Hope’s next film, A Global Affair, was a more high-minded project. He plays a low-level employee at the United Nations who inherits a baby abandoned there late on a Friday when he’s the only one left working. When no one can decide what to do with the infant, Hope announces he will give the baby to the most deserving nation, then gets plied by an array of international beauties, each trying to get him to pick her country. Shot partially on location at the UN, the movie is a mix of curdled sex farce (Hope’s bachelor neighbor, played by Robert Sterling, uses the infant to rouse the mothering instincts of every sexy gal in the vicinity) and promotional brochure for the United Nations—it was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Film Promoting International Understanding. Swiss actress Lilo Pulver brightens up the movie with a charming turn as a Russian agent trying to persuade Hope of the glories of the Soviet state. (Katharine Hepburn could have taken a few lessons from her in The Iron Petticoat.) But Hope once again looks bored with the whole sorry affair.
Director Jack Arnold hated the film so much that he demanded his name be taken off the credits (though it’s still there), complaining that producer Hal Bartlett ruined the film in the editing. But Hope was a problem too—so wedded to his cue cards that Arnold instructed his cameraman to make up technical problems so they would have to shoot each scene at least six times, by which point Hope would presumably have learned his lines. “Bob Hope lives in his own world,” said Arnold. “He comes in, and does his work, and doesn’t socialize with any of the cast—which doesn’t mean that he’s mean, or doesn’t joke around with people. It’s just that he is a very self-centered gentleman. He doesn’t bother to even learn the script, and sometimes, I think, he hasn’t read it.”
• • •
Even as the quality of his work was declining, Hope continued to be a master at promoting it. Every NBC special would be preceded by a slew of newspaper stories, drawn from Hope’s round of phone interviews with TV columnists across the country. He played an active, hands-on role in planning the publicity campaigns for all of his movies. Before the release of his 1959 Western comedy Alias Jesse James, for example, Hope proposed a gala premiere in St. Louis, complete with a Western-style fashion show, and wanted to fly to three cities for simultaneous premieres on the same day. He suggested a magazine feature story on “Friendship in Show Business,” in which some of the Western actors who had cameos in the film, such as Gary Cooper and Roy Rogers, would talk about their longtime friendship with Hope, and told his publicists to get a magazine to do a cover story on him and costar Rhonda Fleming. “I explained to Bob that the magazines are going for stars like Natalie Wood and the younger set,” Hope PR man Arthur Jacobs wrote in a memo relaying Hope’s wishes to the Paramount publicists, “but Bob has something to offer and that is, if we can get a cover he will plug the magazine on his Buick specs.”
Hope also pushed the novel idea of promoting his movies on television. He and Crosby had done TV ads for Road to Bali, and in 1962 Hope got satirist Stan Freberg to film some commercials for The Road to Hong Kong. “The film industry needs a positive approach to sell its pictures on TV,” Hope told Variety. “They’re still sort of laying back and not reaching people like they should. Why aren’t they selling pictures on station breaks, for example? They should have TV campaigns to make the people want to go out and see films.” Thirty years later, such saturation TV campaigns would become de rigueur for every major Hollywood release. Hope, once again, was a pioneer.
Meanwhile, he was expanding his brand more aggressively and with more ingenuity than anyone else in Hollywood. Hope wasn’t just a movie and TV star. He was a bestselling author (his fifth book, I Owe Russia $1200, came out in May 1963) and a recording artist too (the monologue from his 1958 Moscow trip was released as a Decca LP in 1963, with a Hope appearance at Notre Dame University on the flip side). He got his name plastered on countless awards, honorary diplomas, and an occasional building—donating $800,000 to Southern Methodist University for the Bob Hope Theater, which broke ground in 1965. He bought a sixteen-hundred-acre ranch in Simi Valley, once used as a set for movie Westerns, and renamed it Hopetown, with ambitious plans to turn it into a Western-themed amusement park. “It’ll be Southern California’s answer to Mount Rushmore,” Hope said. And in perhaps his greatest marketing coup of all, Hope got his own golf tournament.
