Hope: Entertainer of the Century (18 page)

On the final “thank you,” Ross, in the midst of leaving the bar, suddenly stops and comes back, collapsing tearfully in Hope’s arms. In
just a few minutes, the song has told the story of their relationship, revealed emotions that they have long kept buried, and brought the couple back together. It is one of the most beautifully written and performed musical numbers in all of movies. It was the moment that made Bob Hope a star.

•  •  •

“I don’t think it’s so much,” Dolores said when Bob first brought a recording of “Thanks for the Memory” home for her to hear. She thought he was getting a solo in the movie, not a duet. A born and bred New Yorker, Dolores was already leery of the move to Hollywood—where Bob was just another movie wannabe, not a Broadway star. She was annoyed that the first thing the studio wanted to mess with was his nose. After testing out various shading and highlighting techniques, the studio’s chief makeup man, Wally Westmore, suggested plastic surgery. Dolores objected,
“Bob, your whole personality is in your face. They want to turn you into another leading man. No.”

Hope wasn’t exactly sold on Hollywood either. He was thirty-four years old—practically middle-aged for an actor just starting out in films—and still had a
“log-size chip on my shoulder” about Hollywood. He told his agent, Louis Shurr, that he had some money saved up, and if things didn’t work out in California, he was more than ready to go back to New York.
“It’s amazing that you can be a star in New York and just another fellow elsewhere,” Hope told a reporter from the
New York Daily Mirror
. “When my agent called to tell me that I had been signed for the
Big Broadcast
, I asked him what [Broadway] show he had me booked for after that assignment. ‘Don’t worry about shows,’ he replied. ‘You’re going to be busy in Hollywood for the rest of the season.’ ”

Hope certainly hit the ground running. He and Dolores arrived from New York at the Pasadena train station on Thursday morning, September 9, 1937—
greeted by a Paramount publicist and a photographer for the
Los Angeles Daily News
, which ran a photo of the couple’s arrival the next day. They checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and Bob went into the studio that same afternoon to meet people. Shooting on
The Big Broadcast
began the following Monday.

For an aspiring film comedian just arriving in Hollywood,
Paramount Pictures was a good place to land. Run by an imperious but cultivated Hungarian immigrant named Adolph Zukor, Paramount was among the most prestigious of Hollywood studios, home to such pioneering directors of the silent and early sound eras as Josef von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Rouben Mamoulian, and Cecil B. DeMille. Its impressive roster of stars under contract included Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Maurice Chevalier, Marlene Dietrich, George Raft, and Cary Grant. The studio was especially strong in comedy, having signed up many of the ex-vaudeville comics who were getting into films, including the Marx Brothers (who did their first five films for Paramount before moving over to MGM), W. C. Fields, Mae West, Jack Benny, Martha Raye, and George Burns and Gracie Allen.

What Paramount wasn’t especially good at was nurturing and grooming its stars. In contrast to a studio like MGM, Paramount’s modus operandi, all too often, was simply to throw stars into projects willy-nilly and see what stuck. What’s more, the studio had something of a split personality when it came to comedy. On the one hand, it produced some of the era’s most sophisticated, high-style romantic comedies—the continental “Lubitsch touch.” At the same time, it churned out a host of wild, ramshackle farces—
International House
,
Million Dollar Legs
,
Six of a Kind
—that mixed and matched its comedy stars in seemingly random fashion. Hope had one foot in both camps: he was a gagster from vaudeville, but a sophisticated Broadway-musical star as well. The studio took awhile to figure out just what to do with him.

After a few weeks at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the Hopes rented a house in Beverly Hills from Rhea Gable, Clark’s wife. Dolores was homesick for New York. But even before
The Big Broadcast
finished shooting, Paramount was lining up more projects for Hope. In November he stepped into a role originally intended for Jack Oakie in an all-star musical comedy called
College Swing
. In December the studio tapped him to costar with Martha Raye in
The Wallflower
(later retitled
Give Me a Sailor
), scheduled to start shooting in the spring. He was
being eyed for a Damon Runyon story called
Money from Home
, and there was talk of teaming him in a musical with Dorothy Lamour.
“Bob Hope, fine Broadway comic, has clicked big out here,”
New York Daily News
columnist Ed Sullivan reported in early January—still a month before
Big Broadcast
even opened.

