Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  “I’m still with NBC for three simple reasons,” Hope said at the start of the 1985–86 season, his thirty-sixth with the TV network: “the creative atmosphere, the fine working conditions, and the pictures I took at the 1950 Christmas party.” He could still deliver big ratings on occasion. His birthday special in May 1986—from the Pensacola Naval Air Station, with Elizabeth Taylor and Don Johnson among the guests—drew a 39 percent share of the viewing audience, the highest of any Hope special in five years. But his routine shows were no longer doing well, and with NBC back on top of the network ratings race (led by its hit sitcoms The Cosby Show and Family Ties), programmers had to be careful where they scheduled them. “There might have been a time when you could broadcast a Bob Hope special any day of the week, any time of the night, and pull in an audience regardless of the competition,” an NBC executive said in 1987. “Now we’re looking at protective time frames.”

  The shows themselves were growing increasingly leaden: tired gags, corny sketches, with Hope looking more disengaged and cue-card-dependent than ever. Variety, reviewing his 1989 special from the Bahamas, chided Hope for “permitting his team of writers to throw together such a generally dismal collection of excuses for gags and uniformly horrible skits which could have been bettered by a reasonably talented high school sophomore.”

  Yet the shows were big moneymakers for Hope. When he went to overseas locales such as the Bahamas and Tahiti, the local tourist board would typically pick up the travel and hotel costs (even though the network budget already allotted for them) and also pay Hope an extra fee for “promotional” work. That would cover most of the show’s production costs, leaving virtually the entire license fee paid by NBC (around $1 million per hour) as clear profit for Hope. “The whole show would cost him essentially nothing,” said Kozak. “We made out like bandits really.”

  Hope’s fee for personal appearances was up to $75,000, and he was raking in even more money from commercials. In addition to his work for Texaco, Hope became a TV pitchman for California Federal Savings, and in the mid-1980s he signed a five-year deal to appear in ads for the Silver Pages, a new telephone directory from Southwestern Bell aimed at senior citizens. Kozak negotiated a sweet deal: Hope got $1 million a year for just a couple of days’ work, and when Southwestern Bell ended the campaign prematurely, after three years, the company had to pay him $500,000 just to get out of the contract. (Kozak, who often felt underappreciated, was miffed at Hope’s blasé reaction to the windfall. “He just takes the check,” said Kozak. “No ‘thank you.’ I was so pissed that he didn’t acknowledge what a hell of a deal that was.”)

  The legacy burnishing, meanwhile, continued at a steady clip. NBC renamed a street near its Burbank headquarters Bob Hope Drive. A retirement community for Air Force veterans in the Florida panhandle was christened Bob Hope Village. In January 1988, Hope was guest of honor for the opening of the Bob Hope Cultural Center, a sixty-six-acre arts complex in Palm Springs—with President Reagan among the bigwigs in the audience, Van Cliburn playing the national anthem, and another slew of Hollywood stars on hand to pay their respects. He made The Guinness Book of Records as the recipient of more honors and awards than any other entertainer in the world. (Hope’s publicists were always thinking. In the mid-1970s, the town of Hope, Arkansas—later to become famous as Bill Clinton’s birthplace—invited Hope to its hundredth birthday celebration. Frank Liberman replied that Hope might come if the town would change its name to Bob Hope, Arkansas.)

  Hope was back overseas at Christmas in 1987, traveling to the Persian Gulf (with Barbara Eden, Connie Stevens, and his granddaughter Miranda along for the ride) to entertain US troops aboard warships sent there in response to a threat by the Ayatollah Khomeini to cut off oil shipments. “I think this is appropriate,” said Hope, aboard the USS Midway, “the oldest aircraft carrier meets the oldest operational comedian.” Assuming it would be his last Christmas tour, Hope followed up with a book, Don’t Shoot, It’s Only Me (written with Mel Shavelson), recapping his forty-plus years of entertaining the troops. Yet there would be one more, unexpected tour of duty: another Christmas trip to the Persian Gulf in 1990, where a US buildup of forces was under way in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

