For his 1960 Christmas tour, the Defense Department gave Hope a break from the arctic cold and the grueling long-distance treks through the Far East and Europe. His destination this time was the sunny Caribbean, for a visit to US bases in Panama, Puerto Rico, Antigua, and El Salvador. The climax of the trip, and its chief raison d’être, was a Christmas Eve visit to the US naval base at Guantánamo, on the southeastern coast of Cuba. Communist leader Fidel Castro had taken control of the island country and was ratcheting up anti-American rhetoric, nationalizing US businesses, and prompting fears that the Soviets were gaining a base of influence just ninety miles from US shores.
Hope brought a troupe of nearly sixty with him aboard the Military Air Transport Service (MATS) plane that left on December 19, among them Hungarian-born beauty Zsa Zsa Gabor, musical-comedy star Janis Paige, singer and former Miss Oklahoma Anita Bryant, and a young crooner named Andy Williams. The flight into Guantánamo had some tense moments, as the pilot had to stick to the approved flying corridor or risk being fired upon by the Cubans. At one point, the entertainers looked out their windows and saw two Cuban planes flying alongside them. “It was scary,” Janis Paige recalled. “There was an awful silence. Nobody knew what to say or what to do—when suddenly they peel off and in their place come four of our fighter planes, with the guys giving us the thumbs-up signal. You could see their faces, they were that close.”
But for many in the group, the most stressful part of the trip was dealing with the prima donna known as Zsa Zsa. Hope appreciated performers who could tough out the often harsh conditions, and he was usually lucky in finding them—troupers such as Frances Langford and Patty Thomas, who didn’t complain about the rough accommodations or having to do their hair and makeup on the fly. Even Jayne Mansfield, the blond bombshell who’d joined him on two previous trips, had her husband, Mickey Hargitay, along to buffer any diva behavior. But Gabor, a minor movie actress better known for her jewels, her accent, and her many husbands, was a high-maintenance problem, complaining about the accommodations, throwing tantrums in her dressing room, and monopolizing the hair dryer.
“Everybody hated Zsa Zsa,” said Andy Williams. “On the trip I got crabs from sitting on a toilet seat, and everybody signed a proclamation wanting me to sleep with Zsa Zsa, so I could give them to her.” Paige, the Broadway musical star who had top billing on the tour, was given the best quarters at Guantánamo, a small house on the base, while the rest of the troupe were assigned Quonset huts. Gabor flew into a rage when she found out, and assistant producer Silvio Caranchini had to plead with Paige to trade rooms with her. “He said, ‘Jan, she’s throwing hysterics. She demands that she has to have your quarters. I’m asking you to do this for Bob’s sake,’ ” Paige recalled. “So I stayed in a Quonset hut with bugs that looked liked B-17s on the ceiling. It was hot and miserable. And she slept in an air-conditioned house that night.”
Hope did two shows at Gitmo, on the day before Christmas and on Christmas night. “Guantánamo,” he began his monologue, “that’s a Navy term meaning ‘Hear you knocking but you can’t come in.’ ” In one sketch Hope and Williams played the husbands of two Waves (Paige and Bryant) who sneak them onto the base in violation of Navy orders. A few days after Hope’s return from his tour, outgoing president Eisenhower formally broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba, and Hope reedited the special to give even more time to the Guantánamo segments. The show, which aired on January 11, 1961, drew some of Hope’s highest ratings yet. Just a few days later John F. Kennedy took office.
The early 1960s, with a glamorous and youthful new president in the White House, were Camelot years for Hope as well. Kennedy and his circle gave Hope a rich new load of comedy material. He joked about the president’s wealth, his family, his hair, and his Ivy League brain trust. “There are so many professors in the cabinet,” Hope said, “you can’t leave the White House without raising your hand.” He took note of the president’s political battles, such as his face-off with the nation’s steelmakers over rising steel prices: “Kennedy is still mad,” Hope said. “He just ordered a plywood Chrysler.” When the president’s youngest brother, Ted Kennedy, won a Senate seat from Massachusetts, Hope told an audience overseas, “It’s been a slow year back home. Only one Kennedy got elected.” As Cold War flash points proliferated around the globe, Hope defused the tension with homegrown wisecracks: “There’s trouble in Cuba, Laos, Vietnam. Things are so bad, last week Huntley tried to jump off Brinkley.” When the Soviets launched their first cosmonauts into orbit and fears mounted that America was losing the space race, Hope tried to buck up morale with gallows humor: “It just proves one thing: their German scientists are better than our German scientists.”
He was more than a comedian; he was a national institution. NBC paid tribute to his life and work in an hour biographical special, featuring behind-the-scenes footage from his 1960 Caribbean tour, interviews with associates such as Mort Lachman and Jimmy Saphier, and reverent narration by the mellow-toned Alexander Scourby. It was Hope’s apotheosis as the nation’s comedian laureate. He narrated a TV documentary on Will Rogers, reinforcing his generational link to the beloved humorist. He continued his tours of military bases during the holidays—back up north to Labrador and Greenland in 1961, another swing through Korea and the Far East in 1962. One of the men who kidnapped Frank Sinatra Jr. in 1963 told an FBI agent that the gang had first considered snatching Hope’s oldest son, Tony, but opted for young Sinatra instead because “Bob Hope is such a good American and had done so much in entertaining troops.”
