Bob Hope’s movie career ended with a sad flourish. Cancel My Reservation, his last starring vehicle, was the first Hope movie ever to open at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. The venerable movie palace, the last in America to offer live stage shows along with its film presentations, was having trouble finding G-rated movies suitable for its family audience, and Hope’s sorry effort was apparently one of the few to fill the bill. It opened in October 1972, accompanied by a stage show called, fittingly, “In One Era and Out the Other.”
It had been three years since Hope’s last movie, How to Commit Marriage, with Jackie Gleason. He had flirted with a couple of other projects since then: another film with Gleason, The Bride Wore Blinkers, about two con men who smuggle a racehorse into Ireland (Bing Crosby was penciled in to play an Irish priest); and a comedy by writer-director David Swift (The Parent Trap), with Hope as a small-town politician whose swinging past comes back to haunt him. When neither got off the ground, Hope turned to a Western novel by Louis L’Amour that he had optioned, intending to produce it as a straight Western with other stars. Instead, he asked screenwriters Arthur Marx and Bob Fisher, who had worked on I’ll Take Sweden and Eight on the Lam, to retool it as a comedy vehicle for himself.
Marx and Fisher protested that the story, about the murder of a Native American girl and the theft of tribal land by greedy real estate developers, wasn’t suitable for a Hope comedy. But they came up with a treatment anyway, casting Hope as the stressed-out host of a TV talk show in New York City, who travels to Arizona for a rest and stumbles onto the tribal intrigue. Hope, eager for another film role, bought it. The film was produced jointly by Hope Enterprises and NBC and shot on location in Arizona in August and September of 1971, with a supporting cast that included Eva Marie Saint as Hope’s wife, Keenan Wynn as a local sheriff, and Ralph Bellamy as the villainous real estate developer.
It was not a happy set. To direct the film, Hope turned not to one of his reliable old-timers—most of them by now retired or dead—but to a relative newcomer, TV director Paul Bogart (later the director of nearly a hundred episodes of All in the Family). The two were at odds from the start. Bogart was upset that Hope, in his usual manner, sent the script out to his writers for punching up and inserted gag lines wherever he could. Bogart fumed when Hope would arrive late to the set (in the broiling Arizona summer, he was the only one with an air-conditioned trailer) and would then ask Bogart to restage the scene he had just set up. They even argued about young costar Anne Archer. Hope thought she wasn’t sexy enough. “She’s a beautiful woman; what do you want her to do?” asked Bogart. Hope replied, “Can’t she vamp a little, like Zsa Zsa?”
By the end of the filming, Bogart was a nervous wreck. “We argued about everything,” he said. “The tensions were terrible. But he was in charge, and he wasn’t going to let anybody tell him what to do. I kept calling my agent and saying, ‘Get me off this thing.’ He said, ‘You can’t.’ I was condemned.” Bogart was reduced to sending Hope letters, begging him to fix some of the more egregious things in the editing. The last straw came in New York City, where the film’s final scene was shot on location in Rockefeller Plaza. Hope was late to the set as usual. While waiting, Bogart set up the shot, but when Hope arrived, he wanted it changed. Bogart exploded. “You are fucking impossible!” he screamed at Hope, as hundreds of bystanders watched from behind rope lines. After the scene was shot and the film wrapped, Bogart checked himself into the hospital, suffering from pneumonia.
Cancel My Reservation was no better than it deserved to be. The mix of comedy and murder-mystery might have worked twenty or thirty years before, when Hope could do that sort of thing in his sleep. Now he actually does look asleep—tossing off gag lines mechanically, walking through a series of lame comedy set pieces (a breakneck ride on the back of a motorcycle, reprised from I’ll Take Sweden; a climb to the top of a mountain to consult an old Indian guru, played by Chief Dan George). The film’s run at Radio City was interrupted by a musician’s strike, which shut down the theater for two days. Even without the labor problems, it was a box-office dud. On one Wednesday night, Variety reported, just six hundred of the theater’s sixty-two hundred seats were filled.
After that, Hope and NBC dissolved their moviemaking partnership. Hope continued for years to look for other film properties. But except for a couple of cameo roles (as an ice cream vendor in 1979’s The Muppet Movie and a golfer in Spies Like Us in 1985), Cancel My Reservation was his last big-screen feature. He desperately wanted to produce and star in a film biography of Walter Winchell, the famed gossip columnist whom he had known back in the Broadway days, but he couldn’t get an acceptable script, and he was already too old for the part. Hope even tried to buy the screen rights to Neil Simon’s hit Broadway comedy The Sunshine Boys, hoping to costar in it with Crosby. But Simon refused, unwilling to let his play about two bickering ex-vaudeville partners be turned into a vehicle for the Road picture team. “To my way of thinking, you and Bing would simply overpower the material,” he wrote Hope, explaining his decision. The main characters were modeled on the vaudeville team of Smith and Dale, Simon said, and “not only are their appearance, mannerisms and gestures ethnically Jewish, but more important, their attitudes are as well. And if the audience would believe that Bob and Bing could portray two old Jews, then John Wayne should have been in Boys in the Band.”
• • •
The second inauguration of Richard Nixon, coming just as a peace agreement was being reached to end the Vietnam War, was a festive occasion in Washington, with a record five inaugural balls. Hope, Nixon’s best friend in Hollywood, naturally had a big part in the celebration, joining Frank Sinatra as cohost of an “American Music Concert” at the Kennedy Center on the night before the inauguration, with the first family in attendance. But it was not one of Hope’s finest hours.
For one thing, his cohost didn’t show up. Sinatra, slated to emcee the first half of the show before handing off to Hope, canceled at the last minute, reportedly peeved because the Secret Service wouldn’t allow comedian Pat Henry, one of his Vegas pals, to be added to the bill. Art Linkletter was a late fill-in, and he was impressed when Hope volunteered to take out some jokes from his monologue that overlapped with Linkletter’s. But Hope was less cooperative about adhering to the strict schedule the Secret Service had set for the entertainment, timed to coincide with the comings and goings of the president and other dignitaries.
First, Hope was late getting onstage, causing an awkward delay as Nixon and the rest of the audience stood applauding for him, and the orchestra had to repeat the opening bars of “Thanks for the Memory” three times before he appeared. During his monologue Hope had trouble seeing the cue cards and kept calling for the lights to be turned up. Then, when he ignored warnings to wrap up his performance, his microphone was abruptly shut off and a curtain lowered behind him, as singer Vikki Carr came out for her number. When Hope finally retreated backstage, he threw a fit, reducing a young stage manager to tears. After Carr finished, Hope returned to the stage to do the rest of his truncated monologue, then abruptly left the theater. “The monologue was emasculated,” recalled a member of Hope’s entourage who was there. “He comes offstage pissed. The kid with the headphone starts crying. People are saying, ‘Bob, calm down.’ He says, ‘Dolores, we’re going over to see Van Cliburn.’ And he walked out.”
It was a bad omen for the start of President Nixon’s second term. Before the end of the year, Hope’s good friend Spiro Agnew was forced to resign as vice president, following charges that he had accepted bribes while governor of Maryland and as vice president. Then came the unfolding revelations about the Watergate break-in. Hope at first made light of the scandal that would ultimately drive Nixon from the presidency. “I want to thank the Watergate committee for making room for me,” he said during the televised Watergate hearings. “Just shows, there’s nothing one bunch of comedians won’t do for another.” But as the scandal widened, Hope grew increasingly uncomfortable with the subject. At a Weight Watchers rally at Madison Square Garden, he was booed for making some Watergate cracks that were deemed too pro-Nixon. “I wish they’d flush the whole thing and forget it,” he said before a group of veterans in Columbia, South Carolina. Soon Hope had flushed Watergate from his monologues entirely, saying he thought the subject was overdone and the scandal blown out of proportion. “I think dragging this thing on for years and years is giving dirty politics a bad name,” he told a Playboy interviewer in August 1973. “Every administration has been plagued by some kind of scandal or other. The whole thing has had a Mack Sennett feel to it. Actually, I don’t know whether they ought to get them into court or central casting.”
