Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  Even in his eighties, Hope still had a roving eye. His last girlfriend, according to both Marx and Hope publicist Frank Liberman, was Sandy Vinger, a former writer on his California Federal Savings commercials, who was his frequent companion in the 1980s. In 1994, when Hope was ninety-one, she filed a breach-of-contract suit, claiming that Hope had hired her in 1974 as an “assistant and companion,” on the promise that he would support her for life. The suit was dismissed in 1996 after an undisclosed out-of-court settlement. The amazing thing is how little of all this made its way into the mainstream press. Even in the age of tabloid television and a far-more-aggressive gossip industry, Hope’s all-American image, for most of his fans, remained unsullied.

  Hope’s all-American family, meanwhile, was going through its own trials. His youngest daughter, Nora, had divorced her first husband, Sam McCullagh, after ten years of marriage (and one daughter, Alicia) and married Bruce Somers, the ex-husband of actress Suzanne Somers, a college friend of Nora’s. Her second marriage exacerbated Nora’s already-strained relationship with her mother. Dolores, the strict Catholic, disapproved of the divorce, and she didn’t get along with Nora’s new husband and three stepchildren. According to a friend of Nora’s, the discord came to a head when Dolores told Nora that Bruce and the stepchildren were not welcome at an upcoming holiday get-together. Nora never spoke to her mother again. She eventually cut off contact with her father and the rest of the family as well—even her brother Kelly, with whom she had been close.

  The abrupt renunciation of her adoptive family was inexplicable to many in the Hope circle. Nora had been a favorite of Bob’s—high-spirited, fun, eager to please her dad. But she chafed under her mother’s stern discipline and was never comfortable living in the aura of her father’s celebrity. “I remember always Nora not being at all happy with the public persona and what was required,” said Linda Hope. “Her dream was to marry a shoe salesman and live in a little house with a white picket fence and have nothing to do with all the Bob Hope hoopla.” Nora’s friend pinned much of the blame for the rift on Somers, her second husband, who convinced her that the relationship with her family was toxic and that she needed to break from them.

  For Dolores the estrangement was obviously painful. For Bob, maybe less so. Whatever angst it caused him was kept, as always, well hidden. “I don’t think it really deeply affected him,” said Linda. “It affected my mother more. But maybe he just didn’t talk about it.” Nora later divorced Somers, sought out her birth parents, and continued to reject any attempts by friends and family to reestablish contact. She didn’t attend Bob Hope’s funeral, or Dolores’s eight years later.

  • • •

  Hope’s ninetieth birthday, on May 29, 1993, presented a challenge for NBC. A big celebration was clearly called for, but Hope’s eyesight and hearing were so bad that he could no longer carry a show on his own. Instead, the network prepared an elaborate three-hour special for which Hope would largely be a bystander. He and Dolores were seated at a table on a wing of the stage, as a parade of celebrities (including taped messages from President Clinton and all five living ex-presidents) paid tribute to him. To help him follow what was going on, and for the few segments in which he briefly participated, producer Don Mischer put a small IFB microphone in his ear, so that Linda, sitting in the control room, could brief him on who was there and what was happening.

  Even Hope’s limited role caused some anxiety. Johnny Carson agreed to do a monologue on the show (the first and only one he would do after leaving the Tonight Show) on the assurance that Hope would not do one as well; despite his frustrations with Hope, Johnny didn’t want the master to be embarrassed. George Burns, seven years older than Hope, was apprehensive about the small bit of comedy business that had been written for the two of them. “I don’t know if I can do this because his timing is really off,” he told Mischer. In the end, Burns, seated next to Hope, did all the talking. When Hope got up onstage for a little patter with Dorothy Lamour, he stepped on one of her lines.

  Still, the ninetieth birthday special—which aired Friday night, May 14, and beat the competition in the ratings—was a well-produced and entertaining show. Dance production numbers were interspersed with clips from Hope’s movies, TV shows, stage career, and overseas tours, introduced by guest stars ranging from Roseanne Arnold to Walter Cronkite. Dolores sang “Paper Moon,” the first number Hope had seen her perform in a New York nightclub back in 1933. Through some video trickery, Lucie Arnaz replaced Shirley Ross in the “Thanks for the Memory” scene from The Big Broadcast of 1938. Servicemen from each of the four wars in which Hope had entertained came onstage to convey their thanks. Longtime colleagues such as Barney McNulty, Hal Kanter, NBC’s Rick Ludwin, and even Hope’s handyman did brief walk-ons to wish him happy birthday. Hope took it all in amiably, smiling and nodding with approval, occasionally getting misty eyed, and gathering himself for a few words of thanks at the end. At three hours, the show seemed to never end, but it was a tasteful and often touching farewell.

