The Cat and the Canary was an important film for Hope, but it was overshadowed in 1939 by an unprecedented bounty of Hollywood classics. It was the year of The Wizard of Oz and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; the definitive John Ford Western, Stagecoach; and the classic Kipling adventure tale Gunga Din. Garbo laughed in Ninotchka, Olivier brooded in Wuthering Heights, and a slew of Hollywood’s top leading ladies traded bons mots in Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women. Towering above them all was Gone With the Wind, producer David O. Selznick’s epic screen version of Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War bestseller. Fittingly, the Oscar ceremony that commemorated what would become known as Hollywood’s greatest year was the first one hosted by the entertainer who would do more than anyone else to make that annual event Hollywood’s greatest night.
When Hope was asked to emcee the twelfth annual Academy Awards dinner, held at the Cocoanut Grove on February 29, 1940, it was still primarily a film-industry event, with no national radio coverage and, that year at least, little suspense. The names of the winners, which were typically given out to the press in advance under an embargo, had prematurely been revealed by the Los Angeles Times, which published the results in an early edition of the newspaper at 8:45 p.m., well before the 10:00 p.m. ceremony. The gaffe led the Academy to change its policy the following year: for every Oscar night thereafter, the names of winners would be kept inside sealed envelopes, guarded by the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse.
With or without the spoiler, Gone With the Wind was widely expected to be the big winner, and it was naturally the evening’s hot topic. Walter Wanger, the Motion Picture Academy’s new president, introduced Hope, the evening’s master of ceremonies, as “the Rhett Butler of the airwaves.” Hope began his monologue by echoing the handicappers—“What a wonderful thing, this benefit for David Selznick”—before turning his attention to other stars and trends of Hollywood’s year: Bette Davis’s Oscar collection (again), the ubiquitous teenage star Mickey Rooney (“the ten best actors of the year”), and the current vogue for big biographical dramas, such as The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, starring Don Ameche. “MGM plans to star Mickey Rooney in a super-epic,” said Hope, “portraying Don Ameche as a boy.”
Gone With the Wind made its expected sweep, hauling in ten awards, including Best Picture. “David, you should have brought roller skates,” quipped Hope on one of Selznick’s trips to the podium. Clark Gable was a surprise loser for Best Actor (to Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr. Chips), but Hattie McDaniel was in tears accepting her award for Best Supporting Actress, the first African-American performer to win an Oscar. “Over the Rainbow” won for best song, and Judy Garland got a miniature Oscar for “outstanding performance as a screen juvenile.” Hedda Hopper, recapping the show in her column, criticized some of the boring acceptance speeches, but noted that “Bob Hope, as usual, was his lifesaving self.”
He was the ideal Oscar host: a movie star who could also tell jokes; a Hollywood insider with the irreverence of an outsider; a suave, elegantly dressed ambassador for Hollywood to the rest of the world. When the Oscar shows began to be covered live on radio a few years later, his monologues played an important, often overlooked role in shaping the image of Hollywood for the American moviegoing public. It was a glamorous world, filled with people who were richer and more beautiful than you and I, but Hope brought it down to earth—reporting its gossip, popularizing its jargon, satirizing its mores and morals. Hollywood stars had storybook love affairs, but their marriages didn’t last. They were charming in public, but jealous and backbiting in private. They lived in lavish homes with big swimming pools, but this glittering gated community had a small-town camaraderie, where everybody seemed to know one another. Over the next thirty-five years, Bob Hope, who went on to host or cohost the Oscar show a record nineteen times, provided our annual peek inside it.
Hope’s role at the Oscars in demystifying Hollywood—ribbing its stars and puncturing its pretensions—was paralleled by an evolution that was taking place in his movie roles. He was developing a new kind of comedy, one that helped redefine the relationship between ordinary moviegoers and those remote figures on the silver screen. That evolution, which began with The Cat and the Canary, took a giant leap forward in Hope’s next movie, which opened just a few weeks after his inaugural stint as Oscar host. It was the first of the famous Road pictures, costarring his friend and most enduring show-business partner, Bing Crosby.
After their first appearance on stage together in 1932, at the Capitol Theatre in New York, Hope and Crosby returned to separate coasts and didn’t see much of each other for five years. But they reconnected when Hope arrived at Paramount in the fall of 1937. They would meet for lunch on the studio lot and play golf together at Lakeside, the club where Crosby belonged and Hope soon would join too. Crosby had Hope as a guest on his popular radio show, The Kraft Music Hall, and invited Bob and Dolores down to Del Mar, the racetrack near San Diego that Crosby owned a large share of.
On Saturday night, August 6, 1938, Bing was master of ceremonies for a special Hollywood night at Del Mar when he called Bob to join him onstage. The two horsed around together, rehashing some of the bits they had done at the Capitol Theatre six years before. Their chemistry so impressed William LeBaron, Paramount’s production chief, who was in the audience, that he suggested putting the two of them together in a movie.
The idea took more than a year to come to fruition. The studio may have had second thoughts about teaming Crosby, one of its biggest stars, with Hope, who in mid-1938 was still an unproven quantity. But the project was assigned to screenwriters Frank Butler and Don Hartman, who had written for both Hope (Never Say Die) and Crosby (Waikiki Wedding). They dusted off a script they had done years earlier for Crosby called Follow the Sun and had refashioned for Jack Oakie and Fred MacMurray, with the new title The Road to Mandalay. When Oakie and MacMurray bowed out, the screenwriters retooled it once again for Hope and Crosby and changed the title to Road to Singapore, supposedly because the new locale sounded more sinister.
To round out the team and provide a romantic interest for both Hope and Crosby, Paramount cast one of its top female stars, Dorothy Lamour. A native of New Orleans, Lamour (originally Lambour, before the b got dropped on a marquee) had moved to Chicago with her divorced mother and began her show-business career as a singer with Herbie Kaye’s big band. Following a short-lived marriage to Kaye, she moved to New York and worked solo in nightclubs—where Hope often used to see her when he was starring on Broadway. But she got the call from Hollywood first, and in 1936 moved west to costar in The Jungle Princess, playing a native girl who falls for Ray Milland. She was cast as exotic, scantily clad beauties in several more tropical adventures, among them John Ford’s Hurricane, as well as in the musical High, Wide, and Handsome and Hope’s debut film, The Big Broadcast of 1938. Her dark beauty, sultry voice, and trademark sarong had made her one of Paramount’s most recognizable stars, and she got second billing in Road to Singapore—after Crosby but before Hope.
Shooting began in October 1939 on the Paramount lot, with some location work at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden in Arcadia. The director was an old studio hand, Victor Schertzinger. A former concert violinist, Schertzinger had more experience with musicals than comedy (he even composed two of the movie’s four songs, with lyricist Johnny Burke). But no director could have been prepared for a comedy quite like this.
