Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  Hope too saw himself as a spirit lifter, not just for the troops in the field but also for Americans back home. At the close of his special, he made an emotional plea for support of the war, trying to recapture the patriotic spirit of his World War II appeals, even as he hinted at the divisions that were starting to grip the country. “You hear a few people say, ‘Get out of Vietnam.’ Here’s some of our kids who are getting out the hard way,” he intoned, over shots of the wounded men he had visited in military hospitals. He went on:

  In their everyday job of fighting this treacherous war, they know there’s no alternative. They know that in this shrinking world, the perimeter of war is boundless. They know that if they backed off from this fight, it would leave all of Asia like a big cafeteria for the Communists to pick up a country at a time. There are no reservations in their dedication. Our fighting men have confidence in the decisions of their leaders. It’s hard for them to hear the rumblings of peace over the gunfire, but when peace comes, they’ll welcome it.

  Patriotic rhetoric and foxhole humor, however, couldn’t hide the grim realities of this new kind of war. While Hope was in Vietnam, Bing Crosby sent him a letter, through an old friend named Gordon J. Lippman, a colonel who was serving with the First Infantry at Lai Khe. Enclosed was a photo of Bing swinging a golf club and a joking message: “Dear Bob, don’t you wish you had a finish like this? And a waistline?” Bing asked Lippman to pass along the letter when Hope came through. The letter arrived safely, but before Lippman could deliver it, he was cut down by a sniper’s bullet and died thirty minutes later in the camp’s hospital tent.

  The letter was delivered to Hope later in Toluca Lake, after he had returned home.

  • • •

  Hope’s Christmas tours, and the TV shows that resulted from them, were enormous undertakings. After the itinerary was set in the fall—by the Defense Department, in consultation with the USO and Hope’s people—two Hope advance men, associate producer Silvio Caranchini and soundman John Pawlek, would travel to scout the locations, set up production facilities, and gather local gossip and other tidbits for the writers to use in creating Hope’s monologues. For the entertainers and the crew, the trips meant two weeks of rough accommodations, sporadic sleep, and holidays away from the family. Jack Shea, who directed most of Hope’s Christmas shows in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reluctantly told Hope after the 1964 trip to Vietnam that he could do no more of them; he needed to stay home with his family at Christmas. Hope was taken aback, then wistfully sympathetic. “I’m past that,” he said. Mort Lachman, Hope’s most trusted writer, took on the added duties of directing the Vietnam specials after that.

  Each trip produced more than 150,000 feet of film, which had to be boiled down to around 8,000 feet for the ninety-minute special that would typically air on NBC in mid-January. That meant a two-or three-week siege of round-the-clock work, to wrestle the massive amount of material into shape. “On January first I would take a thirty-day leave of absence from NBC to edit the show,” said film editor Art Schneider, who worked on many of them. “There was an enormous amount of film. It would be shipped to us, and we’d spend two twelve-hour days looking at every single foot of film. Bob would be there, Mort [Lachman], Sil [Caranchini], eight editors, and eight assistants. We used to edit at Universal. They would have cots, beds for us to lie down and sleep. I don’t think we even left for several days at a time. They’d bring in all the food we wanted, anything we wanted to keep us happy. Money was not spared. There was a big placard in the editing room, white letters on a black background: ‘We traveled thirty thousand miles to get these laughs. Don’t cut ’em.’ ”

  The Hope Christmas specials are irreplaceable documents of the Vietnam era. The sight of Hope entertaining vast oceans of men brought home more vividly than anything on the evening news the enormity of America’s commitment in Vietnam. The TV specials were patriotic, corny, inspiring, self-serving—and unmissable. The show edited from Hope’s 1965 Vietnam tour, which aired on January 19, 1966, drew an Arbitron rating of 35.2, with a whopping 56 share of the viewing audience—the biggest audience for any TV show of the season, and the most watched Bob Hope show ever. A week after it aired, Senator Stuart Symington paid tribute in the Congressional Record to Hope, whom he had recruited for his first Christmas trip, to Berlin back in 1948: “Because of his continued and patriotic unselfishness over the Christmas holidays for a number of years, and the happiness he has brought to millions of people in this country and all over the world, Bob Hope could well be the most popular man on earth.”

