For Bob Hope, who loved entertaining, craved live audiences, and could not conceive of a life in which he was not constantly in the public eye, retirement was never a serious option. His compulsive performing and need for applause became something of a punch line of its own. “Bob Hope would go to the opening of a phone booth in a gas station in Anaheim, provided they have a camera and three people there,” Marlon Brando once sniffed. The joke was that Hope would hardly have disagreed. “Hell, if I did,” he’d say when asked about retiring, “I’d have to have an applause machine to wake me up in the morning.”
By the start of the 1980s, however, age was finally starting to wear him down—his hearing getting worse, his paunch bigger, the spring in his step decidedly less springy. Yet except for his ongoing eye problems, and a minor “cardiac disturbance” in October 1978—paramedics were rushed to his hotel room when he felt dizzy following a performance in Columbus, Ohio—he was a remarkably healthy man. He almost never got colds. Though he was a night owl, rarely going to bed before one in the morning, he never had problems sleeping. His mornings would typically start late, between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m., with a breakfast of stewed fruit, decaffeinated coffee, and a B-complex multivitamin, which included 500 mg of vitamin C. He was a meat-and-potatoes man, with a special fondness for lamb chops and a weakness for desserts, especially lemon meringue pie. Even in his old age, he kept his dancer’s body well toned with golf and daily massages; made a practice of hanging from a pair of rings each day to relax his back; and walked at least a mile or two before bed, no matter where he was in the world.
He was a man of action, seemingly never bothered by stress or self-doubt. “Damn it, make a decision,” he once told a family member who was hesitating over a business deal. “If it’s a wrong one, we’ll make another.” His recipe for a long life, he told a Saturday Evening Post interviewer in 1981, was to stay busy and get things done. “Procrastination is the number one cause of tension,” he said. “It causes more heart attacks and strokes than anything else. You always worry about the things you put off. . . . I’m a great believer in getting things taken care of fast.”
In 1983, the year he turned eighty, Hope made 174 personal appearances—including 86 stage shows, 42 charity benefits, 14 golf tournaments, 15 TV commercials, and 11 guest appearances on other TV shows, in addition to the 6 specials he did for NBC. He remained a hands-on manager of his own career. “The thing that impressed me about him,” said Rick Ludwin, the NBC program executive in charge of Hope’s specials in the 1980s, “here was a man who had already been a superstar in every form of entertainment there ever was, and yet he always made the phone calls himself. For every show, he would personally approve the print ad. The promo people would go over to his house, show him the mock-up of the ad and the rough cuts of the [on-air] promos, and he would make suggestions. And then the morning after a show aired he would call himself to get the overnight ratings. At that age, with that level of success, he was still out there hustling.”
With his daughter Linda now running Hope Enterprises and serving as executive producer of his specials, the push to make them big events continued. There was a steady stream of tributes, anniversaries, retrospectives, and birthday celebrations. In January 1981 Hope hosted a two-hour special to mark his thirtieth anniversary on NBC-TV, a black-tie affair with such old friends as George Burns, Martha Raye, and Milton Berle in the audience, giving him an obligatory standing ovation and joining him for bits onstage. That October he went to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to host the dedication of the Gerald Ford Presidential Library, another black-tie affair, with President Reagan, Lady Bird Johnson, Henry Kissinger, and a gaggle of world leaders on hand. (“That’s why I’m up here,” said Hope. “I wasn’t big enough to be in the audience.”) He did a show marking the sixtieth anniversary of the National Football League and another commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of NASA. During the 1980 presidential campaign, he starred in a scripted show in which he’s drafted to run for president—with Johnny Carson putting his name in nomination, Tony Randall playing his campaign manager, and a host of other stars making cameo appearances.
His ratings were up and down, but at their best—especially the birthday specials and his Christmas shows, with Hope’s annual introduction of the college football all-American team and the traditional “Silver Bells” duet with one of his guest stars—they were rare bright spots for NBC, which had sunk to a dismal last place in the network ratings. “We had so many problems at NBC when I got there, but he wasn’t one of them,” said Fred Silverman, the former CBS and ABC programming whiz who became president of NBC in 1978 (and left three years later with the network still in third place). “You knew you would get a great rating with Bob’s shows. We’d put them in sweet spots on the schedule.” Hope was also great for the network’s corporate image—always ready to appear at an affiliates’ convention, press junket, or testimonial dinner, doing his bit for the network he stayed loyal to for more than fifty years.
Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980 was a welcome restoration for Hope. After four years of Jimmy Carter, whom Hope never warmed to (a president who didn’t play golf!), the White House was safely back in Republican hands. What’s more, Reagan was an old friend from their early days in Hollywood, and a frequent target of Hope jokes since his days as California governor. Hope entertained at the 1981 Inaugural Ball (though Johnny Carson landed the emcee gig) and had little trouble refreshing fifteen years of Reagan material for the new resident of the White House. Hope joked about the president’s Hollywood background (“Reagan has been rehearsing for the inaugural all week—he wanted to do it in one take”), his advancing age (“He’s the only candidate who calls me Sonny”), and his wife Nancy’s ritzy taste in White House decor. Yet Hope was a court jester careful not to offend. After making some cracks at a 1981 USO dinner about the first lady’s plans to buy expensive new china, Hope wrote Reagan a note to make sure no feathers were ruffled: “I know that Nancy was shook up a little bit by some of those dish jokes, and I realize that I laid it on a little too strong. You can rest assured that I will not do another dish joke as long as I live.” Reagan’s good-natured reply: “Please don’t concern yourself about the humorous barbs you directed toward the new White House china—after all, if you can dish it out, we can take it!”
Though they had known each other for years, Hope and Reagan were not especially close, and Hope didn’t enjoy the kind of inner-circle access that he had during the Nixon administration. His chief role appears to have been as a supplicant for official presidential messages—to the minor annoyance of the White House staff. In 1981, White House assistant Dodie Livingston got a request from the Bob Hope British Classic for a message from President Reagan for its souvenir program. She declined, explaining that the president didn’t do messages for ordinary benefits—“even if it is named for Bob Hope.” Miffed, a Hope representative threatened to take up the matter with his friend Ed Meese and warned that “if a message wasn’t provided, Bob Hope would never do anything else for the President.” Livingston appealed to Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver: “We’ve already done a couple of messages for events honoring Hope,” she wrote in a memo. “Do you want us to stick to policy on this?” The handwritten reply, apparently from Deaver: “I’m afraid the President would like to do this.”
Requests for presidential messages from groups honoring Hope kept coming: from the Golf Course Superintendents Association, the National Association for Sport and Physical Education, a Boys Club dinner honoring Hope as Los Angeles Citizen of the Year. Most were granted, grudgingly, with notes such as “Randy, don’t overdo—we have done tons for him” and “Keep it short.” Hope did little actual campaigning for Reagan, but he seemed to consider himself an unofficial part of the team. “The thing I remember about Bob Hope is that he’d show up,” said campaign strategist Stu Spencer. “We were in Cincinnati once for a campaign event, and the event guy says, ‘Bob Hope’s here.’ So we’re thinking, ‘What the hell are we gonna do with him?’ We put him on [the program] and he entertained and did fine. But the next morning, around six or seven a.m., I get a call from Hope: ‘Let’s go for a walk.’ I’m beat up, probably hungover, and I go walking the streets of Cincinnati with Bob Hope. It was weird.”
Reagan was there for Hope too. For his eightieth birthday celebration, Hope turned down a fervent bid from his hometown of Cleveland to host the event and opted instead for another big fete at the Kennedy Center in Washington, again produced by Jim Lipton. Reagan not only joined Hope in the guest-of-honor box, as such stars as George C. Scott, Lucille Ball, and Phyllis Diller paid tribute, but also taped an opening segment with Hope in the Lincoln bedroom, in which they reminisced about their early days in show business. It was the first Hope special ever to originate from inside the White House.