Hope and Crosby wanted to re-create the wisecracking spontaneity of their stage appearances together. So they treated the Butler-Hartman script as merely a jumping-off point. They brought in gag writers from their radio shows to add new jokes, tossing them in willy-nilly during rehearsals. “For a couple of days,” Crosby recalled, “when Hope and I tore freewheeling into a scene, ad-libbing and violating all of the accepted rules of movie-making, Schertzinger stole bewildered looks at his script, then leafed rapidly through it searching for the lines we were saying.” Lamour, who prided herself on knowing her lines, was nonplussed when Crosby and Hope kept departing from the script she had learned. “I kept waiting for a cue that never seemed to come,” she recalled, “so finally, in exasperation, I asked, ‘Please, guys, when can I get my line in?’ They stopped dead, broke up, and laughed for ten minutes.” She finally gave up trying to learn the script in advance. “I would read over the next day’s work only to get the idea of what was happening. What I really needed was a good night’s sleep to be in shape for the next morning’s ad-libs.”
Butler and Hartman were not happy when they saw the shambles Hope and Crosby were making of their lines. “If you recognize any of yours, yell bingo!” shouted Hope when the writers showed up on the set. They complained to the studio, but got nowhere; Hope and Crosby’s antics, unorthodox as they were, seemed to be working. Hope described the creative process that began on Road to Singapore and was honed in succeeding Road pictures: “I had a great staff [of writers] on radio . . . all these marvelous people. I would give them the script, and they would bring the jokes in, and I would edit them and call Bing into my room and say, ‘What do you think of this? What do you think of that?’ We’d go to the set, and the stagehands were waiting for us to do nutty stuff. We wouldn’t disappoint them.”
They were playing to the crew, the writers, and anyone else who was on the set. “The Road pictures had the excitement of live entertainment,” Hope said. “Some stars banned visitors, but Bing and I liked to have people around. New visitors sparked new gags.” One visitor was an ex-vaudeville song-and-dance man named Barney Dean, whom Bob had first met at the Stratford Theater in Chicago. A short, bald-headed Jewish immigrant from Russia, born Barnett Fradkin, Dean showed up on the set of Road to Singapore one day selling Christmas cards. He made Crosby and Hope laugh, and Crosby persuaded Paramount to hire him as a writer on the film. Dean did little actual writing, but he would kibitz on scenes, occasionally suggesting a line or bit of business and in general keeping Bob and Bing amused. Dean was legendary among Hollywood gagmen for his ad-lib wit. (Once a policeman stopped him for jaywalking across Hollywood Boulevard. “How fast was I going, Officer?” said Dean.) He became a regular member of the Road picture crew, and a frequent companion for Hope when he toured—writer, court jester, and all-purpose good-luck charm.
Hope and Crosby were fortunate to have a director who indulged their loosey-goosey style. For one scene, Hope recalled, Schertzinger shot just one take, yelled, “Cut and print,” and started to move on. An assistant director pointed out that Hope had stepped out of the light for a few seconds and asked if Schertzinger didn’t at least want to reshoot part of it from other angles, to cover himself. “No,” said Schertzinger. “That scene was like a piece of music; it was well orchestrated and it flowed beautifully. Maybe the flutes were off-key or the cellos didn’t come in at the right time. But the total performance was great.”
No one knew that Road to Singapore would be the first of a series, and the film in some ways is atypical of the Road pictures that followed. Crosby is clearly the central character, with a conventional backstory. He plays Josh Mallon, the son of a shipping magnate (Charles Coburn), who chafes at going into the family business, spurns an engagement to his high-society fiancée, and escapes to a South Seas island with his free-spirited pal Ace Lannigan (Hope). His father’s efforts to bring Josh back home provide a framing device for the comic adventures—a plot obligation jettisoned by future Road pictures, in which Hope and Crosby were simply plopped down in an exotic setting and let loose.
But Road to Singapore introduces most of the key elements of the series’ successful formula. Hope and Crosby are usually hucksters or con men of some sort, trying to earn money by duping the locals. At some point they meet up with Lamour, who becomes both a partner and an object of romantic rivalry, with Crosby nearly always the victor. When danger threatens, Bob and Bing play a childlike game of patty-cake, distracting the villains just long enough to sucker punch them and make their escape. There are four or five songs, including at least one romantic ballad for Crosby and Lamour, and a buddy number for Hope and Crosby.
Most crucially, Road to Singapore establishes the contours of the Hope-Crosby screen relationship. They’re close friends, but always at odds. Hope is the patsy, Crosby the schemer. Hope is a worrier, brash but insecure, all nervous motion. Crosby is the cool customer: easygoing, self-possessed, unflappable. Hope is an overeager puppy with women, chasing but rarely catching them. Crosby merely has to take out his pipe and give them a bu-bu-boo, and the girls can’t resist.
Road to Singapore doesn’t have the comic highs of the later Road pictures; there’s too much plot and not enough nuttiness. Lamour plays a native girl rescued by Hope and Crosby from her bullwhip-wielding boyfriend (Anthony Quinn). She moves in with them as their (chaste) housekeeper, and the three try to make money by hawking a bogus cleaning solution to the locals, predictably ruining the suit of an unsuspecting customer (Jerry Colonna). In the farcical climax, they find themselves in the middle of a native wedding ceremony, where Bing is picked by one of the local girls for marriage and they must make a fast escape—not just from the natives but from Josh’s father and fiancée, who turn up in the jungle looking for him.
The delights of Road to Singapore are in the margins: the fizzy, freestyle repartee between Hope and Crosby. There are relatively few actual jokes. (Trying to wrestle a sailfish into their fishing boat, Crosby shouts, “He won’t give up!” Hope responds, “Must be a Republican!”) The laughs come from the way they bounce off each other so effortlessly, in their idiosyncratic, jazzy slang—so natural that it sounds ad-libbed, but so fast and perfectly timed that it can’t be. After they arrive at their tropical isle destination, for example, the two travelers check their money supply in a few throwaway lines:
BING: “How much you holdin’ there, Bubbles?”
BOB: “We’re loaded, chum. A dollar twenty-eight.”
BING: “One-two-eight.”
BOB: “Net.”
BING: “Well, that should be enough to light a fire under a couple of short beers.”
Or, more elaborately, a scene in which the boys decide that Lamour’s overeager housekeeping is ruining their laid-back bachelor lifestyle, and they have to tell her to leave. Crosby forces Hope to break the bad news—and then, after Lamour has left and both of them are feeling remorseful, tries to take the credit:
BING, seated and puffing on his pipe: “You know, I thought I handled that pretty well, didn’t you?”
BOB, stopping short, in the midst of moving their furniture back in place: “You did what?”
“I handled the situation here pretty well.”
“What was I doin’ in there?”
“Well, you were weakening, I’ll tell you that. I had to back you up.”
“I only gave her the whole idea! I packed her bag and put her on the bus!”
“Yeah, but I was the menace, I was the heavy in the whole piece.”
