Hollywood was a changed place after Pearl Harbor. For days following the attack, Los Angeles was on edge—fearful that the Japanese, having so brazenly attacked our naval base in Hawaii, might next target Southern California, where two-thirds of the nation’s aircraft production was located. There were rumors of Japanese planes buzzing California. Blackouts were ordered, and radio stations were shut down. Japanese Americans were rounded up, suspected of being potential saboteurs. The Army moved uninvited into the Walt Disney lot in Burbank so that it could stand watch over the huge Lockheed plant nearby. The studios, meanwhile, made contingency plans to pool their facilities in case of an enemy attack—“to ensure completion of films in event of loss of life during production of any important screen personalities,” Variety reported.
The start of the war didn’t mean a halt to making movies. On the contrary, Hollywood quickly reassured itself that continuing to make them was more important than ever. “Sacrifices will have to be made,” Daily Variety editorialized on the day after Pearl Harbor, “but the show industry must keep functioning, to preserve morale, to keep up the spirits of this country and its allies with top-rung entertainment and beneficial propaganda.” Yet, like the rest of the country, Hollywood had to adapt to the new wartime restrictions. All guns used on movie sets were confiscated. With rubber and gasoline strictly rationed, car chases were banned. For security reasons, shots of airports, harbors, or bridges were forbidden, as was the filming of battle scenes after 5:00 p.m., so as not to alarm civilians.
With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the national debate over whether the United States should get involved in a “foreign war” came to an abrupt end. Now was the time to band together in an all-out war effort, and Hollywood was eager to play its part. Many stars—Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, William Holden, Tyrone Power—enlisted in the service. Directors such as William Wyler, Frank Capra, and John Ford got officer commissions and went overseas to make war documentaries and propaganda films. Those who stayed home found other ways to contribute. John Garfield and Bette Davis helped set up the Hollywood Canteen, a former livery stable on Sunset and Cahuenga Boulevard converted into a recreation center for servicemen, where movie stars pitched in as waiters, dishwashers, and even dance partners for the boys getting ready to be shipped overseas. Clark Gable was recruited to head the actors’ division of the Hollywood Victory Committee, which lined up stars to travel the country selling war bonds. (Coming back from one of these tours in January 1942, Gable’s own wife, Carole Lombard, was killed in a plane crash.) Hollywood beauties such as Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner sold bonds by offering kisses in return for pledges of $25,000 or $50,000. Dorothy Lamour reportedly sold $30 million worth of bonds in just four days.
At thirty-eight, married, and the father of two, Bob Hope was safe from military service. (With the start of the war, the age of eligibility was raised from thirty-five to forty-five, but in practice no men over thirty-five were ever drafted.) And given his radio show’s many visits to military camps, no star had staked out a clearer role for himself on the home front. But Hope, surprisingly, took a little while to realize it. For the first few weeks after Pearl Harbor, his show remained in the studio, trying to conduct comedy business as usual. “We feel that in times like these, more than ever before, we need a moment of relaxation,” Hope said, opening his first show to air after Pearl Harbor. “All of us in this studio feel that if we can bring into your homes a little laughter each Tuesday night, we are helping to do our part.”
Yet he could hardly ignore the war. Hope’s radio monologues were now peppered with jokes about blackouts, gas rationing, and other wartime privations, such as the ban on women’s girdles to save rubber. Then, on January 27, Hope took his radio show to the San Diego Naval Base and followed it with six straight weeks of military-camp shows. After returning to the studio for one week, he went back on the road and continued to do shows for military audiences virtually nonstop until the end of the war. Jack Benny, Hope’s chief radio rival, did some shows at military bases too, but he found the raucous crowds too disruptive of his timing and carefully scripted material. For Hope, louder, looser, and faster on his feet, they were energizing. “I find these audiences of soldiers and sailors like a tonic,” he told a reporter. “They get so excited at times that they can’t resist trying to join in the performance themselves, which is okay with me because then you know you are getting audience response.”
The servicemen loved him. Hope spoke their language, sympathized with their gripes, and brought sexy movie stars for them to ogle. He would introduce himself by explicitly identifying with whatever group or base he was visiting—“This is Bob Soldier-in-the-Desert Hope,” or “This is Bob San-Diego-Naval-Base-Hospital Hope.” When he was entertaining marines, he’d make jokes about the Navy; in front of Navy men he’d take potshots at the marines. In front of everyone, he would dwell on topic A: sex. “I really don’t think there are enough girls around this base,” he joked in San Diego. “Today I saw twenty-six sailors in line to buy tickets to see a hula dancer tattooed on a guy’s chest.”
Offstage too Hope was at the front lines of Hollywood’s war effort. When the studios made plans in January for a Red Cross War Emergency Drive, Hope helped rally studio employees at Paramount. “We are all soldiers now,” he said at an organizing meeting. “It is the part of some of us to fight with dollars instead of guns.” He traveled with Crosby for a series of exhibition golf matches to raise money for war relief. For a match in Sacramento he formed a twosome with Babe Ruth, playing against Crosby and California governor Culbert Olson. In Houston, the crowds packed the fairways so tightly that Hope and Crosby barely had room to drive. One Hope shot hit a spectator standing in a sand trap and bounced onto the green. When he found his ball, Hope shouted, “Who do I pay? Who do I pay?”
At the end of April, Hope joined the Hollywood Victory Caravan, a star-packed variety show booked on a whistle-stop tour of thirteen cities in three weeks, to raise money for the Army and Navy Relief Funds. The all-star troupe—which included Cary Grant, Groucho Marx, Claudette Colbert, Merle Oberon, James Cagney, Betty Grable, and Laurel and Hardy, among others—set out by train from Los Angeles on April 26 and arrived in Washington three days later to start the tour. Hope, who was too busy with his radio show for the cross-country train ride, hopped a plane instead and met them in Washington, in time for a welcoming tea at the White House, hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Their first show, at Washington’s Capitol Theatre, was a little ragged and under-rehearsed, running nearly three hours long. But Hope, sharing emcee duties with Cary Grant, was a hit. “If anything it was Bob Hope’s Victory Caravan,” Variety said in its review. “As long as Hope was on the stage, the show had zest and lift. With his departure it dropped to varying levels of mediocrity.” The caravan continued on to Boston and Philadelphia, made a swing through the South and Midwest, and finished up in San Francisco on May 19. The trip was grueling enough for most of the Hollywood stars-turned-vaudeville vagabonds. But for Hope, typically, it was little more than a part-time job. He broadcast his radio show from various stops on the tour, played in more exhibition golf matches, and entertained at dozens of military bases along the way. And when the caravan was over, Hope kept on going—doubling back through the South and East, doing his radio show along the way and winding up the season at Mitchel Field on Long Island and the submarine base in New London, Connecticut. His camp-show broadcasts helped propel his radio show into first place in the Hooper ratings in June, the culmination of a remarkable four-year climb. The BBC picked up transcriptions of his show, and Hope became a radio hit in Britain as well.
After ten weeks of traveling and appearances at nearly a hundred military camps, Hope came home physically exhausted. His doctors warned him to slow down. But there was little chance of that. The rush of adrenaline that Hope got from being onstage was multiplied by the wild reception he got from the servicemen—and the feeling that he had found his role in the war effort.
• • •
The war didn’t deter a record crowd of sixteen hundred from packing into the Biltmore Bowl for the annual Academy Awards banquet on February 26, 1942. But it cast a sobering light on the affair. In keeping with the national mood of austerity, the Academy urged attendees to avoid fancy formal wear (though several actresses came in evening gowns anyway). The guest of honor was former presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, author of a new bestselling book urging international cooperation called One World, whose speech was broadcast nationally on CBS radio.
Hope, emceeing the event for the third year in a row, revealed a Willkie button under his lapel. “I haven’t given up yet,” he joked. “And there’s one for Hoover under it.” The wartime anxieties didn’t deter him from his usual Hollywood wisecracks. About a recent air raid in Los Angeles: “That was no air raid; that was John Barrymore coming home from W. C. Fields’s house.” When Hope presented a fake Oscar to Jack Benny, for impersonating a woman in Charley’s Aunt, Hope quipped, “Benny will no longer play any of these female roles because the government’s taking his rubber girdle away from him.”
Hope’s own movie career, meanwhile, was rolling along. He was developing a consistent screen character—the wisecracking, girl-chasing, blustering coward—but the movies themselves had a pleasing variety: service comedies, buddy movies, comic horror films, retro-thirties romantic comedies. With My Favorite Blonde—which began shooting just before Pearl Harbor, finished up in January and was released in April—he discovered a new genre that showed him off especially well: the comedy spy caper.
The movie had its origins in Hope’s radio show. His obsession with the glamorous, blond British actress Madeleine Carroll became a running gag on the show, and one day Carroll, a fellow Paramount star, telephoned to thank Hope for all the publicity. She suggested they ought to do a picture together, and Paramount liked the idea. As a vehicle, the studio chose a script by two of Hope’s former radio writers, Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, rewritten by Don Hartman and Frank Butler, the Road picture team. Sidney Lanfield, a comedy veteran working with Hope for the first time, got the director’s assignment. The result was one of Hope’s best films of the early forties.