In December 1983, Hope made his first overseas Christmas tour since the Vietnam War. The new global trouble spot was Lebanon, where a terrorist bombing in October had killed 241 US marines stationed at the Beirut Airport, sent there as part of an international peacekeeping force following Israel’s 1982 invasion of the country. The marines were still in shock from the tragedy, and their confused mission ended just a couple of months later, when Reagan brought the troops home. But for Hope it was a chance to get up close and personal with his favorite audiences once again, and to try to erase some of the bad memories of Vietnam.
He brought along a new generation of glamour girls, including teenage model Brooke Shields and TV stars Ann Jillian and Cathy Lee Crosby. Ten years removed from the unpleasantness of Vietnam, the entertainers relished the chance to join one of Hope’s storied overseas missions. “I always felt your career wasn’t complete unless you had at least one USO show with Bob Hope under your belt,” said Jillian, who was a lively song-and-dance partner for Hope and led the traditional chorus of “Silent Night.” Crosby, who had worked with Hope on her “Get High on Yourself” series of public-service TV specials, said yes to his last-minute invitation, even though she was in the hospital recovering from knee surgery and had to start rehearsals on crutches.
With Beirut considered too dangerous, Hope and his troupe were restricted to entertaining on the decks of US warships off the Mediterranean coast. (Hope was helicoptered alone into Beirut on Christmas Day for a tour of the battered Marine compound, and he taped a message for the troops.) The performers were impressed with Hope’s stamina and dedication at age eighty—leading the group in climbing a rope ladder from a small ferryboat to one of the warships where they entertained, or keeping his cool when a red alert roused everyone out of bed in the middle of the night aboard the USS Guam. “He was bigger than life,” said Crosby. “For me he was an inspiration.”
The two-hour special devoted to the tour, which aired on January 15, 1984, didn’t have the documentary-like urgency of his Vietnam shows. Hope and his troupe performed on well-lit stages instead of on jungle hillsides, and the show seemed more stage-managed throughout. Some of the service gags dated back at least a couple of wars, and Hope’s ogling of the gals was as retrograde as ever (“Is that scenery or not, huh?”). But he seemed energized by the military audiences, and the special drew a solid 18.7 Nielsen rating—no blockbuster, but better than average for Hope’s shows of the period.
Not all of Hope’s international ventures turned out so well. Earlier in 1983 the Bob Hope British Classic, the pro-am golf tournament launched in 1980 in an effort to replicate Hope’s Palm Springs event, ran into money troubles and had to shut down after just four years, £500,000 in debt. Hope got embroiled in the mess when it was revealed that he had been paid £124,000 in fees and another £75,000 in expenses, even as the tournament was hemorrhaging money. Hope claimed all the money paid to him went toward legitimate expenses: “When you’re bringing stars over and taking care of them and their fares, it’s a hell of a lot of expense there.” Despite the financial mismanagement, the tournament raised £150,000 for charity—which mostly went to an organization for disabled children and for the restoration of the Eltham Little Theatre in Hope’s hometown, which was rechristened the Bob Hope Theatre in a grand ceremony that Hope attended in September 1982.
Hope was having some financial headaches closer to home as well. He was growing disenchanted with his daughter Linda’s management of his TV operations. He thought she was spending too much money. Linda blamed the problems on her father’s overpacked schedule, which left him with little time to focus on his TV shows. “He was very demanding, in a way,” she said. “He expected things to be ready and on time and on budget. But sometimes you had to pay more when you didn’t get decisions until the last minute—sets getting built quickly because he hadn’t had a chance to decide what the sketches were going to be. It would cost him money, and he wasn’t happy about that. And I’d say, ‘Dad, if you’d give more time to your television show, we could get this done and we wouldn’t have a lot of this overage.’ ”
Their clashes got so bad that in 1983 Hope replaced Linda with Elliott Kozak, whom he had originally pushed aside to create a job for his daughter. For Kozak, who had moved to ICM after leaving Hope, the return brought a measure of vindication. Despite getting ousted by her own father, Linda stayed involved, forming her own production company with her partner Nancy Malone and continuing to develop projects for him (including a TV movie based on his life and career, which never got off the ground) before returning to the fold full-time a few years later.
• • •
The awards and honors continued to pile up, so many that Hope barely had time to acknowledge them. When the National Parkinson’s Foundation, whose annual dinner he hosted for more than two decades, named a road near its Miami headquarters for Hope, he asked if the dedication ceremony could be held in the morning, so he could attend it on the way to the airport. While Miami mayor Maurice Ferré was making the formal presentation, Hope’s limo waited nearby with the motor running. Sometimes the honors didn’t live up to his exalted expectations. The USO, the beneficiary of Hope’s seventy-fifth birthday celebration at Kennedy Center, had promised to name its new headquarters building after Hope. But he was disappointed to find out that the building had been downsized, to four leased floors of an existing DC building—and that President Reagan would be out of the country and unable to attend the dedication. In 1985, Hope received one of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors—but only after several other Hollywood stars, among them Cary Grant, Gene Kelly, and Danny Kaye, had preceded him. And when Hope was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame, in November 1986, he was just one of a group of seven that also included Johnny Carson, Ernie Kovacs, Jim Henson, and Eric Sevareid. Hope’s staff worked diligently behind the scenes to make sure he got the final spot on the program, and a presenter of enough stature. (Lucille Ball did the honors, which satisfied him.)
The one place where Hope did not like to stand out was on the financial pages. He was dismayed in 1982 when Forbes magazine put him on its list of the four hundred richest Americans, estimating his net worth at $280 million. Hope, as usual, complained that the figure was too high and even challenged Forbes to prove it. “If my estate is worth over fifty million dollars, I’ll kiss your ass,” he told reporter Richard Behar. The magazine took up the challenge and assigned Behar to track down all of Hope’s real estate holdings and put a value on them. After talking with real estate brokers, appraisers, Hope lawyers, and Hope himself (who displayed an intimate knowledge of his property holdings, down to their exact acreage), Behar concluded that, after some recent sales, Hope owned about eighty-six hundred acres, much of it inaccessible mountain and canyon land worth less than some earlier estimates. In the end, Forbes revised its estimate of Hope’s net worth downward, to around $115 million. “When we’re proved wrong, we’re glad to get it straight,” said the magazine. “Thanks for the memories, Bob.”
Yet he was certainly rich, and he traveled in rich circles. He was friends and golfing buddies with businessmen such as Bill Fugazy, the limousine-company magnate; ice-cream-store owner Tom Carvel; and Alex Spanos, the real estate developer and owner of the San Diego Chargers. Hope and Spanos even developed a little soft-shoe dance routine together that they would sometimes perform at benefits. Being friends with Bob Hope could be a heady, weirdly public experience. Dick Cavett, who got to know Hope while writing for Johnny Carson and later as host of his own talk show, was watching Late Night with David Letterman one night when Hope came on as a guest and casually mentioned that he was taking Dick Cavett to the Army-Navy football game. It was the first Cavett had heard of it. (He wound up flying to the game with Hope aboard the Nabisco corporate jet and eating bean soup with him in the stands during a boring game.)
Yet Hope was a showbiz aristocrat who considered himself a man of the people. He and Dolores sent out five thousand Christmas cards a year, to practically everyone they knew or had met in their travels. He would often drive himself to the take-out window of the local In-N-Out Burger or Bob’s Big Boy. Once while traveling in the South, Hope wanted to watch a Marvin Hagler boxing match, but couldn’t get the satellite broadcast on his hotel TV set. His writers drove around the neighborhood, stopped in at the first house with a satellite dish, and asked the family living there if Hope could come watch at their house—which he did.
