Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  But Hope was approaching the new medium warily. In June 1949 an NBC vice president named John Royal offered a friendly prediction in a letter to Hope: “I want to take a little bet—in fact, a goddam big bet—that the first time Hope gets into television, he will do to this industry what Jolson did in talking pictures. He will make it.” Hope was dismissive at first. “Berle can have that medium all to himself for the next year,” he wrote back. “Then I shall have my head blocked and we’ll all go back into vaudeville!” But he foresaw the inevitable: “Without a doubt television will really be going in a couple of years and we will have to put on our very best manners and do a nice half-hour show every week. I don’t think any less than that will do, as television will have to become a habit . . . maybe one of the nastier habits, but nevertheless an interesting one.”

  The day of reckoning came sooner than he expected. In January 1950, Hugh Davis, of the ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding, came to visit Hope while he was convalescing from his car accident in Palm Springs. He asked Hope if he would consider hosting a TV variety show for Frigidaire, one of the agency’s clients. Hope threw out what he thought was an outrageous amount of money, $50,000. A few days later Davis called back to ask if Hope would do it for $40,000—more than had ever been paid to any entertainer for a one-time performance. Hope, who always liked breaking records, agreed.

  Frigidaire signed him up for five ninety-minute specials, to air throughout the year around holidays. After the initial $40,000, he would get a total of $150,000 for the next four specials—out of which he had to pay his writers and travel expenses to New York, where the shows would be done live. The total cost to Frigidaire for each special: $135,000, more than had ever before been spent on a single hour of television. Max Liebman, who had just begun working on Your Show of Shows, with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, was brought in to direct (on the one week out of the month Caesar and Coca had off), and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Beatrice Lillie, and Dinah Shore signed up as guests for the first show, scheduled for Easter Sunday, April 9.

  Hope flew to New York five days early to prepare. Rehearsals were hampered by a technicians’ union slowdown. Hope was unsure of himself in the new medium, and the writers too were feeling their way along. “I’m being underpaid, I’ll tell you that,” Hope told a reporter during the hectic rehearsals. “This is positive murder.” Mort Lachman, one of four writers Hope brought to New York to work on the show, recalled the chaos: “It was very difficult. There was so much technical trouble—it took hours and hours to prepare. I went to Bob’s dressing room before the show and couldn’t get inside, there were so many people yelling and carrying on.” Carl Reiner, who appeared in sketches on the show, met Hope for the first time backstage just before the broadcast. “His hand was soaking wet,” Reiner recalled. “He was a nervous wreck. He was literally shaking.”

  The Star-Spangled Revue, as the special was called, went on the air at 5:30 p.m. eastern time, broadcast live to twenty-eight NBC stations across the country, with another thirty-two getting it on kinescope a week later. Viewed today, the show looks downright prehistoric. It opens with appliances: the camera panning across a display of Frigidaire products, including the new 1950 model refrigerator (“Just look at the beauty of that full-length door . . . that new target latch with its golden trim”). After a jerky hand-roll of the opening credits, Hope enters through a theater curtain, formally attired in a white, cutaway tuxedo, with a cane and top hat (the same one he wore in Roberta on Broadway). “Television,” Hope begins. “Well, they finally got me.”

  Hope is obviously tense. When jokes fall flat, he is too unsure of himself to react and reach for a saver; he just barrels ahead. His monologue includes jokes about Eleanor Roosevelt, New York’s well-traveled mayor, William O’Dwyer, and, most of all, the unfamiliar new medium he’s just dived into. “I must tell you how I got into television,” he says. “It’s rather sneaky. I lied to them. I told them I was an old-time movie.” The excess verbiage is probably a reflection of his nervousness.

  The show has an old-style vaudeville feel. Hope’s first guest is a stand-up boogie-woogie pianist. Another is former vaudeville hoofer Hal Le Roy, who joins him in a comedy Egyptian-dance number—the same one that Hope did with Lloyd Durbin when he was starting out in vaudeville. The sketches are broad and crudely staged. In one, Hope, playing himself, is wined and dined by NBC executives, who fumigate the room every time “CBS” or “Godfrey” is mentioned. In another, Fairbanks and Lillie join in a British burlesque of American Westerns called “Dragalong Cavendish.” Hope and Dinah Shore have a little fun as Eskimo lovers, shivering in an igloo as they trip over their lines and sing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Hope quips, “Like to see Milton Berle steal this.”