Hope did his part to feed the buzz. He hired a publicist from New York named Mack Millar, a well-connected hustler who was close to the major newspaper columnists such as Sullivan and Walter Winchell. Millar planted Hope’s name in the columns and came up with publicity stunts, including a charity golf match between Hope and Bing Crosby—who had reconnected when Hope moved West—with the loser agreeing to work as a stand-in for one day on the winner’s next movie. (Hope lost, 76 to 72, and had to show up on the set of Crosby’s
Dr. Rhythm
.) The studio played up the friendship between Hope and Crosby, touting Bob as a new challenger to Bing as the “easiest-going actor in Hollywood”:

Hope, like Crosby, is just having a lot of fun out of life. He takes things as they come, worrying more about the size of his golf score than the size of his movie roles. . . . The bizarre clothing of Crosby is completely eclipsed by Hope. As a matter of fact, where Bing’s clothing is a rainbow, Hope’s clothing is an Aurora Borealis. He just can’t be bothered by such things as color ensembles. If he is dressing and needs a tie he picks up the nearest one and puts it on. The same is true in regard to everything from shirts to socks.

Hope’s visibility in Hollywood also got a boost from his radio work. When he moved West in early September, Hope was still a regular on Woodbury soap’s
Rippling Rhythm Revue.
The show was broadcast from New York on Sunday nights, but NBC agreed to let Hope do his opening monologue live from Hollywood, then feed it to New York via a transcontinental hookup.

But when Hope arrived at NBC’s Hollywood studios for his first show, he was dismayed to find that no studio audience was waiting for him. Insisting that he couldn’t do a monologue without one, he got the NBC ushers to rearrange the rope lines so that the audience leaving Edgar Bergen’s show, taped an hour earlier in the studio next door,
would be funneled directly into Hope’s studio. Enough of the confused patrons stuck around to give Hope some live laughs, and the network had a full audience ready for him the following week. By the end of September, however,
The Rippling Rhythm Revue
was off the air, the latest in a growing trail of canceled Hope radio shows.

Eager to get his stop-and-start radio career on track, Hope hired a new agent back in New York, a young, cigar-smoking go-getter named Jimmy Saphier.
“I found him a shrewd boy who knew the business, my kind of guy,” said Hope. Saphier had more connections than Shurr with the ad agencies that controlled most of the programming on radio, and Hope decided to split duties between the two agents: Saphier negotiating his radio deals, while Shurr continued to handle his movie and stage work. Shurr was somewhat dismayed at the newcomer’s taking away a chunk of his Hope business (though Shurr continued to get a share of Hope’s radio deals), but the two agents made an effective and loyal tandem. Both would remain with Hope for the rest of their lives.

Saphier felt strongly that Hope needed to make some changes in his approach to radio, putting less emphasis on sketches and more on his monologues.
“I had watched Hope at the Capitol and had seen him in a Broadway musical before I heard him on radio, and I felt it was a shame the home listeners weren’t getting the best of him,” Saphier said. “Radio simply wasn’t using his talents properly. I knew this, and I sensed Bob knew it but didn’t yet know how to overcome it. His work with [his radio foils] was funny, but his strength seemed to me and also to him—eventually—to be centered in what he did best, the monologue.”

Hope took Saphier’s advice and began talking up his new emphasis in the press.
“The monologue is now showing signs of being a main comedy trend,” he told Samuel Kaufman of the
New York Sun
. “I haven’t discarded dialogue and sketches, and I don’t expect to. But I intend giving short monologues prominent spots on all my programs.”

They would, however, be monologues of a new kind—filled not with generic vaudeville-style gags, but with fresh jokes, drawn from the news and from his own real-life experiences.
“A comedian won’t be able to take the stage and rattle off story after story or spiel gags
without especial point,” he told another reporter. “That’s gone forever. But the monologue in modern dress, clever and smart, is due for a comeback.” Radio columnist Edgar A. Thompson caught the essence of Hope’s new approach:
“He had never been able to understand why he could get hearty laughs from the stage or at the banquet table and why his material seemed to fall short at the microphone. He remembered that big talks at parties went along smoothly without any gags or ‘he and she’ jokes. Many of them started out, ‘On my way over here from home I’–and then Hope realized. Every time he got a laugh it was from a situation and not from a gag.”