When the young stand-up comics who worked at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles went on strike in 1979, seeking to get paid for the first time, Hope sent a telegram backing their cause. “He supported the workingman,” said Tom Dreesen, a leader of the strike, who appeared at benefits with Hope and played in his golf tournament. “I never heard him bad-mouth another comedian. And I can’t say that for most of the comedians I’ve known.” Hope once asked writer Gene Perret what he thought of a young comic Hope was thinking of booking as a guest. Perret wasn’t that fond of him and replied judiciously, “Sometimes he’s good, and sometimes he’s not that thrilling.” Hope’s response: “Gene, that’s all of us.”
Hope became friends with younger entertainers such as Brooke Shields, the statuesque teenage model who became one of his favorite guests, and with whom he developed a close father-daughter relationship. “I’d come over to his house and he’d make me grilled-cheese sandwiches,” said Shields. “When he wanted his ice cream, I’d bring him his ice cream. We were very close. I was kind of like a pet. Because of my age, he kind of let me in, in a sort of daughter-granddaughter way. I think he was even closer to me than he was to his own kids.”
Another younger performer who became friendly with Hope in his later years was Dave Thomas, the SCTV comic who did a dead-on impression of him in sketches (most memorably, a parody of Play It Again, Sam, in which Hope, not Bogart, is the object of Woody Allen’s infatuation). Thomas was sixteen when he first saw Hope in person, performing at the Canadian National Exposition in Toronto; Thomas accosted the star in his limousine after the show and tried to shake hands with him, only to have Hope roll up the window on him. When he met Hope years later—introduced by his friend Jeff Barron, another SCTV veteran, who was writing for Hope—Thomas showed him a videotape of some of his SCTV parodies. After watching them, Hope asked if he could get a copy. “Take the tape,” Thomas said, adding jokingly that Hope could take the TV and the VCR too. “No,” said Hope after a moment’s thought, “I’ll just take the tape.” He was so used to getting freebies that he took Thomas seriously.
Thomas’s impersonation of Hope was affectionate. But to many younger comics, Hope in his old age was ripe for parody—an out-of-touch, cue-card-reading relic of a vanished show-business era. Casey Keller and Richard Albrecht were stymied when they were hired to write for Hope in the mid-1980s. They broke their writer’s block only when they imagined they were writing bad jokes for Dave Thomas’s parody-Hope. “She’s the hottest thing to shoot out of Canada since hockey pucks,” they had Hope say, for instance, to introduce a new Canadian singer. Hope loved the jokes. Said Keller, “Dave Thomas had a better handle on Hope than we did. We were writing for a Hope impersonator.”
Hope’s material, to be sure, was sounding awfully stale by this time. Producer Jim Lipton complained that Hope’s writers were feeding his complacency by giving him variations on the same lines over and over. “I knew why they were doing it,” said Lipton. “Because Bob would choose them—he was familiar with them, and he liked them. But I said, ‘You’re doing him a disservice. It’s easier on you, but in the end it’s unfair to Bob.’ ” The writers faced their own challenges in keeping Hope current. Once they gave him a joke that included the word Formica. Hope didn’t know what it was. “It’s fake wood,” Bob Mills told him. “You’ll never own any of it.”
Hope, moreover, could betray a tin ear when it came to contemporary sensibilities. On July 4, 1983, he entertained at a charity benefit aboard the Trump Princess in New York Harbor and ad-libbed a line he had just heard in the men’s room: “Have you heard? The Statue of Liberty has AIDS. Nobody knows if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Ferry.” The wisecrack, reported the next day in the New York Post, prompted a flurry of angry letters from gay activists and others who found it insensitive, and Hope was forced to apologize.
Nowhere was Hope’s status as showbiz royalty more vividly on display than Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Hope’s frequent guest appearances on the show clung to a familiar, almost comical ritual. He would walk out to the strains of “Thanks for the Memory”—sometimes unannounced, supposedly a “surprise” guest. After some banter with Johnny, sprinkled with obviously prepared gag lines, he would introduce a reel of taped highlights from his upcoming NBC special. Then he would scoot away, always with somewhere urgent to go. One of those who grew tired of the routine was Johnny Carson.
Hope and Carson were NBC’s two biggest stars, and they had much in common. They shared the same studio, designed for Hope back in the 1950s and taken over by Carson in 1972 when he moved the show to California, but always available to Hope for his specials. Their comedy styles were mirror images of each other: Carson did a more urbane and somewhat hipper version of Hope’s monologues—joking commentary on the news, topical but scrupulously nonpartisan. They were strikingly similar personality types as well: cool, remote, and emotionally detached, ingratiating on the surface, but known intimately by only a few.
Yet there were crucial differences too. Carson was a drinker, a brooder, notoriously standoffish in social settings. Hope drank little, socialized easily, and loved being the center of attention. Beneath Carson’s smooth exterior, one could sense the angst. Hope’s superficial bonhomie hid no inner demons. Despite his debt to Hope as a performer, Carson never warmed to the older comedian, either personally or professionally. The Tonight Show host would often mimic and pay homage to the classic comedians he adored—Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, George Burns. He almost never referenced Hope. “Johnny admired Hope’s place in show business,” said Tonight Show producer Peter Lassally, “but he was not a great admirer of his work.”
The coolness between them was in part a reflection of their rivalry. Carson was the only star at NBC who could challenge Hope for clout at the network. Yet Hope was still king, and Carson had to defer. Carson resented the way Hope could virtually book himself on the Tonight Show whenever he had something to promote, which seemed to be all the time. “We’d get a request,” said Lassally, “and Johnny would go, ‘Again?’ And I’d say, ‘Do you want to tell him no?’ And he’d say, ‘No. You can’t turn down Bob Hope.’ ” Hope would bring in highlight reels from his specials that went on interminably. “We’d say, give us two minutes,” said Jeff Sotzing, Carson’s nephew and a Tonight Show producer. “He’d bring in five minutes, cut together with a rusty knife. That was frustrating.” Once, after a Carson monologue that went over particularly well, Hope asked during a commercial break if he could use some of the laughter on his upcoming special. Flabbergasted, Carson said okay; later, on Hope’s special, Johnny claimed he could hear Ed McMahon laughing at Bob’s jokes.
Worst of all, from Carson’s point of view, Hope was not a good guest. He came armed with scripted jokes and would rarely engage in any genuine conversation—especially in the later years, when his bad hearing complicated the give-and-take. “There was nothing spontaneous about Hope,” said Andrew Nicholls, Carson’s former co–head writer. “He was a guy who relied on his writers for every topic. Johnny was very quick on his feet. Very well read. He was a guy who learned Swahili, learned Russian, learned astronomy. He appreciated people who he felt engaged with the real world. There was nothing to talk to Bob about.”
• • •
In the mid-1980s, with Hope’s ratings starting to sag, NBC scaled him back to just four specials a year: a fall season opener, a Christmas show, the annual birthday special in May, and one more show slotted into February or March. Each summer Hope would meet with NBC programming executives—headed by new entertainment chief Brandon Tartikoff—to bat around theme-show ideas for the coming season: Bob tries to buy NBC, for example, or starts his own Ted Turner–style news network, or (around the time of the Iran-contra hearings) gets investigated by Congress. One year Tartikoff even suggested that Hope try to book the pope as a guest for his Christmas special. (Hope could deliver presidents, but Pope John Paul II gave him a pass.) In January 1986, Hope starred in his one and only TV movie, A Masterpiece of Murder, playing a washed-up cop who teams with a retired cat burglar (Don Ameche) to solve crimes.