“I had my whip, right there, I just gave it to her like that!”
“I was the man who really accomplished the final brush-off.”
BOB’s exasperation turning to sarcasm: “Oh, you want the bow? Take a bow.”
BING, obliging with a flourish: “A little light bow—ta-da.”
BOB, now spent, giving up and settling back into a chair: “That’s fine, that’s fine—you did it all!”
“I think so.”
“I’m snookered again.”
“Thank you very much.”
“Thank you. Good night.”
“Leave a call.”
The exchange is propelled by nothing but the momentum of two performers feeding off each other, like riffing jazz musicians. None of the dialogue is in the film’s shooting script—it was apparently improvised on the set. Crosby is hilariously smug, but Hope’s exasperation is the real engine for the comedy. Dressed in a long-sleeved black T-shirt—which flatters his fit, five-foot-eleven-inch frame—he paces frantically, bends insistently over Crosby, uses his hands to italicize points (poking Bing in the chest, miming the cracking of a whip). The lines aren’t funny in isolation. Often they don’t even make much sense (“Leave a call”?). But it is character comedy of a high order.
There had been comedy teams in movies before, of course, and fast-paced dialogue, but this was something new. The interplay between Groucho and Chico Marx, say, or George Burns and Gracie Allen, had an abstract, almost surreal quality. The witty repartee of 1930s screwball comedies such as My Man Godfrey or Bringing Up Baby was too polished and stylized to be mistaken for anything but movie dialogue. Hope and Crosby seemed like ordinary guys—like Hope and Crosby, in fact—perfectly attuned to each other’s thoughts, moods, obsessions, and vulnerabilities. In later Road pictures they would loosen up even more, breaking down the fourth wall and talking to the camera. But even here, still hemmed in by the conventions of 1930s romantic comedy, they are a breath of fresh air, with a spontaneity and intimacy that the movies had never before seen.
Road to Singapore opened nationally in March of 1940 and broke two-year box-office records in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami. Hope helped out by plugging the film constantly on his radio show. By April, Paramount was already planning a sequel, reuniting the trio in a film originally called Blue Lagoon, before someone realized the obvious and retitled it Road to Zanzibar. Road to Singapore wound up earning $1.6 million at the box office—Hollywood’s highest-grossing movie of 1940. The teaming of Hope and Crosby was a smash.
Their real-life relationship was a little more complicated. Hope and Crosby got along well, enjoyed working together, and shared a passion for golf. (Crosby was the better golfer—a three-time winner of the Lakeside club championship—though Hope could occasionally beat him.) But they were not close friends. Though they lived near each other in Toluca Lake, the families rarely socialized. (Bing and his wife, the former actress Dixie Lee, had four sons before Bob and Dolores adopted their first child.) The two men were, moreover, sharp contrasts in temperament. Hope loved being a Hollywood star, enjoyed socializing, and was a workaholic who got antsy on vacations. Crosby seemed more ambivalent about his fame, was often lackadaisical about work, and enjoyed getting away from the Hollywood scene—with his racehorses at Del Mar or, in later years, in Northern California, where he moved with his second wife and family. “Bing loved to hunt and fish, and Bob wouldn’t be caught hunting or fishing anything but a golf ball. Bob had no interest in horses,” Dolores told Crosby biographer Gary Giddins. “They lived entirely different lives, but they respected each other and loved working together.”
Many in Hope’s entourage did not like Crosby, finding him cold and standoffish. Hope, though hard to get close to, at least had a superficial bonhomie. Crosby kept his distance from all but the closest friends. “Bing was a cold tomato,” said Sherwood Schwartz. “He was aloof. Bob was friendly. He’d say hello to everybody. I saw many people come up and put an arm around Bob, say, ‘How you doing?’ I never saw anybody touch Bing.” Once, when they were leaving their hotel in New York City after an appearance together to promote Road to Singapore, Crosby saw Hope stuffing some fan mail into a pillowcase. “What the hell are you doing that for?” he asked. Hope said he was taking the letters back home so that his secretary could answer them. “I’ll show you what I do with my fan mail,” said Crosby. He felt through some envelopes, found a quarter in one that had been enclosed by a fan for postage and photos, pocketed the change, and tossed the letter into the wastebasket.
In many ways Hope looked up to Crosby. Bing was college educated, well read—on radio and in movies he often affected a comically erudite British accent. Bob was a high school dropout who read little but the sports pages and the show-business trades. Bing was a bigger star, and Hope envied his clout and his business savvy. “Bob wanted everything that Bing had, and more,” said Hal Kanter, who was a writer for Crosby before Hope hired him away. They ribbed each other like brothers—Crosby joked about Hope’s nose and his stinginess, Hope made cracks about Crosby’s broad hips and slow racehorses—but the jokes could touch a nerve. Once, when Hope was a guest on Crosby’s radio show in San Francisco, Crosby’s writer Bill Morrow, who got perverse enjoyment out of mocking Hope, wrote some jokes about Hope breaking out of his cage on the plane and being fixed up on a blind date with an ape from the zoo. Hope thought it was too insulting, and he exploded. “It was the only time I saw Bob really get mad,” said Kanter. “He threw down the script: ‘What are you doing to me?’ ” Crosby had to calm him down and tell Morrow to cool it.
Yet they brought out the best in each other, both onstage and off. Hope loosened up Crosby, unleashed his sense of humor. Crosby gave Hope a role model, both as a businessman and as a manager of his own career. Crosby was arguably the greater artist. But Hope was more driven, more responsive to the changing entertainment landscape, and, in the end, had a broader and more lasting impact on the world of show business. He simply tried harder.
• • •
With two career-defining movies released in the space of four months and a radio show steadily climbing in the ratings, Hope’s career shifted into a new gear. His surging popularity was evident when he made an eight-week personal-appearance tour in the spring of 1940, taking his radio show on the road for the last five weeks of the season. His stage show—which also featured radio sidekicks Jerry Colonna, Brenda and Cobina, and the singer who was still billed as Dolores Reade—drew unprecedented crowds. On his first stop in Joliet, Illinois, two shows were scheduled, but a third had to be added to accommodate the overflow. At a Chicago theater, there were lines around the block, and Hope convinced the theater manager to cut a reel out of the featured movie, so they could squeeze in more performances. In Atlantic City, Hope broke a forty-four-year attendance record at the Steel Pier. He played to packed houses in Detroit, Boston, and New York City. With a guarantee of $12,500 a week (up from $4,500 just a year earlier) plus 50 percent of the gate over $50,000, Hope’s gross take was close to $20,000 a week.
