Hope

Chapter 9 AMBASSADOR

“I’m not having any trouble with the language. Nobody speaks to me.”

On November 14, 1955, Bob Hope applied for a visa to visit the Soviet Union. The request, made at the Soviet embassy in Washington for himself and a TV crew of ten, might have seemed strange coming from a staunchly anticommunist Republican at the height of the Cold War. Hope often cast the rigid and ruthless Soviet dictatorship as a comic villain in his monologues. “I saw a Russian ad for cold cream,” he joked when the Soviets aired their first TV commercials. “It had a picture of a beautiful girl, and underneath it said, ‘She’s lovely, she’s engaged, she’s gonna be shot in the morning.’ ” But for Hope, entertainment always trumped ideology, and he wanted to score another show-business coup by becoming the first entertainer to do an American TV show from behind the Iron Curtain.

He got the idea while he was in London in the fall of 1955, shooting his movie The Iron Petticoat, in which Katharine Hepburn played a Soviet pilot who defects to the West. Hope, quixotically, wanted to shoot the movie’s ending at a Moscow airfield. The US State Department turned down the request, even before the Russians had a chance to say no. Then, intrigued at the idea of bringing Soviet entertainment to American audiences, Hope sent his brother Jack to Brussels to get footage of the Moscow Circus, intending to use clips of the troupe (“the greatest I’ve ever seen,” Hope said) in one of his TV specials. But both NBC and his sponsor, Chevrolet, vetoed the idea, apparently fearful of the political fallout.

Hope’s next idea was to bring a TV crew to the Soviet Union to shoot an entire special there, featuring Soviet artists and entertainers who had never performed in the West. “I’ve seen many a curtain go up in my time,” he said. “My greatest thrill would be to see this one, the Iron Curtain, go up.” At a time when the Cold War was at its frostiest, the idea would take two and a half years to come to fruition. But it was the centerpiece of Hope’s efforts in the 1950s to secure his role as America’s leading show-business emissary to the world.

Hope had not taken an entertainment troupe abroad since his Far East swing during the Korean War in 1950. Then, in late 1954, Secretary of the Air Force Harold Talbott asked Hope if he would make a New Year’s Eve trip to Greenland, where five thousand US troops were manning a Strategic Air Command post at Thule Air Base, part of the nation’s early-warning system against a potential Soviet nuclear strike. The lonely and forbidding outpost was 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, but Hope jumped at the chance.

To join him, he recruited a big Hollywood star, William Holden (winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor that year for Stalag 17); two of his World War II traveling companions, Jerry Colonna and Patty Thomas; his radio singer, Margaret Whiting; and newspaper gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who did double duty by writing about the trip in her syndicated column and joining Hope onstage for some banter about Hollywood. He tried to get Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood’s top glamour girl of the moment, but she was embroiled in a contract dispute with her studio, Twentieth Century–Fox, and didn’t even return his phone calls. (Monroe was the one major Hollywood sex symbol Hope never appeared with.) Instead, as the requisite piece of cheesecake, he tapped a well-endowed former Miss Sweden whom he had met at a Big Ten Football Conference banquet in Los Angeles, named Anita Ekberg.

In a brief trip of just forty-eight hours, Hope and his troupe landed at Thule (pronounced TOO-lee) in thirty-six-below weather and for two days never saw the sun. They did two shows, one at a gymnasium at Thule on New Year’s Eve and a second the next day in Goose Bay, Labrador. Both were filmed and later edited together into an hour show for NBC’s Colgate Comedy Hour, which aired on January 9. The telecast drew a protest from the cameramen’s union, which was unhappy that government crews had been used instead of union cameramen. (Hope said he had nothing to do with the decision; he prided himself on supporting unions and regularly refused to cross picket lines.) But it was a landmark for Hope: the first time one of his military tours was televised.

“I can’t tell you how happy I am to be up here on the moon with you,” Hope says in his opening monologue, standing in front of a curtain on the makeshift stage in the converted gym at Thule. “It’s the only place in the world where you get a good-conduct medal just for being alive.” A half dozen dancing girls, dressed in parkas and skating skirts fringed in white fur, sing, “Why do they call it Greenland when everything looks so white?” Holden, adopting his swaggering, cigar-chomping Stalag 17 persona, joins Hope for some repartee and later runs around supplying the props as Hope and Whiting do a patter-and-song number, “Make Yourself Comfortable.” In a sketch, Hope and Holden (joined by the scruffy Robert Strauss, one of Holden’s costars from Stalag 17) play stir-crazy servicemen who vie for the chance to give a tour of the base to Ekberg (as a New York Times reporter!). The familiar jokes about lonely, sex-starved servicemen, along with the sight of big Hollywood stars working with makeshift sets and community-theater production facilities, were a warming touch of home for the men stuck in this forlorn outpost. The special that was edited from the trip drew more viewers than any other Hope TV show yet, with a whopping 60 percent share of the viewing audience.

Hope recognized a winning formula when he saw one. The following year, in the midst of filming The Iron Petticoat in London, he took a break at Christmas to do some shows for the US troops stationed in Iceland, bringing along blond British sexpot Diana Dors as a guest star. Excerpts from the shows were edited into a special that Hope had already recorded back in Hollywood.

The Iceland trip was notable mainly for a mishap that didn’t make it into the show. Among the entertainers Hope brought along was a blond, five-foot-ten-inch strongwoman named Jean Rhodes, who bent steel bars and did a bit with Hope in which she lifted him on her shoulders while they sang “Embraceable You.” Her tacky vaudeville act (testimony to Hope’s low standards for entertainment when it involved curvaceous gals) went well enough until the last show, when Rhodes lost her balance after lifting up Hope, plunging him headfirst to the floor. He cut his nose and wrenched his neck and was flown immediately back to London for X-rays. There were no broken bones (and he was well enough to host a British TV show the next day), though Hope later speculated that the accident may have triggered the eye problems that began to plague him a few years later.

The trip that decisively established Hope’s Christmas tours as an annual tradition came a year later, in December 1956, when he made a more extensive tour of US bases in Alaska. His top-billed guests were Hollywood star Ginger Rogers and New York Yankees slugger Mickey Mantle (who played a mama’s boy Army recruit in one sketch, with Hope as his hard-bitten sergeant). The entertainment seemed a little retro for an audience of young servicemen in the early years of rock ’n’ roll: Hope donned top hat and tails for a dance number with the forty-five-year-old Rogers; housemother Hedda Hopper was back, gossiping about old Hollywood; and Hope’s idea of a young act for “you cats who dig talent” was pert vocalist Peggy King, from the George Gobel Show, who sang “I’ve Grown Accustomed to His Face.” Still, it was a glittery package of stars, songs, and comedy, for an audience that was starved for it.

Hope’s shows in these years were probably the best of his TV career. The sketches, though hardly comedy classics, were more elaborately staged and better written, at their funniest when spoofing current movies and TV shows: a 1956 parody of The Desperate Hours, for example, with Hope in the Bogart role as an escaped convict holding a suburban family hostage, but having trouble getting their attention away from the TV set. Or Hope as a Colonel Parker–like rock ’n’ roll impresario, trying to turn meek Wally Cox into a teen idol. (When Cox asks where all his money has gone, Hope responds indignantly, “Have you ever heard my honesty questioned?” Cox: “I’ve never even heard it mentioned.”)