“I’m still with NBC for three simple reasons,” Hope said at the start of the 1985–86 season, his thirty-sixth with the TV network: “the creative atmosphere, the fine working conditions, and the pictures I took at the 1950 Christmas party.” He could still deliver big ratings on occasion. His birthday special in May 1986—from the Pensacola Naval Air Station, with Elizabeth Taylor and Don Johnson among the guests—drew a 39 percent share of the viewing audience, the highest of any Hope special in five years. But his routine shows were no longer doing well, and with NBC back on top of the network ratings race (led by its hit sitcoms The Cosby Show and Family Ties), programmers had to be careful where they scheduled them. “There might have been a time when you could broadcast a Bob Hope special any day of the week, any time of the night, and pull in an audience regardless of the competition,” an NBC executive said in 1987. “Now we’re looking at protective time frames.”
The shows themselves were growing increasingly leaden: tired gags, corny sketches, with Hope looking more disengaged and cue-card-dependent than ever. Variety, reviewing his 1989 special from the Bahamas, chided Hope for “permitting his team of writers to throw together such a generally dismal collection of excuses for gags and uniformly horrible skits which could have been bettered by a reasonably talented high school sophomore.”
Yet the shows were big moneymakers for Hope. When he went to overseas locales such as the Bahamas and Tahiti, the local tourist board would typically pick up the travel and hotel costs (even though the network budget already allotted for them) and also pay Hope an extra fee for “promotional” work. That would cover most of the show’s production costs, leaving virtually the entire license fee paid by NBC (around $1 million per hour) as clear profit for Hope. “The whole show would cost him essentially nothing,” said Kozak. “We made out like bandits really.”
Hope’s fee for personal appearances was up to $75,000, and he was raking in even more money from commercials. In addition to his work for Texaco, Hope became a TV pitchman for California Federal Savings, and in the mid-1980s he signed a five-year deal to appear in ads for the Silver Pages, a new telephone directory from Southwestern Bell aimed at senior citizens. Kozak negotiated a sweet deal: Hope got $1 million a year for just a couple of days’ work, and when Southwestern Bell ended the campaign prematurely, after three years, the company had to pay him $500,000 just to get out of the contract. (Kozak, who often felt underappreciated, was miffed at Hope’s blasé reaction to the windfall. “He just takes the check,” said Kozak. “No ‘thank you.’ I was so pissed that he didn’t acknowledge what a hell of a deal that was.”)
The legacy burnishing, meanwhile, continued at a steady clip. NBC renamed a street near its Burbank headquarters Bob Hope Drive. A retirement community for Air Force veterans in the Florida panhandle was christened Bob Hope Village. In January 1988, Hope was guest of honor for the opening of the Bob Hope Cultural Center, a sixty-six-acre arts complex in Palm Springs—with President Reagan among the bigwigs in the audience, Van Cliburn playing the national anthem, and another slew of Hollywood stars on hand to pay their respects. He made The Guinness Book of Records as the recipient of more honors and awards than any other entertainer in the world. (Hope’s publicists were always thinking. In the mid-1970s, the town of Hope, Arkansas—later to become famous as Bill Clinton’s birthplace—invited Hope to its hundredth birthday celebration. Frank Liberman replied that Hope might come if the town would change its name to Bob Hope, Arkansas.)
Hope was back overseas at Christmas in 1987, traveling to the Persian Gulf (with Barbara Eden, Connie Stevens, and his granddaughter Miranda along for the ride) to entertain US troops aboard warships sent there in response to a threat by the Ayatollah Khomeini to cut off oil shipments. “I think this is appropriate,” said Hope, aboard the USS Midway, “the oldest aircraft carrier meets the oldest operational comedian.” Assuming it would be his last Christmas tour, Hope followed up with a book, Don’t Shoot, It’s Only Me (written with Mel Shavelson), recapping his forty-plus years of entertaining the troops. Yet there would be one more, unexpected tour of duty: another Christmas trip to the Persian Gulf in 1990, where a US buildup of forces was under way in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.
Hope by this time was eighty-seven and getting frail. His daughter Linda came along to provide support and produce the special, and Dolores joined them as well. Because of security precautions in the walk-up to the US invasion of Iraq, Hope and his entertainers (among them Ann Jillian, Marie Osmond, and the Pointer Sisters) were whisked from show to show by helicopter, often without being told their destination. Press coverage of the trip was severely restricted. (When reporters complained, Hope commiserated, “I live for the press. That’s not my idea, believe me.”) In deference to Islamic customs, moreover, the single women in the troupe were not allowed to perform in Saudi Arabia at all, but confined to shipboard shows and a stop in Bahrain.
Yet Hope weathered the trip well. “He was stronger than most of us,” said Gene Perret, the writer Hope brought along. “He worked hard, did the monologues. He would do dance numbers with the women—which is not easy on a ship.” Hope made the usual wisecracks about US servicemen on a mission far from home (“Where else can you see signs that say YANKEE GO HOME signed by Yankees?”) and took a few jingoistic digs at Saddam Hussein (the Iraqi dictator should get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Hope said, “so we can all spit on it”). With the tight restrictions on what Hope could show of his travels, the ninety-minute special played more like a typical Hope variety show, with full-length numbers from most of the guest stars. Even Dolores, after being edited out of so many of Hope’s earlier tours, was showcased in two numbers, including a duet with Bob on “White Christmas.”
Hope’s usual patriotic closing had a prosaic, almost boilerplate quality: “Let’s pray that somehow or some way, we can destroy the menace that’s causing the trouble over there and it won’t be long before our servicemen and -women are back home where they belong.” But the response from the troops was enthusiastic, the ratings decent—and, for once, the war over quickly. The US invaded Iraq, launching the first Gulf War, just days after Hope’s show aired on January 12, 1991, and by April, Hope was able to host a homecoming special, featuring marines from the 29 Palms training center near Palm Springs, whom he had met in Saudi Arabia. Former president Ford and Jimmy Stewart were on hand for the show, and General Norman Schwarzkopf and Secretary of State Colin Powell sent messages of thanks. Hope hailed the successful military campaign as “a whole new concept in politics” because President Bush “did everything he said he was going to do.” Hope’s last war, at least, ended in victory.
• • •
By the late eighties, Hope’s physical decline was becoming noticeable even to casual viewers. Though he was still in overall good health, both his eyesight and hearing were deteriorating badly. He had another flare-up of his eye hemorrhaging in 1982, but this time in his right eye—previously his good one—and it seriously affected his vision. The cue cards had to be blown up extralarge so that he could read them, and they continued to grow as the years went on, the words scrawled by Barney McNulty in such gargantuan letters that a single joke would sometimes take up three or four cards.
Hope’s hearing was getting worse as well. His ear specialist, Dr. Howard House, prescribed a hearing aid, but Hope was too vain to wear one. “I can still hear the laughs,” he would tell friends. He had trouble hearing normal conversation, and it became hard for him to pick up the musical cues when recording songs for his specials. He was wandering off the beat so often that musical director Bob Alberti had to kneel beside Hope’s cue cards during the tapings, giving him a visual downbeat for each line. And still Hope would sometimes lose the beat.
Producer Jim Lipton noticed the deterioration in the last birthday special he produced for Hope, from Paris in 1989. The monologue went so badly that Hope had to stay behind in the theater to rerecord some of the jokes. Lipton had written new lyrics for “Thanks for the Memory” in French, spelling them out phonetically on the cue cards, but Hope couldn’t handle them. It was painful for both of them. “Great job,” said Lipton, after Hope finished his monologue. “Aw, come on,” Hope said. “I used to be twice as fast.”
“Starting in the late eighties, it was affecting the work,” said NBC’s Rick Ludwin. “It would take him longer to do the monologue. He’d stumble over things. He’d get a little frustrated with himself. There was such goodwill on the part of the audience that they forgave him—they still loved that they were being entertained by Bob Hope. But the postproduction on the show became more difficult, to sort of Scotch-tape together the monologue and have it appear as much as possible to flow logically.”
