Hope: Entertainer of the Century (22 page)

Yet even as his comedy moved closer to home, Hope kept a distance, making it clear that he was, above all, a
comedian—
an entertainer trying to make an audience laugh. He frequently made jokes about his sponsor, the network, or his movie studio. He was the first comedian to openly acknowledge his writers, often tweaking them in his “savers” when jokes didn’t go over.
Variety
cited Hope as an example of
“the extreme wisdom of comedians devoting a substantial amount of income for writers. The gag staff that Hope has surrounded himself with is one of the best.” And the audience was catching on. In its first season Hope’s show averaged a 16.2 Hooper rating, meaning that 16.2 percent of the nation’s households were tuning in. By the end of the second season its rating had soared to 25.0—the fourth most popular show on the air.

Hope’s transformation from a generic radio wise guy to a fully developed radio personality was well under way. A similar transformation was taking place in his movie roles. But it would happen much more abruptly—with his seventh film,
The Cat and the Canary.

The movie, released in November 1939, was a step up in class for Hope. Directed by the capable Elliott Nugent (a sometime stage actor and playwright who had also directed Hope in
Give Me a Sailor
and
Never Say Die
), it’s a comedy-thriller with a mise-en-scène and a narrative coherence that sets it apart from any of Hope’s previous films. In the atmospheric opening, a group of family members are making their way in separate boats at night through a Louisiana bayou, heading to a lonely mansion where a wealthy relative’s will is about to be read. The
will, they soon learn, has left the entire fortune to one family member, played by Paulette Goddard. A storm forces the group to stay overnight in the spooky house, amid dark warnings that one of the passed-over relatives might be out to kill her. Lights flicker on and off, eyes in portraits move, hands emerge from hidden panels, while a sinister housekeeper, Gale Sondergaard, watches over it all with an icy glare.

The wild card in the family gathering is Hope. He plays Wally Campbell, a stage actor whose nervous wisecracks—“Even my goose pimples have goose pimples”—keep breaking the tension of the old-dark-house melodrama. “They do that when you don’t pay your bill,” he quips when the lights go out. “Don’t big, empty houses scare you?” one of the family members asks. “Not me,” says Hope. “I used to be in vaudeville.” Someone asks Wally whether he believes in reincarnation: “You know, dead people coming back?” Hope’s up-to-the-minute retort: “You mean like the Republicans?”

With his double-breasted suit and slicked-back hair, Hope still has the look of a high-style 1930s romantic-comedy lead. But he has discovered the character that he would make his own: the brash coward, a nervous Nellie who uses jokes to ward off his fears, a braggart who talks big but melts when face-to-face with danger. “I always joke when I’m scared,” he says at one point. “I kind of kid myself into being brave.” But it’s more than just jokes; Hope creates a rich comic character, recognizable and relatable—a coward you can root for.

A small scene with Goddard in the middle of the film shows how far he’s come. Hope is in her bedroom, fighting off nerves while assuring her that he’ll protect her. “You always did fight for me, didn’t you, Wally?” she says gratefully. “Even back there in Whitford. Remember when you used to carry my books to school? And the time Big Jim Bailey pulled my hair? And you flew at him, and what a terrible beating—”

“—he gave me? I’ll never forget it,” says Hope, jumping in and timing the turnabout perfectly. “Seems I always got licked fighting for you,” he adds, his tone shifting. “Well, maybe it was worth it.”

There’s a commotion outside the room, and Hope’s bluster/fear response kicks in. He grabs her by the arms and says he’ll go outside to
investigate. “If there’s a rumpus or anything, don’t come out. You just sit tight and yell like the devil.”

“Well, what will you do?”

“Why I’ll”—clenching his fists and setting his jaw for an instant, then relaxing them just as suddenly—“I’ll run and get help. Don’t worry.”

She, affectionately: “I don’t worry when you’re around, Wally.”

He, touched and taken a little aback: “Oh, really? Thanks.” He turns tentatively to leave. “Good night.” He goes out the door, then suddenly reopens it and repeats, more tenderly now, “Good night.” She blows him a kiss.