  Hope by this time was eighty-seven and getting frail. His daughter Linda came along to provide support and produce the special, and Dolores joined them as well. Because of security precautions in the walk-up to the US invasion of Iraq, Hope and his entertainers (among them Ann Jillian, Marie Osmond, and the Pointer Sisters) were whisked from show to show by helicopter, often without being told their destination. Press coverage of the trip was severely restricted. (When reporters complained, Hope commiserated, “I live for the press. That’s not my idea, believe me.”) In deference to Islamic customs, moreover, the single women in the troupe were not allowed to perform in Saudi Arabia at all, but confined to shipboard shows and a stop in Bahrain.

  Yet Hope weathered the trip well. “He was stronger than most of us,” said Gene Perret, the writer Hope brought along. “He worked hard, did the monologues. He would do dance numbers with the women—which is not easy on a ship.” Hope made the usual wisecracks about US servicemen on a mission far from home (“Where else can you see signs that say YANKEE GO HOME signed by Yankees?”) and took a few jingoistic digs at Saddam Hussein (the Iraqi dictator should get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Hope said, “so we can all spit on it”). With the tight restrictions on what Hope could show of his travels, the ninety-minute special played more like a typical Hope variety show, with full-length numbers from most of the guest stars. Even Dolores, after being edited out of so many of Hope’s earlier tours, was showcased in two numbers, including a duet with Bob on “White Christmas.”

  Hope’s usual patriotic closing had a prosaic, almost boilerplate quality: “Let’s pray that somehow or some way, we can destroy the menace that’s causing the trouble over there and it won’t be long before our servicemen and -women are back home where they belong.” But the response from the troops was enthusiastic, the ratings decent—and, for once, the war over quickly. The US invaded Iraq, launching the first Gulf War, just days after Hope’s show aired on January 12, 1991, and by April, Hope was able to host a homecoming special, featuring marines from the 29 Palms training center near Palm Springs, whom he had met in Saudi Arabia. Former president Ford and Jimmy Stewart were on hand for the show, and General Norman Schwarzkopf and Secretary of State Colin Powell sent messages of thanks. Hope hailed the successful military campaign as “a whole new concept in politics” because President Bush “did everything he said he was going to do.” Hope’s last war, at least, ended in victory.

  • • •

  By the late eighties, Hope’s physical decline was becoming noticeable even to casual viewers. Though he was still in overall good health, both his eyesight and hearing were deteriorating badly. He had another flare-up of his eye hemorrhaging in 1982, but this time in his right eye—previously his good one—and it seriously affected his vision. The cue cards had to be blown up extralarge so that he could read them, and they continued to grow as the years went on, the words scrawled by Barney McNulty in such gargantuan letters that a single joke would sometimes take up three or four cards.

  Hope’s hearing was getting worse as well. His ear specialist, Dr. Howard House, prescribed a hearing aid, but Hope was too vain to wear one. “I can still hear the laughs,” he would tell friends. He had trouble hearing normal conversation, and it became hard for him to pick up the musical cues when recording songs for his specials. He was wandering off the beat so often that musical director Bob Alberti had to kneel beside Hope’s cue cards during the tapings, giving him a visual downbeat for each line. And still Hope would sometimes lose the beat.

  Producer Jim Lipton noticed the deterioration in the last birthday special he produced for Hope, from Paris in 1989. The monologue went so badly that Hope had to stay behind in the theater to rerecord some of the jokes. Lipton had written n
ew lyrics for “Thanks for the Memory” in French, spelling them out phonetically on the cue cards, but Hope couldn’t handle them. It was painful for both of them. “Great job,” said Lipton, after Hope finished his monologue. “Aw, come on,” Hope said. “I used to be twice as fast.”

  “Starting in the late eighties, it was affecting the work,” said NBC’s Rick Ludwin. “It would take him longer to do the monologue. He’d stumble over things. He’d get a little frustrated with himself. There was such goodwill on the part of the audience that they forgave him—they still loved that they were being entertained by Bob Hope. But the postproduction on the show became more difficult, to sort of Scotch-tape together the monologue and have it appear as much as possible to flow logically.”