Variety, reviewing his show in Chicago, gave a vivid account of the rock-star frenzy Hope was stirring up:
Bob Hope is blazing hot, and the king can do no wrong. He can come in with last year’s gags; can stall, forget his gags—and yet the audience laps it up. Comedian has a splendid manner; makes a great appearance and handles an audience with the assurance born of years of experience. The box office is whirling itself dizzy. Anything that Hope says or does seemingly is a howl for this mob. He only just started to introduce “two glamour girls” and the audience broke out into a roar before he could finish the introduction. The very mention of “Yehudi” rocked the house. It is a sample of spontaneous public exuberance that fires every gag, every bit of mugging, every gesture, walk-on or walk-off into something that might be construed as brilliant.
Even Hope was taken aback by the reception. “It was my first experience with the power of radio,” he wrote later. “I had no idea that the millions of numbers that made up the ratings every week were actually people.” He drank in the adulation. “This kind of success was brand-new to me, but I felt I could get used to it. I must have been pretty difficult to live with, because when somebody in the mob of autograph hounds outside the stage door asked Dolores if she was connected with Bob Hope, she replied, ‘No, I’m his wife.’ ”
Just what it meant to be Bob Hope’s wife was becoming increasingly clear to Dolores. She still had the remnants of a singing career, thanks to Bob, who used her in his stage shows and occasionally on the radio. After a couple of radio appearances in the spring of 1940, Hope even tried to hire Dolores as the show’s regular singer, to replace the departed Judy Garland, but his sponsor nixed her. Yet Dolores was phasing out her show-business career and starting to put most of her energy into the job that would consume the rest of her life: being Mrs. Bob Hope.
She performed the job with flawless grace. Dolores gave Bob more than just a socially adept partner and a picture-perfect Hollywood home life. She was a stabilizing influence, providing a commonsense sounding board, anchored by her bedrock Catholic values. She was intelligent, opinionated, better read than Bob, more capable of conversing knowledgeably on a range of subjects, from the arts to politics. (She started out as a Democrat and only in later years tacked toward his conservative views.) She had a sense of humor, and she was one of the few who could tell him off—something that became more important as the years went on and the circle of sycophants grew larger and more insulating. Most of all, she was fully on board for his great life endeavor: building the brand known as Bob Hope. “He had his job, and she had her job,” said Dolores’s nephew Tom Malatesta. “They were both on the same page as to where they were going. And they were a hell of a team.”
If she was bothered by his many absences, his sometimes dismissive treatment of her, the rumors of other women, she kept it to herself. On rare occasions there were glimpses of the frustration. “She longed for romance from this man, and he was cold as ice to her,” Elliott Kozak, Hope’s agent and producer in later years, told John Lahr in the New Yorker. “We were in London one time. Bob, Dolores, and I were walking at night. All of a sudden, out of the clear blue sky, she pushed him up against the wall and said, ‘Kiss me, Bob. Tell me you love me.’ I was so embarrassed I didn’t know what to say. I turned my back on it. . . . I never saw him go to her and give her a peck on the cheek. I was with him for twenty-five years.”
Yet shows of affection of any kind were rare for Bob Hope. Whatever bond he and Dolores shared went beyond pecks on the cheek—and was never on display for outsiders, or even family members. She adored him, and he needed her. They had a partnership, an understanding, a marriage that neither ever seriously considered ending, maybe even a love affair. They endured.
The family grew. After adopting Linda in the fall of 1939, the Hopes told the Cradle they wanted a son as well. In the spring of 1940 the agency said it had found a boy for them, and Bob stopped in to see the baby during a stop in Chicago. When he saw that the boy had a ski nose just like his, he was sold. They named him Anthony Jude, known as Tony.
Along with a second child came another move: from their rented place on Navaho Street to a fifteen-room English Tudor–style house in Toluca Lake that they built on a former walnut grove on Moorpark Street—just a short drive from the Lakeside Golf Club and a few blocks away from St. Charles Borromeo Church, where Dolores would become a daily regular at mass. The unpretentious, tree-lined neighborhood was home to a small cadre of movie-industry people who preferred the relatively low-profile San Fernando Valley community to the showier, starrier neighborhoods in Beverly Hills and elsewhere. The Hopes would renovate and expand the house several times, buying up the lots around it, creating a five-acre compound with a one-hole golf course in the backyard (with two different tee boxes, so Bob could play it as two holes), indoor and outdoor swimming pools, and a separate four-thousand-square-foot office wing, added to the main house a few years later. Grand yet homey, decorated in Dolores’s tasteful all-American style (with a Grandma Moses painting among the artwork on the walls), the Toluca Lake house would remain the Hopes’ main residence and the nerve center of Bob’s working life for more than sixty years.
• • •
With a new home, a growing family, and an expanding retinue of writers, assistants, and other support people, Hope turned his attention to money. His phenomenally successful 1940 tour had opened his eyes to his drawing power. When the crowds were circling the block for him in Chicago, Hope called his agent, Louis Shurr, and told him to get on a plane and come see for himself. Hope told Shurr he wanted Paramount to boost his salary to $50,000 a picture. Shurr not only got him the raise, but went one better. When Samuel Goldwyn wanted to borrow Hope to star in a picture for his own independent studio, Shurr told him Hope’s price was $100,000.
Goldwyn turned him down flat. But Hope took the negotiations public when the two found themselves on a stage together in Fort Worth, Texas. Hope was there to host the opening of The Westerner, a film that Gary Cooper had made for Paramount, on loan from Goldwyn. When Hope saw Goldwyn in the audience, he called him up onstage. The sixty-year-old Hollywood mogul announced proudly that he was about to make a film with Hope. “I haven’t made a comedy since Eddie Cantor left me,” he said. “I haven’t found a comedian I want to work with, but I think I’ve found one in Bob Hope.”
“That’s all fine, but let’s talk money,” said Hope, grabbing the microphone. The studio boss demurred. “Why don’t we just lie down and talk things over,” Hope said, pulling Goldwyn down on the floor with him. As Goldwyn protested, the crowd roared. After a whispered colloquy, the two got up, and Hope announced, “It’s going to be a pleasure making a picture with Mr. Goldwyn.” Whether or not the deal was actually consummated there, Hope ultimately got his $100,000.
It would be nearly two years, however, before the Goldwyn film finally went into production. Paramount was keeping Hope too busy. After the success of The Cat and the Canary and Road to Singapore, the studio was dismayed to find that it had only one more Hope movie in the pipeline for the rest of 1940—The Ghost Breakers, due to open in June—thus wasting an opportunity to cash in on the buzz over Hope’s smash personal-appearance tour in the spring. Determined not to be caught short again, the studio put him on a nearly nonstop shooting schedule starting in the fall, teeing up four pictures in quick succession, all of which would be released in 1941.
The Ghost Breakers did nothing to dampen the studio’s confidence in Hope. Another haunted-house comedy-thriller, the film is an obvious attempt to repeat the winning formula of The Cat and the Canary. But whereas Canary put Hope in the middle of an ensemble, in The Ghost Breakers he is the clear center of the action. He plays Larry Lawrence, a Winchell-like gossip columnist who comes to the aid of another frightened heiress—Paulette Goddard again—who is saddled with another spooky old house, this time a supposedly cursed castle in Cuba. Adapted, evidently quite freely, from a play by Paul Dickey and Charles Goddard and directed by George Marshall (a silent-film veteran who had recently directed Destry Rides Again, with James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich), the film probably has more laughs than The Cat and the Canary, but is a more scattershot effort, with a confused story line and tacky special effects, and thus less satisfying overall.