The man once known as Rapid Robert was running down. His physical limitations were hard for him to accept, and he grew testy about them. Taping a sketch with Brooke Shields for one show, Hope kept missing his cue, and Shields tried to help by sneaking the line to him under her breath. Hope blew up at her. “He got really mad at me,” she recalled. “ ‘What are you doing that for, you little idiot?’ I just burst into tears because he had never yelled at me before. And then I realized he was mad at himself because he didn’t hear the cue. I thought I was helping him. And it seemed that I was disrespecting him.”
On the Tonight Show, his hearing problems were making his guest appearances even more of a trial than they already were. He often had trouble picking up Carson’s questions, and Johnny had to stick precisely to the notes his staff gave him; if he asked a question out of order, Hope might answer a different question. Still, Hope kept coming on the show, his frailties on full display for the national TV audience. “If I ever end up like that, guys,” Carson said to his writers, “I want you to shoot me.”
Carson retired gracefully in 1992. But Hope soldiered on, battling not just his failing faculties but also network inattention. Writer Gene Perret had painful memories of one of Hope’s last monologues. The fading star was shunted to a new studio, and when he arrived to do his monologue, a tiny crowd of only around fifty people was waiting in the audience. (NBC claimed the buses hadn’t shown up.) Hope struggled to get any reaction from the sparse crowd, as Perret watched uncomfortably from the wings. Finally Hope stopped midway through, in distress, and called Perret over, asking him for some last-minute jokes about an award Johnny Carson had just been given by the outgoing president, Bush.
Perret quickly came up with a few lines (“Those lame ducks stick together”), and Hope got at least a few laughs before wrapping up the monologue. But afterward, when Perret asked Hope if he wanted to go over the videotape, as they usually did to start the editing process, Hope demurred, saying, “We’ll do it later.” For Perret, it was a poignant sign of defeat. “He knew it was a bad monologue. It was sad.”
• • •
Along with the procession of awards and tributes that filled Hope’s waning years were a couple of unwelcome distractions. One was a nasty dispute over something Hope had hoarded, and mostly guarded from public view, for years: his land.
By the 1980s the bulk of Hope’s real estate holdings lay in the mountainous areas north and west of Los Angeles, a 240-square-mile area designated in 1978 as the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area. A state agency called the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy was seeking to buy up as much of this land as possible, to preserve its pristine views, hiking areas, and endangered wildlife. But Hope, who had watched the land appreciate wildly in value since he’d bought it in the 1950s and 1960s, was starting to sell it to developers—at prices far higher than what the conservancy could afford.
Several parcels had already been sold off. Hope got $13 million for one tract near Malibu Creek State Park, from a developer who built condominiums on it, and $10 million for another 195 acres in Calabasas, where a housing development was planned. But what set off a firestorm was a deal to sell the Jordan Ranch—a twenty-three-hundred-acre parcel in the Simi Hills north of the Ventura Freeway, which Hope had bought in the 1950s for a reported $300,000. In 1987 a Maryland-based developer called Potomac Investments acquired an option to buy the land from Hope for $25 million, pending approval of its plans to build a PGA-owned golf course on it, along with a development of more than eleven hundred homes.
Years of complicated negotiations followed, involving the developer, zoning officials, environmentalists, and Hope’s lawyers. The plans for developing Jordan Ranch had a major stumbling block. The area lacked an access road to a major highway, and the only place to build one was through Cheeseboro Canyon—on land already owned by the National Park Service. So a land-swap compromise was proposed. The Park Service agreed to give up a fifty-nine-acre sliver of Cheeseboro Canyon to allow the developers to build an access road. In return, Potomac would donate the undeveloped half of Jordan Ranch—a picturesque area known as China Flat, long prized by environmentalists—to the state so it could be preserved as parkland.
The proposed deal split the environmental community. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the Sierra Club backed the plan, reasoning that giving up a small slice of national-park land in return for preserving China Flat was worth it. But other environmentalists hotly opposed the deal, arguing that the government had no right to give up any national-park land to pave the way for a housing development in the area.
The dispute boiled over in early 1990, covered extensively in the local press and on TV news. Hope was cast as the environmental villain, a greedy landowner who cared more about golf courses than protecting California’s natural beauty. “No one has a larger ownership of land in the Santa Monicas, and yet has not given up one inch,” said Margot Feuer, of the Save the Mountain Park Coalition. “What is it that drives this man?” An editorial cartoon in the Los Angeles Times showed a map of the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area, with the topographical details replaced by an eighteen-hole golf course. The caption: “Faith, Hope and Damn Little Charity.” One Saturday morning protesters showed up in front of Hope’s Toluca Lake home: HONK IF YOU THINK BOB HOPE HAS ENOUGH MONEY read one sign. The controversy raged in the letters columns of the Los Angeles Times. “Hope doesn’t owe anyone anything,” wrote one reader. “But if he doesn’t see the desperate need to maintain a buffer of open space around Los Angeles and more importantly, respond with a gift of land to the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreational Area, I for one am going to be sorry I ever went to any of his films, or watched any of his numskull TV specials. Thanks for the memories! Thanks for nothing!”
Hope was dismayed to find himself in the role of an environmental meanie. He had a perfect right to profit from the land investments he had made decades ago, he argued. “I didn’t hold it for twenty-five years and pay taxes on it just to give it away,” he told a reporter. His lawyers reminded people of all the work Hope had done for charity and claimed that he had already given away fifteen hundred acres of his land in various places, including the eighty acres in Rancho Mirage that he had donated for the Eisenhower Medical Center.
But the environmental protests succeeded in scuttling the land-swap deal, and Hope soon backed down. After another round of negotiations, a new deal was worked out, with Hope and the developer making major concessions. Potomac agreed to move its housing development and golf course out of Jordan Ranch altogether, combining it instead with another development being planned for Ahmanson Ranch, in Las Virgines Canyon. At the same time, Hope agreed to sell all of Jordan Ranch, along with the rest of his property in the area—including the 4,369-acre Runkle Ranch farther north and 339 acres overlooking the ocean in Malibu’s Corral Canyon—to the government for parkland. Hope would get $29.5 million, substantially below the land’s market value, and the state would get a huge swath of mountain and canyon land protected from developers for good.
More zoning battles, objections from environmentalists, and lawsuits followed. But Hope was instantly transformed from environmental villain into public-spirited land donor. “In preserving these open spaces, Bob Hope is making a special gift to all Californians,” said California governor Pete Wilson, when the deal was signed in November 1991. For Hope, the financial sacrifice must have been painful, but it was worth the restoration of his public image. “The knocks he’s taken from environmentalists for not wanting to give up the properties for so long finally got to him,” a Hope associate told the Los Angeles Times. “Here you have this national hero who has given generously of himself his entire life, and I think he figured the criticism just wasn’t worth it.”
Hope’s image took some blows on another, more personal front around the same time, as some serious breaches appeared in the cone of silence that had long shrouded his extramarital sex life. First, in 1991, one of his former secretaries, Jan King, regaled readers of the Globe tabloid with an account of Hope’s womanizing, which she helped cover up for years. Two years later, Arthur Marx, drawing on King’s account as well as his own interviews, published a gossipy tell-all biography, The Secret Life of Bob Hope.
Marx’s bio, brought out by the small New Jersey publisher Barricade Books, was an uneasy mix of gossip and reporting, sloppily written and wildly unbalanced—with pages and pages devoted to minor Hope dalliances as if they were Soviet spy cases. Hope refused to comment on the book, and his publicist Ward Grant dismissed it as “just a lot of old stuff, nothing new.” One libel suit was brought against it, by Hope’s former son-in-law, Nathaniel Lande, who disputed some allegations about his relationship with the family and won a $10,000 judgment in a jury trial. Yet Marx’s account of Hope’s womanizing was never seriously challenged, and most of those in Hope’s inner circle who would talk candidly agreed that it rang true.