  Saying his good-byes at the end of the show, Hope appears visibly relieved. “I do hope that we got away with it this afternoon. This really sells me on TV. In fact, from now on I’m gonna quit peeking through my neighbor’s window and go out and get a small set of my own.” Hope ends the show, as he often did on radio, with a patriotic sign-off, reflecting the anxieties of the early Cold War years.

  Tomorrow, when I get home, people are gonna say, “What did you do on Easter Sunday?” And I can say, well, we spent Easter with the family. A big family that believes in the American way of life, those folks that have never pulled down an Iron Curtain between their hearts and the Christian ideal called brotherhood of man.

  Hope was the first major radio star to take the plunge into television, and his debut, not surprisingly, was a huge hit in the ratings. The show got a 49.4 Hooper score, meaning that nearly half of all homes in the country with television sets were watching—roughly 10 million viewers, the most for any TV special in the medium’s short history. The reviews were mixed—Life said Hope “seemed subdued and uncertain in his new medium,” and the New York Journal-American thought he looked “petrified with fear”—and Hope himself was not happy with his performance. “I couldn’t believe how nervous and jumpy I was,” he said. “I worried about my material, and especially the pacing of it. I knew that this was a quite different medium from either radio or film, but I hadn’t figured it out yet.” He was distracted by the constantly moving cameras—“like trying to do a nightclub act with three waiters with trays walking in front of you every time you reached the punch line”—and he thought the writing needed to be better. “It was really caveman TV,” said Larry Gelbart, one of the show’s writers. “We were not television writers by any stretch of the imagination. Our idea of television was to find the biggest twenty-gallon hat we could find for him and strap on a dozen six-shooters for a Western sketch. The writing was terrible. I see those shows and cringe.”

  The Frigidaire shows improved as they rolled out through the rest of the year. For his second special, which aired in May, Hope’s top-billed guest was Frank Sinatra—the former bobby-socks idol who was in a career slump and was grateful to Hope for giving him the TV exposure. Hope, who often joked on the radio about Sinatra’s scrawny frame, notices that he has filled out: “After I saw you on camera I had to throw away a lot of skinny jokes.” Sinatra sings “Come Rain or Come Shine” and joins Hope in two sketches: as a pair of baseball players primping themselves for the TV cameras, and in a Road picture parody, with Sinatra paddling a canoe and wearing big ears to impersonate Crosby.

  Hope was learning the new medium, slowing down his pace and relaxing in front of the camera. “I used to work very fast on radio because I found out when I was working for service audiences that they wanted it fast,” he wrote in his memoir Have Tux, Will Travel. “They didn’t want situation comedy; they wanted jokes and they wanted them right now; they wanted them to go bang-bang-bang. I was successful with them that way. I carried this technique over into my first days on television, but it wasn’t too successful. With that particular type of material and a civilian audience, I was ahead of them, and working too fast for them. I’ve slowed down for television, especially with my monologue.”

  Havi
ng broken the ice in TV, Hope began a complicated series of negotiations over his future on both radio and television. Relations with his radio sponsor, Lever Brothers, were continuing to deteriorate—despite the departure of Charles Luckman, the company president with whom Hope had often clashed, who resigned in January after a dispute with his corporate bosses in London. Now Hope wanted out of his ten-year contract, which still had four years to run. In June, after months of wrangling, Lever finally agreed to let him go, and Hope signed with a new radio sponsor, Chesterfield cigarettes.

  Separately, NBC worked to lock up Hope with an exclusive contract for both radio and TV. Those negotiations too dragged on, but concluded in the fall with a deal that guaranteed Hope $3 million over the next five years. All of his TV specials would be produced by Hope Enterprises, and NBC and Hope became partners in each other’s company: NBC agreed to invest $1.5 million for a 25 percent share of Hope Enterprises, while Hope acquired a large block of NBC stock. At the same time, Hope struck a new deal with Paramount, promising eight pictures over the next four years—half produced by Hope Enterprises, the other half by Paramount, but giving Hope a one-quarter share of the profits. By the end of the summer, Hope had set himself up with a profit-sharing stake in everything he did in movies, radio, and television.

