Hope’s 1969 Christmas tour was a departure in two ways. For the first time, it was a round-the-world trip, with stops in Berlin, Italy, and Turkey before the usual series of shows in Thailand and Vietnam. And for the first time, Hope and his troupe (which included perky pop singer Connie Stevens, Teresa Graves of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and the Golddiggers, the singing-dancing troupe from the Dean Martin Show) got an official presidential send-off, with a formal dinner and performance at the White House—a sign that President Nixon was actively embracing the Hope tours as part of his campaign to rally Americans behind his war policies.
At the dinner in the Blue Room, Stevens sat next to Nixon at one end of the table, while Hope sat at the other end beside the first lady (who asked Hope for his autograph). One of the Golddiggers caused a minor disturbance when she unfurled a napkin with a STOP THE WAR slogan on it. Undeterred, Hope and his entertainers did a run-through of the show for the Nixons and a VIP crowd in the East Room. Hope got laughs with jokes about administration figures such as Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Attorney General John Mitchell. “She’s the one who makes Agnew look like Calvin Coolidge,” Hope quipped. The next afternoon the troupe took off from Andrews Air Force Base, with Secretary of State William Rogers, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, and General Westmoreland on hand to wish them bon voyage. Hope, who woke up late and was complaining about his eye again, was so late getting there that Rogers had left.
At their first stop in Germany, Hope was joined onstage by sexy Austrian actress Romy Schneider—and in the audience by Dolores and their son Kelly, now in the Navy, who came over to meet him. Hope did a show aboard the aircraft carrier Saratoga in the Mediterranean, and another at Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey, where the WELCOME BOB HOPE banner was the same one they had used when Hope was there in 1963—the 3 changed to a 9. Then it was on to Thailand and Vietnam, where Hope returned to familiar spots such as Long Binh, Lai Khe, and Da Nang, but ventured farther north than ever before, to Camp Eagle near Hue, just seventy-five miles from the DMZ.
The real star of the 1969 tour was Neil Armstrong, the astronaut who had just walked on the moon. (NASA opposed sending any of the Apollo astronauts to Vietnam with Hope, but President Nixon insisted on it—and threatened to fire any NASA employee who objected.) Armstrong was a big hit with the troops, bantering onstage with Hope and answering questions from the crowd, a few of them pointed. “I want to know why the US is so interested in the moon and not the conflict here in Vietnam,” asked one serviceman. Armstrong replied evenly that the American system “works on many levels” to promote peace, and that “one of the advantages of the space activity is that it has promoted international understanding and enabled cooperative efforts between countries.”
In his closing remarks on the NBC special showcasing the tour, Hope once again made a plea for support of the war, trying to shift the focus from politics to the men doing the fighting: “One of the things that never changes is the unbelievably good spirit of our fighting men. Yes, in all this sorry business, it’s the guys who are making these sacrifices who complain the least.” Over shots of US soldiers with Vietnamese orphans, he continued, “The number of them who devote their free time, energy, and money to aiding Vietnamese families would surprise you. And don’t let that image get tarnished by the occasional combat-disturbed casualty who may freak out and create the horrible headline”—a reference to the My Lai massacre of South Vietnamese civilians, which had recently come to light. “These are the men who lay their lives on the line every day. And in return they ask for one thing: time to do a job. For us to be patient, to believe in them, so they can bring us an honorable peace.”
The 1969 tour, however, was most notorious for an incident that called into question just how in touch Hope really was with the troops he claimed to speak for. At his first show in Vietnam, before ten thousand men of the First Infantry at Lai Khe—so near the fighting, said Hope, “we had to give the Vietcong half the tickets”—Hope told the troops he had just been at the White House and assured them President Nixon had “a plan to end the war.” He was greeted with boos.
The extent of the booing was disputed. The first reports called it a “barrage of boos.” Hope, along with his publicist and later biographer Bill Faith, who accompanied him on the tour, described it as only a “smattering.” Richard Boyle, a war correspondent for Overseas Weekly, recounted a more threatening scene in an interview with Rolling Stone a few years later (though he recalled it as taking place at Long Binh, not Lai Khe): “After about fifteen minutes of Hope’s show, he was being drowned out by the boos. When the TV cameras panned the crowd, the GIs were standing up and giving the finger and making power salutes. Then the troops started throwing things and tried to rush the stage. They brought out about fifty-four MPs to guard the stage, and it was getting very menacing . . . pretty close to a riot. Hope, who was visibly shaken, had to stop the show and leave.”
