Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  • • •

  Hope’s writing staff was going through a transition in the late 1970s. Old-timers Gig Henry and Charlie Lee were still around, but newcomers were filtering in. Gene Perret was writing gags for Phyllis Diller in 1969 when he sent three hundred unsolicited jokes to Hope for one of his Oscar appearances. Hope used ten of them on the air and told Perret, “It looks like you’ve been writing for me all your life.” Perret continued writing jokes for Hope over the next few years, while on staff at The Carol Burnett Show, before joining him full-time in the late seventies. Bob Mills, a lawyer turned gagman, was writing for Dean Martin’s celebrity TV roasts in 1977 when Hope hired him for a special. “I’ve got six more weeks on my Dean Martin contract,” Mills said. Hope replied, “You work on Dean Martin during the day, don’t you? Well, you can work on my stuff in the evenings.” Mills stayed with Hope for fifteen years. Sitcom veterans Seaman Jacobs and Fred Fox also joined the staff, and later Martha Bolton, Hope’s first full-time female writer. Other younger writers came and went, some hired for individual shows, others for a season or two.

  All had to adapt to Hope’s idiosyncratic working style. Even veteran writers never got more than a one-year contract, which kept them on their toes and enabled Hope to dump writers who weren’t measuring up. (For years some of the writers were even represented by Hope’s own agent Jimmy Saphier—a conflict of interest if there ever was one.) The writers got used to the 24/7 schedule, the late-night phone calls, the oddly solitary working life. Unlike on other comedy shows, where writers would sit around a table and bat out scripts together, Hope’s writers mostly worked alone, coming up with jokes on their own, then dropping them “over the wall” at Hope’s Toluca Lake home office, where they might get chased by one of Bob’s German shepherds.

  The pace was intense. “He liked people who worked fast,” said Perret. Hope might call for some jokes on a specific topic, then phone back a half hour later—no hello or greeting of any kind, just a command: “Thrill me.” Hope once told his writers that he was appearing at a psychiatrists’ convention, so they gave him a load of psychiatrist jokes. When Hope arrived at the event, he found out the audience was actually a group of chiropractors. The writers had thirty minutes to come up with a new set of jokes. Mills was once hosting a backyard barbecue when he got a call from Hope and heard music in the background: he was in the wings of some distant theater, minutes away from going onstage. On the way in from the airport, Hope told Mills, the traffic was terrible because all the streets were torn up, and he needed a line about it to open the show. “How much time do you have?” asked Mills. “About twenty seconds,” said Hope. Mills came up with a couple of quickies (“between the hotel and here, the cabbie and I exchanged teeth three times”), then went back to his dinner guests. “I just made my entire salary for the year,” he told them.

  The old-timers sometimes tried to get away with recycling jokes from Hope’s bottomless vault of funnies, but he had a photographic memory and usually rejected them. One time he asked his writers for some football jokes, and Mills sighed that he should just take some old ones out of the files. “Why do we have to write new ones?” Mills asked. Hope snapped, “I pay you with new money, don’t I?” Yet Hope appreciated their hard work and didn’t get down on them if they came up short. Perret once turned in a load of jokes and Hope asked if they were brilliant. “They’re really not,” Perret said. Hope told him not to worry: “The other guys will be hot.”

  The writers were responsible for virtually everything Hope said or that appeared under his name. They wrote his TV shows, monologues for his personal appearances, magazine articles that carried Hope’s byline, jokes that were fed to columnists such as Variety’s Army Archerd, acceptance speeches, commencement addresses, and eulogies. When Hope was a guest on other TV variety shows, he would get the script in advance and have his writers add new lines that he could throw into the sketches during rehearsals. (His practice of rewriting the lines annoyed some producers, who crossed Hope off their guest lists as a result.) Mills once got a request from Hope for some jokes about Pentagon generals. Not seeing any military events on his calendar, Mills asked what the occasion was. Hope said he was going to play golf with three generals and just needed some funny lines for conversation on the course.

  Hope still moved at a pace that would have exhausted much younger men. He was on the road almost constantly—nearly 250 appearances in 1977 alone, from the National Dairy Congress in Waterloo, Iowa, to Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee celebration in London. His TV specials, as a result, were getting increasingly short shrift.