  Then it was back to work—lots of it. Hope seemed to be everywhere. He spent most of the summer on the Paramount lot shooting The Lemon Drop Kid, adapted from another Damon Runyon story, with Marilyn Maxwell as his costar. On his weekends off he entertained at state fairs. In August he hosted an all-star benefit at the Hollywood Bowl, raising $48,000 for the United Cerebral Palsy Association. In September he flew to New York for his third Frigidaire TV special, then returned to LA for the fall premiere of his radio show. He recorded a single for Capitol with Margaret Whiting called “Blind Date,” in which a couple on a first date exchange polite conversation interspersed with their “real” thoughts about each other (with “Home Cookin’,” a song from his new movie Fancy Pants, on the flip side). He continued to turn out his daily newspaper column, It Says Here, for the Hearst syndicate (though he was growing tired of it and would finally call it quits in 1951). Hope even became the star of a comic book.

  At the end of the 1940s, with the sales of superhero comics sagging, DC Comics began experimenting with a new genre: comic adventures based on the screen characters of movie and TV stars such as Ozzie and Harriet and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. In 1949 DC made a licensing deal with Hope and in January 1950 brought out the first bimonthly issue of The Adventures of Bob Hope. Each issue featured a cartoon version of Hope wisecracking through different exploits—Bob invents a new golf club, say, or joins the French Foreign Legion. Hope and his writers had nothing to do with the comic, but it was another extension of his brand and made his ski-nosed caricature instantly recognizable to a new generation of kids. The Adventures of Bob Hope had a surprisingly long run, appearing every other month for eighteen years—well into the Vietnam era, when young people were reading other kinds of comics, and Hope’s adventures weren’t quite so funny anymore.

  • • •

  The five years of peace since the end of World War II had been good to Bob Hope. His career was blazing, he was making lots of money, and he occasionally got home to see the wife and kids. But when North Korean troops, backed by the Soviet Union, invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, Hope’s war-fueled adrenaline began flowing again. Almost as soon as UN troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur turned back the North Korean offensive, Hope began lobbying to make a trip there. MacArthur had requested that no entertainment units of larger than six people—and no women—be allowed into the war zone. But Hope prevailed on his friends among the military top brass to let him take a troupe of fifty there in October. It was hard to say no to Bob Hope.

  His big troupe included cowboy singer Jimmy Wakely (who had accompanied Hope to Alaska the year before), dancer Judy Kelly, the Tailor Maids singing trio, a dance act called the Hi-Hatters, and Les Brown’s band. Also joining the entourage were Hope’s brother Jack, old vaudeville pal Charlie Cooley, four writers, and Hope’s masseur from Lakeside Country Club, Fred Miron. For a leading lady, Hope’s first choice was Jane Russell, but she again had to bow out because of a film commitment, so he asked singer Gloria DeHaven to come along for the first part of the trip, before Marilyn Maxwell could take over midway through the tour.

  They stopped first in Hawaii, then island-hopped to Kwajalein, Guam, and Okinawa, before landing in Tokyo. Hope was a big celebrity in Japan, thanks largely to The Paleface, the most popular American film to open in the country since the war. (While he was being driven through the Tokyo streets, a car full of Japanese fans pulled alongside and serenaded Hope with “Buttons and Bows.”) Hope and his entertainers were guests at a luncheon given by General MacArthur—another charismatic general who impressed Hope greatly. “He held us spellbound,” Hope wrote in his newspaper column, “as he talked with authority and humor on subjects ranging from Bataan to baseball batting averages.” Hope visited injured American soldiers at Tokyo General Hospital (“Most of them are so young you’d think they were drafted on the way to school,” he wrote); flew to Yokota Air Force Base to entertain fliers under the command of General Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell; and did his weekly radio show for an audience of three thousand GIs in Tokyo’s Ernie Pyle Theater.

  From Tokyo, Hope and his band crossed the Sea of Japan and landed at an airfield near Seoul, the South Korean capital that had just been retaken from the Communists. Military trucks carried them over ten miles of rough road to Seoul Stadium, where they entertained twenty thousand GIs in the frigid cold. Hope joked about a war in which the battlelines were shifting almost daily: “Some of these towns are changing hands so fast, one soldier bought a lamp with three thousand won and got his change in rubles. Seoul has changed hands so many times the towels in the hotel are marked ‘His,’ ‘Hers,’ and ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ ”

  After Seoul, Hope crisscrossed the country, going as far south as Pusan and north across the thirty-eighth parallel to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital now in friendly hands. Hope heard that the First Marine Division, which he had entertained in Pavuvu during World War II, was at the port of Wonsan, and he asked if he could do a show for them. He and his troupe were flown to Wonsan in two C-54s, only to find the airport nearly deserted when they arrived. They were waiting in an empty hangar, wondering what to do, when some officers finally arrived, among them General Edward Almond.