Even in his eighties, Hope still had a roving eye. His last girlfriend, according to both Marx and Hope publicist Frank Liberman, was Sandy Vinger, a former writer on his California Federal Savings commercials, who was his frequent companion in the 1980s. In 1994, when Hope was ninety-one, she filed a breach-of-contract suit, claiming that Hope had hired her in 1974 as an “assistant and companion,” on the promise that he would support her for life. The suit was dismissed in 1996 after an undisclosed out-of-court settlement. The amazing thing is how little of all this made its way into the mainstream press. Even in the age of tabloid television and a far-more-aggressive gossip industry, Hope’s all-American image, for most of his fans, remained unsullied.
Hope’s all-American family, meanwhile, was going through its own trials. His youngest daughter, Nora, had divorced her first husband, Sam McCullagh, after ten years of marriage (and one daughter, Alicia) and married Bruce Somers, the ex-husband of actress Suzanne Somers, a college friend of Nora’s. Her second marriage exacerbated Nora’s already-strained relationship with her mother. Dolores, the strict Catholic, disapproved of the divorce, and she didn’t get along with Nora’s new husband and three stepchildren. According to a friend of Nora’s, the discord came to a head when Dolores told Nora that Bruce and the stepchildren were not welcome at an upcoming holiday get-together. Nora never spoke to her mother again. She eventually cut off contact with her father and the rest of the family as well—even her brother Kelly, with whom she had been close.
The abrupt renunciation of her adoptive family was inexplicable to many in the Hope circle. Nora had been a favorite of Bob’s—high-spirited, fun, eager to please her dad. But she chafed under her mother’s stern discipline and was never comfortable living in the aura of her father’s celebrity. “I remember always Nora not being at all happy with the public persona and what was required,” said Linda Hope. “Her dream was to marry a shoe salesman and live in a little house with a white picket fence and have nothing to do with all the Bob Hope hoopla.” Nora’s friend pinned much of the blame for the rift on Somers, her second husband, who convinced her that the relationship with her family was toxic and that she needed to break from them.
For Dolores the estrangement was obviously painful. For Bob, maybe less so. Whatever angst it caused him was kept, as always, well hidden. “I don’t think it really deeply affected him,” said Linda. “It affected my mother more. But maybe he just didn’t talk about it.” Nora later divorced Somers, sought out her birth parents, and continued to reject any attempts by friends and family to reestablish contact. She didn’t attend Bob Hope’s funeral, or Dolores’s eight years later.
• • •
Hope’s ninetieth birthday, on May 29, 1993, presented a challenge for NBC. A big celebration was clearly called for, but Hope’s eyesight and hearing were so bad that he could no longer carry a show on his own. Instead, the network prepared an elaborate three-hour special for which Hope would largely be a bystander. He and Dolores were seated at a table on a wing of the stage, as a parade of celebrities (including taped messages from President Clinton and all five living ex-presidents) paid tribute to him. To help him follow what was going on, and for the few segments in which he briefly participated, producer Don Mischer put a small IFB microphone in his ear, so that Linda, sitting in the control room, could brief him on who was there and what was happening.
Even Hope’s limited role caused some anxiety. Johnny Carson agreed to do a monologue on the show (the first and only one he would do after leaving the Tonight Show) on the assurance that Hope would not do one as well; despite his frustrations with Hope, Johnny didn’t want the master to be embarrassed. George Burns, seven years older than Hope, was apprehensive about the small bit of comedy business that had been written for the two of them. “I don’t know if I can do this because his timing is really off,” he told Mischer. In the end, Burns, seated next to Hope, did all the talking. When Hope got up onstage for a little patter with Dorothy Lamour, he stepped on one of her lines.
Still, the ninetieth birthday special—which aired Friday night, May 14, and beat the competition in the ratings—was a well-produced and entertaining show. Dance production numbers were interspersed with clips from Hope’s movies, TV shows, stage career, and overseas tours, introduced by guest stars ranging from Roseanne Arnold to Walter Cronkite. Dolores sang “Paper Moon,” the first number Hope had seen her perform in a New York nightclub back in 1933. Through some video trickery, Lucie Arnaz replaced Shirley Ross in the “Thanks for the Memory” scene from The Big Broadcast of 1938. Servicemen from each of the four wars in which Hope had entertained came onstage to convey their thanks. Longtime colleagues such as Barney McNulty, Hal Kanter, NBC’s Rick Ludwin, and even Hope’s handyman did brief walk-ons to wish him happy birthday. Hope took it all in amiably, smiling and nodding with approval, occasionally getting misty eyed, and gathering himself for a few words of thanks at the end. At three hours, the show seemed to never end, but it was a tasteful and often touching farewell.
Except that it wasn’t a farewell. Hope refused to quit, continuing to do specials that tested the creativity of Linda and NBC to find formats that would demand little of him. More shows were essentially compilations of old clips, or “young comedians” specials, in which Hope would simply be trotted out to introduce a lineup of new stand-up comics. His Christmas show in 1993 was a visit to the Hope home (actually an NBC studio set) for a family get-together, featuring Hope’s children and grandchildren and drop-ins by such stars as Loni Anderson, Barbara Eden, and Joey Lawrence, with Bob largely an onlooker. For friends and fans alike, the spectacle was getting painful. “Bob Hope could have done what Johnny Carson did—kind of step aside,” said David Letterman in a Rolling Stone interview. “I watched a lot of his early films over the holidays on AMC, and, Jesus, talk about a guy who was sharp and on the money and appealing and fresh and charismatic. Then I saw Bob Hope’s [Christmas show] and it was tough to watch. If it had been a funeral, you would have preferred the coffin be closed. I mean, can he be gratified by that?”
The family gently tried to coax him into retirement. “I said, ‘Dad, you don’t want to keep on with this,’ ” Linda recalled. “ ‘This is not you. You don’t want people to remember you at less than your best.’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah, but I’ve got a deal with NBC.’ He was just so habituated to doing this kind of thing that I think it was very difficult for him to let go of it.” Handling him, never easy for his producer-daughter, became even tougher. During the taping of a young-comedians special in 1994, Dave Thomas witnessed a tense encounter when Linda tried to set up a shot for her father to say a quick good-night. “I’m not doing that!” he snapped at her. Linda backed off and went on to other matters. A few minutes later, Hope took the microphone, the cameras scrambled into place, and he wrapped up the show with a few jokes. “Now that’s the way I say good night,” he told Thomas, as he sat back down. “Not like goddamn Walter Cronkite.”
He continued to make his annual appearances at the Bob Hope Desert Classic, hitting a drive on the first tee to launch the tournament, before retiring for the rest of the event. He had one last hurrah in February 1995, when three living presidents—Clinton, Ford, and Bush—played a round with Hope and the tournament’s defending champion, Scott Hoch. Though he could barely play anymore, Hope puttered around the course with them, hitting most of his drives from the middle of the fairway and skipping a couple of holes. His friend Andrew Coffey, who was at the wheel of his golf cart, had to drive halfway onto the greens, so Bob wouldn’t have to walk too far to putt. Hope was ready to quit after nine holes, but President Clinton was enjoying it so much he said he wanted to play eighteen. “Dammit,” Hope grumbled, as he returned to the course. Hope retired after a few more holes, and President Bush won the presidential match with a round of 92, beating Clinton by a stroke.
Clinton, a lifelong fan of Hope’s, had first met the comedian in the late seventies, when Clinton was Arkansas governor and they had dinner together on the town square in Fayetteville after a Hope appearance at the University of Arkansas. A few months after the Palm Springs match, they had another chance to bond on the golf course when Hope was traveling to Washington and called Clinton at the White House to ask if he had time for nine holes. “I practically fell out of my chair,” Clinton recalled. “But it happened to be a day when I had some free time. So I cleared the schedule and took him out to the Army Navy club [in Arlington, Virginia] because it was close.” Though the ninety-two-year-old Hope could barely see, he could still hit the ball. On a narrow 173-yard par three, with woods on the left and a steep hill on the right, Clinton was astonished to see Hope drive the ball dead straight onto the green.