  The monologues were still a priority. For each one, Hope would cull through hundreds of his writers’ jokes, picking the best thirty minutes’ worth of material, then delivering it before a studio audience (usually Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show audience, who would be asked to stick around for Hope after Carson’s show was finished) before winnowing it down to seven or eight minutes that would make the final broadcast. As for the rest of his TV hours, Hope was paying only minimal attention. He didn’t even try to learn his lines anymore; most of the rehearsal time was spent worrying about where the cue cards were going to be placed. He didn’t like rehearsals that ran long. “Milton Berle liked to retake jokes—he’d say, ‘I can do that one better,’ ” said Sid Smith, who began directing Hope specials in the late seventies. “Hope liked to do it once, and that’s it. He didn’t want to lose the spontaneity of the joke.” He wasn’t happy with guests like Lucille Ball, who rehearsed obsessively and would often stop to make suggestions on how the scenes could be improved. Grumbled Hope during one rehearsal, “She thinks I just got into this business.”

  He was not a temperamental star, at least by most inflated-Hollywood-ego standards. He projected an almost preternatural calm, humming an unidentifiable tune to himself constantly. But technical flubs or unforeseen delays could make him testy, and his fits of temper could be formidable. Dennis Klein, then a young comedy writer (and later the cocreator of The Larry Sanders Show), was in the greenroom for a Tonight Show taping in the late 1960s on a night Hope was a guest. Hope was used to royal treatment at the Tonight Show: always the first guest, always leaving immediately after his segment was over, so that he wouldn’t have to move down the couch and listen to other guests. This time, however, Hope was taken by surprise when Carson announced the show’s first guest—not Bob Hope, but a monkey from the San Diego Zoo.

  “What the fuck!” cried Hope, bolting from his chair and launching a profanity-laden tirade that left everyone in the room cowering. A Tonight Show assistant tried to calm him down, speculating that the animal was too skittish to wait any longer, or it was past feeding time. But Hope was “roaming the greenroom like an enraged animal, spewing invective,” Klein recalled. Only when the monkey’s segment was finished and Carson had announced Hope did he calm down—sauntering out onstage smiling, to the strains of “Thanks for the Memory,” as if nothing had happened.

  By mid-1977 one of Hope’s pet movie projects finally seemed to be coming together: a reunion with Crosby in a new Road picture. London impresario Lew Grade was producing the film, which was based on a Mel Shavelson script called Road to the Fountain of Youth. Grade had even called the much-abused Dorothy Lamour to see if she could be coaxed back for one final reunion. The project got delayed when Crosby hurt his back after falling off a stage during a TV taping in March and needed a couple of months to recuperate. (Hope, a guest on the show, was among those who rushed to Crosby’s side after the accident.) When Hope asked Crosby to appear at a charity golf tournament in June, he still wasn’t well enough, writing Hope wanly, “It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to swing a stick by June—if ever.” By the fall, Crosby had recovered enough to appear for two weeks at London’s Palladium Theatre, after which he went to Spain for a few days of rest and golf. He was walking back to the clubhouse after a round on October 14, 1977, when he collapsed and died of a heart attack. The film was abandoned, and the Road team broken up
for good.

  Hope and Crosby were never close friends. They rarely socialized together and saw even less of each other in the later years, after Crosby moved to Hillsborough, outside of San Francisco, with his second wife, Kathryn, and their new family. But no one else in Hope’s professional life meant more to him. He heard the news of Crosby’s death while in New York City getting ready to do a benefit in New Jersey. (In a sad coincidence, his mother-in-law, Theresa De Fina, died on the same day.) He canceled his appearance, as well as one scheduled for the following night in Arizona, and flew back to Los Angeles. When Linda met him at the airport, she found her father as emotional as she had ever seen him: “He had tears in his eyes. You could see he was really hurting about it. At the same time, he said he felt bad he had left those people in the lurch. It was the first time I ever remember him canceling anything.”