Connie Stevens, who was there, confirmed that the booing was loud enough to drive Hope from the stage—and that he turned to her in distress. “I happened to be walking by the stage,” she said. “And he said, ‘Connie, come here,’ and he threw me out there.” She wrestled with the unruly crowd for a few minutes and only managed to settle them down when she began singing “Silent Night.” Yet the boos, she claimed, were a reaction not to Hope, but to his invocation of Nixon and his supposed plan for ending the war: “They weren’t booing Bob. They were booing the idea that there was any help coming. The war had gone on too long. They were frustrated at what he was saying. They didn’t want to hear it.” Yet the outburst clearly took Hope by surprise. “It threw Bob, because I don’t think he had ever experienced anything like that,” said Stevens. “And I think that was a rude awakening for him.”
Stevens, whose younger brother was serving in Vietnam, never spoke with Hope about the incident afterward. But she was already having her own doubts about the war. She was disturbed at a scene of jubilation she witnessed at one camp when some captured Vietcong soldiers were brought in. When she went to see the commotion, she found a couple of frightened kids of fourteen or fifteen being held up as trophies. “They were severely wounded and they were shaking and they were babies,” she recalled. “I said, ‘You guys, stop this, turn the cameras off.’ I just didn’t like it. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, is this what this war is about?’ I couldn’t go along with that.” Like Jill St. John after Hope’s 1964 tour, she tried voicing her opinions at a press conference. “I was asked not to attend any more press conferences, right then and there.”
When the booing incident was reported, Hope was infuriated. “A few kids, about five, went ‘Boo!,’ which they will do, you know?” he said. “If you say, ‘Second Lieutenant,’ they go ‘Boo!’ ” Yet in an account of the episode in his 1974 memoir The Last Christmas Show, Hope conceded that he had problems with the crowd that day at Lai Khe, calling it “the coldest, most unresponsive audience my show had ever played to.” He found out later that many of the soldiers “were in a state of shock” because they had come to the show directly after a fierce morning of fighting that had resulted in many casualties. “It had been a wipeout day for a lot of them,” he said. “They had lost a lot of friends, and they had been rushed in from a firefight to catch my show. After a morning like that, who could expect them to be in a mood for laughing it up at my jokes?”
Whether overblown or not, the booing incident exposed an undercurrent of frustration among at least a portion of the servicemen Hope entertained. Some of their gripes were trivial: complaints about being shunted to the back rows, for example, so that injured soldiers could be placed up front for the cameras. Some charged that entire units were ordered to attend Hope’s shows, whether they wanted to or not, to ensure huge crowds for TV. Most of the soldiers looked forward to Hope’s appearances; they appreciated the gags, the girls, and the break from their grinding routine. Others were more cynical. “Our response to him came out of fear and loneliness—convicts in a prison wou
ld have done the same thing,” said Ron Kovic, the author of Born on the Fourth of July, who served two tours of duty in Vietnam before suffering injuries that left him a paraplegic. “I remember not wanting to go to the show, and the men who did go came back very cynical. People didn’t laugh at his jokes; the war wasn’t funny anymore, and a hundred Bob Hopes wouldn’t have made any difference.”
Some even questioned Hope’s patriotic motives. As far back as the 1950s there were suggestions that Hope’s military tours were big moneymakers for him. To be sure, the TV shows were produced and owned by Hope’s company, a profit-making enterprise. But Hope always insisted that his Vietnam shows actually lost money. Although the military picked up the costs of travel and accommodations, Hope Enterprises still paid the sizable talent and production costs, which were much higher than for a typical studio show. According to figures supplied by Hope Enterprises to NBC in 1971, Hope’s company made a profit of $165,000 on its five one-hour variety specials for the 1970–71 season. His one ninety-minute Christmas special from Vietnam, however, showed a loss of $274,000. Hope, of course, earned his own fee for these shows (around $200,000 per show during the Vietnam years), and the trips had incalculable public-relations value for him. Yet Bob Hope had easier ways to make money than by spending two grueling weeks a year traveling through military camps in a war zone.
