Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  Bob came on the grandstand as a man on the street, baggy trousers, an ordinary coat, and an open-neck collar. Nothing fancy at all. His nose was really sunburned and caught the brunt of a lot of his own jokes. He started his patter and all of us laughed until tears were just streaming down and we couldn’t see a darned thing. He has been playing Army camps a lot and has picked up the lingo. He can tell you all about lister bags, atabrine tablets and armor artificers. That made his comments much funnier to us. He was speaking our language. . . .

  And all of a sudden Bob said, “Here’s Frances Langford!” There was a din you would not believe. She was stunningly dressed, though simply. It was good to see a clean, neat American girl who spoke our language and thought like we do. She sang and she sang from the very bottom of her heart. It could not have been otherwise. First it was “You Made Me Love You.” Then “Tangerine” and then “Night and Day.” The songs were mixed with patter between Hope and her, clever and funny as you can imagine. We thought it was all over, and Bob asked her back to sing “Embraceable You.” Every one of those thousands of men then went home to their wives and sweethearts. It was almost more than a man could stand.

  Much of the impact came from the knowledge that these Hollywood stars were taking real risks in being there. No entertainers had ever been closer to the action. At the Excelsior Hotel in Palermo, Hope and his troupe were again jolted awake in the middle of the night by an air raid. Too late to make it to the bomb shelter, Hope gritted it out in his hotel room, watching tracer bullets whiz across the sky and a big piece of red-hot flak fly by his window. “After you’ve listened to a raid for a little while you begin to be afraid that just the noise will kill you,” he wrote. “Then after you’ve listened to it a little while longer you begin to be afraid it won’t. You want to curl up in a ball.” When the raid was over, Hope crawled out of bed and checked on his traveling companions. Langford had also been trapped in her room; Pepper was the only one who made it to the bomb shelter. Hope called it “the most frightening experience of my life.”

  War stories can be exaggerated, but Hope’s wasn’t. “I was in two different cities with them during the raids, and I will testify they were horrifying raids,” wrote war correspondent Ernie Pyle, in one of his dispatches for the New York World-Telegram. “It isn’t often that a bomb falls so close that you can hear it whistle. But when you can hear a whole stack of them whistle at once, then it’s time to get weak all over and start sweating. The Hope troupe can now describe that ghastly sound.”

  After Sicily, Hope and his gypsies flew back to Bône, Tunisia, and continued their North African tour. Hope had one bad moment, when a heckler in a crowd of British and American troops yelled, “Draft dodger! Why aren’t you in uniform?” Hope shouted back, “Don’t you know there’s a war on? A guy could get hurt.” Their last stop was Algiers, where Hope did another international radio broadcast and met General Dwight D. Eisenhower, overall commander of the North African forces. Ike was another general who impressed Hope enormously (his voice reminded Hope of Clark Gable’s). “He flattered us not only by being so gracious, but by knowing where we’d been and what we’d been doing,” Hope said. Eisenhower knew that Hope’s troupe had been through several air raids and assured them they would have a safe night in Algiers. “We haven’t had a raid in three months,” Ike said. “We’re too strong for ’em.”

  But that night at the Aletti Hotel, Hope and company were again jolted awake in the middle of the night by German bombers. This time Hope made it down to a wine cellar with the rest of his band to take shelter. They spent an hour and forty minutes there, listening to the bombs, and for the first time he saw Frances Langford lose her composure. “When we were lost over Alaska, during the raids on Bizerte and Palermo, she’d stayed perfectly calm,” he said. “But cooped up in a bomb shelter under Algiers she began to tremble and cry. For once I had the chance to be the big strong man. I put her head on my shoulder and held her close to me, so we sort of trembled in unison.”

  The raid wasn’t over until 6:00 a.m. They were supposed to leave Algiers that morning at eight, but had to put it off until the evening. They finally made it to London and then to Iceland—where they were again delayed by weather and filled the extra time by doing three more shows. Descending at last over the familiar skyline of New York City, Hope felt an understandable letdown. All told, he had spent eleven weeks overseas, doing some 250 shows for an estimated 1.5 million men. He came back with scores of names and addresses scrawled on pieces of paper—of the mothers and wives and sweethearts of the men he had entertained, who asked Hope if he would contact their loved ones and send greetings. Which he did.