  It was hard to argue. He was certainly popular at the White House. On March 31, 1966, Hope was honored at a black-tie dinner at the Washington Hilton to commemorate the USO’s twenty-fifth anniversary. President Johnson made a surprise appearance, presenting Hope with a plaque and telling him that it was nice to honor a “frequent visitor to Vietnam who has never been asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee”—a reference to the televised hearings being conducted by Senator William Fulbright, one of the war’s chief critics. When Hope launched into his prepared jokes about LBJ and his battles with Congress (“It’s nice to be here in Washington—or as the Republicans call it, Camp Runamuck”), the president, sitting on the dais, played a perfect straight man, glowering at Hope after each wisecrack. “I have to do it, sir,” Hope said in mock dismay. “It’s on the paper.”

  The antiwar protests disturbed Hope. He found it unthinkable that US troops fighting a tough war would not get unqualified support back home, and he became bolder in speaking out. He taped a half-hour TV program for Affirmation: Vietnam, a series of patriotic events in support of the war spearheaded by students at Atlanta’s Emory University. He penned (with the help of his writers) an article for Family Weekly, the Sunday supplement for the conservative Hearst newspapers, lambasting the peace protesters: “Can you imagine returning from a combat patrol in a steaming, disease-infected jungle, tired, hungry, scared and sick, and reading that people in America are demonstrating against your being there? That people in America are burning their draft cards to show their opposition and that some of them are actually rooting for your defeat?”

  In June he did the usual round of publicity for his new movie, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! It was perhaps his most wretched vehicle yet, a slapstick sex farce with Hope as a married real estate broker who gets mixed up with a Hollywood sex kitten (Elke Sommer) hiding out from the press. But interviewers seemed less interested in the movie than in grilling him on Vietnam. Asked his opinion of the growing protest movement, Hope sounded a more strident note. “One group is fighting for their country and one group is fighting against it,” he told the New York Post. “They’re giving aid and comfort to the enemy. You’d call these same people traitors if we declared war.” He told Peter Bart of the New York Times that he was too “charged up” about the antiwar protests to stay silent: “People seem to forget we’re at war.”

  Hope never had serious political aspirations, but some were beginning to have them for him. In 1963 Jack Warner had written Hope a letter urging him to run for the US Senate from California in 1964. “They call you a comedian, but that is not my definition,” Warner wrote. “My definition of you is that you are a great American with a big heart. You have the feeling of the human race, which is needed in Washington for the good of our country and the world.” (Hope declined, but his old friend and costar from the Broadway show Roberta, George Murphy, ran for the seat and won.) In May 1966 a Seattle radio station conducted a poll asking listeners if they would vote for Bob Hope for president. More than 62 percent said yes. Around this time, Hope related, “a couple of the Washington boys” came out to see him in Palm Springs and urged him to consider running for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968. Hope had to remind them that he was born in England and thus, according to the Constitution, not even eligible.

  But what made him attractive to some as a political candidate was starting to cause problems for Hope the e
ntertainer. As a comedian, he had always kept himself above politics, never taking sides, aiming his barbs at all. Now his open support for the war was making him a polarizing figure. Though he continued to draw big crowds on more conservative college campuses such as North Carolina State and the University of Florida, only 60 percent of the seats were filled for his appearance at the Yale Bowl in July 1966. When he began booking his 1966 Christmas tour, some stars turned him down because of their reservations about the war. The new Miss World, Reita Faria of India, accepted an invitation, but nearly backed out after protests in her country and a request from the Indian government that she pass up the trip because of its official opposition to the war.

