Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  Hope’s effort was private, done in secret and without official government sanction (though, with a US ambassador and an Air Force plane involved, it clearly had White House approval). But when he returned to Bangkok, the press had gotten wind of it, and Hope’s meeting with the North Vietnamese became worldwide news. The White House, while not endorsing Hope’s mission, said it “deeply appreciated” any gesture on behalf of the POWs. Hope’s effort, however, came to naught. Before leaving Vietnam, he got word that his application for a visa to North Vietnam had been denied. “I’d known all along that my chances were slim,” Hope wrote later, “but it was depressing just the same. I couldn’t help feeling that all the talk in the press might have had something to do with Hanoi’s negative reaction.”

  Hope made only glancing reference to the POW mission in his January special. As US forces were being withdrawn from Vietnam—only about one hundred thousand were still there, down from a peak of half a million—Hope found his audiences more relaxed and ready to laugh. “Actually, you guys are lucky,” he said. “You know you’re going to get home. But what hope is there for our men at the Paris peace talks?” In his closing remarks, Hope said the empty seats, in camps where he had once entertained tens of thousands, were a heartening sign: “Because every empty seat meant a guy who’d returned home, a GI who’d gone back to the world.” And then a final sign-off, for what he expected would be his last trip to Vietnam:

  All any of us wanted to do was make the burden lighter for those who are making the sacrifices. Maybe we don’t all demonstrate or join parades, but we’re all antiwar. Especially these guys right up close to it, the guys doing the miserable business and signing the receipts for it. And when people ask me is this our last trip, I can only hope that this is our last war.

  Hope’s Vietnam special of January 1972 was not the ratings blockbuster it had been the two previous years—only second in the ratings for the week, behind the new hit comedy All in the Family. Hope blamed it on his time slot—later than usual, at 9:30 p.m., eastern time. “I know one thing—I’d never put a show this important and with this work behind it on at that late hour,” he wrote Jimmy Saphier. “I was very apprehensive about it before it was shown and certainly they’ll never get me again in that spot.” But the ratings slide was another sign that Americans were growing tired of Hope’s war.

  • • •

  Nixon and Hope, two men under siege because of the war, grew closer as the debate over Vietnam grew ever more rancorous. Hope had dinner at the White House and at Nixon’s retreat in San Clemente several times. They played golf together—Nixon once landed in a helicopter in Hope’s backyard in Toluca Lake so he could play a round at Lakeside—and would see each other at Walter Annenberg’s annual New Year’s Eve party in Rancho Mirage. They corresponded frequently, Nixon congratulating Hope for various awards, sending condolences on the death of his brother Ivor, praising him for his Vietnam specials. The president showed up to support Hope at the grand opening of the Eisenhower Medical Center, for which Dolores had led the fund-raising campaign. When presidential assistant Dwight Chapin called two months before the opening to warn Hope that Nixon’s schedule might prevent him from attending, Hope bristled. “It was, to say the least, an awkward phone call,” Chapin related in a memo to his boss, H. R. Haldeman. “He indicated that of course if the President had to cancel, he would understand and they would do the best they could. However, he stressed that Mamie is expecting the President to come and everything is being geared around a Presidential appearance. . . . The result is—Hope has been warned, yet he still very much wants the President to try to work it out so he can be there.” Nixon wound up making the event—along with Governor Reagan, Frank Sinatra, and most of the area’s philanthropic and social mavens. Afterward, Nixon and Hope played golf together at the Eldorado Country Club, where Ike had been a regular.

  Nixon had good reason to accommodate Hope. With the 1972 election approaching, the president was more intent than ever on using Hope to help make his case to the nation on Vietnam. On April 20, 1972, after Nixon had stepped up the bombing of North Vietnam in response to a major enemy offensive, Hope paid another visit to the White House. Nixon gave him a putter inscribed with the presidential seal and then brought him into the Oval Office for a chat.

  “Sit down, let me tell you about the situation,” Nixon began, in a conversation recorded on the White House tapes. Explaining the reasoning behind his response to the North Vietnamese offensive, Nixon said the enemy had calculated that “if they threw everything in, that I would not react,” but were not prepared for the major escalation in bombing he ordered—from three hundred to nine hundred sorties a day. “If, after such a massive invasion, we just did tit for tat, it’s no message. So what we are saying is, look here, if you’re gonna play this kind of a game, we are going to hit you and more is to come.”