In the charged atmosphere of the times, Hope’s jokes were sounding increasingly tepid and hackneyed—merely waving at topical issues, before deflecting them with formula gag lines. “The US is so short of oil, we may have to start draining Dean Martin’s hair,” he quipped during the 1973 oil crisis. “You’ve heard of Wounded Knee?” he said, referring to the Native American protest site in South Dakota. “How about the Battle of April 15—Wounded Wallet!” His delivery too was growing more rigid and imperial: the joke, the stare, the laugh, the next setup. No more “savers” when he stumbled on a line, or when a joke fell flat—or much acknowledgment of the audience at all. He was Mount Rushmore with cuff links.
His TV specials as a whole were stodgier than ever. Guest stars such as Ann-Margret or John Denver would perform their musical numbers, exchange scripted patter with Hope, and read the cue cards in sketches. But Hope showed little spontaneity or connection with his guests. Jonathan Winters, one of the few younger comics Hope booked on his shows (with the exception of Phyllis Diller, stand-up comics were not allowed to do monologues on Hope’s shows, so as not to compete with the star), was put off by Hope’s inflexible working style. When Winters would stray from the script and improvise during a sketch, Hope would freeze him with a warning: “Stay on the cards, kid.” “If the other guy got a laugh, it made him uneasy,” said Winters. “Anybody who stepped into his arena bothered him. He was taken with himself and his own importance. He was not a fun guy to be with.”
He wasn’t a lot more fun at home. To celebrate his seventieth birthday, on May 29, 1973, Dolores organized a big family get-together, inviting cousins and their children from Cleveland and around the country to spend the July 4th week at their Toluca Lake home. It was a lively bonding experience for the clan; the kids were scattered in sleeping bags throughout the house, the backyard pool area was turned into a playground, and Dolores organized a series of day trips to Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, and other local attractions. Bob was there only in spurts. “He was usually at dinner, but very busy,” recalled Avis Truska, the daughter of Hope’s late brother Sid. “He’d sneak away and we’d say, ‘Where’s Uncle Bob?’ When he was at dinner, he was often very quiet. I remember Dolores once said, ‘Bob, why don’t you say anything?’ And he said, ‘What do you want me to say?’ ”
Among the excursions Dolores arranged for the family was a trip to Palm Springs, for a tour of the extravagant new house she and Bob were building. Since buying their first home there in the 1940s, the Hopes had become honored first citizens of the ritzy desert community: Dolores a prime mover behind the Eisenhower Medical Center in nearby Rancho Mirage, and Bob host of the annual golf tournament that was the area’s biggest national showcase. They threw many parties at their house on El Alameda street, including an annual Thursday-night dinner during the week of the Hope Classic—a convivial, serve-yourself affair, with Dolores helping cook the pasta, tables set up on the back lawn, and friends and family members mingling with the tournament golfers and Hollywood celebrities.
But Dolores wanted a bigger showplace, and to design it she hired renowned architect John Lautner. A disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright’s, Lautner had designed a widely admired house in Palm Springs for interior decorator Arthur Elrod—a space-age structure with a conical roof and circular living room, which had been used as a set in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever. Dolores got Lautner to design a similar modernist house for the Hopes, with a twenty-nine-thousand-square-foot, dome-shaped roof, perched dramatically on a hillside overlooking the main highway below.
But on July 23, 1973, with construction well under way (and just three weeks after the Hope clan had come down for a tour), a spark from a welder’s torch accidentally set fire to the plywood covering the roof. Every fire truck and volunteer firefighter in Palm Springs was called to the scene, as passersby watched the blaze from the highway below. By the time the fire was brought under control, an hour and a half later, the house was all but destroyed.
Hope’s first instinct, naturally, was to make jokes about it: “We had a little problem with the Palm Springs fire department. We forgot to call for a reservation.” His second was to file lawsuits. Construction was put on hold for years, leaving the charred shell of the house in full view from the valley below, an eyesore that prompted much grumbling from the locals. Building was finally resumed in 1978, after the Hopes had recovered $430,000 in damages—from the contractor, from the ironworks company that did the welding, and from Hope’s own lawyers, who had neglected to buy fire insurance.
• • •
As he entered his seventies, Hope still looked like a man at least ten years younger. He began using a new makeup man, Don Marando, who was doing Robert Goulet’s hair at NBC when a Hope assistant asked if he would take a crack at Bob’s thinning thatch. Marando took one look at Hope’s “Eddie Cantor haircut—waitress black, twenty hairs on his head”—and said he couldn’t do anything until Hope let it grow out. Three weeks later he was summoned to Hope’s house at 10:00 p.m. “Can you do something now?” asked Hope. Marando set to work, applying some ash-brown color, using an ebony pencil in spots, leaving the longish sideburns gray, and giving it a blow-dry to fluff up the few strands that remained atop his head. (Marando also had a toupee made for Hope, but he never wore it.) Hope, the old vaudevillian, liked to do his own makeup, but Marando took over that as well: “Watching him throw on that pancake, I said, ‘You remind me of a monkey throwing on shit.’ ” Marando was on call from then on, doing Hope’s hair and makeup for nearly all his TV specials, traveling with him around the world, and becoming another fixture in Hope’s large and loyal entourage.
Hope’s age was also belied by his workaholic pace. Along with six or seven NBC specials a year and guest appearances on many more shows, Hope averaged at least three personal appearances a week: a nonstop schedule of trade conventions, college concerts, state fairs, Boy Scout jamborees, Rotary Club luncheons, cerebral palsy benefits, hotel-room engagements, and summer-theater gigs. His going rate by the early seventies was $30,000 a night, but he did many charity events for free and was always ready to hop on a plane to pick up another award or honorary college degree (one from Pepperdine in April 1973 was his twenty-second, according to the running count kept by his staff). With Vietnam finally behind him, Hope spent Christmas at home in 1973, for the first time in nearly twenty years. But he hardly took the holiday off, making a tour of veterans’ hospitals in California and traveling to Washington to visit the National Naval Medical Center and Walter Reed Hospital. He even toyed with doing a Las Vegas show. Though Hope made frequent visits to Vegas (he was a fan of Shecky Greene’s lounge shows), he had long resisted a Vegas hotel engagement, telling friends he would do one only if he got paid more than any other performer in Vegas history. Though hotels such as Caesars Palace and the MGM Grand pursued him, no one ever met his price.
He continued to pursue movie projects and tried to expand his TV footprint by setting up a development arm of Hope Enterprises—run for a time by Linda’s husband, Nathaniel Lande, and later, after their divorce, by Linda—to develop other TV series for NBC. It had little success. One Hope-produced pilot called The Bluffer’s Guide, based on a series of British how-to books, aired on NBC in May 1974, but it got bad reviews and didn’t get picked up. A proposed sitcom about cabdrivers (years before Taxi), called O’Shaughnessy and Leibowitz, went through several incarnations, but it too was a no-go. Only one Hope-produced series ever made the NBC schedule: Joe & Valerie, a relationship sitcom that ran for eight episodes in the spring and fall of 1978 before being canceled.
Another thing that didn’t slow down as Hope entered his seventies was his sex life. On the road or at home, Hope never seemed to lack for female companions. His girlfriends were mostly chorus girls, singers, beauty queens, and other showbiz wannabes, whose careers he often helped out and who sometimes appeared as an opening act in his stage shows. Several of these relationships lasted for years. Others were one-night stands, with the arrangements often handled by his trusted assistant and nominal tour manager, Mark Anthony—who was also in charge of supplying Hope’s women with cash when they needed it.