With both delicacy and humor, Hope lets us feel every twinge of the inner battle between his manly duty and his cowardly instincts, all while conveying his emerging feelings for the woman in his care. (Since everyone in the house is related, it’s not clear how the two can be kindling a romance—but never mind.) Little of this is in the actual dialogue; Hope accomplishes it with small gestures, subtle shifts in tone, posture, and facial expression. No need for Mitchell Leisen’s advice anymore; Hope has learned how to act.

Chills and laughter were a potent combination with a long movie tradition. But Hope’s constant comic chatter (“Don’t you ever stop babbling?” someone exclaims) wasn’t just a way of defusing the tension in a spooky old house. It also had resonance for an audience facing an increasingly scary world outside. It was no accident that
The Cat and the Canary
opened in theaters and became a hit just a few weeks after the outbreak of World War II in Europe, when the country was facing terrors of a more sinister, real-world kind. Hope’s brash wisecracks were both a release and a coping mechanism for a stressed-out nation.

The Cat and the Canary
was Hope’s biggest box-office success yet and, despite his two duds earlier in the year, single-handedly
boosted him into tenth place on the list of the top box-office stars of 1939. He would remain in the top ten—with a one-year interruption, when he was preoccupied by a world war—for more than a decade.

The Cat and the Canary
was an important film for Hope, but it was overshadowed in 1939 by an unprecedented bounty of Hollywood classics. It was the year of
The Wizard of Oz
and
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
; the definitive John Ford Western,
Stagecoach
; and the classic Kipling adventure tale
Gunga Din
. Garbo laughed in
Ninotchka
, Olivier brooded in
Wuthering Heights
, and a slew of Hollywood’s top leading ladies traded bons mots in Clare Boothe Luce’s
The Women
. Towering above them all was
Gone With the Wind
, producer David O. Selznick’s epic screen version of Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War bestseller. Fittingly, the Oscar ceremony that commemorated what would become known as Hollywood’s greatest year was the first one hosted by the entertainer who would do more than anyone else to make that annual event Hollywood’s greatest night.

When Hope was asked to emcee the twelfth annual Academy Awards dinner, held at the Cocoanut Grove on February 29, 1940, it was still primarily a film-industry event, with no national radio coverage and, that year at least, little suspense.
The names of the winners,
which were typically given out to the press in advance under an embargo, had prematurely been revealed by the
Los Angeles Times
, which published the results in an early edition of the newspaper at 8:45 p.m., well before the 10:00 p.m. ceremony. The gaffe led the Academy to change its policy the following year: for every Oscar night thereafter, the names of winners would be kept inside sealed envelopes, guarded by the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse.

With or without the spoiler,
Gone With the Wind
was widely expected to be the big winner, and it was naturally the evening’s hot topic. Walter Wanger, the Motion Picture Academy’s new president, introduced Hope, the evening’s master of ceremonies, as “the Rhett Butler of the airwaves.” Hope began his monologue by echoing the handicappers—“What a wonderful thing, this benefit for David Selznick”—before turning his attention to other stars and trends of Hollywood’s year: Bette Davis’s Oscar collection (again), the ubiquitous teenage star Mickey Rooney (“the
ten best actors of the year”), and the current vogue for big biographical dramas, such as
The Story of Alexander Graham Bell
, starring Don Ameche. “MGM plans to star Mickey Rooney in a super-epic,” said Hope, “portraying Don Ameche as a boy.”

Gone With the Wind
made its expected sweep, hauling in ten awards, including Best Picture. “David, you should have brought roller skates,” quipped Hope on one of Selznick’s trips to the podium. Clark Gable was a surprise loser for Best Actor (to Robert Donat in
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
), but Hattie McDaniel was in tears accepting her award for Best Supporting Actress, the first African-American performer to win an Oscar. “Over the Rainbow” won for best song, and Judy Garland got a miniature Oscar for “outstanding performance as a screen juvenile.” Hedda Hopper, recapping the show in her column, criticized some of the boring acceptance speeches, but noted that
“Bob Hope, as usual, was his lifesaving self.”

