Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  Hearn found Hope’s blood pressure elevated and ordered him to rest. But the comedian was soon back at work, overseeing the editing of footage from his Christmas tour. The dizzy spells continued, felling him during a golf game with his friend and PGA tour pro Jimmy Demaret. Now convinced that the ailment related to his eyesight, Hope went to an eye specialist, who diagnosed a blood clot in his left eye and prescribed blood thinners and more rest. Hope canceled a promotional trip to Florida, but continued to work on his next NBC special. During a rehearsal he suffered yet another attack, and his doctors, concerned about the eye’s worsening condition, sent him to New York for a consultation with Dr. Algernon Reese at New York’s Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center.

  News of his worsening eye problems prompted alarmist headlines. “Bob Hope to Fly East in Fight to Save Eye,” read one. Doctors in New York confirmed the diagnosis of a blood clot—a blockage in a retinal vein, which caused hemorrhaging and thus his blurred vision. They thought it could be cleared up without surgery, but warned that he could lose his eyesight unless he seriously cut back on his activities.

  Hope’s eye troubles prompted an outpouring of concern from his fans. He got thousands of get-well cards, many with medical advice or suggestions of doctors for him to see. Several people offered to donate (or sell, at prices ranging from $3,000 to $50,000) one of their own eyes, to replace the orb that ailed Hope. Shaken by the seriousness of his condition, he talked frankly about his need for rest. “If I had taken a day off in Spain or Africa, I think I would have been okay, but I worked when I was sick,” he told Louella Parsons. Hope “seemed depressed” as he discussed his condition with UPI’s Vernon Scott, who found a changed attitude in the comedian. “He’s quieter now. Less brash,” wrote Scott. Hope seemed determined, finally, to cut back on his frenetic pace. “Nobody moved as fast as I did,” he said. “My physical problems began a few years back when I was doing morning and evening radio programs, a weekly television show, movies, and personal appearances. . . . It was ridiculous. I used bad judgment. The folly was I couldn’t keep the money and I was fighting myself on all mediums.”

  Yet Hope’s idea of a slower pace was still enough to wear out most performers. He continued to do his monthly NBC specials for Buick (which continued to bury the competition in the ratings) and made personal appearances throughout the year, including a two-week run at the Cain Park Theater Summer Festival in Cleveland. But he put all his movie work on hold, canceled a promotional tour for his recently completed film Alias Jesse James, and spent more time resting in Palm Springs—even cutting back his golf games from eighteen to nine holes. During the summer he and Dolores vacationed in Scotland, and he took the family on a fishing trip in British Columbia.

  It might have been a nice time to bond with the children, but he was past that. The two oldest kids were in college now—Tony at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and Linda at Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles. The two youngest, Nora and Kelly, were just entering their teens, grabbing what little quality time they could with the Hollywood superstar who sometimes showed up for dinner. “Nora was better able to get his attention,” said a cousin. “She laughed at his jokes. She was cute, very vivacious, funny. Kelly was at sea. He was not doing well in school. Being the son of Bob Hope was a difficult role for both of them.”

  Although Tony accompanied his father on Hope’s 1957 Far East tour, and Linda appeared with him in 1956 as a mystery guest on the TV game show What’s My Line?, Hope didn’t push the kids to join him in show business. But it was hard for them to escape the shadow of his overwhelming fame. “I felt, growing up, that people were always looking past me, at him,” Linda said years later. “I remember inviting people over to the house, as kids always do, and them making a big fuss, and the parents wanting to get inside and see as much as they could. They were more interested in the whole Bob Hope situation, and they weren’t being my friends.” While at Mount St. Mary’s, Linda—an attractive blonde whose cool good looks reminded some of Grace Kelly—was nominated for homecoming queen of nearby Loyola University. “I was just thrilled that finally my moment had arrived,” she said. “And then I found out that I could be guaranteed to be picked as the queen if my father would show up.” He didn’t, and she wasn’t.

