Mitchell Leisen didn’t have much fun working on The Big Broadcast of 1938. The Paramount contract director, a former costume and set designer, was best known for stylish romantic comedies such as Hands Across the Table and Easy Living (the latter, with a script by Preston Sturges, one of the high points of 1930s screwball comedy). Now, however, he was stuck directing the fourth in a middling series of musical-comedy revues, which had begun in 1932 with The Big Broadcast, starring Bing Crosby. The top-billed star for the new film was W. C. Fields, returning to the screen after a year’s health layoff, and the cantankerous comedy veteran gave Leisen nothing but trouble. “The most obstinate, ornery son of a bitch I ever tried to work with,” said Leisen, who was so bored with some of Fields’s recycled comedy routines that he fobbed them off on another director, Ted Reed. The film’s initial screening for Paramount executives was “my most embarrassing moment,” Leisen recalled. “The only part that was any good was ‘Thanks for the Memory.’ ”
Leisen had ordered up the song from Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger, the Paramount songwriting team who had written “Please” for Bing Crosby and “Love in Bloom,” Jack Benny’s theme song. Leisen wanted a number for Bob Hope and Shirley Ross, cast as a divorced couple who find themselves together on the same ocean liner embarked on a transatlantic race. The song, Leisen told the composers, needed to reveal the feelings that the couple still had for each other, but subtly and with humor. “It’s not easy to say, ‘I love you,’ without saying it,” said Robin. “But we’ll see what we can do.”
The songwriters spent three weeks working on the number. After they were done, they worried that it wasn’t funny enough. But when Leisen finished listening to the song for the first time, he was wiping away a tear. “No, it’s not funny,” the director said, “but I’ll take it.” He told them to slow down the tempo and asked for some additional lyrics. Then he made them promise not to come to rehearsals until he was ready to shoot the scene.
Rather than prerecord the song and have the actors lip-synch on camera, as was the usual practice, Leisen convinced the studio to let him record it live, to give it more feeling. That meant having a full orchestra onstage, and three cameras rolling simultaneously to capture the actors’ reactions in real time. “I rehearsed Bob and Shirley over and over, until they could give it just the mood I was trying to get across,” Leisen said. Ross was a rising young singing star at Paramount, with several films under her belt, including Waikiki Wedding with Bing Crosby. But Hope was a neophyte in films, and Leisen took him out to lunch to give him some pointers. “In pictures, everything comes through the eyes,” he said. “Try to think through your eyes.”
When Leisen was finally ready to shoot the number, he called in Robin and Rainger. By the end of the scene, Ross was nearly in tears, and so were the songwriters. “We didn’t know we wrote that song,” they said.
The number is set in the ship’s bar, where Hope, playing a radio announcer named Buzz Fielding, meets his ex-wife, Cleo, for a friendly drink. After some talk about a bet Hope has made on the ocean-liner race, they drift into reminiscing about their failed marriage. Ross mentions that she just found “that green tie of yours” while cleaning out an old trunk. “You know something, Buzz?” she adds wistfully. “I kinda miss your singing in the bathtub.” Hope joins in the reverie: “Good old bathtub.” And she: “Good old singing.” They toast, and then Hope begins the song:
Thanks for the memory
Of rainy afternoons, swingy Harlem tunes
Motor trips and burning lips and burning toast and prunes
[She] How lovely it was . . .
The melody glides up the scale with each line, reaching the top at the final “lovely.” The lyrics, bandied back and forth by the two ex-spouses, tick off random memories from their marriage, in classic “list song” fashion. The wit lies in the juxtaposition of the romantic high points and the mundane low ones:
[She] Thanks for the memory
Of faults that you forgave, rainbows on a wave
[He] And stockings in the basin when a fellow needs a shave.
With gentle irony, the song pokes fun at the stiff-upper-lip sophistication of this “modern” couple, who can’t quite acknowledge their own emotions:
[She] We said goodbye with a highball
[He] And I got as high as a steeple
But we were intelligent people
[She] No tears, no fuss, [together, toasting] hooray for us.
When he saw himself on screen later, Hope cringed at how literally he had taken Leisen’s advice about using his eyes: “When I saw the rushes, I was astonished at my galloping orbs. I did everything with them except make them change places.” Hope does appear a little too stage-directed, raising his eyes dreamily toward the sky or forcing a laugh, and Ross actually delivers most of the emotion in the number, her face registering various shades of amusement, annoyance, hurt, and romantic longing. But Hope is charming. He is fully inside his character—toying distractedly with the lemon in his drink, slumping his chin onto his shoulder like a daydreaming kid, shooting an occasional alert glance at Ross in response to one of her lines. At a few points they slip out of the song into brief bits of spoken dialogue:
[She] Letters with sweet little secrets
That couldn’t be put in a day wire
[He] Too bad it all had to go haywire
That’s life, I guess. I love—
Here Hope turns to Ross and finishes the sentence in his normal conversational voice: “—your dress.” “You do?” she responds, flattered. He: “It’s pretty.” She: “Thanks”—and then picking up the melody once again—“for the memory . . .”
This blend of song and conversation, one of the number’s most engaging devices, artfully connects the stylized lyrics with the real, evolving emotions of the couple singing them. At another point, Ross reminisces about “China’s funny walls, transatlantic calls,” and Hope comes back with “That weekend at Niagara when we hardly saw the falls.” Ross again steps out of the melody, reacting to the obvious sexual allusion with a dreamy, sincere “How lovely that was.” Hope responds with a clipped, amusingly smug “Thank you.” The memory of their best night together, evoked in a perfect confluence of song, dialogue, and acting.
In the final verse, the emotional arc is completed. The tone is more intimate, with a sweet diminuendo:
[She] Strictly entre nous, darling how are you?
[He] And how are all those little dreams that never did come true?
[She] Awfully glad I met you, [He] Cheerio, tootle-oo.
On the final “thank you,” Ross, in the midst of leaving the bar, suddenly stops and comes back, collapsing tearfully in Hope’s arms. In just a few minutes, the song has told the story of their relationship, revealed emotions that they have long kept buried, and brought the couple back together. It is one of the most beautifully written and performed musical numbers in all of movies. It was the moment that made Bob Hope a star.
• • •
“I don’t think it’s so much,” Dolores said when Bob first brought a recording of “Thanks for the Memory” home for her to hear. She thought he was getting a solo in the movie, not a duet. A born and bred New Yorker, Dolores was already leery of the move to Hollywood—where Bob was just another movie wannabe, not a Broadway star. She was annoyed that the first thing the studio wanted to mess with was his nose. After testing out various shading and highlighting techniques, the studio’s chief makeup man, Wally Westmore, suggested plastic surgery. Dolores objected, “Bob, your whole personality is in your face. They want to turn you into another leading man. No.”
Hope wasn’t exactly sold on Hollywood either. He was thirty-four years old—practically middle-aged for an actor just starting out in films—and still had a “log-size chip on my shoulder” about Hollywood. He told his agent, Louis Shurr, that he had some money saved up, and if things didn’t work out in California, he was more than ready to go back to New York. “It’s amazing that you can be a star in New York and just another fellow elsewhere,” Hope told a reporter from the New York Daily Mirror. “When my agent called to tell me that I had been signed for the Big Broadcast, I asked him what [Broadway] show he had me booked for after that assignment. ‘Don’t worry about shows,’ he replied. ‘You’re going to be busy in Hollywood for the rest of the season.’ ”
Hope certainly hit the ground running. He and Dolores arrived from New York at the Pasadena train station on Thursday morning, September 9, 1937—greeted by a Paramount publicist and a photographer for the Los Angeles Daily News, which ran a photo of the couple’s arrival the next day. They checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and Bob went into the studio that same afternoon to meet people. Shooting on The Big Broadcast began the following Monday.