  Back home, Hope was hailed as a hero. He recounted his experiences to columnists such as Ed Sullivan and wrote about his tour in a syndicated newspaper article, “I Saw Your Boys.” Time magazine celebrated him in a cover story, with the headline “Hope for Humanity.” “From the ranks of show business have sprung heroes and even martyrs,” the magazine wrote, “but so far only one legend. That legend is Bob Hope.

  It sprang up swiftly, telepathically, among US servicemen in Britain this summer, traveling faster than even whirlwind Hope himself, then flew ahead of him to North Africa and Sicily, growing larger as it went. Like most legends, it represents measurable qualities in a kind of mystical blend. Hope was funny, treating hordes of soldiers to roars of laughter. He was friendly—ate with servicemen, drank with them, read their doggerel, listened to their songs. He was indefatigable, running himself ragged with five, six, seven shows a day. He was figurative—the straight link with home, the radio voice that for years had filled the living room and that in foreign parts called up its image. Hence boys whom Hope might entertain for an hour awaited him for weeks. And when he came, anonymous guys who had had no other recognition felt personally remembered.

  He went to work on a book for Simon & Schuster about his tour, collaborating with a ghostwriter named Carroll Carroll, an adman who had written for Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall. The two worked together through the fall, meeting every Wednesday in Hope’s living room—Carroll writing up chapters from Hope’s recollections, Hope editing them and handing them over to his gag writers for punching up. The book, I Never Left Home, has plenty of jokes, but also much vivid detail, as well as passages of elegiac and often moving prose. It begins:

  I saw your sons and your husbands, your brothers and your sweethearts. I saw how they worked, played, fought and lived. I saw some of them die. I saw more courage, more good humor in the face of discomfort, more love in an era of hate, and more devotion to duty than could exist under tyranny. I saw American minds, American skill, and American strength breaking the backbone of evil.

  I Never Left Home was published in June 1944—the first hundred thousand copies in paperback, aimed at servicemen and priced at $1, followed by a hardback edition for $2. Hope donated all the proceeds to the National War Fund, which was coordinating relief for the countries being reoccupied in the war. The book got admiring reviews, not just from Hope’s many friends in the Hollywood press but from serious book critics too. “A zany, staccato but often touching account,” wrote Tom O’Reilly in the New York Times Book Review. It sold more than 1.6 million copies, the bestselling nonfiction book for all of 1944. The wartime legend of Bob Hope was born.

  • • •

  Returning to Los Angeles on September 7 after his life-changing trip, Hope tried to adapt to the new normal. He took Dolores and the kids to Del Mar for a rest, then began preparing for the September 21 debut of his sixth radio season. “I think I was suffering from adrenaline withdrawal,” he said. “I had gotten hooked on fear, the real thing, not the sort you felt when a joke didn’t play, or a movie got panned.”

  Hope’s radio show—with Langford and Colonna back as regulars, and Stan Kenton replacing bandleader Skinnay Ennis, who was in the service—was now virtually all military, all the time. He tailored his comedy for each base or military unit he was visiting: the Navy aviators at Term
inal Island, the marines at Camp Pendleton, the gunnery specialists in Las Vegas. The jokes were broad and chummy, aimed squarely at the soldiers—endless variations, for example, on Hope’s favorite “you know—that’s” formula: “You know what a bunk is—that’s a bookshelf with a mattress.” “You know what a Wave is—that’s a Wac with salt water in her blood.” “You know what a tank is—that’s a coffee percolator that made good.” With the help of a new writer, Glenn Whedon, Hope added serious patriotic messages at the end of the shows, urging listeners to buy war bonds or write a serviceman overseas, or paying tribute to the particular service branch or specialty he was entertaining that week—Navy nurses, say, or the Coast Guard. His No. 1 ratings soared to new heights. On February 19, 1944, Hope scored an astonishing 40.9 in the Hooper ratings—meaning 40.9 percent of all the radio homes in the country were tuned in, the highest audience ever for a half-hour radio program.

