Bing Crosby (99 page)

— Bob Hope (1992)
¹

Bob Hope arrived in Los Angeles in September 1937 with his wife, Dolores, and, he would later admit, a “log-size chip on my
shoulder.”
²
He had been lured by a Paramount producer who thought he showed potential. But as an established Broadway star, he was defensive,
suspicious, and truculent. Hollywood was not going to get the better of him. He had money saved, he told his agent, and if
he did not like his part in
The Big Broadcast of
1938, he was ready to return to New York. Dolores, dismayed when she realized her husband’s name meant nothing in Hollywood,
was not too keen on moving anyway. Hope was nearing thirty-five, an advanced age to start out in pictures — not for a character
actor, certainly, but for the leading man he meant to be. Between 1934 and 1936 he had made eight shorts in New York. After
the first opened, Walter Winchell reported, “When Bob Hope saw his picture at the Rialto, he said, ‘When they catch John Dillinger…
they’re going to make him sit through it twice.’”
³
Bob was more sanguine about his stage and radio work.

Leslie Townes Hope was born on May 29, 1903, the fifth of seven sons, in Eltham, England, a suburb of London. His father was
a stonemason, his mother a singer who accompanied herself on harp and piano. The family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1907,
and at ten Leslie demonstrated his inclination toward show business by impersonating Chaplin, the sensation of 1914. He dropped
out of high school to study dancing with a hoofer, taking whatever jobs he could get — soda jerking, boxing, hustling pool.
Soon Hope was giving dancing lessons, and he drafted his girlfriend for an act that played midwestern vaudeville houses. Later,
teamed with dancer George Byrne, he traveled the Keith circuit all the way to New York, by which time he had changed his name.
Hope and Byrne found work around, but rarely in, Manhattan before splitting up.

Bob’s first substantial stage role, as a butler (Screeves) in the 1928 flop
Ups-a-Daisy,
came to nothing. Yet while emceeing in small out-of-the-way joints, he discovered his ability to get laughs. He had no material
and little experience telling jokes, but his fearlessly snappy style and determination to win approval pleased customers.
He charmed them. Realizing that charm could take him only so far, he scrambled for jokes, collecting them from magazines,
books, and other performers. His break came not as a comedian but as the second lead in Jerome Kern’s
Roberta.
His easy ability to get laughs earned him rave notices, which led to other Broadway shows and offers to appear on radio and
in film shorts.

Mitchell Leisen and Harlan Thompson, the director and producer of a forthcoming movie in
The Big Broadcast
series, caught Hope in the
Ziegfeld Follies of
1936, in which he and Eve Arden sang “I Can’t Get Started.” Paramount had a similar love duet lined up for its picture but
was hesitant to cast an unknown. After Jack Benny turned down the role, however, they went back to Hope, who was now wowing
audiences with Jimmy Durante and Ethel Merman in Cole Porter’s
Red, Hot and Blue!
He had one prior commitment — Bob had signed a twenty-six-week contract to deliver monologues on
The Rippling Rhythm Revue,
a Woodbury soap program with bandleader Shep Fields. Paramount guaranteed him a transcontinental hookup enabling him to fulfill
the contract.

* * *

While Dolores unpacked at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Bob impatiently left for the studio, where he knew nobody but Leisen
and Thompson. When they showed him his song, Robin and Rainger’s “Thanks for the Memory,” he was disappointed to learn that
it was a duet, with Shirley Ross, not a solo. He changed his mind when a rehearsal pianist played it; he knew the song was
a sure-fire hit. Before filming began, Bob called Bing. Theirs was the sort of friendship that thrives on competition, as
became evident in the key interests that seemed to bind them at the hip — golf and a brinkmanship approach to comedy. They
had little else in common. As Dolores noted, “Bing loved to hunt and fish, and Bob wouldn’t be caught hunting or fishing anything
but a golf ball. Bob had no interest in horses. They lived entirely different lives, but they respected each other and loved
working together. And eventually they found they loved each other very much.”
⁴

Their millions of fans in the 1940s and 1950s, when Bing and Bob emerged as one of the most adored teams in show-business
history, would have been astonished to learn that the love Dolores spoke of did not blossom fully until 1961, when the two
families shared a castle in England during the filming of
The Road to Hong Kong,
the least successful entry in the
Road
series but the most important to their relationship. Prior to 1961 their friendship, although genuine, was largely professional.
Grievances, petty or serious, were not acknowledged or discussed, and socializing was sporadic, in part because Bob remained
slightly in awe of Bing and because Bing believed that actors’ chemistry ought to be saved for the set. Yet they worked together
so often, they saw more of each other than many avowed buddies: seven
Road
pictures, the Victory Caravan, charity events, radio and television broadcasts, Bing’s cameos in Bob’s movies, endless rounds
of publicly covered golf. Bing died just as Melville Shavelson completed the script for what would have been their eighth
road trip,
Road to the Fountain of Youth.