  Hope issued a statement the next day: “The whole world loved Bing Crosby, with a devotion that not only crossed international borders, but erased them.” Bing had insisted that his funeral be closed to all but family and the closest of friends. Bob and Dolores were among the small group of forty who attended the early-morning service at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Westwood. (Rosemary Clooney and Phil Harris were also there, but not Dorothy Lamour—a final snub from Bing.) Hope was in the middle of preparing his next NBC special, The Road to Hollywood, tied in with a new book about his movie career cowritten with Bob Thomas. Hope turned the special into a tribute to Crosby, retitled On the Road with Bing.

  • • •

  An anniversary, and the passage of three years, apparently dimmed the bad memories of Hope’s last appearance at the Academy Awards, with his controversial role in the Bert Schneider affair. For the fiftieth-birthday Oscar ceremony on April 3, 1978, the Academy decided to bring back Hope as solo host one more time: a nostalgic tribute to the man who had done more than anyone else to make the annual awards telecast a national pastime.

  At nearly seventy-five, Hope sounded a little disingenuous as he poked fun in his monologue at the parade of past Oscar winners trotted out for the anniversary: “It looks like the road company of the Hollywood Wax Museum.” In truth, he had an off night. Hope was unhappy that he had to use a teleprompter instead of cue cards, and he appeared unusually transfixed by the camera. He sounded hoarse, and his delivery was stiffer and less supple than usual. For once, the Oscars’ favorite host was showing his age. Still, he got off some good lines (“I haven’t seen so much expensive jewelry go by since I watched Sammy Davis Jr.’s house sliding down Coldwater Canyon”), and he at least managed to stay out of the big political flap of the night—another inflammatory acceptance speech, this one by Vanessa Redgrave, who called members of the militant Jewish Defense League “Zionist hoodlums” and an “insult to Jewish people all over the world.”

  Marty Pasetta, who directed the show (one of the fourteen Oscarcasts he would handle), was impressed with how well Hope, despite his age, could roll with the punches—squeezing or stretching to fit the time as needed, adding jokes on the fly to respond to what took place during the show. “So many guys can’t do that,” said Pasetta. Johnny Carson, for example, who hosted the show for the next four years, was much less apt to improvise during the show. “Bob was a pleasure to work with,” said Pasetta. “Johnny could be difficult at times. He wasn’t as glib as Bob. He had more writers, and he needed the lines to be precise.” Hope may have been looking like an anachronism by 1978, but his style stood the test of time—the gold standard, not just for Carson, but for every Oscar host who followed.

  As Hope’s seventy-fifth birthday approached on May 29, 1978, NBC suggested an all-star special to celebrate the occasion. Hope, who never liked to acknowledge his age, said no. “I can’t go on television and tell the whole world I’m seventy-five years old,” he told Elliott Kozak. But when James Lipton, a sometime actor, writer, and Broadway composer, who had produced Jimmy Carter’s inaugural gala (and would later become better known as host of TV’s Inside the Actors Studio), proposed a black-tie seventy-fifth birthday tribute at the Kennedy Center, with the proceeds going toward a new USO headquarters that would bear Hope’s name, Hope couldn’t resist. The show became the centerpiece for a weekend of birthday festivities and official tributes in Washington, another step in Hope’s reemergence from the cloud of Vietnam.

  “It’s taken over a year,” wrote Tom Shales in the Washington Post, “but the Carter administration finally established diplomatic relations with Bob Hope.” To kick off the birthday weekend, President Carter hosted a reception for Hope at the White House, with five hundred Washington and Hollywood VIPs in attendance. “I have now been in office for 489 days,” said Carter, on meeting Hope for the first time. “And when I’ve spent three more weeks, I will have slept as many nights here as Bob Hope.” That evening, the Hopes hosted a private dinner at a restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, owned by Dolores’s nephew (and former Agnew aide) Peter Malatesta, with a guest list that included such Hollywood pals as Lucille Ball, Fred MacMurray, Phyllis Diller, Danny Thomas, and Elizabeth Taylor (now the wife of John Warner, soon to be elected senator from Virginia). “I’m pretty sure I’m seventy-five. But I’ve lied to so many girls,” Hope said after the toasts, perhaps a little more lubricated than usual. “Of course, they always find out about one a.m. Dolores—that’s a joke.”

