Bob Hope drove fast. Passengers in the car with him would sometimes be hanging on for dear life when he was speeding along the highway between Toluca Lake and Palm Springs, a trip he made often. But Fred Williams, his hard-drinking writer pal, was dozing in the front seat next to him in January 1950, on the way back from Palm Springs after a weekend of golf and working on script revisions for Hope’s film Fancy Pants. Doing 75 mph on rain-slicked Highway 60, Hope suddenly swerved and lost control of his Cadillac, which hit a ditch and rolled over, throwing both men from the car.
“I remember how my head jerked, and how I thought, ‘This is it. I’m going to die,’ ” Hope recalled. “I remember everything that happened until I got hit on the head and blanked out.” He was standing in the mud by the side of the road testing his golf swing when a passing motorist stopped to help and drove them to a hospital in Riverside. Williams had only bruises, but X-rays showed that Hope had suffered a broken collarbone.
It was a shaky start to a promising new decade, one in which Hope would master a new medium, say good-bye to an old one, and pioneer a new kind of stardom—enterprising, relentless, spanning all media, embracing a public role as well as that of mere entertainer. Show business had seen nothing like it.
The accident forced him to scuttle plans to play in Bing Crosby’s celebrity golf tournament in Pebble Beach and to cancel a few weeks of public appearances. But in early February he was back on the road: flying with Dolores to Washington, where he picked up an award from the Air Force for his work during the Berlin airlift, appeared at a Women’s National Press Club luncheon, and emceed another White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. “Never trust a politician who knows how to measure your inseam,” Hope cracked about the former haberdasher now in the White House, as President Truman laughed along on the dais.
Then Hope prepared for a return to vaudeville. In March, he was booked for a two-week stage show at the Paramount Theatre in New York City, accompanying the premiere of the Paramount film Captain China. Unlike his personal-appearance tours of the late forties—hopping from city to city, doing mostly one-nighters—this would be an old-style, continuous vaudeville run: six forty-minute shows a day, the sort of grinding schedule few Hollywood stars would take on. Hope was guaranteed $50,000 per week, plus a percentage of the gross receipts—more money than a performer on Broadway had ever before been paid. Joined onstage by his favorite glamour girl of the moment, Jane Russell, along with Les Brown’s orchestra, Hope reveled in the chance to revisit his vaudeville roots, polish his stage skills, and get some face time with his fans. “I started in this sort of racket, and I feel that you’ve always gotta go back to where you came from every so often, to sharpen up,” he told the New York Herald Tribune. “At the end of this run, I should have improved my comedy timing and everything else about the act, under all kinds of conditions.”
His show was a smash hit. Despite bitter-cold weather in New York City and brownouts due to a coal strike, Hope set house records for the opening day, opening week, and second week of his Paramount run. “Where was Hope when the lights went out?” trumpeted an NBC ad in the trade papers. “Packing them in at the Paramount.” When the two-week engagement was finished, Hope took the show on the road for another week, traveling to Cincinnati, St. Louis, and several more cities.
For the tour Hope added a new performer—a young Italian American singer he had seen at Pearl Bailey’s nightclub in Greenwich Village, who was going by the stage name Joe Barry. Hope told him he ought to change it to something closer to his real name, Anthony Benedetto—and suggested Tony Bennett. “It was very intuitive and correct,” said Bennett, who would always credit Hope with giving him his first big break in show business, along with his stage name. “He took me on the road for six or seven days and ended in Los Angeles, where he introduced me to Bing Crosby. It was the first time I ever sang in front of a huge crowd.”
Hope made one other important change in his stage show on the road. Because of a movie commitment, Jane Russell couldn’t stay on, so Hope replaced her with a twenty-nine-year-old blond singer and actress named Marilyn Maxwell. Born in Clarinda, Iowa, as Marvel Marilyn Maxwell, she had traveled the road with her mother, a piano accompanist for the dancer Ruth St. Denis, and started in show business as a big-band singer. She puttered around Hollywood, getting supporting parts in mediocre films through much of the 1940s, before landing her best role as the sultry girlfriend of Kirk Douglas’s ruthless boxer in the 1949 film Champion. Maxwell filled all the résumé requirements for a Hope stage partner: sexy good looks, a pleasant singing voice, and a “fun girl” who could trade quips with him. Maxwell became one of his favorite partners onstage, on radio, and later on TV. She also, most likely at some point in 1950, became his girlfriend.
• • •
By early 1950, any doubts that television was going to transform the entertainment world were all but gone. In May 1948, four months before the debut of Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater, there were only 325,000 TV sets in American homes, nearly half of them in the New York City area. By the end of 1949, that number had grown to more than 4 million. Within another year it had nearly tripled again, to 11.6 million. The radio audience was dropping just as swiftly, from an 81 percent share of the broadcast audience at the start of 1949 to just 59 percent at its end.
Radio wasn’t the only medium feeling the heat from television. College and professional sports leagues feared (amazingly, in retrospect) that TV coverage would mean doom because it would cut into stadium attendance. Hollywood was seeing movie attendance plummet—from a peak of 90 million in 1946 to less than 60 million in 1950—and TV was the main culprit. The studios warned their top stars to stay away from the new medium, lest TV exposure damage their value on the big screen, and scrambled for ways to make their films stand out from the TV competition: wide-screen epics, splashy Technicolor musicals, and a few years later such gimmicks as 3-D and Cinerama.
Television, meanwhile, was busily minting new stars. Not just Berle, whose breakout success in the new medium earned him the nickname Mr. Television, but personalities such as Arthur Godfrey, the folksy, mellow-voiced host of not one but two popular TV shows, and Ed Sullivan, the stiff, almost comically untelegenic New York newspaper columnist who hosted the popular Sunday-night variety show Toast of the Town. TV spawned new Western heroes such as Hopalong Cassidy, kids-show stars (Howdy Doody, Kukla, Fran, and Ollie) and showmen of the wrestling ring such as the flamboyant, blond-tressed Gorgeous George.
Television was a frequent target of Hope’s radio jokes in those early years—the old movies that filled up so much of the early TV schedule, the ubiquitous Godfrey and his many sponsors. But Hope could hardly afford to laugh off television. The decline in his audience was among the most precipitous in radio. For the 1948–49 season, Hope’s Hooper rating stood at 23.8, good for third place; one season later it was down to 13.9 and tenth place, one spot behind Gene Autry’s program of cowboy music. “The only radio comic who chooses to ignore television as a part of his future is the comic who wants to quit—to lie down—to retire with the loot the government has allowed him to hold onto,” wrote Walt Taliaferro in a May 1949 story on Hope in the Los Angeles Daily News. “And this is a description of everything Bob Hope isn’t.”
But Hope was approaching the new medium warily. In June 1949 an NBC vice president named John Royal offered a friendly prediction in a letter to Hope: “I want to take a little bet—in fact, a goddam big bet—that the first time Hope gets into television, he will do to this industry what Jolson did in talking pictures. He will make it.” Hope was dismissive at first. “Berle can have that medium all to himself for the next year,” he wrote back. “Then I shall have my head blocked and we’ll all go back into vaudeville!” But he foresaw the inevitable: “Without a doubt television will really be going in a couple of years and we will have to put on our very best manners and do a nice half-hour show every week. I don’t think any less than that will do, as television will have to become a habit . . . maybe one of the nastier habits, but nevertheless an interesting one.”
The day of reckoning came sooner than he expected. In January 1950, Hugh Davis, of the ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding, came to visit Hope while he was convalescing from his car accident in Palm Springs. He asked Hope if he would consider hosting a TV variety show for Frigidaire, one of the agency’s clients. Hope threw out what he thought was an outrageous amount of money, $50,000. A few days later Davis called back to ask if Hope would do it for $40,000—more than had ever been paid to any entertainer for a one-time performance. Hope, who always liked breaking records, agreed.
Frigidaire signed him up for five ninety-minute specials, to air throughout the year around holidays. After the initial $40,000, he would get a total of $150,000 for the next four specials—out of which he had to pay his writers and travel expenses to New York, where the shows would be done live. The total cost to Frigidaire for each special: $135,000, more than had ever before been spent on a single hour of television. Max Liebman, who had just begun working on Your Show of Shows, with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, was brought in to direct (on the one week out of the month Caesar and Coca had off), and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Beatrice Lillie, and Dinah Shore signed up as guests for the first show, scheduled for Easter Sunday, April 9.
Hope flew to New York five days early to prepare. Rehearsals were hampered by a technicians’ union slowdown. Hope was unsure of himself in the new medium, and the writers too were feeling their way along. “I’m being underpaid, I’ll tell you that,” Hope told a reporter during the hectic rehearsals. “This is positive murder.” Mort Lachman, one of four writers Hope brought to New York to work on the show, recalled the chaos: “It was very difficult. There was so much technical trouble—it took hours and hours to prepare. I went to Bob’s dressing room before the show and couldn’t get inside, there were so many people yelling and carrying on.” Carl Reiner, who appeared in sketches on the show, met Hope for the first time backstage just before the broadcast. “His hand was soaking wet,” Reiner recalled. “He was a nervous wreck. He was literally shaking.”
The Star-Spangled Revue, as the special was called, went on the air at 5:30 p.m. eastern time, broadcast live to twenty-eight NBC stations across the country, with another thirty-two getting it on kinescope a week later. Viewed today, the show looks downright prehistoric. It opens with appliances: the camera panning across a display of Frigidaire products, including the new 1950 model refrigerator (“Just look at the beauty of that full-length door . . . that new target latch with its golden trim”). After a jerky hand-roll of the opening credits, Hope enters through a theater curtain, formally attired in a white, cutaway tuxedo, with a cane and top hat (the same one he wore in Roberta on Broadway). “Television,” Hope begins. “Well, they finally got me.”