In his monologues, Hope seemed more conscious of his role as a comedic barometer of current events and national concerns. “There’s been a lot of exciting news these past couple of weeks,” Hope began one monologue in the fall of 1955. “The stock market is holding its own, Archie Moore is holding his head, Perón is holding the bag, and Eddie and Debbie are holding each other, for release at a more convenient time”—surely the only comedian who could combine a defeated heavyweight boxer, an ousted Argentine dictator, and a newlywed Hollywood couple into one gag line. He took note of world crises (“How about that Suez Canal?”) and presidential politics (“Adlai made so many campaign promises, Ike voted for him”). He poked fun at big-money quiz shows and Hollywood epics such as The Ten Commandments and, endlessly, Elvis Presley, the pelvis-shaking rock ’n’ roll sensation who was about to go into the Army. “He’ll be the only private the Army ever had that can roll the dice without taking them out of his pocket,” said Hope. And: “Can’t wait to see Elvis on guard duty, yelling, ‘Halt, who goes there, friend or square?’ ” And: “Elvis is asking for a deferment, on the grounds that it would create a hardship for Ed Sullivan.”

Sometimes the jokes could ruffle feathers. In 1956, when Britain’s Princess Margaret broke off her engagement to the divorced Captain Peter Townsend under pressure from the Church of England, Hope joked about the thwarted affair as he prepared for a trip to London. Among the sights he was looking forward to seeing, he said, was “Buckingham Palace, the guards out front, and Margaret’s handkerchief drying out the window.” His quips drew protests from both Canadian and British fans, who thought Hope was disrespectful. He got complaints of a different kind from NBC station executives, who objected to his frequent use of product names in his jokes—plugs that often resulted in free merchandise for Hope and his writers.

Hope may have felt entitled to a few perks, for he claimed that he was losing money on his television work. Hope Enterprises received a fixed amount from NBC for each special, meant to cover the talent, writers, and other production costs. When Hope looked at the books in the fall of 1956, he realized that he was losing money on the deal—a total of $93,000 in the red for his first three NBC specials for the 1956–57 season, according to his accounting. “I’m a hit but going broke, as far as TV is concerned,” he told reporters. “I wish I could afford TV, but judging from the losses so far this season, I don’t think so.”

It was somewhat disingenuous; even if the shows were running a deficit, Hope personally was still raking in plenty from the network—upward of $1 million a year. But it was a fine negotiating tactic. In early 1957 Hope got NBC to renegotiate his contract, retroactive to 1955. Under the new deal, NBC would pay $15 million for forty TV specials over five years—an average of $375,000 for each show. With the specials budgeted at around $130,000 apiece, that meant Hope cleared at least $200,000 per show, putting his yearly income from NBC at around $1.5 million. As part of the new deal, NBC also pledged to invest $10 million in five Hope films, thus becoming a partner in his moviemaking for the first time.

Hope would renew his contract with NBC every five years, and he always drove a hard bargain. Hope was such a ratings powerhouse that NBC had little choice but to make him happy, and he squeezed the network wherever he could. NBC had a rate card for the use of its production facilities, for instance, and the costs went up steadily over the years—for everyone but Hope, whose charges were grandfathered at the mid-1950s rate. NBC designed an entire studio to Hope’s specifications, with the seats steeply raked so that the audience would be as close to him as possible. (It later became the home of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, but was always Hope’s for the asking.) What’s more, as a sweetener for each contract renewal, Hope would demand a side deal in which NBC purchased one piece of property from him—a way for him to realize some profits from his steadily appreciating real estate holdings. “The land purchase was done directly between me and Bob,” said Tom Sarnoff, NBC’s West Coast vice president of business affairs during most of those years. “He was a tough negotiator. He knew what he wanted.”

Hope began accumulating real estate on a large scale in the 1950s, using the money he and Crosby earned from their lucrative Texas oil wells. In 1955, Hope bought a 1,695-acre ranch in Ventura County from Jim and Marian Jordan, radio’s Fibber McGee and Molly, for $400,000. Hope picked up several more large parcels over the next few years in the San Fernando Valley, Malibu, and the desert communities around Palm Springs, as well as smaller pieces in Arizona and Ohio. He also owned several undeveloped lots in Burbank, including one adjoining NBC’s headquarters and another next door to Universal Pictures—the site of a golf driving range run for years by Hope’s brother-in-law and eventually sold to Universal, which turned it into the entrance to its new theme park. He bought most of this land cheap and held on to it for years. “Bob was known to hang on to his real estate,” said Art Linkletter, who partnered with Hope in several deals. “In fact, I stopped doing deals with him because he never wanted to sell anything.” At his peak Hope owned more than ten thousand acres of Southern California real estate, reputedly more than any other private landowner in the state.

He had an array of other investments as well. He was still part owner of the Cleveland Indians, and in 1949 he bought an 11 percent share of the Los Angeles Rams football team. He headed a group that owned Denver TV station KOA and in 1957 acquired WREX-TV in Rockford, Illinois. Yet he always downplayed his business successes, complaining about how much he had to pay back to the government in taxes. (Hope, with his old-fashioned, Main Street approach to business, never went in for sophisticated tax-shelter arrangements, which might have reduced his tax burden.) He loved to gripe about the business opportunities he’d passed up—an offer to get in on the ground floor of Polaroid, for example, or the time Walt Disney asked if Hope wanted to invest in the big theme park Disney was building in Anaheim. Hope turned him down, convinced that Disneyland would be a flop. If he had only said yes, Hope would tell friends, “I could have been a rich man.”

The business that took up most of his time and attention, however, was the enterprise known as Bob Hope. He gathered around him a large and devoted support staff: his two agents, Louis Shurr and Jimmy Saphier; attorneys Martin Gang and Norman Tyre of the law firm Gang, Kopp & Tyre (surely the most aptly named in Hollywood); and a corps of well-connected publicity agents. Hope’s brother Jack became the nominal producer of his TV shows, while old cronies from Cleveland and vaudeville, such as Eddie Rio and Mark Anthony, were brought on in various capacities. At the center of the operation was Marjorie Hughes, a prim and poised graduate of UCLA who joined his staff in 1942 and served as Hope’s chief assistant for thirty-one years. “Miss Hughes,” as she was always addressed by everyone in the office (including Hope), ran the office, oversaw his schedule, and helped answer his voluminous mail—answers that Hope would usually dictate personally, but which always bore her delicate and dignified touch. Watching over it all was Hope, a hands-on CEO of the most sophisticated star-managing enterprise of the twentieth century.

• • •

It is hard to overstate Bob Hope’s achievement as a multimedia star in the 1950s. Success in movies and television in those years was almost mutually exclusive. Top movie stars (Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner—practically anyone you could name) almost never did television, while TV’s biggest stars, for the most part, had either left their movie careers behind (such as Lucille Ball or Red Skelton) or never had one to begin with (Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason). The only other stars besides Hope who achieved major success in both movies and TV in the 1950s were Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis—but Lewis’s TV career went nowhere after the duo split in 1956, and Martin didn’t get his own variety show until the late 1960s, when his movie career was winding down. No one came close to matching Hope’s two-decade run as a star of both major Hollywood movies and top-rated TV shows.

