• • •
The second inauguration of Richard Nixon, coming just as a peace agreement was being reached to end the Vietnam War, was a festive occasion in Washington, with a record five inaugural balls. Hope, Nixon’s best friend in Hollywood, naturally had a big part in the celebration, joining Frank Sinatra as cohost of an “American Music Concert” at the Kennedy Center on the night before the inauguration, with the first family in attendance. But it was not one of Hope’s finest hours.
For one thing, his cohost didn’t show up. Sinatra, slated to emcee the first half of the show before handing off to Hope, canceled at the last minute, reportedly peeved because the Secret Service wouldn’t allow comedian Pat Henry, one of his Vegas pals, to be added to the bill. Art Linkletter was a late fill-in, and he was impressed when Hope volunteered to take out some jokes from his monologue that overlapped with Linkletter’s. But Hope was less cooperative about adhering to the strict schedule the Secret Service had set for the entertainment, timed to coincide with the comings and goings of the president and other dignitaries.
First, Hope was late getting onstage, causing an awkward delay as Nixon and the rest of the audience stood applauding for him, and the orchestra had to repeat the opening bars of “Thanks for the Memory” three times before he appeared. During his monologue Hope had trouble seeing the cue cards and kept calling for the lights to be turned up. Then, when he ignored warnings to wrap up his performance, his microphone was abruptly shut off and a curtain lowered behind him, as singer Vikki Carr came out for her number. When Hope finally retreated backstage, he threw a fit, reducing a young stage manager to tears. After Carr finished, Hope returned to the stage to do the rest of his truncated monologue, then abruptly left the theater. “The monologue was emasculated,” recalled a member of Hope’s entourage who was there. “He comes offstage pissed. The kid with the headphone starts crying. People are saying, ‘Bob, calm down.’ He says, ‘Dolores, we’re going over to see Van Cliburn.’ And he walked out.”
It was a bad omen for the start of President Nixon’s second term. Before the end of the year, Hope’s good friend Spiro Agnew was forced to resign as vice president, following charges that he had accepted bribes while governor of Maryland and as vice president. Then came the unfolding revelations about the Watergate break-in. Hope at first made light of the scandal that would ultimately drive Nixon from the presidency. “I want to thank the Watergate committee for making room for me,” he said during the televised Watergate hearings. “Just shows, there’s nothing one bunch of comedians won’t do for another.” But as the scandal widened, Hope grew increasingly uncomfortable with the subject. At a Weight Watchers rally at Madison Square Garden, he was booed for making some Watergate cracks that were deemed too pro-Nixon. “I wish they’d flush the whole thing and forget it,” he said before a group of veterans in Columbia, South Carolina. Soon Hope had flushed Watergate from his monologues entirely, saying he thought the subject was overdone and the scandal blown out of proportion. “I think dragging this thing on for years and years is giving dirty politics a bad name,” he told a Playboy interviewer in August 1973. “Every administration has been plagued by some kind of scandal or other. The whole thing has had a Mack Sennett feel to it. Actually, I don’t know whether they ought to get them into court or central casting.”
In the charged atmosphere of the times, Hope’s jokes were sounding increasingly tepid and hackneyed—merely waving at topical issues, before deflecting them with formula gag lines. “The US is so short of oil, we may have to start draining Dean Martin’s hair,” he quipped during the 1973 oil crisis. “You’ve heard of Wounded Knee?” he said, referring to the Native American protest site in South Dakota. “How about the Battle of April 15—Wounded Wallet!” His delivery too was growing more rigid and imperial: the joke, the stare, the laugh, the next setup. No more “savers” when he stumbled on a line, or when a joke fell flat—or much acknowledgment of the audience at all. He was Mount Rushmore with cuff links.
His TV specials as a whole were stodgier than ever. Guest stars such as Ann-Margret or John Denver would perform their musical numbers, exchange scripted patter with Hope, and read the cue cards in sketches. But Hope showed little spontaneity or connection with his guests. Jonathan Winters, one of the few younger comics Hope booked on his shows (with the exception of Phyllis Diller, stand-up comics were not allowed to do monologues on Hope’s shows, so as not to compete with the star), was put off by Hope’s inflexible working style. When Winters would stray from the script and improvise during a sketch, Hope would freeze him with a warning: “Stay on the cards, kid.” “If the other guy got a laugh, it made him uneasy,” said Winters. “Anybody who stepped into his arena bothered him. He was taken with himself and his own importance. He was not a fun guy to be with.”
