Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  Hope began accumulating real estate on a large scale in the 1950s, using the money he and Crosby earned from their lucrative Texas oil wells. In 1955, Hope bought a 1,695-acre ranch in Ventura County from Jim and Marian Jordan, radio’s Fibber McGee and Molly, for $400,000. Hope picked up several more large parcels over the next few years in the San Fernando Valley, Malibu, and the desert communities around Palm Springs, as well as smaller pieces in Arizona and Ohio. He also owned several undeveloped lots in Burbank, including one adjoining NBC’s headquarters and another next door to Universal Pictures—the site of a golf driving range run for years by Hope’s brother-in-law and eventually sold to Universal, which turned it into the entrance to its new theme park. He bought most of this land cheap and held on to it for years. “Bob was known to hang on to his real estate,” said Art Linkletter, who partnered with Hope in several deals. “In fact, I stopped doing deals with him because he never wanted to sell anything.” At his peak Hope owned more than ten thousand acres of Southern California real estate, reputedly more than any other private landowner in the state.

  He had an array of other investments as well. He was still part owner of the Cleveland Indians, and in 1949 he bought an 11 percent share of the Los Angeles Rams football team. He headed a group that owned Denver TV station KOA and in 1957 acquired WREX-TV in Rockford, Illinois. Yet he always downplayed his business successes, complaining about how much he had to pay back to the government in taxes. (Hope, with his old-fashioned, Main Street approach to business, never went in for sophisticated tax-shelter arrangements, which might have reduced his tax burden.) He loved to gripe about the business opportunities he’d passed up—an offer to get in on the ground floor of Polaroid, for example, or the time Walt Disney asked if Hope wanted to invest in the big theme park Disney was building in Anaheim. Hope turned him down, convinced that Disneyland would be a flop. If he had only said yes, Hope would tell friends, “I could have been a rich man.”

  The business that took up most of his time and attention, however, was the enterprise known as Bob Hope. He gathered around him a large and devoted support staff: his two agents, Louis Shurr and Jimmy Saphier; attorneys Martin Gang and Norman Tyre of the law firm Gang, Kopp & Tyre (surely the most aptly named in Hollywood); and a corps of well-connected publicity agents. Hope’s brother Jack became the nominal producer of his TV shows, while old cronies from Cleveland and vaudeville, such as Eddie Rio and Mark Anthony, were brought on in various capacities. At the center of the operation was Marjorie Hughes, a prim and poised graduate of UCLA who joined his staff in 1942 and served as Hope’s chief assistant for thirty-one years. “Miss Hughes,” as she was always addressed by everyone in the office (including Hope), ran the office, oversaw his schedule, and helped answer his voluminous mail—answers that Hope would usually dictate personally, but which always bore her delicate and dignified touch. Watching over it all was Hope, a hands-on CEO of the most sophisticated star-managing enterprise of the twentieth century.

  • • •

  It is hard to overstate Bob Hope’s achievement as a multimedia star in the 1950s. Success in movies and television in those years was almost mutually exclusive. Top movie stars (Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner—practically anyone you could name) almost never did television, while TV’s biggest stars, for the most part, had either left their movie careers behind (such as Lucille Ball or Red Skelton) or never had one to begin with (Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason). The only other stars besides Hope who achieved major success in both movies and TV in the 1950s were Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis—but Lewis’s TV career went nowhere after the duo split in 1956, and Martin didn’t get his own variety show until the late 1960s, when his movie career was winding down. No one came close to matching Hope’s two-decade run as a star of both major Hollywood movies and top-rated TV shows.

  To be sure, by the mid-1950s Hope was no longer the box-office kingpin that he was back in the 1940s. But his 1955 hit The Seven Little Foys proved that he could still, with the right vehicle, attract big crowds to the theaters. What’s more, his critical and popular success with Foys, in a meaty, semidramatic role, encouraged Hope to stretch himself and look for more ambitious film parts. The second half of the 1950s was a time of experimentation for him—not always successful, but also not the mark of a comedian who was resting on his laurels.