The awards and honors poured in, growing ever more weighty and prestigious. The senior class at Notre Dame named him the 1962 Patriot of the Year. He was the first actor to get the Screen Producers Guild’s Milestone Award, in a ceremony beamed to US armed forces around the world and highlighted by a congratulatory phone call from President Kennedy. “If there is anybody who has, and still is, doing more to project a shining image of Hollywood,” said Variety, “and he doesn’t answer to the name Bob Hope, who could that party be?” After some initial resistance, the Senate voted to award him the Congressional Gold Medal, in recognition of his work entertaining the troops. But the measure got bottled up in the House Banking Committee, over concerns that singling out Hope (only the third show-business personality to receive the award, after George M. Cohan and Irving Berlin) would open the floodgates to too many other entertainers. Hope was the only comedian in America who could prompt a congressional fight.
As an entertainer, he was in a class by himself. Other comedians played nightclubs or the big Las Vegas showrooms. Not Hope. He preferred stadiums, civic auditoriums, state fairgrounds—venues more fitting for a comedian of the people. He did a week of shows at the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle, drawing crowds so big that an extra matinee had to be added and overflow spectators were seated in boats moored on a lagoon below the stage. In October 1962 he gave another command performance at the London Palladium, entertaining Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip with jokes about America’s own royal family: “We don’t have titles in the United States. No, sir, in America we have just two classes—the people and the Kennedys.” And Bob Hope.
Yet he was still the hardworking vaudeville trouper, traveling the country for one-nighters—both paid concerts and unpaid charity gigs, raising money for local hospitals and Boys Clubs, supporting the projects and worthy causes of friends. One of his favorite cities was Dallas, where his pals included Bob Bixler, a former vaudevillian who did PR for him, and Tony Zoppi, a columnist for the Dallas Morning News, who would take Hope on late-night jaunts to Jack Ruby’s nightclub. When Hope canceled a January 1962 concert at the Dallas Coliseum, Bixler prevailed on him to help bail out the local promoter who got burned, Iva D. Nichols of the Dallas Theater Guild, by doing a makeup concert in June. Hope did the show, unaware that Nichols was being pursued by the IRS and numerous angry creditors. On the night of his concert, federal marshals and sheriffs deputies were at the box office confiscating the ticket proceeds. Hope ended up getting only $4,500 of the $10,000 fee he was promised and found himself dragged into an embarrassing local scandal. “Let’s face it, Bob,” an executive for Neiman Marcus, another participant in the show, wrote him later, “both of us got had.”
As his sixtieth birthday approached, the life milestones were starting to accumulate. In June 1962, his son Tony graduated from Georgetown University, with plans to go to Harvard Law School in the fall. Hope gave the commencement address, accepting an honorary doctorate in front of three thousand graduates, family members, and friends gathered outdoors on the tree-lined campus. “I can’t wait till I get home and have my son read this to me,” Hope said of the Latin diploma. “I did recognize one word—something about ‘negligence.’ ”
Later that summer his brother Jack, a drinker who suffered from liver problems, went into a hospital in Boston for an operation to remove his spleen. After the surgery his organs began to fail and he fell into a coma. He died on August 6, 1962. His unexpected passing was a blow to Hope, who depended on his easygoing and well-liked brother, less for his titular role as producer of Bob’s TV specials than as an adviser, fixer, and all-around security blanket. “He was just a doll,” said Jack Shea, a director of Hope TV shows in those years. “He was the only person who could go in and tell Bob he was full of it.”
Three months later another key member of Hope’s inner circle, longtime publicist Mack Millar, died suddenly of a heart attack. Millar was an old-school hustler, pals with the veteran newspaper columnists who were rapidly being replaced by younger and less compliant TV journalists. Still, he was one of Hope’s most loyal and hardworking advocates, and a mainstay of his powerful publicity team since the early days in Hollywood. Unfortunately, he wasn’t around to see the culmination of one of his biggest projects: his campaign to get Hope the Congressional Gold Medal.
The bill to award Hope the medal was finally extricated from committee and passed by Congress in June 1962. President Kennedy promptly signed it into law. But it hit yet another snag when Congress failed to pass an appropriations bill that included $2,500 for the medal. That left the award hanging for months. Hope was on a fishing trip with his family in British Columbia in September 1963 when a call came that the medal would finally be presented to him at the White House in two days. He hurried to Washington with the family and was at the White House for the ceremony on September 11.
President Kennedy made the presentation before a crowd of two hundred congressmen and other dignitaries on the White House lawn, reading an inscription that praised Hope for his “outstanding service to the cause of democracy throughout the world.” “This is one of the only bills we’ve gotten by lately,” the president joked, getting a big laugh before handing off to the comedian being honored. Hope noted that Kennedy had seen him entertain in the South Pacific when the future president was a PT boat captain during World War II. “The president was a very gay and carefree young man at that time,” Hope said. “Of course, all he had to worry about then was the enemy.” After the ceremony, Milton Berle, who was there for a White House lunch, playfully grabbed the award from Hope and exchanged a few quips with him, giving reporters some fodder for their morning stories. It was a great day for Hope, who cherished the award as the highest recognition of his achievement as a humanitarian and entertainer. “I feel very humble,” Hope said, “although I think I’ve got the strength of character to fight it.”
• • •
Hope was well past humility. In the 1950s, despite his success in movies and radio, he was still something of a comedian on the make, trying to prove himself in the new medium of television. By the early sixties, his dominance in TV was no longer in doubt. He was NBC’s biggest ratings powerhouse and most indispensable star. In 1961 Variety did an analysis of the ratings for the sixty-eight Hope specials since his first one aired in April 1950. Hope won his time period fifty-seven times—a level of consistency that no other TV star could match over such a long stretch. “Hope is the closest anybody has come to batting 1000, over a more-than-decade span in walloping the competition,” the trade paper marveled.