Hope is obviously tense. When jokes fall flat, he is too unsure of himself to react and reach for a saver; he just barrels ahead. His monologue includes jokes about Eleanor Roosevelt, New York’s well-traveled mayor, William O’Dwyer, and, most of all, the unfamiliar new medium he’s just dived into. “I must tell you how I got into television,” he says. “It’s rather sneaky. I lied to them. I told them I was an old-time movie.” The excess verbiage is probably a reflection of his nervousness.
The show has an old-style vaudeville feel. Hope’s first guest is a stand-up boogie-woogie pianist. Another is former vaudeville hoofer Hal Le Roy, who joins him in a comedy Egyptian-dance number—the same one that Hope did with Lloyd Durbin when he was starting out in vaudeville. The sketches are broad and crudely staged. In one, Hope, playing himself, is wined and dined by NBC executives, who fumigate the room every time “CBS” or “Godfrey” is mentioned. In another, Fairbanks and Lillie join in a British burlesque of American Westerns called “Dragalong Cavendish.” Hope and Dinah Shore have a little fun as Eskimo lovers, shivering in an igloo as they trip over their lines and sing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Hope quips, “Like to see Milton Berle steal this.”
Saying his good-byes at the end of the show, Hope appears visibly relieved. “I do hope that we got away with it this afternoon. This really sells me on TV. In fact, from now on I’m gonna quit peeking through my neighbor’s window and go out and get a small set of my own.” Hope ends the show, as he often did on radio, with a patriotic sign-off, reflecting the anxieties of the early Cold War years.
Tomorrow, when I get home, people are gonna say, “What did you do on Easter Sunday?” And I can say, well, we spent Easter with the family. A big family that believes in the American way of life, those folks that have never pulled down an Iron Curtain between their hearts and the Christian ideal called brotherhood of man.
Hope was the first major radio star to take the plunge into television, and his debut, not surprisingly, was a huge hit in the ratings. The show got a 49.4 Hooper score, meaning that nearly half of all homes in the country with television sets were watching—roughly 10 million viewers, the most for any TV special in the medium’s short history. The reviews were mixed—Life said Hope “seemed subdued and uncertain in his new medium,” and the New York Journal-American thought he looked “petrified with fear”—and Hope himself was not happy with his performance. “I couldn’t believe how nervous and jumpy I was,” he said. “I worried about my material, and especially the pacing of it. I knew that this was a quite different medium from either radio or film, but I hadn’t figured it out yet.” He was distracted by the constantly moving cameras—“like trying to do a nightclub act with three waiters with trays walking in front of you every time you reached the punch line”—and he thought the writing needed to be better. “It was really caveman TV,” said Larry Gelbart, one of the show’s writers. “We were not television writers by any stretch of the imagination. Our idea of television was to find the biggest twenty-gallon hat we could find for him and strap on a dozen six-shooters for a Western sketch. The writing was terrible. I see those shows and cringe.”
The Frigidaire shows improved as they rolled out through the rest of the year. For his second special, which aired in May, Hope’s top-billed guest was Frank Sinatra—the former bobby-socks idol who was in a career slump and was grateful to Hope for giving him the TV exposure. Hope, who often joked on the radio about Sinatra’s scrawny frame, notices that he has filled out: “After I saw you on camera I had to throw away a lot of skinny jokes.” Sinatra sings “Come Rain or Come Shine” and joins Hope in two sketches: as a pair of baseball players primping themselves for the TV cameras, and in a Road picture parody, with Sinatra paddling a canoe and wearing big ears to impersonate Crosby.
Hope was learning the new medium, slowing down his pace and relaxing in front of the camera. “I used to work very fast on radio because I found out when I was working for service audiences that they wanted it fast,” he wrote in his memoir Have Tux, Will Travel. “They didn’t want situation comedy; they wanted jokes and they wanted them right now; they wanted them to go bang-bang-bang. I was successful with them that way. I carried this technique over into my first days on television, but it wasn’t too successful. With that particular type of material and a civilian audience, I was ahead of them, and working too fast for them. I’ve slowed down for television, especially with my monologue.”
Having broken the ice in TV, Hope began a complicated series of negotiations over his future on both radio and television. Relations with his radio sponsor, Lever Brothers, were continuing to deteriorate—despite the departure of Charles Luckman, the company president with whom Hope had often clashed, who resigned in January after a dispute with his corporate bosses in London. Now Hope wanted out of his ten-year contract, which still had four years to run. In June, after months of wrangling, Lever finally agreed to let him go, and Hope signed with a new radio sponsor, Chesterfield cigarettes.
Separately, NBC worked to lock up Hope with an exclusive contract for both radio and TV. Those negotiations too dragged on, but concluded in the fall with a deal that guaranteed Hope $3 million over the next five years. All of his TV specials would be produced by Hope Enterprises, and NBC and Hope became partners in each other’s company: NBC agreed to invest $1.5 million for a 25 percent share of Hope Enterprises, while Hope acquired a large block of NBC stock. At the same time, Hope struck a new deal with Paramount, promising eight pictures over the next four years—half produced by Hope Enterprises, the other half by Paramount, but giving Hope a one-quarter share of the profits. By the end of the summer, Hope had set himself up with a profit-sharing stake in everything he did in movies, radio, and television.
Then it was back to work—lots of it. Hope seemed to be everywhere. He spent most of the summer on the Paramount lot shooting The Lemon Drop Kid, adapted from another Damon Runyon story, with Marilyn Maxwell as his costar. On his weekends off he entertained at state fairs. In August he hosted an all-star benefit at the Hollywood Bowl, raising $48,000 for the United Cerebral Palsy Association. In September he flew to New York for his third Frigidaire TV special, then returned to LA for the fall premiere of his radio show. He recorded a single for Capitol with Margaret Whiting called “Blind Date,” in which a couple on a first date exchange polite conversation interspersed with their “real” thoughts about each other (with “Home Cookin’,” a song from his new movie Fancy Pants, on the flip side). He continued to turn out his daily newspaper column, It Says Here, for the Hearst syndicate (though he was growing tired of it and would finally call it quits in 1951). Hope even became the star of a comic book.
At the end of the 1940s, with the sales of superhero comics sagging, DC Comics began experimenting with a new genre: comic adventures based on the screen characters of movie and TV stars such as Ozzie and Harriet and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. In 1949 DC made a licensing deal with Hope and in January 1950 brought out the first bimonthly issue of The Adventures of Bob Hope. Each issue featured a cartoon version of Hope wisecracking through different exploits—Bob invents a new golf club, say, or joins the French Foreign Legion. Hope and his writers had nothing to do with the comic, but it was another extension of his brand and made his ski-nosed caricature instantly recognizable to a new generation of kids. The Adventures of Bob Hope had a surprisingly long run, appearing every other month for eighteen years—well into the Vietnam era, when young people were reading other kinds of comics, and Hope’s adventures weren’t quite so funny anymore.
• • •
The five years of peace since the end of World War II had been good to Bob Hope. His career was blazing, he was making lots of money, and he occasionally got home to see the wife and kids. But when North Korean troops, backed by the Soviet Union, invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, Hope’s war-fueled adrenaline began flowing again. Almost as soon as UN troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur turned back the North Korean offensive, Hope began lobbying to make a trip there. MacArthur had requested that no entertainment units of larger than six people—and no women—be allowed into the war zone. But Hope prevailed on his friends among the military top brass to let him take a troupe of fifty there in October. It was hard to say no to Bob Hope.
His big troupe included cowboy singer Jimmy Wakely (who had accompanied Hope to Alaska the year before), dancer Judy Kelly, the Tailor Maids singing trio, a dance act called the Hi-Hatters, and Les Brown’s band. Also joining the entourage were Hope’s brother Jack, old vaudeville pal Charlie Cooley, four writers, and Hope’s masseur from Lakeside Country Club, Fred Miron. For a leading lady, Hope’s first choice was Jane Russell, but she again had to bow out because of a film commitment, so he asked singer Gloria DeHaven to come along for the first part of the trip, before Marilyn Maxwell could take over midway through the tour.
They stopped first in Hawaii, then island-hopped to Kwajalein, Guam, and Okinawa, before landing in Tokyo. Hope was a big celebrity in Japan, thanks largely to The Paleface, the most popular American film to open in the country since the war. (While he was being driven through the Tokyo streets, a car full of Japanese fans pulled alongside and serenaded Hope with “Buttons and Bows.”) Hope and his entertainers were guests at a luncheon given by General MacArthur—another charismatic general who impressed Hope greatly. “He held us spellbound,” Hope wrote in his newspaper column, “as he talked with authority and humor on subjects ranging from Bataan to baseball batting averages.” Hope visited injured American soldiers at Tokyo General Hospital (“Most of them are so young you’d think they were drafted on the way to school,” he wrote); flew to Yokota Air Force Base to entertain fliers under the command of General Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell; and did his weekly radio show for an audience of three thousand GIs in Tokyo’s Ernie Pyle Theater.
