Hope: Entertainer of the Century (28 page)

Armed Forces Radio also began producing radio variety shows expressly for the troops and broadcast overseas via shortwave. Hope was a frequent host of one of them,
Command Performance
, a weekly show that featured top Hollywood guests supposedly picked by its GI listeners—“the greatest entertainers in America as requested by you, the fighting men of the United States armed forces throughout the world.” Hope hosted his first broadcast for the troops on July 7, 1942, and did two more that year, sending along jokes from back home and motivational pep talks for the job they were doing over there: “This is Bob rubber-drive Hope, telling you guys out there that we’re all gonna
keep turning in our rubber suspenders till we’ve caught the Axis with their panzers down.” And: “Hitler’s always talking about his spring offensive, but, brother, that guy’s offensive all year round.” He could be a little racier than he could on NBC, where his jokes were closely monitored by the censors. One example was his notorious crack about the rubber shortage and Kate Smith, the amply proportioned singer whose theme song was “When the Moon Comes over the Mountain.” “Kate Smith finally turned in her girdle,” said Hope. “You should see the moon come over the mountain now.” NBC censors nixed the line, but the troops got to hear it.

In the summer of 1942,
one of Hope’s former movie stand-ins, now an army sergeant, dropped by the Paramount lot and suggested that Hope pay a visit to the US troops stationed in Alaska, guarding the Aleutian Islands against a possible Japanese attack. A few entertainers, among them Joe E. Brown and Edgar Bergen, had already traveled to that frozen territory, and Hope was eager to join them. He told his brother Jack to arrange a trip there during the one small window of time he had on his busy schedule—after his current film,
They Got Me Covered
, finished shooting on September 5, and before his first radio show of the season, on September 22.

Bob got two of his radio costars, Frances Langford and Jerry Colonna, to join him. With no room for a band, Langford suggested that Hope bring along a guitarist named Tony Romano, who had worked with Morey Amsterdam on the radio and as Dick Powell’s vocal arranger at Warner Bros. A small, wiry Italian-American from Fresno, California, known as one of the top arrangers in Hollywood, Romano signed on as the fourth member of Hope’s first troupe of wartime entertainers.

The trip was almost scrubbed before it got started. Just as the quartet was getting ready to leave from San Francisco, Hope got a telegram from the military brass in Alaska calling off the tour. The weather looked dicey, they said, and they couldn’t guarantee that Hope would be back in time for his radio show. Hope wired back quickly, all but begging to come: “Four thespians, bags packed with songs and witty sayings, ready to tour your territory. Have been
informed, due to lack of time, trip is off. Please let us make trip and will take our chances.” Twelve hours later he got a reply from Major General Simon Buckner, overall commander of US troops in Alaska: “You leave Tuesday.”

Hope and his entertainers flew first to Fairbanks, where they were assigned a Lockheed Lodestar aircraft and two pilots to ferry them around the territory. Their first stop was Nome, the remote town nicknamed Devil’s Island by the GIs stranded there. Hope entertained in Quonset huts for men jammed inside and standing on tiptoes to see. He did a show for three thousand troops in the rain on Unimak Island in the Aleutians and for thirteen hundred mud-caked construction engineers working on the Canadian-Alaskan Highway in the Yukon Territory. At a refueling stop in Northway, he did an impromptu show for forty men, using a tree stump as a stage. With communications spotty in these forlorn outposts, the arrival of a troupe of Hollywood entertainers often came as a surprise and prompted some emotional reactions. At one show in the Aleutians, when Langford was singing “Isn’t It Romantic,” a general nudged Hope and pointed to two airmen listening to her in the crowd. One had his arm around his buddy, who was silently crying.

Hope and his little band grew close on the trip, as they endured the below-zero weather, bare-bones accommodations, and often treacherous plane flights. Their two pilots, Marvin Setzer (the younger, whom Hope nicknamed Junior) and Bob Gates (the tall one, dubbed Growing Pains), became part of the family too, especially after a perilously close call on a flight from Cordova to Anchorage. The troupe was supposed to be in Anchorage by evening, but with darkness falling—and flying at night in Alaska considered too dangerous—the pilots wanted to wait until morning. But Hope and Langford, intent on getting to Anchorage in time for a welcoming party that had been planned for them, prevailed on the pilots to leave that night.