On camera he was thicker around the middle, a little graying at the temples. The posture was more regal (always a half turn to the right, so the camera would highlight the curling-up-to-the-left smile), the pauses longer and more defiant, almost daring the audience not to laugh. His shows took on a more formalized, almost institutional quality: Hope’s annual presentation of the Hollywood Deb Stars, for instance (a selection of up-and-coming movie starlets that Hope began featuring back in the mid-1950s), or, beginning in the 1960s, the college football all-American team, with a Hope one-liner for each player as he trotted onstage to be introduced. The old variety-show format was starting to look a little stodgy. Well after most other NBC shows had switched to color, Hope’s remained in black and white, probably because it was cheaper. (He finally made the changeover in December 1965.) His humor too was sounding more middle-aged, with smug, older-generation quips about rock ’n’ roll fads such as the twist (“the only dance I know where you wear out your clothes from the inside”) or sketches about those crazy, nonconformist beatniks, always with Hope in his fake goatee, doing hepcat jive talk.
His production team was stocked with people who had been with him for years: prop man Al Borden, who first worked with Hope on his Broadway show Roberta; assistant producer Silvio Caranchini and sound technician John Pawlek, who did the advance production work for his overseas tours; cue-card man Barney McNulty and longtime talent coordinator Onnie Morrow. The writing staff too congealed into a tight-knit group that remained remarkably unchanged: Mort Lachman, Hope’s confidant and house intellectual, and his writing partner, Bill Larkin; Les White, who started out writing jokes for Hope in vaudeville, and his partner, Johnny Rapp; Charlie Lee, a corpulent, acid-tongued Englishman whom Hope nicknamed Lipton (because he drank tea), and Gig Henry, a former US intelligence officer in World War II; and Norm Sullivan, a crew-cut member of Hope’s original Pepsodent Show radio team and the only writer who worked solo.
The writers complained a lot, but they mostly enjoyed their indentured servitude with Hope. He was a demanding boss, insatiable for material and possessive of their time. But he always appreciated their skills, credited their work, and knew he couldn’t do without them. “This is all the talent we have, fellas,” he once said, pointing to a script. Said Lachman, “When things go wrong, Hope takes the whip. He’ll work you like a dog. But when the show’s over, he doesn’t get down on his guys. And he won’t let anyone else do it either.”
Lachman was the closest to him. They would play golf together in the afternoons; when Hope would call and bark into the phone, “Now,” Lachman would rush over to meet him at Lakeside. Lachman was typically the last one left in Hope’s dressing room before a show, after everyone else had cleared out and Hope was making final edits to the script and maybe a last-minute change in his wardrobe. Waiting backstage to go in front of the cameras, Bob would sometimes squeeze Mort’s arm until it was black-and-blue—before striding out in front of the audience, the picture of cool. Their relationship was not always smooth. After Jack Hope’s death, Lachman inherited many of the producing duties on Hope’s TV shows. But when Hope didn’t give him the title of producer (it went instead for a time to Hope’s youngest brother, George), Lachman was miffed and quit to work for Red Skelton. Hope quickly made amends, and Lachman tore up his Skelton contract and went back to Hope.
Hope’s sponsors weren’t quite so loyal. As production costs for TV shows increased during the 1950s and early 1960s, it was becoming harder to find sponsors willing to take on one show for an entire season. Hope’s show was one of the costliest on TV—around $350,000 per hour, plus another $50,000 that Hope demanded the sponsor kick in for publicity. That was too steep for Buick, which ended its sponsorship of Hope’s shows in 1961 (switching instead to Sing Along with Mitch, which was cheaper). Hope shopped around for another company willing to sponsor him for the entire season. When he couldn’t find one, he relented and began making deals on a show-by-show basis. His first special of the 1961–62 season (which didn’t air until Christmas) was sponsored by Revlon, and later ones by Beech-Nut, Timex, and even, during the 1962–63 season, his old radio sponsor Pepsodent.
Then, in early 1963, Hope negotiated a major sponsorship deal with Chrysler. The automaker not only agreed to sponsor Hope’s entire 1963–64 season; it wanted to put him on the air every week, as host of a dramatic anthology series, Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre. Hope would film introductions for each of the weekly dramas and star himself in two scripted comedies during the season, along with six of his usual variety specials. The $14 million deal also made Hope Chrysler’s spokesperson and “image man,” the start of a fruitful, decade-long association with the automaker.
Hope’s Chrysler Theatre, which aired on Friday nights during the 1963–64 season, was one of several new network shows (along with The Richard Boone Show and Kraft Suspense Theater) that augured a brief comeback for the dramatic anthology series, in eclipse since the passing of the 1950s golden age of live TV drama. Hope had little to do with the dramatic hours, which were produced at Revue Studios (later Universal Television) and overseen by writer-producer Dick Berg. But they included such notable programs as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a TV adaptation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel, starring Jason Robards; an original teleplay by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright William Inge; and new work by such top writers as Rod Serling and Budd Schulberg. The scripted comedies that Hope starred in were negligible—laugh-track farces such as Have Girls, Will Travel, with Hope playing a frontier marriage broker, and Her School for Bachelors, in which he’s the editor of a Playboy-style girlie magazine. But with his name on one of TV’s most prestigious dramatic series—the winner of three Emmy Awards in its first season—Hope’s TV profile was never higher.