Hope is fast, flip, and engaging as the reluctant hero, joking away his jitters in the face of malefactors ranging from mob thugs to an assortment of spooks, both real and imagined. He has a sidekick this time, a valet played by Willie Best, the quavering black comic actor whose exaggerated, bug-eyed fright takes actually make Hope look restrained by comparison. (Hope, getting ready to climb a spooky staircase, flashlight in hand: “If a couple of fellows come runnin’ down the stairs in a few minutes, let the first one go. That’ll be me.”)
The jokes sometimes step outside the film, puncturing the supernatural doings with abrupt references to the mundane real world. A stranger, for example, is warning Hope and Goddard about zombies: “A zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly, with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.” Hope’s retort: “You mean like Democrats?” (One out-of-context political joke per film, it seems.) On their boat trip to Cuba, Hope and Goddard run into a sinister passenger, played by the Hungarian-born actor Paul Lukas, who says he wants to buy Goddard’s castle, warning her about the curses and dead spirits that lurk there. Hope chimes in, greeting each gloomy warning with a cheeky wisecrack:
LUKAS: “Are you the one who’s advising Miss Carter not to sell the castle?”
HOPE: “No, my advice is to keep the castle and sell the ghosts.”
LUKAS: “I myself have heard of only one ghost—the spirit of Don Santiago.”
HOPE: “Does he appear nightly, or just Sundays and holidays?”
The lines are trivial, but the psychological resonance isn’t. In mid-1940, with Nazi troops on the march in Europe, Hollywood was debating just how much of the real world ought to be reflected in its movies. While a few films, such as The Mortal Storm and Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, took note of the sobering headlines, far more common were escapist comedies such as The Ghost Breakers. And yet the laughs provided more than just escape. Hope’s breezy, self-confident mockery of the glowering villain—with a Middle European accent, no less—was a tonic for a nation on the verge of war against real foreign enemies: the triumph of the brash, irreverent, can-do American spirit in a world getting darker and more threatening by the day.
“Its lightness and levity throughout, in these times of war, provide added impetus to bright biz prospects,” wrote Variety in its review. The Ghost Breakers was another box-office hit for Hope, and the trade paper noted that it was doing especially well with “the under-21 mob.” Hope wasn’t just hot; he was hip.
• • •
On radio too Hope was blazing. Now one of the most popular stars on the air, he put the squeeze on Pepsodent over the summer to double his salary, to $8,000 a week—even threatening to quit radio for a year if he didn’t get it. He wound up settling for $6,000 and was back on the air in September.
The show was reaching a comfortable cruising speed. Hope would always open with a corny rhyming product plug for his sponsor (“If you’ve got preserves in the cellar, use Pepsodent and you’ll preserve what’s under your smeller”). There were weekly jokes about Skinnay Ennis’s beanpole frame, and back-and-forth insults with “Professor” Colonna. (Bob: “Colonna, this is the last straw.” Jerry: “All right, you use it—I’ll drink from the bottle.”) The monologue jokes were increasingly tied to the news, or the season, or anecdotes from what at least sounded like Hope’s own life—paying his income tax, for example, or fighting the crowds at the Motor Vehicle Department to get new license plates. “I wouldn’t say the line was long,” said Hope. “All I know is when I got to the end of the line, I had to buy Colorado plates.” Hope was having more fun now. He was so fast and sure-footed that on the rare occasions when he stumbled on a line, or a laugh didn’t come as fast as he expected, he got even bigger laughs with his self-mocking comebacks: “Go ahead, talk to each other while we rehearse, will ya?”
Part of Hope’s brilliance was to make these often scripted lines sound like ad-libs. The ruse was common in radio. “Everyone would write down their ad-libs and we wouldn’t tell each other,” said George Burns. “The way to become a star was to ad-lib without rattling your paper.” But Hope could improvise when he had to; his reactions were quick and his ability to roll with the punches impressive. When Chico Marx, a guest on one show, dropped his script in the middle of a bit, there was an awkward stretch of silence as he fished around for it. After a few seconds Hope broke in, “Who do you think you are—Harpo?” Close to a perfect ad-lib—and no one could have written it.
During the 1940 presidential campaign, with Roosevelt running for a third term against Republican candidate Wendell Willkie, Hope made a few tentative forays into political humor. It was the first presidential campaign to feature heavy political advertising on the radio, and that provided an obvious target. “I want to thank both political candidates for giving up their time so this program can be heard,” Hope began one show. “The Democrats really put on a demonstration last Tuesday night,” he said after Roosevelt’s election victory. “But you can’t blame them. It’s not every day that Roosevelt gets elected president. It just seems like it.” Even his few mild political jokes, however, were enough to raise concerns at the network. A telegram from an NBC executive on November 19, 1940, complained about Hope’s jokes on political topics, among them President Roosevelt’s plan to move up the Thanksgiving holiday by a week:
We are getting many protests about Bob Hope from both Democrats and Republicans—concerning his reference to the “Republicans waiting until a week from next Thursday to celebrate Thanksgiving, hoping by that time to have something to be thankful for” and his “Willkie button” crack. Each time he refers to things political, and that’s been pretty consistent for some weeks, we’ve had protests. Can’t we do something about it?
Still, political jokes were relatively rare for Hope in those days. Indeed, many of the headlines were too ominous for humor. At the end of 1940, fears that the United States would be drawn into the war overseas were mounting. President Roosevelt, in the face of isolationist opposition, launched a massive war mobilization effort and began sending arms to Britain under the Lend-Lease Act. In September 1940, Congress passed the nation’s first peacetime draft, requiring every American male between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five to register for military service. When Hope returned to host the Academy Awards dinner on February 27, 1941, the war took center stage. President Roosevelt had been invited to attend the event, but he begged off, saying the tense world situation demanded he remain in Washington. Instead, he delivered a six-minute address to the audience at the Biltmore Hotel, praising Hollywood for its role in supporting his mobilization efforts and for promoting “the American way of life.” Bette Davis followed him onstage to deliver the movie community’s response—“We thank you for the unique honor you have bestowed upon us”—and Judy Garland sang “America.”
Hope, emceeing his second Oscar show, lightened the mood with another batch of Hollywood jokes. He harked back to the previous year’s sweep by Gone With the Wind, pointing to the table filled with Oscar statuettes: “What’s the matter, did Selznick bring them back?” (Producer David Selznick would, in fact, get one of them back, when his film Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, won for Best Picture.) Hope joked about the secrecy surrounding the winners, whose names were now guarded in sealed envelopes by Price Waterhouse: “When the last envelope was sealed, Price Waterhouse had to open it again to let [columnist] Sidney Skolsky out.”