  • • •

  After a year of sporadically enforced rest because of his eye problems, neither Dolores nor his doctors were happy when Bob insisted on doing another Christmas tour at the end of 1959. The trip was at least more manageable—a relatively short jaunt to Alaska (just admitted to the union as the forty-ninth state), with Jayne Mansfield and young film star Steve McQueen along for the ride. Hope turned the trip into a reunion of his old World War II troupe, bringing along Frances Langford, Patty Thomas, and Tony Romano as well as Colonna, by now a regular on Hope’s tours. When Les Brown’s band was not available, Hope even got Skinnay Ennis, his first radio bandleader, as a replacement, just for old times’ sake.

  The publicity-savvy Mansfield hogged most of the spotlight, posing for photographers with a lion cub and taking the stage in a gown so low-cut the men nearly rioted. (When Hope asked if they wanted her to sing, one yelled out, “Just let her breathe!”) At a show in Fairbanks, Hope had another flare-up of his eye problems. When AP reported the story, Hope chewed out Bill Faith, the NBC publicist who had let the news slip out. But otherwise the trip went off without incident, and the show that resulted, which aired on January 13, drew Hope’s highest ratings of the season.

  His TV popularity continued to soar—not just on his own show, but also on the many variety shows where he made guest appearances. In February 1960, Variety did an analysis of the ratings for TV’s most frequent guest stars. Hope was ranked No. 1—beating not only such TV personalities as Jack Benny and Red Skelton but also top movie stars such as Rock Hudson, Ingrid Bergman, and Jimmy Stewart. “Bob Hope is the champ of them all in audience pulling power,” said Variety, “emerging as television’s No. 1 personality.”

  In April 1960 he got another crack at the biggest TV guest spot of all: host of the Academy Awards show. He had not hosted the ceremony on his own since 1955 (when he grappled playfully over an Oscar with Best Actor winner Marlon Brando). For the next two years his sponsor, Chevrolet, barred him from the Oscar show because rival Oldsmobile was one of its sponsors. He returned as one of multiple hosts in both 1958 and 1959. But the 1959 show was a notorious disaster. In a once-in-a-lifetime miscalculation, the show came in twenty minutes short, and Jerry Lewis, the last of six hosts, was forced to ad-lib desperately to fill the time—stretching out a closing sing-along to “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” clowning around and picking up a baton to conduct the orchestra himself—until NBC mercifully cut away. Reviews of the show were scathing. The following year, Hope was back as host all by himself.

  “Many changes have been made since our last show,” Hope said at the start of the April 4 telecast from the Pantages Theatre. “We have a new director, a new producer, and a new watch.” He was sharp and fully in control. The show was taking place during an actors’ strike. “What a country,” said Hope. “Only here would you wait in your swimming pool for the boss to improve working conditions.” One of the year’s Oscar-nominated films was On the Beach, based on Nevil Shute’s bestseller about nuclear Armageddon. “The Russians loved it,” said Hope. “They thought it was a newsreel.” He was ubiquitous throughout the evening: introducing each presenter, sprinkling in quips everywhere, both planned and unplanned. When the Best Short Subject award was announced, Ann Blyth accepted for the absent winner, while a bald-headed man was left wandering uncertainly onstage, apparently thinking the duty was his. Hope gently ushered the confused man offstage: “There’s nothing left over.”

  As if to thank him for his job in righting the ship, the Academy gave Hope another honorary Oscar—the prestigious Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Ben-Hur was the evening’s big winner, taking home a record eleven awards, but the applause for Hope was the longest and
loudest of the night.

  Hope would return as solo host of the Oscars for seven of the next nine years, the greatest run of any host in Academy history. His monologues became don’t-miss events: an eight-minute encapsulation of the major films, hot trends, and celebrity gossip of the year in Hollywood—written and rewritten by Hope and his regular crew of writers (with help from others, such as Oscar-show specialist Hal Kanter) right up until airtime and guarded like a state secret.