For an aspiring film comedian just arriving in Hollywood, Paramount Pictures was a good place to land. Run by an imperious but cultivated Hungarian immigrant named Adolph Zukor, Paramount was among the most prestigious of Hollywood studios, home to such pioneering directors of the silent and early sound eras as Josef von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Rouben Mamoulian, and Cecil B. DeMille. Its impressive roster of stars under contract included Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Maurice Chevalier, Marlene Dietrich, George Raft, and Cary Grant. The studio was especially strong in comedy, having signed up many of the ex-vaudeville comics who were getting into films, including the Marx Brothers (who did their first five films for Paramount before moving over to MGM), W. C. Fields, Mae West, Jack Benny, Martha Raye, and George Burns and Gracie Allen.
What Paramount wasn’t especially good at was nurturing and grooming its stars. In contrast to a studio like MGM, Paramount’s modus operandi, all too often, was simply to throw stars into projects willy-nilly and see what stuck. What’s more, the studio had something of a split personality when it came to comedy. On the one hand, it produced some of the era’s most sophisticated, high-style romantic comedies—the continental “Lubitsch touch.” At the same time, it churned out a host of wild, ramshackle farces—International House, Million Dollar Legs, Six of a Kind—that mixed and matched its comedy stars in seemingly random fashion. Hope had one foot in both camps: he was a gagster from vaudeville, but a sophisticated Broadway-musical star as well. The studio took awhile to figure out just what to do with him.
After a few weeks at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the Hopes rented a house in Beverly Hills from Rhea Gable, Clark’s wife. Dolores was homesick for New York. But even before The Big Broadcast finished shooting, Paramount was lining up more projects for Hope. In November he stepped into a role originally intended for Jack Oakie in an all-star musical comedy called College Swing. In December the studio tapped him to costar with Martha Raye in The Wallflower (later retitled Give Me a Sailor), scheduled to start shooting in the spring. He was being eyed for a Damon Runyon story called Money from Home, and there was talk of teaming him in a musical with Dorothy Lamour. “Bob Hope, fine Broadway comic, has clicked big out here,” New York Daily News columnist Ed Sullivan reported in early January—still a month before Big Broadcast even opened.
Hope did his part to feed the buzz. He hired a publicist from New York named Mack Millar, a well-connected hustler who was close to the major newspaper columnists such as Sullivan and Walter Winchell. Millar planted Hope’s name in the columns and came up with publicity stunts, including a charity golf match between Hope and Bing Crosby—who had reconnected when Hope moved West—with the loser agreeing to work as a stand-in for one day on the winner’s next movie. (Hope lost, 76 to 72, and had to show up on the set of Crosby’s Dr. Rhythm.) The studio played up the friendship between Hope and Crosby, touting Bob as a new challenger to Bing as the “easiest-going actor in Hollywood”:
Hope, like Crosby, is just having a lot of fun out of life. He takes things as they come, worrying more about the size of his golf score than the size of his movie roles. . . . The bizarre clothing of Crosby is completely eclipsed by Hope. As a matter of fact, where Bing’s clothing is a rainbow, Hope’s clothing is an Aurora Borealis. He just can’t be bothered by such things as color ensembles. If he is dressing and needs a tie he picks up the nearest one and puts it on. The same is true in regard to everything from shirts to socks.
Hope’s visibility in Hollywood also got a boost from his radio work. When he moved West in early September, Hope was still a regular on Woodbury soap’s Rippling Rhythm Revue. The show was broadcast from New York on Sunday nights, but NBC agreed to let Hope do his opening monologue live from Hollywood, then feed it to New York via a transcontinental hookup.
But when Hope arrived at NBC’s Hollywood studios for his first show, he was dismayed to find that no studio audience was waiting for him. Insisting that he couldn’t do a monologue without one, he got the NBC ushers to rearrange the rope lines so that the audience leaving Edgar Bergen’s show, taped an hour earlier in the studio next door, would be funneled directly into Hope’s studio. Enough of the confused patrons stuck around to give Hope some live laughs, and the network had a full audience ready for him the following week. By the end of September, however, The Rippling Rhythm Revue was off the air, the latest in a growing trail of canceled Hope radio shows.
Eager to get his stop-and-start radio career on track, Hope hired a new agent back in New York, a young, cigar-smoking go-getter named Jimmy Saphier. “I found him a shrewd boy who knew the business, my kind of guy,” said Hope. Saphier had more connections than Shurr with the ad agencies that controlled most of the programming on radio, and Hope decided to split duties between the two agents: Saphier negotiating his radio deals, while Shurr continued to handle his movie and stage work. Shurr was somewhat dismayed at the newcomer’s taking away a chunk of his Hope business (though Shurr continued to get a share of Hope’s radio deals), but the two agents made an effective and loyal tandem. Both would remain with Hope for the rest of their lives.
Saphier felt strongly that Hope needed to make some changes in his approach to radio, putting less emphasis on sketches and more on his monologues. “I had watched Hope at the Capitol and had seen him in a Broadway musical before I heard him on radio, and I felt it was a shame the home listeners weren’t getting the best of him,” Saphier said. “Radio simply wasn’t using his talents properly. I knew this, and I sensed Bob knew it but didn’t yet know how to overcome it. His work with [his radio foils] was funny, but his strength seemed to me and also to him—eventually—to be centered in what he did best, the monologue.”
Hope took Saphier’s advice and began talking up his new emphasis in the press. “The monologue is now showing signs of being a main comedy trend,” he told Samuel Kaufman of the New York Sun. “I haven’t discarded dialogue and sketches, and I don’t expect to. But I intend giving short monologues prominent spots on all my programs.”
They would, however, be monologues of a new kind—filled not with generic vaudeville-style gags, but with fresh jokes, drawn from the news and from his own real-life experiences. “A comedian won’t be able to take the stage and rattle off story after story or spiel gags without especial point,” he told another reporter. “That’s gone forever. But the monologue in modern dress, clever and smart, is due for a comeback.” Radio columnist Edgar A. Thompson caught the essence of Hope’s new approach: “He had never been able to understand why he could get hearty laughs from the stage or at the banquet table and why his material seemed to fall short at the microphone. He remembered that big talks at parties went along smoothly without any gags or ‘he and she’ jokes. Many of them started out, ‘On my way over here from home I’–and then Hope realized. Every time he got a laugh it was from a situation and not from a gag.”
Hope explicitly invoked Will Rogers, the late monologuist beloved for his homespun commentary on politics and current events. “He took an old form and cloaked it with novelty, gave it vitality,” said Hope. “There was a performer. You get only one like him in a generation.” Yet Hope was Rogers’s logical heir. He adopted the humorist’s everyman approach and topical subject matter (“All I know is what I read in the papers,” went Rogers’s famous line), but added speed and moxie and a vaudeville gagster’s instinct for the laugh line. In doing so, he invented a new kind of monologue—the seeds of modern stand-up comedy.
Hope’s new approach evolved slowly, but it started to become apparent in his next radio job. In December 1937 Saphier convinced Albert Lasker, head of the powerful Chicago-based ad agency Lord & Thomas, to give Hope a couple of guest spots on Your Hollywood Parade, a one-hour variety show sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarettes, a Lord & Thomas client. Hosted by Hollywood musical star Dick Powell, the show was a leisurely mix of songs from new movies, “behind-the-scenes” features on moviemaking, and original playlets featuring Hollywood stars such as Edward G. Robinson. Hope’s role in the show was limited to a single comedy spot, with Powell serving as straight man. Hope hired a writer named Wilkie Mahoney to help him come up with material, and the two would spend two or three late nights a week together, working long after Hope’s day of shooting was done at Paramount.