The Bob Hope Desert Classic had its origins in the old Thunderbird Invitational, which began in 1952 at the Thunderbird Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California. When the tournament ran into money troubles and had to shut down in 1959, a group of Palm Springs area golf boosters, not wanting to give up a valuable weekend on the PGA Tour, got together and fashioned a new tournament to replace it, the Palm Springs Golf Classic. The plan was to make it a pro-am event, played over five days on four different courses in the Palm Springs area; each foursome of pros and amateurs would play one round on each of the four courses, with the fifth and final day reserved for the pros alone.
The tournament debuted in 1960 and struggled financially for a couple of years, until two of its founders, Milt Hicks and Ernie Dunlevie, came up with the notion of recruiting Hope as its celebrity front man, to compete with the other major pro-am tournament on the PGA Tour, the Bing Crosby Invitational in Pebble Beach. In 1963 they approached Hope with the idea in the locker room at the O’Donnell Golf Club in Palm Springs. Always competitive with his friend Crosby, Hope didn’t take long to agree. After a year’s delay while the tournament worked out some tax problems (the backers didn’t want Hope to be linked to any negative publicity), Hope came on board, bringing along Chrysler as tournament sponsor.
The Bob Hope Desert Classic made its debut the first week of February in 1965. NBC paid $100,000 for the rights to televise it (matching the amount it paid for Crosby’s tournament), and Hope wrangled dozens of celebrities to play in the event, among them Kirk Douglas, Lawrence Welk, Bob Newhart, and New York Mets manager Casey Stengel. The mammoth field included 128 PGA pros and 384 amateurs; a battalion of 160 NBC executives and production people were on hand for the TV coverage; and the week’s festivities included a lavish Saturday-night dinner-dance hosted by Hope. Billy Casper won the tournament by a stroke over Arnold Palmer, and former president Dwight D. Eisenhower was there to congratulate the winner at the eighteenth green.
In the years that followed, the Hope Desert Classic surpassed the Crosby as the most star-studded event on the PGA Tour. Hope lured in not just top Hollywood celebrities, but sports stars such as Johnny Bench, astronauts such as Alan Shepard, and even presidents. Gerald Ford, who retired to the Palm Springs area after leaving the White House, was a regular participant, as well as a frequent golfing partner for Hope (and target of many jokes about Ford’s errant golf shots). Eisenhower never played in the tournament, but he was a regular guest of honor. When he died, proceeds from the tournament went to build a hospital in his name, the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, which broke ground in 1969 on eighty acres of land donated by Hope.
The Hope Classic was not a favorite of many of the PGA touring pros, mainly because it forced them to play for four days with celebrity amateurs, who were not always the best golfers. (Crosby, a more serious golfer, had higher standards for the amateurs he invited to play. Hope was more willing to let duffers play if they had big names and could entertain the crowd.) But as one of the first events of the PGA year, with a stellar lineup of golfers playing in the golden desert sunshine while the rest of the country shivered, Hope’s tournament became one of the highest-rated TV events on the PGA Tour—and an invaluable marketing tool for the booming Palm Springs area.
In the early years, Hope would play all four of the amateur rounds. Later he scaled back to just an opening-day round, and eventually, as swinging the club got to be harder, to just ceremonial duties, hitting an opening drive to launch the tournament and then retiring until a final appearance to crown the winner. Each year he would host a Monday-night black-tie gala at the Riviera Hotel, always with surprise Hollywood
guest stars. Though he used his clout and connections to keep the tournament packed with celebrities, Hope left the actual running of it to others. “He never came to a board meeting,” said Dunlevie. “He never told us what he’d like to do or how he’d like to do it.” One year the tournament was played on the new, extremely difficult PGA West Stadium Course in La Quinta, and fifty-two pros later signed a letter complaining about the course and refusing to play it again. “Milt and I went over to see Hope and said, ‘Bob, did you see all the complaints? We gotta find another golf course.’ And he said, ‘Why? Look at all the publicity we got.’ I think that was the only meeting of substance we ever had with him.”