Except for an occasional whistle-blower such as Jan King—a former Hope secretary who gossiped about his women in a 1991 story for the Globe tabloid—all of this was kept discreetly out of the public eye. Friends and coworkers indulged Hope’s behavior, looked the other way, and frequently covered for him. Rosemary Clooney, a good friend of the Hopes, was in a Beverly Hills hair salon when she overheard a customer bragging about having spent the previous night with Hope. Clooney challenged the woman’s story, claiming that she, Clooney, had been with Hope that night—then called Bob and warned him to be more careful. Lande, Hope’s son-in-law, was on a flight from Los Angeles to New York City when his seatmate began talking about the weekend she had just spent with her “boyfriend,” Bob Hope. The two shared a taxi from the airport to Manhattan, and before parting, Lande told the woman, “The next time you talk to Bob, tell him his friend Nathaniel Lande said hello.”
Hope did little to hide his indiscretions when he was around people he trusted. Ben Starr, a writer who worked on film scripts and TV specials for Hope, was at a TV rehearsal with Hope when an attractive chorus girl walked by. Hope casually swiped his index finger across her belly as she passed. “It was his way of saying to me, ‘She’s mine,’ ” said Starr. A producer who was editing one of Hope’s TV shows in the 1970s said Hope would routinely arrive each night with a different blonde on his arm. “We called them the Trixies,” she said. Nor did Hope have any qualms about sharing the sexual opportunities. On one trip to London with Hope, makeup man Don Marando lamented that he needed some female companionship. Hope told him to go to the hotel bar at 8:00 p.m., and a woman in a red dress would be waiting for him. Marando made the assignation, and after dinner the two retired to his hotel room. Waiting for him there was a bottle of champagne and a note: “Good luck. Bob.”
• • •
Even as the Watergate scandal began to overtake the Nixon presidency, Hope stood by his friend in the White House, defending him in public and bucking him up with encouraging notes in private. In March 1974, after Nixon appeared before a friendly business group in Chicago to defend his actions on Watergate, Hope dashed off a telegram to the president: “I now know why you were captain of the debating team at Whittier. I thought your Chicago appearance was magnificent. The best yet.” In May, Hope sent Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods a clipping from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in which Hope defended the president. (“I’ve heard fouler language every time I tip my caddy,” Hope said of the expletive-laden White House tapes.) He told Woods to show the article to Nixon: “I would like the President to know how I really talk about him behind his back. . . . And I want you to know the audience applauded like mad when I said these things.”
Hope didn’t have much to say when Nixon finally resigned in August. “It was so sad for that poor bastard,” he told the Washington Post a few months later. The two talked on the phone in December, Hope related, and Nixon seemed “very depressed. . . . I said, ‘When are you going to come out to the Springs and play some golf?’ He said, ‘It’ll have to be quite awhile.’ ” They met at a party in Palm Springs in March 1975, and Hope tried to cheer up Nixon with jokes: “I told him The Towering Inferno was the burning of the White House tapes. He didn’t think that that was too funny.”
Hope stayed friendly with the disgraced ex-president and in later years continued to stand by him. “I just think that Nixon got himself into a tough spot,” Hope said, when asked about Watergate in 1977. “They hired those Mack Sennett burglars who went over there. When they got caught, Nixon tried to protect the staff—what you and I would do up to a point—and then he got to where he didn’t know which way to go. If he knew the Supreme Court was going to let him down, he would have burned those tapes just like that.”
With Nixon’s resignation, Hope lost a friend in the White House, but he gained an even better one. Hope had known Gerald Ford only slightly before he became president, but the two soon bonded over golf. Ford was a good golfer—capable of driving 250 yards, though he had a penchant for errant shots that gave Hope a chance to recycle the bad-golfer jokes he had once used for Spiro Agnew: “It’s not hard to find Gerry Ford on the golf course. Just follow the wounded.” The Fords vacationed in Palm Springs during their White House years, dining with the Hopes often, and retired to the area afterward, sealing the friendship. “Of all the Presidents,” said Hope, “he is the one I can call a pal.”
Hope was trying to keep a lower political profile in these years, hoping to put the partisan rancor of Vietnam behind him. But echoes of the Vietnam turmoil were hard to escape entirely. In April 1975 he found himself back at the center of a political storm, quite unexpectedly, at the Academy Awards.
Hope had not hosted an Oscar show since 1971, when his cracks about sexually explicit Hollywood films (“I go back to the kind of movie when a girl says, ‘I love you,’ and it’s a declaration, not a demonstration”) made him seem a little more old-fashioned than the Academy was perhaps comfortable with. But he was asked back as one of four hosts for the 1975 ceremony, along with Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, and Sammy Davis Jr. Hope’s jokes about the year’s big films were mostly innocuous. (“I think The Godfather Part II has an excellent chance of winning. Neither Mr. Price nor Mr. Waterhouse has been heard from in days.”) The trouble came a few minutes after his opening monologue, when the award for best documentary feature went to Hearts and Minds, Peter Davis’s sharply critical account of the US involvement in Vietnam.
The timing was piquant. Two years after the US withdrawal, South Vietnamese forces were rapidly collapsing in the face of a final Communist offensive. Three weeks later, on April 30, 1975, Saigon would fall, forcing the last US embassy personnel to make an ignominious escape by helicopter. “It is ironic that we’re here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated,” producer Bert Schneider said in accepting the award for Hearts and Minds. Then he read a telegram from the Vietcong delegation to the Paris peace talks: “Please transmit to all our friends in America our recognition of all that they have done on behalf of peace. . . . These actions serve the legitimate interests of the American people and the Vietnamese people.”
The statement caused a stir in the hall—and a bigger one backstage. Hope was furious that Schneider had used the Oscar podium to deliver what Hope considered a propaganda message from America’s enemies. He told Howard Koch, the show’s producer, that the Academy should issue its own statement disavowing Schneider’s remarks. “Don’t you dare!” cried Shirley MacLaine, a prominent opponent of the war. But Hope scrawled out a statement on his own, gave it to Frank Sinatra, who was about to start his portion of the evening, and insisted that he read it on the air. “If you don’t read it, I will,” said Hope.
Sinatra, a former Kennedy pal turned Nixon supporter, obliged. Appearing onstage a few minutes later, he told the audience, “I’ve been asked by the Academy to make the following statement regarding a statement made by a winner. The Academy is saying, ‘We are not responsible for any political references made on the program and we are sorry they had to take place this evening.’ ”
Backstage, Shirley MacLaine tore into Sinatra: “You said you were speaking on behalf of the Academy. Well, I’m a member of the Academy and you didn’t ask me!” (Her brother, Warren Beatty, later chided Sinatra from the podium: “You old Republican, you.”) The controversy percolated for days. Hope denounced Schneider’s statement as a “cheap, cheap shot” and said he wrote his response after getting telegrams backstage saying that “millions of viewers and the parents of fifty-five thousand American boys did not appreciate the Academy being used as a platform for propaganda from Hanoi.” Yet even some of those critical of Schneider’s remarks objected that Hope and Sinatra had taken it upon themselves to deliver a statement on behalf of all three thousand members of the Academy. Finally the Academy issued a statement endorsing the Hope-Sinatra reply, pointing out that Koch, as the show’s producer, was “the Academy’s authorized representative,” and quoting bylaws stating that the “Academy is expressly prohibited from concerning itself with economic, political or labor issues.”
The fracas was a vestigial reminder of the country’s still-raw Vietnam wounds. But it soon died down, and so, eventually, did the passions. “Bob Hope’s so mad at me he’s going to bomb Encino,” Shirley MacLaine joked after the ceremony. But she bore no lasting ill will toward Hope, who had helped her raise money for charities and whom she genuinely admired. “So he was screwed up about the war,” she said years later. “Who wasn’t?” Still, for the folks who put together the annual Oscar telecast, Hope was proving to be something of a liability. He would not be asked back as host for another three years.