To be sure, by the mid-1950s Hope was no longer the box-office kingpin that he was back in the 1940s. But his 1955 hit The Seven Little Foys proved that he could still, with the right vehicle, attract big crowds to the theaters. What’s more, his critical and popular success with Foys, in a meaty, semidramatic role, encouraged Hope to stretch himself and look for more ambitious film parts. The second half of the 1950s was a time of experimentation for him—not always successful, but also not the mark of a comedian who was resting on his laurels.

That Certain Feeling, his first film after The Seven Little Foys, was a return to more conventional romantic comedy. But it was unusual for Hope in being based on a Broadway play—The King of Hearts, by Jean Kerr and Eleanor Brooke, which ran for eight months in 1954—and casting him in a relatively realistic, contemporary role. He plays Francis X. Dignan, a neurotically insecure cartoonist who is hired to “ghost” the popular comic strip of a pompous colleague named Larry Larkin, played by George Sanders. The instigator of this arrangement is Larkin’s assistant and fiancée, who also happens to be Dignan’s ex-wife—played by Eva Marie Saint, in her first movie after her Oscar-winning film debut in On the Waterfront.

Written and codirected by former Hope writers Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, That Certain Feeling is a more sophisticated romantic comedy than anything Hope had done before. His familiar skittish, nervous-Nellie character now has real psychological underpinnings: he’s seeing a psychiatrist (a first for Hope) to deal with his pathological fear of confrontation. Sanders does a funny caricature of a smug, bleeding-heart New York intellectual, giving Hope’s deflating wisecracks more satiric bite. “When you pick up that pencil, my friend,” Sanders lectures Hope, “you draw Larkin, you think Larkin, you are Larkin.” Says Hope: “All right, but I insist on separate toothbrushes.”

In a superfluous subplot, Larkin adopts an orphan, played by Jerry Mathers, later of TV’s Leave It to Beaver. (Hope’s nine-year-old son, Kelly, also appears in one scene as Mathers’s playmate.) And a youthful, honey-voiced Pearl Bailey, in the thankless role of Larkin’s maid, gets a couple of nice songs, including the film’s title number, resurrected from a 1925 Gershwin musical. But the heart of the movie is the reawakening romance between Dignan and his ex-wife, and Hope plays it with restraint and feeling. This is one of his few screen romances that actually gives off some sexual heat, and he’s an indulgent straight man for Saint’s big comedy scene, when the neatly tailored ice princess gets drunk and flounces around her apartment in silk Chinese pajamas.

“He was very patient as an actor, very generous and giving,” said Saint, who also found Hope’s easygoing working style refreshing. In contrast to the intensity of Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando on the closed Waterfront set, Hope’s set was open and relaxed; one day an entire football team came to watch. “Thank God I had grown up in live television, where tours would come through and watch from behind the glass,” said Saint. “As an actress I had learned how to concentrate.”

As he did for The Seven Little Foys, Hope went all out to promote the movie, which opened in June 1956. He did four stage shows a day at the Paramount Theater for the film’s New York opening; made nearly a dozen TV guest appearances; and hosted premiere screenings around the country to benefit United Cerebral Palsy. One of his NBC specials, The Road to Hollywood, was little more than a long plug for the movie. Thinly disguised as a tribute to Hope’s Hollywood career (with former leading ladies such as Jane Russell and Dorothy Lamour among the guests), the show featured Hope’s first use of one of his publicity innovations: a clip reel of flubs and outtakes from his new movie. “Leave it to Bob Hope to show ’em how to plug a picture,” said Variety, in its review of the show. “If NBC is willing to give away 90 minutes of prime time for a plug, and audiences are willing to take it with the palatable grain of sugar it was mixed with, more power to Hope.”

Yet That Certain Feeling was a disappointment at the box office. Variety theorized that Hope’s movie wisecracks were “too much the type of entertainment he offers on television.” More likely, the relatively sophisticated New York relationship comedy was a little too rarefied for Hope’s audience. Still, it was one of his most enjoyable and underrated films of the 1950s. After it, things began to go seriously awry.

The Iron Petticoat began with a script by veteran screenwriter Ben Hecht (Scarface, The Front Page): a Cold War–era update of Ninotchka about a female Soviet pilot who defects to the West and has a romantic and ideological awakening while being shown around London by an American Air Force captain. Katharine Hepburn was cast as the pilot, and Cary Grant was originally envisioned as her costar. But when Grant turned it down, producer Harry Saltzman came up with the notion of pairing Hepburn, Hollywood’s classiest leading lady, with Hope, its most popular movie clown. Intrigued with the idea of working with Hepburn (as well as plans to shoot the movie in England), Hope signed on. Against the advice of friends, Hepburn agreed too.

It was an ill-starred project. Hecht and Hope were at odds from the start. According to Hope, the script was unfinished when he arrived in London for the start of shooting (Hecht no doubt rewriting it to suit the casting of Hope), and Hope merely suggested a few “hokey thoughts” to help it out. In Hecht’s view, Hope was wreaking havoc on his script, bringing in gag writers to add jokes where they didn’t belong. Hepburn was just as dismayed. “I had been sold a false bill of goods,” she said later. “I was told that this was not going to be a typical Hope movie, that he wanted to appear in a contemporary comedy. That proved not to be the case.” Ralph Thomas, the film’s British director, was caught in the middle. “After only two days I realized there was no point of contact between the two of them,” he said. “There was Bob inserting his one-liners—and she telling him, very forcibly, very chillingly, what she thought of his lack of professionalism.”

Hope, who never liked to bad-mouth a colleague, was polite in retrospect, saying Hepburn was “a gem” during the filming. “She played the Jewish mother on the set, fussing over everyone who happened to sneeze.” Hepburn did not return the compliment, calling Hope “the biggest egomaniac with whom I have worked in my entire life.” Hecht, for his part, demanded that his name be removed from the credits and ran a full-page “open letter” to Hope in the Hollywood Reporter disavowing the film. “This is to notify you that I have removed my name as author from our mutilated venture, The Iron Petticoat. Unfortunately your other partner, Katharine Hepburn can’t shy out of the fractured picture with me.” Hope replied with his own sarcastic ad: “I am most understanding. The way things are going you simply can’t afford to be associated with a hit.”

The Iron Petticoat, which opened in December 1956, wasn’t a hit, or anything resembling a good film. Hepburn complained that Hope wanted to turn the picture “into his cheap vaudeville act with me as his stooge,” but her strident, humorless performance as the dogma-spouting Soviet pilot (with one of the worst Russian accents ever recorded) is what ruins the film. Hope at least tries to keep it grounded in recognizable human behavior, and he has some nice moments when Hepburn is offscreen—doing some deft flimflammery at the Soviet embassy, for example, to help her escape from the authorities who have arrested her. But the movie is heavy-handed and charmless, with not a smidgen of romantic chemistry between the two stars. “The notion of these two characters falling rapturously, romantically in love is virtually revolting,” wrote the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther. “If this was meant to be a travesty, it is.”

Hope’s next project, Beau James, at least brought him closer to home turf. Mel Shavelson and Jack Rose, who had given him one of his best roles in The Seven Little Foys, came up with the idea of casting Hope as Jimmy Walker, the colorful and corrupt 1920s mayor of New York City, in a biopic based on a recently published biography of Walker by Gene Fowler. For an essentially dramatic role, it was especially well suited to Hope. Walker had been a songwriter before getting into politics (he wrote the lyrics to “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?”), and as New York mayor was a bon-vivant symbol of the Roaring Twenties, who let speakeasies flourish in the city, allowed Tammany Hall corruption to run rampant, and left his wife for a showgirl.