  Hope jumped in eagerly: “This is five years too late, this bombing! How can you not? It’s like letting a guy who has a gun, let the fellow keep bringing ammunition, to fire at your house. It’s stupid.” He told Nixon of a conversation he had had with the late president Eisenhower four years earlier, in the backyard of Ike’s Palm Desert home. “I said, ‘If you were president today, what would you do?’ And he said, ‘I would invade North Vietnam and not be against using nuclear weapons.’ ”

  “The point is, there is no choice,” Nixon continued. “The United States cannot lose in Vietnam. We can’t lose fifty thousand Americans and lose this war. This is where our Democratic critics are just dead wrong.”

  “And what about the future? What about Southeast Asia? The world?”

  “What about the Mideast?” Nixon said. “Your Jewish friends—you see a lot of those people. Let me tell you, if a Russian-supported invasion of South Vietnam by [North Vietnam] succeeds against the United States, what the hell do you think the Russians are going to do in the Mideast? They will arm those missiles over there, and man them with Russians in the UAR, and Israel is finished.”

  “Oh, God,” said Hope.

  Nixon bragged about his prowess as a poker player: “I can hardly remember a time when I was called that I didn’t have the cards. We’ve got the cards now. And if they call us, and if these bastards continue to go down there and they do not come to the conference table and really negotiate, about everything including prisoners, we’re going to continue to bomb the hell out of ’em, until we get an end. People say you lose the election if you do it, and impeachment. I don’t give a damn. The main thing is, it’s more important to save the country than to win an election.”

  The conversation wandered to Hope’s relations with the press and Nixon’s golf game. But the president hammered home his point one more time as he ushered Hope out the door: “And about Vietnam, just remember—we’re gonna do what’s right for this damn country, the hell with the election. You’re the war hero.”

  Hope was a good messenger. He spoke out for Nixon’s policies in his stage shows, at awards dinners, and in TV talk-show appearances. On October 26, 1972, a few days before the election, Nixon wrote Hope to thank him for the supportive comments he had made in accepting the Union League’s Gold Medal Award in Philadelphia, and in an appearance on the Merv Griffin Show: “Your friendship and support are always welcome, but especially so during these last few days before November 7, and I just wanted you to know I am proud to have Bob Hope in my corner!”

  The US withdrawal from Vietnam was continuing, even as the Paris peace talks dragged on without an agreement. Few entertainers were going there anymore. By mid-1972 the USO had only three clubs left open in South Vietnam, down from twelve at the war’s height. But Hope had to see it through to the bitter end. In December 1972 he made one more trip to Vietnam, announcing in advance that it would be his last.

  He lined up one big-name guest star: Redd Foxx, the former nightclub comic now starring in the hit NBC sitcom Sanford and Son. Known for his raunchy club material, Foxx ignored Hope’s pleas to keep his material c
lean and did a stand-up act so rough it couldn’t be used on the air. Lola Falana was back for a second year, along with singer Fran Jeffries, Los Angeles Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel, and a selection of runners-up from the Miss America, Miss World, and Miss Universe pageants, dubbed the American Beauties.

  Dolores also came along for the last Vietnam tour—meeting the troupe in Bangkok, so that Bob could “coax” her onstage from the audience for a song. The troupe nicknamed her Hambone, and Hope didn’t do her any favors onstage either. While she sang “But Beautiful,” he stood in the background behind her, idly swinging a golf club, in full view of the camera. Dolores’s number is included in a transcript of his NBC special reprinted in Hope’s Vietnam memoir The Last Christmas Show. But her song was cut from the final broadcast—as Dolores’s numbers nearly always were when she joined Bob on his overseas tours. There was only one star in this family.

  The tour began at Camp Shemya in the Aleutian Islands and included stops in Japan, South Korea, and the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, with just one show in Vietnam, at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. “We figured it would be all over when we got here this time,” Hope told the crowd. “But no luck. Not only did they fail to reach agreement in Paris, but now they’re fighting over the hotel bill.” In fact, a breakdown in talks had prompted Nixon to launch another major round of bombing just after Hope left on his tour. At Utapau, a B-52 air base in Thailand where Hope had often entertained, many of the flyers were missing because they were on missions over North Vietnam. At least fifteen aircraft from the base were lost.