• • •
Coping with enormous fame can be a challenge for any Hollywood celebrity. The adulation, the loss of privacy, the reluctance of underlings to tell you bad news, the shell that forms to protect against the onslaught of people who want favors or money—all can make it difficult, if not impossible, to stay grounded, human, in touch with the world outside of your own narcissistic bubble. In some ways, Bob Hope handled his fame better than most. He wasn’t insecure or uncomfortable in the limelight; he wasn’t a temperamental monster to work for; he didn’t turn to drink or drugs. He played around with women, but never broke up his family. He had a relatively unpretentious lifestyle: a house in Toluca Lake that was spacious but not flashy, pet German shepherds, utilitarian American cars (usually supplied by his sponsors) that he liked to drive himself. He was always happy to greet fans who approached him on the street or in airports, chatting with them and signing autographs.
Yet decades of being one of the most recognizable people in the world, combined with his natural English reserve and an aversion to introspection, led Hope to wall off a great part of himself from outsiders, even those quite close to him. In social settings he could be convivial and charismatic, but also detached and programmed—a rote “How about that” or “Innat great” substituting for real conversation. He would deflect probing questions with jokes or by changing the subject. “He’s shallow in the sense that he’s never taken the time to look into himself,” said Martin Ragaway, who wrote for him in the early 1960s, “and he won’t let others do it either.” Being interviewed by reporters, he could be remote and ungiving. “When he’s not quipping, his conversation is flat, faceless, withdrawn,” wrote a Time magazine reporter who spent time with him in 1963. “He appeared vague and preoccupied, lost in thoughts he couldn’t articulate. He was courteous, gracious and removed. He wasn’t uncooperative. One felt there just wasn’t much there.”
He had a temper, which could erupt when technical foul-ups or other problems occurred on the set. He could get nervous before shows and had show-business superstitions—no whistling in the dressing room or hats on the bed. But pressure never seemed to upset him or ruffle his cool. His calm self-possession had a way of assuaging the insecurities of others. Peter Leeds, a sketch actor who worked with him on TV and tours for years, recalled pitching Hope an idea for a TV show and getting no response for weeks. His anger steadily rising, Leeds finally blew his top and cursed out his boss. “Take it easy,” said Hope, unperturbed. “We’ll get to it.” Leeds was later horrified that he had exploded at Hope. “If it were Danny Thomas or Milton Berle,” he said, “they would’ve thrown me out on my ear.” Hope didn’t.
Yet he expected deference. Art Schneider, who edited many of Hope’s early TV specials, was working late at night on a Christmas show when he got a phone call. “This is Bob,” came the voice on the phone. “Bob who?” said Schneider, who also had a son named Bob. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” Hope snapped. Hal Kanter, who directed some of Hope’s filmed introductions for his Chrysler hours, had a tiff with the star over his wardrobe. Since the intros for several shows were taped in one sitting, Kanter told Hope he needed to change neckties for each. Hope dismissed the idea, saying no one would notice. After Kanter pressed the matter, Hope took him into his dressing room and lectured him, “From now on, don’t argue with me in front of the help. Just do it. Do you get my message?” Kanter said he did—and quit.
Hope hated confrontations. When he was unhappy with a performer or a staff member, he got others to deliver bad news. He wanted to be loved by everyone. He couldn’t understand criticism and would complain to his publicists when he got a bad review or a negative story: “Are you telling these interviewers how much I raise for charity each year, or how much I pay in property taxes?” (The standard answer for each was $1 million.) He never bad-mouthed fellow performers in public and chastised those who repeated nasty gossip. “There’s always some guy who wants to chop a comedian,” Hope told a reporter. “I’ve met these guys everywhere. I’ve heard all the chops. I don’t go in for that. I can understand these guys because I was one of them.” He wasn’t any more. He was Bob Hope.
His cheapness was legendary, if sometimes exaggerated. As producer of his own shows, he watched over expenses like a hawk, signed all the checks, and could balk at the cost of a cab ride or late-night pizzas for the crew editing his specials. Director Sid Smith, who worked on Hope specials in the 1980s, once submitted a $39 receipt for a taxi ride to the airport. Hope objected that the same trip only cost him $27. “I never put in another expense account in all my years with Bob Hope,” said Smith. Bob Alberti, Hope’s musical director in the later years, once finished a recording session in New York City after midnight and had to deliver the audiotape to Hope at a production studio across town. When Alberti arrived and turned in his cab receipt, Hope asked why he couldn’t have taken a crosstown bus. Even a family member, after a stay at the Toluca Lake house, was startled to get a bill from Hope’s office—for a $3.75 long-distance phone call he had made while there.
Lachman and others would leave tips for Hope at restaurants, just to make sure he didn’t shortchange the waiters. Often it wasn’t stinginess so much as sheer inattention. Hope once walked into the officers’ club at Keesler Air Base in Mississippi and ordered “drinks on the house.” Then he left, forgetting to settle the tab. “We were paying it off for the next year,” recalled an officer’s wife who was there.
Bob Mills, a Hope writer in the 1970s and 1980s, saw Hope’s frugality as a function of his competitiveness. Hope hated to miss out on a deal or to feel that he was being taken advantage of. When his writing staff convinced him in the 1980s to get a fax machine (ending the tradition of personally dropping off jokes at the Hope compound), they bought the boss an expensive, fully loaded machine, while the writers got cheaper models at the fleet rate. When Hope found out about it, he asked why he hadn’t gotten the same good deal. “Why did he care? He cared because we are sitting here with a deal that he didn’t get,” said Mills. After he explained to Hope why he needed the more expensive machine, the boss appeared satisfied. Then he thought for a minute and asked, “Why do I need a separate phone line?”