Hope made his first appearance on Your Hollywood Parade on December 29, 1937, Powell introducing him as a “Broadway comedian exploring Hollywood with gagbook and funny bone.” Hope made jokes about Christmas shopping, tours of movie-star homes, and his own recent arrival in Hollywood. It was hardly Will Rogers material, but at least it was pegged to the real-life Hollywood scene and his own place in it. He was rewarded with a regular spot on the show, and the reviewers began to take notice. “Hope appears too adaptable a comic to be kept out of the general proceedings and tucked away for a few minutes of dialogue,” wrote Variety. The head of Lucky Strike, the show’s sponsor, even wanted Hope to replace Powell as the program’s host, but the movie star’s contract had him locked in.
Your Hollywood Parade lasted only thirteen weeks. But Hope’s stint there impressed Lasker, as well as another important person: Charles Luckman, the marketing wunderkind who had built Pepsodent toothpaste into the bestselling brand in America. Pepsodent, also a Lord & Thomas client, was about to end its nine-year sponsorship of Amos ’n’ Andy, once the top-rated show on radio but now a fading franchise, and the company was looking to shift its dollars to a new program for the fall. Saphier began negotiating to get Bob Hope the starring job.
• • •
The Big Broadcast of 1938 finally opened in February of 1938. Hope’s first feature film is a labored hodgepodge of comedy bits and musical numbers, linked by a silly plot about a transatlantic race between two mammoth ocean liners. Fields, playing a dual role as an ocean-liner magnate and his wastrel son, is at close to his worst, trudging through tired comedy bits (including variations on his pool-room and golf-course routines that he had done often before in films) and interacting little with the rest of the cast. Martha Raye turns up midway through the film, rescued from a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean, and gives it some spark with an acrobatic musical number, “Mama, That Moon Is Here Again,” in which she’s tossed about like a sack of potatoes by a bunch of sailors. There’s a perfunctory romantic subplot involving Dorothy Lamour and Leif Erickson; a Busby Berkeley–style production number celebrating the waltz; a Wagnerian solo from Metropolitan Opera star Kirsten Flagstad; and even an animated cartoon, to go with a musical number by Shep Fields and His Rippling Rhythm Orchestra.
Hope has more screen time than anyone else but Fields, and he’s considerably more lively. He opens the film in alimony jail: “I had a little trouble keeping a wife and the government on one salary,” he quips, looking stylishly disheveled in a suit jacket and open-collar white shirt. Actually, there are three ex-wives, none of whom will bail him out. Ross plays wife No. 3, and the caustic push-pull of their relationship is established right at the start. “Remember the last time we were in jail?” Hope asks. “Our wedding night,” she responds drily. “Did you ever manage to find the marriage license?” Hope: “Gee, that was about the maddest house detective I ever saw.”
Hope eventually gets sprung from jail and boards one of the ocean liners, serving as radio broadcaster for the race and emcee for the shipboard entertainment. He has some uninspired comedy business with a sidekick played by Ben Blue, does a comedy bit with his old radio foil Honey Chile, and shows off some steps in the big waltz number. But his duet with Ross in “Thanks for the Memory” is the film’s high point. Al Jolson had actually introduced the song on radio the previous December, predicting that it would be the “big hit tune of 1938.” But it took Hope and Ross’s lovely handling of it on-screen to make the prediction come true.
The movie got mixed reviews. “All loose ends and tatters, not too good at its best, and downright bad at its worst,” scoffed Frank Nugent in the New York Times. But nearly everyone singled out Hope and Ross’s number as the film’s bright spot. “You’ll rave over Bob Hope and Shirley Ross warbling ‘Thanks for the Memory,’ ” wrote Ed Sullivan. Hedda Hopper proclaimed, “Bob is our American Noël Coward.” The song spent ten weeks on radio’s Your Hit Parade, three weeks in the No. 1 spot. What may have put it over the top was a love letter from Damon Runyon, who raved about the song in his syndicated newspaper column, the Brighter Side, on March 13, 1938:
Our favorite gulp of the moment is something called “Thanks for the Memory.” A gulp is a song of the type that makes you keep swallowing that old lump in your throat. We have always been a dead cold setup for a good gulp. . . . Mr. Hope is no great shakes as a singer, though he is as good a light comedian as there is around. He sort of recites his lyrics, but he does it well, and that Miss Ross really can turn on when it comes to singing a gulp. If we had a lot of money we would hire the pair of them to go around with us singing “Thanks for the Memory” at intervals for the next month.
The Big Broadcast of 1938 was Paramount’s biggest box-office hit of the winter season—and the highest grossing of all the Big Broadcast films (though it would be the last). The studio publicity machine churned out stories by and about the film’s new star: Hope on the differences between Hollywood and Broadway, for example, or Hope’s guide to comedy slang. He became a hot attraction at benefit dinners around town: emcee for a Film Welfare League dinner in February, host of a Temple of Israel benefit in March, guest of honor at the Professional Music Men of America banquet in April, where he was made an “honorary crooner” for singing “Thanks for the Memory.” Hope was doing a monologue at the Turf Club Ball in Del Mar when Al Jolson turned to George Jessel and said, “Move over, boys.” It was the old guard acknowledging a new star had arrived.
On-screen, however, Hope had trouble following up his Big Broadcast success. His second film, College Swing, which opened in April, was another star-packed musical comedy, with Gracie Allen as a student at a fusty New England college who must pass her final exams to earn an inheritance. Hope’s part was originally so small that he went to producer Lewis Gensler—who had worked with him on Broadway in Ballyhoo of 1932—to get it beefed up. Cast as Gracie’s tutor and business manager (George Burns is also in the film, but on this rare occasion is not Gracie’s partner), Hope has mostly straight-man duty—“a pleasant comedian completely bested by bad material,” wrote Howard Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune. But Hope does get rewarded with the film’s best musical number: a peppy Burton Lane–Frank Loesser duet, “How’d Ya Like to Love Me,” which he sings with Martha Raye as they cavort around his office, tear through assorted props, and exit through a glass door, munching bananas.
Hope’s next film, Give Me a Sailor, teamed him with Raye again. He and Jack Whiting play a pair of brothers in the Navy who battle over two sisters: one a good-looking prima donna (Betty Grable), the other a plain-Jane homebody (Raye). It is mainly Raye’s picture, with Hope doing his best to make sense of a frantic and convoluted plot that culminates with Raye’s winning a “beautiful legs” contest (in a movie with Betty Grable!). Hope shows some spirit, and even a little emotional depth, as a guy who discovers that the ugly duckling is really a swan. But it was another slapdash B-picture, which got a tepid reception and did little for Hope’s prospects.
In the spring, Paramount was dithering on whether to pick up Hope’s option for another year. There was talk that studio executives thought he was too similar to Jack Benny, or that his sashaying walk (which seemed modeled on Benny’s) made him look too fey. Shurr tried to shop Hope to other studios, but all he got was an offer from Universal for $10,000—just half of what he was getting at Paramount—to costar in a picture with Loretta Young. And Young vetoed him in favor of David Niven.
“Thanks for the Memory” saved Hope again. Paramount had the rights to a play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett about a bickering married couple called Up Pops the Devil. To get some more mileage out of the song that had launched Hope in movies, someone had the bright idea to retool the story as a vehicle for Hope and his Big Broadcast costar Shirley Ross and retitle it, shamelessly, Thanks for the Memory. In June of 1938 the studio gave the film a green light and picked up Hope’s option at the same time.