A few minutes after taking off, the plane was enveloped in fog and sleet. As they headed toward Anchorage, the right engine conked out, and so did the radio. The plane was losing altitude at a rate of two hundred feet a minute and couldn’t find the airport. Back in the
main cabin, Hope and company knew something was wrong when they heard shouting from the cockpit. The crew chief came back and told them to put on their parachutes and “Mae West” life vests.

As he watched Langford being outfitted, Hope felt a wave of guilt: he had prevailed on her husband, actor Jon Hall, to let Frances take the trip. Colonna nervously stroked his mustache and quipped drily that the station wagon probably wouldn’t be there. It was a reference to a joke Hope told, about a nervous recruit making his first parachute jump. The sergeant instructs him to pull the rip cord and ride the parachute to the ground, where a station wagon will be waiting to pick him up. But when the recruit pulls the cord, the parachute doesn’t open. Hurtling toward the earth, he grumbles, “I’ll bet the station wagon won’t be there either.”

“It was a pretty scary night,” Gates, the copilot, recalled years later. “Bob came up to the cockpit, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, ‘They’re all on their knees praying back there.’ I said, ‘Tell ’em to keep going, ’cause we’re gonna need all the help we can get.’ ” The ground crew at Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage, learning of the plane’s troubles, turned on all their searchlights, in violation of security rules. The plane had dropped to about two thousand feet when Gates and Setzer finally caught sight of the beams and headed the plane toward the airport.

“We saw this big glow, circled, and landed,” said Gates. “We couldn’t taxi, because we only had one engine. There was ice all over the airplane. All the generals and base commanders came running out. Bob was one of the first ones out. I was the last one. He came over, put his arms around me, and said, ‘Okay, let’s go to the barracks and change our drawers.’ ”

Hope later gave each pilot a watch, with the inscription “Thanks for my life.” He wasn’t exaggerating the danger. Gates, who became a colonel in the Air Force and logged eighteen thousand hours of flying time (including several more overseas trips with Hope), said that of all the flights he made in his career, that was the worst.

Bad weather of a more benign sort nearly kept Hope from getting back in time for his first radio show of the season. Pepsodent had lined
up Edgar Bergen and bandleader Kay Kyser to fill in for him, in case Hope didn’t make it. But the weather cleared just in time for Hope and company to fly to Seattle on Monday, and they did a show on Tuesday night from nearby Fort Lewis. Then they turned around and flew back to finish the Alaska tour, making a few final stops in the Aleutians before heading home to Los Angeles.

The Alaska trip made a powerful impression on Hope, and he talked soberly about it afterward.
“I wouldn’t trade this trip for my last five years in show business—my lucky years,” he told a reporter. “I tell you, a guy gets to seeing himself in the proper focus in a setup like that. It’s touching to think that the visit of a mere human being can mean so much.” He promised to make another trip to Alaska, launched a drive to raise money for athletic gear and other recreational equipment for the men up there, and said he planned to go next to the British Isles. “Yes, Hollywood won’t see so much of Hope from here on out. I’ve got other plans.”

•  •  •

Questions were occasionally raised as to why Hope, Hollywood’s greatest cheerleader for the troops, wasn’t in uniform himself. He batted away the criticism fairly easily, with the help of friendly newspaper columnists. Dorothy Kilgallen reminded her readers how much Hope had done for the war effort, entertaining the troops and selling war bonds, and reported that he had tried to enlist six times (unlikely).
“He was rejected every time,” she wrote, “because the Army would rather have him doing what he is doing than carrying a gun.” Ed Sullivan, after a golf game with Hope and heavyweight champion Joe Louis, now a sergeant in the Army, quoted Louis as telling Hope that it was more important for him to stay out of the line of fire.
“The greatest good you can do is by making soldiers and sailors laugh,” said Louis. “Us younger boys will take care of the fighting. You take care of the laughing.”

He was taking care of it quite well. His
Pepsodent Show
, riding high on Hope’s wartime gags, was now the
No. 1 program in radio’s Hooper ratings, just ahead of
Fibber McGee and Molly
, the show that followed Hope on Tuesday nights. And in November 1942, Paramount
released a third
Road
picture,
Road to Morocco
, probably the most famous and fondly remembered (if not necessarily the best) of the entire series.