At the same time, Hope raised millions for charity (most of it through the Bob and Dolores Hope Foundation, which he set up in 1962) and was generous in helping out relatives and friends—supporting family members who were broke, staking former colleagues in business ventures, and giving work to old vaudeville pals such as Charlie Cooley and Jack Pepper. Hope appreciated professionalism and would reward it. When Arlene Dahl failed to show up for a guest appearance on one of Hope’s TV shows in the mid-1950s, Hope got Janis Paige to fill in at the last minute. She quickly learned Dahl’s part in a sketch and rehearsed a new musical number. Later she got two paychecks—hers, and the one that Dahl was supposed to get. “Thanks a lot, kid,” Hope wrote in a note. He stayed loyal to his longtime agents, Louis Shurr and Jimmy Saphier, even when MCA made a pitch to take over all of his representation. After Hope read the proposed contract, he asked if MCA would be willing to buy out Shurr and Saphier. “Name a figure,” came the reply. Said Hope, “Well, if they settle for anything less than ten million dollars, I’ll never talk to them again.” That ended the discussion.
He had a Depression-era mind-set. He never forgot his family’s hand-to-mouth existence, and his years of struggle in vaudeville. Though his real estate holdings and other investments made him one of the wealthiest people in Hollywood, he never thought of himself as rich. “Emotionally he’s still the vaudevillian who fought his way up during the Depression,” said Lachman. “To vaudevillians, and to Hope, the only thing that matters is how much money you’ve got in your pocket, how much food in the kitchen, how much you can charge and get away with. The rest is crap.”
Hope ran his sprawling enterprises like a mom-and-pop operation. Though he paid decent salaries and gave generous Christmas gifts to his employees, he provided no medical insurance or retirement benefits for his office staff until the 1990s. He was a hands-on manager of his many ventures, and only he knew the full extent of them. “Dad was always of the mind to divide and conquer,” said his daughter Linda. “He would have all these different compartments and different people handling different things. And he was sort of the hub of the wheel. He knew the whole picture, but not too many other people did. And he kind of liked it that way.”
He was always busy. His appearances at home carried a sense of occasion. When he arrived at family dinners, nearly always late, the clan would often stand to greet him, or his daughter Nora would sing a joking welcome song for him. When the larger extended family got together at the holidays, he could be funny and voluble or drift into stretches of impenetrable silence. “Even within the family it felt like he was special,” said Justine Carr, a cousin. “It didn’t feel like he was a dad; he was always Bob Hope. Everyone was on notice when he was around—waiting to see, was he going to be attentive, or aloof?”
“He was an impersonal guy in a lot of ways,” said nephew Tom Malatesta. “I think everything else in his life was not as important as what he was doing for a living. Could he sit at the table and tell jokes and entertain? Absolutely. But that’s what he did. He was Bob Hope, twenty-four/seven.”
One houseguest who got an inside look at the Hope home life in those years was John Guare, the future playwright (The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation), who was best friends with Hope’s son Tony at Georgetown. After graduating in 1963, Guare drove cross-country with Tony and was about to start an intern job at Universal Studios when he got his draft notice. While he was trying to sort out his draft status and enlist in the reserves, Dolores gave Guare an open-ended invitation to stay with the family in Toluca Lake. He wound up living there for nearly ten months.
His first Hope family dinner was memorable. “We sat down for dinner, and everybody turned quiet,” Guare recalled. “Suddenly doors open on either side of the fireplace, and maybe eight men come in with enormous white cards, with jokes written on them. They stood around us at the table, and one by one Mr. Hope would say, ‘Yes, no, yes . . .’ No reaction to the jokes—just ‘That’s funny’ or ‘No, put that over there.’ He was building his act. And that’s what you did for dinner.”
Yet Guare found it a warm and bustling household, thanks largely to Dolores and her spirited family—her mother, Theresa, who lived with them, and her sister, Mildred, who was often around. Both were streetwise, no-nonsense New Yorkers who helped keep the home lively and grounded. “You could imagine Theresa out on the sidewalk on Tenth Avenue playing cards with the girls,” said Guare. “They were rich people; they were stars. But in a sense they weren’t used to it. They had this glamorous house, but they were determined to keep the Tenth Avenue–ness of it.” Dolores ran a tight ship, with a large household staff and a sign-up sheet for family members who would be joining for dinner, and even when Bob was around, one had a sense that his bags were never unpacked. But any tension over his frequent absences was kept well hidden. “It was not a house full of undercurrents,” said Guare. “There was not a threat in the air, or wariness. It was a genuinely pleasant house.”
Another outsider who got a close-up glimpse of the Hope household in those years was Tony Coelho, an aspiring seminary student and later a six-term California congressman. After graduating from Loyola University in 1964, he was diagnosed with epilepsy, a disease that disqualified him from seminary school and estranged him from his parents, Portuguese-born Catholics who regarded it as evidence of possession by the devil. Unable to get a driver’s license or a job, Coelho was close to suicide when a psychologist at Loyola connected him with Dolores Hope. She offered to give him a place to live while he tried to piece his life together.
Coelho spent nine months with the Hopes, living in their guest suite above the garage and becoming close friends with Kelly, the one Hope child still living at home. It was a heady experience: dinner with Martha Raye, phone calls from Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson during the 1964 presidential campaign. (Hope was a Goldwater supporter; Johnson was trying to make sure that support stayed private.) The Hopes had other houseguests, among them a Standard Oil heiress who hired a pianist to play for her while she painted in the Hope backyard. “They obviously had a lot of money,” said Coelho. “But they didn’t flash it or try to impress you with it. They were regular people, fun to be around.”