Hope was a good amateur golfer and worked hard at his game, getting tips from every pro he knew, and he knew practically all of them. At his peak, in the early 1950s, he carried a 6 handicap, though it was edging into the low double digits by the mid-1960s. He could drive the ball around 230 yards, had a graceful swing (once compared to Fred Couples’s) and was “without doubt one of the best chippers and putters I’ve ever seen,” according to Lakeside caddy Eddie Gannon. Golf relaxed Hope and provided his main form of exercise, along with the late-night walks that he would routinely take before bed in later years. He shared a love of the game with Dolores, who was almost as good a golfer as he. “He could hit the ball farther, but around the green, her short game was impeccable,” said Mort Lachman, who played with both.
Hope used golf to cement relationships with powerful people—politicians, generals, corporate bigwigs. “He would do a benefit for, say, John Deere tractors,” said Linda Hope, “and then he’d go out on the golf course with the people in the company who played golf. And the head of John Deere might bring along other people who were also company heads, and so Dad would make a nice connection there. In years later it gave him access to a lot of these corporate guys, who had planes and could fly him where he needed to go. He was very smart with that kind of thing.”
He was a walking advertisement for golf, from his widely publicized fund-raising matches with Crosby during World War II, to his constant jokes and references to the game in his radio and TV monologues. Along with Eisenhower, the golf-playing president, and Arnold Palmer, golf’s first TV superstar, Hope was one of the three people who did the most to popularize golf in America during its boom years of the 1950s and 1960s.
“He was a fair golfer,” said Palmer. “He shot mostly in the eighties. But he worked hard at it, and he was a great fan of the game. He and his tournament brought untold benefits to the game of golf.” Palmer, a greenskeeper’s son who learned to play golf on a public course in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, was golf’s great working-class hero. Hope, by contrast, was a country-club guy. But his zeal for the game played a major role in raising the sport’s profile and attracting new players to it. “Palmer got the blue-collar guys,” said Dunlevie. “Hope got the white-collar guys. People could say, ‘He’s an ordinary golfer—he’s not any better than I am.’ That encouraged a lot of people who weren’t interested before.”
He played on more than two thousand courses over his golfing lifetime—from Palm Springs to Scotland, in Korea and Vietnam, once on a course that filled the inside of a racetrack in Vienna. He made five holes in one and reputedly once beat Ben Hogan in a round. He published a bestselling memoir about the game, Confessions of a Hooker: My Lifelong Love Affair with Golf, cowritten by Golf Digest editor Dwayne Netland. Hope started bringing a golf club onstage with him when he entertained, an ever-present prop that became, along with his ski-slope nose, his most recognizable trademark. He even began carrying a golf club with him on his late-night walks—ostensibly for protection. As the tumult of the 1960s began to engulf him, he would need it.
V
LOSING HIS GRIP
From Patriot to Partisan in the Quagmire of Vietnam
Chapter 11
PATRIOT
“I’d rather be a hawk than a pigeon.”
By the early 1960s, Hope’s annual Christmas tours to entertain the troops overseas were starting to draw some criticism. A few wondered why they were still necessary in peacetime. Cynics suggested that Hope was simply using the military to create top-rated TV shows. Objections were raised in Congress about the tours’ cost to the military—which had to plan them, provide the facilities, and pay most of the travel and accommodations expenses. For his 1961 tour of Labrador and Greenland, the Air Force limited Hope’s troupe to just one plane to save money, barring any journalists or even Hope press agents from coming along.
Inside the military too some grumbled that Hope’s tours were taking too much money away from other, more mundane but equally important projects. “Hope did a valid service. But it was an expensive project, and it took a good deal of the budget,” said Dorothy Reilly, whose husband, Colonel Alvin E. Reilly, as head of entertainment and recreation for the Air Force, argued internally that the trips ought to be cut back. “That budget had to cover everything—libraries, R-and-R centers. There were so many ways that money could be used.” She couldn’t forget the sight of thousands of GIs in Korea in 1957, waiting on a hillside for hours in the subzero cold while Hope and his troupe were preparing and rehearsing. “I thought it was kind of a selfish use of the military,” said Reilly.