Hope does well in the role, his flip, wisecracking persona perfectly suited to the raffish mix of showbiz and politics that Walker embodied. The film’s depiction of New York City politics is simplistic but often witty—a montage of Walker campaigning across the city, for instance, tailoring his campaign song to each ethnic group he encounters. “What kind of mayor is this guy going to make?” asks one bystander. “A lousy mayor,” his campaign chief responds, “but what a candidate!” Beau James doesn’t ignore the corruption that marred Walker’s administration, or the personal indiscretions that enlivened it. (Alexis Smith plays Walker’s wife-in-name-only, and Vera Miles is the showgirl he has an affair with.) The problem, as in The Seven Little Foys, is that Hope’s opaqueness as an actor doesn’t give us much insight into Walker’s character or motives. Hope got respectful reviews, but the movie grossed just $1.75 million, his third box-office disappointment in a row.

Hope took his next movie into his own hands. He wanted to shoot another film overseas and came up with a bare-bones story idea in which he would essentially play himself, an American comedy star who sails to Paris in pursuit of a script for his next picture. Hope got United Artists to back the film, cast the French comedian Fernandel (who had guested on one of Hope’s TV shows from London) as his costar, and hired screenwriters Edmund Beloin and Dean Riesner to flesh out a script. He also decided, for the first time, to serve as his own producer—a decision he came to regret.

Filming was scheduled to begin in Paris in April 1957. But Fernandel, who spoke no English, didn’t see the script until Hope was about to arrive for the start of shooting, and he wasn’t happy to find that his role was clearly secondary to Hope’s. Hope made an emergency call to two of his writers, Mort Lachman and Bill Larkin, and ordered them to Paris, where they quickly reworked the script to pacify the French star—delaying the start of filming for ten days as the crew sat idle. The production fell further behind thanks to various technical snafus, bad weather (snow in May and a heat wave in June), and the French crew’s habit of starting work late and taking long lunches. “At present we’re three weeks behind on film and three weeks ahead on wine,” Hope joked at a benefit for French war orphans that he hosted while in Paris. When their twelve-week lease on the Boulogne studios outside of Paris was up and the film still wasn’t done, the crew had to relocate to another studio in Joinville to finish up. In the end, Hope claimed the production went $1 million over budget.

The results on-screen were just as discombobulated. Paris Holiday is a slovenly mix of Hope one-liners, silent-comedy set pieces for Fernandel (he pretends to be seasick, for example, to get some ship passengers to vacate a couple of deck chairs), and a slapdash story involving spies (among them Anita Ekberg) who are after the same film script that Hope is trying to buy. The film’s director, Gerd Oswald, appears to be missing in action, and Hope was apparently too distracted by the production problems to pay much attention to the comedy. Paris Holiday was not just Hope’s worst film to date; it was his laziest performance.

• • •

In December 1957, Hope made his most ambitious Christmas trip yet, a two-week tour of the Far East, with blond bombshell Jayne Mansfield as his top guest star and a far-flung itinerary that climaxed with a show before seven thousand infantrymen perched on a snowy hillside near the thirty-eighth parallel, the border between North and South Korea. The NBC special that resulted became the model for all of Hope’s Christmas shows that followed. Unlike his previous three Christmas shows from the Arctic—essentially Hope variety shows done on location for military audiences—this one was a more elaborately produced travelogue: shots of the cast getting on and off planes, excerpts from their performances at each stop on the tour, all linked by Hope’s voice-over narration and ending with his patriotic tribute to “our boys in a foreign land, there to preserve our way of life.”

The trip was widely covered by several entertainment columnists whom Hope had cleverly invited along, and the special, which NBC aired on Friday, January 17, drew Hope’s highest ratings of the season. Hedda Hopper (who again doubled as a guest star and chronicler of the trip) hailed the selfless work Hope was doing, anointing him, more explicitly than ever before, as Hollywood’s finest role model for public service:

Each time I pack my bags and turn my back on the wreathed door and the piles of gaily wrapped gifts, I have a warmer, more satisfying feeling in my heart. I can remember a day when Hollywood didn’t think much about serious things. I remember the time of the mammoth Christmas party, the $5 Christmas card and the exchange of valuables which meant Yuletide in the movie colony. I remember too the first Christmas when a sober note was struck, when someone reminded us what we owed the rest of the world. The time was 1943 and, you guessed it, the someone was Bob Hope.

Hope’s status as Hollywood’s most celebrated public servant and goodwill ambassador, however, would reach its high-water mark a couple of months later. After more than two years of trying, Hope finally got approval to make his trip to the Soviet Union.

He had renewed his application for visas in November 1957, while he was in London for some personal appearances and a screening of Paris Holiday. He told Ursula Halloran, a pretty young publicist who had gone to work for him in New York, to pursue the request with the powers in Washington and asked NBC’s Moscow correspondent, Irving R. Levine, to press the matter from his end. Hope also appealed for help from the American ambassador in London, Jock Whitney, who personally brought up the trip with Russian ambassador Jacob Malik. “What does your Mr. Hope want to do,” Malik said, “entertain our troops in Red Square?” Hope was disappointed that the approval didn’t come before he had to fly home from London. But a few weeks later, he was summoned to the Soviet embassy in Washington. The Soviets had approved his trip, and six visas were waiting for him.

The State Department gave its blessing for the trip—the first to be scheduled in the wake of a cultural-exchange agreement between the United States and Soviet Union, signed in January. Yet Cold War suspicions were still high, and the Russians placed severe restrictions on the trip. Hope was not allowed to travel outside Moscow. All negotiations for Russian talent had to be conducted through the Soviet government, and only Russian film crews could be used. Moreover, with visas for just six, Hope had to severely limit his entourage. He brought along two writers, Mort Lachman and Bill Larkin; two PR people, Ursula Halloran (with whom he was having a fairly open affair) and Arthur Jacobs (a United Artists publicity man whose job was to arrange a Moscow premiere of Paris Holiday); and a top cameraman from London named Ken Talbot.

Hope, accompanied by the two publicists, flew to Copenhagen on March 14, 1958, and from there boarded a Soviet airliner for Moscow. (The writers and Talbot came separately.) Before the flight their passports were checked three times: at the gate, at the bottom of the ramp, and at the top of the ramp. (“This was to prevent us from changing identities halfway up the stairs,” Hope noted.) Arriving in Moscow, they were greeted by NBC’s Irving R. Levine and a handful of journalists, including two reporters for Look magazine, and taken to Moscow’s newest luxury hotel, the Ukraine, where most of the lobby furniture was still covered with sheets.

Hope met first with top officials from the Ministry of Culture and gave them his wish list for the visit: a tour of a Russian TV or movie studio, a visit with students at a Russian university, and a theater where he could do a monologue for an English-speaking audience. The Russians politely took his requests and granted none of them. His efforts to arrange a Moscow opening for Paris Holiday also came to naught. For the entire trip Hope suspected that his hotel room was bugged. One night when he returned to the room, he found his suitcase open and his monologue jokes spread out over the bed. “I still don’t know who went through those jokes,” Hope wrote later, “and I guess I never will unless Molotov starts doing my act in Pinsk.”