Hope got his own award that year: a plaque in recognition of his “unselfish services for the motion picture industry” and for being the “man who did the most for charity in 1940.” He was taken by surprise and fumbled for words (“I don’t feel a bit funny,” he said) as the audience of fourteen hundred applauded wildly for nearly a minute. In a year that saw two popular stars, Jimmy Stewart and Ginger Rogers, win the top acting awards (for The Philadelphia Story and Kitty Foyle respectively), Hope got the biggest ovation of the night.
It was testimony to the stature he had achieved in Hollywood after just three years. Other stars, such as Eddie Cantor, were well-known for their charity work and frequent benefit appearances. But no one was as tireless as Hope. In two years he entertained at a reported 562 benefits, raising money for domestic charities such as the March of Dimes and the American Red Cross, but also, as the war in Europe spread (and his home country of England was fighting for survival), for such war-related causes as the Greek War Relief Committee and Bundles for Britain.
Altruism, to be sure, was only one of Hope’s motivations. Entertaining at charity events provided him with the enthusiastic live audiences that he craved, and it was also—as the Academy honor validated—great for his image. But Hope also recognized, more acutely than any other star of his day, the power of his celebrity and felt a calling to use it. The rest of Hollywood would learn from him.
• • •
A long ten months passed between The Ghost Breakers and the release of Hope’s next film, Road to Zanzibar, in April 1941. The second Road picture reunited most of the same creative team from Road to Singapore. Screenwriters Frank Butler and Don Hartman again took an old script, originally titled Find Colonel Fawcett, and repurposed it for Hope, Crosby, and Lamour. Director Victor Schertzinger was back too, along with lyricist Johnny Burke—though teamed this time with a new composer, Jimmy Van Heusen.
The film was shot in November and December of 1940, and the set was the usual mix of chaos and camaraderie. The impish Barney Dean would shuttle back and forth between the stars, feeding them new lines. Lamour (whom Bob and Bing nicknamed Mother because of her habit of adopting young actresses on the set) tried to keep up with the mayhem, getting a makeup man to black out two of her teeth and startling Hope and Crosby with a gap-toothed smile in the middle of one scene. A studio press release claimed that when the film was screened for its first test audience, it got too many laughs—and seventy-two of them had to be removed, “so that the spectators would be able to follow the story.”
Road to Zanzibar was, indeed, a more rollicking trip than the first Road film—one of the best of all the Road pictures and the one that firmly established the winning format of the series. There is no cumbersome backstory for Crosby this time; he and Hope are a team of equals (Hope has moved up to second billing, ahead of Lamour) and are plunged into their adventures from the very first frame. Even before the first frame: over the opening credits we hear Crosby singing a Burke–Van Heusen ditty called “You Lucky People, You.” When the credits finish, he is revealed to be singing on a carnival stage somewhere in Africa, trying to entice the locals to plunk down their money for a daredevil act called the Living Bullet.
That would be Hope. Dubbed Fearless Frazier, he has been stuffed inside a giant cannon, wearing a dorky crash helmet with a skull and crossbones on it. “I don’t mind being drafted, but not as ammunition,” Hope gripes when Crosby comes over to check on him. Scoffing at Hope’s fears, Bing fires off the cannon, sending Bob flying through a ring of fire. Actually, he’s hiding in a secret compartment inside the cannon, but the flaming dummy fired in his place sets the carnival tents ablaze, forcing Crosby and Hope to make a fast getaway, pursued by the police.
The next few minutes deftly establish the modus operandi of these carnival hucksters. There’s a quick travel montage, punctuated by town signposts and newspaper headlines: Hope as the Human Dynamo, dressed in superhero tights and holding a lightbulb in his mouth, as a jolt of electricity is pumped through him; Hope as the Human Bat, wearing the same dumb outfit but now with giant bat wings attached, getting ready to leap off a hundred-foot cliff. Finally, back in their tent—Hope now nursing a broken arm—Crosby has a giant fish tank carted in, with an octopus inside. His latest idea: Hope will put on a diver’s suit and wrestle the beast, “like you did with Bonzo the Bear.” Hope goes ballistic, and what follows is another of their bristling comedy duets:
BOB: “That thing’s got eight arms! I only got one little hand!”
BING: “What’s the matter with that?”
“I don’t like the odds.”
“Well, if it bothers you, we’ll snap a couple off him.”
“Those things are murderous! That ain’t spaghetti he’s wavin’. Besides, they’re poisonous. They spit ink!”
“All the better. You can wrestle him and write home at the same time.” (Then switching tacks, taunting.) “You’re really slippin’. I’m trying to make a big fellow outta you! A famous man! They’ll write books about you.”
“Yeah, and I know three words that won’t be in ’em: ripe old age.”
“Why, it’s a cinch, we’ll train him.”
“Train him? I’d look fine runnin’ around with a chair and a whip. You can’t train an octopus. They only know one thing: grab you quick and suck the blood outta you. How would I look goin’ around with no blood?”
After peering into the octopus tank, the pair turn toward each other and deliver the kicker in perfect unison: “Just the same.”
It’s a brilliant scene, capturing the essence of their comic relationship: always at odds, yet perfectly in sync; Hope the panicked prey, Crosby the cool predator. In Singapore, there was still a distance between them: Crosby the rich kid chafing under family obligations, Hope the gadabout friend who lures him to the South Seas. Now Crosby is the schemer, and Hope the one who wants to go home to Birch Falls. There’s a sadistic streak in Crosby’s cavalier treatment of his friend. When Hope convinces him to take the money they’ve earned and buy ship’s passage back home, Crosby instead squanders it on a phony diamond mine. Hope is so angry that he wants to end the friendship for good. “I’ve stood plenty from you,” he says, sincerely hurt, “but now we’re through, know what I mean?”
“Now look here, Junior,” says Crosby, a bit chastened and using the diminutive nickname that symbolizes their relationship. “We’ve been through a lot together since we were kids. We’ve been through thick and thin. I never figured it was your dough or my dough. I always thought it belonged to both of us. It was share and share alike.”
Hope, who has started to soften, suddenly perks up: “What about that blonde in Brooklyn?”
“Oh, you didn’t want a share in her. You wanted to be the whole corporation.”
“Yeah, and you wound up as the holding company.”
All the actors up their game in Road to Zanzibar. Lamour, cast as a meek native girl in the previous film, is funnier here, more integrated into the comedy action, playing an American who is running her own con game—posing as a girl about to be sold in a slave auction and then, after Hope and Crosby shell out to save her, splitting the proceeds with her friend (Una Merkel) and the bogus slave trader. Crosby too seems energized by the more sharply defined relationship with Hope and a more equal romantic partner in Lamour.