Secure in his future at the studio, at least for a while, Hope got set for a busy summer. In June he reprised his Broadway role as Huck Haines in the West Coast premiere of Roberta at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. As soon as the ten-day engagement was finished, he flew to New York to headline a stage show at the Loews State Theatre, with former child actor Jackie Coogan as his featured guest star. Hope basked in his return to the New York vaudeville stage, sprinkling his monologue with cracks about his budding movie career (“Paramount signed me in one of my weaker moments—I was starving”) and his new Hollywood surroundings (“Everyone goes to bed at nine o’clock out there—with each other”).
Most notably, he closed the show with new lyrics for what had become his signature song:
Thanks for the memories
Good audience of the State, your welcome has been great
I hope I can return again on some near future date
I thank you so much
It was the first of thousands of renditions of “Thanks for the Memory” that Hope would use to close his TV, radio, and stage shows for the rest of his career. Only a few months after introducing the song in The Big Broadcast of 1938, Hope had discovered its amazing adaptability, as well as its value as a branding tool. Robin’s delicately ironic lyrics would be replaced time and again by greeting-card sentiments, syrupy tributes, and outright plugs. But “Thanks for the Memory” proved to be the most enduring and versatile theme song in show-business history. And it was all Hope’s.
• • •
Back in Los Angeles, Bob and Dolores were settling into their new life. Bob joined Lakeside, the golf club in Toluca Lake that Crosby had introduced him to, and whose members also included many other golf-playing (non-Jewish) Hollywood celebrities, among them Douglas Fairbanks, Wallace Beery, W. C. Fields, and Oliver Hardy. The Hopes rented a house on Navaho Street, just a few blocks from the club, while they looked to build a permanent home in Toluca Lake, just over the hill from Hollywood.
To help manage his expanding career, Hope gave a call to his brother Jack, who was back in Ohio working in their brother Fred’s meat business. Three years older than Bob, Jack was the sibling he felt the closest to. They had shared a bedroom as kids and once stayed together in the same New York City hotel room when both were looking for work. (They had only enough money for one pair of dress pants, so they would trade off wearing it for job interviews.) Jack, an affable, blond-haired ladies’ man, who was in between two of his eventual five marriages, quit his job, hopped in his 1937 Pontiac, and drove out to Los Angeles. Bob put him to work in various roles—producer, advance man, consigliere, and all-purpose assistant, another member of Hope’s growing entourage who would remain with him for life.
In the meantime, Hope finally got the break he had been waiting for in radio. Early in the summer of 1938 Saphier closed a deal to give Hope the starring role in a new comedy-variety show sponsored by Pepsodent and scheduled to air Tuesday nights on NBC starting in September.
Pepsodent and its ad agency, Lord & Thomas, had considered Milton Berle and Fred Allen for the job, and they were taking something of a risk with Hope. They thought he would appeal to a young audience, but feared that his cocky, fast-talking radio persona might be too abrasive for Middle America. They told Saphier that Hope needed to be more self-deprecating—that he should make himself the butt of jokes, the way Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen did. Saphier relayed this in a letter to Hope, stressing that he should take care “to prevent your being a smart aleck . . . as only sympathetic comedians have a chance for long life on the air.”
In launching his new show, Hope had a daunting task. Most comics in radio came equipped with an established character or familiar running gags: Jack Benny’s cheapskate, or the comic sparring matches between Edgar Bergen and his monocled dummy, Charlie McCarthy. Hope had no such crutches; he had to build his show practically from the ground up, with jokes drawn, not from the comedian’s self-contained radio community, but from the outside world.
To do that, he needed writers, and he hired more of them than anyone else in radio. They were mostly young guns, writers who were hungry and not too expensive. He paid them as little as $50 or $100 a week—low for the time, but a sacrifice for Hope, since it all came out of his starting salary of $1,500 a week. “No comic had ever tried to maintain a staff that size, especially not out of his own end,” Hope said. “But I wanted to be number one, and I knew that jokes were the key. . . . All these comedy minds were necessary if I was to carry out my plan, which was almost unheard of at that time. It was to go on the air every week with topical jokes written right up to airtime. And some even after.”
Hope’s charter staff of writers included Wilkie Mahoney, his Hollywood Parade cohort; Al Schwartz, who had written gags for Walter Winchell in New York; and the team of Milt Josefsberg and Melville Shavelson, who had impressed Hope with some material they wrote for his stage show at the Loews State. A few weeks into the season he added Sherwood Schwartz, Al’s younger brother, who was studying for a master’s degree in biological sciences at the University of Southern California; Norman Sullivan, another New York radio writer; and Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, two aspiring playwrights from Chicago who had written for Milton Berle. The staff would grow and evolve over the years, as some left and others replaced them, but this was the founding core of the biggest and most storied writing crew in all of radio.
For his new show, Hope also knew he needed a strong supporting cast. He looked first for a bandleader with some personality who could also serve as a comedy foil. After coming close to hiring Ozzie Nelson, Hope settled on Edgar Clyde “Skinnay” Ennis, a drawling, rail-thin North Carolina native who had appeared in Hope’s film College Swing. As announcer, Hope chose honey-voiced Bill Goodwin, who could also banter with him and take part in sketches. For more comic support, he hired Jerry Colonna, a former trombone player who looked like a refugee from Mack Sennett silent comedies, with bulging eyes, a walrus mustache, and a sirenlike voice that could hold notes for longer than most opera singers. Colonna used to do Nelson Eddy parodies at parties, and Bing Crosby once brought him on his radio show, introducing him as a famous Italian tenor making his US debut and even inviting prominent music critics to the show. (Some of them apparently thought he was for real.) Colonna had done a funny bit in College Swing, playing a zany professor of music who does a florid rendition of the Crosby song “Please,” and he was one of Hope’s most inspired additions. Rounding out the team of regulars was a close-harmony singing group, Six Hits and a Miss, who did backup vocals, an occasional featured song, and the commercials on the show (which, as was common in radio, were all performed live).
The Pepsodent Show debuted on Tuesday night, September 27, 1938, broadcast live from a rented NBC studio on Sunset Boulevard, at seven o’clock Pacific time—10:00 p.m. eastern time, following NBC’s popular comedy Fibber McGee and Molly. For his theme song, Hope had originally intended to use a rewritten version of “Wintergreen for President,” a song from the Gershwin musical Of Thee I Sing. But when he found out the rights would cost him $250 a show, he opted instead for the cheaper, and more obvious, alternative, “Thanks for the Memory.” The vocal group opens the show:
We bid you all hello, and welcome to our show
May we present for Pepsodent, a guy you ought to know.
Hope then chimes in:
Ah, thank you, so much . . .
Tonight is the night and I hope you will tune in on us every Tuesday
Let’s make it your chase-away-blues day
By listening in, when we begin . . .