From Tokyo, Hope and his band crossed the Sea of Japan and landed at an airfield near Seoul, the South Korean capital that had just been retaken from the Communists. Military trucks carried them over ten miles of rough road to Seoul Stadium, where they entertained twenty thousand GIs in the frigid cold. Hope joked about a war in which the battlelines were shifting almost daily: “Some of these towns are changing hands so fast, one soldier bought a lamp with three thousand won and got his change in rubles. Seoul has changed hands so many times the towels in the hotel are marked ‘His,’ ‘Hers,’ and ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ ”
After Seoul, Hope crisscrossed the country, going as far south as Pusan and north across the thirty-eighth parallel to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital now in friendly hands. Hope heard that the First Marine Division, which he had entertained in Pavuvu during World War II, was at the port of Wonsan, and he asked if he could do a show for them. He and his troupe were flown to Wonsan in two C-54s, only to find the airport nearly deserted when they arrived. They were waiting in an empty hangar, wondering what to do, when some officers finally arrived, among them General Edward Almond.
“How long have you been here?” asked Almond.
“Twenty minutes,” said Hope.
“Are you kidding? We just made the landing.” Weather had delayed their arrival, and Hope’s troupe had actually beaten the Marines there. “Bob Hope and Marilyn Maxwell in Wonsan before Leathernecks,” blared the headlines back home. Actually, the South Koreans had retaken the port two weeks earlier, so the marine landing was something of an anticlimax. “The only thing we’re going in for is to give Bob Hope an audience,” grumbled one marine.
Hope did shows on the deck of the battleship Missouri and the aircraft carrier Valley Forge, then returned to Pyongyang to entertain fifteen thousand troops in front of the former Communist headquarters. The tour ended with a swing through Alaska and the Aleutians, where Hope did the last of four radio broadcasts from the trip. He returned home to a big reception at the Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank, with Dolores and all four kids there to greet him. Hope had traveled twenty-five thousand miles and done fifty-four shows in his four weeks abroad. He wasn’t the first Hollywood entertainer to go to Korea; Al Jolson had preceded him in September (and had suffered a fatal heart attack a couple of weeks later, caused at least partly by the strain of the trip). But Hope was once again in his glory, the nation’s most celebrated soldier in greasepaint.
Inspired by the trip, Hope resumed his wartime routine of bringing his radio show to a different military camp each week. For his Frigidaire TV special in November, he featured the entertainers from his Korean trip, showed film clips from the tour, and closed the show with another of his inspirational messages, full of patriotic swagger:
The Iron Curtain boys thought they’d thrown a Sunday punch when they backed us up to Pusan. But they forgot one little detail. Ever since Plymouth Rock, Americans have had something to fight for—and, yes, die for if necessary. It’s ten thousand miles from Westchester to Wonsan, but the flame of freedom in the human breast defies all distance and brings men together in a fight for the common ideal of a free and democratic world under God.
The Korean War dragged on for nearly three more years, settling into a stalemate and provoking a political firestorm when President Truman fired General MacArthur for “insubordination.” Hope stayed away from the political controversy, but he was privately frustrated at the lack of military resolve. “I always had the feeling that if the US had used the air power it had standing by in Japan and the Philippines to bomb across the Yalu River line, a lot of American lives would have been saved,” he wrote later. “But it would have meant attacking Red China, and that was a political no-no.” For Hope the battle lines were as clear-cut as they were in World War II. One of his writers, Larry Gelbart, came back with more ambivalent feelings about the war. His experiences traveling with Hope in Korea—especially their visits to mobile army hospital units near the front lines—supplied the raw material for his hugely successful antiwar sitcom of the 1970s, M*A*S*H.
• • •
By the early 1950s, Hope’s image and attitude were undergoing a subtle but unmistakable shift. For much of the 1940s he was something of a renegade: an irreverent radio comedian and movie star, full of American moxie and impudence. Now he was show-business royalty: feted by generals, honored by presidents, entertaining queens. He grew more protective of his image and reputation, sensitive to criticism, notoriously litigious. In June 1950, he was sued for making jokes—by the Forrest Hotel in New York City, which claimed Hope had defamed it with some wisecracks about his stay there when he was playing the Paramount Theater. In November, Hope sued Life magazine for making jokes—in an article called “Radio’s Seven Deadly Sins,” by TV critic John Crosby. “Writers got $2,000 a week in Hollywood for copying down Fred Allen’s jokes and putting them on Bob Hope’s program,” Crosby wrote. Hope sought $2 million in damages, claiming the line gave readers the serious impression that he was a plagiarist. (Life’s editors smoothed things over, and Hope eventually dropped the suit. His attorney Martin Gang said in a statement, “Hope had become convinced that the offending paragraph had been left in the story inadvertently and that there was no intention to harm him.”)
With a greater role in producing his own films, Hope grew bolder in throwing his weight around. Just before he left for Korea in October, Paramount screened his just-completed film, The Lemon Drop Kid, which the studio wanted to have ready for a Christmas release. But Hope was unhappy with several scenes, and he insisted that Frank Tashlin, who had helped punch up Monsieur Beaucaire, be brought in again for rewrites. This time Tashlin was also allowed to direct the new scenes—infuriating director Sidney Lanfield, who never forgave Hope for taking the film out of his hands. “He was the worst egomaniac I ever worked with,” Lanfield told author Lawrence Quirk, “a back-knifing son of a bitch, mean as sin. His way was the only way. I tried to buck him, and he took it out on me.”
Another sign of Hope’s growing power was the openness of his philandering. A tacit acceptance of Hollywood stars’ extramarital activities was standard operating procedure in that prefeminism era. But the ability of Hope, along with his army of publicists and protectors, to keep his very open affairs out of the press was a real achievement. When rumors of his relationship with Marilyn Maxwell were rampant during the filming of The Lemon Drop Kid, Hollywood gossip doyenne Louella Parsons devoted a column to dismissing them. “In an exclusive interview with Dolores Hope,” she wrote, “I have learned that there is absolutely no truth to the current rumors that Bob Hope and his leading lady, Marilyn Maxwell, are serious about each other just because they have been seen together so much.”
Keeping Hope’s womanizing under wraps was part of the job description for members of his entourage. Frank Liberman, a former studio publicist who began working for Hope in 1950, recalled an early conversation with Hope’s longtime agent Louis Shurr. “Our mission in life,” Shurr told him, “is to keep all news about fucking and sucking away from Dolores.” Mark Anthony, an old friend from Cleveland who later took charge of arranging Hope’s tours, as well as many of his assignations, said, “The boss knew a number of people, including newsmen, who were wise to his playing around on the side, but he counted on their loyalty to keep it quiet. When I told him he was pushing his luck, he would say, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and I figured if he didn’t, I wouldn’t.” Still, many in his inner circle were shocked at how brazenly Hope chased women. “You didn’t know him in his frisky days,” Charlie Lee, an acerbic British writer who joined Hope’s staff in 1950, confided years later to a younger writer. “If the guy had any class, he’d commit suicide.”
Dolores almost certainly knew about his sexual escapades, but she played the role of good wife to perfection. On the rare occasions when a reporter got near the subject, she would dance around it gracefully—though with more candor as the years went on. “I think he’s a great man,” she told Life magazine in 1971. “No person living has the kind of unspotted life that is the perfect example of clean living.” “If he’s had romances, I don’t know about it,” she told a Washington Star reporter in 1978. “I have read it in the paper. The paper loves to print things like that.” Yet asked if she thought Bob was “one hundred percent true-blue,” Dolores replied, “I doubt it. I think he’s perfectly human and average and all that.” When John Lahr raised the subject of Hope’s womanizing in a 1998 profile of Hope for the New Yorker, Dolores gave this sweetly accepting response: “It never bothered me because I thought I was better looking than anybody else.”
Clearly, she did what was needed to keep together a marriage that offered many compensations and was, in most other ways, sincerely close. She knew Bob was a rover from the start, she would tell people in later years, and simply made the best of it. “You can do anything you want,” she told him, “as long as you don’t bring any of it home.” Said Linda Hope, “I’m sure that my mother knew what was going on. And she just decided that he was worth going through whatever she had to go through, to have the life and be Mrs. Bob Hope. But I don’t think any of [the other women] had the significance to him that she did and that the family did. The stability, coming from a large family himself, was sort of an anchor that allowed him to go and do the kinds of things that he did.”
If there were tensions in the marriage, they were kept well hidden from outsiders. Rory Burke, who as a child spent a good deal of time at the Hope house, caught a rare glimpse of discord—a sarcastic crack from Dolores, a snappish response from Bob, and quick orders for the children to leave the room. Most of the time, however, Dolores maintained a brave front. “She had grace under fire,” said Burke. “She turned away from it. The main message was, you make your bed, you stay in it. If you’re Catholic, you never get divorced.”
Catholicism was Dolores’s refuge and solace. She attended mass once a day, sometimes more, at St. Charles Borromeo Church, down the street from their house in Toluca Lake. She raised money for Catholic charities and surrounded herself with men of the church (like another family, the Kennedys, whose friendship with Catholic prelates seemed a way of atoning for family indiscretions). She had a passion for decorating and channeled her energies into the Toluca Lake house, undertaking a series of renovations, which she would typically have carried out while Bob was traveling. He joked that he hated to go away because he never knew what the house would look like when he came back.
But he did go away, often. In the spring of 1951 he spent a full two months abroad, on a personal-appearance tour that took him to London, Ireland, France, and Germany. Dolores had gone with him on his three previous non-wartime trips to Europe—in 1939, 1947, and his 1948 Christmas trip to Berlin. But this time she stayed home. His traveling companion, instead, was his costar on the tour Marilyn Maxwell.