• • •
By the mid-1970s, some of Hope’s oldest friends, colleagues, and support people were starting to pass from the scene. In December 1974, Jack Benny, Hope’s friend and onetime radio rival, died of pancreatic cancer. “He was stingy to the end,” said Hope, in a eulogy written for him by Mort Lachman. “He only gave us eighty years, and it wasn’t enough.” Jimmy Saphier, the agent who had negotiated all of Hope’s radio and TV deals since 1937, suffered a stroke in his office and died in April 1974, of what was later diagnosed as a brain tumor. (Louis Shurr, Hope’s first movie agent, had died of cancer in 1968.) Marjorie Hughes, Hope’s loyal assistant for thirty-one years and the linchpin of his superefficient office operation, retired in 1973. (Hope Enterprises left her with no pension, and she had to pester her former boss for months about it. Hope wound up writing personal checks to support her in retirement.) Bob’s elder brother Jim, who oversaw the ranch Bob owned near Malibu dubbed Hopetown, died in August 1975—leaving Fred, back in Cleveland, the only one of Hope’s six brothers still alive.
And just before the start of the fall 1975 TV season, Hope had to say good-bye to many of the people who had worked with him for decades. He blamed it on his sponsor.
Hope had been shopping for a new corporate partner since 1973, when Chrysler ended its sponsorship of his TV shows (while continuing to sponsor his golf tournament). For two seasons Hope signed up sponsors on a show-by-show basis, among them Gillette, Timex, and Ford. Then, in early 1975, he negotiated a lucrative new deal with Texaco. The oil company agreed to pay $3.15 million for seven hours of specials in each of the next three seasons, plus another $250,000 annually to Hope for commercials and other duties as corporate spokesman. In return, however, Texaco wanted Hope to make a thorough housecleaning of his creative staff. His shows had clearly fallen into a rut, and the demographics of his audience were skewing older and older. Texaco thought the shows needed fresh blood.
The plan was to cut back on the number of specials and to make them more “special,” hiring different producers for each. That meant saying good-bye to the man who had been producing all of them, Hope’s longtime writer and confidant, Mort Lachman. Hope also fired his entire writing staff—veterans who had been with him for years such as Charlie Lee, Gig Henry, Les White, and Norm Sullivan. “It had to be done,” Hope told UPI’s Vernon Scott, “because I thought that after twenty-five years it was time to get a fresh format, some new ideas, a new style.” In addition, with Texaco promising more PR support, Hope laid off his two longest-serving publicists, Frank Liberman and Allan Kalmus.
“Bob caved in,” said Elliott Kozak, Saphier’s former assistant, who had taken over his dealmaking duties. “It was too strong a deal. He didn’t stand up to it.” Kozak convinced Hope to rehire at least one writing team, Lee and Henry, to provide some continuity and veteran support for the newcomers being brought in. Both Liberman and Kalmus, too, were back working for Hope within a year. But the split with Lachman was unavoidable, and painful. Hope, always averse to confrontation, gave Kozak the job of breaking the bad news. Lachman was surprised and hurt, but he took it stoically. When Hope took him to play golf and tried to explain the decision, Lachman cut him off. “He was very sad, very close to a tear,” Lachman recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not interested in this whole conversation. Let’s play.’ We just played golf. And we left, and I told him we can still play golf anytime you call me. But it was a sad day.” (They remained friends and golfing buddies, and Lachman had a successful post-Hope career as executive producer of such sitcoms as All in the Family, Kate & Allie, and Gimme a Break!)
Hope’s first show under the Texaco banner, a belated season opener on October 24, 1975, was indeed more special, though hardly new: a two-hour compilation of highlights from his TV career, to mark his twenty-fifth anniversary on NBC. The three Hope specials that followed included a Christmas show, with guests Redd Foxx and Angie Dickinson; a concert special from Montreal, to raise money for the US and Canadian Olympic teams, with Bing Crosby among the guests; and a ninety-minute scripted show, in which Hope hosts a party at his home, where the guests (some fifty comedians, from Milton Berle to Freddie Prinze) are getting murdered one by one. The material was only marginally improved, but the shows at least had a fresher look, ratings were strong, and Texaco got its money’s worth: Hope did nearly all the commercials as well, touting the company’s oil-drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico, pitching Havoline motor oil, and singing the praises of the “owners of America’s oil companies”—stockholders like you and me.
The bicentennial celebration of 1976 gave Hope a chance to wave the flag once again, as host of a ninety-minute NBC special on July 4, Bob Hope’s Bicentennial Star-Spangled Spectacular. It was one of his better shows of the era, with Hope and Sammy Davis Jr. playing anchormen of a revolutionary-era newscast, a spoof of the comedy soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and a funny Hope takeoff of Johnny Carson as host of an 1876 version of the Tonight Show, making jokes about Custer and griping about the tough studio audience. (“Better warm up the buckboard, Ed, they’re getting hostile.”) Hope closed with a sentimental, Norman Rockwellian tribute to the real “heroes” of America: “the guy in the bleachers with his kid, rooting for his team between bites on a hot dog . . . the man who fights the traffic every morning to get to work . . . These most uncommon common people are the heart of America, its hope and its future.” It was Hope’s plea to move beyond the divisive years of Vietnam and Watergate, and a heartfelt justification of his own life’s work:
I like to hold up a mirror to our lives and see the fun in everything we do. Over the years I’ve gotten more than my share of laughs—about you and me and America and the way we live. But when the houselights dim and the cameras are turned off, I’m just like the rest of you. Kid America? You bet your life. Love America? All the way.
For all the heat he had taken, Hope still saw himself as a unifying figure, an entertainer above partisanship—and, it seemed, above criticism. He hated bad reviews, and frequently got his writers and other staff members to write letters responding to them, often in the guise of ordinary readers or viewers, the voice of the people. During the bicentennial summer, he entertained at a state dinner in Washington for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, hosted by President Ford and the first lady. A few days after the event, which was televised on public TV, the Los Angeles Times ran two letters to the editor criticizing his performance. “I was shocked, disappointed and dismayed by the whole miserable mess, which has most certainly damaged the cultural image and prestige of our country,” wrote one viewer. “Bob Hope should fire his writers, or, better still, retire gracefully.”
A week later the Times printed three letters in response. One reader, identifying himself as one of Hope’s writers (it was signed Charles Liebleck, evidently Charlie Lee), said that Hope “has entertained and brought the gift of laughter to more people in more places than any other single performer of our time” and pointed out that writing comedy is “much harder than writing bitchy letters to a newspaper.” A second letter came from Geoffrey Clarkson—the pianist in Les Brown’s band—who reported that he was at the state dinner and that “the Queen and Prince Philip enjoyed the entertainment immensely.” A third letter asserted that Hope’s “humanitarianism and talent are unquestionable, and to have such a great man as Bob Hope belittled is abominable.” It was signed by Mark Antonio of Burbank, California—almost surely Hope’s crony and longtime assistant Mark Anthony.
Hope was especially eager, in the post-Vietnam years, to repair his image on college campuses, to show that he could still communicate with the young people who had turned against him because of his support for the war. His April 1975 special, Bob Hope on Campus, consisted mostly of a live performance at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, where the audience was friendly and most of the gags were about the school’s basketball team (John Wayne played Coach John Wooden in one sketch). But the show also included clips of Hope talking informally with small groups of students on other college campuses, such as Vassar and Columbia—awkward encounters, with Hope posing prepared questions such as “Is pot passé?” and “Who would you sooner be, Jonas Salk or Catfish Hunter?” (One student’s reply: “Jonas Salk. Because he made it possible for more people to be Catfish Hunters.” Right answer.)
Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976 marked a new and unfamiliar challenge for Hope. A friend to every president since Truman, Hope was now faced with a president he had never met—one who didn’t even play golf. The former peanut farmer from Georgia, who came from nowhere to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, provided Hope with plenty of gag material. He joked about Carter’s Southern roots (“When he prays, he calls God by his first name–Y’all”), his toothy smile (“He went to the dentist today to get his teeth cleaned; should be out by August”), and his colorful brother, Billy, the first presidential sibling with his own beer. But Hope, for the first time in many years, was left off the invitation list for the president’s inauguration.
