Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  No movie he had done meant more to Hope than The Seven Little Foys, and when it was released in May 1955, he went into overdrive to promote it. He made a tour of Australia in conjunction with the film’s world premiere—the first time an American star had ever come to Australia to open a major Hollywood film. Back in the United States, Hope went on a four-week, twenty-five-city promotional tour for the movie, doing live stage shows and TV interviews in every city he visited. Paramount estimated that Hope’s personal stumping added $1 million to the film’s box office. “I think the way things are going, an actor is very foolish not to help sell his pictures,” Hope told Louella Parsons. Hollywood was discovering the potential of using stars to promote their own films with personal appearances and media interviews—sellebrities, they were dubbed—and Hope, once again, was a pioneer.

  The Seven Little Foys earned $6 million at the box office, Hope’s biggest hit in years. Its mix of comedy and sentiment left a few critics uneasy, but most of them generally admired the movie and praised Hope’s performance. “A commanding abandonment of the buffoon,” said Variety. The New York Daily News raved, “Hope can now hold up his head with Hollywood dramatic thespians; for the first time in his career, Hope isn’t playing Hope on the screen.” In truth, Hope isn’t exactly playing Eddie Foy either. He does a sort of half impersonation—imitating Foy’s hoarse, laid-back, cigar-chomping swagger, but never quite disappearing into the role. He’s still best being Bob Hope—trading wisecracks with his acerbic kids, and in the justly celebrated dance sequence with Cagney, in which they match steps atop a banquet table. (Cagney is clearly the better dancer, but he graciously allows Hope to outshine him.)

  Hope’s innate charm cheats a bit on the dark side of Foy’s character—his self-regard, his emotional detachment, and his inattention as a father. But his stoic underplaying is effective in the big courtroom scene in which Foy laments his failings as a father, the culmination of his battle for custody of the kids against his former sister-in-law. He’s even better in the quieter, earlier scenes when Foy comes home from traveling to find that his wife (whose illness he has willfully ignored) has died in his absence. Hope silently goes from bedroom to bedroom to check on his sleeping children. One daughter rouses from her sleep and asks groggily, “Who is it?” Hope’s blank, poignant response: “Nobody.”

  The film may have had more real-life resonance than Hope was willing to admit. “How can you stay all these years with this man?” Foy’s sister-in-law complains to his wife at one point about his frequent absences. “A stranger in his own home. A visitor to his children. Nothing to show how he feels.” It’s almost too obvious to note the parallels to Hope’s own family life in the middle of the 1950s.

  The older kids, Tony and Linda, were now attending Catholic high school in Hollywood. The younger two, Nora and Kelly, were in grade school and struggling to get attention (Nora, the more outgoing, with better luck than Kelly). Quality time with their father, always at a premium, grew even scarcer as their home life became grander and more public. “The family changed in the 1950s,” said nephew Tom Malatesta. “Bob became enormous. There were more people around the house with bigger names. At a party Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio might walk in the door, or Ray Milland or Lana Turner. It was a larger environment, and the family relationship was more formal. More people came into the intimate setting.”

  There was occasional family time—fishing trips to British Columbia or Colorado, and the annual get-together of the extended family during the Christmas holidays, when relatives from Cleveland would come to town for a New Year’s party and pile into a chartered bus for a trip to the Rose Bowl, with a police escort and seats on the fifty-yard line. Dolores, as always, picked up the slack when Bob was away, keeping the house organized and the kids in line. “She looked at the report cards and got us to school on time,” said Kelly Hope, “and made sure the lunches were ready to go, and whoever was going to pick us up at three o’clock, and what doctor did we have to go to and why. For lack of a better word, she ran the show.” Dolores could be tough, and her discipline unforgiving. Once when Kelly misbehaved, all the furniture was removed from his bedroom as punishment, except for his bed and a lamp. And their father’s mere presence could be intimidating: when playing hide-and-seek in the library, the kids would often be shushed because Bob might still be sleeping in the bedroom above.