Hope’s intimate relationship with Maxwell was well-known to most of the people who worked with him. Writers traveling with Hope would find Maxwell in his hotel room when they met him there for meetings. On the road for a military-camp show, publicist Frank Liberman once saw Hope and Maxwell check in for the night at a cheap motel decorated with tepees and a neon sign reading SLEEP IN A WIGWAM TONIGHT. The two were together so often that people on the Paramount lot began referring to Maxwell as Mrs. Hope. For a time, according to some, she thought she might be.
Just how serious Hope was about Maxwell is hard to say. Twice married (she and her second husband, Andy McIntire, split in early 1951) and a former girlfriend of Frank Sinatra’s (who was said to be jealous when Hope took up with her), Maxwell was unusual among Hope’s girlfriends in being a high-profile leading lady, rather than one of the lesser known chorus girls, beauty queens, and showbiz wannabes he more typically hooked up with. Liberman, the publicist who helped cover up his affairs for many years, called Maxwell the second most serious of Hope’s many girlfriends. (First place went to Rosemarie Frankland, a British-born beauty queen Hope was involved with in the 1960s.) Maxwell was one girlfriend who could hold her own with him onstage: until their relationship ended in 1954 (when Maxwell married her third husband, TV writer Jerry Davis), she and Hope appeared together, on radio, TV, and the stage, nearly two hundred times.
Hope’s 1951 trip was the first of four visits he would make to England in four successive years. He felt a bond with the country of his birth, where he was nearly as popular as he was in the United States. (A Motion Picture Herald poll ranked him as Britain’s No. 1 box-office star of 1951, followed by Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne.) London also had a great music-hall tradition, and Hope longed to play the Palladium, the last outpost for full-time vaudeville entertainment on either side of the Atlantic. But when the dates he wanted in April were already promised to Judy Garland, he agreed instead to a two-week engagement at the smaller Prince of Wales Theatre.
He gave himself a televised going-away party: a TV special for Frigidaire on April 8, 1951, that featured an all-British cast of guest stars, including Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, the husband-wife acting couple then appearing on Broadway in Bell, Book and Candle. In a sketch with Arthur Treacher, Hope shops for clothes for his trip, and in a big finale an all-star parade of “surprise” visitors—among them Ed Wynn, Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Jimmy Durante, and Frank Sinatra—drop by Hope’s stateroom to wish him bon voyage.
He sailed for London aboard the Queen Mary and did three one-nighters—in Manchester, Blackpool, and Dudley—before making his way to London for the Prince of Wales engagement. On the bill with him were British comic actor Jerry Desmonde and an array of vaudeville acts, including a trick cyclist, a juggler, and a one-legged dancer named Peg-Leg Bates. Some of the London critics griped that Hope went on too long and that his material “had lapses into feebleness, surprising in a man who travels with a small army of gag men.” But the two-week run was a sellout, and the Brits were impressed with his vaudeville pluck. “If little that Hope gave us was either inimitable or dazzling,” said the Guardian, “much in the act was delightfully funny and as truly the stuff of the music hall as any film star has yet offered us.”
Hope got an extra round of applause for donating the proceeds from the engagement to charity. A year earlier, on the Paramount lot, he was introduced to a diminutive Anglican priest named James Butterfield, who ran a center for underprivileged boys in South London called Clubland. The building had been badly damaged during the war, and Butterfield was trying to raise enough money to rebuild it. Hope impulsively promised that the next time he came to London he would do a benefit for the club. True to his word, he donated the bulk of the $50,000 he was paid for the Prince of Wales engagement, handing over a check personally on a visit to the club in its seedy South London neighborhood. One of the reformed delinquents who accepted Hope’s gift talked years later about how much the gesture meant. “Bob was really great to us kids,” said actor Michael Caine. “You can always send money. But to leave the West End and come right down to the Walworth Road, which isn’t the Beverly Hills of London, takes a really charming man.”
Hope finally made it to the Palladium a year later, headlining a two-week engagement in August 1952 with singer Betsy Duncan, and again in September 1953, with Gloria DeHaven. He built up a loyal support staff in London—a publicity team, two writers to help him tailor his material for his British audiences, and an agent, Lew Grade, who arranged British and European bookings. Hope’s visits were widely covered in the British press and his London shows were nearly all sellouts.
There were some bumps, however. During his 1951 trip, Hope played in the British Amateur Golf Championship in Porthcawl, Wales, a year after Crosby had entered the same event. But Hope didn’t play well, and the following year a columnist for the London Star publicly urged him not to come back: “Last year Hope never looked like a serious contender. His first match was a nightmare of gagging and tomfoolery. He departed leaving behind many sighs of relief.”
Hope responded with jokes (“How hard can you hit a wet tea bag?”), while friends such as David Niven and golfer Jimmy Demaret wrote letters in his defense. But Hope skipped the tournament in 1952 and instead played a benefit match with Crosby against two British entertainers, Donald Peers and Ted Ray, at the Temple Golf Club in Maidenhead. That evening Crosby made an unbilled guest appearance with Hope at a benefit he was emceeing at London’s Stoll Theatre—the first time Crosby had ever appeared on a London stage.
• • •
Hope’s movies in the early 1950s were a mixed bag. Some harked back to his modest black-and-white comedies of the 1940s; others were more lavishly produced Technicolor farces, replete with sight gags typical of his broad, increasingly degraded later comedies. Fancy Pants, his 1950 Western comedy, was an unfortunate example of the latter, with Hope out of his comfort zone playing a British butler in the old West, Lucille Ball miscast as a frontier gal, and a lot of people getting hit over the head with crockery. The Lemon Drop Kid, released in April 1951, was a middling example of the former: another Damon Runyon story, featuring Hope as a racetrack tout who claims to get his tips directly from the horses, but with more farce and less warmth than Sorrowful Jones.
The Lemon Drop Kid does, however, boast one classic sequence: Hope and Maxwell’s performance of “Silver Bells,” the pretty, waltz-time Christmas song that Livingston and Evans had written to order for the movie. (It was originally called “Tinkle Bells,” before someone thought better of it.) Hope was unhappy with the original staging of the number—he and Marilyn Maxwell sang it in a gambling parlor, with the gamblers providing choral accompaniment—and got his rescue man, Frank Tashlin, to totally reconceive it. Hope’s instincts were right. The new scene, with the camera following the couple as they stroll along a snowy, movie-set re-creation of the New York City streets at Christmastime, has a lovely, nostalgic glow, and “Silver Bells” soon became a holiday standard, a perennial feature of Hope’s Christmas TV specials, and a close second to “Thanks for the Memory” as Hope’s great contribution to the American popular songbook.
My Favorite Spy, released in December 1951, was another throwback to Hope’s classic style: the third in the My Favorite series, but actually an improvement over the last one, My Favorite Brunette. Hope has a role that is right in his wheelhouse—a cheesy burlesque comic named “Peanuts” White, who is a look-alike for an enemy spy from Tangier—and costar Hedy Lamarr, the Vienna-born beauty whose movie career was on the wane, shows a surprising flair for comedy. But Hope’s next film, Son of Paleface, was a more significant harbinger of things to come. A sequel to his hit 1948 Western spoof, the movie did a robust $3.4 million at the box office (one of the top-ten grossing films of the year), tickled most of the critics (“95 minutes of uninhibited mirth,” said Variety), and remains one of the most popular Hope films of the fifties. Yet it doesn’t hold up well and marks another step in the dumbing down of Hope’s movie comedy.
He plays the son of his Paleface character, “Painless” Peter Potter—a snooty Harvard grad who has come West to claim his inheritance. Again Hope meets up with Jane Russell, this time playing the ringleader of a gang of gold thieves (a bigger star now, she has much more to do in this film, including a couple of musical numbers), as well as Roy Rogers, as a federal marshal on her trail. Playing a puffed-up “Harvard man,” sneering at the townspeople while they’re laughing behind his back, Hope is more effete and buffoonish than ever before. Russell, dressed in busty dance-hall outfits, looks ready to devour him. (Her steamy come-ons and revealing outfits prompted the Catholic Legion of Decency to slap the movie with an “objectionable” label, for “suggestive costuming, dialogue and situations.”) In one creepy scene, Hope even finds himself in bed with Trigger, Roy Rogers’s horse.
Son of Paleface was the first Hope film directed in full by Frank Tashlin, and the former cartoon director loads it with slapstick gags and camera gimmickry. When he first arrives in town, Hope loses control of his jalopy and sprays all the townspeople with mud. When he downs a strong drink, his body spins around like a top, steam blows out of his ears, and his head disappears into his torso. In a big chase scene, he trips the Indians by throwing banana peels in their path; in another he escapes by flying his car across a giant chasm, with the help of an umbrella. Some of this gets laughs, but it demeans Hope. Never before has he seemed so incidental to his gags.
“Let’s see ’em beat this on television!” says Hope in the movie’s last scene, as his car rears up on its hind wheels, like Trigger. And television, to be sure, was consuming most of Hope’s attention in these years.
His flirtation with the new medium did not sit well with Paramount, which feared that its No. 1 comedy star was damaging his value on the big screen by doing television. But Hope too was hesitant about fully embracing the new medium. Like other radio stars, he feared getting overexposed on TV, which had shown how quickly it could burn up material and burn out performers—even Milton Berle’s ratings were already slipping badly. In the 1951–52 season Hope hosted a couple of half hours for Chesterfield, his radio sponsor, including a December show from the deck of the USS Boxer, an aircraft carrier just back from Korea. But when Chesterfield wanted to put him on a more regular schedule, appearing once a month on Thursday nights (alternating with the popular police show Dragnet), Hope turned it down and said he was going to lay off television, except for occasional guest shots, for the rest of the season.