  Except that it wasn’t a farewell. Hope refused to quit, continuing to do specials that tested the creativity of Linda and NBC to find formats that would demand little of him. More shows were essentially compilations of old clips, or “young comedians” specials, in which Hope would simply be trotted out to introduce a lineup of new stand-up comics. His Christmas show in 1993 was a visit to the Hope home (actually an NBC studio set) for a family get-together, featuring Hope’s children and grandchildren and drop-ins by such stars as Loni Anderson, Barbara Eden, and Joey Lawrence, with Bob largely an onlooker. For friends and fans alike, the spectacle was getting painful. “Bob Hope could have done what Johnny Carson did—kind of step aside,” said David Letterman in a Rolling Stone interview. “I watched a lot of his early films over the holidays on AMC, and, Jesus, talk about a guy who was sharp and on the money and appealing and fresh and charismatic. Then I saw Bob Hope’s [Christmas show] and it was tough to watch. If it had been a funeral, you would have preferred the coffin be closed. I mean, can he be gratified by that?”

  The family gently tried to coax him into retirement. “I said, ‘Dad, you don’t want to keep on with this,’ ” Linda recalled. “ ‘This is not you. You don’t want people to remember you at less than your best.’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah, but I’ve got a deal with NBC.’ He was just so habituated to doing this kind of thing that I think it was very difficult for him to let go of it.” Handling him, never easy for his producer-daughter, became even tougher. During the taping of a young-comedians special in 1994, Dave Thomas witnessed a tense encounter when Linda tried to set up a shot for her father to say a quick good-night. “I’m not doing that!” he snapped at her. Linda backed off and went on to other matters. A few minutes later, Hope took the microphone, the cameras scrambled into place, and he wrapped up the show with a few jokes. “Now that’s the way I say good night,” he told Thomas, as he sat back down. “Not like goddamn Walter Cronkite.”

  He continued to make his annual appearances at the Bob Hope Desert Classic, hitting a drive on the first tee to launch the tournament, before retiring for the rest of the event. He had one last hurrah in February 1995, when three living presidents—Clinton, Ford, and Bush—played a round with Hope and the tournament’s defending champion, Scott Hoch. Though he could barely play anymore, Hope puttered around the course with them, hitting most of his drives from the middle of the fairway and skipping a couple of holes. His friend Andrew Coffey, who was at the wheel of his golf cart, had to drive halfway onto the greens, so Bob wouldn’t have to walk too far to putt. Hope was ready to quit after nine holes, but President Clinton was enjoying it so much he said he wanted to play eighteen. “Dammit,” Hope grumbled, as he returned to the course. Hope retired after a few more holes, and President Bush won the presidential match with a round of 92, beating Clinton by a stroke.

  Clinton, a lifelong fan of Hope’s, had first met the comedian in the late seventies, when Clinton was Arkansas governor and they had
dinner together on the town square in Fayetteville after a Hope appearance at the University of Arkansas. A few months after the Palm Springs match, they had another chance to bond on the golf course when Hope was traveling to Washington and called Clinton at the White House to ask if he had time for nine holes. “I practically fell out of my chair,” Clinton recalled. “But it happened to be a day when I had some free time. So I cleared the schedule and took him out to the Army Navy club [in Arlington, Virginia] because it was close.” Though the ninety-two-year-old Hope could barely see, he could still hit the ball. On a narrow 173-yard par three, with woods on the left and a steep hill on the right, Clinton was astonished to see Hope drive the ball dead straight onto the green.

  “He could see the ball below his feet, but he had no distance vision,” Clinton said. “We got up to the green, and the young fellow who was with him was helping him aim his putts. And I said, ‘Bob, you have a twenty-foot putt, slightly uphill, and it’s gonna break about six, maybe eight inches max, to the left.’ He said, ‘I got it.’ The guy lined him up, he hit the ball to two inches, and tapped in for a par. For a guy his age, it was just amazing.”