“He could see the ball below his feet, but he had no distance vision,” Clinton said. “We got up to the green, and the young fellow who was with him was helping him aim his putts. And I said, ‘Bob, you have a twenty-foot putt, slightly uphill, and it’s gonna break about six, maybe eight inches max, to the left.’ He said, ‘I got it.’ The guy lined him up, he hit the ball to two inches, and tapped in for a par. For a guy his age, it was just amazing.”
Back at NBC, Hope’s specials—now mostly shunted to low-viewership Saturday nights—were getting the worst ratings of his career. After his ninetieth birthday special NBC was rumored to be ready to retire him, but the network was careful not to force the issue. “Brandon Tartikoff regarded Bob Hope as an institution and part of the DNA of NBC,” said Ludwin. “There was never a thought of canceling him.” But clearly he couldn’t continue much longer. In 1995, as he was planning a trip to Europe for a special to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day, Dolores finally threw up her hands. “We’re doing this one,” she said. “But this has got to be the last.” That December, for the first time since 1950, there was no Bob Hope Christmas special. An NBC spokesman explained that a mutual decision had been made to “devote our energies toward specials in 1996.”
An exit plan was quietly worked out. “There came a point where all the parties involved decided that it was really tough to go forward,” said Ludwin. “We discussed with Linda and the press reps how we wanted to handle it. Because when you’re dealing with someone who has been in business at NBC for six decades, you have to handle it diplomatically.” Ludwin remembered how Lucille Ball, when her ratings at CBS were falling, announced that she was leaving the network. “I thought to myself, ‘What a classy way to handle this. What network could fire Lucille Ball? She had to fire the network.’ So I thought to myself, ‘That’s the way this has to be handled. No one can fire Bob Hope. He has to fire us.’ ”
One last special was scheduled: a retrospective of Hope’s presidential humor, tied in with his soon-to-be-published book, Dear Prez, I Wanna Tell Ya! On October 23, 1996, one month before the telecast, Hope took out a full-page ad in Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and the Los Angeles Times—paid for by NBC—announcing that it would be his last NBC special. “Guess what? I’ve decided to become a FREE AGENT,” the announcement read. “My thanks to NBC, for making it possible to be part of your lives all these years. It’s been a great ride. Now, caddy, hand me my 7-iron.”
His publicist Ward Grant stressed that Hope was not retiring, but would be touring to promote his new book, updating his autobiography, and overseeing the release of his specials on home video. Hope was resistant to the bitter end. “It was sort of a mutual thing,” said Linda Hope of the retirement scenario, “although Dad was less mutual about it. If NBC had said, ‘We’ll do another year,’ Dad would have done it.”
Hope’s final NBC special, Laughing with the Presidents, aired on November 23, 1996. Tony Danza was the host, introducing film clips of Hope’s encounters with presidents and engaging in a bit of carefully edited conversation with him. The good-bye was painless, if anticlimactic. “This TV entry? An amusing look at Hope’s tilting with Presidents,” said Variety in its review. “His comedy and his career? Both terrif.”
• • •
The last few years were not pretty. Hope’s eyesight and hearing were going, and signs of dementia were starting to appear. In his few public appearances, at various benefit dinners and ceremonial events, Hope could seem confused or disoriented. His short-term memory was spotty, and he had trouble recognizing people—though it was difficult to tell if the problem was his eyesight or his mind.
Remarkably, he could still pull himself together in front of a microphone. In January 1997 he appeared briefly onstage at a benefit performance given by Dolores and Rosemary Clooney in Palm Springs. After Bob’s retirement, Dolores had decided to restart her long-dormant singing career, and she recorded an album of standards, Now and Then. She and Clooney then prepared a nightclub act together, which they debuted at Palm Desert’s McCallum Theatre, to a sold-out crowd. At the end of the show they called Bob onstage.
“Backstage he was not in good shape,” recalled Michael Feinstein, the cabaret singer, who became close to both Bob and Dolores in the later years. “We were worried. But, wouldn’t you know it, once he was introduced, he went right to center stage, took the microphone, and he was right there.” He joined Clooney in a duet of “It’s De-Lovely,” his old number from Red, Hot and Blue. The gimmick was that Bob merely repeated each it’s, with Clooney picking up the rest of the lyrics. Before they started, she took out her score and gave him one the size of a postage stamp. “Can you spare it?” Hope quipped.
At other times, however, he could seem like a very old man. He was in the audience when Rosemary and Dolores opened their show together at New York City’s Rainbow and Stars. Dolores appeared first, singing “Paper Moon” and “I Thought About You” and teaming with Clooney for Sondheim’s “Old Friend,” before turning the show over to Clooney, the headliner. The New York Times gave Dolores a nice review: “Her timbre was clear and strong, her intonation pitch-perfect,” wrote critic Stephen Holden. But Hope couldn’t help upstaging his wife, even in his dotage. Bill Tush, an entertainment reporter who was covering the event for CNN’s Showbiz Today, recalled the uncomfortable scene when Hope, apparently unable to hear, began talking loudly during Dolores’s numbers. She gamely ignored him, before finishing her set and returning to the table.
“Mrs. Hope joined Bob at his table and Rosemary sang,” Tush recalled. “Then I could hear him—‘What are you doing? Stop that!’ I looked, and she was rubbing his head, lovingly. ‘Stop kissing me. Stop that!’ It really got embarrassing for everybody, and finally they got up to leave. I couldn’t help but look. When he stood up, his pants were undone. He pulled them up to button them. Meanwhile Rosemary kept the show going. Mrs. Hope and a handler helped Bob out. He was stooped over and still yelling things out, like ‘Leave me alone! I’m okay!’ Out the door they went, and that was the last time I saw Bob Hope. What a way to remember.”
At home he settled into a comfortable routine. He still slept late, waking between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m. His caretaker, J. Dennis Paulin, would read to him from the morning Los Angeles Times, and large-print editions were made of business documents that he needed to see. He would watch Jeopardy! on TV (with headphones, so he could hear) and still took his late-night walks, though they were usually indoors now—up and down the aisles of the local Vons supermarket in Toluca Lake, or, when he was in Palm Springs, through the terminal building of the Palm Springs Airport. Sometimes, in Toluca Lake, Paulin would let him take the wheel of his golf cart and drive the five blocks to Lakeside for a couple of holes of golf. Paulin had a key to the back gate and could cut onto the course and look for a vacant hole where Bob could play, then take him back to the clubhouse for a fake Brandy Alexander. In 1996, after a lifetime of dilatory churchgoing, Hope acceded to his devout wife’s wishes and was baptized into the Catholic Church.
Reports of his failing health, along with photos showing his stooped frame and red-rimmed eyes, would occasionally surface in the tabloids, with dire headlines about his “tragic last days.” On June 4, 1998, AP actually reported his death by mistake, when an advance obituary for him was inadvertently posted on the Internet. When the House Republican leader, Representative Dick Armey, heard the news, he passed it on to Representative Bob Stump, the Republican chairman of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, who delivered a eulogy on the floor of the House. “We’re all going to miss him,” said Stump, praising Hope as “the best friend anyone in uniform ever had.” When reporters began phoning, Linda calmly informed them that her father was having breakfast.