What Hope needed to stifle the criticism was a real shooting war. And in 1962 he found one—in South Vietnam, where government forces were fighting a stubborn Communist insurgency backed by North Vietnam. The United States had only about nine thousand military “advisers” in the country, and the war was still beneath the radar for most Americans. But Hope made a request to go there as part of a Far East tour in December 1962.
Pentagon officials initially approved the trip, but at the last minute reversed themselves and nixed it as too dangerous. Hope went ahead with his Far East tour, visiting US bases in the Philippines, Guam, Okinawa, Japan, and South Korea. But the war in Vietnam shadowed the trip. At Iwakuni Air Base in Japan, a marine who claimed he had “hitchhiked” from Vietnam gave Hope a scroll with hundreds of signatures from soldiers there, asking him to come entertain. Hope put in another call to the Pentagon, asking for last-minute permission to go, but again he was turned down.
Echoes of Vietnam also were unmistakable when Hope and his troupe visited that other divided Asian country, Korea. On the heavily guarded border between North and South, Hope saw a Christmas tree that had been planted by the United Nations and that the North Koreans were demanding be removed. “The commies just stared at us,” Hope said, narrating his NBC special on the tour. “They claimed it was a capitalist weapon. In a way they were right. . . . But that tree is still there. And while it stands, there’s hope for all.”
A year later, with the US military presence in Vietnam growing, Hope again asked to make a trip there at Christmas. Again he got an initial okay. But after the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963, in a military coup backed by the CIA, the Pentagon again called off the trip as too risky. Instead, Hope switched the itinerary to the eastern Mediterranean, where Greece and Turkey were locked in a dispute over the island of Cyprus.
Just before the trip, Hope had another flare-up of his eye problems. On the advice of his doctors, he went to San Francisco to see another specialist, Dr. Dohrmann Pischel, who had developed a new laser treatment for his condition. Hope received two treatments in early December at San Francisco’s Children’s Hospital and was forced to lie nearly immobile in a darkened room for days. During his hospital stay, he got so many get-well calls that two extra switchboard operators had to be added to handle them. President Johnson, barely two weeks in office following the assassination of President Kennedy, sent him a handwritten get-well note: “Christmas without Bob Hope is simply not Christmas. God be with you.”
Hope returned to Palm Springs to recuperate, and his Christmas troupe began the tour without him—flying to Turkey, with Jerry Colonna handling the emcee duties and teen-movie star Tuesday Weld as the top-billed guest. But Hope wouldn’t sta
y grounded. He joined the company in Ankara and continued with them to Greece, Libya, and Italy. In between shows he had to wear a pair of dark glasses with pinholes to protect his eye. Hope tired easily, and the trip was “one of the roughest we’ve ever had,” said a veteran of his tours. But Hope got stronger as the trip went on, and for the last show, against doctor’s orders, he did a strenuous dance routine with old-time vaudevillian John Bubbles. The special that resulted drew some of Hope’s best reviews yet. “Bob Hope is so established an institution that he necessarily runs the risk of being taken for granted; he shouldn’t be,” wrote Jack Gould in the New York Times. “His annual Christmas tour of overseas bases . . . remains one of the enduring demonstrations of the star’s special niche in contemporary Americana.”
Hope had no reason to believe the cheers wouldn’t continue the following year, when he finally got approval to go to South Vietnam. The intensifying war there still enjoyed strong support back home. After an attack on US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, Congress in August 1964 overwhelmingly passed a resolution authorizing President Johnson to take any action necessary to counter threats to US forces or allies in the region. The war was not a major issue in the 1964 presidential election, which Johnson won in a landslide over Republican Barry Goldwater. By the end of the year the official US presence in the country was still only around twenty-three thousand men. For Hope, South Vietnam was simply another global hot spot where American troops needed a lift.
Hope: Entertainer of the Century Page 40