  On March 11, 1944, he went to Washington to emcee the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, with President Roosevelt as guest of honor. It was the first time Hope entertained a president—a coveted assignment that he almost missed. Hope and his radio cast had just done a show at an officers’ training school in Miami, and before flying to Washington, Hope decided to stop at Brookley Field in Mobile, Alabama, for a golf game with the base commander. But the weather turned bad, the golf was canceled, and it looked likely that Hope would be stranded in Alabama. He got to Washington only after a telegram from General Henry “Hap” Arnold was delivered to the base commander: “Have plane coming north tonight. Make sure Hope is on it.”

  He got to the dinner an hour late, and the show had already started, with Duffy’s Tavern star Ed Gardner filling in as emcee. But after Fritz Kreisler, Gracie Fields, and Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians entertained, Hope was there in time for his closing monologue. He joked about the president’s battles with Congress, Eleanor’s peripatetic traveling, and the First Couple’s least favorite newspaper, the conservative Chicago Tribune. Hope joked that Fala, the Roosevelts’ Scottish terrier, was “the only dog housebroken on that paper.” When Hope glanced over nervously to see the president’s reaction, FDR’s head was tilted back in laughter.

  In these heady and dramatic times, Hope’s movies seemed almost like an afterthought. When shooting began in November 1943 on Road to Utopia, the fourth in the Road series, signs of the star’s inattention and self-involvement were becoming apparent. The script, set in the 1890s Alaska gold rush, was by Panama and Frank (their first screenplay for Hope, after getting only story credit for My Favorite Blonde), and the writers had to revise it several times to please both stars. “In those days they were enormous stars,” said Frank. “You really had to have their okay on the script, even though they were under contract and could be forced to do what you wanted. So we would sit down with Crosby and explain our ideas and we would make it sound like it was going to be his picture. Then we’d tell Hope the story and make it attractive from his point of view.” On the set too Hope and Crosby moved at their own leisurely pace, forcing director Hal Walker to work around their golf games and trips to the racetrack. “Some days I became almost as nonchalant as Bing,” Hope admitted. “Together we were a deadly combination.”

  Lamour often bore the brunt. One Saturday morning she spent two hours getting into her period gown, hair, and makeup for a musical number with Hope and Crosby, scheduled to start shooting at 9:00 a.m. But neither showed up. She was still waiting in the afternoon when Gary Cooper dropped by the set and told her she should just go home. She did—a few minutes before Hope and Crosby finally sauntered in. They had spent the day at a charity golf match and claimed to have forgotten about the scene. “The next day it was all patched up,” Lamour wrote, charitably, in her autobiography. “Of course, Bing and Bob took turns teasing the life out of me, calling me ‘that temperamental Lamour woman who stormed off the set.’ But they didn’t pull another stunt like that ever again.” Still, it was a sign of how thoroughly Hope and Crosby had turned the Road films into their own private playground. For Lamour, the slights would accumulate.

  In the spring of 1944 Hope shot another film for Goldwyn, initially called Sylvester the Great and later changed to The Princess and the Pirate—Hope’s first costume picture and his first movie in color. But his war-related activities were taking up more and more time and attention. He hosted a bond drive and charity golf tournament with Crosby at Lakeside and did several more Command Performance broadcasts for Armed Forces Radio. In March he made a four-day tour of US military bases in the Caribbean. And he prepared to make his next major overseas tour, during his radio show’s summer vacation, this time to the Pacific theater.

  His last show of the season was scheduled for June 6, 1944. Early that morning, Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy, launching the long-awaited invasion of Western Europe. Hope scrapped the show he had planned, from the Van Nuys Air Field, and instead delivered a tribute to the invasion forces of D-day. His wartime prose was never more eloquent, his brisk, plain-spoken delivery rendering it even more powerful:

  What’s happened during these last few hours not one of us will ever forget. How could you forget? You sat up all night by the radio and heard the bulletins, the flashes, the voices coming across from England, the commentators, the pilots returning from their greatest of all missions, newsboys yelling in the street. And it seemed that one world was ending and a new world beginning, that history was closing one book and opening a new one. And somehow we knew it had to be a better one. We sat there, and dawn began to sneak in, and you thought of the hundreds of thousands of kids you’d seen in camps the past two or three years. The kids who scream and whistle when they hear a gag and a song. And now you could see all of them again, in four thousand ships in the English Channel, tumbling out of thousands of planes over Normandy and the occupied coast. And countless landing barges crashing the Nazi gate and going on through to do the job that’s the job of all of us. The sun came up, and you sat there looking at that huge black headline, that one great black word with the exclamation point—Invasion! The one word that the whole world has waited for, that all of us have worked for.