In the spring he starred in two installments of TV variety shows with rotating hosts, the All-Star Revue and the Colgate Comedy Hour, one filmed at the Presidio in San Francisco and the other at a Douglas Aircraft plant. And in June he and Crosby, making his television debut, were cohosts of a fourteen-hour televised fund-raiser—one of the first nationwide telethons—for US athletes headed to the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki. The show was carried on two networks, CBS and NBC; attracted dozens of top stars; and toted up more than $1 million in pledges (though only $300,000 was actually raised, an embarrassing shortfall that forced the fund-raisers to scramble for more donors to get the athletes to the Olympics).
The show was most memorable, however, for the rare sight of Hope getting upstaged. The manic comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were at their peak of popularity—starring in hit movies, drawing top ratings on TV’s Colgate Comedy Hour, and attracting huge crowds for their nightclub appearances and stage shows. (Their week at New York’s Paramount Theater in July 1951 grossed $150,000—$30,000 more than the record Hope had set a year earlier.) Hope saw their potential early on, inviting them as guests on his radio show in 1948, before their first movie was even released. But when he introduced them on the telethon, Lewis’s frenetic, demented-child antics so unnerved Crosby that he fled backstage, leaving Hope to vainly try to get a word in, before he too gave up and left them alone onstage. The contrast between show-business generations—“It’s time for the old-timers to sit down!” cried Lewis—was hard to miss. Martin and Lewis brought a jolt of anarchic energy to TV. Hope and Crosby, with their easygoing japery, were starting to look a little tired.
That impression was reinforced, alas, on their sixth Road picture, Road to Bali. Released in November 1952, five years after their last Road trip, to Rio, it was the first Road film in color, and the first of the television age. (Hope and Crosby even shot seven TV commercials to promote the movie.) But for the first time, the series was showing signs of wear.
It was another three-way joint production, between Hope, Crosby, and Paramount, and Lamour again felt left out. When she was asked to join Hope and Crosby in recording an album of songs from the film, she refused. “I didn’t think it fair that I get less for the album than they did, and told them so,” she said. “It was never mentioned again.” Later she found out they went ahead and did the album with Peggy Lee. “It would have been nice if I had been informed,” she commented sourly.
Most of the familiar ingredients of the series are here. Hope and Crosby once again play a small-time vaudeville team on the run—this time from Australia to the South Seas, in search of sunken treasure. The best laughs come from the stars’ self-mocking asides. When Crosby and Lamour (back in a sarong as a South Seas princess) head offscreen together for a number, Hope turns to the camera: “He’s gonna sing, folks. Now’s the time to go out and get popcorn.” While they’re trekking through the jungle, a hunter walks on, fires his rifle, then leaves. “That’s my brother Bob,” explains Crosby. “I promised him a shot in the picture.” A few minutes later there’s a clip of Humphrey Bogart lugging his boat through the swamps in The African Queen. “Boy, is he lost,” says Hope.
The trouble with Road to Bali is that it’s almost all diversions. The plot is virtually nonexistent, and the interplay between Hope and Crosby, both looking a little paunchier, lacks the improvisational zip that enlivened their earlier films. More than ever, the film seems to exist largely to indulge and showcase its two stars—a Scottish number called “Hoot, Mon,” for example, so they can dress up in kilts. Still, Road to Bali did relatively well at the box office, and it would have been a respectable wrap-up for the great series. Unfortunately, there would be one last unnecessary chapter.
It took another decade to unfold. Plans for another Road film were in the works almost as soon as Road to Bali opened. A screenplay called Road to the Moon, written by Ken Englund (who had worked on Hope’s first film, Big Broadcast of 1938), was set to be filmed in the fall of 1953, but it was shelved. The series lay dormant until eight years later, when Norman Panama and Melvin Frank wrote an entirely new script, still featuring a space trip, but now titled The Road to Hong Kong. With their film work getting more scarce, both Hope and Crosby were eager to recapture a little of their past glory, and the movie was scheduled to be shot for United Artists in the summer of 1961, at Shepperton Studios in London.
The production was a rare bonding experience for the Hope and Crosby families. Dolores came along, and she brought all four of the children, during their summer school vacations (Linda, the oldest, had just finished college). Crosby’s second wife, Kathryn—pregnant with their third child—also joined them, along with their three-year-old son, Harry Jr. The two families rented a house together in Surrey—an English estate called Cranbourne Court, with twelve bedrooms, a croquet court, and a staff of proper English servants. Each morning Bob and Bing would eat breakfast with the wives, take a chauffeured car to the studio just a few minutes away, and wrap up the workday at 3:00 p.m. so they could get in a round of golf. On Friday nights the two couples went into London for dinner, took in the races at Ascot on Saturday afternoons, and spent one weekend together in the south of France. “I haven’t seen this much of Bob since we were married,” Dolores told Kathryn.
The odd woman out on this final Road trip was Dorothy Lamour. She had not done a movie of any kind since Road to Bali and was living in Baltimore with her husband, Bill Howard. But she was understandably hurt to discover that a new Road film was being planned without her. In the brutal casting calculus of Hollywood, Lamour—at forty-seven, more than a decade younger than Hope and Crosby—was deemed too old to play the love interest for them anymore. She was replaced with Joan Collins, a striking, twenty-eight-year-old British film actress who had appeared with Hope in one of his TV specials.
At the last minute Norman Panama gave Lamour a call and said there was a part for her in the film. After he dropped off a script in Baltimore on his way to London, she was disappointed to find that it was only a cameo—a single scene with Hope, with a song—and refused to do it. A series of pleading phone calls from London followed, asking her to relent: Panama and Frank had promised United Artists that Lamour would be part of the film and desperately needed her. “Realizing how important it was that I accept,” she wrote in her memoir, “and remembering all the good times we went through together, I came to their rescue—but at a price, with a few zeroes attached to it.”
The Road to Hong Kong was a sad last wheeze for the memorable series. Hope and Crosby, nearly sixty, look too old to be playing footloose con men (Hope has put on more weight, but Crosby has aged more). Their banter occasionally has some of the old spark. (Bing: “Ask your patriotic conscience what to do.” Bob: “I already did.” “What did it say?” “Yankee go home.”) Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, among others, make cameo appearances, and Peter Sellers has a funny bit as an Indian doctor treating Hope for amnesia. The film also boasts one of the best buddy songs of the entire series—“Teamwork,” by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen.
But Hope and Crosby perform the number, significantly, not while riding a camel or on a carnival stage in darkest Africa, but over the opening credits, dressed in gaudy striped jackets in a spotlight on a generic stage—a sort of abstract idealization of their Road-picture camaraderie. References to earlier Road pictures are sprinkled throughout the film. “Not dangerous?” exclaims Hope, after hearing one Crosby scheme. “That’s what you said when you shot me out of a cannon, when you dropped me in a tank with an octopus, when you had me wrestle a gorilla.” Yet the out-of-character asides and fourth-wall-breaking stunts that made the earlier films so much fun are, strangely, almost entirely missing. Instead, Bob and Bing are put through a silly, way-too-consequential Cold War plot, with a shadowy superpower called the Third Echelon trying to launch a rocket to the moon to enslave the world. Bob and Bing wind up substituting for two chimpanzees being shot into orbit, providing the pretext for some crude fast-motion slapstick, as the strapped-in astronauts are force-fed food and drink by robotic machines that go haywire.
The Road to Hong Kong opened in May 1962 and got a deserved drubbing from the critics. Still, hopes for yet another reunion lived on. In the early seventies screenwriter Ben Starr wrote a treatment for a new film called Road to Tomorrow, but Hope scrapped it, and Starr had to threaten to sue to get his money. Then Mel Shavelson came up with a new script, titled Road to the Fountain of Youth, which was gearing up to start production in 1977 when Crosby died of a heart attack in Spain. Even after that, Hope toyed with recruiting George Burns to play the Crosby role in one last entry in the series. Thankfully, it never materialized. The greatest buddy series in movie history was finally put to rest.
Lamour never got over the feeling of being left out, her contribution to the series unappreciated to the end. Hope treated her better than Crosby did, giving her occasional guest spots on his TV specials in later years, as his career soared and she played dinner theaters. But when he included her in a 1966 special called Bob’s Leading Ladies, she was offended to find herself just one of a dozen former movie costars given equal billing. “That was demeaning to her,” said a friend. “She wasn’t part of the crowd.” Her resentment boiled over at a dinner at New York’s Lincoln Center in the 1980s, when she let forth a tirade at the mention of Hope’s name. “He still holds Hollywood like King Kong in the grip of his hand,” she vented, according to film critic Carrie Rickey, who was at her table. “He treated all women with contempt. He never paid me any respect for my role in the Road movies and never helped me find work later. I was a totally replaceable part.” It was always about the boys.
• • •
In July 1952, NBC asked Hope to do a series of daily five-minute monologues for its coverage of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions—the first political conventions to be televised nationally. Political material was becoming a bigger part of Hope’s comedy repertoire: jokes about President Truman’s testy relations with Congress, for example, or General Eisenhower’s move into politics. “I happen to know why he’s running for president,” Hope said of Ike. “It’s the only way to get out of the Army.” As usual, Hope took aim, not at his targets’ political views, but rather at superficial aspects of their popular image, such as Eisenhower’s military background. “The Democrats are really determined to win this election,” he said. “They’re afraid if they don’t win, Eisenhower will put ’em on KP.”