  Dolores tried to shield them from the perils of being a celebrity’s child—the constant press attention, the schoolmates who wanted access to their famous father, and sometimes worse. When Confidential magazine in 1956 published Barbara Payton’s steamy account of her five-month affair with Hope in 1949, Dolores had to warn the children in advance. “This trashy magazine is coming out with an article about your dad,” Linda recalled her mother telling them. “I just want you to know, in case they bring it up at school or some of your friends say something. But it’s not true. You know your dad, and that’s what’s important.”

  Just how well they knew him was harder to say.

  Chapter 9

  AMBASSADOR

  “I’m not having any trouble with the language. Nobody speaks to me.”

  On November 14, 1955, Bob Hope applied for a visa to visit the Soviet Union. The request, made at the Soviet embassy in Washington for himself and a TV crew of ten, might have seemed strange coming from a staunchly anticommunist Republican at the height of the Cold War. Hope often cast the rigid and ruthless Soviet dictatorship as a comic villain in his monologues. “I saw a Russian ad for cold cream,” he joked when the Soviets aired their first TV commercials. “It had a picture of a beautiful girl, and underneath it said, ‘She’s lovely, she’s engaged, she’s gonna be shot in the morning.’ ” But for Hope, entertainment always trumped ideology, and he wanted to score another show-business coup by becoming the first entertainer to do an American TV show from behind the Iron Curtain.

  He got the idea while he was in London in the fall of 1955, shooting his movie The Iron Petticoat, in which Katharine Hepburn played a Soviet pilot who defects to the West. Hope, quixotically, wanted to shoot the movie’s ending at a Moscow airfield. The US State Department turned down the request, even before the Russians had a chance to say no. Then, intrigued at the idea of bringing Soviet entertainment to American audiences, Hope sent his brother Jack to Brussels to get footage of the Moscow Circus, intending to use clips of the troupe (“the greatest I’ve ever seen,” Hope said) in one of his TV specials. But both NBC and his sponsor, Chevrolet, vetoed the idea, apparently fearful of the political fallout.

  Hope’s next idea was to bring a TV crew to the Soviet Union to shoot an entire special there, featuring Soviet artists and entertainers who had never performed in the West. “I’ve seen many a curtain go up in my time,” he said. “My greatest thrill would be to see this one, the Iron Curtain, go up.” At a time when the Cold War was at its frostiest, the idea would take two and a half years to come to fruition. But it was the centerpiece of Hope’s efforts in the 1950s to secure his role as America’s leading show-business emissary to the world.

  Hope had not taken an entertainment troupe abroad since his Far East swing during the Korean War in 1950. Then, in late 1954, Secretary of the Air Force Harold Talbott asked Hope if he would make a New Year’s Eve trip to Greenland, where five thousand US troops were manning a Strategic Air Command post at Thule Air Base, part of the nation’s early-warning system against a potential Soviet nuclear strike. The lonely and forbidding outpost was 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, but Hope jumped at the chance.

  To join him, he recruited a big Hollywood star, William Holden (winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor that year for Stalag 17); two of his World War II traveling companions, Jerry Colonna and Patty Thomas; his radio singer, Margaret Whiting; and newspaper gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who did double duty by writing about the trip in her syndicated column and joining Hope onstage for some banter about Hollywood. He tried to get Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood’s top glamour girl o
f the moment, but she was embroiled in a contract dispute with her studio, Twentieth Century–Fox, and didn’t even return his phone calls. (Monroe was the one major Hollywood sex symbol Hope never appeared with.) Instead, as the requisite piece of cheesecake, he tapped a well-endowed former Miss Sweden whom he had met at a Big Ten Football Conference banquet in Los Angeles, named Anita Ekberg.

  In a brief trip of just forty-eight hours, Hope and his troupe landed at Thule (pronounced TOO-lee) in thirty-six-below weather and for two days never saw the sun. They did two shows, one at a gymnasium at Thule on New Year’s Eve and a second the next day in Goose Bay, Labrador. Both were filmed and later edited together into an hour show for NBC’s Colgate Comedy Hour, which aired on January 9. The telecast drew a protest from the cameramen’s union, which was unhappy that government crews had been used instead of union cameramen. (Hope said he had nothing to do with the decision; he prided himself on supporting unions and regularly refused to cross picket lines.) But it was a landmark for Hope: the first time one of his military tours was televised.