  It was only fitting that Hope, the man who had brought the war home to America, would be the one to capture the nation’s relief and pride in the military triumph that would help bring it to an end.

  Much was still left to do in the Pacific, however, where the United States was embarked on a painfully slow, island-by-island march toward what seemed an inevitable invasion of Japan. Again Hope assembled an entertainment troupe and headed for the action. Langford and Romano were back, and Colonna, who had to pass on the European trip the year before, was on board this time. For some added sex appeal, Hope hired Patty Thomas, a pretty, leggy dancer who had been working in USO shows in the States and got the job after an interview with Hope. He added one more member to the troupe: his crony, sometime writer, and Road picture jester, Barney Dean. “We had Barney along in case we had to trade with the natives,” Hope cracked.

  The group left San Francisco on June 22 aboard a C-54 medical transport plane. They stopped first in the Hawaiian Islands, where they spent nine days and did some thirty-five shows, the largest for twenty-five thousand civilian employees at the Pearl Harbor Naval Yards. Then they flew off to Christmas Island and began hopscotching islands on the “pineapple circuit.”

  Ferried around by a Catalina seaplane, they went to Kwajalein, Bougainville, and Eniwetok (where Navy lieutenant Henry Fonda was stationed), doing five, six, or even seven shows a day. They visited the site of bloody battles such as Tarawa and Guadalcanal, doing shows near unmarked graves and pillboxes full of weapons abandoned by the Japanese. Hope joked often about the tiny islands and the swampy, bug-infested conditions. “You’re not defending this place, are you?” he cracked on one. “Let them take it!” Hope picked up jungle rot on the trip, a skin disease that would plague him for years.

  For Hope the most memorable stop was the isla
nd of Pavuvu, where the Marine First Division was preparing for an attack on Peleliu, a nearby Japanese stronghold. For six months the fifteen thousand men there had seen no entertainment. The island was so small there was no airstrip, so Hope and his crew had to fly in on tiny Piper Cubs, the men cheering as each plane buzzed the baseball field. Eugene B. Sledge, one of the marines who was there, described Hope’s visit in his classic combat memoir, With the Old Breed:

  Probably the biggest boost to our morale about this time on Pavuvu was the announcement that Bob Hope would come over from Banika and put on a show for us. . . . Bob Hope, Colonna, Frances Langford, and Patty Thomas put on a show at a little stage by the pier. Bob asked Jerry how he liked the trip over from Banika, and Jerry answered that it was “tough sledding.” When asked why, he replied, “No snow.” We thought it was the funniest thing we had ever heard. Patty gave several boys from the audience dancing lessons amid much grinning, cheering and applause. Bob told many jokes and really boosted our spirits. It was the finest entertainment I ever saw overseas.

  Weeks after their show on Pavuvu, the assault on Peleliu began. An operation that was supposed to take four days stretched out for two months—one of the bloodiest battles of the war, with more than sixty-five hundred men killed or wounded. Months later, Hope was visiting a hospital in Oakland when one of the patients called out, “Pavuvu!” Hope went over to shake the man’s hand and found out the ward was full of marines who had seen Hope at Pavuvu and survived the campaign. One injured soldier awakened after an operation to see Hope standing over the bed. “Bob!” he exclaimed. “When did you get here?”

  In the tight-knit family of traveling entertainers, Hope was nicknamed Dad, and Langford was known as Mother. Thomas, the youngster in the group (she celebrated her twenty-second birthday on Pavuvu), developed a close, sisterly bond with Langford. They shared bedrooms and often went to the bathroom together in the rough-hewn latrines, where the men would put up a sheet to give them privacy. Frances gave Patty advice on clothes (slacks, not skirts, and sweaters for the cool nights), food (eat as little as possible before flying), and avoiding sticky situations with the sex-starved servicemen—a little-mentioned peril for female entertainers traveling through the war zone. “You had to be careful,” said Thomas. “Not talk to them alone, only in groups. These kids wanted to meet someone. But I wouldn’t dare lead them on. One guy came up to me and said, ‘I’d like to ---- you.’ He was beaten up by the other soldiers.”