What’s more, while the shows clearly served Hope’s purposes, they also were serving the needs of a huge audience back home. For supporters of the war, Hope’s specials were a patriotic booster shot; for opponents, a reminder of the vast waste of men and resources wrought by the war; for everyone, a communal wallow in the quagmire that was tearing the nation apart. The ninety-minute NBC special edited from his 1969 Christmas tour, which aired on January 15, 1970, drew an almost inconceivable 46.6 rating—meaning that 46.6 percent of all TV homes in the country were tuned in to Hope on that Thursday night. It was the largest audience for any entertainment show in television history.
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A peculiar irony of the Vietnam years was that, even as Hope became an increasingly partisan and controversial figure, his TV popularity was never greater. Chrysler ended his weekly dramatic anthology series in 1967 after four seasons, but the company remained the sponsor of his comedy specials, which continued to draw spectacular ratings. Maybe it was the “silent majority” speaking, or simply the escape that Hope’s shows provided from the stressful, politically explosive times. During the 1966–67 season Hope’s specials averaged an impressive 29.3 Nielsen rating—higher than TV’s top-rated weekly series, Bonanza. For the 1969–70 season, his average rating soared to a phenomenal 32.3—the highest of Hope’s career.
It didn’t seem to matter that the shows were growing more rote and predictable, with their old-fashioned variety format, hokey sketches, and cue-carded patter between Hope and his guests. The monologues were still topical, and occasionally funny, but there were an awful lot of potted jokes about Jackie Gleason’s weight and Dean Martin’s drinking and Zsa Zsa’s husbands. Hope’s musical guests would sometimes include a Smokey Robinson or Ray Charles, but mostly he stuck with middle-of-the-roaders such as Tom Jones, Eydie Gormé, and Andy Williams. He did one show paying tribute to old-time vaudeville, with guests George Burns and Lucille Ball; in another he reprised his original stage role in Roberta, in a live performance taped at the Bob Hope Theater at SMU. (With Hope playing the same role that he had originated thirty-five years earlier, it was a stodgy relic—and Hope’s lowest-rated show of the season.) Sometimes the comedy material was literally recycled: in one February 1971 sketch, Hope played a man being roped into marriage by his fiancée, with Petula Clark taking the role that Rosemary Clooney had played in the virtually identical sketch back in 1954.
His jokes about the counterculture were sounding increasingly smug and out of touch. “Hey, did you read about that rock festival in upstate New York that was attended by four hundred thousand hippies?” he said in his 1969 season opener, a month after Woodstock. “It was held in a cow pasture. I can’t think of a better place for it. Four hundred thousand hippies. Since the dawn of man that’s the most dandruff that was ever in one place.” He poked fun at the feminist movement in an October 1970 special, imagining what would happen if women took over the country. It was not a pretty sight. Hope meets a new female network chief, played by Nanette Fabray, who dusts the furniture during their meeting, and the Indianapolis 500 is canceled because “all thirty-nine women drivers crashed into the pace car.” The show prompted an onslaught of angry mail. “I am not part of ‘women’s lib,’ ” said one letter writer, “but I have never felt so insulted nor so infuriated.”
The critics were getting snippier too. A review in the Hollywood Reporter called his March 1970 special “one of those curiously lackadaisical Hope efforts of late, in which he seems to be living a cruel fantasy that he’s Dean Martin.” Another Reporter critic, reviewing Hope’s special the following month, said it looked as if “everyone has hurriedly gotten together to do the show between holes at Lakeside.” Jimmy Saphier, Hope’s agent, sent both reviews over to the boss, with a note: “They are so prejudiced and vicious and unfair that there may be something more here than meets the eye. I don’t know Tichi Wilkerson Miles [the Reporter’s editor], but if you know somebody who knows her well, she should be spoken to.” No telling if she was, but she did get some letters in Hope’s defense. “This kind of bitchy, ill-tempered effluvium hardly qualifies as a review,” one reader wrote of another Reporter attack on Hope’s poor material. “Anyone who knows anything at all about Mr. Hope’s career knows that his writers have helped make him one of the wealthiest men in all of show business.” The author, using a pseudonym, was Charlie Lee, one of Hope’s writers.