He was the ideal Oscar host: a movie star who could also tell jokes; a Hollywood insider with the irreverence of an outsider; a suave, elegantly dressed ambassador for Hollywood to the rest of the world. When the Oscar shows began to be covered live on radio a few years
later, his monologues played an important, often overlooked role in shaping the image of Hollywood for the American moviegoing public. It was a glamorous world, filled with people who were richer and more beautiful than you and I, but Hope brought it down to earth—reporting its gossip, popularizing its jargon, satirizing its mores and morals. Hollywood stars had storybook love affairs, but their marriages didn’t last. They were charming in public, but jealous and backbiting in private. They lived in lavish homes with big swimming pools, but this glittering gated community had a small-town camaraderie, where everybody seemed to know one another. Over the next thirty-five years, Bob Hope, who went on to host or cohost the Oscar show a record nineteen times, provided our annual peek inside it.

Hope’s role at the Oscars in demystifying Hollywood—ribbing its stars and puncturing its pretensions—was paralleled by an evolution that was taking place in his movie roles. He was developing a new kind of comedy, one that helped redefine the relationship between ordinary moviegoers and those remote figures on the silver screen. That evolution, which began with
The Cat and the Canary
, took a giant leap forward in Hope’s next movie, which opened just a few weeks after his inaugural stint as Oscar host. It was the first of the famous
Road
pictures, costarring his friend and most enduring show-business partner, Bing Crosby.

After their first appearance on stage together in 1932, at the Capitol Theatre in New York, Hope and Crosby returned to separate coasts and didn’t see much of each other for five years. But they reconnected when Hope arrived at Paramount in the fall of 1937. They would meet for lunch on the studio lot and play golf together at Lakeside, the club where Crosby belonged and Hope soon would join too. Crosby had Hope as a guest on his popular radio show,
The Kraft Music Hall
, and invited Bob and Dolores down to Del Mar, the racetrack near San Diego that Crosby owned a large share of.

On Saturday night, August 6, 1938, Bing was master of ceremonies for a special Hollywood night at Del Mar when he called Bob to join him onstage. The two horsed around together, rehashing some of the bits they had done at the Capitol Theatre six years before.
Their
chemistry so impressed William LeBaron, Paramount’s production chief, who was in the audience, that he suggested putting the two of them together in a movie.

The idea took more than a year to come to fruition. The studio may have had second thoughts about teaming Crosby, one of its biggest stars, with Hope, who in mid-1938 was still an unproven quantity. But the project was assigned to screenwriters Frank Butler and Don Hartman, who had written for both Hope (
Never Say Die
) and Crosby (
Waikiki Wedding
). They dusted off a script they had done years earlier for Crosby called
Follow the Sun
and had refashioned for Jack Oakie and Fred MacMurray, with the new title
The Road to Mandalay.
When Oakie and MacMurray bowed out, the screenwriters retooled it once again for Hope and Crosby and changed the title to
Road to Singapore
, supposedly because the new locale sounded more sinister.

To round out the team and provide a romantic interest for both Hope and Crosby, Paramount cast one of its top female stars, Dorothy Lamour. A native of New Orleans, Lamour (originally Lambour, before the
b
got dropped on a marquee) had moved to Chicago with her divorced mother and began her show-business career as a singer with Herbie Kaye’s big band. Following a short-lived marriage to Kaye, she moved to New York and worked solo in nightclubs—where Hope often used to see her when he was starring on Broadway. But she got the call from Hollywood first, and in 1936 moved west to costar in
The Jungle Princess
, playing a native girl who falls for Ray Milland. She was cast as exotic, scantily clad beauties in several more tropical adventures, among them John Ford’s
Hurricane
, as well as in the musical
High, Wide, and Handsome
and Hope’s debut film,
The Big Broadcast of 1938.
Her dark beauty, sultry voice, and trademark sarong had made her one of Paramount’s most recognizable stars, and she got second billing in
Road to Singapore
—after Crosby but before Hope.

Shooting began in October 1939 on the Paramount lot, with some location work at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden in Arcadia. The director was an old studio hand, Victor Schertzinger. A former concert violinist, Schertzinger had more experience
with musicals than comedy (he even composed two of the movie’s four songs, with lyricist Johnny Burke). But no director could have been prepared for a comedy quite like this.