“Well, here we are,” Hope begins his first monologue, “with a brand-new sponsor, a brand-new program, a brand-new cast, and ready to tell some . . . jokes.” The pause is the first sign that Hope has taken his sponsor’s advice to make himself the self-deprecating butt of gags. (It’s also accurate; few of the jokes in the first show are new, or very good.) The show follows the usual format for comedy-variety shows of the era: an opening monologue, followed by a musical number from the house band (Ennis and his group do Irving Berlin’s “Change Partners”) and then Hope’s introduction of the week’s guest star—Constance Bennett, of the popular Topper films, on the opener. There are two comedy sketches: Bob and Connie go to a girls’ baseball game, and Bob plays the head of a detective agency assigned to find a little girl’s lost basket (a play on Ella Fitzgerald’s hit song “A-Tisket, A-Tasket”). Colonna gets a featured spot, trading quips with Hope and then launching into a song with his trademark hyperextended opening wail—“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, sweet mystery of life . . .” The only topical joke is a throwaway gag in the baseball sketch. “Who’s that girl going around and around without stopping at home?” asks Bill Goodwin. “That’s Mrs. Roosevelt,” says Hope—a reference to Eleanor Roosevelt’s peripatetic travel schedule. Hope closes with a slower-tempo reprise of “Thanks for the Memory,” and that’s the show.
Variety was impressed: “That small speck going over the center-field fence is the four-bagger Hope whammed out his first time at bat for Pepsodent. If he can keep up the pace he’ll get as much word-of-mouth for 1938–39 as Edgar Bergen got for 1937–38. He sounded like success all the way.” But Hope knew that the show needed to improve. In succeeding weeks, as he and the writers grew more comfortable, the material got better, as well as more current. When California had a lot of rain, there were rainstorm jokes: “Cop gave me a ticket for crossing a street against the tide.” During Christmas shopping season, Hope talked about the crowds at the post office: “Somebody shoved me, I went right through the parcel post window. Cost me sixty dollars to get back to Hollywood.” When he went to the racetrack at Santa Anita, he joked about his pokey horses: “I should have known better when I saw the jockey carrying an overnight bag.”
The gag lines had more snap than wit, but Hope delivered them with crisp self-assurance, and faster than anybody else on the air. Soon they were calling him Rapid Robert. “My idea was to do [the monologue] as fast as I could and still have the listeners at home get it and let the live audience in the studio laugh too,” said Hope. “Unless the live audience took the play away from me with their laughter, I raced.” Hope was a good editor, with a sure sense of the quickest path from setup to laugh. “When you wrote for Hope, you learned not to put one word extra in,” said Sherwood Schwartz. “Electronic sound, radio, was a new medium, and Hope was the smartest guy in it. He knew how to pack it in, pace it, and fill it. You had to write all bone and make a great joke in twenty-four words or less.”
Everything about him was fresh and modern. Benny had the slow pace and fussy manners of your old spinster aunt, with gags about his underground money vault and antique Maxwell car. Radio’s popular comedy teams—Bergen and McCarthy, Burns and Allen—sounded as if they might still be doing two-a-days at the Palace Theatre in New York. Fred Allen, probably the most brilliant radio wit of the era, was a more pointed satirist than Hope would ever be, but he was an acquired taste, too cerebral for the mob. Hope was brash but chummy, in the know but available to all.
As the season went on, the show began to develop recurring comic themes—Hope’s cheapness, for example, and his obsession with Hollywood glamour girls such as Madeleine Carroll and Hedy Lamarr. Colonna became a big hit, opening his segments with a hearty “Greetings, Gate!”—an obscure bit of jazz-era slang that Colonna turned into a national catchphrase—and needling Hope with his insults, puns, and nonsensical stories. Hope joked easily with guest stars such as Olivia de Havilland, Chico Marx, and Betty Grable. He had a special rapport with Judy Garland, the sixteen-year-old MGM star best known (in her pre–Wizard of Oz days) for her schoolgirl love song, “Dear Mr. Gable.” In her guest appearance in March 1939, Garland confesses a crush on Hope. He gently tries to dissuade her. She asks if he’s “somebody else’s crush.” He replies, “I was, but she married me.” Disappointed, Judy laments that she’s “in between—not old enough to be a glamour girl, and too old to go around with dolls.” Hope’s retort: “I hope I’m never too old to go around with dolls.”
Hope established a working routine with his writers that would change little through the years. For each week’s monologue, Hope would suggest several topics—his trip to Palm Springs, say, or the Rose Bowl game, or a Hollywood star’s wedding. Each writer or writing team (they worked mostly in pairs) would churn out a dozen or more jokes for each topic. Hope would then gather the writers in his living room and read all the jokes aloud, winnowing them down to his favorites and putting together a rough cut of the monologue. He would test out the jokes in a run-through of the entire show on Sunday night, done before a live audience and often running an hour or more—followed by a late-night session with the writers, in which he’d make the final selections for the monologue and do some more fine-tuning.
Hope’s focus was intense and all-consuming. He was on the job 24/7, and he demanded the same from his writers. If he ran into one of them at a restaurant eating lunch, he’d ask why he wasn’t working. When Shavelson and Josefsberg came to see Hope on the afternoon they arrived in Los Angeles, “he seemed a little concerned that we had spent the whole morning of our arrival without writing a line,” Shavelson recalled. “Later in our career I learned that it was unwise to show up at a story conference with Hope sporting a tan, indicating a wasted day at the beach to his expert eye.”
Hope could call at almost any hour of the day or night to suggest a new topic or ask for some new jokes, due first thing in the morning—or sooner. “He had no sense of time,” said Sherwood Schwartz. “Whenever he wanted something, he wanted it.” When they got together for meetings at his house, Hope wouldn’t even offer snacks. If he got hungry, he’d send out Schwartz, the junior writer on the staff, with thirty-five cents to buy him a pineapple sundae, then eat the whole thing himself. (Years later, when Schwartz was no longer working for Hope, he walked in on a Hope writing session in New York and as a gag brought along a pineapple sundae for him. Hope didn’t bat an eye. “What took you so long?” he said.)
He was a genial, easygoing boss, but often self-absorbed and insensitive. On payday, Hope used to stand at the top of the circular staircase in his house, make paper airplanes out of the writers’ paychecks, and float them downstairs, forcing the writers to grovel on the floor for their wages. He joked that he wanted to give them some exercise. It was a gag, but some of the writers were offended, taking it as a sign of his disdain. (After the story got around, Hope stopped doing it.)
Hope had other ways of lording it over his writers. On Shavelson’s first day on the job after arriving in California, he told Hope that he had just moved into an apartment and was waiting for his fiancée to come out from New York. Hope brightened and asked if he could borrow the key to his place that night. “I’ll leave it in the mailbox when I leave around midnight,” Hope said. The cowed young writer, in a real-life version of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, had to give up his apartment to his boss and wander the streets until midnight. When he returned, he found the key in the mailbox as promised, the bed unmade, and two sets of wet footprints leading from the shower to the bed.
Hope’s sexual dalliances were well-known and discreetly ignored by his writers. “We’d go to a hotel, I swear to you, outside his room were three, four, five young, beautiful girls, waiting to be picked by him to come in,” said Schwartz. “That’s just how it was.” Hope would often call writers’ meetings for the evening, then arrive an hour or two late. “What we didn’t realize for a long time was that it was Bob’s excuse for getting out of the house,” said Shavelson. “So when he finished with the girl, he’d show up at the meeting and we would have all the jokes ready for him.” Such antics were taken for granted, regarded as a perk of fame. “It never occurred to us to be embarrassed or guilty,” said Shavelson. “This was show business. He was a star enjoying his stardom. All men would do the same with his charm and opportunities.”
Despite the indignities, the grueling hours, and the sometimes overbearing ego, most of the writers enjoyed working with Hope. Shavelson remained associated with him for years, writing and directing several of his movies and ghostwriting one of his books. (Yet he got bleeding ulcers while still in his twenties, and when asked what caused them, Shavelson would say, “Two things: Sam Goldwyn and Bob Hope.”) Sherwood Schwartz left Hope to go into the Army during World War II, and the star was not pleased when, on his return, Schwartz said he wasn’t coming back to work for him. (Schwartz went into sitcoms and later created Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch.) Still, Schwartz loved his time with Hope. “There was no separation, no wall,” he said. “He was detached, but you never had a feeling that he looked down on you just because you were a writer. He was really quite incredible.”