The stay helped turn his life around. “The Hopes were very supportive, just by accepting me. After going through suicide and family rejection and questioning the Church and my religion, all of a sudden getting this opportunity—I was just overwhelmed.” After Hope suggested that Coelho go into politics instead of the ministry, he landed a staff job with a Democratic congressman from California, Fred Sisk. When Hope found out, he was dismayed that it was a congressman he’d never heard of. “If I knew you were serious about it,” he told Coelho, “I could have got you with somebody who had a name.”
“He was very kind to me,” said Coelho. “He seemed to be a guy who knew himself and was in control of himself. I never felt that he was hiding anything. The only thing I picked up was that he was protecting himself. I think he always expected people to take advantage.” When Coelho moved out, Hope sent him to a Bank of America branch and told him to borrow as much money from Hope’s account as he needed. Hope asked only one thing in return: that Coelho promise never to write anything about his time living there. “There was no contract; he knew that he couldn’t stop me,” said Coelho. “But I felt it was interesting that he had to ask. It told me that he had been hurt. I don’t think he let many people get to know the real Bob Hope.”
• • •
As he entered his sixties, Hope continued his almost superhuman work pace: star of TV comedy specials and host of a weekly drama series, a couple of feature films a year, and a full schedule of personal appearances that kept him constantly on the move. Requests for his presence to help one worthy cause or another poured in at a rate of fifty a day, and he accepted as many as he could pack in. “Your hospital needs a new wing? Your church a vestry? You’ve got a flock of juvenile delinquents and no gymnasium? Or a Man of the Year Award that’s not working? Your man is Bob Hope,” wrote Dwight Whitney in a TV Guide profile. “At times the world seems made up exclusively of ‘people I can’t disappoint.’ ”
The nonstop travel satisfied an ex-vaudevillian’s love of the road (and gave him more freedom for his extramarital dalliances), but it became a drain on his time and energy. “It was something that obviously called out to him,” said his daughter Linda. “But many times he would leave his television shows and films sort of orphan children out there. They kind of got done, but they weren’t necessarily his main interest.” Movies had always been Hope’s top priority; he considered himself a Hollywood star first, while TV was simply what he did for a living. By the 1960s, the movies too seemed to be getting short shrift. The scripts were getting worse, and Hope’s performances more perfunctory and distracted—a far cry from the energetic, committed comic actor of twenty or even ten years earlier.
After his well-received 1960 romantic comedy The Facts of Life, Hope continued to flirt with more mature romantic-comedy roles, but with much less success. In Bachelor in Paradise, released in November 1961, he plays an author of bestselling books about his globe-trotting bachelor lifestyle. When he is forced to return to the United States because of income tax problems, his publisher convinces him to move into a California bedroom community and write about American suburban mores. There he encounters a lot of nosy neighbors and randy housewives (and one conveniently available single, played by Lana Turner). But the comedy is mostly hackneyed sitcom stuff: washing machines overflow when they’re filled with too much detergent, dinners go up in smoke when the oven is left on too long, and neighbors are always walking in on each other without knocking at just the wrong moment. Hope delivers his wisecracks mechanically and can’t muster a real reaction to anything on-screen. Never before has he seemed so disengaged.
Following his reunion with Crosby in The Road to Hong Kong, Hope starred in another romantic comedy, Critic’s Choice, released in April 1963. Adapted from a Broadway play by Ira Levin, it casts Hope as a New York theater critic who must decide whether to review a play written by his wife (Lucille Ball in her fourth and last film with Hope). The part seems all wrong for Hope—the last person one could imagine sitting down to write a theater review—and the contortions to turn it into a Hope vehicle destroy any sliver of credibility. In a ludicrous slapstick climax, he shows up sloshed for his wife’s Broadway opening (one of Hope’s rare drunk scenes), gets shunted to the balcony because the show has already started, winds up dangling from his heels over the orchestra seats—and still manages to get back to the office in time to write a devastating pan of the play for the morning paper.
In Call Me Bwana, released two months later, Hope was at least more in his comfort zone. He plays a travel writer who is sent to Africa by the US government to find a moon rocket that has crashed in the jungle. The character harks back to Hope’s lecherous cowards of old: a timid New Yorker whose bogus adventure-travel books were actually written from the safety of his apartment. “The only wild animal I wanna see is the cigarette girl at the Stork Club,” he says. “And I carry a gun when I’m with her.” But with a lumpy script, lazy direction by Gordon Douglas, and a costar, Anita Ekberg, who provides little but decoration, the safari hits a dead end pretty quickly. The self-indulgence of the whole enterprise is epitomized by a cameo appearance by Arnold Palmer, who shows up in the middle of the jungle for a game of golf with Hope. He’s there because Hope needed a golf partner during the filming.
Produced by Harry Saltzman and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli—who were just finishing up their first James Bond film, Dr. No—Call Me Bwana was originally supposed to be shot in Kenya, but political instability there forced a switch to London’s Pinewood Studios. Hope didn’t mind too much since he had begun a relationship with Rosemarie Frankland, a Welsh beauty who had won the title of Miss World, at age eighteen, at a ceremony hosted by Hope in the fall of 1961.
Hope took Frankland on his 1961 Christmas trip to the Arctic, supported her when she moved to Los Angeles to pursue a film career, and gave her a small part in his 1965 movie I’ll Take Sweden. “Bob admitted to me that the great love of his life was Rosemarie Frankland,” said Hope’s publicist Frank Liberman, who was often on the receiving end of phone calls from Frankland when she needed money and couldn’t reach Hope. The relationship, according to Liberman, lasted for nearly thirty years, but her movie career never took off, and Frankland died of a drug overdose in 2000. (She wasn’t the only former Hope girlfriend to meet a similar sad end. Ursula Halloran, the publicist he was involved with in the late fifties, was found dead of a drug overdose in November 1963. Barbara Payton, the former starlet who told the tale of their 1949 fling in Confidential magazine, turned to drugs and prostitution as her career fell apart and drank herself to death in 1967, at age thirty-nine.)