His movies were no better: increasingly tired farces, with Hope looking more disengaged than ever, and doing little business at the box office. In the vapid, sitcom-like Eight on the Lam, released in 1967, he plays a single father running from the law with his seven kids and housekeeper Phyllis Diller. In 1968’s The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell, he’s an army sergeant trying to get beer and girls for his men on a South Pacific island during World War II—a dated service comedy that was Frank Tashlin’s last film. Hope’s 1969 film How to Commit Marriage at least tried to look a little more with it. Hope and Jane Wyman play a middle-aged couple who decide to divorce, but hold off so as not to set a bad example for their newly engaged daughter. The twist is that the daughter’s fiancé is a straitlaced classical pianist who is rebelling against his father, a pot-smoking, free-love-spouting rock-music producer, played by Jackie Gleason. The film’s satire of the peace-and-love generation was hackneyed even then (a new-age guru touting “peace through protein”; rock groups with funny names like the Five Commandments and the Post-Nasal Drips), but the movie did marginally better at the box office, and Gleason’s energy at least forced Hope to pay more attention.
During the summer of 1970, Hope again found himself in the center of the Vietnam fray. Following another wave of campus protests in response to the US invasion of Cambodia in May—and the killing of four students at Kent State University by members of the Ohio National Guard—backers of President Nixon organized a daylong series of patriotic events across the country on July 4, dubbed Honor America Day. Though billed as a nonpartisan celebration of America, the event was another effort to blunt the antiwar protests, orchestrated behind the scenes by the White House.
Hope agreed to cochair the event along with the Reverend Billy Graham, and to host an entertainment gala on the Capitol Mall in the evening. “This is one day we’re not trying to sell any political message,” Hope insisted at a press conference. But opponents such as radical activist Rennie Davis charged that the event was “designed to show a phony national consensus for Richard Nixon’s foreign and domestic policies.” In response the organizers recruited some prominent Democrats to endorse the event, among them Senators George McGovern and Edmund Muskie. But Honor America Day became anothe
r lightning rod for antiadministration protests.
The festivities began on the morning of July 4 with an interfaith religious service and an address by Graham on the Capitol Mall. Demonstrators trying to disrupt the event started early as well, with a band of a thousand Yippies staging a “pot smoke-in” and bathing nude in the Reflecting Pool. When Kate Smith began to sing “God Bless America,” antiwar chants nearly drowned her out. Protesters and police clashed throughout the day, with at least thirty-four people arrested and twenty policemen injured. When Hope was driven to the site in the afternoon, for a run-through of the evening’s show with bandleader Les Brown, a group of hippies stood by hollering at him. Hope invited them to the show.
Some 350,000 people, mostly families with no interest in demonstrating on one side or the other, crowded onto the Mall in the evening for Hope’s show. “What a gathering,” Hope said when he came onstage. “Nixon took one look at the crowd and said, ‘My God, what has Agnew done now?’ ” The entertainers on the bill were mostly old-timers, known conservatives, or people who owed Hope favors—among them Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Dinah Shore, Glen Campbell, Pat Boone, and Connie Stevens. Hope was distracted by sporadic disturbances throughout the show. When it was over, demonstrators broke through a police cordon and pounded on the trunk of the Chrysler limousine that was driving him back to safety. Hope was the emcee for what was looking more and more like a national nervous breakdown.
Even once-friendly venues were becoming trouble spots for Hope. The Oscar ceremony in April 1970 was a microcosm of the nation’s cultural divide: new-generation films such as Easy Rider and the X-rated Midnight Cowboy were competing for awards, while John Wayne, nominated for True Grit, was greeted at the theater by a picket sign reading JOHN WAYNE IS A RACIST. “This is not an Academy Awards, ladies and gentlemen; it’s a freak-out,” said Hope, one of sixteen “friends of Oscar” who shared hosting duties that year. A Time magazine reporter watched the ceremony at an Oscar party at the home of producer Don Mitchell and writer Gwen Davis, attended by a gaggle of Hollywood insiders. The mostly liberal crowd booed when Wayne won for Best Actor. And when Hope closed the show with a plea for the nation to come together (“Perhaps a time will come when all the fighting will be for a place in line outside the theater”), Shirley MacLaine yelled at the TV screen, “Oh, shut up, Bob Hope.”
Hope: Entertainer of the Century Page 44