  Hope managed to recruit Joey Heatherton and Anita Bryant, two returnees from 1965, for the 1966 tour, along with singer Vic Damone. Without a Hollywood sex symbol on hand, Hope went in another direction—inviting Phyllis Diller, the fright-haired comedienne whom he had first seen at a Washington nightclub in the late fifties and had cast in Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! Diller, who became a Hope favorite, had trouble onstage at first, but with the help of Hope’s writers, she developed a self-mocking routine with Hope that went over well. (Phyllis: “All the other girls got bouquets.” Bob: “What’d they give you?” Phyllis: “A machete and a map of the jungle.”) “He played the straight man, I got all the lines,” said Diller. “Very, very generous. That got me through the tour.” Hope just missed getting another big name for the trip: Lynda Bird Johnson, the president’s daughter, who called from the White House in November and asked if she could join the tour. LBJ had apparently given his assent, but General Westmoreland vetoed the idea, saying that ensuring her security would be too difficult.

  One familiar face was missing from the 1966 tour. Jerry Colonna, Hope’s favorite second banana and his compatriot on every Christmas tour since 1948, suffered a major stroke in August, which left him paralyzed on his left side and unable to go. Colonna was too incapacitated to work much after that—though Hope, loyal to the man who had served him so well comedically for nearly three decades, continued to give him small parts on his TV specials (always positioned to hide his paralyzed side) and sent regular “royalty” checks to help him and his wife, Flo, until Jerry’s death in 1986.

  The 1966 tour also turned into a rare family Christmas for the Hopes. Dolores, who hadn’t accompanied Bob on a Christmas tour since 1959, invited herself along this time, bringing their two college-age kids, Kelly and Nora. Kelly worked on the production, helping out assistant stage manager Clay Daniel, and Nora, the bubbly member of the brood, got up onstage at one show and did the Watusi. Hope introduced Dolores at Takhli Air Base in Thailand and asked her to sing “White Christmas.” When she pleaded that she didn’t know all the lyrics, Bob fed them to her. “She was charming and lovely,” wrote Mort Lachman in his journal of the tour, “and when she changed the tempo in the second chorus and wound up with the words ‘And may all your Christmases be at home,’ the boys cheered and cheered and waved and whistled.”

  Hope didn’t give his wife quite as good a review. “The last thing those guys needed was sentiment,” he said years later. “Dolores became their mother. What they needed was the Golddiggers and Raquel.” Hope’s treatment of Dolores was often the most callous when she tried to share the spotlight with him onstage—a mixture of hardheaded showbiz calculation and, perhaps, some resentment that she was putting a damper on his freewheeling life on the road. Dolores’s number was omitted from the NBC special on the tour, and she didn’t join Bob again in Vietnam until his last trip there, in 1972.

  In Bangkok, Hope and his troupe were invited to the king’s palace for dinner with the royal family, for the third year in a row. The king, who played the saxophone, had learned “Thanks for the Memory” in Hope’s honor. For security reasons, the troupe spent only one night in Saigon, on Christmas Eve; the rest of the time they were based at the Erawan Hotel in Bangkok, shuttling back and forth for their shows in Vietnam. The heat, always oppressive, was especially brutal that year. Barney McNulty fainted at one show, and Lachman had to handle the cue cards. At another, Nora Hope acted as a runner, carrying ice-cold towels to the band members, so they wouldn’t pass out from heat prostration. (Dolores, Kelly, and Nora left when the conditions got too difficult, finishing out the tour in the Philippines.) The crowds were bigger than ever: ten thousand at Tan Son Nhut, twelve thousand at Di-An, fifteen thousand at Qui Nhon. Flying into soggy Da Nang, Lachman was awestruck: “We saw the show site from the air, and then we saw the hills covered and covered with men—all the way up to Marble Mountain. We’ve never seen such a sight. In the rain—in their hooded ponchos, or bareheaded but coated—in the mud—there were thousands and thousands and thousands of them. Would you believe 20,000? They looked like more.”

  Hope said he was happy to be back in Vietnam, wearing “my Sunday-get-shot-at clothes.” Again, he took note of the political storm that was brewing over the war: “If you don’t get better ratings, this whole war may be canceled.” He told the troops he brought them good news from back home: “The country is behind you, fifty percent.” Dressed in tropical shirts and pants hiked up high on his waist, swinging his now ubiquitous golf club, Hope looked more and more like a middle-aged emissary from the Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce. In World War II he had been one of the boys. Now he was one of their father’s friends.