  “I can’t tell you how happy I am to be up here on the moon with you,” Hope says in his opening monologue, standing in front of a curtain on the makeshift stage in the converted gym at Thule. “It’s the only place in the world where you get a good-conduct medal just for being alive.” A half dozen dancing girls, dressed in parkas and skating skirts fringed in white fur, sing, “Why do they call it Greenland when everything looks so white?” Holden, adopting his swaggering, cigar-chomping Stalag 17 persona, joins Hope for some repartee and later runs around supplying the props as Hope and Whiting do a patter-and-song number, “Make Yourself Comfortable.” In a sketch, Hope and Holden (joined by the scruffy Robert Strauss, one of Holden’s costars from Stalag 17) play stir-crazy servicemen who vie for the chance to give a tour of the base to Ekberg (as a New York Times reporter!). The familiar jokes about lonely, sex-starved servicemen, along with the sight of big Hollywood stars working with makeshift sets and community-theater production facilities, were a warming touch of home for the men stuck in this forlorn outpost. The special that was edited from the trip drew more viewers than any other Hope TV show yet, with a whopping 60 percent share of the viewing audience.

  Hope recognized a winning formula when he saw one. The following year, in the midst of filming The Iron Petticoat in London, he took a break at Christmas to do some shows for the US troops stationed in Iceland, bringing along blond British sexpot Diana Dors as a guest star. Excerpts from the shows were edited into a special that Hope had already recorded back in Hollywood.

  The Iceland trip was notable mainly for a mishap that didn’t make it into the show. Among the entertainers Hope brought along was a blond, five-foot-ten-inch strongwoman named Jean Rhodes, who bent steel bars and did a bit with Hope in which she lifted him on her shoulders while they sang “Embraceable You.” Her tacky vaudeville act (testimony to Hope’s low standards for entertainment when it involved curvaceous gals) went well enough until the last show, when Rhodes lost her balance after lifting up Hope, plunging him headfirst to the floor. He cut his nose and wrenched his neck and was flown immediately back to London for X-rays. There were no broken bones (and he was well enough to host a British TV show the next day), though Hope later speculated that the accident may have triggered the eye problems that began to plague him a few years later.

  The trip that decisively established Hope’s Christmas tours as an annual tradition came a year later, in December 1956, when he made a more extensive tour of US bases in Alaska. His top-billed guests were Hollywood star Ginger Rogers and New York Yankees slugger Mickey Mantle (who played a mama’s boy Army recruit in one sketch, with Hope as his hard-bitten sergeant). The entertainment seemed a little retro for an audience of young servicemen in the early years of rock ’n’ roll: Hope donned top hat and tails for a dance number with the forty-five-year-old Rogers; housemother Hedda Hopper was back, gossiping about old Hollywood; and Hope’s idea of a young act for “you cats who dig talent” was pert vocalist Peggy King, from the George Gobel Show, who sang “I’ve Grown Accustomed to His Face.” Still, it was a glittery package of stars, songs, and comedy, for an audience that was starved for it.

  His popular Christmas shows helped send Hope’s ratings soaring. For the 1955–56 season, his specials aired on Tuesday nights, sponsored by Chevrolet and alternating with Milton Berle and Martha Raye. Hope was the only one of the three who regularly beat the hot new sitcom airing opposite them on CBS—Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko in You’ll Never Get Rich. For the 1956–57 season, still sponsored by Chevrolet, Hope moved to Sunday nights, alternating with Dinah Shore and Ray Bolger, and drew even mightier ratings. By early 1957 his shows were averaging 41 million viewers a week, and Variety was marveling at his staying power after seven years on television. “In an era when even the best of ’em consider they’ve ‘had it’ after a three-four-season TV span, the multiplying payoff on Hope’s seven-year itch for the Top 10 continues as the TV Ripley of the Decade.”