Hope’s next film, A Global Affair, was a more high-minded project. He plays a low-level employee at the United Nations who inherits a baby abandoned there late on a Friday when he’s the only one left working. When no one can decide what to do with the infant, Hope announces he will give the baby to the most deserving nation, then gets plied by an array of international beauties, each trying to get him to pick her country. Shot partially on location at the UN, the movie is a mix of curdled sex farce (Hope’s bachelor neighbor, played by Robert Sterling, uses the infant to rouse the mothering instincts of every sexy gal in the vicinity) and promotional brochure for the United Nations—it was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Film Promoting International Understanding. Swiss actress Lilo Pulver brightens up the movie with a charming turn as a Russian agent trying to persuade Hope of the glories of the Soviet state. (Katharine Hepburn could have taken a few lessons from her in The Iron Petticoat.) But Hope once again looks bored with the whole sorry affair.
Director Jack Arnold hated the film so much that he demanded his name be taken off the credits (though it’s still there), complaining that producer Hal Bartlett ruined the film in the editing. But Hope was a problem too—so wedded to his cue cards that Arnold instructed his cameraman to make up technical problems so they would have to shoot each scene at least six times, by which point Hope would presumably have learned his lines. “Bob Hope lives in his own world,” said Arnold. “He comes in, and does his work, and doesn’t socialize with any of the cast—which doesn’t mean that he’s mean, or doesn’t joke around with people. It’s just that he is a very self-centered gentleman. He doesn’t bother to even learn the script, and sometimes, I think, he hasn’t read it.”
• • •
Even as the quality of his work was declining, Hope continued to be a master at promoting it. Every NBC special would be preceded by a slew of newspaper stories, drawn from Hope’s round of phone interviews with TV columnists across the country. He played an active, hands-on role in planning the publicity campaigns for all of his movies. Before the release of his 1959 Western comedy Alias Jesse James, for example, Hope proposed a gala premiere in St. Louis, complete with a Western-style fashion show, and wanted to fly to three cities for simultaneous premieres on the same day. He suggested a magazine feature story on “Friendship in Show Business,” in which some of the Western actors who had cameos in the film, such as Gary Cooper and Roy Rogers, would talk about their longtime friendship with Hope, and told his publicists to get a magazine to do a cover story on him and costar Rhonda Fleming. “I explained to Bob that the magazines are going for stars like Natalie Wood and the younger set,” Hope PR man Arthur Jacobs wrote in a memo relaying Hope’s wishes to the Paramount publicists, “but Bob has something to offer and that is, if we can get a cover he will plug the magazine on his Buick specs.”
Hope also pushed the novel idea of promoting his movies on television. He and Crosby had done TV ads for Road to Bali, and in 1962 Hope got satirist Stan Freberg to film some commercials for The Road to Hong Kong. “The film industry needs a positive approach to sell its pictures on TV,” Hope told Variety. “They’re still sort of laying back and not reaching people like they should. Why aren’t they selling pictures on station breaks, for example? They should have TV campaigns to make the people want to go out and see films.” Thirty years later, such saturation TV campaigns would become de rigueur for every major Hollywood release. Hope, once again, was a pioneer.
Meanwhile, he was expanding his brand more aggressively and with more ingenuity than anyone else in Hollywood. Hope wasn’t just a movie and TV star. He was a bestselling author (his fifth book, I Owe Russia $1200, came out in May 1963) and a recording artist too (the monologue from his 1958 Moscow trip was released as a Decca LP in 1963, with a Hope appearance at Notre Dame University on the flip side). He got his name plastered on countless awards, honorary diplomas, and an occasional building—donating $800,000 to Southern Methodist University for the Bob Hope Theater, which broke ground in 1965. He bought a sixteen-hundred-acre ranch in Simi Valley, once used as a set for movie Westerns, and renamed it Hopetown, with ambitious plans to turn it into a Western-themed amusement park. “It’ll be Southern California’s answer to Mount Rushmore,” Hope said. And in perhaps his greatest marketing coup of all, Hope got his own golf tournament.
The Bob Hope Desert Classic had its origins in the old Thunderbird Invitational, which began in 1952 at the Thunderbird Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California. When the tournament ran into money troubles and had to shut down in 1959, a group of Palm Springs area golf boosters, not wanting to give up a valuable weekend on the PGA Tour, got together and fashioned a new tournament to replace it, the Palm Springs Golf Classic. The plan was to make it a pro-am event, played over five days on four different courses in the Palm Springs area; each foursome of pros and amateurs would play one round on each of the four courses, with the fifth and final day reserved for the pros alone.
The tournament debuted in 1960 and struggled financially for a couple of years, until two of its founders, Milt Hicks and Ernie Dunlevie, came up with the notion of recruiting Hope as its celebrity front man, to compete with the other major pro-am tournament on the PGA Tour, the Bing Crosby Invitational in Pebble Beach. In 1963 they approached Hope with the idea in the locker room at the O’Donnell Golf Club in Palm Springs. Always competitive with his friend Crosby, Hope didn’t take long to agree. After a year’s delay while the tournament worked out some tax problems (the backers didn’t want Hope to be linked to any negative publicity), Hope came on board, bringing along Chrysler as tournament sponsor.