  That Certain Feeling, his first film after The Seven Little Foys, was a return to more conventional romantic comedy. But it was unusual for Hope in being based on a Broadway play—The King of Hearts, by Jean Kerr and Eleanor Brooke, which ran for eight months in 1954—and casting him in a relatively realistic, contemporary role. He plays Francis X. Dignan, a neurotically insecure cartoonist who is hired to “ghost” the popular comic strip of a pompous colleague named Larry Larkin, played by George Sanders. The instigator of this arrangement is Larkin’s assistant and fiancée, who also happens to be Dignan’s ex-wife—played by Eva Marie Saint, in her first movie after her Oscar-winning film debut in On the Waterfront.

  Written and codirected by former Hope writers Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, That Certain Feeling is a more sophisticated romantic comedy than anything Hope had done before. His familiar skittish, nervous-Nellie character now has real psychological underpinnings: he’s seeing a psychiatrist (a first for Hope) to deal with his pathological fear of confrontation. Sanders does a funny caricature of a smug, bleeding-heart New York intellectual, giving Hope’s deflating wisecracks more satiric bite. “When you pick up that pencil, my friend,” Sanders lectures Hope, “you draw Larkin, you think Larkin, you are Larkin.” Says Hope: “All right, but I insist on separate toothbrushes.”

  In a superfluous subplot, Larkin adopts an orphan, played by Jerry Mathers, later of TV’s Leave It to Beaver. (Hope’s nine-year-old son, Kelly, also appears in one scene as Mathers’s playmate.) And a youthful, honey-voiced Pearl Bailey, in the thankless role of Larkin’s maid, gets a couple of nice songs, including the film’s title number, resurrected from a 1925 Gershwin musical. But the heart of the movie is the reawakening romance between Dignan and his ex-wife, and Hope plays it with restraint and feeling. This is one of his few screen romances that actually gives off some sexual heat, and he’s an indulgent straight man for Saint’s big comedy scene, when the neatly tailored ice princess gets drunk and flounces around her apartment in silk Chinese pajamas.

  “He was very patient as an actor, very generous and giving,” said Saint, who also found Hope’s easygoing working style refreshing. In contrast to the intensity of Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando on the closed Waterfront set, Hope’s set was open and relaxed; one day an entire football team came to watch. “Thank God I had grown up in live television, where tours would come through and watch from behind the glass,” said Saint. “As an actress I had learned how to concentrate.”

  As he did for The Seven Little Foys, Hope went all out to promote the movie, which opened in June 1956. He did four stage shows a day at the Paramount Theater for the film’s New York opening; made nearly a dozen TV guest appearances; and hosted premiere screenings around the country to benefit United Cerebral Palsy. One of his NBC specials, The Road to Hollywood, was little more than a long plug for the movie. Thinly disguised as a tribute to Hope’s Hollywood career (with former leading ladies such as Jane Russell and Dorothy Lamour among the guests), the show featured Hope’s first use of one of his publicity innovations: a clip reel of flubs and outtakes from his new movie. “Leave it to Bob Hope to show ’em how to plug a picture,” said Variety, in its review of the show. “If NBC is willing to give away 90 minutes of prime time for a plug, and audiences are willing to take it with the palatable grain of sugar it was mixed with, more power to Hope.”

  Yet That Certain Feeling was a disappointment at the box office. Variety theorized that Hope’s movie wisecracks were “too much the type of entertainment he offers on television.” More likely, the relatively sophisticated New York relationship comedy was a little too rarefied for Hope’s audience
. Still, it was one of his most enjoyable and underrated films of the 1950s. After it, things began to go seriously awry.

  The Iron Petticoat began with a script by veteran screenwriter Ben Hecht (Scarface, The Front Page): a Cold War–era update of Ninotchka about a female Soviet pilot who defects to the West and has a romantic and ideological awakening while being shown around London by an American Air Force captain. Katharine Hepburn was cast as the pilot, and Cary Grant was originally envisioned as her costar. But when Grant turned it down, producer Harry Saltzman came up with the notion of pairing Hepburn, Hollywood’s classiest leading lady, with Hope, its most popular movie clown. Intrigued with the idea of working with Hepburn (as well as plans to shoot the movie in England), Hope signed on. Against the advice of friends, Hepburn agreed too.