Hope began his sightseeing in Red Square, accompanied by Lachman and with Talbot filming as he visited such landmarks as St. Basil’s Cathedral and Lenin’s tomb, unnoticed by passersby. “Can you believe it? Not one person knows who I am,” Hope marveled. “Congratulations,” replied Lachman. “Now you know what it’s like to be me.” Talbot was allowed to film freely in most of the approved locations, but when the group wandered off the itinerary to a nightclub to see a popular all-girl orchestra, he had to sneak in his camera and film surreptitiously while a reporter distracted the maître d’.

Hope attended a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet, saw a Russian jazz combo, and went to a Russian puppet show (though most of the footage of these acts used in the show was supplied by his Soviet hosts, shot a year earlier for the fortieth anniversary celebration of the Soviet revolution). When Hope was having no luck making arrangements for a theater for his monologue, US ambassador Llewellyn Thompson offered his residence, Spaso House, for the show. Three hundred people—mostly embassy personnel, their families, and other English-speaking residents of the city—were in the audience as a Russian camera crew filmed Hope making jokes about the Cold War, the cold weather, and his cold reception in Moscow. “I got a wonderful tribute at the airport,” he quipped. “They fired twenty-one shots in the air in my honor. Of course it would have been nicer if they’d waited for the plane to land.” He added, “Surprisingly enough, I’m not having any trouble with the language. Nobody speaks to me.”

Officials at the Ministry of Culture went over his jokes afterward and raised objections to several of them. One was a wisecrack about Sputnik, the Soviets’ new space satellite, orbiting the earth every ninety minutes or so. “The Russians are overjoyed at their Sputnik,” Hope said. “It’s kind of weird, being in a country where every ninety-two minutes there’s a holiday. Anybody without a stiff neck is a traitor.” The Russians were sincerely proud of their space achievement, he was told, and “traitor is a very serious charge in Russia.” Hope tried to explain: “What we are trying to do is to state in a humorous way how proud the people are of their Sputnik.” To placate the officials, Hope told them to submit a list of the jokes they were unhappy with and he would consider removing them. Like so much else in his bureaucracy-encrusted visit, the list never came through.

In all, Hope spent six days in Moscow. But he left without his film footage. Talbot had brought forty thousand feet of film from London, intending to process it back home, but the Russians insisted on using their own film and processing it there—adding another layer of uncertainty to the trip. Hope made Lachman and Larkin stay behind, to wait for the processed film and personally bring it back in their luggage. The writers arrived safely with it a day later. So did a bill from the Russians for $1,200, to cover the processing, camera crews, and film clips used in the show. Hope never paid the bill, claiming he didn’t get all the clips he ordered. (He did, however, get the title for a memoir he eventually produced on the trip, I Owe Russia $1200, ghostwritten by Lachman.)

The TV special edited from his Soviet trip, Bob Hope in Moscow, aired on Saturday night, April 5, 1958, and was one of his finest achievements. Clips of Hope sightseeing in Moscow are interspersed with footage of Soviet entertainers—ballerina Galina Ulanova, violinist David Oistrakh, Russian circus clown Oleg Popov, a selection of folk dancers from various Soviet republics. Hope’s voice-over plays on American stereotypes of the stolid Russians and stern Soviet dictatorship. Over shots of a beefy all-female orchestra, Hope comments, “They’re playing this year’s hit tune, ‘When My Tractor Smiles at Me.’ ” As he gets ready to visit Moscow State University, he notes that it is “located on Stalin or Lenin or Bulganin Boulevard—I’m not sure which, I haven’t seen today’s newspaper.” He has self-deprecating fun with his anonymity on the Moscow streets. As he is wandering through Red Square, a crowd of pedestrians approaches. “We’ll cut across the square, if we can just get past this pack of autograph hounds,” Hope narrates. The group walks right through him, oblivious. “Hmmpf. Guess they never heard of me.”

He closes the show with a call for understanding between the two Cold War superpowers: “For five days and nights I stared and I walked and I wandered. It’s a strange city. I missed the street signs, the advertisements, the neons gleaming in the night, everybody owning their own car.” The words were almost surely written by Lachman—Hope’s most trusted writer, whose thoughtful manner and big, round glasses got him nicknamed the Owl. As the street scenes of Moscow dissolve into shots of smiling Russian children, Hope concludes hopefully:

I found out that the little kids with the fur hats and the sticky faces have no politics, and that their party line is confined to “please pass the ice cream.” You know, it would be wonderful if these children would someday grow up in a world that spoke the same language and respected the same things. . . . Take these characters right here. In a few years they’ll be in school. Will they teach him that Communism is his friend, his salvation? And that democracy is his deadly enemy? Twenty years from now, will he be a violinist? A shopkeeper? A teacher? Or will he be the one at the countdown who pushes the button which shakes the crust of the earth? I certainly don’t envy Mr. Dulles the job at hand. But it would be nice if somebody could work out a plan for peaceful coexistence, so that human beings like these don’t become obsolete.

The critics had their reservations about Hope’s stab at international diplomacy. “I wish there’d been a lot more Russia and a lot less Hope,” said Cecil Smith in the Los Angeles Times. The New York Times’ Jack Gould complained that Hope’s chauvinistic wisecracks at the expense of the Soviets were in poor taste. But Hope’s achievement was hard to dismiss. “Who would have thought even a few years ago,” said Gould, “there could be such a change in the world climate that a viewer would be hearing Mr. Hope broach such subjects? In the universality of cultural artistry there indeed may be a ray of hope for a divided world.”

Bob Hope in Moscow drew solid, if not sensational, ratings, won a Peabody Award for its “contribution to international understanding,” and had a highly publicized rerun telecast on NBC the following January. The show was the first of several groundbreaking cultural exchanges between the United States and Soviet Union. In June, Ed Sullivan presented the American TV debut of the famed Moiseyev Dance Company; a year later impresario Sol Hurok brought the Bolshoi Ballet to New York City. And in September 1959 Soviet premier Khrushchev made his much-heralded first visit to the United States.

Hope was among the Hollywood celebrities invited to a lunch for the Soviet leader when he visited the Twentieth Century–Fox studios in Los Angeles. Sitting next to Mrs. Khrushchev (with Frank Sinatra on her other side), Hope suggested that she and Mr. K. ought to visit Disneyland. Khrushchev requested a visit, but the LA police turned him down (claiming it could not guarantee security), and the Soviet premier had a highly publicized temper tantrum. “What do you have there—rocket launching pads?” he bellowed to reporters. Hope would later joke that his casual comment to Mrs. Khrushchev started the Cold War. Not quite—Khrushchev had in fact requested the Disneyland trip well before the luncheon—but Hope’s landmark show from Moscow surely melted some of the ice.

• • •

“Guys ask me all the time about what happened to Sid Caesar or George Gobel or Jackie Gleason or Wally Cox,” Hope said in a 1957 interview, trying to explain the secret of his long-running TV success. “You’ve got no idea what a tremendous strain it is trying to be funny week after week. The American audience is the sharpest, most sophisticated, and fickle audience in the world. You can’t get away with old jokes, old routines, second-class material. Trying to satisfy the public—honestly, it can tear you apart.”