  He joked about big-budget movie spectacles (“Right now Sam Spiegel has more men under arms than NATO”), Liz and Dick’s affair on the set of Cleopatra (“I don’t know how the picture is, but I’d like to make a deal for the outtakes”), the growing sexual frankness on-screen (“One picture got the seal of approval, and the director said, ‘Where have we failed?’ ”). He came armed with good lines, but he had the quickness and agility to handle the unscripted moments too. When a gate-crasher disrupted the 1962 ceremony, bounding onstage to give Hope a bogus Oscar, the host was unflappable: “Who needs Price Waterhouse? All we need’s a doorman.” When the winner of a short-subject award went on too long in his acceptance speech (in the days when acceptance speeches were rarely longer than a few seconds), thanking his wife, his son, and a friend back in Bronxville, Hope commented impeccably, “Well, that saves a telegram.” Even as the shows grew longer and drearier, Hope made them sparkle.

  By early 1960 Hope was back to a nearly full schedule of work. He signed a new five-year contract with NBC, after the usual protracted negotiations. He was the network’s eight-hundred-pound gorilla, and he could be demanding and peevish when he didn’t get his way. When NBC couldn’t deliver a Saturday-night time slot that Hope wanted for one of his specials, his agent Jimmy Saphier raised a ruckus and threw Hope’s weight around. “Don’t you think this is a rather strange way for NBC to treat its number one piece of talent,” he wrote the network, “particularly in view of the fact that your contract with Bob Hope is in its final year?”

  After a self-imposed layoff of more than a year, Hope’s movie career was also getting back on track. His last film before the layoff, Alias Jesse James, was released in March 1959, and the Western spoof—with Hope playing a New York insurance man who mistakenly sells a policy to Jesse James, then has to go out West to try to keep him alive—was a mild uptick from the disastrous Paris Holiday. Following it, a year and a half later, came a movie that showed a new side of Hope on-screen.

  The Facts of Life began with a script by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank about two married suburban neighbors, bored with their respective spouses, who try to have an affair. Panama and Frank originally wanted to cast William Holden and Olivia de Havilland as the couple, but had trouble selling it to a studio. Then they had the idea to refashion it for two comedians: Bob Hope and Lucille Ball.

  Hope was wary of the idea at first. “It’s a little straight, isn’t it?” he said of the script. But he told Panama and Frank that he would do it if Lucy agreed. Ball, Hope’s favorite costar, had largely dropped out of movies since her huge success on TV with I Love Lucy and was now partners with her (soon-to-be ex-) husband, Desi Arnaz, in Desilu Studios. She had her own reservations about the film, worried that it would turn into a typical Hope farce. “I don’t want it to be the Road to Infidelity,” she told the screenwriters. But she agreed to do it, and the movie began shooting in June 1960, with co-screenwriter Frank as the director.

  The production had its share of problems. Climbing into a rowboat for one scene, Ball slipped and fell, gashing her leg and bruising her face so badly that the production had to shut down for two weeks. While she was recuperating, Frank sprained his ankle on the golf course, and Hope jammed his thumb in a door. The film also posed creative challenges for the two stars. Ball, a more meticulous actor than Hope, worked hard to create a realistic character distinct from her farcical TV persona: “Was I Lucy? Was I Lucy?” she would ask after scenes. At times she pushed director Frank too far. “If you want to direct the picture, I’ll go play golf,” he snapped one day when she became too overbearing.

  Hope, on the other hand, had to be steered away from his natural inclination to go for the easy laugh. In one scene, the couple check into a motel to consummate their affair, and the script has Hope making small talk when he enters the room—nice closet, good lamp—to show his nervousness. Hope wanted instead to come into the room and surreptitiously test out the springs of the bed. Frank indulged his star by shooting both versions; Hope’s got more laughs, but Frank ended up using his own.

  The Facts of Life is an enjoyable romantic comedy, proof that the two comic stars can handle relatively sophisticated adult material. It is handicapped by Hollywood’s 1950s prudishness about sex (there is none) and by its farcical predictability (on the night of their assignation, Hope’s convertible top won’t go up and they’re drenched in the rain). Hope is restrained and credible in a role that, for once, suits his middle-aged spread, and he has some funny moments: stuck at a Boy Scout meeting, for example, when he’s late for a rendezvous with Ball, squirming as he has to sit through a Scout’s interminable report on smoke signals. But Ball outshines him nearly all the way; indeed, she exposes some of his limitations as a serious actor. Every nuance of her character’s conflicting emotions is registered in her animated face, body language, and line readings. Hope’s inner life, hidden beneath his cool-wiseacre façade, is pretty much a cipher.