No two writers had a more ambivalent attitude toward Hope than Norman Panama and Melvin Frank. They graduated together from the University of Chicago and intended to go to New York to write socially relevant plays. Instead, they moved to Los Angeles to see if they could make money writing for radio. After supplying gags for Milton Berle, they got hired by Hope at $50 a week, with a promised raise to $62.50 after three weeks. Frank, a left-wing political idealist who was attending Communist Party meetings at the time, scorned the radio show as “an amazing bit of capitalist excess” and had mixed feelings about his boss. “Hope is the ordinary actor type—and he’s not bad as such,” he wrote in his journal. “Spoiled, of course, and a complete egoist, he is inconsiderate of people close to him (he treats his older brother [Jack], a man shell-shocked in the war, with complete disdain) and has been working Norm and me 14 and 15 hours a day every day.”
If Hope knew about their left-wing politics, it didn’t seem to bother him; they could turn out the jokes. Panama and Frank left Hope within a year, unhappy over their low pay. Yet they were back two years later writing a movie for him, My Favorite Blonde, and continued to work on Hope films through the 1950s. “My father really loved Hope,” said Frank’s daughter, Elizabeth Frank, an author and literature professor at Bard College. “He thought of him as his creative father, as the embodiment of everything that moved my father about certain aspects of American identity, that transcended ethnicity, the heat that melted the melting pot.”
Hope’s own politics were largely undefined at this point: a conservative, but also a fan of President Roosevelt’s and a union supporter. He was hardly a corporate lackey, often tangling with his sponsor and the network over his suggestive material. “He still had a tendency to go overboard on the sexy innuendos,” recalled Wally Bunker, an NBC executive who was in the control room during The Pepsodent Show’s early years. “During rehearsals the NBC [censor] would say to Hope, ‘You can’t use that word.’ And Hope would snap back, ‘I’m going to use it anyway.’ ” Once the offending lines were bleeped out a couple of times, Hope would usually relent. But he always bristled at interference from the corporate suits. Sherwood Schwartz recalled a writers’ meeting in which Tom McAvity, the ad-agency executive who oversaw The Pepsodent Show, suggested that Hope ought to downplay his girl-chasing gags and try to develop a more wholesome image. Hope exploded, according to Schwartz, pushing McAvity against the wall and telling him hotly, “This is what I do. I tell jokes. I’m not gonna sit down and invent a character because you think it’s better.”
Whatever Hope was doing was working. A 1939 poll of radio critics ranked Hope fourth on a list of the best comedians on the air (behind Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and Edgar Bergen), quite an achievement for a relative newcomer. His ratings, while still well behind the more established hit shows, were moving up steadily. After a string of false starts and ill-suited vehicles, Hope finally had a radio show that looked as if it was going to stick. And it did, for seventeen years.
• • •
The fourth Hope film to be released in his breakthrough year of 1938, Thanks for the Memory, opened in November. Hope and Shirley Ross play New York newlyweds who are having trouble paying the rent on their improbably ritzy penthouse apartment. He’s a struggling writer trying to finish his novel, and she’s a former model who goes back to work to support him. The film is a curdled bit of late-thirties romantic fluff, with a parade of stock Depression-era comic characters: the wisecracking best-friend couple (the wife played by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who gave the film plenty of coverage in her newspaper column); a kept man and his rich battle-ax of a wife; and a tipsy swell in top hat and tails who keeps wandering in and out. Patricia “Honey Chile” Wilder, Hope’s old radio foil, even shows up as a flighty, flirty neighbor with bats in her apartment.
The marital misunderstandings are drawn out mainly to justify a reprise of the title song, inserted clumsily near the end and sung by the bickering couple from either side of a locked bedroom door. This time the lyrics are more bitter than ironic—
Thanks for the memory
Of quarts of gin and rye, how you’d alibi
And how you swore the night you wore my mother’s Christmas tie
—before some last-minute contortions to get the couple back together.
The film’s real musical highlight, however, comes earlier, when Hope and Ross are still in their lovey-dovey stage. After a night of partying, they collapse on their balcony, share a cigarette, and sing Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser’s wonderful “Two Sleepy People.” Though it lacks the emotional complexity of “Thanks for the Memory,” it is an even more affecting song, with its lovely, lulling melody and cozy, romantic lyrics:
Here we are, out of cigarettes
Holding hands and yawning, look how late it gets
Hope and Ross recycle some of the same devices they used in their original version of “Thanks for the Memory”—bits of dialogue interspersed with the lyrics, a couple of jokes tossed in. But Hope is warmer and more relaxed than before—playful with some lyrics (“kaarazy in the head”), caressing others with real feeling, totally winning from start to finish.
Thanks for the Memory was the first Hope film in which he’s the undisputed star, and the critics were pleased. “In previous pictures, in which he was smothered by poor scripts or Martha Raye, it has largely been a case of Hope deferred,” wrote Frank Nugent in the New York Times, “but in Thanks for the Memory, with a feather-brained story, an arsenal of effective gags at his disposal and no ‘Big Broadcast’ trappings to stumble over, Bob assumes his rightful stature as the most debonair and delightful of the screen’s romantic comedians.” Though not a very good film or a big hit, Thanks for the Memory seemed to steady Hope and promise better things.
Hope’s rising profile in Hollywood was confirmed in February 1939, when he made his first appearance at the Academy Awards. The Oscars were just ten years old, and the annual awards dinner, held that year at the Biltmore Hotel, was still largely a closed industry event. Hope’s role was limited to handing out the awards for short subjects. But he was ushered in to the strains of “Thanks for the Memory”—which had won an Oscar for Best Original Song earlier in the evening—and he made a few jokes that went over well with the Hollywood insiders in the room: “Looks like Bette Davis’s garage,” he quipped when he saw the table full of Oscars, a reference to Davis’s two Best Actress wins in the past four years. “Bob Hope didn’t get an Oscar,” wrote Variety the next day, “but deserved one for a slick bit of nonsense that injected persiflage into the ceremony when it showed signs of lagging.”
Hope’s own film career, however, was still struggling to get on track. Thanks for the Memory was followed in 1939 by two more negligible B-pictures: Never Say Die, with Hope as a rich hypochondriac at a Swiss spa who thinks he’s dying, and Some Like It Hot (later retitled Rhythm Romance, to distinguish it from the infinitely better 1959 Billy Wilder film), in which he costars once again with Shirley Ross and plays the fast-talking owner of a failing carnival. Both were duds at the box office, continuing Hope’s string of disappointments since The Big Broadcast. All six of his films to that point, moreover, seemed like throwbacks to an increasingly outdated film era: stylized romantic comedies with glamorous settings (an ocean liner, a Manhattan penthouse, a European spa), stock comedy characters, and an air of effete, Depression-era escapism. Hope glided easily through these films, but they gave him little chance to develop a distinctive personality or establish any real connection with the audience. He said the funny lines, sang the songs, kissed the girl at the end, and moved on to the next project.