  Hope had an uncharacteristic diplomatic lapse on his last trip to Thailand, when he offended the locals by making jokes about the country’s food, crowded living conditions, and no-holds-barred politics (which he compared to Thai kickboxing). After newspaper editorials claimed that he had insulted the country, the American embassy had to do some fast damage control, trotting out Hope for a Christmas Eve press conference in which he said he meant no offense.

  But overall, Hope got a warm reception. “Back in the States, a negative press was writing that Hope was booed by the troops because he had spoken out in favor of our military presence. In fact, he was cheered wildly wherever he went,” recalled Ray Siller, a writer who accompanied Hope on the tour. Siller was impressed with Hope’s focus and stamina, even in the last days of his last Vietnam tour. On the way back home, Hope ordered a last-minute stop on Wake Island, and Siller had to gin up a monologue for him on the plane. With no time to put the jokes on cue cards, he simply read them to Hope from his notepad as they were circling the runway at midnight. Hope listened to them once, then asked for a second read-through. A few minutes later he went onstage and delivered all the jokes flawlessly, from memory.

  It was an emotional farewell for Hope. At the end of the special that aired on January 17, 1973, he paid one last tribute to the soldiers he had entertained in Vietnam for nine straight Christmases: “Everywhere we witnessed the kindness and humanity of our GIs. They went out of their way to help the civilian population with their time, their money, and their goodwill. I can tell you that they’re more concerned with building and healing than destroying.” He read a long list of thank-yous—to his entertainers, his sponsors, the technical crew, President Nixon. “And especially to the millions of guys we played to in every latitude and every longitude around the world. Thank you for Christmases I’ll never forget. Good night.” And then it was over.

  • • •

  On January 14, 1973, three days before Hope’s last Vietnam special aired, an agreement to end the war was finally reached at the Paris peace talks, and a cease-fire went into effect on January 27. Hope and Nixon talked frequently during this period. On January 9, a few days before the peace agreement, Hope called the White House to wish Nixon a happy sixtieth birthday, and the president told him that negotiations were “coming along.” On February 15, Hope called again to share Nixon’s jubilation over the homecoming of the first POWs released by North Vietnam. “You must be beaming all over!” cried Hope.

  “It’s so good for the country,” Nixon said. “The country could not lose this war.”

  Hope exulted, “And it emanates from you! Your strength and how right you were!”

  Even Dolores got on the phone to add her congratulations over the freed POWs. “I think they’re gonna bring America back with them!” she said.

  Three weeks later Hope was back at the White House, getting a briefing from Nixon on plans for an all-star dinner in May to celebrate the POWs’ homecoming. “You must feel like eight zillion dollars, winding this thing up,” said Hope. “What you did is something else.”

  “We now realize that all the heat was really worth it,” said Nixon.

  But a lot of work remained to be done—not just to patch up a badly divided nation, but to repair Bob Hope’s career.

  VI

  ENSURING THE LEGACY

  Trying to Recover, and Refusing to Quit

  Chapter 13

  RESTORATION

  “When the houselights dim and the cameras are turned off, I’m just like the rest of you.”

  Bob Hope’s movie career ended with a sad flourish. Cancel My Reservation, his last starring vehicle, was the first Hope movie ever to open at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. The venerable movie palace, the last in America to offer live stage shows along with its film presentations, was having trouble finding G-rated movies suitable for its family audience, and Hope’s sorry effort was apparently one of the few to fill the bill. It opened in October 1972, accompanied by a stage show called, fittingly, “In One Era and Out the Other.”

  It had been three years since Hope’s last movie, How to Commit Marriage, with Jackie Gleason. He had flirted with a couple of other projects since then: another film with Gleason, The Bride Wore Blinkers, about two con men who smuggle a racehorse into Ireland (Bing Crosby was penciled in to play an Irish priest); and a comedy by writer-director David Swift (The Parent Trap), with Hope as a small-town politician whose swinging past comes back to haunt him. When neither got off the ground, Hope turned to a Western novel by Louis L’Amour that he had optioned, intending to produce it as a straight Western with other stars. Instead, he asked screenwriters Arthur Marx and Bob Fisher, who had worked on I’ll Take Sweden and Eight on the Lam, to retool it as a comedy vehicle for himself.