Hope is better than ever: faster, more animated, with a broader repertoire of double takes and panic reactions—true to his character even as the farcical shenanigans grow more outlandish. As they plunge deeper into the jungle, the boys are captured by cannibals and put inside giant birdcages to be eaten. (The stereotypical Hollywood treatment of African natives, alas, has to be overlooked.) Then Hope, to win his freedom, is forced to wrestle a gorilla, in a ludicrous but very funny slapstick climax: Bob and the beast trade wrestling holds while Bing distracts the ape by lighting matches and the gorilla keeps running over to blow them out.
The film introduces another signature element of the Road pictures: the first of Hope’s out-of-character, self-mocking asides to the camera. When two thugs barge into Hope and Crosby’s quarters, looking to reclaim the money Hope has bilked from them (by reselling the phony diamond mine), Bob and Bing do a reprise of their patty-cake routine from Road to Singapore. But just as they are about to throw their punches, the chief muscleman conks them both on the head. Hope, on the floor, looks up dazed: “He musta seen the picture!”
Time, using the film as the occasion for a cover story on Crosby, called it “some of the most uninhibited, daffy nonsense to hit the US screen since the heyday of Harold Lloyd.” Road to Zanzibar was another hit at the box office, and within weeks Paramount had announced plans for a third in the series: Road to Moscow. The politically charged destination would later be changed to the more benign Morocco, but Hope and Crosby clearly had a buddy act that could travel anywhere.
Hope’s next film, Caught in the Draft, was ginned up quickly, to capitalize on the vogue for military comedies in the wake of the reinstatement of the draft in September 1940. (Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates, released in January, beat Hope’s film to the theaters and was a big hit.) Based on an idea by producer Buddy DeSylva and a script by Harry Tugend, it casts Hope as Don Bolton, a vain Hollywood actor who stars in war pictures but is scared to death of gunshots. To evade the draft, he decides to get married and sets his sights on a gruff army colonel’s daughter, played by Dorothy Lamour. When she questions his patriotism, Hope concocts a scheme to “enlist” with a fake recruiting officer, played by an actor he’s hired. But the plan backfires when Hope enlists with an actual recruiting sergeant by mistake and winds up in the army for real.
As a pampered, self-centered movie star, Hope was playing more to type than he was probably ready to admit. Caught in the Draft was shot during January and February of 1941 and suffered many delays because of bad weather. When the skies finally cleared, director David Butler—a portly, easygoing veteran of Shirley Temple films, working with Hope for the first time—scheduled a key scene to be shot in the afternoon in Malibu. Driving to the location with his makeup man, Hope decided to stop off and see some property he was thinking of buying. They misjudged the time, and when Hope finally got to the set, the light was nearly gone and Butler was furious. “I thought David was going to knife me,” said Hope. They finished the scene with the help of lights, and Butler apparently forgave him—he did three more films with Hope and became one of his favorite directors—but he wasn’t the last director to learn that working around Hope’s schedule could be a challenge.
As a service comedy, Caught in the Draft is merely serviceable, putting Hope through a predictable gauntlet of army indignities: peeling potatoes, pulling guard duty, trying to overcome his nerves at the rifle range. But Hope gives the character some real dimension and empathy, as he sucks it up and tries to prove—to his fellow soldiers, to Lamour and her father, and most of all to himself—that he’s not a coward and a bumbler. After he loses control of a tank and crashes it into the colonel’s car, there’s something touching about the way Hope surveys the wreckage, smartly salutes, and issues a crisp apology: “I’m terribly sorry about the car, sir. I hope you haven’t kept up the payments.”
Caught in the Draft opened in June 1941 to terrific business. On July 4, it set an all-time box-office record for a matinee at New York’s Paramount Theater. With patriotic sentiment growing and broader slapstick comedies making a comeback, supplanting the more refined drawing-room comedies of the 1930s, Hope’s film was perfectly pitched to the mood of the country. It earned $2.2 million at the box office, more than any other Hope film yet.
Hope’s Hollywood winning streak continued with his next film, Nothing But the Truth, released in October. Directed by Elliott Nugent (who, after The Cat and the Canary, had taken a year off from Hollywood to star on Broadway in James Thurber’s The Male Animal), it gives Hope another chance to show off his maturing skills as a comic actor. Once again he gives a farcical character some human dimension, playing a shallow egotist who discovers unknown reserves of courage and moral fiber.
Hope plays a stockbroker who goes to work for a tony Miami brokerage firm. On his first day on the job he arrives in a dapper white suit, accompanied by a valet and looking forward to a cushy job. But he balks when his first assignment is to sell unsuspecting customers a worthless mining stock. After a debate with his colleagues over whether it’s okay to tell “necessary lies” to do business, Hope makes a bet that he can tell nothing but the truth for twenty-four hours. This puts him in a predictable series of tight spots. At a dinner party aboard the company yacht, he has to bite his tongue to avoid offending the high-society guests at the table, including his boss’s pretty niece (Paulette Goddard, for once unaccompanied by spooks). His jutting chin never looked so defiant, or so vulnerable, as he tries to navigate the polite conversation without losing the bet.
“Cat got your tongue?” the hostess says after he’s been quiet for too long. “You haven’t said very much. And I’ve put you between two of Miami’s most attractive women. Don’t you agree?”
Hope, sitting between two dowagers, turns to look at one—then swivels his head an extra half-turn, pricelessly, looking for the person the hostess might be referring to. He recovers quickly: “Why, you’re right. I haven’t said very much.”
You can see the wheels turning, as he tries to maneuver through each treacherous conversational pass with evasions and euphemisms. Finally, he gives up and lets loose a torrent of truth-telling—blurting out that one guest at the table “couldn’t pass for thirty unless she had a bag over her head.” Scandalized, the haughty hostess lectures him, “We should weigh our words very carefully before we speak.” Hope cries, “I do!” Indeed, no one in movies weighed them better.
• • •
Al Capstaff, a producer on The Pepsodent Show, was the first to suggest to Hope that he broadcast one of his radio shows from a military camp. Capstaff’s brother was stationed at March Field, the Air Force base in Riverside, California, and the men there needed entertainment, Capstaff said. Hope was initially cool to the idea: “Why should we drag the whole show down there?” But the appeal of a captive audience of a thousand bored servicemen—plus a chance to promote his upcoming movie, Caught in the Draft—helped change his mind.
On Tuesday, May 6, 1941, Hope and his radio troupe were bused to Riverside to do a remote broadcast from the base. Autograph seekers mobbed them as soon as they were inside the gates. Once they were onstage, nearly every joke was greeted with howls of laughter. “I want to tell you I’m thrilled to be here,” Hope said. “I came up to look at some of the sweaters I knitted.” And: “One of the aviators here took me for a plane ride this afternoon. I wasn’t frightened, but at two thousand feet one of my goose pimples bailed out.”