  Back at NBC, Hope’s specials—now mostly shunted to low-viewership Saturday nights—were getting the worst ratings of his career. After his ninetieth birthday special NBC was rumored to be ready to retire him, but the network was careful not to force the issue. “Brandon Tartikoff regarded Bob Hope as an institution and part of the DNA of NBC,” said Ludwin. “There was never a thought of canceling him.” But clearly he couldn’t continue much longer. In 1995, as he was planning a trip to Europe for a special to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day, Dolores finally threw up her hands. “We’re doing this one,” she said. “But this has got to be the last.” That December, for the first time since 1950, there was no Bob Hope Christmas special. An NBC spokesman explained that a mutual decision had been made to “devote our energies toward specials in 1996.”

  An exit plan was quietly worked out. “There came a point where all the parties involved decided that it was really tough to go forward,” said Ludwin. “We discussed with Linda and the press reps how we wanted to handle it. Because when you’re dealing with someone who has been in business at NBC for six decades, you have to handle it diplomatically.” Ludwin remembered how Lucille Ball, when her ratings at CBS were falling, announced that she was leaving the network. “I thought to myself, ‘What a classy way to handle this. What network could fire Lucille Ball? She had to fire the network.’ So I thought to myself, ‘That’s the way this has to be handled. No one can fire Bob Hope. He has to fire us.’ ”

  One last special was scheduled: a retrospective of Hope’s presidential humor, tied in with his soon-to-be-published book, Dear Prez, I Wanna Tell Ya! On October 23, 1996, one month before the telecast, Hope took out a full-page ad in Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and the Los Angeles Times—paid for by NBC—announcing that it would be his last NBC special. “Guess what? I’ve decided to become a FREE AGENT,” the announcement read. “My thanks to NBC, for making it possible to be part of your lives all these years. It’s been a great ride. Now, caddy, hand me my 7-iron.”

  His publicist Ward Grant stressed that Hope was not retiring, but would be touring to promote his new book, updating his autobiography, and overseeing the release of his specials on home video. Hope was resistant to the bitter end. “It was sort of a mutual thing,” said Linda Hope of the retirement scenario, “although Dad was less mutual about it. If NBC had said, ‘We’ll do another year,’ Dad would have done it.”

  Hope’s final NBC special, Laughing with the Presidents, aired on November 23, 1996. Tony Danza was the host, introducing film clips of Hope’s encounters with presidents and engaging in a bit of carefully edited conversation with him. The good-bye was painless, if anticlimactic. “This TV entry? An amusing look at Hope’s tilting with Presidents,” said Variety in its review. “His comedy and his career? Both terrif.”

  • • •

  The last few years were not pretty. Hope’s eyesight and hearing were going, and signs of dementia were starting to appear. In his few public appearances, at various benefit dinners and ceremonial events, Hope could seem confused or disoriented. His short-term memory was spotty, and he had trouble recognizing people—though it was difficult to tell if the problem was his eyesight or his mind.

  Remarkably, he could still pull himself together in front of a microphone. In January 1997 he appeared briefly onstage at a benefit performance given by Dolores and Rosemary Clooney in Palm Springs. After Bob’s retirement, Dolores had decided to restart her long-dormant singing career, and she recorded an album of standards, Now and Then. She and Clooney then prepared a nightclub act together, which they debuted at Palm Desert’s McCallum Theatre, to a sold-out crowd. At the end of the show they called Bob onstage.

  “Backstage he was not in good shape,” recalled Michael Feinstein, the cabaret singer, who became close to both Bob and Dolores in the later years. “We were worried. But, wouldn’t you know it, once he was introduced, he went right to center stage, took the microphone, and he was right there.” He joined Clooney in a duet of “It’s De-Lovely,” his old number from Red, Hot and Blue. The gimmick was that Bob merely repeated each it’s, with Clooney picking up the rest of the lyrics. Before they started, she took out her score and gave him one the size of a postage stamp. “Can you spare it?” Hope quipped.