The Bob Hope Desert Classic made its debut the first week of February in 1965. NBC paid $100,000 for the rights to televise it (matching the amount it paid for Crosby’s tournament), and Hope wrangled dozens of celebrities to play in the event, among them Kirk Douglas, Lawrence Welk, Bob Newhart, and New York Mets manager Casey Stengel. The mammoth field included 128 PGA pros and 384 amateurs; a battalion of 160 NBC executives and production people were on hand for the TV coverage; and the week’s festivities included a lavish Saturday-night dinner-dance hosted by Hope. Billy Casper won the tournament by a stroke over Arnold Palmer, and former president Dwight D. Eisenhower was there to congratulate the winner at the eighteenth green.
In the years that followed, the Hope Desert Classic surpassed the Crosby as the most star-studded event on the PGA Tour. Hope lured in not just top Hollywood celebrities, but sports stars such as Johnny Bench, astronauts such as Alan Shepard, and even presidents. Gerald Ford, who retired to the Palm Springs area after leaving the White House, was a regular participant, as well as a frequent golfing partner for Hope (and target of many jokes about Ford’s errant golf shots). Eisenhower never played in the tournament, but he was a regular guest of honor. When he died, proceeds from the tournament went to build a hospital in his name, the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, which broke ground in 1969 on eighty acres of land donated by Hope.
The Hope Classic was not a favorite of many of the PGA touring pros, mainly because it forced them to play for four days with celebrity amateurs, who were not always the best golfers. (Crosby, a more serious golfer, had higher standards for the amateurs he invited to play. Hope was more willing to let duffers play if they had big names and could entertain the crowd.) But as one of the first events of the PGA year, with a stellar lineup of golfers playing in the golden desert sunshine while the rest of the country shivered, Hope’s tournament became one of the highest-rated TV events on the PGA Tour—and an invaluable marketing tool for the booming Palm Springs area.
In the early years, Hope would play all four of the amateur rounds. Later he scaled back to just an opening-day round, and eventually, as swinging the club got to be harder, to just ceremonial duties, hitting an opening drive to launch the tournament and then retiring until a final appearance to crown the winner. Each year he would host a Monday-night black-tie gala at the Riviera Hotel, always with surprise Hollywood guest stars. Though he used his clout and connections to keep the tournament packed with celebrities, Hope left the actual running of it to others. “He never came to a board meeting,” said Dunlevie. “He never told us what he’d like to do or how he’d like to do it.” One year the tournament was played on the new, extremely difficult PGA West Stadium Course in La Quinta, and fifty-two pros later signed a letter complaining about the course and refusing to play it again. “Milt and I went over to see Hope and said, ‘Bob, did you see all the complaints? We gotta find another golf course.’ And he said, ‘Why? Look at all the publicity we got.’ I think that was the only meeting of substance we ever had with him.”
Hope was a good amateur golfer and worked hard at his game, getting tips from every pro he knew, and he knew practically all of them. At his peak, in the early 1950s, he carried a 6 handicap, though it was edging into the low double digits by the mid-1960s. He could drive the ball around 230 yards, had a graceful swing (once compared to Fred Couples’s) and was “without doubt one of the best chippers and putters I’ve ever seen,” according to Lakeside caddy Eddie Gannon. Golf relaxed Hope and provided his main form of exercise, along with the late-night walks that he would routinely take before bed in later years. He shared a love of the game with Dolores, who was almost as good a golfer as he. “He could hit the ball farther, but around the green, her short game was impeccable,” said Mort Lachman, who played with both.
Hope used golf to cement relationships with powerful people—politicians, generals, corporate bigwigs. “He would do a benefit for, say, John Deere tractors,” said Linda Hope, “and then he’d go out on the golf course with the people in the company who played golf. And the head of John Deere might bring along other people who were also company heads, and so Dad would make a nice connection there. In years later it gave him access to a lot of these corporate guys, who had planes and could fly him where he needed to go. He was very smart with that kind of thing.”
He was a walking advertisement for golf, from his widely publicized fund-raising matches with Crosby during World War II, to his constant jokes and references to the game in his radio and TV monologues. Along with Eisenhower, the golf-playing president, and Arnold Palmer, golf’s first TV superstar, Hope was one of the three people who did the most to popularize golf in America during its boom years of the 1950s and 1960s.
“He was a fair golfer,” said Palmer. “He shot mostly in the eighties. But he worked hard at it, and he was a great fan of the game. He and his tournament brought untold benefits to the game of golf.” Palmer, a greenskeeper’s son who learned to play golf on a public course in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, was golf’s great working-class hero. Hope, by contrast, was a country-club guy. But his zeal for the game played a major role in raising the sport’s profile and attracting new players to it. “Palmer got the blue-collar guys,” said Dunlevie. “Hope got the white-collar guys. People could say, ‘He’s an ordinary golfer—he’s not any better than I am.’ That encouraged a lot of people who weren’t interested before.”
He played on more than two thousand courses over his golfing lifetime—from Palm Springs to Scotland, in Korea and Vietnam, once on a course that filled the inside of a racetrack in Vienna. He made five holes in one and reputedly once beat Ben Hogan in a round. He published a bestselling memoir about the game, Confessions of a Hooker: My Lifelong Love Affair with Golf, cowritten by Golf Digest editor Dwayne Netland. Hope started bringing a golf club onstage with him when he entertained, an ever-present prop that became, along with his ski-slope nose, his most recognizable trademark. He even began carrying a golf club with him on his late-night walks—ostensibly for protection. As the tumult of the 1960s began to engulf him, he would need it.