Not that Hope needed the extra activity. He was doing fewer specials now (four per season, down from six or seven), but working even harder to promote them. Before each one, he would do a round of phone interviews with TV columnists; make guest appearances on other variety shows; sit for interviews with talk show hosts such as Mike Douglas and Phil Donahue; and make his now-ritual drop-in appearance on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Hope continued to develop movie projects, commissioning a script for the Walter Winchell biopic from writer Sidney Boehm, which he found too “negative,” and then a second one from Art Arthur, which came in at an unwieldy three hundred pages. Plans were announced for a Bob Hope Museum, to house Hope’s voluminous collection of memorabilia—which he first wanted to build on fifty acres of his Malibu property, then on a plot of land in Burbank that he owned adjacent to NBC headquarters. Like so many other Hope projects, it never got off the ground. “The problem with Dad is that he would have these ideas,” said Linda Hope. “And he would call you from Peoria, Illinois, and say, ‘I think we’ve got to get on this thing and start developing this or doing that.’ And then he would be gone for a week or two weeks, and he’s home for a few days, and in the meantime he had to do his real TV work, and he really had no time to develop the kinds of things that he may have dreamed of. He didn’t have time.”
By 1976 Linda was working for her father full-time. Her marriage to Lande (with whom she had a son, Andrew) had ended in divorce the year before—a split that took him by surprise. “I was in England writing a show,” said Lande. “I came home to an empty house. She left me a note. It was all calculated and all devastating.” (Linda later had a long-term gay relationship with TV producer-director Nancy Malone.) She always had an ambivalent relationship with her father; getting his attention was sometimes so frustrating, she told a friend, that she would purposely bounce checks, just so he would call her into his office to scold her. But after the divorce, she needed work, and her father put her in charge of program development for Hope Enterprises. She was paid little (only $600 a week at first), but she did a good job, overseeing the development of Joe & Valerie, the one series Hope’s company managed to get on the air.
Her brother Tony might have seemed the more logical Hope child to enter the family business. He worked for a while in business affairs at Twentieth Century–Fox and served as an associate producer on the TV series Judd, for the Defense and the 1971 Australian film Walkabout. His father depended on Tony for business advice, and some friends thought they recognized some of Bob’s comic genes. Hal Kanter liked to tell the story of an encounter with Hope on the Paramount lot in the early 1950s. Kanter was wearing a bright red tie with red socks, and when Bob passed by, he commented, “My God, Kanter, that’s the longest red tie I’ve ever seen.” Years later, Kanter was at the Twentieth Century–Fox studios, again wearing bright red socks with a red sweater. This time Tony Hope saw him and wisecracked, “That’s the longest red sweater I ever saw.” Tony insisted he had never heard his father’s line.
But Tony’s career in show business came to an abrupt and not very happy end. In 1973 he teamed up with Barney Rosenzweig, a TV producer who had worked with Tony at Fox, to produce an independent film called Who Fears the Devil? It was a strange movie, based on a series of fanciful folktales by Manly Wade Wellman about an Appalachian balladeer who is transported back in time. After Rosenzweig kept lowering the budget to try to get backers, Tony Hope agreed to finance the film with $400,000 of his own money.
The production was beset with problems. Arlo Guthrie was originally cast in the lead, but he didn’t work out and had to be replaced by an unknown. The dailies were not good, and the screenwriter pleaded for the director to be replaced. After it was finished, the film couldn’t find a distributor, and Rosenzweig began peddling it himself, booking it in college towns across the Southeast—a grassroots technique that had been used successfully by the 1971 independent hit Billy Jack. But the movie died quickly, and Tony Hope lost his entire investment.
He took it hard. “He felt he failed, and he became bitter,” said Rosenzweig. “We were having breakfast a year or two later. He said, ‘Barney, we can’t do this anymore. Because when I see you, I think of the movie, and when I think of the movie, I want to throw up.’ ” For the son of Bob Hope, the failure must have been especially difficult. “It had to be tough for Tony,” said Rosenzweig. “Bob Hope was a tough taskmaster. I’m sure his father was brutal to him about it.”
The whole episode left Tony—then living in Malibu with Judy and their two young children—broke and in debt, with no bailout coming from Dad. “Bob and Dolores thought everyone could make it on their own,” said Judy Hope. She went back to work as a lawyer, making the long commute to downtown Los Angeles, while teaching part-time at Pepperdine University in Malibu. Then, in April 1975, a malfunctioning furnace in their home caught fire, and the house burned to the ground. Suddenly homeless as well as broke, Tony and Judy picked up and moved the family to Washington, DC.
Judy, who had connections in the Ford administration, went to work at the White House and became a partner in the law firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky and Walker. (She later worked on President Reagan’s Commission on Organized Crime and in 1988 was nominated for a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The nomination was blocked by Senate Democrats.) Tony, meanwhile, bounced around in various jobs with such companies as Mutual of Omaha and Touche Ross. In 1986 he moved back to California to run for Congress, but lost in the Republican primary to an opponent who branded him a carpetbagger. Later he became the first head of the Indian Gaming Commission under President George H. W. Bush. But there was a sense of potential never quite realized. “Bob called Tony a lot,” said Judy Hope. “When he wanted to buy a piece of property, Tony would go and look at it. When he had a radio station in Puerto Rico that had some problems, Tony worked them out. His dad trusted and relied on him. In a way, he shortchanged his own career for his dad.”
• • •
Hope’s writing staff was going through a transition in the late 1970s. Old-timers Gig Henry and Charlie Lee were still around, but newcomers were filtering in. Gene Perret was writing gags for Phyllis Diller in 1969 when he sent three hundred unsolicited jokes to Hope for one of his Oscar appearances. Hope used ten of them on the air and told Perret, “It looks like you’ve been writing for me all your life.” Perret continued writing jokes for Hope over the next few years, while on staff at The Carol Burnett Show, before joining him full-time in the late seventies. Bob Mills, a lawyer turned gagman, was writing for Dean Martin’s celebrity TV roasts in 1977 when Hope hired him for a special. “I’ve got six more weeks on my Dean Martin contract,” Mills said. Hope replied, “You work on Dean Martin during the day, don’t you? Well, you can work on my stuff in the evenings.” Mills stayed with Hope for fifteen years. Sitcom veterans Seaman Jacobs and Fred Fox also joined the staff, and later Martha Bolton, Hope’s first full-time female writer. Other younger writers came and went, some hired for individual shows, others for a season or two.
All had to adapt to Hope’s idiosyncratic working style. Even veteran writers never got more than a one-year contract, which kept them on their toes and enabled Hope to dump writers who weren’t measuring up. (For years some of the writers were even represented by Hope’s own agent Jimmy Saphier—a conflict of interest if there ever was one.) The writers got used to the 24/7 schedule, the late-night phone calls, the oddly solitary working life. Unlike on other comedy shows, where writers would sit around a table and bat out scripts together, Hope’s writers mostly worked alone, coming up with jokes on their own, then dropping them “over the wall” at Hope’s Toluca Lake home office, where they might get chased by one of Bob’s German shepherds.
The pace was intense. “He liked people who worked fast,” said Perret. Hope might call for some jokes on a specific topic, then phone back a half hour later—no hello or greeting of any kind, just a command: “Thrill me.” Hope once told his writers that he was appearing at a psychiatrists’ convention, so they gave him a load of psychiatrist jokes. When Hope arrived at the event, he found out the audience was actually a group of chiropractors. The writers had thirty minutes to come up with a new set of jokes. Mills was once hosting a backyard barbecue when he got a call from Hope and heard music in the background: he was in the wings of some distant theater, minutes away from going onstage. On the way in from the airport, Hope told Mills, the traffic was terrible because all the streets were torn up, and he needed a line about it to open the show. “How much time do you have?” asked Mills. “About twenty seconds,” said Hope. Mills came up with a couple of quickies (“between the hotel and here, the cabbie and I exchanged teeth three times”), then went back to his dinner guests. “I just made my entire salary for the year,” he told them.