But in April 1939, he began shooting a new film that would change all that. It was an adaptation of John Willard’s Broadway play The Cat and the Canary, a haunted-house melodrama that had been filmed once before, as a silent thriller in 1927. Paramount decided to retool it as a comedy for Hope and Martha Raye, but the female lead wound up going instead to Paulette Goddard, a Paramount star who was waiting to shoot The Great Dictator with her husband, Charlie Chaplin. When Hope met Chaplin, his boyhood idol, during the filming, the great comedian told Hope that he had seen some of the rushes. “I want you to know that you are one of the best timers of comedy I’ve ever seen,” Chaplin said. Hope was thrilled, and Chaplin was right. The film would rejuvenate Hope’s movie career.
But first he took a vacation. Hope had been working almost nonstop since arriving in Hollywood, shooting seven feature films and launching a new radio show in just twenty-one months. When The Pepsodent Show went on summer hiatus at the end of the 1938–39 season, he and Dolores decided to take a break with a trip to England—Hope’s first visit to the country of his birth since sailing for America with the family in 1908.
Hope could never relax much on vacations, and he packed this one, typically, with plenty of work. On the way to New York, where they were scheduled to sail for England on August 2, Hope was booked for stage appearances in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Atlantic City. Joined onstage by Colonna and Dolores (and his brother Jack pitching in as a stooge), Hope drew big crowds, evidence of the growing popularity of his radio show. At the State Lake Theater in Chicago, Hope’s show earned $44,500 for the July 4th week—beating Jack Benny, who took in $35,000 a week later. In Chicago, Pepsodent’s top executives threw a dinner party for Hope aboard the company yacht on Lake Michigan. Along with an official renewal for a second season of The Pepsodent Show, they gave him a bon-voyage gift of two round-trip tickets to Europe and $25,000 in spending money once he got there. “A little pin money to keep you in cigars and cigarettes,” wrote Pepsodent president Kenneth Smith. “Dolores,” Hope told his wife, “start brushing four times a day.”
After Chicago, Bob and Dolores made a stop in Cleveland to see the family. The Hope clan there had dwindled since Avis’s death in 1934. His father, seemingly lost since his wife’s death, outlasted her by only three years and died in 1937. Three Hope brothers (Jack, Jim, and George) were now living in California, leaving only Ivor and Fred holding the fort in Cleveland, with Sid raising a family on his farm 150 miles away in northwest Ohio. Bob and Dolores got the Ohio clan together for a family dinner at the Hotel Cleveland, before leaving for New York with one family member in tow: Bob’s Uncle Frank, Harry’s brother, who joined them on the trip to England.
In New York, Hope was honored with “Bob Hope Day” at the New York World’s Fair, and then settled in for a two-week engagement at the Paramount Theater. “As always, Hope isn’t inclined to work too hard, but he has an ingratiating personality and an effective comedy style,” Variety wrote of his show. “He’s even better than before he went to the Coast—and that’s plenty good enough.” In an interview backstage with a New York Times reporter, Hope was the picture of relaxed self-confidence, talking about his fast-moving career in between sprints on and off the stage. “I’m used to this sort of thing,” said Hope, “I love it. Keeps a guy on his toes, you know. There’s nothing as pleasant as the sound of applause when you’re hitting on all six.” And he was.
War clouds were gathering in Europe as the Hopes sailed for England aboard the French liner Normandie on August 2, 1939. The passenger list included such Hollywood stars as Norma Shearer, George Raft, Madeleine Carroll, Charles Boyer, and Edward G. Robinson, along with US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. After docking in Southampton, the Hopes took a train to London, where they checked into the Berkeley Hotel. They went to the theater, played golf (Hope hit five different courses during his two weeks there), visited Bob’s hometown of Eltham, and took a trip up to Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, where his ninety-six-year-old grandfather, James, lived, still riding a bicycle every day. A crowd of relatives gathered in a local pub to see their famous American cousin, now the talk of Hollywood.
After their stay in Britain, Bob and Dolores sailed across the Channel to Paris. They had barely checked in at the George V Hotel when they got disturbing news. Adolf Hitler’s army was threatening to invade Poland, and the Hollywood studios were suddenly nervous that so many of their traveling stars might be stranded in Europe if war broke out. “Studios Call Stars Back from War-Menaced Europe,” read the headline in the Los Angeles Times on August 26: “Crisp instructions were sent to traveling motion-picture notables, most of them in England and France. ‘Book passage on first available American-owned ship,’ were the cabled messages.”
The Hopes cut short their Paris stay, returned to England, and secured one of the last cabins left aboard the Queen Mary, set to sail from Southampton on August 30. Among the 2,331 passengers who jammed into the ship (including 250 who slept on cots in the public areas) were financier J. P. Morgan Jr., Hollywood studio chief Harry Warner, and Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front.
On September 1, two days after they set sail, German forces invaded Poland. Two days later, at around eight o’clock on Sunday morning, Dolores was at mass when she heard the news that Britain had declared war on Germany. She rushed back to their cabin to tell Bob. He got dressed, went out on deck, and later recalled the tense scene: “Many of the British people were in tears; women and men too. Nobody was saying anything. They just sat around thinking. I guess they knew that a lot of their people and their relatives were going to be killed before things were better again.” King George VI’s speech to the nation was broadcast aboard the ship around lunchtime. When it was over, the passengers stood and sang “God Save the King.” The captain announced that for the rest of the voyage the ship would sail without lights, for fear of German submarines.
The captain asked Hope if he would do a show for the passengers that night. He tried to beg off, saying he didn’t think it was time for comedy, but Harry Warner convinced him that a little entertainment might boost morale. Hope did an impromptu show, ad-libbing a few jokes about their predicament. “My steward told me when I got on board, if anything happens, it’s women and children first,” he quipped, “but the captain said in your case you can have your choice.” He closed with “Thanks for the Memory,” with new lyrics he had penned himself that afternoon:
Thanks for the memory
Of this great ocean trip, on England’s finest ship
Though they packed ’em to the rafters, they never made a slip . . .
Thanks for the memory
Some folks slept on the floor, some in the corridor;
But I was more exclusive, my room had “Gentlemen” above the door
Ah, thank you so much
When the ship docked safely in New York on September 4, the captain gave every passenger a copy of Hope’s lyrics as a memento of the trip.
• • •
Back in New York, Bob and Dolores found a message waiting for them. They had a new baby.
Dolores had grown increasingly frustrated at her inability to have a child. While they were still living in New York, according to a cousin, she even pleaded with her sister Mildred, who had one son and was pregnant again, not to go ahead with a planned abortion and to give her the baby instead. Mildred refused. Finally, Dolores began looking into adoption. At the suggestion of George Burns and Gracie Allen, she contacted the Cradle, a well-known adoption agency in Evanston, Illinois, founded in 1923 by Florence Walrath. During their stop in Chicago on the way to New York, she got Bob to go with her for a screening interview.
“We were getting along fine and I wasn’t too keen on the idea,” Hope wrote, with unaccustomed candor, in his memoir. “I was content with a wife and show business and golf. But after five years of being nudged by Dolores, I was talked into visiting the Cradle.” While they were traveling in Europe, a baby girl was found for them, and they made a stop in Evanston on their way home to see her. They returned to Los Angeles while the legal arrangements were being completed, and Dolores came back later to pick up their new eight-week-old baby daughter, whom they named Linda Theresa.
The family addition didn’t put much of a crimp in Hope’s peripatetic work schedule. Just days after his return to Los Angeles, he went to San Francisco to do a week of stage shows at the Golden Gate Theater, also making several appearances at the San Francisco World’s Fair and playing in a charity golf tournament. Then it was back to Los Angeles to start work on the new season of The Pepsodent Show.
