firmly under Allied control, German bombing raids were continuing, and Hope’s troupe got caught in several of them. In Bizerte—just a short hop from Sicily and thus a major target of German bombers—they were rousted out of bed at the Transatlantique Hotel by an air raid in the middle of the night. They watched another raid on the city from a road a few miles away, as they were driving back from a tour of hospitals. “Frances and I were standing next to our parked car,” Hope recalled. “We had on helmets. I’ve never heard such noise. Every once in a while we’d see one of the big German planes burst into flame and come plunging down.” When the planes came so close they could hear the whistles, an MP hustled them to cover. Romano dove under a car, Pepper got inside an ambulance, and Hope and Langford piled on top of each other in a ditch—Hope spraining a ligament as he dove in.

  As he had in Britain, Hope showed remarkable reserves of energy. He kept himself fresh with frequent catnaps—he could drop off to sleep seemingly anywhere. Riding with him in a bumpy jeep in Tunisia, Jack Pepper was am
azed: “I was bouncing like a rubber ball and losing everything I’d ever eaten in my life. But when I turned to look at Hope, the guy is fast asleep.” Reporting on the trip for Esquire, Sidney Carroll compared Hope to another famously tireless world traveler, Eleanor Roosevelt. “He is what the psychologists call an ‘energist,’ or one who seems to possess unfailing reserves of the magic motive power. . . . It is as much of a miracle as the burning bush. Hope never burns out.”

  Just three days after the successful Allied invasion of Sicily, Hope’s troupe got aboard a B-17 and flew to Palermo, the first American entertainers to arrive on the European continent since the start of the war. Hope did a show for sixteen thousand men jammed into a soccer field, and another in a gulley for nineteen thousand soldiers from the Forty-Fifth Army Division, with P-38s circling overhead for protection. (“It not only gives you a feeling of security,” said Hope, “it gives you a feeling your jokes aren’t being heard.”) General George Patton, hero of the Sicily campaign, invited Hope and his troupe to dinner at King Victor Emmanuel’s palace, where Patton had taken up residence. The general asked Hope about his travels, showed off his pearl-handled six-guns, and impressed Hope with his quick wit. “A very wonderful guy,” Hope recalled. “Never opened my kisser but that he topped it.” Patton may have had his own agenda in inviting Hope to the palace. The hard-driving general was under fire for slapping two soldiers, and he asked Hope for a favor when he got back home: “I want you to tell the people that I love my men.” Hope, who didn’t know about the controversy, was puzzled: “I looked at this guy and I thought he was suffering from some kind of battle fatigue.”

  Footage of Hope’s shows in North Africa and Sicily is all but nonexistent. But seeing him must have been a powerful experience for American soldiers just days out of battle. An Army lieutenant named John D. Saint Jr., who saw Hope in Sicily, wrote a vivid description of his show in a letter home to his parents: