“Well, here I am starting my eighth year for the same sponsor,” said Bob Hope, opening his new season for Pepsodent on September 11, 1945. “I reenlisted.” The war was over, but as far as his radio show was concerned, Hope was still on a war footing. He broadcast his first show of the season from the Corpus Christi Naval Training Station and continued traveling to military bases throughout the fall—the Victorville Army Air Field, the Santa Ana Army Separation Center, the battleship South Dakota in San Francisco Bay. In the euphoria that followed the war’s end, the military crowds were so raucous and responsive that even Hope was taken aback. “Is it that good, really?” he mewled after the outburst for one mild joke on his season opener.
He wasn’t about to tamper with a formula that had made him the No. 1 show in radio. Colonna and Langford were back as regulars, and so was bandleader Skinnay Ennis, returning from the service. Far from downplaying the military humor, Hope seemed to revel in it—adding new segments with Mel Blanc as a stuttering Private Sad Sack, based on the popular wartime comic-book character. In place of the patriotic appeals urging listeners to write a serviceman or buy war bonds, now he closed the show with calls to unite in the postwar rebuilding effort. “Nobody would ever deny that we owe those men a great debt,” he said, referring to the soldiers who had won the war. “But our first and biggest payment toward this debt, and the prescription for veterans’ readjustment, ought to be American unity—unity of purpose among labor and management and government. Peace with a purpose.”
Postwar “reconversion” was the watchword now. Factories were gearing up production of the consumer goods that Americans had been without for so long during the war. The men who fought were back home—starting families, becoming homeowners, buying cars and washing machines. Some thought Hope wasn’t changing fast enough. Even before the war’s end, NBC was getting complaints from some listeners about his continuing military orientation: “Why isn’t Hope doing shows for us now?” Not until December 4, 1945, did Hope finally bring his show back into the studio, for the first time since early 1942. “This is Bob Broadcasting-from-NBC-Again-It’s-Been-a-Long-Long-Time Hope,” he opened. Then it was back to jokes about Bette Davis’s wedding and W. C. Fields’s drinking.
Yet Hope still missed the large, enthusiastic crowds that he got on the road. He started taking his show to college campuses—the University of Southern California, Pomona College, the University of Arizona—getting screams of laughter for his local references. (“This is a beautiful campus. That noise you hear is the wind in the acacia trees, and that silence you hear is the nightlife in Claremont.”) In Arizona he joked about rodeos; in Reno about divorces; in San Francisco about the steep hills. Like so much of network radio—which was still dominated by the same prewar stars (Benny, Bergen, Fibber McGee and Molly) and well-worn gags, as if the war had never happened—Hope’s return to peacetime sounded more like a throwback than a step forward.
In the fall, after his dispute with Paramount was resolved, Hope was back on the studio lot, shooting his first movie in two years, Monsieur Beaucaire. In the meantime, Paramount was able to tide over Hope fans with a film that had been sitting on the shelf for more than a year: Road to Utopia, the fourth in the Road series, and one of the best.
Directed by Hal Walker, who had been assistant director on the two previous Road pictures, and written by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, it has a slicker production than any of the earlier films, some of the wildest gags, and the most brazen riffs of self-parody. Set in the frozen Yukon, instead of Africa or the South Seas, the film avoids the sometimes uncomfortable racial stereotyping of the other films. It also boasts the best of the Hope-Crosby buddy songs: Burke and Van Heusen’s “Put It There, Pal,” with the pair razzing each other’s radio shows and movies as they glide through the snow on a dogsled.
The story, uniquely for the Road series, is told in flashback. The film opens with Hope and Lamour, in old-folks makeup, as an aged married couple being reunited after many years with a white-haired Crosby. As the three of them reminisce, we flash back to turn-of-the-century San Francisco, where Hope and Crosby are working in a carnival, scamming customers with a bogus psychic act called Ghost-O. When their con game is exposed, they’re forced to flee, and Crosby suggests they hop a boat for Alaska, to join the gold rush. Hope, as usual, balks. Crosby, as usual, cons him into going—by pickpocketing his boat ticket home. En route north, they stumble onto a map leading to a valuable gold mine, a gang of crooks determined to get it back, and Lamour.
The self-referential, fourth-wall-breaking gags come thick and fast. Humorist Robert Benchley appears on-screen at the outset to introduce the film, then pops up throughout to make wry comments on the action. Hope and Crosby step out of character repeatedly, poking fun at the film and their roles in it. In one scene they’re shoveling coal in a ship’s engine room. A man dressed in top hat and tails casually passes through and asks for a light. “You in this picture?” asks Crosby. “No,” the fellow says, “taking a shortcut to Stage Ten.” Lamour, trying to wheedle the map out of Hope, gives him a big smooch; after catching his breath, Hope turns to the camera and says, “As far as I’m concerned, this picture’s over right now.” While riding through the snow on a dogsled, Hope sees a mountain in the distance. “Get a load of that bread and butter,” he says. “Bread and butter? That’s a mountain,” Crosby replies. “May be a mountain to you, but it’s bread and butter to me,” says Hope, as the peak is encircled by lights, re-creating the Paramount logo. There is a talking fish, and a grizzly bear that invades the boys’ tent looking for its mate, then trudges off silently, before turning to the camera: “A fine thing. A fish they let talk. Me they won’t give one stinking line.”
It is subversive nonsense, satirizing the artifice of filmmaking itself. Yet it doesn’t destroy the integrity of the comic relationship at the core of the film. Hope is more put-upon and overheated than ever, with bug-eyed double takes, hat-grabbing panic reactions, and wolflike growls in the presence of sexy gals. He gives every wisecrack just the right pitch and weight. “You wouldn’t do this to me if I was in shape!” he cries as he’s being carted off by the ship’s officers—the perfect expression of his hapless bluster. In one scene, the boys swagger into a Klondike saloon, and Crosby tells Hope to act tough, so they can blend in with the crowd. At the bar the chief villain asks what they want to drink. “A couple fingers of rotgut,” says Crosby gruffly. “I’ll have a lemonade,” Hope responds brightly. A quick poke from Crosby and Hope snarls, “In a dirty glass!” Panama and Frank get credit for the line, but Hope’s perfect delivery, the split-second turn from milquetoast to roughneck, is what makes it perhaps the most famous joke in all the Road pictures.
Road to Utopia ends with a clever twist on the perennial Crosby-Hope romantic rivalry. In the climactic scene, as the villains are closing in on the boys in the arctic wilderness, the ice pack beneath them suddenly breaks and splits apart, and Crosby and Hope are separated—Hope on one side with Lamour, Crosby on the other, with the bad guys. Here the flashback ends, and Crosby, back in present time, recounts how he escaped, while Hope and Lamour bring him up-to-date on their life together since—which now includes a son. They call the boy downstairs to say hello. It is Crosby. As Old Bing fidgets uncomfortably, Old Bob turns to the camera and confides, in the film’s capper, “We adopted him.”
When Paramount production chief Buddy DeSylva proposed the ending, to replace one that Panama and Frank had written, Hope said it would never get past the censors. But it did. And Road to Utopia went on to gross $5 million at the box office, the most ever for a Road picture, or for any Hope movie to date.
• • •
With the war over, and his largely volunteer work for the USO completed, Hope focused once again on his finances. In January 1945 he signed a new contract with Pepsodent that raised his salary to $18,000 a week, guaranteeing him $7.5 million over ten years—the largest contract for radio talent ever negotiated to that point. His 1946 income was projected to reach $1.25 million. But he was pouring much of it into real estate and other investments, and in the spring of 1946 he found himself cash poor, unable to pay the $62,000 he owed in income tax.
For a quick payday, Hope got his agent Louis Shurr to book him on a personal-appearance tour in June. It was a fast-paced trip—twenty-nine cities in thirty days—in which Hope played auditoriums, stadiums, and state fairgrounds from Seattle to Topeka. His traveling company included sexy Latin singer Olga San Juan, his wartime tour buddy Jack Pepper, another former vaudevillian and old Cleveland pal named Eddie Rio, Skinnay Ennis and his band, and a bevy of Paramount starlets—more than forty entertainers in all.
They were ferried from city to city on two DC-3s, the first domestic vaudeville tour to travel by plane rather than train. The pace was frenetic. Hope would typically arrive in town around noon, play a charity golf match in the afternoon, have a massage before dinner, put on a three-hour show in the evening, and often end the night at an after-show party thrown by a friend or local businessman. A phalanx of five Hope staffers, among them his brother Jack, handled arrangements and publicity for the tour at every stop. “I can’t even remember what city I’m in,” Jack said in an interview with the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. “I don’t even know where I’m going next. Tonight, for example, I’ll call Bob and tell him I’m through in St. Louis and ask where he wants me to go next. Your idea is as good as mine.”
The tour was a huge success, grossing $500,000 in ticket sales (earning Hope $200,000 after expenses). Nearly as much as his World War II tours, his 1946 domestic tour was a defining event in Hope’s career. It rekindled his love of vaudeville-style road trips, even when the audiences weren’t raucous servicemen, and showed that they could be big moneymakers. It enabled him to get up close and personal with his fans—the show-business equivalent of retail politics, which Hope mastered better than anyone else in Hollywood. He would continue doing it for as long as he could still walk out on a stage. And even longer.
Hope, meanwhile, was busy getting his financial house in order. He split his show-business endeavors into three corporate entities: one, Hope Enterprises (with twenty-five stockholders, among them Bing Crosby), for his movies and personal appearances; another for his books (a sequel to his wartime bestseller, I Never Left Home, was in the works, entitled So This Is Peace); and a third for records (Capitol was planning an album of highlights from his World War II broadcasts). His business arrangement drew widespread attention—“Hope Inc.,” read the headline in Time. Some cynicism began to creep into his press coverage. “Wherever he goes, the whole board of directors ambles right along with him,” wrote Robert Welch, interviewing Hope for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in July 1946. “Even when he goes to the gentlemen’s retiring room he looks like a platoon. He is constantly surrounded with busy, worried and preoccupied people, with briefcases, papers and knitted brows.”
Yet Hope was a hands-on manager of his business affairs. Board meetings for Hope Enterprises would be held in his dressing room during the shooting of Monsieur Beaucaire. “We made him remove the wig because it didn’t look dignified,” said his attorney, Martin Gang. Whenever Hope was considering whether to buy a piece of land, he would always take a drive and walk the property himself. He was a micromanager of everything from his movie publicity campaigns to the placement of his newspaper column, It Says Here. The columns “have been doing pretty well here in Los Angeles lately, keeping it on page five,” Hope wrote Ward Greene, his contact at King Features, in 1946. “If they would give me one spot and keep it there, I do think we could make it a habit.” After Hearst renewed Hope’s contract in October 1946, Greene wrote back, “Mr. Hearst is very pleased. He has instructed me to see that the papers carry your column in the news section and that the papers give it uniform position.”
Hope could indulge in some personal whims as well. In June 1946 he joined a syndicate headed by Bill Veeck and acquired a one-sixth share of the Cleveland Indians, Hope’s hometown baseball team, for around $1.75 million. “I used to climb over the fence at League Park to see a ball game. I’d like to come through the front gate for a change,” Hope said. “Cleveland has been my home, I have other property interests there, and aside from my share as an investment, this is a matter of sentiment with me.” Investing in the Indians not only satisfied his hometown pride and his interest in sports, it provided years of good comedy material—especially when Crosby, around the same time, became part owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Hope took little active role in running the Indians. But he brought some Hollywood glamour to a franchise run by the most celebrated baseball promoter of his era. Veeck put Indians games on the radio for the first time; signed Larry Doby as the first black player in the American League; and famously (a few years later, when he owned the St. Louis Browns) hired a midget to pinch-hit as a publicity stunt. Under his guidance, the Indians rose from a lowly sixth place in 1946, when Hope acquired his share in the team, to the American League pennant in 1948. Hope came to Cleveland for the World Series, filling a box with family and friends as he watched the Indians beat the Boston Braves 4 games to 2.
• • •
Back home in Toluca Lake, the Hope family, like millions of others in America, were settling into a new postwar routine. First came expansion. Dolores had been eager for years to adopt another child, but the war had intervened. Finally, in the fall of 1946, she and Bob went back to the Cradle in Evanston to pick up a new two-month-old baby girl. Once there, they were told that a baby boy had also become available. They decided to take both—naming the girl Honorah (Nora, for short) and the boy William Kelly (known as Kelly). Dolores had requested a baby of either Italian or Irish heritage; she got one of each.
Linda and Tony were grade-schoolers by now, a picture-perfect, blond-and-brunet matched set of Hollywood children, trotted out for photo ops when their father came back from overseas, dressed up in their best clothes for an occasional dinner at the Brown Derby, often accompanied by Louis Shurr, Bob’s man-about-town agent. Yet they had a more grounded, less pampered upbringing than many Hollywood children. They lived not in Hollywood or ritzy Beverly Hills but “over the hill,” in the less pretentious San Fernando Valley. Their Toluca Lake circle included a few show-business families (Jerry and Flo Colonna and their son Robert; John Wayne’s ex-wife Josie and their kids), but they largely avoided the catered birthday parties and junior social whirl that marked the childhood of so many Hollywood youngsters. “We didn’t really do the Hollywood-celebrity-kid thing,” said Linda Hope. “I don’t know if it was something my parents decided between them, that they weren’t going to have us be part of the Hollywood scene. But I think they wanted us to grow up normal.”
The family dynamic was, in many respects, not unlike that of many other postwar families. Bob was the busy working father, traveling for his job, gone much of the time, emotionally detached when he was there. (“Hello, Bob Hope,” Tony once called out when his father walked in to meet them in a restaurant.) Dolores took on most of the child-rearing and household-management duties. The children had governesses, who got them dressed for school and ready for dinner. But Dolores was the disciplinarian, enforcing strict manners and codes of conduct, strongly influenced by her Catholic faith.
“She wasn’t easy,” said Linda. “She knew what was right, and she had a very strict moral code and sense of honor and all of that.” “Dolores had a voice,” recalled Rory Burke, songwriter Johnny Burke’s daughter, who regarded Dolores as a surrogate mother after her parents’ divorce. “She was very assertive. She didn’t like certain things—things that were shades of gray she saw in black and white. At the table you had to have your manners. You didn’t reach. You wait for the food to be served to you. But she was very warm, funny. She had a batty side to her.”
“She was a mother of the period,” said Robert Colonna, another close friend of the family. “Very strict. We had to know how to behave, when to keep our mouths shut. A lot had to do with show business and the strictures of public life. And a lot had to do with her Catholicism.” (Her strict Catholic values didn’t prevent an embarrassing run-in with the law in the spring of 1946, when Dolores held an outdoor carnival on their lawn in Toluca Lake as a fund-raiser for some Carmelite nuns. The police were alerted that games of chance were being played, and the carnival was raided for gambling.)
With Dolores as the tough cop, Bob could play the childish cutup. “My mother would say, you know, sit up straight, and my dad would be at the end of the table hunched over or in some wacky pose, so it was kind of counterproductive,” said Linda. He would entertain the kids by playing an imaginary friend, using the drapes as a curtain and adopting a falsetto voice: “Hello, Mr. Hope, this is Bessie. Can Tony and Linda come out to play?” Yet he was not a father to depend on for advice or heart-to-heart talks. “He was not somebody you’d sit and tell your troubles to,” Linda said. “Dad didn’t deal well with illness and other bad things. Not that he wasn’t caring. He’d just say, ‘You’ll work it out.’ ”
The Toluca Lake house was the center of a large and close extended family. Dolores’s younger sister, Mildred, lived just a few blocks away with her husband and two sons, and she was around often. The two sisters were a study in contrasts: Dolores was tall, attractive, with an almost regal bearing; Mildred was more plain-looking, feisty, outspoken. “Dolores was gracious, more formal,” said Tom Malatesta, the younger of Mildred’s two sons. “Mother was a pistol. She liked attention. She’d speak her mind.” Mildred and Dolores’s mother, Theresa, who came out from New York in the late forties and moved in with Bob and Dolores, was another formidable presence in the household. She was tough and opinionated, a streetwise Irish Catholic with a sense of humor—the kids called her “Mrs. Malaprop,” for her frequent verbal miscues. Bob got along well enough with her, though having a mother-in-law in the house may have been a source of some sensitivity. Hope was one comedian who never did mother-in-law jokes.
Bob was relatively close with his own brothers as well, giving most of them jobs or helping out financially at one time or another. Jack was on Bob’s payroll full-time. George, his youngest brother and former vaudeville stooge, worked for him from time to time as a writer and producer. Ivor, back in Cleveland, had a metal-products business that Bob backed financially. Younger brother Sid, who lived on a farm in northwest Ohio, would occasionally ask Bob for loans for various small-business ventures. When Sid died in 1946, of cancer at the age of just forty-one, Bob helped support his wife and children, who moved to Mount Gilead, Ohio, where they managed a motel and restaurant owned by Bob and his brother Fred. Fred, who ran United Provision Company, a successful meat-supply business with offices in both Cleveland and Columbus, was the one Hope brother who never needed Bob’s financial help.
Bob’s most complicated sibling relationship was with Jim, his cantankerous older brother, who had moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s, hoping to break into show business. Though he got some vaudeville and movie work (including a small role in a 1943 Monogram cheapie called Spotlight Revue), Jim sounded a bit desperate in 1946 when he wrote a letter asking for Bob’s help in finding a job. “I’ve worn out four agents, patiently trying to get me picture work,” Jim wrote. “I’ve tried vaudeville, so far very little success. . . . Naturally I would like something in the studios or in Hollywood, [but] I don’t care what it is, so long as it’s an honest living for honest effort.”
The two brothers were drawn into an embarrassing legal dispute in 1942, when Jim’s first wife, Marie, who had done secretarial work for Bob, claimed she had been underpaid and sued for $2,900 in back wages. (Bob countersued for $1,425, which he claimed Marie owed him as repayment for a loan. The suit was settled out of court.) And the brothers had an awkward near-encounter in the spring of 1946, when Jim and his second wife, Wyn, were doing a small-time vaudeville act in Spokane, Washington. During his 1946 tour, Bob was booked in Spokane at the same time, and he was surprised to learn from a reporter that Jim was doing a show in town too, billing himself as Bob Hope’s brother. Apparently miffed that Jim might be trying to cash in on the family connection, Bob turned down the paper’s request for a photo of the two together and left town without speaking to his brother.
Bob later regretted the snub. “It was a silly thing, silly and thoughtless,” he told his biographer William Robert Faith. “As I look back, I remember thinking something secret was going on. But I was wrong.” Bob eventually came to Jim’s aid, giving him a job managing the White Oak Ranch, one of the large tracts of land that Hope acquired years later in the Santa Monica Mountains.
• • •
Paramount released Monsieur Beaucaire, the first film Hope had made since the end of the war, in September 1946. It was an auspicious return for him—a first-rate production, with a good supporting cast, a relatively sustained and coherent story, and plenty of opportunity for Hope to demonstrate his growing assurance as a comic actor. It remains one of his most celebrated films and inaugurated a rich, new postwar phase in his movie career.
Loosely adapted from a Booth Tarkington novel and play set in eighteenth-century France (filmed once before, in 1924, as a swashbuckler with Rudolph Valentino), the film had a bumpy road to the screen. Producer Paul Jones didn’t like the original script by Panama and Frank and assigned a new writer to it. After Panama and Frank complained to the Writers Guild, the studio (backed by Hope) forced Jones to revert to their original script. Then, when the finished film, directed by comedy vet George Marshall, got a tepid reception at a test screening, the studio brought in Frank Tashlin, a director of Bugs Bunny cartoons at Warner Bros., to punch it up with more physical gags. The result was a Hope romp that had more formal integrity than most of his films—no talking animals, no asides to the camera—and plenty of good laughs too.
Hope plays a barber in the French court of King Louis XV who is sentenced to the guillotine for insulting the king. A duke helps him escape to Spain, where the two trade identities, pursue their separate romantic liaisons (Hope is after a court chambermaid played by Joan Caulfield, who has, conveniently, also been banished to Spain), and get entangled in a plot by a devious Spanish general (Joseph Schildkraut) to start a war between the two countries. The powdered wigs and poofy shirts suit Hope’s comedy well, emphasizing the classic roots of his farcical character: the poseur, always playing a role (swordsman, lover, hero, even the king) to hide the timid “real” self underneath. Even the most predictable gags seem somehow ennobled—the inevitable comic turnabout, for example, when his girlfriend suggests that they elude the bad guys by splitting up:
“We’ll never make it together. You go on alone.”
“What, and leave you behind? Never!”
“But you must!”
“I said never!”
“They’ll cut you to pieces!”
(Beat. Gulp. Dropping the pose.) “I’ll send for you.”
The sheer brilliance of Hope’s voice as a comic instrument is often overlooked: that sharp, crystal-clear tenor, slicing through the confusion even when he’s swallowing his words, gasping in panic, or fleeing up a staircase. Hope’s physical comedy has the same kind of precision and clarity: powdering the king’s wig, for example, and blubbering his apologies as he powders the king instead. Or in the climactic sword fight (one of Tashlin’s additions), as he wields nearly every instrument in the court orchestra to pummel the villain: wedging the fellow’s head between the strings of a harp, slamming a piano lid on his hand, and conking him on the head with a bull fiddle that has attached itself to Hope’s back.
For latter-day fans such as Woody Allen, Monsieur Beaucaire was a high point of Hope’s comic acting (and an obvious model for the nervous, cowardly character Allen played in such early films as Bananas and Sleeper). “He was a wonderful comic actor,” said Allen. “He’s totally committed to his character: he’s scared when he’s supposed to be scared, leching when he’s supposed to be leching, playing someone more grand than he is. He was not a sufferer, like Chaplin, or even as dimensional as someone like Groucho Marx, who suggested a kind of intellect. Hope was just a superficial, smiling guy tossing off one-liners. But he was amazingly good at it.” Even his best films were never more than competent vehicles for him, and Hope was rare among top Hollywood stars in that he never worked for a major director. But none of his comedy contemporaries—Groucho Marx or Jack Benny or Red Skelton—could match his command of both verbal and physical comedy, or his ability to create recognizable, sympathetic, and very human characters in essentially farcical movies.
“Monsieur Beaucaire, as now enacted by no less a clown than Bob Hope, is an item that bears a fair comparison with the best of screen travesties,” wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times. “Charlie Chaplin as Don Jose in Carmen or Will Rogers as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court have only the advantage of fond memory over Mr. Hope’s barber in Madrid.” “That rumbling yesterday,” wrote John L. Scott in the Los Angeles Times, “wasn’t thunder or an explosion; it was laughter shaking the walls of Paramount Downtown and Hollywood theaters, where Bob Hope’s newest comedy Monsieur Beaucaire began runs which will prove extensive and profitable.” The film earned a solid $3 million at the box office, proving that Hope’s wartime break from Paramount had done little to dampen his popularity.
His next film, My Favorite Brunette, was another milestone: the first picture produced by Hope’s own company, under the deal he had worked out with Paramount in 1945. With a financial interest in the film, Hope stuck to business on the set. “He used to say that he carried two watches with him, one set to Paramount time and the other to his own,” said Dorothy Lamour, his costar. “He kept comparing them in order to discover how much time he’d be wasting if he were working for Paramount. It was a joke, but we didn’t mess around as much as usual.” His attentiveness paid off: Hope brought the film in for $1.69 million—$72,000 under budget.
Hope also made sure the first movie from his own production company got a full-court press of publicity. Paramount orchestrated a promotion in which fourteen brunette beauty queens were selected from around the country, brought out to Los Angeles by train, and feted with parties and radio appearances. Pepsodent ran a contest on Hope’s radio show asking listeners to complete a jingle beginning “My favorite brunette is . . .” and giving away four Chevrolets every week to the winners. For the film’s Hollywood opening, Hope hosted an all-star show to benefit the Damon Runyon Memorial Cancer Fund, broadcast nationwide on ABC and around the world over Armed Forces Radio.
The title had been floating around for a couple of years—first attached to the film with Paulette Goddard that had been scrubbed when Hope went on strike, then for a movie with Hope and Signe Hasso, which eventually became Where There’s Life, released later that year. Directed by Elliott Nugent from a script by Edmund Beloin and Jack Rose, My Favorite Brunette was obviously meant as a companion piece to Hope’s 1942 hit My Favorite Blonde. But the two films are quite different: the first a breezy spy caper, the second a more heavy-handed parody of private-eye films.
The movie starts, a little jarringly, with Hope on death row, narrating the story in flashback. He plays Ronnie Jackson (one of the least inspired of Hope’s character names), a baby photographer who longs to be a private eye. He gets his chance when the gumshoe next door (Alan Ladd in an unbilled cameo) goes on vacation. “It only took brains, courage, and a gun,” Hope says in the tough-guy voice-over. “And I had the gun.” Lamour is the inevitable mystery woman who shows up in the office and lures him into a dangerous spy plot. Peter Lorre plays a knife-throwing villain, and Lon Chaney Jr. takes a break from horror films to play the bad guys’ slow-witted muscleman. The movie has some funny sequences, such as a scene in which Hope, the bumbling investigator, searches for clues in an empty house and keeps overlooking the one that Lorre keeps surreptitiously shoving in front of his face. And Crosby gets another cameo at the end—playing the prison executioner who is thwarted when Hope gets a last-minute pardon. “Boy, he’ll take any kind of part,” quips Hope.
But the noirish parody isn’t Hope’s strong suit, and the film isn’t as fleet and fun as some of his others of the period. Still, it pleased his fans (“The best picture Monsieur Robin le Hope has ever made in his happy and prosperous life,” said Louella Parsons) and was another hit at the box office. And for the first time, Hope was getting a piece of the action.
• • •
Hope stuck close to home in early 1947, shooting Road to Rio, the fifth in the series, in January and February and then spending six weeks with the family in Palm Springs, where he now owned a small house on Buena Vista Drive—the first of three homes Hope would acquire in the desert community, which was growing in popularity as a winter retreat for Hollywood’s rich and famous. There was talk of Hope’s returning to Broadway in a new Irving Berlin musical, or making a trip to Europe and North Africa in the summer, retracing his first World War II tour. But neither materialized. Instead, in June, Bob took Dolores and the two older kids on a vacation to South America. They visited Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and a half dozen other capitals; in Montevideo they stayed at the palatial estate of Alberto Cernadas, the most recent husband of Hope’s former radio foil Patricia “Honey Chile” Wilder. On the boat ride back to New York, Hope got so sunburned (aggravating it with a golf game when he got back) that he had to delay the start of his next film—The Paleface, ironically enough.
On radio, meanwhile, Hope was hitting a rough patch. First came more criticism from religious groups over his risqué material. Jimmie Fidler, one of the many entertainment columnists with whom Hope was friendly, gave Hope an early warning of trouble in November 1946, passing along a letter from a Catholic high school student, who said her teacher had requested the class “not to listen to his program because it is so unclean.” Fidler told Hope, “It is one of many letters I have received, voicing the same charge. If such a thing as this should gather momentum, Bob, it could be disastrous.” In a poll of twenty thousand Catholic and Protestant college students in late 1947, Hope was branded the most tasteless comedian on the air.
The bad publicity was upsetting to Hope—and, he felt, unfair. Hope’s material was often suggestive, but rarely over the line. On the few occasions when he let himself go, the censors were usually there to protect him. In April 1947 he hosted an hour-long radio special for Walgreens drugstores, with Groucho Marx among the guests. The show was running long, and by the time Groucho was introduced, a half hour late, he was annoyed. “Why, Groucho Marx! What are you doing way out here in the Sahara Desert?” Hope asked, following the script. “Desert, hell! I’ve been standing in a drafty corridor for forty-five minutes,” Groucho ad-libbed. Hope cracked up, and what followed was an innuendo-laden free-for-all between the two comics, little of which could be used on the air. (John Guedel, producer of the radio show People Are Funny, who was in the studio, was so impressed with Groucho’s ad-libbing that he created a game show for him, You Bet Your Life, which revived Groucho’s career.)
Hope’s biggest run-in with NBC censors, however, had nothing to do with racy material, only corporate sensitivities. On Fred Allen’s show of April 20, 1947, NBC censored about thirty seconds in which Allen made some wisecracks about an (unnamed) NBC programming vice president. The incident was widely reported, and Hope made a joke about it on his own show two nights later. Las Vegas was a town “where you can get tanned and faded [at the craps tables] at the same time,” Hope cracked. Then he added, “Of course, Fred Allen can get faded [censored] anytime.” The network bleeped out Hope’s line.
The network’s hypersensitivity (Red Skelton was also censored on the same night for making a wisecrack about the Allen incident) prompted derisive criticism in the press. NBC president Niles Trammell eventually issued a conciliatory statement, calling the censoring of Allen’s original lines a mistake. But Hope got into more hot water a few weeks later, in a segment with guest star Frank Sinatra. In saying his good-nights, Hope told Sinatra, “I’ll be seeing you tomorrow night on your show.” The line got bleeped because Sinatra’s show was on CBS, and NBC had a ban on plugs for the rival network. (NBC didn’t apologize for that one, reiterating its policy against cross-network plugs.)
Hope’s battles with the network got plenty of publicity, but didn’t do much to perk up a radio show that was beginning to sound a little tired. In the fall of 1946 Hope tried freshening up the old format with a new bandleader (Latin nightclub star Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball’s husband, who replaced Skinnay Ennis); a new sidekick, Vera Vague (another shrill, man-chasing spinster character, played by Barbara Jo Allen); and a few new comedy twists, such as a recurring bit in which Hope has conversations with his “conscience.” (It didn’t last long.) In a more important symbolic break with the wartime years, Hope said good-bye to the singer who had been identified with him for five years, Frances Langford, replacing her with a series of guest vocalists.
But the following season even that mildly innovative spirit seemed to be gone. Arnaz was replaced by Les Brown and his more traditional big band, and the show’s formula was sounding increasingly stale and predictable: the weekly back-and-forth jousts with “Professor” Colonna; the man-chasing gags from Vera Vague; even the “Poor Miriam” musical jingles for Irium, the new whitening ingredient in Pepsodent—sung by a group called the Starlighters, which included a young Andy Williams.
The critics were starting to grouse. “You could enjoy it if you had not heard it the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth times,” wrote the New York Times’ Jack Gould, reviewing the premiere of Hope’s ninth season, in September 1946. A year later, Variety was even more cutting. “Here’s the epitome of radio’s ‘sad saga of sameness,’ ” began its review of Hope’s season opener in 1947:
Apparently it’s just too much to expect that Hope would veer an inch from his time-tested routine. His answer, it goes without saying, is: Why get out of the rut when there’s pay dirt in it? And top pay dirt at that! By Hooper’s count, too, Hope seems to be justified. His routine is apparently one of the things we fought the war for, like Ma’s apple pie. Question simply is: Who’s going to outlive the other: Hope or the listening public?
Hope’s ratings were still strong (though no longer consistently No. 1), but he was encountering something he hadn’t since The Pepsodent Show first went on the air back in 1938: a growing sense that Hope was old hat.
Hope’s relations with his sponsor were also deteriorating. Pepsodent chief Charles Luckman—now the president of Lever Brothers, the British conglomerate that had acquired the toothpaste company—was Hope’s original radio patron and considered himself a fan and a friend. But he and Hope were increasingly at odds—over Hope’s demands for more money (“I can tell the seasons of the year and the Crossley ratings just by the tone of Hope’s voice when he phones me for a raise,” Luckman said), his resistance to making changes in the show after the war, and more recently his constant traveling. Hope liked taking the show on the road, where he always got a great reception from the live audiences. But each location show cost about $25,000 more than a studio show, and Luckman thought it was getting too expensive.
The travel issue came to a head in November 1947, when Hope was invited to attend the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth in London and to headline a gala for the royal family at the Odeon Theater. Luckman objected to the trip since it would take Hope away from the studio for three weeks. But Hope refused to cancel, promising to do his radio shows from London while he was away. Luckman’s fears were realized when the transatlantic crossing aboard the Queen Mary was delayed, and Hope had to miss the first week’s broadcast—the first time in ten years that Hope was a no-show on his own radio program. (Eddie Cantor replaced him, joined by an array of NBC guest stars, including Red Skelton, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Amos and Andy.)
The London trip may have been a flash point for Pepsodent, but it was a triumph for Hope. He brought along Dolores, as well as three writers (among them Fred Williams, an alcoholic rapscallion who keeled over drunk in front of the royal family in the lobby of the Odeon Theater), and the Odeon show was a hit with the royal audience. Queen Elizabeth reportedly “laughed so hard at some of Bob’s cracking that she nearly split her seams.” After the show, Hope presented the royal family with a book of autographed photos of Hollywood stars.
As Hope was leafing through the book, King George piped up, “Look at him. He’s hurrying to get to his own picture.”
“Why not?” Hope replied. “It’s the prettiest.”
“Is Bing’s autograph there too?”
“Yes, but he doesn’t write. He just made three Xs.”
The ad-lib session between Hope and King George made headlines around the world.
While he was in London, Hope met with US Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who asked if Hope would make an impromptu trip to West Germany, to do some shows for US occupation forces there. Dolores objected that he was too exhausted, but Hope jumped at the chance to entertain his favorite audiences once again. He did several shows in Frankfurt and Bremerhaven for the troops, before his voice gave out and he had to cancel the last couple of appearances. He flew back to London, where he broadcast one more radio show before taking a flight back to New York. Dolores returned separately by ship.
Hope was thrilled to be called into service by his country once again. Back in Los Angeles, he held a press conference to talk up his trip and urge more US aid to Europe. “The most important thing for us in America today is to maintain our friendship with the people of Europe,” he told reporters. “We have to support the Marshall Plan. This is a wonderful Shangri-la we’re living in over here, and we should share it with the Europeans before other forces move in and make them our enemies.”
Hope’s political views were well in the mainstream internationalist spirit of the times. Though always a political conservative, Hope liked and admired President Truman—joking often about his fights with Congress, his Missouri roots, and his daughter Margaret’s musical ambitions. (The jokes about Margaret drew angry mail from some listeners, who thought Hope was disrespectful.) He was a strong anticommunist, but again hardly outside the mainstream in those early Cold War years, when fears of the Soviet threat were at a peak. “The Russians say they can’t do anything until they get international cooperation,” went a typical Hope joke. “International cooperation—that’s ‘Show us how to make the atom bomb and we’ll show you where New York City used to be.’ ”
In the fall of 1947, when Congress was probing alleged Communist infiltration in Hollywood (an investigation that resulted in the blacklisting of the so-called Hollywood Ten), Hope took his show to Claremore, Oklahoma, the birthplace of Will Rogers. In paying tribute to the beloved political humorist, Hope did little to disguise his anti-Red sentiments: “The only sad thing about coming to Claremore,” he said, “is that Will Rogers isn’t here to say a few things about our troubled times with the tolerance and humor that made him an all-time great. ‘I see by the papers,’ he might have said, ‘they’ve uncovered a few Reds out in Hollywood. Personally I’ve never preferred my politics in Technicolor, and when boy meets girl in the movies, I like to have them riding on the Freedom Train.’ ”
Hope was growing bolder in speaking out—cloaking himself in the unabashed patriotism of the war years, even as the world was growing more complicated. He was still groping for a role for himself in the postwar years, and fighting a perception that he and his radio show had not changed with the times.
In one area, however, Hope’s audience was happy to see how little things had changed. Paramount had initially vowed that Road to Utopia, filmed in 1944 and released in early 1946, would be the last of the Road pictures. The movies were getting too expensive, and working around Hope’s and Crosby’s schedules too difficult. But the two stars wanted to continue, and they worked out a three-way coproduction deal with Paramount to film a fifth in the series, Road to Rio. Released at the end of 1947, it was another first-rate comedy, and one of the most successful of the whole series.
With a financial stake in the film, Hope and Crosby were unusually businesslike on the set: no more extended lunch breaks or afternoons playing hooky on the golf course. “Bing and I hardly left the set, except to go to the men’s room,” said Hope. “At precisely sixty minutes after lunch was called, Bing would say, ‘All right, let’s get moving. What are we waiting for?’ ” Yet the film, directed by Norman Z. McLeod (whose comedy credits included two early Marx Brothers films and W. C. Fields’s masterpiece It’s a Gift), was a relatively elaborate production, with a large supporting cast that included the Andrews Sisters (who sing “You Don’t Have to Know the Language”) and the Wiere Brothers, doing a funny turn as a Brazilian street band impersonating American jazz musicians. Hope even threw in a part for his radio pal Colonna, who leads a cavalry charge that comes up empty in the film’s last reel.
The boys, once again, are carnival entertainers, with Hope again conned by Crosby into performing a daredevil stunt, this time riding a bicycle across a high wire. (“You know, this picture could end right here,” he quips while hanging on for his life.) Bing and Bob stow away on a ship to Rio and meet Lamour, who shows a mysterious split personality: flirting with them seductively one minute and rejecting them coldly the next. Turns out she’s been hypnotized by her evil aunt (Gale Sondergaard) so that she will go through with an arranged marriage. “I found myself saying things I didn’t know why I was saying them,” she says, emerging from one of her hypnotic trances. Hope: “Why don’t you just run for Congress and leave us alone.”
Hope is fast, funny, and fully engaged, nailing every exasperated reaction and outshining Crosby almost every step of the way. (In their song-and-dance routines, Hope shows off some still agile hoofing, while Crosby merely goes through the motions.) The film is the most polished and least manic of the Road pictures, with more care taken in setting up the story and the running gags. If Road to Utopia was Hope and Crosby’s Duck Soup—their surreal high point—Road to Rio is their Night at the Opera, the Road film for everyone. It took in $4.5 million at the box office—the top-grossing movie for all of 1947.
The only sour note involved Lamour, who was upset when she found out the three-way production deal did not include her. “They could have considered a four-way split, but no one ever asked me,” she wrote in her memoir. “My feelings were hurt. (And, as it would prove later, so would my pocketbook.)” It confirmed her growing feeling that she was an unappreciated third wheel on the Road picture express, and she nursed the resentment for the rest of her life.
Her relations with Hope remained friendly, if hardly close. (She and her husband, Bill Howard, lived nearby in Toluca Lake—“two blocks from his garbage entrance,” she liked to say.) But Crosby was openly disdainful of her, barely acknowledging her when they met at public events. “Crosby’s attitude toward Dorothy Lamour was deplorable,” said Frank Liberman, Hope’s longtime publicist. “He didn’t even try to hide his feelings about her in public. Bing felt that he and Hope were the mainstays of the Road pictures and that Dorothy was just ‘a dumb, lucky broad.’ ”
Yet Crosby was aloof with a lot of people, and even Hope could feel dissed by him. On November 2, 1947, the Friars Club threw an all-star roast for Hope, with Jack Benny, George Burns, Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, and George Jessel among the stars on the dais. Crosby was supposed to be there too, but he didn’t show up. When reporters pressed him about it later, Crosby defended himself coolly: “My friendship with Bob doesn’t depend on appearing at testimonials for him.” Some said that Hope was hurt by the no-show, and he may well have been. Though he always had words of affection for Crosby in public, in private he was less charitable. Many years later, shortly after Crosby died, Hope was sitting in an NBC editing room, looking over film clips for a TV special he was preparing on their screen work together. Associate producer Marcia Lewis was startled when Hope turned to her and made a blunt admission:
“You know, I never liked Bing. He was a son of a bitch.” In all their years of working together, Hope said, “He never had Dolores and me to dinner.”
• • •
The year 1948 marked a turning point for Hope on several career fronts. In the fall, he finally made a major overhaul of his radio show, the first since it went on the air in 1938. He starred in just one feature film during the calendar year, but it was an important one: The Paleface, his biggest box-office hit to date and a film that signaled a new direction for him on-screen, both for good and ill. And at the end of the year he was called on to entertain US troops overseas during an international crisis, launching a Christmas tradition that would define the rest of his career.
On his way back from London in November 1947, Hope met with Pepsodent’s Luckman, and the two at least temporarily patched up their differences. Hope agreed to cut back on the show’s traveling and to make major changes for the following season. He also promised to steer clear of any more controversy over his material. “Bob is very much worried about the bad press he has been getting of late, and means to do everything he can to keep himself above criticism from here on in,” Hugh Davis, an executive at Pepsodent’s ad agency, Foote, Cone & Belding (the former Lord & Thomas), wrote in a memo. The critics’ gripes about the show were finally starting to be reflected in the ratings, which had fallen from first place to fifth for the 1947–48 season. Lever Brothers was reportedly close to dropping Hope altogether (though other sponsors, among them Campbell’s soup, were ready to snap him up). In the end, Lever decided to stick with Hope for another season, but switched products on him. Instead of Pepsodent, the brand he had been associated with for a decade, Hope would in the fall be pitching Swan soap, which Lever was promoting hard in an effort to catch the market leader, Ivory.
Hope was hardly the only radio personality feeling pressure in 1948, the breakthrough year for television. The new medium, whose development had been put on hold during World War II, was making rapid progress in the first years after the war. Hope was an early pioneer, serving as host on January 22, 1947, of Los Angeles’s first commercial television broadcast, over Paramount-owned station KTLA. “This is Bob First-Commercial-Television-Broadcast Hope,” he said, opening the show in front of a makeshift curtain, with an industrial-size bank of cameras and klieg lights pointed at him, “telling you gals who’ve tuned in, and I want to make this emphatic, if my face isn’t handsome and debonair, please blame it on the static.” Only about five hundred TV sets were able to pick up the crude broadcast, which was sponsored by a local Lincoln-Mercury dealer and also featured such Paramount stars as Dorothy Lamour, William Bendix, and director Cecil B. DeMille.
Hope, like most of radio’s other top stars, was holding back from taking a full plunge into TV. Although the new medium was gaining viewers fast, radio still had the bulk of the audience and the advertising dollars. It took an entertainer who had enjoyed little success on radio and thus had little to lose to be the groundbreaker. On Tuesday night, September 14, 1948, Milton Berle made his debut as host of a new weekly variety series on NBC-TV, the Texaco Star Theater. The show was an instant hit, igniting the sales of TV sets and launching a scramble by the four major TV networks—NBC, CBS, ABC, and DuMont—to roll out full schedules of national programming.
On the very same Tuesday night that Berle made his TV debut, Hope introduced his revamped radio show for Swan soap. He had done a thorough housecleaning over the summer, hiring an almost entirely new writing staff, and dumping his two main sidekicks, Jerry Colonna and Barbara Jo Allen, as Vera Vague. (Colonna, who had been with Hope for ten years, was ready to leave and strike out on his own, according to his son Robert, but the parting must have been difficult, both for him and for Hope, who genuinely liked Colonna and valued his contribution to the show’s success.) Only Les Brown and his orchestra were kept on. Brown’s Band of Renown was known for its high-quality players and clean-cut image—no drugs, no drinking—and they were one of the few traditional big bands to survive much beyond World War II. Hope would keep the group, and their easygoing, unobtrusive bandleader, close by his side for virtually the rest of his career.
At Brown’s urging, Hope also added a new singer to the show: Doris Day, who had sung with Brown’s band during the war (they had a hit recording of “Sentimental Journey”) and who replaced the guest vocalists who had filled in ever since Langford’s departure in 1946. Several other newcomers were added to the show, including Irene Ryan, the latest incarnation of the shrill, wisecracking spinster character that Hope was so fond of; a young baritone from Cleveland named Bill Ferrell; and a new announcer, Hy Averback. Even Hope’s signature opening monologue had a fresh coat of paint. Now it was repackaged as “Bob Hope’s Swan’s Eye View of the News,” with announcer Averback introducing each news headline ticker-tape style—Truman campaigns for reelection, Detroit unveils its new cars, the Soviets blockade Berlin—followed by a string of Hope jokes on the subject.
The newly revamped Bob Hope show debuted on September 14 and was marginally improved. The writing was a little sharper, and Day’s addition was a big plus: she had a fresh, girlish soprano—in contrast to the smoky contraltos (Frances Langford, Dolores Reade) that Hope seemed to favor—and was a lively companion for Hope in sketches. Some reviewers noted his efforts to avoid stirring any controversy: “He is definitely out to remove any basis for criticism of the ‘color’ of his material,” wrote one, “even if it means bending over backwards to do so.”
He was still cautious about political material. Hope did surprisingly little, for example, on the 1948 presidential race between Harry Truman and New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. But after Truman’s upset victory, Hope had plenty of fun with the pollsters (George Gallup’s reaction to the results, said Hope: “That’s the last time I take a house-to-house survey; from now on I’m gonna ask people”) and the surprised first family. “Now Margaret Truman has to go back to the White House,” Hope said. “And she had it all set to be the fourth Andrews sister.” His most memorable postelection quip, however, was the one-word telegram he sent to the White House on the morning after Truman’s victory. It read, simply, “Unpack.”
In overhauling his show, Hope also streamlined his working process. His staff of writers was downsized from a dozen to just six, working in three teams. There was more division of labor: rather than having each team write a draft of every sketch (Hope would then mix and match the best material), each sketch was now assigned to just one writing team. All the writers still contributed to the monologue, which drew the lion’s share of Hope’s attention. Every week he would suggest five or six topics, and each writing team would turn out a dozen jokes or more for each. Hope would then assemble the writers in his wood-paneled office—now located in a new office wing, which was added to the Toluca Lake house in 1948—and go through the resulting pile of a couple of hundred jokes. He would put a check next to his favorites; read over them a second time and put a cross through the check for the ones he liked best; and, on a third read-through, draw a circle around the best of those. The final selections would then literally be cut into strips and spread out on the floor or a pool table, so they could be put in final order.
“He was trying something quite novel for him,” said Larry Gelbart, one of the new writers who joined the staff in 1948. “He was used to having a platoon of writers and didn’t enjoy a particularly good reputation among writers. But he was terrific with us. He was a great editor. He knew what he should do and knew what he shouldn’t do. He cared about the rest of the show, but nothing received the personal attention and that kind of involvement that the monologue did.”
Despite his reputation for cheapness, Hope paid his top writers well. Gelbart and his partner Larry Marks, who had worked together previously on the radio show Duffy’s Tavern, started out at $750 a week and worked their way up to $1,250. If Hope could get away with less, he did. Mort Lachman, an aspiring journalist from Seattle who joined the staff as an apprentice in 1947, started at just $75 a week. The writers were on call for anything Hope needed—monologues for his personal appearances, newspaper and magazine articles that carried Hope’s byline, punching-up duty on his movie scripts. At almost any hour of the day or night Hope might call with a request for a new joke—“I need a bigger kid for the finish”—or to summon them for a meeting in the morning: “Ten o’clock. Tomorrow. My house. Bring your own orange juice.”
Hope kept a close eye on every aspect of the show, and that included the freebies that the writers often got from companies in return for plugs on the air. “In those days there were product payoffs,” said Si Rose, another young writer who joined the staff in 1948. “We’d get a General Electric gag on, and one of us would get a refrigerator. Bob found out and got in on the deal. Or a script would have a line about a hotel, and he would make it a line about a specific hotel in Palm Springs. He didn’t need any of this stuff. But he was greedy. He wanted in on everything.”
For all his demands, he was not a difficult boss, and most of the writers enjoyed working for him. But his ego needed tending. “He was demanding, but not temperamental,” said Gelbart. “He only got angry with me twice. Once I made a joke about his nose. That was personal, and he took it as such. Then one day we were writing a monologue for the opening at Santa Anita racetrack, and I wrote three lousy jokes: ‘My horse is so old, they’re betting him to win, place, and live.’ Hope picked ’em, and I said, ‘You’re kidding! It’s gonna sound like a goddamn Hope monologue!’ He really got pissed.”
Day, his new singer, found Hope a “joyous man to be around. He radiated good cheer.” But she was bothered by the sycophantic treatment by his underlings. After each broadcast, she wrote in her memoir:
Bob’s staff would circle around him and tell him what a dynamite show it was. Week after week they’d squeal with delight after every show and Bob preened in the glow of their hyperbole. . . . I knew very well that some of those shows were quite awful. Allegedly funny lines that weren’t funny at all. And I couldn’t believe that Bob, wise about show business as he is, didn’t know it—but I guess it was easier for him to defer his judgment to the uncritical accolades of his aides.
As the ego got puffed up, so did the sense of entitlement, especially when it came to women. The writers had to tolerate Hope’s many sexual escapades, which he felt little need to hide. “When we traveled on the road, we’d always see a gal with him,” said Rose. “We’d laugh because she often didn’t even have a bedroom; she’d be in a cot. Or we’d see her riding on the train when we were going on a radio tour. The miracle of the century is how he never got caught.”
Some in Hope’s entourage joined in the fun, but others were put off by it. On a trip to New York City with Hope, Rose once walked into the star’s hotel room and found an “orgy” under way. “Broads all over the place,” Rose recalled. “Some of the guys are participating. Bob’s eating ice cream. One of his assistants is on the floor boffing this girl. It was revolting. Ugly stuff.” Rose left and returned to his hotel room, joining his wife in bed. A few minutes later, the phone rang. Assuming it was Hope, Rose told his wife to answer and say he was out. She picked up the phone, heard the familiar voice, and said, “I thought he was with you, Bob.” Hope didn’t skip a beat: “Oh, he must be in one of the other rooms. I’ll find him.”
It became a famous anecdote in Hollywood comedy circles, repeated often—though with varying details, attributed to different writers, and with the orgy left out. But the point was always the same: Hope, hearing a wife say she didn’t know where her husband was, automatically assumed he was tomcatting around—and instinctively covered for him, as his writers so often did for him.
• • •
The Paleface was shot in the late summer of 1947, but Paramount waited more than a year to release it, until just before Christmas in 1948. The studio had come up with the idea of doing a Western comedy teaming Hope with Jane Russell, the buxom brunette who had made an R-rated screen debut in Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw. Russell—who had done only one other film, a bomb called Young Widow, also for Hughes—was forever grateful to Hope for giving her a chance to show off her comedy talents, and to escape the mercurial, director-devouring Hughes. His films took months to shoot; on Hope’s set, “they did one take, and if it worked, fine. If not they did two,” Russell recalled. “I thought I had died and gone to heaven.” Even Hope’s lackadaisical working style was refreshing. One afternoon, as director Norman Z. McLeod was getting ready to shoot a scene, Hope suddenly announced he was through for the day and left for a golf game. The soft-spoken McLeod waited until the star was across the soundstage and out of hearing, then commanded, in a voice barely above a whisper, “Bob, you get back here!” Russell and the crew cracked up.
The movie had a hit song before it even opened. Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, Paramount songwriters who had done the music for Monsieur Beaucaire and My Favorite Brunette, were asked to write a song for Hope, playing a frontier dentist named “Painless” Peter Potter, to sing to Russell, as Calamity Jane. They came up with the bouncy “Buttons and Bows,” a comic lament for the delights of the “civilized” East, set to the clip-clop of a horse-drawn wagon. Impatient over the long delay before the film’s release, Livingston and Evans got Dinah Shore to record it for Capitol, and the song was No. 1 weeks before the film opened. (It later won an Oscar for Best Song.) Hope’s rendition, tossed off in a mock-Western twang as he sits on a buckboard playing a concertina—“Don’t bury me on this prairie / Take me where the cee-ment grows . . .”—is understated and almost anticlimactic, but nonetheless charming.
The Paleface was a departure from Hope’s previous films. Shot in candy-colored Technicolor, it is bigger and broader, full of burlesqued gunfights and slapstick chases. Hope’s familiar nervous Nellie character seems quite at home in the land of cowboys and Indians, quaking in his boots one minute (“You’re not afraid are you?” “No, I can always get another scalp”), swaggering around town the next when he thinks he’s single-handedly fought off an Indian attack (Russell has done all the shooting). But The Paleface hits a few discordant notes that foreshadow a turn in Hope’s film comedy.
With a script by Edmund Hartmann (a Hope first-timer who had written for Abbott and Costello), Frank Tashlin (the former cartoon director who had worked on Monsieur Beaucaire), and Hope’s former radio writer Jack Rose, the laughs often depend on physical gags that are little particularized to Hope. In one running gag, for instance, Hope grabs the reins of his wagon and is yanked out when the horses bolt, dragged along the ground like a rag doll. It’s both jarring and a little unseemly; it could just as well come from a Three Stooges short. In another scene, Hope and Russell get married in a quickie ceremony. As they repeat their vows, the camera remains fixed on the couple’s hands—Bob fumbling with the ring, putting it on the wrong finger. After the minister pronounces them man and wife, he says, “And now the kiss.” There is a loud offscreen smooch. “Not me, you fool!” says the minister. It gets a laugh—but it’s pure, untethered nonsense. No matter how foolish or flustered a Hope character might be at the altar, he would never kiss the minister by mistake.
Still, the Western burlesque was a good showcase for Hope, and most of the critics loved the film. “A triumphant travesty,” raved Howard Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune. “There could scarcely be a more joyful show for the Yule season.” The Paleface grossed $7 million at the box office, a new record high for Hope.
While he was gearing up for the Christmas release of The Paleface, Hope got a phone call that would alter the course of his career and revive his commitment to a mission that had seemingly ended with the war. Stuart Symington, secretary of the Air Force and a sometime golfing buddy, asked if Hope would make a Christmas trip to entertain US troops taking part in the Berlin airlift.
The former German capital—partitioned by the Allies after the war, but surrounded by Soviet-controlled East Germany—had been under a Soviet-imposed blockade since the spring, with all road and rail access cut off. In response, Britain and the United States launched a daily airlift to keep the city supplied with food and other essential supplies. Symington told Hope that President Truman thought a delegation of entertainers at Christmas would be an important morale boost and a show of support from back home.
Though he had been planning to take Dolores and the kids to Lake Tahoe for the holidays, Hope had little trouble saying yes. He quickly put together a troupe of entertainers, including most of his radio cast (minus Day, who had a film commitment), singer Jane Harvey, songwriter Irving Berlin, radio personality Jinx Falkenberg, and the Radio City Rockettes. Vice President–elect Alben Barkley and General Jimmy Doolittle also came along, courtesy of the US government, and so did Dolores—leaving the kids at home for Christmas.
They left a few days before Christmas, made a refueling stop at the US air base at Burtonwood, England, and then flew to Wiesbaden, West Germany, the embarkation point for planes carrying supplies into Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport. The group was scheduled to fly to Berlin on Christmas morning, but the weather looked bad, so Hope and a few members of his troupe were rushed onto an earlier flight there on Christmas Eve. The rest of the group (including Dolores, who went to Christmas mass at 5:30 a.m., driven there in an Air Force jeep) flew in the next morning on a series of cargo flights. “It was an adventure,” said Si Rose, one of three writers Hope brought along. “We were flying on a broken-down C-47. There was a board listing all the things that were wrong with the plane. We were standing up, not strapped in or anything, holding on to rods. We were all cargo.”
In frigid Berlin, Hope went to meet incoming airlift pilots, before doing a big show at the Titania Palast theater, an old vaudeville house. He talked about his flight through the tightly guarded air corridor: “Soviet planes started to buzz us, but the first Russian pilot took one look at me and said, ‘They’re okay—look at the hammerhead and sickle.’ ” Barkley, a former senator from Kentucky, told the airmen trying to outlast the Russian blockade that they were taking part in “the greatest filibuster of all times.” Irving Berlin closed the show by singing “White Christmas.”
General Lucius Clay had an after-party at his West Berlin quarters for Hope and visiting dignitaries, among them Walter Bedell Smith, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Riding back to the hotel with Dolores, Hope insisted on making one more stop. An Army sergeant who hosted a radio show in Berlin had asked if Hope would drop by the studio for an interview. Though it was after midnight, Hope asked his driver to find the radio station. With gasoline in short supply in Berlin, the car ran out of fuel a few blocks from their destination—forcing Bob, Dolores, and the driver, flashlight in hand, to trudge the last few blocks in the snow to the station, where Hope took over the mike from the startled DJ.
Hope and company returned to Wiesbaden and made stops in London and Paris before flying back to New York on New Year’s Eve. The following May the Soviets lifted the blockade, ending one of the first major confrontations of the Cold War. Hope had played his part.
• • •
Just a few days after returning from Berlin, Hope began a busy stretch of domestic travel. In January and February of 1949, he and his radio cast went on a thirty-three-day, thirty-four-city tour across the South, East, and Midwest, playing big venues such as the Boston Garden and the Orange Bowl in Miami. He was back on the road in April for another, even more jam-packed tour—twenty-one cities in just over two weeks. He and his troupe flew from city to city aboard a United Airlines DC-6. At the time such short-hop air travel was rare for entertainers, and United used Hope’s tour as a promotional tool. “Here is a perfect example of how air travel opens new opportunities for the entire show business,” read an ad in Variety, accompanied by a photo of Hope posing with United pilots.
In her memoir, Doris Day, who suffered from stage fright even in the best of circumstances, recalled the nerve-rattling flights and the hectic scenes on the ground when they landed:
We often flew through storms and turbulence that had me praying more than once. We made landings where I couldn’t see the airfield until I was on the ground; sometimes the pilot had to circle a few times to find the landing strip. Then when we thankfully got off the plane, there would invariably be a mob of people waiting at the bottom of the steps. Bob was first off and I was in back of him with my hands full of traveling gear; as his fans moved in and mobbed Bob, I’d always get clobbered by the backwash of his faithful, virtually shoved off the steps, and an hour or so later, still spooked by the harrowing airplane ride and the clobbering fans, I’d have to go out on the stage of whatever mammoth auditorium we were playing with my pipes in good condition and my personality bubbling. I really learned what the expression “tough it like a trouper” means.
Something else may have contributed to Day’s stress on the tour. Around the studio Hope liked to tease her with sexual banter—he called her “jut-butt”—but it may not have been entirely innocent. Hope claimed to a friend years later that he and Day had a brief romantic fling while they were touring together in 1949. If so, it was uncharacteristic of Hope, who usually avoided entanglements with his movie and radio costars, and it didn’t last long. When they returned home to Burbank, Dolores was at the airport to greet them, giving Bob an ostentatious welcome-home hug. According to Hope, Day saw the gesture as a wife’s symbolic marking of her territory, and she ended the relationship then and there. Day never commented on the alleged affair.
Not all of Hope’s extramarital activities were discreet. During a stop in Dallas in the spring of 1949, Hope met a blond twenty-one-year-old Universal starlet named Barbara Payton, and the two began a relationship that lasted for several months. According to Payton, one of Hollywood’s most notorious party girls, and her biographer, John O’Dowd, she followed Hope around the country, moved into a furnished apartment that he rented for her in Hollywood, and, when the affair ended in August, was paid off by Hope to keep quiet about it. If so, it didn’t stop Payton—whose film career was tainted by scandal and over by the mid-fifties—from selling her story to Confidential magazine in 1956, a rare breach in the wall of secrecy that surrounded Hope’s sex life.
Hope’s 1949 personal-appearance tours were huge moneymakers for him, grossing a total of $870,000, of which Hope kept 75 percent. “You can’t make money like that on Broadway. You can’t make money like that anywhere,” Hope told John Crosby of the New York Herald Tribune. At a time when Hollywood was having anxiety attacks over the threat from television, Hope’s success was viewed as a heartening sign that movie stars could still be big draws with the public. “The Hope success should inspire some of our other better entertainers,” said the Hollywood Reporter, “to get a show together and go out, first, of course, to grab some good moola, but more important to hypo show business generally that now needs all the dynamite that can be blasted at the public to get them going back to the theaters.”
Between his radio show, his movie work, and his lucrative concert tours, Hope was probably earning more money than any other star in Hollywood. He was investing much of it in real estate. He also owned a stake in several broadcasting ventures, including DuMont Television and KOA radio in Denver. And in 1949, with his friend Crosby, he got into the oil business.
Years earlier, he and Crosby had met a Fort Worth oilman named Will Moncrief at a golf benefit in Texas. They stayed in touch, and in mid-1949 Moncrief cut them in on a deal to lease seventeen hundred acres of West Texas oil land. Hope put up $50,000, and another $50,000 when the first well came up dry, before they hit a gusher that was soon producing a thousand barrels a day. Hope, always a hands-on businessman, flew to Texas for a weekend in August to inspect the well. (Crosby, just as characteristically, stayed home fishing.) It was one of Hope’s shrewdest investments. When he and Crosby sold out in the early 1950s, each earned a windfall of $3.5 million.
Big money was still being tossed around in radio as well. In late 1948 and early 1949, CBS chairman William Paley launched a series of talent raids on rival NBC, offering lucrative contracts to lure away many of the network’s top comedy stars, including Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Red Skelton, and Burns and Allen. After he added Bing Crosby to his stable (hiring him away from ABC, where Bing had moved his radio show in 1946), Paley set his sights on Hope, envisioning a Hope-Crosby tandem airing back-to-back on CBS.
It’s not clear how far the negotiations went, but Hope was one major NBC star who stayed put. His instinctive loyalty to the network that had helped make him a star doubtless played a role. But NBC also stepped up as it hadn’t for some of its other defecting talent, promising to bankroll various Hope Enterprises projects and dangling a seven-figure salary when Hope made the all-but-inevitable move into television. Hope never seriously considered switching networks again.
Relations with his sponsor, Lever Brothers, weren’t quite so tranquil. In the spring of 1949 Hope got into another fight with Luckman, this time over the taping of his radio show. Though most radio programs were still broadcast live, some stars (notably Crosby, who owned a piece of the Ampex audiotape company) were beginning to record shows in advance, and Hope wanted the option of doing the same when he was traveling. Luckman objected, complaining about the cost and worrying that radio listeners wouldn’t sit still for “canned” shows. The dispute went to an arbitration panel, which ruled against Hope. Lever renewed its sponsorship of Hope’s show for the 1949–50 season—encouraged, possibly, by a Gallup poll in September that named him America’s favorite comedian (beating Milton Berle, the new TV sensation, by a two-to-one margin). But the disputes were taking their toll, and it would be Hope’s last season for his longtime sponsor.
Back at Paramount, Hope spent most of the summer of 1949 filming Where Men Are Men (later retitled Fancy Pants), a remake of Ruggles of Red Gap, the 1935 Charles Laughton comedy about an English butler in the old West. While shooting a scene in which he rides a bucking mechanical barrel, Hope was thrown off the machine, fell six feet to the floor, and was knocked unconscious. A stay in the hospital revealed no serious injuries, but he needed a week off to recuperate from the bruises. Hope got plenty of publicity mileage out of the accident, writing an open letter to studio chief Henry Ginsberg: “If your economy-minded production heads had used a real horse instead of putting me over a broken-down barrel I would not have landed on my back on Stage 17 with an injury which you will see from the bill was not cheap.”
Paramount could afford to have a sense of humor. The accident came a month after the release of Sorrowful Jones, an unexpectedly big hit for Hope and a real advance for him as a screen actor—the first film in which he plays something close to a dramatic role.
Based on a Damon Runyon story first filmed in 1934 as Little Miss Marker, with Shirley Temple, Sorrowful Jones is hardly devoid of comedy. Indeed, screenwriters Ed Hartmann, Mel Shavelson, and Jack Rose added gag lines to suit Hope’s wisecracking screen personality, much to the dismay of some Runyon purists. Hope plays a bookie who finds himself saddled with a little girl (Mary Jane Saunders) when her father leaves her as a marker for a racing bet and gets bumped off by gangsters before he can retrieve her. The role was unlike any Hope had played before. Instead of his usual bumbling, girl-chasing coward, he is a hard-boiled, cynical, thoroughly citified Runyon wise guy. He even has a relatively adult, smoldering-at-arm’s-length romantic relationship—with his ex-girlfriend, now a local mobster’s girl, wonderfully played by Lucille Ball, in the first of four films she would do with Hope. They meet by chance, apparently for the first time in years, in front of a department store window, and the entire history of their relationship is told in one brief, brittle exchange:
“You know, it’s been almost four years since I saw you, Sorrowful. But I recognize the suit.”
“It’s been lucky for me—up to now. Some people seem to forget what some people spend on some people.”
“Spend? Where did you ever learn that word? I always figured you invented the dutch treat.”
The film’s chief love story, however, is between Sorrowful and little Martha Jane, the tyke in his care who disrupts his comfortably disordered bachelor’s life. Their first night together in Sorrowful’s apartment is a Hope gem. Martha Jane bursts in on him while he’s undressing, and he scrambles for his pants like a ten-year-old surprised by his big sister. She asks where the bathroom is; he grits his teeth and stabs his finger toward the facilities: “Get you a floor plan later.” When she takes too long to get to bed, he barks at her in tough-guy Runyonese: “Hey, Shorts, drag your royal chassis outta there and hit the sack.”
Predictably, the little girl soon breaks down his resistance and awakens his fatherly instincts. Hope’s underplaying—with the help of a sensitive director, Sidney Lanfield—keeps the transformation honest and touching, especially in the memorable bedtime scene, when Sorrowful teaches the little girl to pray. It begins when he mentions God, and Martha Jane tells him casually, “My daddy says there’s nobody named God.”
SORROWFUL: “When did he say that?”
MARTHA JANE: “When my mommy went away.”
SORROWFUL takes a moment to register this—the girl is an orphan: “I guess your daddy got a bad break. But what he said wasn’t right. Not just right. He kind of forgot a little. I mean, there is somebody named God.”
“Do you know him?”
“I heard about him. And from what I hear he’s a pretty good sport. Always tryin’ to give a citizen a break. If there’s something you want and can’t promote for yourself, you ask God for it. And as often as not, he comes through.”
“Do you write him letters, like Santa Claus?”
“No. That’s where prayin’ comes in.”
The scene is beautifully played—not a hint of condescension or cuteness. Hope seems to be working it out for himself, even as he explains it in language that his little charge will understand. It’s Hope the communicator, sizing up his audience and talking its language. He would have made a good father.
Sorrowful Jones skips along brightly toward a rather overwrought farcical-sentimental climax: Martha Jane has an accident and falls into a coma, and Sorrowful has to sneak her favorite racehorse into the hospital to save her. But the film is less treacly than the earlier screen version, Little Miss Marker, with Shirley Temple overdoing the adorableness and Adolphe Menjou as a more sorrowful Sorrowful. Time said the film “lifts comedian Bob Hope out of an accumulated litter of silly scripts, props and costumes, and gives him a new grip on the US public’s funny bone.” Sorrowful Jones was the top-grossing film in the country for the month of July, and one of Hope’s biggest hits of the forties—the culmination of his long road from farceur to fully mature comic actor.
Hope had one more movie left to come in 1949, The Great Lover. It’s relatively minor Hope, but a delightful film nonetheless, and a fitting coda to Hope’s extraordinary decade. Directed by Alexander Hall (who had, coincidentally, directed the original Little Miss Marker), the film in some ways is a look back for Hope, to the comedy-thrillers that were his bread and butter earlier in the decade, but with some fresh twists. Hope plays a newspaper reporter chaperoning a Scout troop on a tour of Europe. On the boat going home he gets entangled with a murderous cardsharp (Roland Young) and a gold-digging European duchess (Rhonda Fleming, the latest Paramount beauty to get matched with Hope). Hope is boyishly engaging as he tries to elude the watchful eyes of the straight-arrow Scouts while making time with the down-on-her-luck duchess. Released near the end of 1949, The Great Lover wasn’t as big a hit as Hope’s two previous films, The Paleface and Sorrowful Jones. But the three combined to boost Hope, for the first time, into the No. 1 spot in two annual film-industry polls of the top box-office stars of the year.
Hope’s decade was capped off with another phone call from Stuart Symington. Hope had attended a Hollywood screening of Twelve O’Clock High, the story of the World War II hero Air Force general Frank Armstrong Jr., and Symington wanted to know if Hope would spend Christmas entertaining the troops now under Armstrong’s command up in Alaska. Hope was hesitant, saying that he couldn’t be away from his kids for a second Christmas in a row. Symington said to bring them along. Dolores was game, and Tony and Linda were excited at the prospect of a snow vacation, so the family (minus the toddlers, Kelly and Nora) made the trip together.
With just a few hours to put together a troupe, Hope recruited Patty Thomas, his dancing companion from World War II; cowboy singing star Jimmy Wakely; and Les Brown’s pianist Geoff Clarkson. Then he called up his head radio writer, Norm Sullivan, and told him the writers would have to put together the following week’s show on their own because Hope was going to Alaska. After a pause, Sullivan deadpanned, “We’ll move your pin on the map.”
Hope and the family flew aboard Armstrong’s B-17 to Seattle, where they caught Symington’s plane to Anchorage. From there, Hope did twelve shows in three days and had five Christmas dinners. “You know who you are, don’t you?” Bob told the troops freezing in twenty-below temperatures. “God’s frozen people.” He caught a cold on the trip and by the end could barely talk. When he climbed aboard the plane headed home, he said, “Get me some soup and some sleeping pills.”
The brief trip was an important one for Hope, solidifying his status as the Pentagon’s go-to entertainer and Hollywood’s ambassador of holiday cheer for US troops around the globe. “The Bob Hope Christmas stint for the troops in Alaska had the entire Pentagon going sentimental with delight,” reported Variety, “and reminiscing over last year’s junket at the height of the Berlin Air Lift—a trip still remembered here as an all-time high in public relations.” Berlin, however, had been a special assignment—Hope heeding his country’s call in a world crisis. The Alaska trip was more in the realm of routine duty, establishing the Christmas tradition that would become Hope’s calling card.
As the 1940s ended, Hope was riding higher than ever. “His professional jaunts have astonished several branches of science, having the same kind of monumental energy normally associated with nuclear fission,” the New York Times wrote in January 1950. “Today Hope’s backlog of good will and public favor is of a size and quality most public figures can only dream about.” He was the No. 1 movie star in America, a stage entertainer without peer, and still one of the most popular stars on radio, who was about to enter the medium that would replace it. What’s more, he had laid the groundwork for his annual Christmas tours to entertain the troops, the patriotic missions that would ensure his legacy—and, two decades later, unexpectedly tarnish it.