  The next morning, Bob, Dolores, and most of the family were in the gallery of the House of Representatives, where Congressman Paul Findley of Illinois introduced a resolution saluting Hope on his birthday. (Hope woke up late and almost missed the 10:00 a.m. session. “Can’t we change it to eleven?” he asked.) For forty minutes, the august chamber was filled with sentimental tributes and congressional mirth, highlighted by a chorus of “Happy Birthday” and some new verses for “Thanks for the Memory,” sung by Minority Whip Robert Michel:

  Thanks for the memory

  Of places you have gone, to cheer our soldiers on

  The president sent Kissinger, but you sent Jill St. John . . .

  The three-hour special, broadcast live from Kennedy Center the following Monday night, was a fairly stodgy affair, done in what Variety described as “that peculiarly square and predictable style that seems to typify ‘official’ dress-up entertainment projects from the capital.” George C. Scott led the parade of celebrities, ranging from George Burns to KC and the Sunshine Band, who offered reminiscences, songs, jokes, and clips of Hope’s career highlights, as the guest of honor watched from a box next to former president Ford. The birthday special drew a mighty 27.1 Nielsen rating, the most watched program of the week and the best showing for a Hope special in years.

  It validated the effort by Texaco and NBC to make Hope’s specials bigger events. More of his shows were now done on location or pegged to an anniversary or other special occasion, many expanded to ninety minutes or even two hours. In February of 1978 he went on a five-city concert tour of Australia (with guests Florence Henderson, Barbara Eden, and Charo—and a young David Letterman among the writers) and turned it into a ninety-minute special that aired in April. In October he was the cohost, with Danny Kaye, of a two-hour special marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of baseball’s World Series. Hope’s own birthdays, meanwhile, became annual TV events, with Lipton returning to produce the celebration from a different locale each year—in May 1979 from the deck of the USS Iwo Jima in New York Harbor, with the Village People singing “In the Navy” to a shipload of rather bemused sailors.

  Hope wasn’t slowing down. He still took a hands-on role in nearly every aspect of his TV specials: monitoring the budgets, approving the network publicity, and calling in for ratings on the morning after the telecast. He demanded the same dedication from the people who worked for him. When he was unhappy with his ratings or thought he wasn’t getting enough press, he would needle his publicists: “Are you still working for me?” or “Who’s handling Sinatra?” Staffers got used to late-night phone calls from Hope, sometimes just to relate a joke he had heard
on the Tonight Show. “When he pays you a salary, he expects you to work around the clock,” said Elliott Kozak, his agent, whom he put in charge of Hope Enterprises.

  Kozak was a smart and loyal representative for Hope, and as close to him as anyone, but he had to put up with a lot. Once Hope summoned him to the house for a 9:00 p.m. meeting. Kozak already had dinner plans with his wife for their wedding anniversary and said he couldn’t make it. “Oh, you don’t have time for me anymore?” Hope snapped. They once got in a fight over a deal that Kozak negotiated for Hope to appear at the London Palladium. Hope wanted $50,000 for the show, but Lew Grade, its producer, said he could afford only $25,000. Hope relented, and the contract was drawn up. But months later, on the eve of his trip to London, Hope saw the contract and asked what happened to his $50,000. Kozak tried to correct him: “No, Bob, we asked for fifty, but they could only come up with twenty-five.” Hope wouldn’t budge: “You tell him he’s gotta come up with the fifty thousand or forget about it.”

  Kozak, steamed that Hope was reneging on a deal that Kozak thought had been signed off on, had to go back and plead for another $25,000 from Grade—who came up with the money, on a promise that Hope would play another engagement at the Palladium the following year. But Hope would not admit his mistake, insisting that Kozak had simply “got me the original fifty thousand.” Kozak was angry and threatened to quit: “You don’t trust me, and I break my back for you. I’m shocked and hurt after all these years.” Finally Hope came the closest he could to an apology: “Let’s just say it was a misunderstanding.”

  Kozak was soon out of a job anyway. In 1979, Hope replaced him as the head of Hope Enterprises with his daughter Linda, who had been in charge of program development. She protested that she wasn’t ready for the job, but Hope insisted; he wanted someone he could trust in the position. The family ties, however, made their working relationship even more fraught than it had been between Hope and Kozak. They clashed openly on Linda’s first big working trip with her father: his landmark 1979 visit to the People’s Republic of China.