  The man once known as Rapid Robert was running down. His physical limitations were hard for him to accept, and he grew testy about them. Taping a sketch with Brooke Shields for one show, Hope kept missing his cue, and Shields tried to help by sneaking the line to him under her breath. Hope blew up at her. “He got really mad at me,” she recalled. “ ‘What are you doing that for, you little idiot?’ I just burst into tears because he had never yelled at me before. And then I realized he was mad at himself because he didn’t hear the cue. I thought I was helping him. And it seemed that I was disrespecting him.”

  On the Tonight Show, his hearing problems were making his guest appearances even more of a trial than they already were. He often had trouble picking up Carson’s questions, and Johnny had to stick precisely to the notes his staff gave him; if he asked a question out of order, Hope might answer a different question. Still, Hope kept coming on the show, his frailties on full display for the national TV audience. “If I ever end up like that, guys,” Carson said to his writers, “I want you to shoot me.”

  Carson retired gracefully in 1992. But Hope soldiered on, battling not just his failing faculties but also network inattention. Writer Gene Perret had painful memories of one of Hope’s last monologues. The fading star was shunted to a new studio, and when he arrived to do his monologue, a tiny crowd of only around fifty people was waiting in the audience. (NBC claimed the buses hadn’t shown up.) Hope struggled to get any reaction from the sparse crowd, as Perret watched uncomfortably from the wings. Finally Hope stopped midway through, in distress, and called Perret over, asking him for some last-minute jokes about an award Johnny Carson had just been given by the outgoing president, Bush.

  Perret quickly came up with a few lines (“Those lame ducks stick together”), and Hope got at least a few laughs before wrapping up the monologue. But afterward, when Perret asked Hope if he wanted to go over the videotape, as they usually did to start the editing process, Hope demurred, saying, “We’ll do it later.” For Perret, it was a poignant sign of defeat. “He knew it was a bad monologue. It was sad.”

  • • •

  Along with the procession of awards and tributes that filled Hope’s waning years were a couple of unwelcome distractions. One was a nasty dispute over something Hope had hoarded, and mostly guarded from public view, for years: his land.

  By the 1980s the bulk of Hope’s real estate holdings lay in the mountainous areas north and west of Los Angeles, a 240-square-mile area designated in 1978 as the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area. A state agency called the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy was seeking to buy up as much of this land as possible, to preserve its pristine views, hiking areas, and endangered wildlife. But Hope, who had watched the land appreciate wildly in value since he’d bought it in the 1950s and 1960s, was starting to sell it to developers—at prices far higher than what the conservancy could afford.

  Several parcels had already been sold off. Hope got $13 million for one tract near Malibu Creek State Park, from a developer who built condominiums on it, and $10 million for another 195 acres in Calabasas, where a housing development was planned. But what set off a firestorm was a deal to sell the Jordan Ranch—a twenty-three-hundred-acre parcel in the Simi Hills north of the Ventura Freeway, which Hope had bought in the 1950s for a reported $300,000. In 1987 a Maryland-based developer called Potomac Investments acquired an option to buy the land from Hope for $25 million, pending approval of its plans to build a PGA-owned golf course on it, along with a development of more than eleven hundred homes.

  Years of complicated negotiations followed, involving the developer, zoning officials, environmentalists, and Hope’s lawyers. The plans for developing Jordan Ranch had a major stumbling block. The area lacked an access road to a major highway, and the only place to build one was through Cheeseboro Canyon—on land already owned by the National Park Service. So a land-swap compromise was proposed. The Park Service agreed to give up a fifty-nine-acre sliver of Cheeseboro Canyon to allow the developers to build an access road. In return, Potomac would donate the undeveloped half of Jordan Ranch—a picturesque area known as China Flat, long prized by environmentalists—to the state so it could be preserved as parkland.

  The proposed deal split the environmental community. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the Sierra Club backed the plan, reasoning that giving up a small slice of national-park land in return for preserving China Flat was worth it. But other environmentalists hotly opposed the deal, arguing that the government had no right to give up any national-park land to pave the way for a housing development in the area.