He made a few trips to Washington for events honoring him—including a visit to the White House, where President Clinton signed a congressional resolution making Hope the first Honorary Veteran of the US Armed Forces—but Dolores did most of the talking. After returning from a trip in June 2000, for the opening of the Bob Hope Gallery of Entertainment at the Library of Congress, Hope had a major health scare. Some renovations at the Toluca Lake house were not finished, and the Palm Springs house was closed for the season, so when he returned, Hope moved temporarily into the old house on El Alameda street. There he began having stomach pains and was rushed by ambulance to the Eisenhower Medical Center, suffering from gastrointestinal bleeding. Family spokesmen minimized the event, but he was seriously ill. “He was in very critical condition,” said Paulin. “It was a pretty harrowing event.” Hope recovered, but after that needed full-time nursing care.
He lingered for three more years—bedridden most of the time, but brought out by Dolores in a wheelchair for family get-togethers. In July 2001, Pentagon officials came to the house in Toluca Lake to present him with the Order of Horatio Gates Gold Medal, for his work raising the morale of US soldiers around the world. In April 2003, as his hundredth birthday approached, NBC marked the occasion with one more tribute special, 100 Years of Hope Humor. He got more than two thousand birthday cards—from President George W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth, among others—and at least thirty-five states proclaimed his birthday “Bob Hope Day.” “His eyes light up with each thing I tell him,” Linda told Variety, “and they bring a big smile to his face.” On the day he turned one hundred, the milestone his grandfather never quite reached, he had his favorite dinner of roast lamb with mint jelly.
He lived just two months longer. On Sunday night, July 27, 2003, with family members and a few household staff gathered at his bedside in Toluca Lake and Dolores holding his hand, Bob Hope died peacefully, officially of pneumonia. The family waited until early morning to notify the police, who had a security plan in place and set up roadblocks around the house to keep away gawkers and the press. Some TV news crews beat the roadblocks and camped outside anyway.
• • •
The funeral was low-key, with a hundred family members, household staff, and caregivers gathered at 6:00 a.m. Wednesday morning in the chapel at St. Charles Borromeo Church. Hope’s two sons, Tony and Kelly, and his grandson Zach, spoke briefly at the thirty-minute service. Hope could have been buried with pomp at Arlington National Cemetery, or in the Hollywood showplace for dead celebrities, Forest Lawn. But Dolores opted for quieter dignity, and his flag-draped coffin was transported in a police motorcade to the San Fernando Mission Cemetery, in Mission Hills, California, where he was laid to rest.
A month later, on August 27, the family held a larger, invitation-only funeral mass at St. Charles Borromeo. The eulogists included Senator Dianne Feinstein and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mickey Rooney, Kathryn Crosby, Tom Selleck, Raquel Welch, Brooke Shields, Nancy Reagan, and former president Gerald Ford and wife, Betty, were among those in the audience. “He was leading us to something deeper than laughter—joy,” said Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles, who conducted the service. Later in the afternoon, a more raucous memorial was held at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, where friends and colleagues—including Sid Caesar, Jack Carter, Lee Iacocca, and Larry King—paid tribute with stories and jokes. “I couldn’t be here in spirit, so I came in person,” said Red Buttons.
His oldest son, Tony, died unexpectedly of a heart aneurysm just a year later, at age sixty-three. Dolores lived long enough to celebrate her own hundredth birthday and then some (she died in September 2011, at age 102). Linda, the daughter who tended to her father so loyally in his final years, took charge of the legacy, orchestrating the tributes that dribbled on for years and tending to his estate, estimated at around $300 million at the time of his death.
His death triggered the usual round of media tributes that routinely follow the passing of any major showbiz celebrity: the front-page obituaries, the encomiums from colleagues and friends, the endless loop of film clips on the entertainment shows and cable news channels. There was more, befitting a national hero. The flags were lowered to half-staff. “Today America has lost a great citizen,” said President George W. Bush in a statement. Former president Clinton praised Hope’s “matchless legacy of laughs to people all over the world.” Nancy Reagan said, “Losing him is like losing a member of the family.”
Yet the response to Hope’s passing seemed restrained, almost dutiful. The master of comic timing had, quite simply, lingered too long, the memories of his great years tarnished by his long and very public decline. The New York Times’ obituary for Hope had been sitting on the shelf so long that its author, former film critic Vincent Canby, had himself been dead for three years. Time magazine gave the comedian of the century a polite but meager one-page send-off. (The death of George Harrison, the third-best Beatle, rated a cover story.) NBC, having just aired its hundredth-birthday tribute to Hope in April—and rerun it on his birthday in May—opted not to gear up another one. Instead, on the evening after his death, the network ran a two-minute “salute” to Hope at the beginning of prime time—then returned to regularly scheduled programming.
In the years that followed, even the people most indebted to Hope seemed to take him for granted. Younger stand-up comics, when asked about the comedians who influenced them, would cite rebel role models such as Lenny Bruce, and occasionally an old-timer such as Groucho Marx or Jack Benny. Almost no one mentioned Bob Hope—an odd omission, considering that he essentially invented their art form. His movie work never enjoyed a revival-house rediscovery or received the kind of film-buff attention accorded more fashionable comics—W. C. Fields or the Marx Brothers—or the silent-film clowns. Unlike Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, and other comedy stars of TV’s golden age—who starred in sitcoms that lived on endlessly in cable reruns and thus gained new generations of fans—Hope appeared mainly in variety shows that have been out of circulation for years, leaving most younger audiences with little memory of him, except in his declining later years.
Yet the show-business world he left behind would not have been the same without him. Every late-night talk-show host who does an opening monologue is tilling the ground that Bob Hope first plowed. Every year’s burst of Oscar frenzy—the obsessive handicapping of nominees, tracking of odds, dissection of the studios’ Oscar campaigns—can be traced back, at least in part, to Hope’s role in making the Academy Awards show an annual must-see event. The entire image-making industry that rules Hollywood—the publicists, agents, managers, and studio executives who create the stars, shape their careers, and protect their private lives—is an elaboration of the publicity and brand-building machinery that Hope pioneered.
His passion for public service had a lasting impact as well. During the Iraq War, comedians as distant from his sensibility as David Letterman and Stephen Colbert carried on his tradition of traveling to the war zone and entertaining the troops. When George Clooney, at the 2010 Emmy Awards, accepted a Bob Hope Humanitarian Award for his work for human rights and disaster relief around the world, he took a moment to credit the award’s namesake—Bob, and Dolores too—for their charitable work and for embodying, as Clooney put it, “the best version of the term celebrity.”
Even his long, long good-bye was somehow inevitable and fitting. Hope needed to keep performing because he couldn’t stop believing that the audience needed him. It was understandable for an entertainer who never forgot the days when a visit from Bob Hope meant everything to a lonely soldier on a distant battlefield, or an anxious family gathered around the radio in times of national crisis.
In 1943, on his first tour of England during World War II, Hope and his entertainment troupe were traveling from camp to camp through the moors of Devonshire. But they couldn’t go everywhere, and one unit of six hundred men found out that Hope was going to miss them. Disappointed, they heard that he was doing a show ten miles away, and the entire camp, officers as well as enlisted men, marched the ten miles across the wild moors to see him. But when they arrived, they found that the show was indoors and packed to capacity, with no room for them. All they could do was turn around and start the ten-mile trek back.
After the show Hope was told of their disappointment. He commandeered a couple of jeeps, piled his troupe into them, and caught up with the soldiers, still trudging back to their camp. With a few boards laid out across the jeeps for a stage, Hope did a forty-minute show for the men in the driving rain. “I love the English weather,” he cracked, wearing a tin hat borrowed from one of the GIs. “It’s so dependable.” By the end of the show, Frances Langford’s hair was streaming wet across her face, and Tony Romano’s guitar was so drenched he had to spend half the night drying it. The applause was like nothing they had ever heard.
“Never make ’em think you don’t care,” Hope once told a reporter, explaining why he always signed autographs. “Your time’s not your own. You owe ’em.” They owed him too. He may have taken a little too long to leave the stage, but at his peak—a peak that lasted longer than almost anyone else’s—he was the best version of celebrity. He was there in spirit. And he was there in person.