He wasn’t a lot more fun at home. To celebrate his seventieth birthday, on May 29, 1973, Dolores organized a big family get-together, inviting cousins and their children from Cleveland and around the country to spend the July 4th week at their Toluca Lake home. It was a lively bonding experience for the clan; the kids were scattered in sleeping bags throughout the house, the backyard pool area was turned into a playground, and Dolores organized a series of day trips to Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, and other local attractions. Bob was there only in spurts. “He was usually at dinner, but very busy,” recalled Avis Truska, the daughter of Hope’s late brother Sid. “He’d sneak away and we’d say, ‘Where’s Uncle Bob?’ When he was at dinner, he was often very quiet. I remember Dolores once said, ‘Bob, why don’t you say anything?’ And he said, ‘What do you want me to say?’ ”
Among the excursions Dolores arranged for the family was a trip to Palm Springs, for a tour of the extravagant new house she and Bob were building. Since buying their first home there in the 1940s, the Hopes had become honored first citizens of the ritzy desert community: Dolores a prime mover behind the Eisenhower Medical Center in nearby Rancho Mirage, and Bob host of the annual golf tournament that was the area’s biggest national showcase. They threw many parties at their house on El Alameda street, including an annual Thursday-night dinner during the week of the Hope Classic—a convivial, serve-yourself affair, with Dolores helping cook the pasta, tables set up on the back lawn, and friends and family members mingling with the tournament golfers and Hollywood celebrities.
But Dolores wanted a bigger showplace, and to design it she hired renowned architect John Lautner. A disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright’s, Lautner had designed a widely admired house in Palm Springs for interior decorator Arthur Elrod—a space-age structure with a conical roof and circular living room, which had been used as a set in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever. Dolores got Lautner to design a similar modernist house for the Hopes, with a twenty-nine-thousand-square-foot, dome-shaped roof, perched dramatically on a hillside overlooking the main highway below.
But on July 23, 1973, with construction well under way (and just three weeks after the Hope clan had come down for a tour), a spark from a welder’s torch accidentally set fire to the plywood covering the roof. Every fire truck and volunteer firefighter in Palm Springs was called to the scene, as passersby watched the blaze from the highway below. By the time the fire was brought under control, an hour and a half later, the house was all but destroyed.
Hope’s first instinct, naturally, was to make jokes about it: “We had a little problem with the Palm Springs fire department. We forgot to call for a reservation.” His second was to file lawsuits. Construction was put on hold for years, leaving the charred shell of the house in full view from the valley below, an eyesore that prompted much grumbling from the locals. Building was finally resumed in 1978, after the Hopes had recovered $430,000 in damages—from the contractor, from the ironworks company that did the welding, and from Hope’s own lawyers, who had neglected to buy fire insurance.
• • •
As he entered his seventies, Hope still looked like a man at least ten years younger. He began using
a new makeup man, Don Marando, who was doing Robert Goulet’s hair at NBC when a Hope assistant asked if he would take a crack at Bob’s thinning thatch. Marando took one look at Hope’s “Eddie Cantor haircut—waitress black, twenty hairs on his head”—and said he couldn’t do anything until Hope let it grow out. Three weeks later he was summoned to Hope’s house at 10:00 p.m. “Can you do something now?” asked Hope. Marando set to work, applying some ash-brown color, using an ebony pencil in spots, leaving the longish sideburns gray, and giving it a blow-dry to fluff up the few strands that remained atop his head. (Marando also had a toupee made for Hope, but he never wore it.) Hope, the old vaudevillian, liked to do his own makeup, but Marando took over that as well: “Watching him throw on that pancake, I said, ‘You remind me of a monkey throwing on shit.’ ” Marando was on call from then on, doing Hope’s hair and makeup for nearly all his TV specials, traveling with him around the world, and becoming another fixture in Hope’s large and loyal entourage.