  Marx and Fisher protested that the story, about the murder of a Native American girl and the theft of tribal land by greedy real estate developers, wasn’t suitable for a Hope comedy. But they came up with a treatment anyway, casting Hope as the stressed-out host of a TV talk show in New York City, who travels to Arizona for a rest and stumbles onto the tribal intrigue. Hope, eager for another film role, bought it. The film was produced jointly by Hope Enterprises and NBC and shot on location in Arizona in August and September of 1971, with a supporting cast that included Eva Marie Saint as Hope’s wife, Keenan Wynn as a local sheriff, and Ralph Bellamy as the villainous real estate developer.

  It was not a happy set. To direct the film, Hope turned not to one of his reliable old-timers—most of them by now retired or dead—but to a relative newcomer, TV director Paul Bogart (later the director of nearly a hundred episodes of All in the Family). The two were at odds from the start. Bogart was upset that Hope, in his usual manner, sent the script out to his writers for punching up and inserted gag lines wherever he could. Bogart fumed when Hope would arrive late to the set (in the broiling Arizona summer, he was the only one with an air-conditioned trailer) and would then ask Bogart to restage the scene he had just set up. They even argued about young costar Anne Archer. Hope thought she wasn’t sexy enough. “She’s a beautiful woman; what do you want her to do?” asked Bogart. Hope replied, “Can’t she vamp a little, like Zsa Zsa?”

  By the end of the filming, Bogart was a nervous wreck. “We argued about everything,” he said. “The tensions were terrible. But he was in charge, and he wasn’t going to let anybody tell him what to do. I kept calling my agent and sayi
ng, ‘Get me off this thing.’ He said, ‘You can’t.’ I was condemned.” Bogart was reduced to sending Hope letters, begging him to fix some of the more egregious things in the editing. The last straw came in New York City, where the film’s final scene was shot on location in Rockefeller Plaza. Hope was late to the set as usual. While waiting, Bogart set up the shot, but when Hope arrived, he wanted it changed. Bogart exploded. “You are fucking impossible!” he screamed at Hope, as hundreds of bystanders watched from behind rope lines. After the scene was shot and the film wrapped, Bogart checked himself into the hospital, suffering from pneumonia.

  Cancel My Reservation was no better than it deserved to be. The mix of comedy and murder-mystery might have worked twenty or thirty years before, when Hope could do that sort of thing in his sleep. Now he actually does look asleep—tossing off gag lines mechanically, walking through a series of lame comedy set pieces (a breakneck ride on the back of a motorcycle, reprised from I’ll Take Sweden; a climb to the top of a mountain to consult an old Indian guru, played by Chief Dan George). The film’s run at Radio City was interrupted by a musician’s strike, which shut down the theater for two days. Even without the labor problems, it was a box-office dud. On one Wednesday night, Variety reported, just six hundred of the theater’s sixty-two hundred seats were filled.

  After that, Hope and NBC dissolved their moviemaking partnership. Hope continued for years to look for other film properties. But except for a couple of cameo roles (as an ice cream vendor in 1979’s The Muppet Movie and a golfer in Spies Like Us in 1985), Cancel My Reservation was his last big-screen feature. He desperately wanted to produce and star in a film biography of Walter Winchell, the famed gossip columnist whom he had known back in the Broadway days, but he couldn’t get an acceptable script, and he was already too old for the part. Hope even tried to buy the screen rights to Neil Simon’s hit Broadway comedy The Sunshine Boys, hoping to costar in it with Crosby. But Simon refused, unwilling to let his play about two bickering ex-vaudeville partners be turned into a vehicle for the Road picture team. “To my way of thinking, you and Bing would simply overpower the material,” he wrote Hope, explaining his decision. The main characters were modeled on the vaudeville team of Smith and Dale, Simon said, and “not only are their appearance, mannerisms and gestures ethnically Jewish, but more important, their attitudes are as well. And if the audience would believe that Bob and Bing could portray two old Jews, then John Wayne should have been in Boys in the Band.”