When Hope took on more controversial figures, he was careful to avoid offending—usually poking fun at the mere fact that they were controversial. “General Eisenhower said that if he was elected, he was going to give General MacArthur a very important job,” Hope said. “Do you think we need an ambassador at the north pole?” Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunts were lampooned with gibes that even McCarthy could laugh at: “Senator McCarthy is going to disclose the names of two million Communists. He just got his hands on a Moscow telephone book.” There were endless jokes playing off the color red: McCarthy investigating red caps at the train station, or Congress appropriating money “for Red Skelton to dye his hair black.” The Army-McCarthy hearings, said Hope, were “a new kind of television show. It’s sort of a soap opera where everyone comes out tattletale gray.”
Hope kept his own views on McCarthy private, but they surfaced unexpectedly in an audience question-answer session at the London Palladium in 1953. When one audience member asked what he thought about McCarthyism, Hope replied with unusual candor: “I think it’s Americanism. Some people think McCarthy is wrong. Personally I think he’s right ninety-nine times out of a hundred.” Many in the audience booed, and Hope shut up after that.
For the 1952–53 season, Hope finally committed to a regular monthly TV show: as one of the rotating hosts (along with Martin and Lewis, Abbott and Costello, and Eddie Cantor) of NBC’s popular Colgate Comedy Hour on Sunday nights. Hope’s Colgate hours regularly trounced the tough competition on CBS, Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town. Then, for the 1953–54 season, General Foods sponsored him in a once-a-month variety hour on Tuesday nights, alternating with Milton Berle’s Buick Show. Hope consistently outperformed Berle, and for the season ranked fifth in the Nielsen ratings. In those two years Hope ended any doubts that he was in television to stay and established the variety-show format that he would stick with for the rest of his TV career.
He was hardly an innovator. While Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca were pioneering satirical sketch comedy on Your Show of Shows, and Martin and Lewis were bringing their improvisational anarchy to the Colgate Comedy Hour, Hope merely transferred his old radio format to television: an opening monologue, scripted patter with his guest stars, a song from the musical guest, and two or three comedy sketches. The shows were more elaborately produced than his early Frigidaire specials, often with a choreographed musical opening (a baseball-themed number for opening day, for example, or an Irish dance for St. Patrick’s Day). Hope was now fully at ease with the camera: striding confidently to the microphone with his long-gaited, slightly effeminate, palms-facing-backward walk; reeling off the jokes at a brisk, metronome-steady pace; setting his jaw and locking in his gaze as he waited for the laughs, then breaking into a crooked, upcurled-to-the-left smile when they came, as they nearly always did.
The jokes were timely and topical, a chronicle of the issues, news makers, fads, and fears of early-1950s America: the A-bomb and 3-D movies, Christine Jorgensen’s sex-change operation and Senator Kefauver’s organized-crime hearings, the Cold War and color television. “NBC wants to get the color perfect before they release it to the public,” Hope said. “We don’t want the Russian who’s inventing it next week to make any mistakes.” (Hope was slated to host TV’s first commercial color broadcast, on November 17, 1953. But the FCC at the last minute withheld its approval, allowing only a closed-circuit colorcast of the dress rehearsal. Hope was disappointed to miss out on the historic first—which came a week later on a Donald O’Connor–hosted segment of the Colgate Comedy Hour.)
On television, unlike radio, Hope couldn’t hold a script, so he read his lines from cue cards—scrawled out for him by Barney McNulty, an Army Air Corps veteran who used to transcribe Morse code messages in block letters. McNulty came up with the idea of using cue cards for Ed Wynn’s TV show in 1949, and he began doing them for Hope in 1953, putting them on stacks of thirty-by-forty-inch poster board. (Hope wanted the cards as big as possible, so they would have to be flipped less often.) An affable Irishman, McNulty became another loyal member of the entourage, often a whipping boy for Hope when things went wrong on the set, and all but inseparable from him for the next forty years.
In later years, Hope was notorious for being tied to the cue cards for virtually every moment of his shows. But in the early fifties he wasn’t using them in sketches, and it showed. The skits were broad and crudely staged, with an overreliance on funny costumes and incongruous settings—Hope as a caveman, say, or a college frat boy, or a movie director named Orson Von Hope. But Hope was focused and well rehearsed, and at their best the sketches had the same wisecracking zing of his better movies of the period. In a 1954 bit with Rosemary Clooney, for example, he plays a turn-of-the-century bachelor who’s being roped into marriage by his high-society girlfriend:
ROSEMARY: “Oh, Robert, don’t you realize we’re the only ones in our set that haven’t been married?”
BOB: “Yeah, I was thinking about that.”
“What do you think we should do about it?”
“Join a new set?”
“Can’t you see what I’m hinting at? We have so much in common, haven’t we?”
“Well, it’s true that we have one important thing in common. We both like me.”
“We could be so happy together. The two of us could be one.”
“Won’t there be some parts left over?”
The unscripted moments were even better. Animals were always good for some unrehearsed laughs, such as a sketch in which Hope plays poker with Trigger, or a funny This Is Your Life parody in which Hope cracks up as a parade of trained dogs troop onstage to pay tribute to Lassie. Blown lines and mishaps were common, and the spontaneous reactions to them were often funnier than the scripted lines: Jack Benny, as a violinist who wanders into Hope’s New Orleans jazz club, breaking character to complain about his bad lines; or Fred MacMurray, as a college jock, grabbing a ukulele and serenading Hope’s girlfriend (Janis Paige), then flubbing a line and nearly crushing his two costars as they stifle laughter on a couch underneath him. The sight of big Hollywood stars grappling with an unpredictable live medium was part of the fun of these early fifties TV variety shows. And no one had more fun with them than Hope.
• • •
Even as he was growing more comfortable with television, Hope was hedging his bets in radio, continuing to host his Tuesday-night show even as the audience steadily dwindled. In the spring of 1952 Chesterfield pulled out as Hope’s radio sponsor, and for the first time in fifteen years he was left off NBC’s fall schedule. But General Foods picked up the show, and he was back on the air in January, now pitching Jell-O, the dessert product so long associated with Jack Benny. With a new sponsor came other changes. His show was moved from its familiar Tuesday-night slot, where it had been a fixture since 1938, to Wednesdays at 10:00 p.m. What’s more, Hope suddenly had a new radio program: a fifteen-minute daytime talk show, to air every weekday morning on NBC. Far from giving up on radio, Hope would now be on the air six times a week.
Hope’s move into morning radio was a sign of the medium’s desperation. As the audience for radio’s long-running nighttime hits was fleeing for television, there was a brief flurry of hopeful speculation that the old radio favorites could have new life in daytime. The model was Arthur Godfrey, who, in addition to his two prime-time TV shows, was the host of a popular morning show on CBS radio. “It’s not only a challenge, but it gives Bob a better chance to get closer to the people,” said Hope’s agent Jimmy Saphier, explaining the rationale behind the morning show, “and it’s my strong conviction that daytime radio will outlast nighttime.” Hope, with his inexhaustible appetite for work, was game to try anything.
His morning show, which debuted in November 1952 and was taped in the evenings at NBC’s Hollywood studios, was a mix of celebrity chatter (Zsa Zsa Gabor was his first week’s guest), musical numbers, and banter with the audience. “The new arrangement should make me very popular,” Hope joked on his opening show. “When I did my show just once a week, people used to say, ‘Wasn’t Hope lousy last Tuesday?’ Now they can say, ‘If you think he was lousy on Tuesday, you should have heard him on Wednesday.’ ” Variety, reviewing the show’s first week, was encouraging: “Hope at his old-time radio best—and that’s good. It may well set the pattern for a complete reshuffle in network radio programming, in that a number of name personalities may follow Hope into the after-breakfast hours if he can draw a rating.”
He didn’t. After a few weeks NBC moved the show from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m., where it hoped more stations would pick it up. But Hope’s daytime show never rose above a modest 3 or 4 Nielsen rating and couldn’t challenge the formidable Godfrey. In July 1954, after two seasons on the air, NBC pulled the plug, ending this odd, forgettable cul-de-sac in Hope’s career.
Hope continued his nighttime show for another season, but his radio career was stumbling to an end. In March 1953 the ratings for his prime-time show sank to a lowly forty-fourth place in the Nielsens. That fall General Foods dropped out as Hope’s sponsor, replaced by the American Dairy Association, and NBC moved the show yet again, to Thursday nights. Still, Hope plodded on, with Margaret Whiting joining as regular singer and Bill Goodwin, a charter member of the original Pepsodent Show crew, back as announcer.
On his last show of the 1954–55 season, Hope’s guest was his old sidekick Jerry Colonna. In the featured comedy sketch, Hope has a meeting with a snooty NBC executive, played by Jim Backus, who breaks the news that Hope’s show has been canceled. (The punch line is that Colonna is replacing him.) It was meant to be a joke, but Hope’s sign-off on April 21, 1955—“Thanks from all of us for the memory of a grand season, and good night”—were the last words he would ever speak as the host of a network radio show. When the season was over, American Dairy dropped his program, and this time no new sponsor was waiting to pick him up.
After seventeen years, without a whimper or a formal good-bye, Bob Hope’s radio career was over. Jack Benny’s show ended its twenty-three-year run that same spring. Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy lasted just one more season. The golden age of radio had faded years earlier, and now even its last relics were gone.