  It was an ill-starred project. Hecht and Hope were at odds from the start. According to Hope, the script was unfinished when he arrived in London for the start of shooting (Hecht no doubt rewriting it to suit the casting of Hope), and Hope merely suggested a few “hokey thoughts” to help it out. In Hecht’s view, Hope was wreaking havoc on his script, bringing in gag writers to add jokes where they didn’t belong. Hepburn was just as dismayed. “I had been sold a false bill of goods,” she said later. “I was told that this was not going to be a typical Hope movie, that he wanted to appear in a contemporary comedy. That proved not to be the case.” Ralph Thomas, the film’s British director, was caught in the middle. “After only two days I realized there was no point of contact between the two of them,” he said. “There was Bob inserting his one-liners—and she telling him, very forcibly, very chillingly, what she thought of his lack of professionalism.”

  Hope, who never liked to bad-mouth a colleague, was polite in retrospect, saying Hepburn was “a gem” during the filming. “She played the Jewish mother on the set, fussing over everyone who happened to sneeze.” Hepburn did not return the compliment, calling Hope “the biggest egomaniac with whom I have worked in my entire life.” Hecht, for his part, demanded that his name be removed from the credits and ran a full-page “open letter” to Hope in the Hollywood Reporter disavowing the film. “This is to notify you that I have removed my name as author from our mutilated venture, The Iron Petticoat. Unfortunately your other partner, Katharine Hepburn can’t shy out of the fractured picture with me.” Hope replied with his own sarcastic ad: “I am most understanding. The way things are going you simply can’t afford to be associated with a hit.”

  The Iron Petticoat, which opened in December 1956, wasn’t a hit, or anything resembling a good film. Hepburn complained that Hope wanted to turn the picture “into his cheap vaudeville act with me as his stooge,” but her strident, humorless performance as the dogma-spouting Soviet pilot (with one of the worst Russian accents ever recorded) is what ruins the film. Hope at least tries to keep it grounded in recognizable human behavior, and he has some nice moments when Hepburn is offscreen—doing some deft flimflammery at the Soviet embassy, for example, to help her escape from the authorities who have arrested her. But the movie is heavy-handed and charmless, with not a smidgen of romantic chemistry between the two stars. “The notion of these two characters falling rapturously, romantically in love is virtually revolting,” wrote the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther. “If this was meant to be a travesty, it is.”

  Hope’s next project, Beau James, at least brought him closer to home turf. Mel Shavelson and Jack Rose, who had given him one of his best roles in The Seven Little Foys, came up with the idea of casting Hope as Jimmy Walker, the colorful and corrupt 1920s mayor of New York City, in a biopic based on a recently published biography of Walker by Gene Fowler. For an essentially dramatic role, it was especially well suited to Hope. Walker had been a songwriter before getting into politics (he wrote the lyrics to “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?”), and as New York mayor was a bon-vivant symbol of the Roaring Twenties, who let speakeasies flourish in the city, allowed Tammany Hall corruption to run rampant, and left his wife for a showgirl.

  Hope does well in the role, his flip, wisecracking persona perfectly suited to the raffish mix of showbiz and politics that Walker embodied. The film’s depiction of New York City politics is simplistic but often witty—a montage of Walker campaigning across the city, for instance, tailoring his campaign song to each ethnic group he encounters. “What kind of mayor is this guy going to make?” asks one bystander. “A lousy mayor,” his campaign chief responds, “but what a candidate!” Beau James doesn’t ignore the corruption that marred Walker’s administration, or the personal indiscretions that enlivened it. (Alexis Smith plays Walker’s wife-in-name-only, and Vera Miles is the showgirl he has an affair with.) The problem, as in The Seven Little Foys, is that Hope’s opaqueness as an actor doesn’t give us much insight into Walker’s character or motives. Hope got respectful reviews, but the movie grossed just $1.75 million, his third box-office disappointment in a row.

  Hope took his next movie into his own hands. He wanted to shoot another film overseas and came up with a bare-bones story idea in which he would essentially play himself, an American comedy star who sails to Paris in pursuit of a script for his next picture. Hope got United Artists to back the film, cast the French comedian Fernandel (who had guested on one of Hope’s TV shows from London) as his costar, and hired screenwriters Edmund Beloin and Dean Riesner to flesh out a script. He also decided, for the first time, to serve as his own producer—a decision he came to regret.