Hope explicitly invoked Will Rogers, the late monologuist beloved for his homespun commentary on politics and current events.
“He took an old form and cloaked it with novelty, gave it vitality,” said Hope. “There was a performer. You get only one like him in a generation.” Yet Hope was Rogers’s logical heir. He adopted the humorist’s everyman approach and topical subject matter (“All I know is what I read in the papers,” went Rogers’s famous line), but added speed and moxie and a vaudeville gagster’s instinct for the laugh line. In doing so, he invented a new kind of monologue—the seeds of modern stand-up comedy.

Hope’s new approach evolved slowly, but it started to become apparent in his next radio job. In December 1937 Saphier convinced Albert Lasker, head of the powerful Chicago-based ad agency Lord & Thomas, to give Hope a couple of guest spots on
Your Hollywood Parade
, a one-hour variety show sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarettes, a Lord & Thomas client. Hosted by Hollywood musical star Dick Powell, the show was a leisurely mix of songs from new movies, “behind-the-scenes” features on moviemaking, and original playlets featuring Hollywood stars such as Edward G. Robinson. Hope’s role in the show was limited to a single comedy spot, with Powell serving as straight man. Hope hired a writer named Wilkie Mahoney to help him come up with material, and
the two would spend two or three late nights a week together, working long after Hope’s day of shooting was done at Paramount.

Hope made his first appearance on
Your Hollywood Parade
on December 29, 1937, Powell introducing him as a “Broadway comedian
exploring Hollywood with gagbook and funny bone.” Hope made jokes about Christmas shopping, tours of movie-star homes, and his own recent arrival in Hollywood. It was hardly Will Rogers material, but at least it was pegged to the real-life Hollywood scene and his own place in it. He was rewarded with a regular spot on the show, and the reviewers began to take notice.
“Hope appears too adaptable a comic to be kept out of the general proceedings and tucked away for a few minutes of dialogue,” wrote
Variety
.
The head of Lucky Strike, the show’s sponsor, even wanted Hope to replace Powell as the program’s host, but the movie star’s contract had him locked in.

Your Hollywood Parade
lasted only thirteen weeks. But Hope’s stint there impressed Lasker, as well as another important person: Charles Luckman, the marketing wunderkind who had built Pepsodent toothpaste into the bestselling brand in America. Pepsodent, also a Lord & Thomas client, was about to end its nine-year sponsorship of
Amos ’n’ Andy
, once the top-rated show on radio but now a fading franchise, and the company was looking to shift its dollars to a new program for the fall. Saphier began negotiating to get Bob Hope the starring job.

•  •  •

The Big Broadcast of 1938
finally opened in February of 1938. Hope’s first feature film is a labored hodgepodge of comedy bits and musical numbers, linked by a silly plot about a transatlantic race between two mammoth ocean liners. Fields, playing a dual role as an ocean-liner magnate and his wastrel son, is at close to his worst, trudging through tired comedy bits (including variations on his pool-room and golf-course routines that he had done often before in films) and interacting little with the rest of the cast. Martha Raye turns up midway through the film, rescued from a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean, and gives it some spark with an acrobatic musical number, “Mama, That Moon Is Here Again,” in which she’s tossed about like a sack of potatoes by a bunch of sailors. There’s a perfunctory romantic subplot involving Dorothy Lamour and Leif Erickson; a Busby Berkeley–style production number celebrating the waltz; a Wagnerian solo from Metropolitan Opera star Kirsten Flagstad; and even an animated cartoon, to go with a musical number by Shep Fields and His Rippling Rhythm Orchestra.

Hope has more screen time than anyone else but Fields, and he’s considerably more lively. He opens the film in alimony jail: “I had a little trouble keeping a wife and the government on one salary,” he quips, looking stylishly disheveled in a suit jacket and open-collar white shirt. Actually, there are three ex-wives, none of whom will bail him out. Ross plays wife No. 3, and the caustic push-pull of their relationship is established right at the start. “Remember the last time we were in jail?” Hope asks. “Our wedding night,” she responds drily. “Did you ever manage to find the marriage license?” Hope: “Gee, that was about the maddest house detective I ever saw.”