In truth, Hope got away with plenty of old jokes—tired, knee-jerk gags about Gleason’s weight and Benny’s cheapness and Crosby’s many kids—and his material was often second-class. But throughout the 1950s his TV popularity never flagged. He outlasted every TV trend and fad: the rage for Westerns and big-money quiz shows, the emergence of sitcoms and the glut of me-too variety shows. He stayed in the top ten despite changing nights, challenging time periods, and revolving sponsors. In the fall of 1957, Timex replaced Chevrolet as Hope’s sponsor—paying $360,000 for an hour of airtime, highest ever for a variety show—but dropped him after just one month, upset over his guest appearance on a Frank Sinatra show, which was partly sponsored by Bulova, a Timex competitor. (Hope’s agent Jimmy Saphier claimed Hope did the show only after being assured that the Bulova ad would not air until after the show’s closing credits.) NBC had to postpone Hope’s November special while another sponsor was found. Plymouth eventually picked him up for the rest of the season, before Hope switched to yet another car company, Buick, for the 1958–59 season.

One reason for his durability was his wise decision to carefully ration his TV exposure. Where other comedians, such as Caesar and Berle, did weekly shows and either burned themselves out or overstayed their welcome, Hope limited himself to just six or eight specials a year and tried to make them as special as possible—with big-name guest stars, foreign locales (he did two shows from London in 1955, another from Morocco after shooting Paris Holiday in 1957), and special events, including a reprise of his stage role in Roberta at the St. Louis Muny Opera, taped in the summer of 1958 and broadcast as his season opener in September.

Just as important was Hope’s dogged and creative efforts to promote his shows. “It’s getting out there in person and selling each show like there’s not going to be any tomorrow,” Hope told Pete Martin in the Saturday Evening Post. “I get behind every show I’m in and push it as if it’s a new musical comedy or a new feature-length movie.” Before each special Hope would get his publicists to line up phone interviews with TV columnists around the country, and the one-on-one conversations would generate reams of coverage. “I sit in my office out there in Burbank and shove those calls through,” he said. “It’s a wonderful idea. They ask me about my next show, and I tell them a few intimate things about it. Then they give the fact that I called them a lot of space.”

The quality of his shows in these years was spotty. The best sketches poked fun at popular TV shows and trends (Hope playing a tough private eye, for example, working “the most crime-ridden street in Hollywood—eighteen crime shows on one block”). The attempts at more ambitious social or cultural satire were pretty crude. When women were still a novelty in politics, Maureen O’Hara played a newly elected congresswoman, who interrupts a meeting with a top Army general to paste Green Stamps in her coupon book and suggests decorating Army tanks with wallpaper. When beatniks became a media obsession, Hope donned goatee and beret and played a bass-playing hipster, waiting in the maternity ward for his jive-talking wife to deliver their new baby. (The baby has a goatee too.) But the seat-of-the-pants spirit of the comedy, the self-mocking ad-libs making fun of the bad jokes or missed cues, even the tacky production values, all enlisted the audience in the artifice. This wasn’t satire; it was show business.

The monologues were still the high point, a running chronicle of the headlines and hot topics of the era. When Soviet No. 2 man Anastas Mikoyan made a diplomatic visit to the United States, he “brought back everything he could that might give them a clue to our defenses,” said Hope. “They’ve been up in Siberia for three weeks now trying to launch a Hula-Hoop.” When President Eisenhower took a vacation in the California desert, Hope joked, “He wanted some peace and quiet, and La Quinta is the perfect hideaway. The Russians can’t find it; the Democrats can’t afford it.” In the wake of his trip to Moscow, Hope savored his role as a comedy statesman, and the quips sometimes turned serious. During Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the United States, Hope closed one show with praise for a trip that allowed the Soviet leader “to show his sharp mind and tongue to the American people. Freedom of speech is a basic American principle, and so Khrushchev was allowed to come to this country to speak his mind and attempt to sell us Communism. I just hope that when our president visits Russia, they give him equal time to sell freedom.”

Hope’s stature in the show-business world was never higher, ratified by a growing stack of awards: a Meritorious Public Service Citation from the Navy, the Murray-Green Award for community service from the AFL-CIO, a humanitarian award from the American College of Physicians for “healing without resorting to pills or medicine.” He was named honorary mayor of Chicago and hosted a TV special for the Boy Scouts’ new Explorer program. He set attendance records almost everywhere he went, from the Canadian National Exposition in 1957 to a concert at the Lubbock Coliseum in 1958, the biggest one-nighter in the city’s history. He told his publicist Mack Millar to make inquiries about getting him a Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for his work entertaining the troops. When the White House initially turned down the request, explaining that it would be unfair to single out Hope when so many other entertainers had done their share, Hope told Millar (without irony) to try for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Hope’s Christmas tours to entertain the troops were by now national events, coordinated by the Defense Department and the USO and watched by some of the biggest audiences in television. In December 1958, a year after his successful tour of Korea and the Far East, Hope was booked on an equally ambitious tour of North Africa and Europe. This time, however, he ran into a problem that had been looming for years, but that he had managed to keep at bay: his health.

The trip had an especially grueling itinerary of eight countries in just twelve days. To join him, Hope wanted to book a major European sexpot such as Brigitte Bardot or Sophia Loren, but the best he could get was an appearance by Gina Lollobrigida, who was shooting Solomon and Sheba in Spain and agreed to meet the troupe for one day, for $10,000 in cash up front. To fill out his troupe, Hope brought along Molly Bee, a singer on Tennessee Ernie Ford’s TV show, and folk singer Randy Sparks, along with the reliable Jerry Colonna, the inevitable Hedda Hopper, and the indefatigable Les Brown and his band.

The trip ran into problems from the start. Hope and company took off from Burbank on December 17 in two Air Force planes, headed for McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, but one of the aircraft had engine trouble and had to return to California. After a day’s delay, the reunited troupe flew to the Azores and then headed for Morocco, on a flight so stormy that even Hope, usually able to sleep through anything, couldn’t catch a nap. He arrived in Morocco exhausted, then went straight to a charity golf match, followed by a visit to King Muhammed’s palace, a tour of Rabat, and a show in the evening. The next morning he was back on a plane to Spain. During the first seventy-six hours of the trip, Hope figured he got only seven hours of sleep.

He was being greeted by the commanding officer at the Morón Air Base in Spain, when he suffered his first dizzy spell. “The walls of the room we were standing in started closing in on me,” he recalled. “I shook my head to clear it, but the haze was still there.” He was taken to the base hospital for an examination, but after some sleep felt well enough to join that night’s show, which the rest of the cast had started without him.

He soldiered on as the tour resumed its relentless pace: to Madrid, where Lollobrigida made her guest appearance; to Naples, where they did two Christmas Eve shows in the rain aboard the aircraft carrier Forrestal; and to Frankfurt, Germany, where they were feted at a reception thrown by General F. W. Farrell. There Hope had another attack, passing out in the middle of the party. His earlier health scare had been kept quiet, but this one was in public and in front of the journalists along on the trip, and it soon became worldwide news.

Hope vetoed the idea of another hospital visit and, after a night’s sleep, again felt well enough to continue, doing a show at Rhein-Main Air Base and then flying with the troupe to West Berlin. There he got a call from Dolores, who had read the news of his illness and was worried. He told her that he was fine. “Stop lying to me and put your doctors on the phone,” she said. Hope struggled through three more days in Germany and a trip back home through Scotland and Iceland. Dolores was waiting to greet him at the Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank with all four kids, a Christmas tree, and an appointment to see his doctor, Tom Hearn.