The old-timers sometimes tried to get away with recycling jokes from Hope’s bottomless vault of funnies, but he had a photographic memory and usually rejected them. One time he asked his writers for some football jokes, and Mills sighed that he should just take some old ones out of the files. “Why do we have to write new ones?” Mills asked. Hope snapped, “I pay you with new money, don’t I?” Yet Hope appreciated their hard work and didn’t get down on them if they came up short. Perret once turned in a load of jokes and Hope asked if they were brilliant. “They’re really not,” Perret said. Hope told him not to worry: “The other guys will be hot.”
The writers were responsible for virtually everything Hope said or that appeared under his name. They wrote his TV shows, monologues for his personal appearances, magazine articles that carried Hope’s byline, jokes that were fed to columnists such as Variety’s Army Archerd, acceptance speeches, commencement addresses, and eulogies. When Hope was a guest on other TV variety shows, he would get the script in advance and have his writers add new lines that he could throw into the sketches during rehearsals. (His practice of rewriting the lines annoyed some producers, who crossed Hope off their guest lists as a result.) Mills once got a request from Hope for some jokes about Pentagon generals. Not seeing any military events on his calendar, Mills asked what the occasion was. Hope said he was going to play golf with three generals and just needed some funny lines for conversation on the course.
Hope still moved at a pace that would have exhausted much younger men. He was on the road almost constantly—nearly 250 appearances in 1977 alone, from the National Dairy Congress in Waterloo, Iowa, to Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee celebration in London. His TV specials, as a result, were getting increasingly short shrift.
The monologues were still a priority. For each one, Hope would cull through hundreds of his writers’ jokes, picking the best thirty minutes’ worth of material, then delivering it before a studio audience (usually Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show audience, who would be asked to stick around for Hope after Carson’s show was finished) before winnowing it down to seven or eight minutes that would make the final broadcast. As for the rest of his TV hours, Hope was paying only minimal attention. He didn’t even try to learn his lines anymore; most of the rehearsal time was spent worrying about where the cue cards were going to be placed. He didn’t like rehearsals that ran long. “Milton Berle liked to retake jokes—he’d say, ‘I can do that one better,’ ” said Sid Smith, who began directing Hope specials in the late seventies. “Hope liked to do it once, and that’s it. He didn’t want to lose the spontaneity of the joke.” He wasn’t happy with guests like Lucille Ball, who rehearsed obsessively and would often stop to make suggestions on how the scenes could be improved. Grumbled Hope during one rehearsal, “She thinks I just got into this business.”
He was not a temperamental star, at least by most inflated-Hollywood-ego standards. He projected an almost preternatural calm, humming an unidentifiable tune to himself constantly. But technical flubs or unforeseen delays could make him testy, and his fits of temper could be formidable. Dennis Klein, then a young comedy writer (and later the cocreator of The Larry Sanders Show), was in the greenroom for a Tonight Show taping in the late 1960s on a night Hope was a guest. Hope was used to royal treatment at the Tonight Show: always the first guest, always leaving immediately after his segment was over, so that he wouldn’t have to move down the couch and listen to other guests. This time, however, Hope was taken by surprise when Carson announced the show’s first guest—not Bob Hope, but a monkey from the San Diego Zoo.
“What the fuck!” cried Hope, bolting from his chair and launching a profanity-laden tirade that left everyone in the room cowering. A Tonight Show assistant tried to calm him down, speculating that the animal was too skittish to wait any longer, or it was past feeding time. But Hope was “roaming the greenroom like an enraged animal, spewing invective,” Klein recalled. Only when the monkey’s segment was finished and Carson had announced Hope did he calm down—sauntering out onstage smiling, to the strains of “Thanks for the Memory,” as if nothing had happened.
By mid-1977 one of Hope’s pet movie projects finally seemed to be coming together: a reunion with Crosby in a new Road picture. London impresario Lew Grade was producing the film, which was based on a Mel Shavelson script called Road to the Fountain of Youth. Grade had even called the much-abused Dorothy Lamour to see if she could be coaxed back for one final reunion. The project got delayed when Crosby hurt his back after falling off a stage during a TV taping in March and needed a couple of months to recuperate. (Hope, a guest on the show, was among those who rushed to Crosby’s side after the accident.) When Hope asked Crosby to appear at a charity golf tournament in June, he still wasn’t well enough, writing Hope wanly, “It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to swing a stick by June—if ever.” By the fall, Crosby had recovered enough to appear for two weeks at London’s Palladium Theatre, after which he went to Spain for a few days of rest and golf. He was walking back to the clubhouse after a round on October 14, 1977, when he collapsed and died of a heart attack. The film was abandoned, and the Road team broken up for good.
Hope and Crosby were never close friends. They rarely socialized together and saw even less of each other in the later years, after Crosby moved to Hillsborough, outside of San Francisco, with his second wife, Kathryn, and their new family. But no one else in Hope’s professional life meant more to him. He heard the news of Crosby’s death while in New York City getting ready to do a benefit in New Jersey. (In a sad coincidence, his mother-in-law, Theresa De Fina, died on the same day.) He canceled his appearance, as well as one scheduled for the following night in Arizona, and flew back to Los Angeles. When Linda met him at the airport, she found her father as emotional as she had ever seen him: “He had tears in his eyes. You could see he was really hurting about it. At the same time, he said he felt bad he had left those people in the lurch. It was the first time I ever remember him canceling anything.”
Hope issued a statement the next day: “The whole world loved Bing Crosby, with a devotion that not only crossed international borders, but erased them.” Bing had insisted that his funeral be closed to all but family and the closest of friends. Bob and Dolores were among the small group of forty who attended the early-morning service at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Westwood. (Rosemary Clooney and Phil Harris were also there, but not Dorothy Lamour—a final snub from Bing.) Hope was in the middle of preparing his next NBC special, The Road to Hollywood, tied in with a new book about his movie career cowritten with Bob Thomas. Hope turned the special into a tribute to Crosby, retitled On the Road with Bing.
• • •
An anniversary, and the passage of three years, apparently dimmed the bad memories of Hope’s last appearance at the Academy Awards, with his controversial role in the Bert Schneider affair. For the fiftieth-birthday Oscar ceremony on April 3, 1978, the Academy decided to bring back Hope as solo host one more time: a nostalgic tribute to the man who had done more than anyone else to make the annual awards telecast a national pastime.
At nearly seventy-five, Hope sounded a little disingenuous as he poked fun in his monologue at the parade of past Oscar winners trotted out for the anniversary: “It looks like the road company of the Hollywood Wax Museum.” In truth, he had an off night. Hope was unhappy that he had to use a teleprompter instead of cue cards, and he appeared unusually transfixed by the camera. He sounded hoarse, and his delivery was stiffer and less supple than usual. For once, the Oscars’ favorite host was showing his age. Still, he got off some good lines (“I haven’t seen so much expensive jewelry go by since I watched Sammy Davis Jr.’s house sliding down Coldwater Canyon”), and he at least managed to stay out of the big political flap of the night—another inflammatory acceptance speech, this one by Vanessa Redgrave, who called members of the militant Jewish Defense League “Zionist hoodlums” and an “insult to Jewish people all over the world.”
Marty Pasetta, who directed the show (one of the fourteen Oscarcasts he would handle), was impressed with how well Hope, despite his age, could roll with the punches—squeezing or stretching to fit the time as needed, adding jokes on the fly to respond to what took place during the show. “So many guys can’t do that,” said Pasetta. Johnny Carson, for example, who hosted the show for the next four years, was much less apt to improvise during the show. “Bob was a pleasure to work with,” said Pasetta. “Johnny could be difficult at times. He wasn’t as glib as Bob. He had more writers, and he needed the lines to be precise.” Hope may have been looking like an anachronism by 1978, but his style stood the test of time—the gold standard, not just for Carson, but for every Oscar host who followed.