  At other times, however, he could seem like a very old man. He was in the audience when Rosemary and Dolores opened their show together at New York City’s Rainbow and Stars. Dolores appeared first, singing “Paper Moon” and “I Thought About You” and teaming with Clooney for Sondheim’s “Old Friend,” before turning the show over to Clooney, the headliner. The New York Times gave Dolores a nice review: “Her timbre was clear and strong, her intonation pitch-perfect,” wrote critic Stephen Holden. But Hope couldn’t help upstaging his wife, even in his dotage. Bill Tush, an entertainment reporter who was covering the event for CNN’s Showbiz Today, recalled the uncomfortable scene when Hope, apparently unable to hear, began talking loudly during Dolores’s numbers. She gamely ignored him, before finishing her set and returning to the table.

  “Mrs. Hope joined Bob at his table and Rosemary sang,” Tush recalled. “Then I could hear him—‘What are you doing? Stop that!’ I looked, and she was rubbing his head, lovingly. ‘Stop kissing me. Stop that!’ It really got embarrassing for everybody, and finally they got up to leave. I couldn’t help but look. When he stood up, his pants were undone. He pulled them up to button them. Meanwhile Rosemary kept the show going. Mrs. Hope and a handler helped Bob out. He was stooped over and still yelling things out, like ‘Leave me alone! I’m okay!’ Out the door they went, and that was the last time I saw Bob Hope. What a way to remember.”

  At home he settled into a comfortable routine. He still slept late, waking between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m. His caretaker, J. Dennis Paulin, would read to him from the morning Los Angeles Times, and large-print editions were made of business documents that he needed to see. He would watch Jeopardy! on TV (with headphones, so he could hear) and still took his late-night walks, though they were usually indoors now—up and down the aisles of the local Vons supermarket in Toluca Lake, or, when he was in Palm Springs, through the terminal building of the Palm Springs Airport. Sometimes, in Toluca Lake, Paulin would let him take the wheel of his golf cart and drive the five blocks to Lakeside for a couple of holes of golf. Paulin had a key to the back gate and could cut onto the course and look for a vacant hole where Bob could play, then take him back to the clubhouse for a fake Brandy Alexander. In 1996, after a lifetime of dilatory churchgoing, Hope acceded to his devout wife’s wishes and was baptized into the Catholic Church.

  Reports of his failing health, along with photos showing his stooped frame and red-rimmed eyes, would occasionally surface in the tabloids, with dire headlines about his “tragic last days.” On June 4, 1998, AP actually reported his death by mistake, whe
n an advance obituary for him was inadvertently posted on the Internet. When the House Republican leader, Representative Dick Armey, heard the news, he passed it on to Representative Bob Stump, the Republican chairman of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, who delivered a eulogy on the floor of the House. “We’re all going to miss him,” said Stump, praising Hope as “the best friend anyone in uniform ever had.” When reporters began phoning, Linda calmly informed them that her father was having breakfast.

  He made a few trips to Washington for events honoring him—including a visit to the White House, where President Clinton signed a congressional resolution making Hope the first Honorary Veteran of the US Armed Forces—but Dolores did most of the talking. After returning from a trip in June 2000, for the opening of the Bob Hope Gallery of Entertainment at the Library of Congress, Hope had a major health scare. Some renovations at the Toluca Lake house were not finished, and the Palm Springs house was closed for the season, so when he returned, Hope moved temporarily into the old house on El Alameda street. There he began having stomach pains and was rushed by ambulance to the Eisenhower Medical Center, suffering from gastrointestinal bleeding. Family spokesmen minimized the event, but he was seriously ill. “He was in very critical condition,” said Paulin. “It was a pretty harrowing event.” Hope recovered, but after that needed full-time nursing care.

  He lingered for three more years—bedridden most of the time, but brought out by Dolores in a wheelchair for family get-togethers. In July 2001, Pentagon officials came to the house in Toluca Lake to present him with the Order of Horatio Gates Gold Medal, for his work raising the morale of US soldiers around the world. In April 2003, as his hundredth birthday approached, NBC marked the occasion with one more tribute special, 100 Years of Hope Humor. He got more than two thousand birthday cards—from President George W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth, among others—and at least thirty-five states proclaimed his birthday “Bob Hope Day.” “His eyes light up with each thing I tell him,” Linda told Variety, “and they bring a big smile to his face.” On the day he turned one hundred, the milestone his grandfather never quite reached, he had his favorite dinner of roast lamb with mint jelly.