Hope’s age was also belied by his workaholic pace. Along with six or seven NBC specials a year and guest appearances on many more shows, Hope averaged at least three personal appearances a week: a nonstop schedule of trade conventions, college concerts, state fairs, Boy Scout jamborees, Rotary Club luncheons, cerebral palsy benefits, hotel-room engagements, and summer-theater gigs. His going rate by the early seventies was $30,000 a night, but he did many charity events for free and was always ready to hop on a plane to pick up another award or honorary college degree (one from Pepperdine in April 1973 was his twenty-second, according to the running count kept by his staff). With Vietnam finally behind him, Hope spent Christmas at home in 1973, for the first time in nearly twenty years. But he hardly took the holiday off, making a tour of veterans’ hospitals in California and traveling to Washington to visit the National Naval Medical Center and Walter Reed Hospital. He even toyed with doing a Las Vegas show. Though Hope made frequent visits to Vegas (he was a fan of Shecky Greene’s lounge shows), he had long resisted a Vegas hotel engagement, telling friends he would do one only if he got paid more than any other performer in Vegas history. Though hotels such as Caesars Palace and the MGM Grand pursued him, no one ever met his price.
He continued to pursue movie projects and tried to expand his TV footprint by setting up a development arm of Hope Enterprises—run for a time by Linda’s husband, Nathaniel Lande, and later, after their divorce, by Linda—to develop other TV series for NBC. It had little success. One Hope-produced pilot called The Bluffer’s Guide, based on a series of British how-to books, aired on NBC in May 1974, but it got bad reviews and didn’t get picked up. A proposed sitcom about cabdrivers (years before Taxi), called O’Shaughnessy and Leibowitz, went through several incarnations, but it too was a no-go. Only one Hope-produced series ever made the NBC schedule: Joe & Valerie, a relationship sitcom that ran for eight episodes in the spring and fall of 1978 before being canceled.
Another thing that didn’t slow down as Hope entered his seventies was his sex life. On the road or at home, Hope never seemed to lack for female companions. His girlfriends were mostly chorus girls, singers, beauty queens, and other showbiz wannabes, whose careers he often helped out and who sometimes appeared as an opening act in his stage shows. Several of these relationships lasted for years. Others were one-night stands, with the arrangements often handled by his trusted assistant and nominal tour manager, Mark Anthony—who was also in charge of supplying Hope’s women with cash when they needed it.
Except for an occasional whistle-blower such as Jan King—a former Hope secretary who gossiped about his women in a 1991 story for the Globe tabloid—all of this was kept discreetly out of the public eye. Friends and coworkers indulged Hope’s behavior, looked the other way, and frequently covered for him. Rosemary Clooney, a good friend of the Hopes, was in a Beverly Hills hair salon when she overheard a customer bragging about having spent the previous night with Hope. Clooney challenged the woman’s story, claiming that she, Clooney, had been with Hope that night—then called Bob and warned him to be more careful. Lande, Hope’s son-in-law, was on a flight from Los Angeles to New York City when his seatmate began talking about the weekend she had just spent with her “boyfriend,” Bob Hope. The two shared a taxi from the airport to Manhattan, and before parting, Lande told the woman, “The next time you talk to Bob, tell him his friend Nathaniel Lande said hello.”
Hope did little to hide his indiscretions when he was around people he trusted. Ben Starr, a writer who worked on film scripts and TV specials for Hope, was at a TV rehearsal with Hope when an attractive chorus girl walked by. Hope casually swiped his index finger across her belly as she passed. “It was his way of saying to me, ‘She’s mine,’ ” said Starr. A producer who was editing one of Hope’s TV shows in the 1970s said Hope would routinely arrive each night with a different blonde on his arm. “We called them the Trixies,” she said. Nor did Hope have any qualms about sharing the sexual opportunities. On one trip to London with Hope, makeup man Don Marando lamented that he needed some female companionship. Hope told him to go to the hotel bar at 8:00 p.m., and a woman in a red dress would be waiting for him. Marando made the assignation, and after dinner the two retired to his hotel room. Waiting for him there was a bottle of champagne and a note: “Good luck. Bob.”