  In his TV special chronicling the tour, Hope seemed more intent than ever on rousing the nation’s patriotic spirit and making a case for the war. Hope does an on-camera interview with Marines general Lew Walt, who says Vietnam is “a war we must win,” to free the people of South Vietnam, who “have been enslaved by the Communist forces that have come into the country.” Billy Graham, who crossed paths with Hope on the trip, appears in Da Nang to assure the troops, “Millions of Americans are very proud of what you fellas are doing.” Anita Bryant sings a lugubrious version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (Les Brown was tearing his hair out at her slow, ponderous tempos). “Nobody wanted this war, but we can’t wish it away,” Hope says in closing. “The boys fighting in Vietnam want peace as much as we do, and they’re fighting to get it.”

  Some who were close to him said it was his 1966 Vietnam trip that hardened Hope’s views on the war. He was taken to a Vietnamese village to witness the military’s “pacification” program—the effort to win the allegiance of the people by helping local villages become self-sustaining—and came back enthusiastic. “This is what has to win it,” he raved. “Wonderful what they’re doing!” He had dinner with General Westmoreland in Saigon and met with other top generals, absorbing their view that the war needed to be pursued more aggressively. “Bob and Westy would sit up talking a lot that trip,” said General Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, Hope’s friend and golfing buddy, who was now head of the USO. “They’d talk about the war, what was happening at home, what it all meant. And this reinforced what Bob was seeing in hospitals. He was terribly torn up by those wards, trying to be gay with a guy whose guts are coming out. Hope put on a bold front, but when he got in the back room with his drink—vodka and orange juice—he’d ask why we subject our boys to this, to get killed, to get maimed, for what—to fight and not to win?”

  When he came home, Hope seemed charged up by the experience, more outspoken than before. “Everybody I talked to there wants to know why they can’t go in and finish it,” he told Hal Humphrey of the Los Angeles Times, “and don’t let anybody kid you about why we’re there. If we weren’t, those commies would have the whole thing, and it wouldn’t be long until we were looking at them off the coast of Santa Monica.” Asked at a press conference if he was a hawk on the war, Hope—who had resisted the term until then—replied, “I’m afraid I am. But I’d rather be a hawk than a pigeon.”

  Hope’s position on the war was simplistic, emotional, and unsurprising. He had become a national hero during World War II and, like many members of his generation, could not conceive that his country would get into a war it c
ouldn’t, or shouldn’t, pursue to victory. He fully subscribed to the Cold War dogma that stopping Communism in Vietnam was essential to preventing the rest of the dominoes from falling in Southeast Asia. Most of all, he backed his nation’s leaders. One of the strongest arguments in favor of the war, in Hope’s view, was that it had been supported by every president since Eisenhower. “When you get guys like Eisenhower and his staff,” he said, “Kennedy and his staff, Johnson and his staff, all of whom thought it was important enough to save this little nation from Communism or enslavement, then you have to think maybe they know something.”

  “He was very supportive of the American government, the president, no matter who it was,” said Tony Coelho, the future Democratic congressman from California, who lived with the Hopes for nine months in 1964 and 1965. “That was true of a lot of people of his generation. I don’t think it was so much naïve as patriotic. He supported the troops. He’d come back from those Christmas trips and he was emotionally worn, torn, elated—he was part of their effort. So I think it was hard for him to stand back and critique or question. He became part of it.”

  Obviously reflecting the views of the generals he talked to, Hope argued that the war could have been won quickly if only the military had not been hamstrung by politicians. “If Kennedy had lived, I guarantee that the war would have been over in four weeks,” he said in 1977. Yet he never talked about the politics of the war with the entertainers he brought with him to Vietnam—and rarely, in any sustained way, with friends and family back home. “It was difficult for him to really give voice to the emotions that were going on,” said his daughter Linda. “He didn’t really talk much about the trips when he got back. He’d just say, ‘It was something else’ or ‘It was very moving.’ He said, ‘People don’t have any idea what goes on. And I see it.’ ”