• • •
Nothing gave Hope’s TV profile a bigger boost in the early 1950s than the night of March 19, 1953, when he was host for the first televised Academy Awards ceremony. He had emceed the Oscar show six times before, but not since 1946—a reflection, most likely, of the movie studios’ unhappiness over Hope’s plunge into television. (Danny Kaye and Jack Benny were among the hosts in the interim.) But when NBC offered to pay $100,000 for the rights to televise the 1953 awards, the Academy decided it was time to make peace with television—and with Bob Hope too.
It was an ambitious broadcast for the young medium. Nine tuxedo-clad cameramen were stationed at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, while another crew was dispatched to the International Hotel in New York City, where Conrad Nagel hosted the East Coast segments of the show. (Several nominees were appearing on Broadway, including Shirley Booth, who won the Best Actress award for Come Back, Little Sheba.) The broadcast, marking the Oscars’ twenty-fifth anniversary, opened with a clip from the first Best Picture winner, Wings, followed by shots of modern jets in flight. “Like the streaking jet plane,” announcer Ronald Reagan intoned, “the Academy Award ceremony itself has been streamlined, has become a major news event, originating tonight on two coasts of a great continent and beamed around the globe.”
Rain was falling in Los Angeles as the live broadcast began with a few quick shots of the red carpet arrivals. “We’re having some unusual California weather,” noted Reagan, before handing off to the orchestra, which opened the show with “The Continental,” winner of the first Oscar for Best Song. Academy president Charles Brackett made some introductory remarks, and then came Hope.
Dressed in dinner jacket, white vest, and white tie, he was the picture of Hollywood elegance. Glancing down at a script in front of him (no cue cards yet), he opened with jokes about television: “I want to thank all the wrestlers for relinquishing their time. Just shows you, there’s nothing that one group of actors won’t do for another.” He was a little patronizing to the new medium—“Television, that’s where movies go when they die”—but also eager to call a truce in the industry feud. “This is indeed a wedding of two great entertainment mediums, motion pictures and television. And with Oscar twenty-five years old, it’s high time he got married. While it’s true he has a child bride, it’s a comfort to note the kid is loaded.”
Hope then reverted to his usual barrage of Hollywood jokes, tailored for the new TV audience: “Keep your eyes on the losers tonight as they applaud the winners. You’ll see great understanding. Great sportsmanship. Great acting.” He harped, as usual, on his favorite running gag, getting passed over for his own Academy Award: “There was a rumor going around last year that I might win an Oscar. But nobody paid any attention, so I stopped spreading it.”
In fact, Hope did get an Oscar that year—his third honorary award, for “his contribution to the laughter of the world, his service to the motion picture industry, and his devotion to the American premise.” Hope could even claim a tiny share of credit for the year’s winner for Best Picture. In a mild upset, the Oscar went to The Greatest Show on Earth, the Cecil B. DeMille circus extravaganza, in which Hope had a brief cameo, sitting in a circus audience next to Crosby, watching Dorothy Lamour on the trapeze.
The first Oscar telecast was a triumph for both television and the movies. “Seldom has the immediacy and actuality of television been used so advantageously,” said Jack Gould in the New York Times. “As a TV show,” cheered Variety, “it was socko almost all the way. . . . Certainly it dramatized the future course of show biz on how TV and pix must ‘go steady’ whether they like it or not.” The show was watched by nearly 50 million people, the largest audience for any TV show in the medium’s short history. For this vast audience, Hope would be the face of Hollywood, a guide to its glamour and a deflator of its pretensions, for the next two and a half decades.
He was Hollywood’s First Citizen, its most acclaimed goodwill ambassador, an entertainer who transcended mere entertainment. In February 1953, to mark his fifteenth anniversary at both Paramount and NBC, the Friars Club threw him a testimonial dinner at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Along with the usual Friars regulars—Milton Berle, George Jessel, Fred Allen (but again, no Crosby)—the dais was filled with the sort of dignitaries only Bob Hope could attract, among them Senator Stuart Symington, former vice president Alben Barkley, New York City mayor Vincent Impellitteri, and eighty-three-year-old former presidential adviser Bernard Baruch—who got out of his sickbed for the event.
What’s more, Hope now had a friend in the White House: his old World War II comrade Dwight D. Eisenhower. He played golf with the new president for the first time in April 1953, when Hope was in Washington for the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Hope and Eisenhower formed a twosome, playing against senators Stuart Symington and Prescott Bush. Hope shot an 85, and he and Ike lost $4 on the match. The next day they played again, this time on opposite sides—Hope paired with Bush, and Ike with General Omar Bradley. Hope shot a 75, and Eisenhower lost again. “Why didn’t you play this well yesterday?” Ike said. Recalled Hope, “He wasn’t laughing either.”
Even as Hope hobnobbed with the rich and powerful, he never stopped thinking of himself as a working stiff. In 1952 friends talked him into running as a write-in candidate for president of the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA), the union representing stage performers. He was elected by a landslide—though, at a time when the union was involved in several contentious labor disputes, Hope didn’t attend a single meeting and quit when his one-year term ended. Meanwhile, as he reached his fiftieth birthday in 1953, Hope made his most serious attempt at an autobiography, collaborating on a memoir with ghostwriter Pete Martin, who had just helped Bing Crosby write his autobiography, Call Me Lucky. When Hope’s book was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post beginning in February 1954, the first monthly installment (with a Norman Rockwell painting of Hope on the cover, the first time a Hollywood celebrity had ever been a Post cover subject) sold 5.2 million copies, a magazine record.
The book, published by Simon & Schuster the following December under the title Have Tux, Will Travel, was breezy, joke-filled, and only minimally revealing. But it was as candid as Hope would ever get in print. “That breezy Bob Hope—that Hope with a bounce you see on the screen or on your TV set—is me,” he wrote in the introduction. “I get peeved as easy as the next guy—unless the next guy is Donald Duck. Occasionally I’m disillusioned with people I’ve liked and trusted. But I don’t make a hobby of mental turmoil. . . . I know it’s hard for people to believe a man in my business is normal emotionally and mentally. If they don’t, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
• • •
The neglected stepchild in Hope’s extended family of show-business activities in these years was his movie career. His two releases for 1953 were both oddities, neither very successful nor very good. In Off Limits Hope plays a boxing trainer who enlists in the Army when his new champion is drafted—then gets stuck there on his own when the champ is rejected as psychologically unfit. He finds another young recruit (Mickey Rooney) to train, while falling for his aunt, a nightclub singer played by Marilyn Maxwell. Hope is engaged and energetic, but too old to be playing an Army recruit, and the film, with its familiar service gags, feels like a weary retread of Caught in the Draft.
Next came Here Come the Girls, Hope’s only full-scale movie musical. Set in turn-of-the-century New York, it cast him as Stanley Snodgrass, the “world’s oldest chorus boy,” who is given the starring role in a Broadway musical (opposite diva Arlene Dahl) as a decoy to catch a serial killer. Despite a couple of bright Livingston-Evans tunes—including “Ya Got Class,” which Hope sings with Rosemary Clooney—the script is ludicrous, and Hope again seems too old for the part (he’s living with his parents!). His bulging schedule of TV, radio, and personal appearances may have been taking its toll. He didn’t rehearse much, and Arlene Dahl was most impressed with his ability to take catnaps between scenes. “He told me he starts with his feet and tells them to relax,” she said. “Then his calves and thighs, up his body, gets to his head, and he’s asleep. Very yoga-like.” Rosemary Clooney recalled, “Bob was doing about twelve other things at the same time. It seemed to me that he would show up for about an hour a day and we would shoot around him the rest of the time.” Clooney called Here Come the Girls “one of the world’s worst pictures”; coming in the midst of the early-fifties heyday of the movie musical, it was certainly one of the most forgettable.
Casanova’s Big Night, his next film, was at least an improvement, a return to one of his most successful genres, the costume swashbuckler. As in Monsieur Beaucaire, Hope dons period garb, playing a tailor’s apprentice who poses as the famed eighteenth-century lover. Directed by Norman Z. McLeod, the film is another glossy production with an impressive supporting cast that includes Joan Fontaine, Basil Rathbone, and an unbilled Vincent Price as the real Casanova. Though less winning than Beaucaire, the film has its pleasures. Hope is in top form as a commoner with pretensions, sharp-tongued and physically graceful (when he bows low, his hat falls off his head and drops effortlessly into his waiting hand), and there’s a clever, tongue-in-cheek double ending. Just before the guillotine is about to fall on Hope, he stops the action and replays it with his own alternate happy ending—then asks the audience to vote on which one it wants, his or the studio’s. Hope loses.
Yet Casanova’s Big Night, released in March 1954, got a surprisingly sour reception from the critics. Variety said the film “misses as often as it clicks,” and the Hollywood Reporter complained, “Aside from a few scattered laughs, which come from Hope’s wonderful gift for clowning rather than any wit in the script, there is little entertainment.” Though it earned a respectable $3 million at the box office, better than most other Hope films of the period, it was a sign that Hope’s formula was starting to wear thin.
Unhappy at the slump in his film career, Hope decided to break out on his own. In October 1954 he announced that he was leaving Paramount, the studio that had brought him to Hollywood and where he had spent seventeen successful if sometimes stormy years. After one final film, all his future movies would be produced by Hope Enterprises, giving him the right to peddle them to any studio for distribution. He wanted more leeway to pick his projects, set his schedule—and, he hoped, keep more of the profits. He played down the breakup the next day in an interview with columnist Hedda Hopper, saying he’d be happy to continue working with Paramount for another seventeen years, but was “only asking for good stories through my own company, Hope Enterprises. That’s the kid I want to fatten up.”