  Hope’s shows in these years were probably the best of his TV career. The sketches, though hardly comedy classics, were more elaborately staged and better written, at their funniest when spoofing current movies and TV shows: a 1956 parody of The Desperate Hours, for example, with Hope in the Bogart role as an escaped convict holding a suburban family hostage, but having trouble getting their attention away from the TV set. Or Hope as a Colonel Parker–like rock ’n’ roll impresario, trying to turn meek Wally Cox into a teen idol. (When Cox asks where all his money has gone, Hope responds indignantly, “Have you ever heard my honesty questioned?” Cox: “I’ve never even heard it mentioned.”)

  In his monologues, Hope seemed more conscious of his role as a comedic barometer of current events and national concerns. “There’s been a lot of exciting news these past couple of weeks,” Hope began one monologue in the fall of 1955. “The stock market is holding its own, Archie Moore is holding his head, Perón is holding the bag, and Eddie and Debbie are holding each other, for release at a more convenient time”—surely the only comedian who could combine a defeated heavyweight boxer, an ousted Argentine dictator, and a newlywed Hollywood couple into one gag line. He took note of world crises (“How about that Suez Canal?”) and presidential politics (“Adlai made so many campaign promises, Ike voted for him”). He poked fun at big-money quiz shows and Hollywood epics such as The Ten Commandments and, endlessly, Elvis Presley, the pelvis-shaking rock ’n’ roll sensation who was about to go into the Army. “He’ll be the only private the Army ever had that can roll the dice without taking them out of his pocket,” said Hope. And: “Can’t wait to see Elvis on guard duty, yelling, ‘Halt, who goes there, friend or square?’ ” And: “Elvis is asking for a deferment, on the grounds that it would create a hardship for Ed Sullivan.”

  Sometimes the jokes could ruffle feathers. In 1956, when Britain’s Princess Margaret broke off her engagement to the divorced Captain Peter Townsend under pressure from the Church of England, Hope joked about the thwarted affair as he prepared for a trip to London. Among the sights he was looking forward to seeing, he said, was “Buckingham Palace, the guards out front, and Margaret’s handkerchief drying out the window.” His quips drew protests from both Canadian and British fans, who thought Hope was disrespectful. He got complaints of a different kind from NBC station executives, who objected to his frequent use of product names in his jokes—plugs that often resulted in free merchandise for Hope and his writers.

  Hope may have felt entitled to a few perks, for he claimed that he was losing money on his television work. Hope Enterprises received a fixed amount from NBC for each special, meant to cover the talent, writers, and other production costs. When Hope looked at the books in the fall of 1956, he realized that he was losing money on the deal—a total of $93,000 in the red for his first three NBC specials for the 1956–57 season, according to his accounting. “I’m a hit but going broke, as far as TV is concerned,” he told reporters. “I wish I could
afford TV, but judging from the losses so far this season, I don’t think so.”

  It was somewhat disingenuous; even if the shows were running a deficit, Hope personally was still raking in plenty from the network—upward of $1 million a year. But it was a fine negotiating tactic. In early 1957 Hope got NBC to renegotiate his contract, retroactive to 1955. Under the new deal, NBC would pay $15 million for forty TV specials over five years—an average of $375,000 for each show. With the specials budgeted at around $130,000 apiece, that meant Hope cleared at least $200,000 per show, putting his yearly income from NBC at around $1.5 million. As part of the new deal, NBC also pledged to invest $10 million in five Hope films, thus becoming a partner in his moviemaking for the first time.

  Hope would renew his contract with NBC every five years, and he always drove a hard bargain. Hope was such a ratings powerhouse that NBC had little choice but to make him happy, and he squeezed the network wherever he could. NBC had a rate card for the use of its production facilities, for instance, and the costs went up steadily over the years—for everyone but Hope, whose charges were grandfathered at the mid-1950s rate. NBC designed an entire studio to Hope’s specifications, with the seats steeply raked so that the audience would be as close to him as possible. (It later became the home of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, but was always Hope’s for the asking.) What’s more, as a sweetener for each contract renewal, Hope would demand a side deal in which NBC purchased one piece of property from him—a way for him to realize some profits from his steadily appreciating real estate holdings. “The land purchase was done directly between me and Bob,” said Tom Sarnoff, NBC’s West Coast vice president of business affairs during most of those years. “He was a tough negotiator. He knew what he wanted.”