  Yet The Facts of Life, released in November 1960, earned a healthy $3.2 million at the box office, more than any other Hope film since The Seven Little Foys. Rare for a Hope film, it even picked up five Academy Award nominations, including one for Panama and Frank’s screenplay. (The film won one Oscar, for Edith Head’s costumes.) It was a promising step forward for Hope as a film actor, a move into more intelligent, age-appropriate romantic comedy. Unfortunately, it was the last good film he would ever make.

  The start of the 1960s augured big changes for both Hope and the nation. He joked often about the charismatic young senator from Massachusetts who was running for president in 1960: “Do we really want a president who rides for half fare on the bus?” When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, the generational shift registered acutely for Hope—from Dwight D. Eisenhower, Hope’s personal link to World War II, to a new and unfamiliar band of Ivy League–educated New Frontiersmen.

  Hope, now fifty-seven, was becoming keenly aware of the passage of time. When he was entertaining the troops in Germany in 1958, a young solider came up to him and brought greetings from his father, who had seen Hope at Guadalcanal. “I entertained his father! That one line really aged me,” said Hope. His old movies were now on TV—Paramount had sold all of its pre-1948 films, including most of Hope’s classics, to television for $50 million (a deal that Hope publicly complained about, since it gave the actors no residuals)—and the contrast between the brash young movie star of the 1940s and the paunchier, middle-aged Hope was there on the small screen for all to see.

  In the world of comedy, too, times were changing. By the end of the 1950s, a new wave of stand-up comics was emerging from the folk clubs and hip nightspots of New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. These comedians—Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart, Mike Nichols and Elaine May—rejected the impersonal, joke-driven style of Hope and the comics of his generation who came out of vaudeville and the borscht belt. The new comedians wrote their own material and developed more individualized styles: doing characters and improvising scenes, using stand-up comedy to explore their own lives, experiences, and neuroses, and to express their often dissenting social and political views.

  Hope was a fan of many of these comedians (though he had few of them on his shows). He saw Bruce, the infamous “dirty” comic, perform several times and thought he was brilliant. Once in the early sixties he went to see Bruce at a Florida nightclub. Bruce introduced Hope in the audience and after the show ran into the parking lot to flag him down, asking Hope if he would give Bruce a guest spot on one of his TV
shows. Hope laughed him off: “Lenny, you’re for educational TV.”

  Yet Bruce and the other new-wave comics were beginning to make Hope look old-fashioned. He was the older generation now, a friend of presidents and court jester for the Establishment—a symbol of everything the younger comics were rebelling against. It was not a role that Hope welcomed, or that would treat him very well.

  Chapter 10

  KING

  “I feel very humble, although I think I’ve got the strength of character to fight it.”

  For his 1960 Christmas tour, the Defense Department gave Hope a break from the arctic cold and the grueling long-distance treks through the Far East and Europe. His destination this time was the sunny Caribbean, for a visit to US bases in Panama, Puerto Rico, Antigua, and El Salvador. The climax of the trip, and its chief raison d’être, was a Christmas Eve visit to the US naval base at Guantánamo, on the southeastern coast of Cuba. Communist leader Fidel Castro had taken control of the island country and was ratcheting up anti-American rhetoric, nationalizing US businesses, and prompting fears that the Soviets were gaining a base of influence just ninety miles from US shores.

  Hope brought a troupe of nearly sixty with him aboard the Military Air Transport Service (MATS) plane that left on December 19, among them Hungarian-born beauty Zsa Zsa Gabor, musical-comedy star Janis Paige, singer and former Miss Oklahoma Anita Bryant, and a young crooner named Andy Williams. The flight into Guantánamo had some tense moments, as the pilot had to stick to the approved flying corridor or risk being fired upon by the Cubans. At one point, the entertainers looked out their windows and saw two Cuban planes flying alongside them. “It was scary,” Janis Paige recalled. “There was an awful silence. Nobody knew what to say or what to do—when suddenly they peel off and in their place come four of our fighter planes, with the guys giving us the thumbs-up signal. You could see their faces, they were that close.”