Some important additions were made to the show in its second season. Judy Garland, who had worked so well with Hope when she guested the previous season, was brought back as the regular singer. “My schoolteacher’s happy I’m on the program,” the seventeen-year-old star of The Wizard of Oz said brightly on the season opener. “She says I ought to be glad to take anything to get started.” Her rapport with Hope was obvious; she giggled girlishly at his jokes, and he playfully called her Jude or Judith. She often poked fun at his image as a wannabe Romeo. In one sketch he takes her to the high school prom in a broken-down jalopy. Judy: “This car is uncomfortable. What’s covering the springs?” Bob: “You.” It was sweet, funny, and blessedly free of any sexual innuendo. (She was too young for any serious moves—though Hope years later confided to a friend that Garland showed up one night at his hotel room door, and he had to turn her away.)
Also joining the show in its second season were Elvia Allman and Blanche Stewart, who played two shrill-voiced, man-hungry society girls named Brenda and Cobina—a takeoff of two real-life debutantes, Brenda Frazier and Cobina Wright. They were the first incarnation of a favorite Hope comedy foil: the homely, sex-starved spinster, obsessed with landing a man. The sexist humor was redeemed by some slick gag writing:
BRENDA, prepping Cobina for a big society party: “Ya gotta act like a lady. When they pass the food, say ya ain’t hungry. And when they pass the drinks, say ya ain’t thirsty.”
COBINA: “All right, but if they pass the men, I’m gonna ad-lib.”
In the second season, Jerry Colonna also came into his own as the show’s comedy spark plug. Hope began referring to him as “the professor” and played a perfect straight man to Colonna’s absurdist riffs. On one show, when cast members were trying to come up with names for expectant father Bill Goodwin’s baby, Colonna blurted out, “Yehudi”—presumably a reference to violinist Yehudi Menuhin. The question “Who’s Yehudi?” soon became a running gag on the show, and a national catchphrase. Sketches were built around it; Ennis and the singers even turned it into a novelty song.
Hope, meanwhile, was sharpening his radio persona. In the first season he would often use generic setups and gags—“My girlfriend wore a pillbox hat. A fellow with heartburn followed us all day with a glass of water.” (No one was supposed to believe Hope actually had a girlfriend—he was just telling jokes.) He soon ditched those and began building jokes more organically from his real life, work, and daily activities—as well as the radio personality his writers were building for him, which was closer to reality than he probably liked to admit. “We took his own characteristics and exaggerated them,” said Mel Shavelson. “The woman chaser. The coward. The cheap guy. We just put them in. He thought he was playing a character. He was playing, really, the real Bob Hope.”
Yet even as his comedy moved closer to home, Hope kept a distance, making it clear that he was, above all, a comedian—an entertainer trying to make an audience laugh. He frequently made jokes about his sponsor, the network, or his movie studio. He was the first comedian to openly acknowledge his writers, often tweaking them in his “savers” when jokes didn’t go over. Variety cited Hope as an example of “the extreme wisdom of comedians devoting a substantial amount of income for writers. The gag staff that Hope has surrounded himself with is one of the best.” And the audience was catching on. In its first season Hope’s show averaged a 16.2 Hooper rating, meaning that 16.2 percent of the nation’s households were tuning in. By the end of the second season its rating had soared to 25.0—the fourth most popular show on the air.
Hope’s transformation from a generic radio wise guy to a fully developed radio personality was well under way. A similar transformation was taking place in his movie roles. But it would happen much more abruptly—with his seventh film, The Cat and the Canary.
The movie, released in November 1939, was a step up in class for Hope. Directed by the capable Elliott Nugent (a sometime stage actor and playwright who had also directed Hope in Give Me a Sailor and Never Say Die), it’s a comedy-thriller with a mise-en-scène and a narrative coherence that sets it apart from any of Hope’s previous films. In the atmospheric opening, a group of family members are making their way in separate boats at night through a Louisiana bayou, heading to a lonely mansion where a wealthy relative’s will is about to be read. The will, they soon learn, has left the entire fortune to one family member, played by Paulette Goddard. A storm forces the group to stay overnight in the spooky house, amid dark warnings that one of the passed-over relatives might be out to kill her. Lights flicker on and off, eyes in portraits move, hands emerge from hidden panels, while a sinister housekeeper, Gale Sondergaard, watches over it all with an icy glare.
The wild card in the family gathering is Hope. He plays Wally Campbell, a stage actor whose nervous wisecracks—“Even my goose pimples have goose pimples”—keep breaking the tension of the old-dark-house melodrama. “They do that when you don’t pay your bill,” he quips when the lights go out. “Don’t big, empty houses scare you?” one of the family members asks. “Not me,” says Hope. “I used to be in vaudeville.” Someone asks Wally whether he believes in reincarnation: “You know, dead people coming back?” Hope’s up-to-the-minute retort: “You mean like the Republicans?”
With his double-breasted suit and slicked-back hair, Hope still has the look of a high-style 1930s romantic-comedy lead. But he has discovered the character that he would make his own: the brash coward, a nervous Nellie who uses jokes to ward off his fears, a braggart who talks big but melts when face-to-face with danger. “I always joke when I’m scared,” he says at one point. “I kind of kid myself into being brave.” But it’s more than just jokes; Hope creates a rich comic character, recognizable and relatable—a coward you can root for.
A small scene with Goddard in the middle of the film shows how far he’s come. Hope is in her bedroom, fighting off nerves while assuring her that he’ll protect her. “You always did fight for me, didn’t you, Wally?” she says gratefully. “Even back there in Whitford. Remember when you used to carry my books to school? And the time Big Jim Bailey pulled my hair? And you flew at him, and what a terrible beating—”
“—he gave me? I’ll never forget it,” says Hope, jumping in and timing the turnabout perfectly. “Seems I always got licked fighting for you,” he adds, his tone shifting. “Well, maybe it was worth it.”
There’s a commotion outside the room, and Hope’s bluster/fear response kicks in. He grabs her by the arms and says he’ll go outside to investigate. “If there’s a rumpus or anything, don’t come out. You just sit tight and yell like the devil.”
“Well, what will you do?”
“Why I’ll”—clenching his fists and setting his jaw for an instant, then relaxing them just as suddenly—“I’ll run and get help. Don’t worry.”
She, affectionately: “I don’t worry when you’re around, Wally.”
He, touched and taken a little aback: “Oh, really? Thanks.” He turns tentatively to leave. “Good night.” He goes out the door, then suddenly reopens it and repeats, more tenderly now, “Good night.” She blows him a kiss.
With both delicacy and humor, Hope lets us feel every twinge of the inner battle between his manly duty and his cowardly instincts, all while conveying his emerging feelings for the woman in his care. (Since everyone in the house is related, it’s not clear how the two can be kindling a romance—but never mind.) Little of this is in the actual dialogue; Hope accomplishes it with small gestures, subtle shifts in tone, posture, and facial expression. No need for Mitchell Leisen’s advice anymore; Hope has learned how to act.
Chills and laughter were a potent combination with a long movie tradition. But Hope’s constant comic chatter (“Don’t you ever stop babbling?” someone exclaims) wasn’t just a way of defusing the tension in a spooky old house. It also had resonance for an audience facing an increasingly scary world outside. It was no accident that The Cat and the Canary opened in theaters and became a hit just a few weeks after the outbreak of World War II in Europe, when the country was facing terrors of a more sinister, real-world kind. Hope’s brash wisecracks were both a release and a coping mechanism for a stressed-out nation.
The Cat and the Canary was Hope’s biggest box-office success yet and, despite his two duds earlier in the year, single-handedly boosted him into tenth place on the list of the top box-office stars of 1939. He would remain in the top ten—with a one-year interruption, when he was preoccupied by a world war—for more than a decade.