As Hope’s seventy-fifth birthday approached on May 29, 1978, NBC suggested an all-star special to celebrate the occasion. Hope, who never liked to acknowledge his age, said no. “I can’t go on television and tell the whole world I’m seventy-five years old,” he told Elliott Kozak. But when James Lipton, a sometime actor, writer, and Broadway composer, who had produced Jimmy Carter’s inaugural gala (and would later become better known as host of TV’s Inside the Actors Studio), proposed a black-tie seventy-fifth birthday tribute at the Kennedy Center, with the proceeds going toward a new USO headquarters that would bear Hope’s name, Hope couldn’t resist. The show became the centerpiece for a weekend of birthday festivities and official tributes in Washington, another step in Hope’s reemergence from the cloud of Vietnam.
“It’s taken over a year,” wrote Tom Shales in the Washington Post, “but the Carter administration finally established diplomatic relations with Bob Hope.” To kick off the birthday weekend, President Carter hosted a reception for Hope at the White House, with five hundred Washington and Hollywood VIPs in attendance. “I have now been in office for 489 days,” said Carter, on meeting Hope for the first time. “And when I’ve spent three more weeks, I will have slept as many nights here as Bob Hope.” That evening, the Hopes hosted a private dinner at a restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, owned by Dolores’s nephew (and former Agnew aide) Peter Malatesta, with a guest list that included such Hollywood pals as Lucille Ball, Fred MacMurray, Phyllis Diller, Danny Thomas, and Elizabeth Taylor (now the wife of John Warner, soon to be elected senator from Virginia). “I’m pretty sure I’m seventy-five. But I’ve lied to so many girls,” Hope said after the toasts, perhaps a little more lubricated than usual. “Of course, they always find out about one a.m. Dolores—that’s a joke.”
The next morning, Bob, Dolores, and most of the family were in the gallery of the House of Representatives, where Congressman Paul Findley of Illinois introduced a resolution saluting Hope on his birthday. (Hope woke up late and almost missed the 10:00 a.m. session. “Can’t we change it to eleven?” he asked.) For forty minutes, the august chamber was filled with sentimental tributes and congressional mirth, highlighted by a chorus of “Happy Birthday” and some new verses for “Thanks for the Memory,” sung by Minority Whip Robert Michel:
Thanks for the memory
Of places you have gone, to cheer our soldiers on
The president sent Kissinger, but you sent Jill St. John . . .
The three-hour special, broadcast live from Kennedy Center the following Monday night, was a fairly stodgy affair, done in what Variety described as “that peculiarly square and predictable style that seems to typify ‘official’ dress-up entertainment projects from the capital.” George C. Scott led the parade of celebrities, ranging from George Burns to KC and the Sunshine Band, who offered reminiscences, songs, jokes, and clips of Hope’s career highlights, as the guest of honor watched from a box next to former president Ford. The birthday special drew a mighty 27.1 Nielsen rating, the most watched program of the week and the best showing for a Hope special in years.
It validated the effort by Texaco and NBC to make Hope’s specials bigger events. More of his shows were now done on location or pegged to an anniversary or other special occasion, many expanded to ninety minutes or even two hours. In February of 1978 he went on a five-city concert tour of Australia (with guests Florence Henderson, Barbara Eden, and Charo—and a young David Letterman among the writers) and turned it into a ninety-minute special that aired in April. In October he was the cohost, with Danny Kaye, of a two-hour special marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of baseball’s World Series. Hope’s own birthdays, meanwhile, became annual TV events, with Lipton returning to produce the celebration from a different locale each year—in May 1979 from the deck of the USS Iwo Jima in New York Harbor, with the Village People singing “In the Navy” to a shipload of rather bemused sailors.
Hope wasn’t slowing down. He still took a hands-on role in nearly every aspect of his TV specials: monitoring the budgets, approving the network publicity, and calling in for ratings on the morning after the telecast. He demanded the same dedication from the people who worked for him. When he was unhappy with his ratings or thought he wasn’t getting enough press, he would needle his publicists: “Are you still working for me?” or “Who’s handling Sinatra?” Staffers got used to late-night phone calls from Hope, sometimes just to relate a joke he had heard on the Tonight Show. “When he pays you a salary, he expects you to work around the clock,” said Elliott Kozak, his agent, whom he put in charge of Hope Enterprises.
Kozak was a smart and loyal representative for Hope, and as close to him as anyone, but he had to put up with a lot. Once Hope summoned him to the house for a 9:00 p.m. meeting. Kozak already had dinner plans with his wife for their wedding anniversary and said he couldn’t make it. “Oh, you don’t have time for me anymore?” Hope snapped. They once got in a fight over a deal that Kozak negotiated for Hope to appear at the London Palladium. Hope wanted $50,000 for the show, but Lew Grade, its producer, said he could afford only $25,000. Hope relented, and the contract was drawn up. But months later, on the eve of his trip to London, Hope saw the contract and asked what happened to his $50,000. Kozak tried to correct him: “No, Bob, we asked for fifty, but they could only come up with twenty-five.” Hope wouldn’t budge: “You tell him he’s gotta come up with the fifty thousand or forget about it.”
Kozak, steamed that Hope was reneging on a deal that Kozak thought had been signed off on, had to go back and plead for another $25,000 from Grade—who came up with the money, on a promise that Hope would play another engagement at the Palladium the following year. But Hope would not admit his mistake, insisting that Kozak had simply “got me the original fifty thousand.” Kozak was angry and threatened to quit: “You don’t trust me, and I break my back for you. I’m shocked and hurt after all these years.” Finally Hope came the closest he could to an apology: “Let’s just say it was a misunderstanding.”
Kozak was soon out of a job anyway. In 1979, Hope replaced him as the head of Hope Enterprises with his daughter Linda, who had been in charge of program development. She protested that she wasn’t ready for the job, but Hope insisted; he wanted someone he could trust in the position. The family ties, however, made their working relationship even more fraught than it had been between Hope and Kozak. They clashed openly on Linda’s first big working trip with her father: his landmark 1979 visit to the People’s Republic of China.
China was the last great frontier for Hope. Not long after President Nixon’s breakthrough visit to the Communist country in 1972, Hope began lobbying to take an entertainment troupe there. (During a White House meeting with Hope in March 1973, Nixon put in a call to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger about the trip. Kissinger said the Chinese first wanted to see a tape of Hope’s 1958 special from the Soviet Union.) But not until President Carter established diplomatic relations with China in December 1978, and cultural exchanges between the two countries began in earnest, did Hope finally get approval for the trip.
He hired Lipton, his big-event specialist, to produce the show. Lipton and director Bob Wynn made an advance trip to China in April 1979 to scout locations and sign up Chinese performers. Back home, Hope lined up country singer Crystal Gayle, the singing duo Peaches and Herb (Hope thought their hit song “Reunited” was a good theme for the trip), and ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov to join him on the tour. When Baryshnikov said he couldn’t go because he had to appear with the New York City Ballet in Saratoga, New York, Hope called choreographer George Balanchine, with whom he had worked on Broadway in Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, and got him to rearrange the dancer’s schedule so he could make the trip.
Dolores was along too (carrying cookies, crackers, and packets of Cup-a-Soup in her luggage, in case the food wasn’t edible) when the troupe of forty-five arrived in Beijing on June 16, 1979. Few people in China knew Hope. When he and his entourage got off the plane, there was a flurry of excitement—for a delegation of Japanese diplomats who were on the same flight. Hope and his troupe spent four weeks in the country, shooting at such landmarks as the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and Tiananmen Square. Hope played Ping-Pong with Chinese youngsters, joined an early-morning tai-chi class, walked the streets with Big Bird from Sesame Street, and discussed his movie Monsieur Beaucaire with a class of Chinese film students. Baryshnikov performed a scene from Giselle with a Chinese ballet student, and Dolores sang “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music to a group of schoolchildren. (Hope was mellowing: for once he didn’t cut Dolores’s segment from the final broadcast.) Chinese acrobats, comedians, puppets, and a trained panda performed. Hope did a monologue before a mixed audience of Americans and Chinese at the downtown Capital Theatre. To translate his jokes, he first tried subtitles projected on a giant screen, but found that the Chinese speakers in the audience were laughing before he got to the punch lines. Instead, Chinese actor Ying Ruocheng was recruited to translate each joke after Hope finished—thus giving him the pleasure of two laughs, in the right order.
Dealing with the Chinese authorities was a chore. They insisted on approving the entire script, which meant late nights going over the day’s work, explaining jokes, and often fighting to keep them in. (For example, Hope made a wisecrack about a Chinese alcoholic drink: “I had one Mao-Tai, and my head felt like the Gang of Four.” The censors made him take it out.) The Chinese crews that the authorities forced Hope to use weren’t accustomed to the Americans’ fast pace, and they seemed to purposely slow things down. “The Chinese were very, very difficult,” said associate producer Marcia Lewis. “They wanted a successful show, but they didn’t want to look cooperative.” Some of the performers were balky too. The owner of the trained panda complained that he wasn’t getting paid enough and said he would allow the show to use only half of the panda’s act. After wrangling with him, Linda Hope agreed to take just the last half—but had the cameras record all of it, knowing that the animal would have to do its whole act from beginning to end anyway.
The crew had to resort to cloak-and-dagger tactics to get around some of the bureaucratic problems. After the Chinese found out that Hope had taped a sequence at the Democracy Wall, where Chinese citizens were allowed to post complaints about the government, they demanded the videotape of the segment. Director Bob Wynn wouldn’t give it up. Then, after secretly sending it back to the United States in the luggage of a Los Angeles TV crew that was covering the trip, he gave the Chinese a blank tape instead—knowing they did not have the equipment needed to play it.
Relations between Linda, who shared a producer title with Lipton, and her father grew more tense as the trip went on. Bob was annoyed at the many delays and the rising costs, and Linda bore the brunt. Their arguments—often out on the hotel balcony, because Hope thought the rooms were bugged—became so heated that director Wynn had to step in and act as mediator. The final straw came at the airport in Shanghai, as the troupe was getting ready to leave for home. The Chinese demanded another videotape, of a Coke commercial that Hope had done at the Great Wall, as well as the equipment to play it on, which had already been loaded on the plane. As Linda argued with the officials and the plane sat on the ground, Bob stewed. “Dad was really aggravated with it,” said Linda. “And he was aggravated with me—‘Just give them the tape!’ ”
The three-hour special that resulted, Bob Hope on the Road to China, was more of a diplomatic triumph than an entertainment one. Hope opens the show in front of the Great Wall, singing, “We’re off on the road to China,” to the tune of “The Road to Morocco,” with new lyrics penned by Lipton. Hope has a few pointed monologue jokes that somehow eluded the censors: “Housing must be a problem here. By the time I got to my hotel there was a family of four living in my luggage.” But for the most part, the diplomatic niceties and travel-brochure boosterism make the show a little numbing. (“The Chinese are easy to like,” says Hope. “They’re ready to smile, they’re courteous and helpful, and they make every effort to understand us.”) What’s more, the telecast, which aired on Sunday, September 16, 1979, was a disappointment in the ratings, ranking just twenty-sixth for the week.
Yet the China trip seemed to whet Hope’s appetite for more diplomatic ventures abroad. He wanted to go to Moscow for the 1980 Olympics, but that was scuttled by the US boycott of the games following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Instead, during the diplomatic chill that ensued, Hope went to Moscow to do a show for US embassy personnel. When Iranian revolutionaries stormed the US embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two Americans hostage for more than a year, Hope proposed a trip to Tehran to do a Christmas show for the hostages. An aide to President Carter worked with Tony Hope to try to arrange that or some other role for Hope in ending the hostage crisis, but nothing came of it. Hope had more success as an ambassador for golf: in September 1980 he went to London to host the first edition of the Bob Hope British Classic, a British counterpart to his popular Palm Springs pro-am tournament.
With the passions of the Vietnam era fading, there seemed to be more of an effort to recapture and pay homage to the Bob Hope of old. In April 1979 the Film Society of Lincoln Center staged a gala tribute to Hope, hosted by Dick Cavett—a big fan since junior high school, when he saw Hope give a concert in Cavett’s hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska—and with Diane Keaton, Shelley Winters, Kurt Vonnegut, and Andy Warhol among the twenty-seven hundred fans in the audience. The centerpiece of the evening was a sixty-three-minute retrospective of Hope’s film work, narrated by Woody Allen, who called Hope his favorite comedian and showed how strongly his own screen character had been influenced by Hope in such films as Monsieur Beaucaire, My Favorite Brunette, and the Road pictures. “When my mother took me to see Road to Morocco,” said Allen, “I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.”
A tough Rolling Stone profile in 1980 rehashed some of the old Vietnam resentments, but other journalists seemed willing to let bygones be bygones. “Oh, go on, highbrows, take your great comedians and your intellectual clowns—but look at what America thought was really funny: Bob Hope,” wrote Peter Kaplan in a fond 1978 profile in New Times magazine. “Age cannot wither, nor custom stale, the charm of Bob Hope,” wrote Tom Dowling, in the Washington Star, during Hope’s seventy-fifth birthday festivities. “[He] is, in short, a totem of every virtue held dear by the Elks, Moose, Kiwanii, Rotarians, Eagles, Odd Fellows and USO-ers. He’s likable, quick on his feet, dependably salty when with the boys, safely correct when ladies are in the room, and a font of uplifting public-spiritedness when impressionable kiddies have their ears perked up. Like all men you can count on, he’s as comfy as an old shoe.”
By this time, he was an old shoe with a closet full of Guccis. In 1968, Fortune magazine put him on its list of the sixty-six wealthiest people in America, with a net worth estimated at between $150 million and $200 million—the richest entertainer in Hollywood. Hope routinely claimed such estimates were exaggerated, and since most of his holdings were in real estate, it was always hard to know precisely. But in 1979, after years of avoiding ostentatious displays of his wealth, he and Dolores oversaw the completion of their hilltop mansion in Palm Springs, which to many was the epitome of extravagance.
Construction on the house, on hold since the 1973 fire, finally resumed in 1978. Given the do-over, Dolores set about making changes in Lautner’s severe modernist design, to cut costs and make it more user-friendly. She enclosed some open space (the original design necessitated going outside to get from the kitchen to the living area), made some changes in the exterior, and reduced the size of the upstairs. Lautner objected to many of the changes, and Dolores fired him—finishing up the house with another architect, and the help of her friend and decorator Laura Mako. “Mrs. Hope was kind of a frustrated architect,” said Dolores’s longtime assistant Nancy Gordon. “She had a very keen eye, and she was forever moving walls around here and there. I’m sure Lautner was frustrated. But she got what she wanted.”
The house was still quite a statement, with its swooping, mushroom-shaped roof that reminded many of the TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport. It had a sixty-foot-wide central skylight, lavish separate bedroom suites for Bob and Dolores, two swimming pools (one indoors and one out), a small chapel for Dolores, a one-hole golf course for Bob, a massive outdoor fireplace, and an expansive slate patio, where party guests had a breathtaking view of the valley below. Many friends and family missed the old house on El Alameda (which the Hopes kept for guests), with its homier atmosphere and serve-yourself Italian dinners. Bob was one of them. “I love that little house,” he told Andy Williams, a Palm Springs friend. “But Dolores wanted to have that big airplane hangar.”
But he got used to it. The Hopes moved into their new Palm Springs home in late 1979, threw a spectacular party there every year during golf-tournament week, and spent most of the winters there for the rest of their lives—a pleasure palace at last befitting Hollywood’s royal couple.