Hearn found Hope’s blood pressure elevated and ordered him to rest. But the comedian was soon back at work, overseeing the editing of footage from his Christmas tour. The dizzy spells continued, felling him during a golf game with his friend and PGA tour pro Jimmy Demaret. Now convinced that the ailment related to his eyesight, Hope went to an eye specialist, who diagnosed a blood clot in his left eye and prescribed blood thinners and more rest. Hope canceled a promotional trip to Florida, but continued to work on his next NBC special. During a rehearsal he suffered yet another attack, and his doctors, concerned about the eye’s worsening condition, sent him to New York for a consultation with Dr. Algernon Reese at New York’s Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center.

News of his worsening eye problems prompted alarmist headlines. “Bob Hope to Fly East in Fight to Save Eye,” read one. Doctors in New York confirmed the diagnosis of a blood clot—a blockage in a retinal vein, which caused hemorrhaging and thus his blurred vision. They thought it could be cleared up without surgery, but warned that he could lose his eyesight unless he seriously cut back on his activities.

Hope’s eye troubles prompted an outpouring of concern from his fans. He got thousands of get-well cards, many with medical advice or suggestions of doctors for him to see. Several people offered to donate (or sell, at prices ranging from $3,000 to $50,000) one of their own eyes, to replace the orb that ailed Hope. Shaken by the seriousness of his condition, he talked frankly about his need for rest. “If I had taken a day off in Spain or Africa, I think I would have been okay, but I worked when I was sick,” he told Louella Parsons. Hope “seemed depressed” as he discussed his condition with UPI’s Vernon Scott, who found a changed attitude in the comedian. “He’s quieter now. Less brash,” wrote Scott. Hope seemed determined, finally, to cut back on his frenetic pace. “Nobody moved as fast as I did,” he said. “My physical problems began a few years back when I was doing morning and evening radio programs, a weekly television show, movies, and personal appearances. . . . It was ridiculous. I used bad judgment. The folly was I couldn’t keep the money and I was fighting myself on all mediums.”

Yet Hope’s idea of a slower pace was still enough to wear out most performers. He continued to do his monthly NBC specials for Buick (which continued to bury the competition in the ratings) and made personal appearances throughout the year, including a two-week run at the Cain Park Theater Summer Festival in Cleveland. But he put all his movie work on hold, canceled a promotional tour for his recently completed film Alias Jesse James, and spent more time resting in Palm Springs—even cutting back his golf games from eighteen to nine holes. During the summer he and Dolores vacationed in Scotland, and he took the family on a fishing trip in British Columbia.

It might have been a nice time to bond with the children, but he was past that. The two oldest kids were in college now—Tony at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and Linda at Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles. The two youngest, Nora and Kelly, were just entering their teens, grabbing what little quality time they could with the Hollywood superstar who sometimes showed up for dinner. “Nora was better able to get his attention,” said a cousin. “She laughed at his jokes. She was cute, very vivacious, funny. Kelly was at sea. He was not doing well in school. Being the son of Bob Hope was a difficult role for both of them.”

Although Tony accompanied his father on Hope’s 1957 Far East tour, and Linda appeared with him in 1956 as a mystery guest on the TV game show What’s My Line?, Hope didn’t push the kids to join him in show business. But it was hard for them to escape the shadow of his overwhelming fame. “I felt, growing up, that people were always looking past me, at him,” Linda said years later. “I remember inviting people over to the house, as kids always do, and them making a big fuss, and the parents wanting to get inside and see as much as they could. They were more interested in the whole Bob Hope situation, and they weren’t being my friends.” While at Mount St. Mary’s, Linda—an attractive blonde whose cool good looks reminded some of Grace Kelly—was nominated for homecoming queen of nearby Loyola University. “I was just thrilled that finally my moment had arrived,” she said. “And then I found out that I could be guaranteed to be picked as the queen if my father would show up.” He didn’t, and she wasn’t.

• • •

After a year of sporadically enforced rest because of his eye problems, neither Dolores nor his doctors were happy when Bob insisted on doing another Christmas tour at the end of 1959. The trip was at least more manageable—a relatively short jaunt to Alaska (just admitted to the union as the forty-ninth state), with Jayne Mansfield and young film star Steve McQueen along for the ride. Hope turned the trip into a reunion of his old World War II troupe, bringing along Frances Langford, Patty Thomas, and Tony Romano as well as Colonna, by now a regular on Hope’s tours. When Les Brown’s band was not available, Hope even got Skinnay Ennis, his first radio bandleader, as a replacement, just for old times’ sake.

The publicity-savvy Mansfield hogged most of the spotlight, posing for photographers with a lion cub and taking the stage in a gown so low-cut the men nearly rioted. (When Hope asked if they wanted her to sing, one yelled out, “Just let her breathe!”) At a show in Fairbanks, Hope had another flare-up of his eye problems. When AP reported the story, Hope chewed out Bill Faith, the NBC publicist who had let the news slip out. But otherwise the trip went off without incident, and the show that resulted, which aired on January 13, drew Hope’s highest ratings of the season.

In April 1960 he got another crack at the biggest TV guest spot of all: host of the Academy Awards show. He had not hosted the ceremony on his own since 1955 (when he grappled playfully over an Oscar with Best Actor winner Marlon Brando). For the next two years his sponsor, Chevrolet, barred him from the Oscar show because rival Oldsmobile was one of its sponsors. He returned as one of multiple hosts in both 1958 and 1959. But the 1959 show was a notorious disaster. In a once-in-a-lifetime miscalculation, the show came in twenty minutes short, and Jerry Lewis, the last of six hosts, was forced to ad-lib desperately to fill the time—stretching out a closing sing-along to “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” clowning around and picking up a baton to conduct the orchestra himself—until NBC mercifully cut away. Reviews of the show were scathing. The following year, Hope was back as host all by himself.

“Many changes have been made since our last show,” Hope said at the start of the April 4 telecast from the Pantages Theatre. “We have a new director, a new producer, and a new watch.” He was sharp and fully in control. The show was taking place during an actors’ strike. “What a country,” said Hope. “Only here would you wait in your swimming pool for the boss to improve working conditions.” One of the year’s Oscar-nominated films was On the Beach, based on Nevil Shute’s bestseller about nuclear Armageddon. “The Russians loved it,” said Hope. “They thought it was a newsreel.” He was ubiquitous throughout the evening: introducing each presenter, sprinkling in quips everywhere, both planned and unplanned. When the Best Short Subject award was announced, Ann Blyth accepted for the absent winner, while a bald-headed man was left wandering uncertainly onstage, apparently thinking the duty was his. Hope gently ushered the confused man offstage: “There’s nothing left over.”

As if to thank him for his job in righting the ship, the Academy gave Hope another honorary Oscar—the prestigious Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Ben-Hur was the evening’s big winner, taking home a record eleven awards, but the applause for Hope was the longest and loudest of the night.

Hope would return as solo host of the Oscars for seven of the next nine years, the greatest run of any host in Academy history. His monologues became don’t-miss events: an eight-minute encapsulation of the major films, hot trends, and celebrity gossip of the year in Hollywood—written and rewritten by Hope and his regular crew of writers (with help from others, such as Oscar-show specialist Hal Kanter) right up until airtime and guarded like a state secret.