He plays a small-time vaudeville song-and-dance man who does a cheesy act with a roller-skating penguin. Carroll is a British secret agent who shows up at his dressing-room door (“Too late, sister, I’ve already got an agent,” he tells her) and drags him into a Hitchcockian spy plot. The MacGuffin is a brooch with a secret code, needed to launch a fleet of British bombers from an air base in California. Carroll surreptitiously plants the brooch on Hope, then accompanies him on a cross-country train trip to deliver it, with enemy spies in hot pursuit. (The silly premise was close enough to reality to disturb some British military officers, who complained about the film’s suggestion that the launching of an RAF fleet would be dependent on such a harebrained scheme.)
My Favorite Blonde puts a comic twist on a familiar Hitchcock formula: the average Joe drawn unwittingly into life-or-death intrigue. Some of the scenes consciously echo The 39 Steps, the 1935 Hitchcock film in which Carroll raced around the Scottish countryside with Robert Donat, trying to foil an enemy spy ring. Hope does an amusing parody of their stiff-upper-lipped derring-do: he’s a quavering, reluctant hero who wants no part of the adventure but is too moonstruck by Madeleine to avoid it. Their first encounter in his dressing room is Hope at his babbling, glassy-eyed best:
MADELEINE: “Do you know what it feels like to be followed and hounded and watched every second?”
BOB: “Well, I used to. Now I pay cash for everything.”
MADELEINE (urgently): “Look at me.”
BOB (hypnotized): “I’m looking.”
MADELEINE: “You’ve got to trust me.”
BOB: “I’m not through looking.”
Hope gets the most out of every gag line, even the most obvious ones. Being dragged away by the authorities: “They can’t do this to me! I’m an American citizen! I pay taxes!” Beat. “Well, I’m an American citizen.” But the film also shows off his skills as a physical comedian as never before. Riding the train in one scene, he hides behind a newspaper as a trio of threatening characters silently join him in the compartment. Hope fidgets, peeks timidly from behind the paper, fans himself nervously with his hat, opens his cigarette case, and spills all of them on the floor. It’s Hope’s version of a classic comic archetype—the childlike naïf, flustered by an intimidating adult world—harking back to Chaplin and ahead to Jerry Lewis.
Though Hope stays admirably committed to character, he steps outside of the film at several points, with self-mocking references to his offscreen life and career—a device that would become common in his films. At one point he turns on the radio and hears an announcer introducing The Pepsodent Show. He quickly switches it off. “I can’t stand that guy,” he snaps. And Crosby turns up for the first of many unbilled cameos in Hope films, as a truck driver who gives Hope directions to a Teamsters picnic. After getting the directions and giving Bing a light for his pipe, Hope walks away, then stops and does a double take. “Couldn’t be,” he mutters, before moving on.
“Not only the funniest Bob Hope picture, but the funniest comedy within memory—that is the verdict of New York critics (and of New Yorkers) on My Favorite Blonde,” reported the Los Angeles Times when the film opened in April. “Unless everybody hereabouts is wrong, this is an almost perfect feature.” It broke records for its four-week run at the Paramount Theater in New York and outdrew Hope’s previous hits Caught in the Draft and Nothing But the Truth at theaters around the country. Once again, it was an escapist comedy with potent echoes of the real world. Though conceived before the United States was drawn into the war, Hope’s comic face-off with the vaguely identified (but obviously German) spies was a welcome release for a nation now fighting real-life foreign enemies.
The early months of 1942 were the darkest of the war. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan’s war machine moved with frightening speed—overrunning Hong Kong, Burma, Thailand, Singapore, and the Philippines in a matter of weeks. American merchant ships, speeding across the Atlantic to supply the European Allies with war matériel, were being sunk by German submarines faster than new ships could be built. With America’s war-production efforts still gearing up, a much-anticipated counteroffensive by the Allies was many months away.
Hollywood’s first efforts to bring entertainment to the troops were, by necessity, confined to the home front. The United Service Organizations (USO), created in 1941 by six nonprofit groups to provide recreation and entertainment for America’s men in uniform, set up clubs near military camps around the country where soldiers could eat, drink, and dance with local volunteer girls. Later, through its Camp Shows subsidiary, run by Abe Lastfogel, head of the William Morris talent agency, the USO began sending stars such as Al Jolson, Mickey Rooney, and Martha Raye on entertainment tours of domestic military bases.
Armed Forces Radio also began producing radio variety shows expressly for the troops and broadcast overseas via shortwave. Hope was a frequent host of one of them, Command Performance, a weekly show that featured top Hollywood guests supposedly picked by its GI listeners—“the greatest entertainers in America as requested by you, the fighting men of the United States armed forces throughout the world.” Hope hosted his first broadcast for the troops on July 7, 1942, and did two more that year, sending along jokes from back home and motivational pep talks for the job they were doing over there: “This is Bob rubber-drive Hope, telling you guys out there that we’re all gonna keep turning in our rubber suspenders till we’ve caught the Axis with their panzers down.” And: “Hitler’s always talking about his spring offensive, but, brother, that guy’s offensive all year round.” He could be a little racier than he could on NBC, where his jokes were closely monitored by the censors. One example was his notorious crack about the rubber shortage and Kate Smith, the amply proportioned singer whose theme song was “When the Moon Comes over the Mountain.” “Kate Smith finally turned in her girdle,” said Hope. “You should see the moon come over the mountain now.” NBC censors nixed the line, but the troops got to hear it.
In the summer of 1942, one of Hope’s former movie stand-ins, now an army sergeant, dropped by the Paramount lot and suggested that Hope pay a visit to the US troops stationed in Alaska, guarding the Aleutian Islands against a possible Japanese attack. A few entertainers, among them Joe E. Brown and Edgar Bergen, had already traveled to that frozen territory, and Hope was eager to join them. He told his brother Jack to arrange a trip there during the one small window of time he had on his busy schedule—after his current film, They Got Me Covered, finished shooting on September 5, and before his first radio show of the season, on September 22.
Bob got two of his radio costars, Frances Langford and Jerry Colonna, to join him. With no room for a band, Langford suggested that Hope bring along a guitarist named Tony Romano, who had worked with Morey Amsterdam on the radio and as Dick Powell’s vocal arranger at Warner Bros. A small, wiry Italian-American from Fresno, California, known as one of the top arrangers in Hollywood, Romano signed on as the fourth member of Hope’s first troupe of wartime entertainers.
The trip was almost scrubbed before it got started. Just as the quartet was getting ready to leave from San Francisco, Hope got a telegram from the military brass in Alaska calling off the tour. The weather looked dicey, they said, and they couldn’t guarantee that Hope would be back in time for his radio show. Hope wired back quickly, all but begging to come: “Four thespians, bags packed with songs and witty sayings, ready to tour your territory. Have been informed, due to lack of time, trip is off. Please let us make trip and will take our chances.” Twelve hours later he got a reply from Major General Simon Buckner, overall commander of US troops in Alaska: “You leave Tuesday.”
Hope and his entertainers flew first to Fairbanks, where they were assigned a Lockheed Lodestar aircraft and two pilots to ferry them around the territory. Their first stop was Nome, the remote town nicknamed Devil’s Island by the GIs stranded there. Hope entertained in Quonset huts for men jammed inside and standing on tiptoes to see. He did a show for three thousand troops in the rain on Unimak Island in the Aleutians and for thirteen hundred mud-caked construction engineers working on the Canadian-Alaskan Highway in the Yukon Territory. At a refueling stop in Northway, he did an impromptu show for forty men, using a tree stump as a stage. With communications spotty in these forlorn outposts, the arrival of a troupe of Hollywood entertainers often came as a surprise and prompted some emotional reactions. At one show in the Aleutians, when Langford was singing “Isn’t It Romantic,” a general nudged Hope and pointed to two airmen listening to her in the crowd. One had his arm around his buddy, who was silently crying.
Hope and his little band grew close on the trip, as they endured the below-zero weather, bare-bones accommodations, and often treacherous plane flights. Their two pilots, Marvin Setzer (the younger, whom Hope nicknamed Junior) and Bob Gates (the tall one, dubbed Growing Pains), became part of the family too, especially after a perilously close call on a flight from Cordova to Anchorage. The troupe was supposed to be in Anchorage by evening, but with darkness falling—and flying at night in Alaska considered too dangerous—the pilots wanted to wait until morning. But Hope and Langford, intent on getting to Anchorage in time for a welcoming party that had been planned for them, prevailed on the pilots to leave that night.
A few minutes after taking off, the plane was enveloped in fog and sleet. As they headed toward Anchorage, the right engine conked out, and so did the radio. The plane was losing altitude at a rate of two hundred feet a minute and couldn’t find the airport. Back in the main cabin, Hope and company knew something was wrong when they heard shouting from the cockpit. The crew chief came back and told them to put on their parachutes and “Mae West” life vests.
As he watched Langford being outfitted, Hope felt a wave of guilt: he had prevailed on her husband, actor Jon Hall, to let Frances take the trip. Colonna nervously stroked his mustache and quipped drily that the station wagon probably wouldn’t be there. It was a reference to a joke Hope told, about a nervous recruit making his first parachute jump. The sergeant instructs him to pull the rip cord and ride the parachute to the ground, where a station wagon will be waiting to pick him up. But when the recruit pulls the cord, the parachute doesn’t open. Hurtling toward the earth, he grumbles, “I’ll bet the station wagon won’t be there either.”