• • •
Even as the Watergate scandal began to overtake the Nixon presidency, Hope stood by his friend in the White House, defending him in public and bucking him up with encouraging notes in private. In March 1974, after Nixon appeared before a friendly business group in Chicago to defend his actions on Watergate, Hope dashed off a telegram to the president: “I now know why you were captain of the debating team at Whittier. I thought your Chicago appearance was magnificent. The best yet.” In May, Hope sent Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods a clipping from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in which Hope defended the president. (“I’ve heard fouler language every time I tip my caddy,” Hope said of the expletive-laden White House tapes.) He told Woods to show the article to Nixon: “I would like the President to know how I really talk about him behind his back. . . . And I want you to know the audience applauded like mad when I said these things.”
Hope didn’t have much to say when Nixon finally resigned in August. “It was so sad for that poor bastard,” he told the Washington Post a few months later. The two talked on the phone in December, Hope related, and Nixon seemed “very depressed. . . . I said, ‘When are you going to come out to the Springs and play some golf?’ He said, ‘It’ll have to be quite awhile.’ ” They met at a party in Palm Springs in March 1975, and Hope tried to cheer up Nixon with jokes: “I told him The Towering Inferno was the burning of the White House tapes. He didn’t think that that was too funny.”
Hope stayed friendly with the disgraced ex-president and in later years continued to stand by him. “I just think that Nixon got himself into a tough spot,” Hope said, when asked about Watergate in 1977. “They hired those Mack Sennett burglars who went over there. When they got caught, Nixon tried to protect the staff—what you and I would do up to a point—and then he got to where he didn’t know which way to go. If he knew the Supreme Court was going to let him down, he would have burned those tapes just like that.”
With Nixon’s resignation, Hope lost a friend in the White House, but he gained an even better one. Hope had known Gerald Ford only slightly before he became president, but the two soon bonded over golf. Ford was a good golfer—capable of driving 250 yards, though he had a penchant for errant shots that gave Hope a chance to recycle the bad-golfer jokes he had once used for Spiro Agnew: “It’s not hard to find Gerry Ford on the golf course. Just follow the wounded.” The Fords vacationed in Palm Springs during their White House years, dining with the Hopes often, and retired to the area afterward, sealing the friendship. “Of all the Presidents,” said Hope, “he is the one I can call a pal.”
Hope was trying to keep a lower political profile in these years, hoping to put the partisan ranc
or of Vietnam behind him. But echoes of the Vietnam turmoil were hard to escape entirely. In April 1975 he found himself back at the center of a political storm, quite unexpectedly, at the Academy Awards.
Hope had not hosted an Oscar show since 1971, when his cracks about sexually explicit Hollywood films (“I go back to the kind of movie when a girl says, ‘I love you,’ and it’s a declaration, not a demonstration”) made him seem a little more old-fashioned than the Academy was perhaps comfortable with. But he was asked back as one of four hosts for the 1975 ceremony, along with Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, and Sammy Davis Jr. Hope’s jokes about the year’s big films were mostly innocuous. (“I think The Godfather Part II has an excellent chance of winning. Neither Mr. Price nor Mr. Waterhouse has been heard from in days.”) The trouble came a few minutes after his opening monologue, when the award for best documentary feature went to Hearts and Minds, Peter Davis’s sharply critical account of the US involvement in Vietnam.
The timing was piquant. Two years after the US withdrawal, South Vietnamese forces were rapidly collapsing in the face of a final Communist offensive. Three weeks later, on April 30, 1975, Saigon would fall, forcing the last US embassy personnel to make an ignominious escape by helicopter. “It is ironic that we’re here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated,” producer Bert Schneider said in accepting the award for Hearts and Minds. Then he read a telegram from the Vietcong delegation to the Paris peace talks: “Please transmit to all our friends in America our recognition of all that they have done on behalf of peace. . . . These actions serve the legitimate interests of the American people and the Vietnamese people.”
Hope: Entertainer of the Century Page 47