  Filming was scheduled to begin in Paris in April 1957. But Fernandel, who spoke no English, didn’t see the script until Hope was about to arrive for the start of shooting, and he wasn’t happy to find that his role was clearly secondary to Hope’s. Hope made an emergency call to two of his writers, Mort Lachman and Bill Larkin, and ordered them to Paris, where they quickly reworked the script to pacify the French star—delaying the start of filming for ten days as the crew sat idle. The production fell further behind thanks to various technical snafus, bad weather (snow in May and a heat wave in June), and the French crew’s habit of starting work late and taking long lunches. “At present we’re three weeks behind on film and three weeks ahead on wine,” Hope joked at a benefit for French war orphans that he hosted while in Paris. When their twelve-week lease on the Boulogne studios outside of Paris was up and the film still wasn’t done, the crew had to relocate to another studio in Joinville to finish up. In the end, Hope claimed the production went $1 million over budget.

  The results on-screen were just as discombobulated. Paris Holiday is a slovenly mix of Hope one-liners, silent-comedy set pieces for Fernandel (he pretends to be seasick, for example, to get some ship passengers to vacate a couple of deck chairs), and a slapdash story involving spies (among them Anita Ekberg) who are after the same film script that Hope is trying to buy. The film’s director, Gerd Oswald, appears to be missing in action, and Hope was apparently too distracted by the production problems to pay much attention to the comedy. Paris Holiday was not just Hope’s worst film to date; it was his laziest performance.

  • • •

  In December 1957, Hope made his most ambitious Christmas trip yet, a two-week tour of the Far East, with blond bombshell Jayne Mansfield as his top guest star and a far-flung itinerary that climaxed with a show before seven thousand infantrymen perched on a snowy hillside near the thirty-eighth parallel, the border between North and South Korea. The NBC special that resulted became the model for all of Hope’s Christmas shows that followed. Unlike his previous three Christmas shows from the Arctic—essentially Hope variety shows done on location for military audiences—this one was a more elaborately produced travelogue: shots of the cast getting on and off planes, excerpts from their performances at each stop on the tour, all linked by Hope’s voice-over narration and ending with his patriotic tribute to “our boys in a foreign land, there to preserve our way of life.”

  The trip was widely covered by several entertainment columnists whom Hope had cleverly invited along, and the special,
which NBC aired on Friday, January 17, drew Hope’s highest ratings of the season. Hedda Hopper (who again doubled as a guest star and chronicler of the trip) hailed the selfless work Hope was doing, anointing him, more explicitly than ever before, as Hollywood’s finest role model for public service:

  Each time I pack my bags and turn my back on the wreathed door and the piles of gaily wrapped gifts, I have a warmer, more satisfying feeling in my heart. I can remember a day when Hollywood didn’t think much about serious things. I remember the time of the mammoth Christmas party, the $5 Christmas card and the exchange of valuables which meant Yuletide in the movie colony. I remember too the first Christmas when a sober note was struck, when someone reminded us what we owed the rest of the world. The time was 1943 and, you guessed it, the someone was Bob Hope.

  Hope’s status as Hollywood’s most celebrated public servant and goodwill ambassador, however, would reach its high-water mark a couple of months later. After more than two years of trying, Hope finally got approval to make his trip to the Soviet Union.

  He had renewed his application for visas in November 1957, while he was in London for some personal appearances and a screening of Paris Holiday. He told Ursula Halloran, a pretty young publicist who had gone to work for him in New York, to pursue the request with the powers in Washington and asked NBC’s Moscow correspondent, Irving R. Levine, to press the matter from his end. Hope also appealed for help from the American ambassador in London, Jock Whitney, who personally brought up the trip with Russian ambassador Jacob Malik. “What does your Mr. Hope want to do,” Malik said, “entertain our troops in Red Square?” Hope was disappointed that the approval didn’t come before he had to fly home from London. But a few weeks later, he was summoned to the Soviet embassy in Washington. The Soviets had approved his trip, and six visas were waiting for him.