“It was a pretty scary night,” Gates, the copilot, recalled years later. “Bob came up to the cockpit, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, ‘They’re all on their knees praying back there.’ I said, ‘Tell ’em to keep going, ’cause we’re gonna need all the help we can get.’ ” The ground crew at Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage, learning of the plane’s troubles, turned on all their searchlights, in violation of security rules. The plane had dropped to about two thousand feet when Gates and Setzer finally caught sight of the beams and headed the plane toward the airport.
“We saw this big glow, circled, and landed,” said Gates. “We couldn’t taxi, because we only had one engine. There was ice all over the airplane. All the generals and base commanders came running out. Bob was one of the first ones out. I was the last one. He came over, put his arms around me, and said, ‘Okay, let’s go to the barracks and change our drawers.’ ”
Hope later gave each pilot a watch, with the inscription “Thanks for my life.” He wasn’t exaggerating the danger. Gates, who became a colonel in the Air Force and logged eighteen thousand hours of flying time (including several more overseas trips with Hope), said that of all the flights he made in his career, that was the worst.
Bad weather of a more benign sort nearly kept Hope from getting back in time for his first radio show of the season. Pepsodent had lined up Edgar Bergen and bandleader Kay Kyser to fill in for him, in case Hope didn’t make it. But the weather cleared just in time for Hope and company to fly to Seattle on Monday, and they did a show on Tuesday night from nearby Fort Lewis. Then they turned around and flew back to finish the Alaska tour, making a few final stops in the Aleutians before heading home to Los Angeles.
The Alaska trip made a powerful impression on Hope, and he talked soberly about it afterward. “I wouldn’t trade this trip for my last five years in show business—my lucky years,” he told a reporter. “I tell you, a guy gets to seeing himself in the proper focus in a setup like that. It’s touching to think that the visit of a mere human being can mean so much.” He promised to make another trip to Alaska, launched a drive to raise money for athletic gear and other recreational equipment for the men up there, and said he planned to go next to the British Isles. “Yes, Hollywood won’t see so much of Hope from here on out. I’ve got other plans.”
• • •
Questions were occasionally raised as to why Hope, Hollywood’s greatest cheerleader for the troops, wasn’t in uniform himself. He batted away the criticism fairly easily, with the help of friendly newspaper columnists. Dorothy Kilgallen reminded her readers how much Hope had done for the war effort, entertaining the troops and selling war bonds, and reported that he had tried to enlist six times (unlikely). “He was rejected every time,” she wrote, “because the Army would rather have him doing what he is doing than carrying a gun.” Ed Sullivan, after a golf game with Hope and heavyweight champion Joe Louis, now a sergeant in the Army, quoted Louis as telling Hope that it was more important for him to stay out of the line of fire. “The greatest good you can do is by making soldiers and sailors laugh,” said Louis. “Us younger boys will take care of the fighting. You take care of the laughing.”
He was taking care of it quite well. His Pepsodent Show, riding high on Hope’s wartime gags, was now the No. 1 program in radio’s Hooper ratings, just ahead of Fibber McGee and Molly, the show that followed Hope on Tuesday nights. And in November 1942, Paramount released a third Road picture, Road to Morocco, probably the most famous and fondly remembered (if not necessarily the best) of the entire series.
One reason is the film’s title number, sung by the boys while riding on the back of a two-humped camel—the iconic image of the raffish camaraderie that sparked the films. The two, who have washed up on a desert shore after their ship has exploded and sunk (thanks to a match tossed inadvertently by Hope into the engine room), look as good as they ever have: sailor caps perched jauntily on their heads, Crosby trimmer and more animated than usual, Hope looking fit and manly in a white T-shirt and stubble of beard. Johnny Burke’s lyrics, batted back and forth by the two stars, are a high point of the Road films’ self-parodying, in-joke humor:
Where we’re goin’, why we’re goin’, how can we be sure?
I’ll lay you eight to five that we meet Dor-o-thy Lamour . . .
[Bing] For any villains we may meet, we haven’t any fear
[Bob] Paramount will protect us ’cause we’re signed for five more years.
The entire Burke–Van Heusen score, which includes the standard “Moonlight Becomes You,” is probably the best of all the Road pictures. The comic plot—from another screenplay by Frank Butler and Don Hartman, directed by David Butler (replacing Victor Schertzinger, who had died unexpectedly in October 1941)—is a satisfying pile-on of schemes and counterschemes. First, to make some money, Bing sells Bob into slavery. When Bob winds up being pampered in a harem and engaged to marry a desert princess (Lamour, naturally), Bing tries to horn in on the action. Then, when Hope finds out that any man who marries the princess is cursed to die, he tries to con Bing into taking his place. The thrust and parry of their back-and-forth has been polished to a fine edge:
BING: “We’ll have to storm the place.”
BOB: “You storm, I’ll stay here and drizzle.”
BING: “You got red blood, ain’t you?”
BOB: “Yeah, but I don’t want to get it all over strangers.”
BING: “I wanna have a talk with you, man-to-man.”
BOB: “Who’s gonna hold up your end?”
Road to Morocco is the wackiest and most anarchic Road picture yet. There are talking camels (“This is the screwiest picture I was ever in,” one says) and fourth-wall-breaking gags. In a scene near the end, for example, an exasperated Hope quickly recaps all the troubles that Bing has gotten them into. “I know all that!” says Bing after he finishes. “Yeah,” Bob replies, “but the people who came in the middle of the picture don’t.” (Bing’s retort: “You mean they missed my song?”) And the movie has one of the only truly ad-libbed moments in the entire Road series. In the middle of a scene with a camel they’ve found in the desert (the one they’ll hop onto for the “Road to Morocco” number), the beast suddenly spits in Hope’s face. As Hope reels back out of camera range, Crosby laughs and pets the animal: “Good girl, good girl.” The camel improvised the spit—but when director Butler saw the spontaneous reaction, he kept it in the film.
The Morocco setting turned out to be unfortunately timed—Allied troops invaded North Africa just days before the film’s release—but that mattered little. Road to Morocco earned $4 million at the box office, the best ever for a Road picture and the fourth highest for any film of 1942.
• • •
By early 1943, the tide in the war had turned in the Allies’ favor. Starting with the Battle of Midway in June 1942, Japan’s advances in the Pacific were being steadily reversed. The German invasion of the Soviet Union had bogged down in the bitter Russian winter. The long-awaited Allied offensive in the European theater, the invasion of North Africa in November 1942, had succeeded beyond expectations, with Rommel’s forces driven out and Allied troops now securely in control of the region. So secure, in fact, that the USO was able to start sending entertainers there. Hope, tied up with his radio show until the summer, must have looked on enviously as stars such as Martha Raye and Carole Landis were in the first wave of entertainers to travel to North Africa in the early months of 1943.
Hope did his bit back home, making a ten-week tour in the spring of military camps in the Midwest and South. His pace was unflagging, his energy almost uncanny. “There were never less than three telephones in our rooms, and all of them rang at the same time every second of the day and night,” said Barney Dean, who accompanied Hope on the trip. “And people, people, people. It was maddening. But Bob didn’t seem to mind.” When his exhausted troupe reached Atlanta, looking to rest up before the next day’s radio broadcast, Hope got a call from a Paramount wardrobe boy who had been drafted and was now stationed in Albany, Georgia. Hope grabbed Barney Dean and made a hundred-mile drive there, just to do a show for the fellow’s unit.
Back in Hollywood, Hope made a cameo appearance in Star Spangled Rhythm, a flag-waving Paramount musical revue, and played a newspaper reporter in Washington who stumbles on a German spy plot in They Got Me Covered, his long-delayed picture for Goldwyn. On March 4 Hope emceed his fourth Academy Awards banquet, held at the Cocoanut Grove. The war once again took center stage. The evening began with privates Alan Ladd and Tyrone Power unfurling an American flag containing the names of 26,677 members of the Hollywood community who were in uniform, and ended with the Best Picture award going to Mrs. Miniver, the inspirational wartime drama about an English family during the German Blitz. In between, Hope made jokes about the many Hollywood leading men who were off fighting in the war. “Pretty soon,” he said, “we’ll see Hedy Lamarr waiting to be kissed while they put a heating pad on Lewis Stone”—Mickey Rooney’s screen father in the Andy Hardy films.
Hope was about to become one of those missing Hollywood stars. For his summer radio hiatus in July and August of 1943, Hope made plans for his first overseas tour of military bases: a two-month trip to the British Isles and North Africa, under the auspices of the USO Camp Shows. He wanted to reassemble the same group he had taken with him to Alaska and managed to recruit both Langford and guitarist Romano. But Colonna had movie commitments and a family to support, and he had to beg off. In his place Hope brought along Jack Pepper, a pudgy former vaudeville entertainer (once married to Ginger Rogers), who was in the Army and stationed in Texas, where Hope reconnected with him while traveling on his spring tour.
The four entertainers flew to New York in mid-June, to get their inoculations and await word on when they could depart. Dolores came along too, joining Bob for a few nights at the Waldorf Astoria. During the days, he went over material, which included some special songs written for the tour by Johnny Mercer. In the evenings he and Dolores would take in a nightclub or a Broadway show, including the hit new Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! Hope even squeezed in some last-minute reshoots for Let’s Face It, the movie version of Cole Porter’s Broadway musical that he had shot in the spring. Paramount had decided the film needed a better ending and sent second-unit director Hal Walker all the way to New York to get two new scenes on film before Hope left for Europe.
After six days of waiting, Hope and company finally got the word to be at LaGuardia’s Marine Air Terminal at 1:00 a.m. There, Bob and Dolores had an anxious but subdued parting. A few months earlier, in February 1943, a similar USO flight headed for North Africa had crashed near Lisbon, killing Tamara, Hope’s former costar in Roberta on Broadway, and severely injuring singer Jane Froman, who had appeared with him on his early radio show The Intimate Revue.
“Take care of yourself,” Dolores said, as Bob got ready to board the plane.
“You know I will,” he replied. They kissed, and he was off.
For Dolores the partings were becoming sadly familiar. In one of her few interviews around that time, with Screenland magazine, she put a typically upbeat face on it, praising Bob’s dedication and energy, and touting her own volunteer work during the war—as head of the Southern California chapter of the American Women’s Volunteer Services, in charge of agriculture. “I couldn’t let this exciting world fly by without doing my share, and I’m busy,” Dolores said. “You have no idea how many angles this involves. We spend days and nights rounding up workers, both men and women—thousands and thousands of them, to harvest the fruit and vegetable crops. Also, the vast vineyards. We have to work fast, you know, and it is a tremendous task. But we are so elated over our success that we forget to be tired.”
She was circumspect, as always, about their marriage—though, in the coded language of 1940s Hollywood wives, one can detect hints of the accommodations she had to make: “It is the woman who makes the marriage, and like any career, one must work at it.” She laughed off any suggestion that she might be jealous over “all those beautiful movie girls” her husband worked with. But she added, “Marriage can become complicated. Nothing is stationary, least of all emotions. But when a couple has built up understanding and companionship, along with the love, they find little difficulty in bridging the various evolutions.” She was good.
• • •
Hope and his troupe were among the thirty passengers and crew aboard the Pan Am Clipper that took off from LaGuardia, lights blacked out for security reasons, early in the morning of June 25, 1943. They made a stop in Newfoundland and were on their way to Britain when they were forced to turn back because of high winds. Grounded for an extra day, the troupe did its first show of the tour at a Royal Canadian Air Force command station.
The next day they flew to Foynes, Ireland, and from there to Bristol—the Hope family’s last home in England, before sailing for America in 1908. They caught a train to London, where they were greeted by a throng of fans, reporters, and newsreel photographers. Also in the welcoming party: William Dover, chief of the USO in England, and Hal Block, a radio gag writer supplied by the Office of War Information to help visiting entertainers with their comedy material. Seeing London for the first time since his trip there in 1939, Hope was startled at the damage wrought by the German bombing, and by the impact the war was having on everyday life. When he checked into Claridge’s Hotel, Hope called up room service and said there wasn’t any soap in the bathroom. “Sorry, sir,” came the reply, “there is no soap in the King’s bathroom either.”
On his first day in London, Hope had a driver take him to Hitchin, forty miles away, to see his ninety-nine-year-old grandfather, James. The old man had slowed down considerably since the family get-together back in 1939, but he and his grandson still spent some time together talking about the family. “I was sorry I wasn’t able to tell him more about the children,” Bob noted. “I’d been traveling around the country so much that when I came home, it was just like doing another personal appearance, only with meals.” A week later, while Hope was still in England, his grandfather died, just a few weeks short of his hundredth birthday. “He finished out of the money,” said Hope.
After a night of theater in London, the “Hope gypsies,” as Hope dubbed them, embarked on an eleven-day, thirteen-hundred-mile swing through the English countryside. They traveled in two cars, a 1938 Hudson and a 1938 Ford, with drivers supplied by the English Women’s Corps, navigating roads from which the road signs had been removed, a precautionary measure to thwart a potential German invasion. They entertained at air hangars, supply depots, and bomber bases, doing three or four shows a day, sometimes for pilots who were going out on bombing runs the next day. An advance truck would typically arrive at each location twenty minutes ahead of the performers to set up the sound system. When the shows were finished, the entertainers would spend the night at local inns, with and without plumbing, or private farmhouses.
“I’ve just arrived from the States,” Hope would begin. “You know, that’s where Churchill lives.” Then after the laugh: “He doesn’t exactly live there. He just goes back to deliver Mrs. Roosevelt’s laundry.” He joked about the Brits and their customs (“They drive on the wrong side of the street here—just like in California”) and about barracks life: “Were the soldiers at the last camp happy to see me! They actually got down on their knees. What a spectacle! What a tribute! What a crap game!” He talked about the Hollywood stars who were now in uniform (one of them, Clark Gable, was stationed at an air base in England that Hope visited) and the pinup girls who were waiting back home. “We soon discovered you had to be pretty lousy to flop in front of those guys,” Hope said in his memoir of the trip, I Never Left Home. “They were so glad to see somebody from home that they yelled and screamed and whistled at everything. And for a little while, they were able to forget completely their own problems and what they’d been through, or what they might be expecting to go through.”
Hope and his entertainers visited military hospitals nearly everywhere they went. “Don’t get up!” Bob would shout when he entered the wards. He would walk among the beds, making small talk with the men, dishing out wisecracks to cheer them up—“Did you see our show or were you sick before?” In one ward, Hope did a few quick dance steps, slipped on a wet floor, and sprained his wrist—an injury that bothered him the rest of the trip. He instructed his fellow entertainers to keep the mood light and their emotions in check, but sometimes it was hard. In one ward Langford began to sing “As Time Goes By,” but had only got through eight bars when a soldier with a head wound began to cry. She finished the song in a whisper and went outside, where she burst into tears.
After their first eleven-day swing, Hope and his troupe returned to London to rest, before making several more hops around the country. They flew to Belfast for a tour of army camps, submarine bases, and aircraft plants in Northern Ireland. Hope returned to Bristol to take part in an international radio broadcast and, to cap off the tour, appeared in a gala variety show at London’s Odeon Theater, with other USO performers who were in the country, including Adolphe Menjou, Hal Le Roy, and Stubby Kaye. Afterward, with help from Senator Happy Chandler, who was in London with a group of visiting US dignitaries, Hope wrangled an invitation to a reception at 10 Downing Street, where he met Winston Churchill. The prime minister did a double take on seeing the Hollywood star, then autographed Hope’s “short snorter,” a five-pound note commonly used by travelers during the war to collect signatures as souvenirs.
Hope spent a total of five weeks in Britain, covered five thousand miles, and gave nearly a hundred performances, not counting the hospital visits. No other USO performer moved as fast or left as big an impression. “The most wonderful thing about England right now is Bob Hope,” wrote Captain Burgess Meredith in a letter to Paulette Goddard. “The boys in camp stand in rain, they crowd into halls so close you can’t breathe, just to see him. He is tireless and funny, and full of responsibility too, although he carries it lightly and gaily. There isn’t a hospital ward that he hasn’t dropped into and given a show; there isn’t a small unit anywhere that isn’t either talking about his jokes or anticipating them.”
Novelist John Steinbeck, covering the war for the New York Herald Tribune, saw Hope too and paid him a memorable tribute:
When the time for recognition of service to the nation in wartime comes to be considered, Bob Hope should be high on the list. In some way he has caught the soldiers’ imagination. He gets laughter wherever he goes, from men who need laughter. . . . It is hard to overestimate the importance of this thing and the responsibility involved. The battalion of men who are moving half tracks from one place to another, doing a job that gets no headlines, no public notice, and yet which must be done if there is to be a victory, are forgotten, and they feel forgotten. But Bob Hope is in the country. Will he come to them, or won’t he? And then one day they get a notice that he is coming. Then they feel remembered.
Other reporters, from Time and Esquire and Vogue, tagged along with Hope, documenting his trip and the extraordinary reaction to it. By the time he left Britain, he was America’s most celebrated wartime entertainer. And he was just getting started.
Hope had just appeared on the screen in Road to Morocco, and his next stop, improbably, was Morocco. He and his troupe took off from Prestwick, Scotland (where Hope got in his only golf game of the trip—most of the courses in England having been covered with barbed wire to prevent enemy planes from landing on them), and landed in Marrakech. Hope’s wardrobe, geared for the blustery British weather, was too heavy for the North African heat, so an officer lent him a lightweight, green linen suit. Hope wore it for the rest of the trip.
They flew first to Tunis, operational headquarters for the bomber groups that were preparing for an invasion of Sicily, and embarked on a fast-moving tour of the region, doing shows at every air base, tank corps, and military hospital they could reach. “Hiya, fellow tourists,” Hope would greet the crowds. “Isn’t this a great country, Africa? It’s Texas with Arabs.” No matter how corny or stale the jokes, the men roared.
Though North Africa was firmly under Allied control, German bombing raids were continuing, and Hope’s troupe got caught in several of them. In Bizerte—just a short hop from Sicily and thus a major target of German bombers—they were rousted out of bed at the Transatlantique Hotel by an air raid in the middle of the night. They watched another raid on the city from a road a few miles away, as they were driving back from a tour of hospitals. “Frances and I were standing next to our parked car,” Hope recalled. “We had on helmets. I’ve never heard such noise. Every once in a while we’d see one of the big German planes burst into flame and come plunging down.” When the planes came so close they could hear the whistles, an MP hustled them to cover. Romano dove under a car, Pepper got inside an ambulance, and Hope and Langford piled on top of each other in a ditch—Hope spraining a ligament as he dove in.
As he had in Britain, Hope showed remarkable reserves of energy. He kept himself fresh with frequent catnaps—he could drop off to sleep seemingly anywhere. Riding with him in a bumpy jeep in Tunisia, Jack Pepper was amazed: “I was bouncing like a rubber ball and losing everything I’d ever eaten in my life. But when I turned to look at Hope, the guy is fast asleep.” Reporting on the trip for Esquire, Sidney Carroll compared Hope to another famously tireless world traveler, Eleanor Roosevelt. “He is what the psychologists call an ‘energist,’ or one who seems to possess unfailing reserves of the magic motive power. . . . It is as much of a miracle as the burning bush. Hope never burns out.”
Just three days after the successful Allied invasion of Sicily, Hope’s troupe got aboard a B-17 and flew to Palermo, the first American entertainers to arrive on the European continent since the start of the war. Hope did a show for sixteen thousand men jammed into a soccer field, and another in a gulley for nineteen thousand soldiers from the Forty-Fifth Army Division, with P-38s circling overhead for protection. (“It not only gives you a feeling of security,” said Hope, “it gives you a feeling your jokes aren’t being heard.”) General George Patton, hero of the Sicily campaign, invited Hope and his troupe to dinner at King Victor Emmanuel’s palace, where Patton had taken up residence. The general asked Hope about his travels, showed off his pearl-handled six-guns, and impressed Hope with his quick wit. “A very wonderful guy,” Hope recalled. “Never opened my kisser but that he topped it.” Patton may have had his own agenda in inviting Hope to the palace. The hard-driving general was under fire for slapping two soldiers, and he asked Hope for a favor when he got back home: “I want you to tell the people that I love my men.” Hope, who didn’t know about the controversy, was puzzled: “I looked at this guy and I thought he was suffering from some kind of battle fatigue.”
Footage of Hope’s shows in North Africa and Sicily is all but nonexistent. But seeing him must have been a powerful experience for American soldiers just days out of battle. An Army lieutenant named John D. Saint Jr., who saw Hope in Sicily, wrote a vivid description of his show in a letter home to his parents:
Bob came on the grandstand as a man on the street, baggy trousers, an ordinary coat, and an open-neck collar. Nothing fancy at all. His nose was really sunburned and caught the brunt of a lot of his own jokes. He started his patter and all of us laughed until tears were just streaming down and we couldn’t see a darned thing. He has been playing Army camps a lot and has picked up the lingo. He can tell you all about lister bags, atabrine tablets and armor artificers. That made his comments much funnier to us. He was speaking our language. . . .
And all of a sudden Bob said, “Here’s Frances Langford!” There was a din you would not believe. She was stunningly dressed, though simply. It was good to see a clean, neat American girl who spoke our language and thought like we do. She sang and she sang from the very bottom of her heart. It could not have been otherwise. First it was “You Made Me Love You.” Then “Tangerine” and then “Night and Day.” The songs were mixed with patter between Hope and her, clever and funny as you can imagine. We thought it was all over, and Bob asked her back to sing “Embraceable You.” Every one of those thousands of men then went home to their wives and sweethearts. It was almost more than a man could stand.
Much of the impact came from the knowledge that these Hollywood stars were taking real risks in being there. No entertainers had ever been closer to the action. At the Excelsior Hotel in Palermo, Hope and his troupe were again jolted awake in the middle of the night by an air raid. Too late to make it to the bomb shelter, Hope gritted it out in his hotel room, watching tracer bullets whiz across the sky and a big piece of red-hot flak fly by his window. “After you’ve listened to a raid for a little while you begin to be afraid that just the noise will kill you,” he wrote. “Then after you’ve listened to it a little while longer you begin to be afraid it won’t. You want to curl up in a ball.” When the raid was over, Hope crawled out of bed and checked on his traveling companions. Langford had also been trapped in her room; Pepper was the only one who made it to the bomb shelter. Hope called it “the most frightening experience of my life.”
War stories can be exaggerated, but Hope’s wasn’t. “I was in two different cities with them during the raids, and I will testify they were horrifying raids,” wrote war correspondent Ernie Pyle, in one of his dispatches for the New York World-Telegram. “It isn’t often that a bomb falls so close that you can hear it whistle. But when you can hear a whole stack of them whistle at once, then it’s time to get weak all over and start sweating. The Hope troupe can now describe that ghastly sound.”
After Sicily, Hope and his gypsies flew back to Bône, Tunisia, and continued their North African tour. Hope had one bad moment, when a heckler in a crowd of British and American troops yelled, “Draft dodger! Why aren’t you in uniform?” Hope shouted back, “Don’t you know there’s a war on? A guy could get hurt.” Their last stop was Algiers, where Hope did another international radio broadcast and met General Dwight D. Eisenhower, overall commander of the North African forces. Ike was another general who impressed Hope enormously (his voice reminded Hope of Clark Gable’s). “He flattered us not only by being so gracious, but by knowing where we’d been and what we’d been doing,” Hope said. Eisenhower knew that Hope’s troupe had been through several air raids and assured them they would have a safe night in Algiers. “We haven’t had a raid in three months,” Ike said. “We’re too strong for ’em.”
But that night at the Aletti Hotel, Hope and company were again jolted awake in the middle of the night by German bombers. This time Hope made it down to a wine cellar with the rest of his band to take shelter. They spent an hour and forty minutes there, listening to the bombs, and for the first time he saw Frances Langford lose her composure. “When we were lost over Alaska, during the raids on Bizerte and Palermo, she’d stayed perfectly calm,” he said. “But cooped up in a bomb shelter under Algiers she began to tremble and cry. For once I had the chance to be the big strong man. I put her head on my shoulder and held her close to me, so we sort of trembled in unison.”
The raid wasn’t over until 6:00 a.m. They were supposed to leave Algiers that morning at eight, but had to put it off until the evening. They finally made it to London and then to Iceland—where they were again delayed by weather and filled the extra time by doing three more shows. Descending at last over the familiar skyline of New York City, Hope felt an understandable letdown. All told, he had spent eleven weeks overseas, doing some 250 shows for an estimated 1.5 million men. He came back with scores of names and addresses scrawled on pieces of paper—of the mothers and wives and sweethearts of the men he had entertained, who asked Hope if he would contact their loved ones and send greetings. Which he did.
Back home, Hope was hailed as a hero. He recounted his experiences to columnists such as Ed Sullivan and wrote about his tour in a syndicated newspaper article, “I Saw Your Boys.” Time magazine celebrated him in a cover story, with the headline “Hope for Humanity.” “From the ranks of show business have sprung heroes and even martyrs,” the magazine wrote, “but so far only one legend. That legend is Bob Hope.
It sprang up swiftly, telepathically, among US servicemen in Britain this summer, traveling faster than even whirlwind Hope himself, then flew ahead of him to North Africa and Sicily, growing larger as it went. Like most legends, it represents measurable qualities in a kind of mystical blend. Hope was funny, treating hordes of soldiers to roars of laughter. He was friendly—ate with servicemen, drank with them, read their doggerel, listened to their songs. He was indefatigable, running himself ragged with five, six, seven shows a day. He was figurative—the straight link with home, the radio voice that for years had filled the living room and that in foreign parts called up its image. Hence boys whom Hope might entertain for an hour awaited him for weeks. And when he came, anonymous guys who had had no other recognition felt personally remembered.
He went to work on a book for Simon & Schuster about his tour, collaborating with a ghostwriter named Carroll Carroll, an adman who had written for Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall. The two worked together through the fall, meeting every Wednesday in Hope’s living room—Carroll writing up chapters from Hope’s recollections, Hope editing them and handing them over to his gag writers for punching up. The book, I Never Left Home, has plenty of jokes, but also much vivid detail, as well as passages of elegiac and often moving prose. It begins:
I saw your sons and your husbands, your brothers and your sweethearts. I saw how they worked, played, fought and lived. I saw some of them die. I saw more courage, more good humor in the face of discomfort, more love in an era of hate, and more devotion to duty than could exist under tyranny. I saw American minds, American skill, and American strength breaking the backbone of evil.
I Never Left Home was published in June 1944—the first hundred thousand copies in paperback, aimed at servicemen and priced at $1, followed by a hardback edition for $2. Hope donated all the proceeds to the National War Fund, which was coordinating relief for the countries being reoccupied in the war. The book got admiring reviews, not just from Hope’s many friends in the Hollywood press but from serious book critics too. “A zany, staccato but often touching account,” wrote Tom O’Reilly in the New York Times Book Review. It sold more than 1.6 million copies, the bestselling nonfiction book for all of 1944. The wartime legend of Bob Hope was born.
• • •
Returning to Los Angeles on September 7 after his life-changing trip, Hope tried to adapt to the new normal. He took Dolores and the kids to Del Mar for a rest, then began preparing for the September 21 debut of his sixth radio season. “I think I was suffering from adrenaline withdrawal,” he said. “I had gotten hooked on fear, the real thing, not the sort you felt when a joke didn’t play, or a movie got panned.”
Hope’s radio show—with Langford and Colonna back as regulars, and Stan Kenton replacing bandleader Skinnay Ennis, who was in the service—was now virtually all military, all the time. He tailored his comedy for each base or military unit he was visiting: the Navy aviators at Terminal Island, the marines at Camp Pendleton, the gunnery specialists in Las Vegas. The jokes were broad and chummy, aimed squarely at the soldiers—endless variations, for example, on Hope’s favorite “you know—that’s” formula: “You know what a bunk is—that’s a bookshelf with a mattress.” “You know what a Wave is—that’s a Wac with salt water in her blood.” “You know what a tank is—that’s a coffee percolator that made good.” With the help of a new writer, Glenn Whedon, Hope added serious patriotic messages at the end of the shows, urging listeners to buy war bonds or write a serviceman overseas, or paying tribute to the particular service branch or specialty he was entertaining that week—Navy nurses, say, or the Coast Guard. His No. 1 ratings soared to new heights. On February 19, 1944, Hope scored an astonishing 40.9 in the Hooper ratings—meaning 40.9 percent of all the radio homes in the country were tuned in, the highest audience ever for a half-hour radio program.
On March 11, 1944, he went to Washington to emcee the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, with President Roosevelt as guest of honor. It was the first time Hope entertained a president—a coveted assignment that he almost missed. Hope and his radio cast had just done a show at an officers’ training school in Miami, and before flying to Washington, Hope decided to stop at Brookley Field in Mobile, Alabama, for a golf game with the base commander. But the weather turned bad, the golf was canceled, and it looked likely that Hope would be stranded in Alabama. He got to Washington only after a telegram from General Henry “Hap” Arnold was delivered to the base commander: “Have plane coming north tonight. Make sure Hope is on it.”
He got to the dinner an hour late, and the show had already started, with Duffy’s Tavern star Ed Gardner filling in as emcee. But after Fritz Kreisler, Gracie Fields, and Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians entertained, Hope was there in time for his closing monologue. He joked about the president’s battles with Congress, Eleanor’s peripatetic traveling, and the First Couple’s least favorite newspaper, the conservative Chicago Tribune. Hope joked that Fala, the Roosevelts’ Scottish terrier, was “the only dog housebroken on that paper.” When Hope glanced over nervously to see the president’s reaction, FDR’s head was tilted back in laughter.
In these heady and dramatic times, Hope’s movies seemed almost like an afterthought. When shooting began in November 1943 on Road to Utopia, the fourth in the Road series, signs of the star’s inattention and self-involvement were becoming apparent. The script, set in the 1890s Alaska gold rush, was by Panama and Frank (their first screenplay for Hope, after getting only story credit for My Favorite Blonde), and the writers had to revise it several times to please both stars. “In those days they were enormous stars,” said Frank. “You really had to have their okay on the script, even though they were under contract and could be forced to do what you wanted. So we would sit down with Crosby and explain our ideas and we would make it sound like it was going to be his picture. Then we’d tell Hope the story and make it attractive from his point of view.” On the set too Hope and Crosby moved at their own leisurely pace, forcing director Hal Walker to work around their golf games and trips to the racetrack. “Some days I became almost as nonchalant as Bing,” Hope admitted. “Together we were a deadly combination.”
Lamour often bore the brunt. One Saturday morning she spent two hours getting into her period gown, hair, and makeup for a musical number with Hope and Crosby, scheduled to start shooting at 9:00 a.m. But neither showed up. She was still waiting in the afternoon when Gary Cooper dropped by the set and told her she should just go home. She did—a few minutes before Hope and Crosby finally sauntered in. They had spent the day at a charity golf match and claimed to have forgotten about the scene. “The next day it was all patched up,” Lamour wrote, charitably, in her autobiography. “Of course, Bing and Bob took turns teasing the life out of me, calling me ‘that temperamental Lamour woman who stormed off the set.’ But they didn’t pull another stunt like that ever again.” Still, it was a sign of how thoroughly Hope and Crosby had turned the Road films into their own private playground. For Lamour, the slights would accumulate.
In the spring of 1944 Hope shot another film for Goldwyn, initially called Sylvester the Great and later changed to The Princess and the Pirate—Hope’s first costume picture and his first movie in color. But his war-related activities were taking up more and more time and attention. He hosted a bond drive and charity golf tournament with Crosby at Lakeside and did several more Command Performance broadcasts for Armed Forces Radio. In March he made a four-day tour of US military bases in the Caribbean. And he prepared to make his next major overseas tour, during his radio show’s summer vacation, this time to the Pacific theater.
His last show of the season was scheduled for June 6, 1944. Early that morning, Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy, launching the long-awaited invasion of Western Europe. Hope scrapped the show he had planned, from the Van Nuys Air Field, and instead delivered a tribute to the invasion forces of D-day. His wartime prose was never more eloquent, his brisk, plain-spoken delivery rendering it even more powerful:
What’s happened during these last few hours not one of us will ever forget. How could you forget? You sat up all night by the radio and heard the bulletins, the flashes, the voices coming across from England, the commentators, the pilots returning from their greatest of all missions, newsboys yelling in the street. And it seemed that one world was ending and a new world beginning, that history was closing one book and opening a new one. And somehow we knew it had to be a better one. We sat there, and dawn began to sneak in, and you thought of the hundreds of thousands of kids you’d seen in camps the past two or three years. The kids who scream and whistle when they hear a gag and a song. And now you could see all of them again, in four thousand ships in the English Channel, tumbling out of thousands of planes over Normandy and the occupied coast. And countless landing barges crashing the Nazi gate and going on through to do the job that’s the job of all of us. The sun came up, and you sat there looking at that huge black headline, that one great black word with the exclamation point—Invasion! The one word that the whole world has waited for, that all of us have worked for.
It was only fitting that Hope, the man who had brought the war home to America, would be the one to capture the nation’s relief and pride in the military triumph that would help bring it to an end.
Much was still left to do in the Pacific, however, where the United States was embarked on a painfully slow, island-by-island march toward what seemed an inevitable invasion of Japan. Again Hope assembled an entertainment troupe and headed for the action. Langford and Romano were back, and Colonna, who had to pass on the European trip the year before, was on board this time. For some added sex appeal, Hope hired Patty Thomas, a pretty, leggy dancer who had been working in USO shows in the States and got the job after an interview with Hope. He added one more member to the troupe: his crony, sometime writer, and Road picture jester, Barney Dean. “We had Barney along in case we had to trade with the natives,” Hope cracked.
The group left San Francisco on June 22 aboard a C-54 medical transport plane. They stopped first in the Hawaiian Islands, where they spent nine days and did some thirty-five shows, the largest for twenty-five thousand civilian employees at the Pearl Harbor Naval Yards. Then they flew off to Christmas Island and began hopscotching islands on the “pineapple circuit.”
Ferried around by a Catalina seaplane, they went to Kwajalein, Bougainville, and Eniwetok (where Navy lieutenant Henry Fonda was stationed), doing five, six, or even seven shows a day. They visited the site of bloody battles such as Tarawa and Guadalcanal, doing shows near unmarked graves and pillboxes full of weapons abandoned by the Japanese. Hope joked often about the tiny islands and the swampy, bug-infested conditions. “You’re not defending this place, are you?” he cracked on one. “Let them take it!” Hope picked up jungle rot on the trip, a skin disease that would plague him for years.
For Hope the most memorable stop was the island of Pavuvu, where the Marine First Division was preparing for an attack on Peleliu, a nearby Japanese stronghold. For six months the fifteen thousand men there had seen no entertainment. The island was so small there was no airstrip, so Hope and his crew had to fly in on tiny Piper Cubs, the men cheering as each plane buzzed the baseball field. Eugene B. Sledge, one of the marines who was there, described Hope’s visit in his classic combat memoir, With the Old Breed:
Probably the biggest boost to our morale about this time on Pavuvu was the announcement that Bob Hope would come over from Banika and put on a show for us. . . . Bob Hope, Colonna, Frances Langford, and Patty Thomas put on a show at a little stage by the pier. Bob asked Jerry how he liked the trip over from Banika, and Jerry answered that it was “tough sledding.” When asked why, he replied, “No snow.” We thought it was the funniest thing we had ever heard. Patty gave several boys from the audience dancing lessons amid much grinning, cheering and applause. Bob told many jokes and really boosted our spirits. It was the finest entertainment I ever saw overseas.
Weeks after their show on Pavuvu, the assault on Peleliu began. An operation that was supposed to take four days stretched out for two months—one of the bloodiest battles of the war, with more than sixty-five hundred men killed or wounded. Months later, Hope was visiting a hospital in Oakland when one of the patients called out, “Pavuvu!” Hope went over to shake the man’s hand and found out the ward was full of marines who had seen Hope at Pavuvu and survived the campaign. One injured soldier awakened after an operation to see Hope standing over the bed. “Bob!” he exclaimed. “When did you get here?”
In the tight-knit family of traveling entertainers, Hope was nicknamed Dad, and Langford was known as Mother. Thomas, the youngster in the group (she celebrated her twenty-second birthday on Pavuvu), developed a close, sisterly bond with Langford. They shared bedrooms and often went to the bathroom together in the rough-hewn latrines, where the men would put up a sheet to give them privacy. Frances gave Patty advice on clothes (slacks, not skirts, and sweaters for the cool nights), food (eat as little as possible before flying), and avoiding sticky situations with the sex-starved servicemen—a little-mentioned peril for female entertainers traveling through the war zone. “You had to be careful,” said Thomas. “Not talk to them alone, only in groups. These kids wanted to meet someone. But I wouldn’t dare lead them on. One guy came up to me and said, ‘I’d like to ---- you.’ He was beaten up by the other soldiers.”
(The GIs weren’t the only problem for Thomas. She also had to fend off advances from Colonna, until Hope stepped in to help. “Bob would tell people, ‘This is my girl.’ I was not Bob’s girl, but he did that for my protection.” When she got back to the States, Thomas made a point of assuring Dolores that any rumors about them weren’t true. Dolores was satisfied. “Honey, I know what you’re like,” she said. “I’ve seen you in church.”)
The few film clips from his Pacific tour show how confident and charismatic Hope was onstage—tanned, often chewing gum, hair slightly mussed, as deft a straight man as he was a gagster. He and Romano had an easy, bantering relationship, doing patter songs together or parodies of the Ink Spots along with Colonna. Hope matched dance steps with Thomas, whose skimpy outfits and knockout figure always got a big reaction. Said Hope, introducing her to the crowd, “I just want you boys to see what you’re fighting for.”
The sex was never far from the surface, but Hope somehow made it seem innocent and wholesome. When Langford, who would close the show with some rewritten lyrics to “Thanks for the Memory,” got to the lines “I wish that I could kiss / Each and every one of you,” Hope stepped up to the microphone and cried, in mock-horror, “You want to get us trampled to death?” For men trying to survive grueling conditions in lonely outposts, sometimes days away from battle, it must have been marvelous.
After six weeks of island hopping, the troupe flew to Australia for a few days of shows. There, they had their closest call of the trip. Flying from Brisbane to Sydney, Hope asked the pilot of the Catalina seaplane if he could take the controls. While the plane was on automatic pilot, one engine conked out and the plane began dipping. Patty Thomas was looking out the window and saw black smoke. “Hey, Dad, I think we’re in trouble,” she said to Hope. “We’re only working on one propeller!” The pilot hurried back to the cockpit and ordered the passengers to jettison whatever they could—luggage, souvenirs, cases of liquor. Barney Dean, who was petrified of plane flights even in the best of circumstances, told Hope to dump his wallet, since it was the heaviest thing on the plane.
The pilot located a small body of water near the village of Laurieton and maneuvered the seaplane to an emergency landing, skidding to a stop on a sandbar. A fisherman saw them and rowed over to rescue them. The first thing he asked for was some American cigarettes. Hope and his troupe did a show that night at the local dance hall in gratitude. The crash landing made headlines all over Australia, as well as back in the United States. When Hope flew the next day to Sydney, a mob of thousands was there to greet him at the hotel, pressing in so hard that Hope had to be rescued by the military police.
After Australia, Hope and his troupe continued on to Hollandia, New Guinea, recently recaptured from the Japanese. During the day they did a show for twenty thousand troops, the biggest crowd Hope had ever entertained in a war zone, and at night did a second show for five thousand Seabees. Then they hopped onto PT boats to entertain in the tiny Woendi islands. Among those in the audience, Hope learned years later, was a PT boat captain named John F. Kennedy.
The Pacific tour generated nearly as much attention back home as Hope’s tour of Europe and North Africa had the year before. King Features, the Hearst newspaper syndicate, asked Hope if he would send back some dispatches from his trip, and midway through the tour (with help from a war correspondent, Frank Robertson, he met in Australia) Hope turned out several newspaper columns recounting his experiences. The War Department nixed Pepsodent’s request to let Hope broadcast his radio show from the trip. But on August 12, he hosted a special NBC broadcast from a naval hospital “somewhere in the South Pacific.” After joking about the bug-infested islands and harrowing plane flights (“It was so rough the automatic pilot bailed out”), Hope concluded with a sober tribute to the men he had visited, and an appeal to the nation to pull together for final victory:
Sure, a lot of citizens in the States have it pretty tough, with the rationing of meat, shoes, gasoline, and other items. But we’ve been deprived of these things while at home. How’d you like to be deprived of these things while crouched in a foxhole, ducking that lead with your initials on it? Where a bottle of Coke or a beer is a luxury, and hot water and linen are a dim memory, and your bathroom just ain’t. . . . We’ve seen kids smile for the last time, and other boys spending long, monotonous, pain-filled hours fighting for their lives, after fighting for yours. Ladies and gentlemen, it might surprise you to know that these boys, who have made the sacrifice, are also buying bonds. Think it over.
Throughout the war, President Roosevelt had sought to convince the nation that the battles overseas and the war effort back home, from recycling rubber to buying war bonds, were inextricable, all part of the same great national crusade. Hope, with his blunt, no-nonsense wartime prose, brought that message home like no one else.
The long trip back to the United States went through Wake Island and took fifty hours. In all, Hope’s Pacific tour had encompassed thirty thousand miles and 150 shows in eight weeks. Arriving in Burbank on Saturday, September 2, at the Lockheed Air Terminal, Hope was welcomed home by Dolores and the kids, along with a gaggle of reporters and photographers. His bags were filled with souvenirs of the trip—Japanese swords and guns, a native chieftain’s cane. Four-year-old Tony greeted his father, “Good-bye, Daddy.” Dolores had to explain: “He’s so used to seeing Bob going away, he can’t get used to his coming home.”
• • •
Though his wartime tours were a high point of his performing life and a mission he passionately believed in, they were a financial sacrifice for Hope. The USO paid its performers only a nominal amount, and by spending two months out of the summer entertaining the troops overseas, Hope was giving up a lot of potentially lucrative paydays. Still, he was one of Hollywood’s top earners in these years. He was making $100,000 per picture, and that, combined with his radio show, stage appearances, and other ventures, brought his income close to $1 million a year. But Hope was chafing under the three-picture-a-year pace that Paramount was keeping him on—and was dismayed that so much of the money he made was going to the government in taxes.
His lawyer, Martin Gang, suggested a creative solution. Hope could improve his bottom line, Gang said, by setting up his own production company and, instead of getting a salary, taking a share of the profits from his films, thus allowing him to pay taxes at the lower corporate rate. Hope liked the idea and took Paramount chief Y. Frank Freeman to lunch to propose it. Freeman, a gentlemanly Southerner, listened politely, but refused flatly: “I don’t see how we can let you do that, Bob.”
Hope responded by going on strike. He refused to do the next two films that Paramount had lined up for him: a cameo appearance in Duffy’s Tavern (an all-star screen version of the popular radio series) and a starring role, with Paulette Goddard, in a film called My Favorite Brunette. When Hope didn’t show up for the scheduled first day of shooting on Brunette, on Monday, November 6, 1944, the studio suspended him.
Hope quickly took charge of the spin, claiming that he was suspending the studio. He was too busy with his war-related work, he said, to do three films a year for Paramount. “Just now I’ve been to Toronto, New York, Akron, Chicago, and Topeka—all war-benefit appearances,” he told a reporter. “In the next month I do six more shows—three in Chicago and one each in Atlanta, Cleveland, and Independence, Kansas. . . . And I’ve got five or ten wires on my desk, asking me to give shows at other service camps along the way. These things are important. There are thousands of kids waiting there.” In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he added, “I’m not underrating the importance of motion pictures to a career. But there is a big horizon to the present situation that has to be recognized. Now is the time above all others to give to the war effort, and if what entertainers do is helpful and morale building, then this is the time for them to concentrate on that sort of helpfulness.”
It was a shrewd appeal to patriotism in what was essentially a contract dispute. For six months there was a stalemate, as Hope refused to work. My Favorite Brunette was shelved. (Hope made a picture with the same title three years later, but with a different script and another costar, Dorothy Lamour.) Road to Utopia, which had finished shooting in February 1944, was held back from release, ostensibly because Paramount had a logjam of wartime films. Moviegoers were about to experience something they hadn’t since Hope made his feature-film debut in The Big Broadcast of 1938: after the release of The Princess and the Pirate in the fall of 1944, more than a year passed without a Bob Hope picture.
While Hope was fighting with his movie studio, he was embroiled in a different sort of dispute over his radio program. In November 1944 an editorial in the Pilot, the weekly newspaper of Boston’s Roman Catholic archdiocese, raised objections to the sexually suggestive jokes that Hope was doing for his military audiences. The editorial called Hope’s material “artful filth,” claiming it encouraged promiscuity among married servicemen and put lewd thoughts into the heads of young, impressionable ones. “Some of the servicemen are boys barely past adolescence,” the Catholic paper said. “Their mothers knew that they were delivering their cherished sons to danger of death. They accepted that. But they never supposed that their boys would be exposed to ‘entertainment’ which might ruin their souls.”
Battles over Hope’s allegedly lewd material had been going on for years, though mostly behind closed doors. Notes from a 1942 meeting of NBC executives revealed that serious consideration was given to pulling Hope’s show from the air after complaints from several New England stations about his off-color jokes. One NBC executive even proposed leaking news of the stations’ complaints to the press, to pressure Hope and other radio comics to tone down their material:
I think if we came out with some publicity, stating that 11 New England stations threaten to cancel a certain program of a certain well-known comedian and give the reasons for it, you are not hurting the comedian and you are making four or five of them [radio comedians] sit up and take notice, why then you are drawing first blood in this and they are on the defensive. And I don’t know that [CBS] would be willing to take a show that we threw off the air or which we cancelled because we wouldn’t go for stuff which we regarded as being lewd.
There’s no evidence NBC came close to acting on this rather outlandish suggestion. But the Catholic complaints, aired in public, presented a more delicate problem for Hope. “I think it is only fair to me to point out that if my shows were offensive,” he responded carefully, “I could hardly have reached the position of where a great nationwide audience hears my radio program regularly, considering what public taste means.” The controversy percolated for several weeks. Another Catholic paper, Chicago’s Novena Notes, published the results of a poll of ten thousand readers, who voted Hope the entertainer who “most consistently violates” Christian principles. (Milton Berle was second.) Both supporters and foes inundated Hope with letters. (“Risqué stories—phooey!” said one defender. “I’ll bet that editor loves them.”) Boxoffice magazine came to his defense, declaring the attacks “as unfair a charge against a great entertainer and a good American as has been treated to printer’s ink in many years.” In the end, the campaign made little dent in Hope’s enormous popularity. For the 1944–45 season, The Pepsodent Show finished first in the Hooper ratings by its biggest margin ever—drawing 34.1 percent of the radio audience, more than 3 points higher than the show in second place, Fibber McGee and Molly.
The only thing that could possibly slow down the Bob Hope juggernaut was his health. In May 1944 he had to take off five days for an eye operation—its exact nature unclear, but possibly the first sign of the eye problems that would plague him in later years. In January 1945 Hope’s doctor, Hugh Strathearn, raised concerns about an electrocardiogram that, while in the normal range, “showed that you have been under a terrific strain, as far as your heart muscles are concerned.” In a letter to Hope, who was traveling, the doctor added, “I do not feel that this condition is serious at this time, but I do think that it would be wise for you to plan to cut down on some of the activities which keep you under a nervous tension, and take a good rest when you come back to California. . . . After all, no human being can stand the strain that you must have been under the past few years.”
Yet he seemed incapable of cutting back. In January 1945, Hope traveled East for several war-related benefits and to accept the Gold Medal of Achievement from Philadelphia’s Poor Richard Club. He did more shows for Armed Forces Radio, including a celebrated musical parody of Dick Tracy for Command Performance, with an all-star cast that included Bing Crosby, Jimmy Durante, Judy Garland, and Dinah Shore (Hope played Flattop). He even became a newspaper columnist.
After seeing the columns that he had sent back from his 1944 Pacific tour for the Hearst syndicate, William Randolph Hearst personally urged Hope to continue them when he returned. Now Hope (meaning his writers, of course) was turning out a five-day-a-week column called It Says Here, with breezy observations on everything from buying tires and picking out a Christmas tree to visiting a veterans’ hospital in Atlanta. More than seventy newspapers picked up the column, and Hope got 50 percent of the gross proceeds. At a time when several other Hollywood stars, such as Orson Welles and Gracie Allen, were experimenting with newspaper columns, Hope’s was, as usual, the most successful, and it continued for several years after the war, until he walked away from it in the early 1950s.
On March 15, 1945, Hope returned to host the Academy Awards ceremony, after a year off. (Jack Benny had replaced him for the 1944 awards, explaining, “I’m here through the courtesy of Bob Hope’s having a bad cold.”) The event was no longer a banquet, but now took place at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and for the first time it was broadcast nationally, by ABC radio. Hope, who took over the show after director John Cromwell handled some of the early awards, was in fine form throughout. When eight-year-old Margaret O’Brien was given a special Oscar, Hope lifted her up so she could reach the radio microphone. After holding her for a few seconds, he quipped, “Would you hurry and grow up, please?” When Paramount’s production chief Buddy DeSylva came up to accept the Best Picture award for Going My Way, Hope got down on his hands and knees, pulled out a handkerchief, and started shining DeSylva’s shoes—a reference to the star’s well-publicized dispute with the studio. When his friend Bing Crosby won the Best Actor award for Going My Way, Hope cracked that Crosby winning an Oscar was “like Sam Goldwyn lecturing at Oxford.” But Hope got an award too—his second honorary one, a life membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, presented to him by Walter Wanger. “I guess I get the consolation prize,” Hope said.
The impasse with Paramount came to an end on May 6, 1945, when Hope signed a new seven-year contract that allowed him to set up his own production company. Hope Enterprises, the new company, was allowed to produce one film a year on its own and to partner with Paramount on the rest. A few stars—notably James Cagney and Bing Crosby—had already set up similar production companies. But Hope’s very public victory in his battle with Paramount was considered a watershed. “When a star of Hope’s stature announces he doesn’t want to work for nothing, who can blame him?” wrote Florabel Muir in the New York Daily Mirror. “Which is why we are going to see more and more top stars going as independent as they can.” And they did. Over the next decade more top actors such as Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas started their own production companies, and by the 1980s nearly every major star in Hollywood had a production deal modeled on the one that Hope set up in 1945.
Before returning to the Paramount lot, however, Hope had more war work to do. World events were moving swiftly. On April 12, President Roosevelt died suddenly from a brain hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia. Hope gave up five minutes of airtime on his show the following Tuesday for an address to the nation by the new president, Harry Truman. On April 30, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, and a week later Germany surrendered unconditionally, ending the war in Europe. Yet Hope pressed on. On May 12 he was in Washington to host a three-hour NBC radio show kicking off another war bond drive. Afterward, Hope got a tour of the White House from President Truman and did a show for the new first family. Hope finished his radio season on the road, then prepared for one last wartime tour—to entertain the American troops still in Europe, now an occupying force itching to come home.
One familiar companion was missing. Frances Langford had parlayed her wartime popularity into a summer radio show of her own (after a legal battle with Pepsodent, which claimed she was exclusively bound to Hope’s show) and couldn’t join him on the tour. In her place, Hope brought along a pinup-pretty, redheaded singer named Gale Robbins, along with Colonna, Romano, Patty Thomas, and Jack Pepper. With fewer restrictions on the size of his troupe, Hope also added two more singer-musicians, June Bruner and Ruth Denas, and even a writer, Roger Price.
They took the slow route to Europe this time, sailing aboard the Queen Mary—the ship Hope had last taken in 1939, when the first guns of World War II were sounding. They visited air bases in England and did a show for ten thousand GIs at London’s Albert Hall, then went to Paris, which was crawling with American entertainers, from Mickey Rooney to Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Hope entertained the 438th Troop Carrier Group in Amiens, near the site of the Normandy landing, then headed south to Arles and Marseille. He was emceeing an all-star benefit at a soccer park in Nice when he spotted Maurice Chevalier in the audience. The French star had drawn harsh criticism for cooperating with the German-backed Vichy government during the war. But when Hope called him to the stage, the former Paramount star got a warm reception and sang a medley of his songs. Chevalier never forgot Hope’s kindness.
Hope and his troupe then flew to Bremen for a tour of occupied Germany—Hope sending back dispatches for his newspaper column at every stop. They performed for throngs of US troops in Potsdam, Heidelberg, and Berlin. Unlike on his previous tours, however, Hope found many of his GI audiences restless, distracted, eager to get home. At one stop, Hope referred to the American soldiers as “occupation troops” and was greeted with a howl of protest. “Well, that’s what they told me,” he responded weakly. “Everything was different from the last time we’d played the European theater,” Hope wrote. “Last time the men who saw our shows were hopped up with the anticipation of impending combat. They wanted to like everything. This time they listened to us while packing.”
The war ended in the middle of his tour. Hope was playing Ping-Pong in his billet in Nuremberg when the word came that Japan had surrendered. An announcement was made to the crowd gathered at Soldiers Field, formerly Nuremberg Stadium, for the GI Olympics. “Those boys in the stadium rose twenty-five feet in the air and yelled for twenty minutes,” Hope wrote in his column. “What a thrill it was to hear those American cheers for victory in a place where Adolf used to hold yearly heiling practice.” Hope’s official itinerary had him continuing on the tour for two more weeks, but he wrapped up early, flying back to New York on August 21 and returning to California a week later. It’s not clear why Hope cut his tour short. The end of the war may have taken the wind out of his sails, or he may simply have been worn-out. But his great World War II adventure was over.
It had been a transforming experience for Hope. He carried the memories, and the patriotic glow, of his World War II tours with him forever. He brought back souvenirs—a piece of Hitler’s stationery from the Führer’s Berlin bunker, a photo of General Patton peeing in the Rhine that Patton himself had given him. Hope had a photographic recall of places and dates, the officers he had met, and the units he had entertained. He got letters, thousands of them, from servicemen and their families, thanking him for being there. He answered nearly all of them, often with personal comments and jokes, establishing a permanent bond with the soldiers who had seen and been moved by him. “It was a pleasure to hear from you and as much of a surprise,” one GI stationed in Iran wrote him in December 1944, after getting one of Hope’s personal replies. “Can’t we become pals and write? I’ve always enjoyed your screen and radio acting, but never once did I think that you would step down to write to a common US soldier.”
Hope’s wartime tours, critics would later point out, were also a brilliant career move. Hope cloaked himself in patriotism at a time when patriotism was in fashion, and it made him the most popular entertainer in America. He would try to re-create the experience again and again, in times that had changed without his realizing it. Yet no cynical view of his motives, nothing that happened later during the Vietnam years, could diminish his extraordinary achievement during World War II. He grabbed the moment, and the mission, as no other entertainer ever had.
Now all he had to do was learn how to live with peace.