Dolores had known Bing before she met Bob, in Philadelphia in 1927, when she and Ginger Meehan worked in
Honeymoon Lane.
She next saw him in 1932, when she sang at New York’s Richmond Club and a columnist referred to her as the female Crosby.
Bing and Dixie came by the club, and she told them that the comparison unnerved her. That was the year Bing and Bob first
met near the Friars Club and shared the stage at the Capitol Theater. Bob and
Dolores were married in 1933. In the summer of 1935, while Bing and Dixie vacationed in Saratoga, Bing ran into Bob at Paul
White-man’s opening at the Riviera Club — their only encounter in the interim between the Capitol and the Hopes’ arrival in
Hollywood.

Yet within a few weeks, Bob’s name was appearing in the columns as a Crosby crony. A Paramount publicist orchestrated the
November golf match in which the loser was purportedly obliged to work a day as an unpaid stand-in for the winner. The newspapers
went along. “Crosby, champion of the Lakeside Club, is the favorite. Hope, a former Broadway stage actor, is new to the movies.
Little is known here of his golfing prowess,” wrote a stringer for the
New York Herald Tribune,
as if the match were a serious sporting event.
⁵
Hope carded an 84 to Bing’s three-over-par 73.

The studio was less successful in its attempts to remodel Bob’s face. Unlike Bing, who refused to consider ear surgery, Hope
was actually willing to have his nose unsloped if required. Dolores talked him out of it. The nose issue vanished, along with
his anonymity west of the Mississippi, when
The Big Broadcast of 1938
opened. “Thanks for the Memory” was greatly admired (though it did little for Shirley Ross); and Paramount’s advertising
campaign, depicting the all-star cast in caricatured profiles, made Hope’s nose almost iconic. It remained only for Bing to
call him Ski-nose — and Spoonface and Trout Snout and Ratchedhead and the Pepsodent Pinnochio, et al. — for a defect to be
reassessed as a major asset.

Three months after the Woodbury series ended, Bob was added to the cast of
Your Hollywood Parade,
a Warner Bros. promotional program with emcee Dick Powell, sponsored by Lucky Strike and its intrusive despot, George Washington
Hill, whom Hope remembered as constantly demanding more and more violins. It lasted only a few months, through March 1938.
But that was time enough to draw national attention to Hope’s topical and leering one-liners and his fast, wisecracking delivery.
Bob debuted as Bing’s guest on
Kraft Music Hall
in July, to promote his picture. Frank Woodruff, a J. Walter Thompson program director, called it “a very good show” but
thought “Hope not quite at home in this set up.”
⁶
That remarkable evaluation may not have been completely off base; the show was little noticed, unlike Hope’s pas de deux
with Bing two weeks later at Del Mar.

Bing invited Bob and Dolores to the track for the weekend. Dolores recalled of the August 6 clambake, “Bing was, naturally,
master of ceremonies and he called Bob up and they started fooling, doing these same funny little things that they did at
the Capitol when they were there. And somebody from Paramount said, They’re like cream and sugar. They were just marvelous
together, really, a natural.”
⁷
The executives at ringside included Paramount producers William LeBaron and Harlan Thompson. “So they went back to the studio,”
Bob recalled, “and everybody said, ‘How can they work that good together? My God.’ They didn’t know that we had done it for
two weeks at the Capitol. And they said, ‘We gotta put these guys in a picture.’”
⁸