  The dispute boiled over in early 1990, covered extensively in the local press and on TV news. Hope was cast as the environmental villain, a greedy landowner who cared more about golf courses than protecting California’s natural beauty. “No one has a larger ownership of land in the Santa Monicas, and yet has not given up one inch,” said Margot Feuer, of the Save the Mountain Park Coalition. “What is it that drives this man?” An editorial cartoon in the Los Angeles Times showed a map of the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area, with the topographical details replaced by an eighteen-hole golf course. The caption: “Faith, Hope and Damn Little Charity.” One Saturday morning protesters showed up in front of Hope’s Toluca Lake home: HONK IF YOU THINK BOB HOPE HAS ENOUGH MONEY read one sign. The controversy raged in the letters columns of the Los Angeles Times. “Hope doesn’t owe anyone anything,” wrote one reader. “But if he doesn’t see the desperate need to maintain a buffer of open space around Los Angeles and more importantly, respond with a gift of land to the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreational Area, I for one am going to be sorry I ever went to any of his films, or watched any of his numskull TV specials. Thanks for the memories! Thanks for nothing!”

  Hope was dismayed to find himself in the role of an environmental meanie. He had a perfect right to profit from the land investments he had made decades ago, he argued. “I didn’t hold it for twenty-five years and pay taxes on it just to give it away,” he told a reporter. His lawyers reminded people of all the work Hope had done for charity and claimed that he had already given away fifteen hundred acres of his land in various places, including the eighty acres in Rancho Mirage that he had donated for the Eisenhower Medical Center.

  But the environmental protests succeeded in scuttling the land-swap deal, and Hope soon backed down. After another round of negotiations, a new deal was worked out, with Hope and the developer making major concessions. Potomac agreed to move its housing development and golf course out of Jordan Ranch altogether, combining it instead with another development being planned for Ahmanson Ranch, in Las Virgines Canyon. At the same time, Hope agreed to sell all of Jordan Ranch, along with the rest of his property in the area—including the 4,369-acre Runkle Ranch farther north and 339 acres overlooking the ocean in Malibu’s Corral Canyon—to the government for parkland. Hope would get $29.5 million, substantially below the land’s market value, and the state would get a huge swath of mountain and canyon land protected from developers for good.

  More zoning battles, objections from environmentalists, and lawsuits followed. But Hope was instantly transformed from environmental villain into public-spirited land donor. “In preserving these open spaces, B
ob Hope is making a special gift to all Californians,” said California governor Pete Wilson, when the deal was signed in November 1991. For Hope, the financial sacrifice must have been painful, but it was worth the restoration of his public image. “The knocks he’s taken from environmentalists for not wanting to give up the properties for so long finally got to him,” a Hope associate told the Los Angeles Times. “Here you have this national hero who has given generously of himself his entire life, and I think he figured the criticism just wasn’t worth it.”

  Hope’s image took some blows on another, more personal front around the same time, as some serious breaches appeared in the cone of silence that had long shrouded his extramarital sex life. First, in 1991, one of his former secretaries, Jan King, regaled readers of the Globe tabloid with an account of Hope’s womanizing, which she helped cover up for years. Two years later, Arthur Marx, drawing on King’s account as well as his own interviews, published a gossipy tell-all biography, The Secret Life of Bob Hope.

  Marx’s bio, brought out by the small New Jersey publisher Barricade Books, was an uneasy mix of gossip and reporting, sloppily written and wildly unbalanced—with pages and pages devoted to minor Hope dalliances as if they were Soviet spy cases. Hope refused to comment on the book, and his publicist Ward Grant dismissed it as “just a lot of old stuff, nothing new.” One libel suit was brought against it, by Hope’s former son-in-law, Nathaniel Lande, who disputed some allegations about his relationship with the family and won a $10,000 judgment in a jury trial. Yet Marx’s account of Hope’s womanizing was never seriously challenged, and most of those in Hope’s inner circle who would talk candidly agreed that it rang true.