Hope recalled, “I got goose pimples myself from the roar that followed that one. Then I started to understand. What I said coincided with what these guys were feeling, and laughter was the only way they could communicate how they felt to the rest of the country. I was their messenger boy.” Hope returned to the studio the following week, but he missed the fired-up military crowds and went back on the road for several more troop shows—at the San Diego Naval Station, the Marines’ Camp Roberts in San Luis Obispo, and the Army’s Camp Callan in Torrey Pines—before the season ended in June.
To get a reaction from the men, Hope would send out an advance team of writers to find out the popular hangouts, names of commanding officers, and other local gossip so that he could plug them into the monologue. “It was our job to talk to the men, and anyone else, to find out which captain they didn’t like, or what terminology we could use,” said Sherwood Schwartz. “We were all civilians. We didn’t know about army stuff at the time.” A line on one show made a reference to the “head of the Navy,” and it got an unexpected laugh—Hope and company didn’t know that head meant “bathroom.” Even the term GI, standing for “government issue,” was not in common usage until Hope began using it to refer to the soldiers. For a nation being dragged reluctantly toward war, Hope’s shows played an important, if rarely acknowledged, role in getting Americans accustomed to the military mind-set, and providing a link to the servicemen who would soon be defending them on the battlefield—his own contribution to the war mobilization effort.
One member of Hope’s troupe who was a particular hit with the servicemen was his new singer—a pretty, petite brunette named Frances Langford. She had grown up in Florida and originally wanted to be an opera singer before a tonsillectomy changed her voice from soprano to contralto and she switched to pop. Langford began singing on radio and had appeared in a few movies, but she reached her career apotheosis when Hope began using her on his radio show in the spring of 1941 and made her a regular the following season. Langford had a mile-wide smile and a brassy, emotionally charged voice that could carry over an expanse of thousands of men. She was sexy, but had the openhearted wholesomeness of an older sister. Along with his other contributions to the war effort, Hope had discovered the iconic singing voice of World War II.
With a string of hit movies, a radio show that was moving up steadily in the ratings (The Pepsodent Show finished in third place for the 1940–41 season, trailing only Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen), and the start of his military-camp shows, Hope was riding higher than ever. But he didn’t rest. Even as his career was still in its formative stages, Hope set himself apart from nearly every other Hollywood star by the aggressive and creative ways in which he sought to promote himself and market his fame.
Hope noticed how many fan letters he was getting, many with requests for bios and photos, and over the summer he came up with the idea of writing a humorous memoir, timed to come out at the start of his fall radio season. Pepsodent, seeing the promotional possibilities, agreed to back the project, and Hope’s writers spent the rest of the summer churning out a ninety-six-page, joke-filled paperback called They Got Me Covered. Pepsodent printed 4 million copies and sold them for ten cents apiece (plus a box top from a tube of Pepsodent toothpaste). Free copies were handed out to Hope’s studio audiences; Paramount distributed ten thousand more to the press to promote his fall movie Nothing But the Truth; and Hope flogged the book constantly on his radio show. It was a marketing masterstroke.
The book gave Hope not just his first brand extension, but an early opportunity to take control of his own life story. The accounts of his boyhood in Cleveland and early show-business career are lighthearted, gag-filled, and all but useless for anyone looking for real insights into Bob Hope:
I was such a beautiful baby. My parents had me kidnapped twice a week just so they could see my picture in the papers.
I remember my first appearance as a comedian. I had them rolling in the aisles. Then the usher came and took away the dice.
Fan mail is like bread and butter to an actor. That reminds me—we’re having postcards for dinner tonight.
Hope would write other, marginally more revealing memoirs in later years. But he was already constructing a wall around his private life and taking charge of his public image. In July 1941 he was the subject of a laudatory profile in Time magazine, but he was unhappy because of a few comments about his wealth and his reputation for cheapness. Asked by Time how much he earned in a year, Hope replied, “You can say it’s about a quarter of a million, and I don’t like it.” The magazine estimated his net worth at around $800,000 and noted, “Around the Paramount lot he is known as a ‘hard man with a dollar.’ ”
Nothing got under Hope’s skin more. He had his publicists feed stories to the press about his charitable donations (a reported $100,000 in 1940) and his busy schedule of benefit appearances. Crosby even wrote a letter to Time, identifying himself as the source of the “hard man with a dollar” crack, but insisting that the reporter had not recognized it as a joke. “It’s not very often that I get mad,” he wrote, “but to speak of the ‘appealing avarice’ of Hope, the one man in the business who does not deserve such snide reporting, is fantastic.” But the portrait stuck: Hope’s wealth and reputed tightness with money became touchstones for nearly every profile of him.
Hope’s fourth film of 1941, the year that vaulted him to the front rank of American entertainment stars, was Louisiana Purchase. It was a screen adaptation of Irving Berlin’s Broadway musical, with Hope playing a Louisiana businessman caught up in a graft investigation. Though a relatively big-budget production with a Broadway pedigree, it was Hope’s weakest film of the year—with one of Berlin’s most negligible scores, and the tedious Victor Moore taking up way too much screen time as a graft-investigating senator. But Hope gives the film his all, particularly in a climactic filibuster on the floor of the Senate (with its obvious echoes of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), and the movie, which opened on Christmas Day, earned $2.75 million at the box office, another record high for a Hope film.
It was an amazing year for Hope. He was Paramount’s No. 1 star and ranked fourth on Variety’s annual list of Hollywood’s top box-office draws—behind Gary Cooper, Abbott and Costello, and Clark Gable. According to SEC figures, he earned $294,000 for his movie work in 1941—second only to Bing Crosby, with $300,000. A poll of 450,000 radio listeners named him the top comedian on the air, beating out Jack Benny for the first time. Radio Daily gave him its “No. 1 Entertainer” award, and the Women’s Press Club even named him the “most cooperative star in Hollywood.” In December the Los Angeles Times ran an adulatory story on him, portraying an upbeat Hollywood star at the top of his game: “Other top-line funnymen either complain of overwork or feel that stage and screen have passed over their ‘real’ dramatic talents. Bob thinks his work is swell, life is grand, everything is hunky-dory. And he doesn’t want to play Hamlet.”
It was the last time for a while that he could appear so carefree. The Times story appeared, by chance, on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. Hope was at home, having just finished working with his writers on his radio monologue, when Dolores came into his bedroom to tell him the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Hope thought it was a joke at first, and it still hadn’t quite sunk in when he went to a Hollywood Stars football game in the afternoon. At halftime an announcement was made for all men in uniform to report to their units. Hope went ahead with the usual Sunday night run-through of his radio show (“We were all too shocked to react normally by canceling it,” he said) and told jokes about Christmas shopping as if nothing had happened. “The audience laughed in little spurts,” he recalled, “on the edge of their seats in case they had to make a hasty exit.”
The show never aired. Hope’s Tuesday-night broadcast was preempted for an address to the nation by President Roosevelt, telling the country to get ready for war.