Yet back in Hollywood, second-guessing tempered the initial enthusiasm. Bing was Paramount’s bread and butter; Bob was, the
studio hoped, up-and-coming. When the front office saw prints of
The Big Broadcast of 1938,
it picked up his option and rushed him into a tepid Burns and Allen vehicle,
College Swing.
He fared no better in
Give Me a Sailor
or the desperately titled
Thanks for the Memory,
all rolled out that year. Confidence in the idea of teaming him with Bing waned. How much interest could be generated by
a crooner and a comedian, or for that matter, any two men who were not united by stormy drama? Buddy pictures had not yet
found a niche in Hollywood beyond Laurel and Hardy and Saturday-matinee cowboys and their sidekicks. In his memoir Bob credits
Bing with getting the project rolling: “Not everyone knows how shrewd he is when it comes to the entertainment business. He
instantly recognized the value of the
Road
pictures as a way of getting a spontaneous ad-libby type of humor. There were doubters in the studio who shook their heads
and said, ‘Well… I don’t know.’ But Bing was an important star. They listened to him. He was right.”
⁹

Captains of industry, like politicians, often trust the opinions of others more than their own, most especially in show business,
where the sine qua non of survival is someone else to blame. Lord and Thomas, the advertising agency that placed Hope in
The Rippling Rhythm Revue
and
Your Hollywood Parade,
was unable to secure him his own program until his success on the Lucky Strike show and reviews of his first picture convinced
Pepsodent toothpaste, which was looking to replace the ratings-damaged — how times had changed! —
Amos ‘n’ Andy.
The thirty-minute
Pepsodent Show Starring Bob Hope
triumphed from the start, ruling its Tuesday-night time slot (and lasting defiantly through 1950). With guest stars and regulars
— at first, Judy Garland, bandleader Skinnay Ennis, and comedian Jerry Colonna, who sang like a police siren and hailed Hope
with a trademark phrase, “Greetings, Gate!” — the show was brisk and surprising, chiefly because of Hope’s timely one-liners,
which were often aimed at Hollywood. The popularity of
The Pepsodent Show,
in turn, convinced Paramount that it was on the right track and propelled the search for a script to team Hope and Crosby.

Screenwriters Frank Butler and Don Hartman — the duo behind
Waikiki Wedding, Paris Honeymoon,
and
The Star Maker
— were given the task of finding a suitable property. They did not have far to look. After briefly considering a spurned
Burns and Allen project called
Havana,
they turned to their own rusting script based on a story by Harry Hervey, a veteran of exotic intrigue (he plotted von Sternberg’s
Shanghai Express).
Initially adapted as a project for Bing in 1936, titled
Follow the Sun,
it was revised in 1938 by Butler and Ken Englund, to tell the story of Josh Mallon, heir to the Mallon Mercantile fortune,
and his pal Ace Winthrop, the son of a horse thief, who board a ship and find themselves bound for Indochina. With Hartman
on board, the script was retooled, retitled
(Road to Mandalay),
and offered as a knockabout escapade for Jack Oakie and Fred Mac Murray, who had clicked in a couple of 1936 films.
¹⁰
They or their agents turned it down. Now Hartman and Butler re-revised it for Bing and Bob, tricking it up with gags and
places to insert songs.

To underscore a rivalry, it was decided to situate one woman between them. The studio chose Dorothy Lamour, formerly Mary
Leta Dorothy Slaton of New Orleans, where she was born in 1914. When her parents divorced, her devoted mother married Clarence
Lambour just long enough for Dorothy (as she was known) to take his name. At sixteen Dorothy won a beauty contest, and she
and her mother relocated to Chicago, where she operated a hotel elevator and looked for a place to sing. A hotel acquaintance
set her up with Everett Crosby, who took her to hear his brother Bing and introduced her to bandleader Herbie Kay, who hired
and married her. On a tour in Texas, she showed Herbie a poster that providentially dropped the
b
from Lambour. Dorothy decided to keep it that way. She was soon
hired to sing at New York’s Stork Club and the Greenwich Village boîte, One Fifth Avenue, where her repeat customers included
Bob Hope. Paramount gave her a screen test, and she made a splash in 1936, as
The Jungle Princess,
draped in a strip of cloth called a sarong. She appeared that year on
Kraft Music Hall.
After a few more tropical epics — famously, John Ford’s
The Hurricane
— Lamour and sarong were all but synonymous.

Lamour liked to tell a story about leaving the Paramount commissary, laughing to herself, and running into two writers who
asked her what was so funny. She told them she had just seen Bing and Bob hamming it up at a table, and said she would love
to make a picture with them. Whether or not the incident had anything to do with her recruitment, the studio could not have
dreamed up anyone more appropriate. Her beauty suggested a sultry innocence, nothing too serious; she could handle a melody,
so there was no need to overdub her vocals; and she was a genuine mainstay of the very type of adventure movie they were about
to burlesque.