He joked about big-budget movie spectacles (“Right now Sam Spiegel has more men under arms than NATO”), Liz and Dick’s affair on the set of Cleopatra (“I don’t know how the picture is, but I’d like to make a deal for the outtakes”), the growing sexual frankness on-screen (“One picture got the seal of approval, and the director said, ‘Where have we failed?’ ”). He came armed with good lines, but he had the quickness and agility to handle the unscripted moments too. When a gate-crasher disrupted the 1962 ceremony, bounding onstage to give Hope a bogus Oscar, the host was unflappable: “Who needs Price Waterhouse? All we need’s a doorman.” When the winner of a short-subject award went on too long in his acceptance speech (in the days when acceptance speeches were rarely longer than a few seconds), thanking his wife, his son, and a friend back in Bronxville, Hope commented impeccably, “Well, that saves a telegram.” Even as the shows grew longer and drearier, Hope made them sparkle.

By early 1960 Hope was back to a nearly full schedule of work. He signed a new five-year contract with NBC, after the usual protracted negotiations. He was the network’s eight-hundred-pound gorilla, and he could be demanding and peevish when he didn’t get his way. When NBC couldn’t deliver a Saturday-night time slot that Hope wanted for one of his specials, his agent Jimmy Saphier raised a ruckus and threw Hope’s weight around. “Don’t you think this is a rather strange way for NBC to treat its number one piece of talent,” he wrote the network, “particularly in view of the fact that your contract with Bob Hope is in its final year?”

After a self-imposed layoff of more than a year, Hope’s movie career was also getting back on track. His last film before the layoff, Alias Jesse James, was released in March 1959, and the Western spoof—with Hope playing a New York insurance man who mistakenly sells a policy to Jesse James, then has to go out West to try to keep him alive—was a mild uptick from the disastrous Paris Holiday. Following it, a year and a half later, came a movie that showed a new side of Hope on-screen.

The Facts of Life began with a script by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank about two married suburban neighbors, bored with their respective spouses, who try to have an affair. Panama and Frank originally wanted to cast William Holden and Olivia de Havilland as the couple, but had trouble selling it to a studio. Then they had the idea to refashion it for two comedians: Bob Hope and Lucille Ball.

Hope was wary of the idea at first. “It’s a little straight, isn’t it?” he said of the script. But he told Panama and Frank that he would do it if Lucy agreed. Ball, Hope’s favorite costar, had largely dropped out of movies since her huge success on TV with I Love Lucy and was now partners with her (soon-to-be ex-) husband, Desi Arnaz, in Desilu Studios. She had her own reservations about the film, worried that it would turn into a typical Hope farce. “I don’t want it to be the Road to Infidelity,” she told the screenwriters. But she agreed to do it, and the movie began shooting in June 1960, with co-screenwriter Frank as the director.

The production had its share of problems. Climbing into a rowboat for one scene, Ball slipped and fell, gashing her leg and bruising her face so badly that the production had to shut down for two weeks. While she was recuperating, Frank sprained his ankle on the golf course, and Hope jammed his thumb in a door. The film also posed creative challenges for the two stars. Ball, a more meticulous actor than Hope, worked hard to create a realistic character distinct from her farcical TV persona: “Was I Lucy? Was I Lucy?” she would ask after scenes. At times she pushed director Frank too far. “If you want to direct the picture, I’ll go play golf,” he snapped one day when she became too overbearing.

Hope, on the other hand, had to be steered away from his natural inclination to go for the easy laugh. In one scene, the couple check into a motel to consummate their affair, and the script has Hope making small talk when he enters the room—nice closet, good lamp—to show his nervousness. Hope wanted instead to come into the room and surreptitiously test out the springs of the bed. Frank indulged his star by shooting both versions; Hope’s got more laughs, but Frank ended up using his own.

The Facts of Life is an enjoyable romantic comedy, proof that the two comic stars can handle relatively sophisticated adult material. It is handicapped by Hollywood’s 1950s prudishness about sex (there is none) and by its farcical predictability (on the night of their assignation, Hope’s convertible top won’t go up and they’re drenched in the rain). Hope is restrained and credible in a role that, for once, suits his middle-aged spread, and he has some funny moments: stuck at a Boy Scout meeting, for example, when he’s late for a rendezvous with Ball, squirming as he has to sit through a Scout’s interminable report on smoke signals. But Ball outshines him nearly all the way; indeed, she exposes some of his limitations as a serious actor. Every nuance of her character’s conflicting emotions is registered in her animated face, body language, and line readings. Hope’s inner life, hidden beneath his cool-wiseacre façade, is pretty much a cipher.

Yet The Facts of Life, released in November 1960, earned a healthy $3.2 million at the box office, more than any other Hope film since The Seven Little Foys. Rare for a Hope film, it even picked up five Academy Award nominations, including one for Panama and Frank’s screenplay. (The film won one Oscar, for Edith Head’s costumes.) It was a promising step forward for Hope as a film actor, a move into more intelligent, age-appropriate romantic comedy. Unfortunately, it was the last good film he would ever make.

The start of the 1960s augured big changes for both Hope and the nation. He joked often about the charismatic young senator from Massachusetts who was running for president in 1960: “Do we really want a president who rides for half fare on the bus?” When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, the generational shift registered acutely for Hope—from Dwight D. Eisenhower, Hope’s personal link to World War II, to a new and unfamiliar band of Ivy League–educated New Frontiersmen.

Hope, now fifty-seven, was becoming keenly aware of the passage of time. When he was entertaining the troops in Germany in 1958, a young solider came up to him and brought greetings from his father, who had seen Hope at Guadalcanal. “I entertained his father ! That one line really aged me,” said Hope. His old movies were now on TV—Paramount had sold all of its pre-1948 films, including most of Hope’s classics, to television for $50 million (a deal that Hope publicly complained about, since it gave the actors no residuals)—and the contrast between the brash young movie star of the 1940s and the paunchier, middle-aged Hope was there on the small screen for all to see.

In the world of comedy, too, times were changing. By the end of the 1950s, a new wave of stand-up comics was emerging from the folk clubs and hip nightspots of New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. These comedians—Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart, Mike Nichols and Elaine May—rejected the impersonal, joke-driven style of Hope and the comics of his generation who came out of vaudeville and the borscht belt. The new comedians wrote their own material and developed more individualized styles: doing characters and improvising scenes, using stand-up comedy to explore their own lives, experiences, and neuroses, and to express their often dissenting social and political views.

Hope was a fan of many of these comedians (though he had few of them on his shows). He saw Bruce, the infamous “dirty” comic, perform several times and thought he was brilliant. Once in the early sixties he went to see Bruce at a Florida nightclub. Bruce introduced Hope in the audience and after the show ran into the parking lot to flag him down, asking Hope if he would give Bruce a guest spot on one of his TV shows. Hope laughed him off: “Lenny, you’re for educational TV.”

Yet Bruce and the other new-wave comics were beginning to make Hope look old-fashioned. He was the older generation now, a friend of presidents and court jester for the Establishment—a symbol of everything the younger comics were rebelling against. It was not a role that Hope welcomed, or that would treat him very well.