Hope was showing his independent streak with his TV network as well. In the fall of 1954, Hope accepted an invitation for another command performance for the royal family at the London Palladium. Because of the trip, he told NBC he would have to skip his regularly scheduled special for November. The network bosses objected, since it meant losing General Foods’ sponsorship of the hour. But Hope refused to cancel the trip, telling Jimmy Saphier, “Let them sue me if they want.”
In place of his November special, Hope told NBC, he would put together a big event for December: an international variety special featuring entertainers never before seen on American television. He arrived in London on October 15, two weeks before his Palladium appearance, and began lining up stars for the show. He hired the 182-member Cologne Choir after hearing them at Festival Hall. He flew to Paris (almost getting thrown in jail because he left his passport in London) and recruited Maurice Chevalier to make his American TV debut. While there he also signed up twenty-one-year-old ballerina Liane Dayde, whom he saw at the Paris Opera Ballet, and later added his old cohort Bea Lillie, traveling all the way to Glasgow to do rehearsals with her.
The special was filmed over two nights, November 7 and 8, by a BBC crew at the Empire Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush. “In television in America we’ve got to such a difficult state with these big commercial shows that you see the same stars on four or five shows in the same week,” he told the audience. “It’s become impossible to do anything new. That’s why we are over here.” The show was edited in the United States and telecast on December 7, accompanied by a network publicity campaign heralding it as “the first truly global television show.”
The ratings were only fair, and the critical response polite at best. “As an evening’s entertainment, it should have been received in good grace if not with screams of joy,” said Variety. But Hope was proud of the show, which gave him a chance to reaffirm his status as an international star and champion of global understanding. “Entertainment will continue to be the common denominator expressing mutual comprehension among the world’s peoples,” he told a reporter. “There’s only one world for television.”
Yet Hope was restless, making noises about slowing down. He turned down lucrative offers from Texaco and General Motors to sponsor his TV shows for the 1955–56 season, saying he wanted to take a break from television. He may simply have been playing hard to get in advance of negotiations for a new contract with NBC. But it’s possible he was also feeling a whiff of mortality. In January 1955 his pal Charlie Yates, an agent who had helped Hope in his early vaudeville days, dropped dead of a heart attack while playing golf with Hope in Palm Springs. “It didn’t really affect me for three days,” Hope told the AP’s Bob Thomas. “Then the shock set in. I was terribly upset. I began to feel all sorts of pains and things wrong in my body.” Even after the doctor gave him a clean bill of health, Hope decided he should take it easier. “The gang at Lakeside will tell you that Bob Hope is dead serious about slowing down,” reported Variety. “Too many of his friends have crossed the border and, while still in his early 50s, he feels that the grueling pace of past years may catch up with him too.”
In mid-1955 Hope agreed to a new five-year contract with NBC, which called for a scaled-back schedule of only six specials a year. Hope may well have wanted to slow down, but he also realized that the key to survival on TV was limiting his exposure, and making his fewer appearances as special as possible. It was a shrewd calculation that would pay off in the years ahead.
• • •
In early 1954, Mel Shavelson and Jack Rose, two of Hope’s favorite writers, came to see him in Toluca Lake, bringing along a quart of ice cream as a peace offering. They told him about a movie they wanted to do: a biography of Eddie Foy, the turn-of-the-century vaudeville star who created an act with his seven children after their mother, an Italian dancer he had met and married in vaudeville, died of cancer. They wanted Hope to star as Eddie Foy.
Hope liked the idea. He had seen the Foys in vaudeville and welcomed a chance to do a challenging, semidramatic role. Then the writers told him their conditions. Shavelson wanted to direct the film himself (he had never directed a movie before), and Rose wanted to produce it (he had never produced a movie before). “That’s okay,” said Hope. “My last picture was so lousy, you guys can’t possibly do one lousier.” There was one more condition: Paramount agreed to back the film, but only if Hope took no money up front, just a share of the profits. After some consideration, Hope agreed to that as well—the first time he had ever done a movie for no salary—and the film was produced jointly by Paramount, Hope Enterprises, and the partnership of Shavelson and Rose.
The Seven Little Foys was the first film in which Hope played a real-life character, and he did some homework for it, reading up on Foy and watching old silent movies of him. He also brushed up on his dancing, especially when James Cagney agreed to a cameo in the film as George M. Cohan—reprising his Oscar-winning role in Yankee Doodle Dandy—for a scene in which he challenges Foy to a dancing contest at the Friars Club. (Cagney took no salary for the part. When he was a starving Broadway chorus boy, he explained, the Foys would invite him to their house in Westchester County for Sunday dinner. Often it was the only good meal he got for a week. This was his payback.) The filming took place in August and September of 1954. During it, Hope paid a visit to his friend Barney Dean, who was in the hospital dying of cancer—sad motivation for the dramatic scenes he was in the midst of shooting.
No movie he had done meant more to Hope than The Seven Little Foys, and when it was released in May 1955, he went into overdrive to promote it. He made a tour of Australia in conjunction with the film’s world premiere—the first time an American star had ever come to Australia to open a major Hollywood film. Back in the United States, Hope went on a four-week, twenty-five-city promotional tour for the movie, doing live stage shows and TV interviews in every city he visited. Paramount estimated that Hope’s personal stumping added $1 million to the film’s box office. “I think the way things are going, an actor is very foolish not to help sell his pictures,” Hope told Louella Parsons. Hollywood was discovering the potential of using stars to promote their own films with personal appearances and media interviews—sellebrities, they were dubbed—and Hope, once again, was a pioneer.
The Seven Little Foys earned $6 million at the box office, Hope’s biggest hit in years. Its mix of comedy and sentiment left a few critics uneasy, but most of them generally admired the movie and praised Hope’s performance. “A commanding abandonment of the buffoon,” said Variety. The New York Daily News raved, “Hope can now hold up his head with Hollywood dramatic thespians; for the first time in his career, Hope isn’t playing Hope on the screen.” In truth, Hope isn’t exactly playing Eddie Foy either. He does a sort of half impersonation—imitating Foy’s hoarse, laid-back, cigar-chomping swagger, but never quite disappearing into the role. He’s still best being Bob Hope—trading wisecracks with his acerbic kids, and in the justly celebrated dance sequence with Cagney, in which they match steps atop a banquet table. (Cagney is clearly the better dancer, but he graciously allows Hope to outshine him.)
Hope’s innate charm cheats a bit on the dark side of Foy’s character—his self-regard, his emotional detachment, and his inattention as a father. But his stoic underplaying is effective in the big courtroom scene in which Foy laments his failings as a father, the culmination of his battle for custody of the kids against his former sister-in-law. He’s even better in the quieter, earlier scenes when Foy comes home from traveling to find that his wife (whose illness he has willfully ignored) has died in his absence. Hope silently goes from bedroom to bedroom to check on his sleeping children. One daughter rouses from her sleep and asks groggily, “Who is it?” Hope’s blank, poignant response: “Nobody.”
The film may have had more real-life resonance than Hope was willing to admit. “How can you stay all these years with this man?” Foy’s sister-in-law complains to his wife at one point about his frequent absences. “A stranger in his own home. A visitor to his children. Nothing to show how he feels.” It’s almost too obvious to note the parallels to Hope’s own family life in the middle of the 1950s.
The older kids, Tony and Linda, were now attending Catholic high school in Hollywood. The younger two, Nora and Kelly, were in grade school and struggling to get attention (Nora, the more outgoing, with better luck than Kelly). Quality time with their father, always at a premium, grew even scarcer as their home life became grander and more public. “The family changed in the 1950s,” said nephew Tom Malatesta. “Bob became enormous. There were more people around the house with bigger names. At a party Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio might walk in the door, or Ray Milland or Lana Turner. It was a larger environment, and the family relationship was more formal. More people came into the intimate setting.”
There was occasional family time—fishing trips to British Columbia or Colorado, and the annual get-together of the extended family during the Christmas holidays, when relatives from Cleveland would come to town for a New Year’s party and pile into a chartered bus for a trip to the Rose Bowl, with a police escort and seats on the fifty-yard line. Dolores, as always, picked up the slack when Bob was away, keeping the house organized and the kids in line. “She looked at the report cards and got us to school on time,” said Kelly Hope, “and made sure the lunches were ready to go, and whoever was going to pick us up at three o’clock, and what doctor did we have to go to and why. For lack of a better word, she ran the show.” Dolores could be tough, and her discipline unforgiving. Once when Kelly misbehaved, all the furniture was removed from his bedroom as punishment, except for his bed and a lamp. And their father’s mere presence could be intimidating: when playing hide-and-seek in the library, the kids would often be shushed because Bob might still be sleeping in the bedroom above.
Dolores tried to shield them from the perils of being a celebrity’s child—the constant press attention, the schoolmates who wanted access to their famous father, and sometimes worse. When Confidential magazine in 1956 published Barbara Payton’s steamy account of her five-month affair with Hope in 1949, Dolores had to warn the children in advance. “This trashy magazine is coming out with an article about your dad,” Linda recalled her mother telling them. “I just want you to know, in case they bring it up at school or some of your friends say something. But it’s not true. You know your dad, and that’s what’s important.”
Just how well they knew him was harder to say.