One reason is the film’s title number, sung by the boys while riding on the back of a two-humped camel—the iconic image of the raffish camaraderie that sparked the films. The two, who have washed up on a desert shore after their ship has exploded and sunk (thanks to a match tossed inadvertently by Hope into the engine room), look as good as they ever have: sailor caps perched jauntily on their heads, Crosby trimmer and more animated than usual, Hope looking fit and manly in a white T-shirt and stubble of beard. Johnny Burke’s lyrics, batted back and forth by the two stars, are a high point of the
Road
films’ self-parodying, in-joke humor:

Where we’re goin’, why we’re goin’, how can we be sure?

I’ll lay you eight to five that we meet Dor-o-thy Lamour . . .

[Bing] For any villains we may meet, we haven’t any fear

[Bob] Paramount will protect us ’cause we’re signed for five more years.

The entire Burke–Van Heusen score, which includes the standard “Moonlight Becomes You,” is probably the best of all the
Road
pictures. The comic plot—from another screenplay by Frank Butler and Don Hartman, directed by David Butler (replacing Victor Schertzinger, who had died unexpectedly in October 1941)—is a satisfying pile-on of schemes and counterschemes. First, to make some money, Bing sells Bob into slavery. When Bob winds up being pampered in a harem and engaged to marry a desert princess (Lamour, naturally), Bing tries to horn in on the action. Then, when Hope finds out that any man who marries the princess is cursed to die, he tries to con Bing into taking his place. The thrust and parry of their back-and-forth has been polished to a fine edge:

BING:
“We’ll have to storm the place.”

BOB:
“You storm, I’ll stay here and drizzle.”

BING:
“You got red blood, ain’t you?”

BOB:
“Yeah, but I don’t want to get it all over strangers.”

BING:
“I wanna have a talk with you, man-to-man.”

BOB:
“Who’s gonna hold up your end?”

Road to Morocco
is the wackiest and most anarchic
Road
picture yet. There are talking camels (“This is the screwiest picture I was ever in,” one says) and fourth-wall-breaking gags. In a scene near the end, for example, an exasperated Hope quickly recaps all the troubles that Bing has gotten them into. “I know all that!” says Bing after he finishes. “Yeah,” Bob replies, “but the people who came in the middle of the picture don’t.” (Bing’s retort: “You mean they missed my song?”) And the movie has one of the only truly ad-libbed moments in the entire
Road
series. In the middle of a scene with a camel they’ve found in the desert (the one they’ll hop onto for the “Road to Morocco” number), the beast suddenly spits in Hope’s face. As Hope reels back out of camera range, Crosby laughs and pets the animal: “Good girl, good girl.”
The camel improvised the spit—but when director Butler saw the spontaneous reaction, he kept it in the film.

The Morocco setting turned out to be unfortunately timed—Allied troops invaded North Africa just days before the film’s release—but that mattered little.
Road to Morocco
earned $4 million at the box office, the best ever for a
Road
picture and the fourth highest for any film of 1942.

•  •  •

By early 1943, the tide in the war had turned in the Allies’ favor. Starting with the Battle of Midway in June 1942, Japan’s advances in the Pacific were being steadily reversed. The German invasion of the Soviet Union had bogged down in the bitter Russian winter. The long-awaited Allied offensive in the European theater, the invasion of North Africa in November 1942, had succeeded beyond expectations, with Rommel’s forces driven out and Allied troops now securely in control of the region. So secure, in fact, that the USO was able to start sending entertainers there. Hope, tied up with his radio show until the
summer, must have looked on enviously as stars such as Martha Raye and Carole Landis were in the first wave of entertainers to travel to North Africa in the early months of 1943.

Hope did his bit back home, making a ten-week tour in the spring of military camps in the Midwest and South. His pace was unflagging, his energy almost uncanny.
“There were never less than three telephones in our rooms, and all of them rang at the same time every second of the day and night,” said Barney Dean, who accompanied Hope on the trip. “And people, people, people. It was maddening. But Bob didn’t seem to mind.” When his exhausted troupe reached Atlanta, looking to rest up before the next day’s radio broadcast,
Hope got a call from a Paramount wardrobe boy who had been drafted and was now stationed in Albany, Georgia. Hope grabbed Barney Dean and made a hundred-mile drive there, just to do a show for the fellow’s unit.