  “How long have you been here?” asked Almond.

  “Twenty minutes,” said Hope.

  “Are you kidding? We just made the landing.” Weather had delayed their arrival, and Hope’s troupe had actually beaten the Marines there. “Bob Hope and Marilyn Maxwell in Wonsan before Leathernecks,” blared the headlines back home. Actually, the South Koreans had retaken the port two weeks earlier, so the marine landing was something of an anticlimax. “The only thing we’re going in for is to give Bob Hope an audience,” grumbled one marine.

  Hope did shows on the deck of the battleship Missouri and the aircraft carrier Valley Forge, then returned to Pyongyang to entertain fifteen thousand troops in front of the former Communist headquarters. The tour ended with a swing through Alaska and the Aleutians, where Hope did the last of four radio broadcasts from the trip. He returned home to a big reception at the Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank, with Dolores and all four kids there to greet him. Hope had traveled twenty-five thousand miles and done fifty-four shows in his four weeks abroad. He wasn’t the first Hollywood entertainer to go to Korea; Al Jolson had preceded him in September (and had suffered a fatal heart attack a couple of weeks later, caused at least partly by the strain of the trip). But Hope was once again in his glory, the nation’s most celebrated soldier in greasepaint.

  Inspired by the trip, Hope resumed his wartime routine of bringing his radio show to a different military camp each week. For his Frigidaire TV special in November, he featured the e
ntertainers from his Korean trip, showed film clips from the tour, and closed the show with another of his inspirational messages, full of patriotic swagger:

  The Iron Curtain boys thought they’d thrown a Sunday punch when they backed us up to Pusan. But they forgot one little detail. Ever since Plymouth Rock, Americans have had something to fight for—and, yes, die for if necessary. It’s ten thousand miles from Westchester to Wonsan, but the flame of freedom in the human breast defies all distance and brings men together in a fight for the common ideal of a free and democratic world under God.

  The Korean War dragged on for nearly three more years, settling into a stalemate and provoking a political firestorm when President Truman fired General MacArthur for “insubordination.” Hope stayed away from the political controversy, but he was privately frustrated at the lack of military resolve. “I always had the feeling that if the US had used the air power it had standing by in Japan and the Philippines to bomb across the Yalu River line, a lot of American lives would have been saved,” he wrote later. “But it would have meant attacking Red China, and that was a political no-no.” For Hope the battle lines were as clear-cut as they were in World War II. One of his writers, Larry Gelbart, came back with more ambivalent feelings about the war. His experiences traveling with Hope in Korea—especially their visits to mobile army hospital units near the front lines—supplied the raw material for his hugely successful antiwar sitcom of the 1970s, M*A*S*H.

  • • •

  By the early 1950s, Hope’s image and attitude were undergoing a subtle but unmistakable shift. For much of the 1940s he was something of a renegade: an irreverent radio comedian and movie star, full of American moxie and impudence. Now he was show-business royalty: feted by generals, honored by presidents, entertaining queens. He grew more protective of his image and reputation, sensitive to criticism, notoriously litigious. In June 1950, he was sued for making jokes—by the Forrest Hotel in New York City, which claimed Hope had defamed it with some wisecracks about his stay there when he was playing the Paramount Theater. In November, Hope sued Life magazine for making jokes—in an article called “Radio’s Seven Deadly Sins,” by TV critic John Crosby. “Writers got $2,000 a week in Hollywood for copying down Fred Allen’s jokes and putting them on Bob Hope’s program,” Crosby wrote. Hope sought $2 million in damages, claiming the line gave readers the serious impression that he was a plagiarist. (Life’s editors smoothed things over, and Hope eventually dropped the suit. His attorney Martin Gang said in a statement, “Hope had become convinced that the offending paragraph had been left in the story inadvertently and that there was no intention to harm him.”)