Hope: Entertainer of the Century (33 page)

He wasn’t about to tamper with a formula that had made him the No. 1 show in radio. Colonna and Langford were back as regulars, and so was bandleader Skinnay Ennis, returning from the service. Far from downplaying the military humor, Hope seemed to revel in it—adding new segments with Mel Blanc as a stuttering Private Sad Sack, based on the popular wartime comic-book character. In place of the patriotic
appeals urging listeners to write a serviceman or buy war bonds, now he closed the show with calls to unite in the postwar rebuilding effort. “Nobody would ever deny that we owe those men a great debt,” he said, referring to the soldiers who had won the war. “But our first and biggest payment toward this debt, and the prescription for veterans’ readjustment, ought to be American unity—unity of purpose among labor and management and government. Peace with a purpose.”

Postwar “reconversion” was the watchword now. Factories were gearing up production of the consumer goods that Americans had been without for so long during the war. The men who fought were back home—starting families, becoming homeowners, buying cars and washing machines. Some thought Hope wasn’t changing fast enough. Even before the war’s end, NBC was getting complaints from some listeners about his continuing military orientation:
“Why isn’t Hope doing shows for us now?” Not until December 4, 1945, did Hope finally bring his show back into the studio, for the first time since early 1942. “This is Bob Broadcasting-from-NBC-Again-It’s-Been-a-Long-Long-Time Hope,” he opened. Then it was back to jokes about Bette Davis’s wedding and W. C. Fields’s drinking.

Yet Hope still missed the large, enthusiastic crowds that he got on the road. He started taking his show to college campuses—the University of Southern California, Pomona College, the University of Arizona—getting screams of laughter for his local references. (“This is a beautiful campus. That noise you hear is the wind in the acacia trees, and that silence you hear is the nightlife in Claremont.”) In Arizona he joked about rodeos; in Reno about divorces; in San Francisco about the steep hills. Like so much of network radio—which was
still dominated by the same prewar stars (Benny, Bergen, Fibber McGee and Molly) and well-worn gags, as if the war had never happened—Hope’s return to peacetime sounded more like a throwback than a step forward.

In the fall, after his dispute with Paramount was resolved, Hope was back on the studio lot, shooting his first movie in two years,
Monsieur Beaucaire
. In the meantime, Paramount was able to tide over
Hope fans with a film that had been sitting on the shelf for more than a year:
Road to Utopia
, the fourth in the
Road
series, and one of the best.

Directed by Hal Walker, who had been assistant director on the two previous
Road
pictures, and written by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, it has a slicker production than any of the earlier films, some of the wildest gags, and the most brazen riffs of self-parody. Set in the frozen Yukon, instead of Africa or the South Seas, the film avoids the sometimes uncomfortable racial stereotyping of the other films. It also boasts the best of the Hope-Crosby buddy songs: Burke and Van Heusen’s “Put It There, Pal,” with the pair razzing each other’s radio shows and movies as they glide through the snow on a dogsled.

The story, uniquely for the
Road
series, is told in flashback. The film opens with Hope and Lamour, in old-folks makeup, as an aged married couple being reunited after many years with a white-haired Crosby. As the three of them reminisce, we flash back to turn-of-the-century San Francisco, where Hope and Crosby are working in a carnival, scamming customers with a bogus psychic act called Ghost-O. When their con game is exposed, they’re forced to flee, and Crosby suggests they hop a boat for Alaska, to join the gold rush. Hope, as usual, balks. Crosby, as usual, cons him into going—by pickpocketing his boat ticket home. En route north, they stumble onto a map leading to a valuable gold mine, a gang of crooks determined to get it back, and Lamour.

The self-referential, fourth-wall-breaking gags come thick and fast. Humorist Robert Benchley appears on-screen at the outset to introduce the film, then pops up throughout to make wry comments on the action. Hope and Crosby step out of character repeatedly, poking fun at the film and their roles in it. In one scene they’re shoveling coal in a ship’s engine room. A man dressed in top hat and tails casually passes through and asks for a light. “You in this picture?” asks Crosby. “No,” the fellow says, “taking a shortcut to Stage Ten.” Lamour, trying to wheedle the map out of Hope, gives him a big smooch; after catching his breath, Hope turns to the camera and says, “As far as I’m concerned, this picture’s over right now.” While riding through the snow
on a dogsled, Hope sees a mountain in the distance. “Get a load of that bread and butter,” he says. “Bread and butter? That’s a mountain,” Crosby replies. “May be a mountain to you, but it’s bread and butter to me,” says Hope, as the peak is encircled by lights, re-creating the Paramount logo. There is a talking fish, and a grizzly bear that invades the boys’ tent looking for its mate, then trudges off silently, before turning to the camera: “A fine thing. A fish they let talk. Me they won’t give one stinking line.”

It is subversive nonsense, satirizing the artifice of filmmaking itself. Yet it doesn’t destroy the integrity of the comic relationship at the core of the film. Hope is more put-upon and overheated than ever, with bug-eyed double takes, hat-grabbing panic reactions, and wolflike growls in the presence of sexy gals. He gives every wisecrack just the right pitch and weight. “You wouldn’t do this to me if I was in shape!” he cries as he’s being carted off by the ship’s officers—the perfect expression of his hapless bluster. In one scene, the boys swagger into a Klondike saloon, and Crosby tells Hope to act tough, so they can blend in with the crowd. At the bar the chief villain asks what they want to drink. “A couple fingers of rotgut,” says Crosby gruffly. “I’ll have a lemonade,” Hope responds brightly. A quick poke from Crosby and Hope snarls, “In a dirty glass!” Panama and Frank get credit for the line, but Hope’s perfect delivery, the split-second turn from milquetoast to roughneck, is what makes it perhaps the most famous joke in all the
Road
pictures.

Road to Utopia
ends with a clever twist on the perennial Crosby-Hope romantic rivalry. In the climactic scene, as the villains are closing in on the boys in the arctic wilderness, the ice pack beneath them suddenly breaks and splits apart, and Crosby and Hope are separated—Hope on one side with Lamour, Crosby on the other, with the bad guys. Here the flashback ends, and Crosby, back in present time, recounts how he escaped, while Hope and Lamour bring him up-to-date on their life together since—which now includes a son. They call the boy downstairs to say hello. It is Crosby. As Old Bing fidgets uncomfortably, Old Bob turns to the camera and confides, in the film’s capper, “We adopted him.”

When Paramount production chief Buddy DeSylva proposed the ending, to replace one that Panama and Frank had written,
Hope said it would never get past the censors. But it did. And
Road to Utopia
went on to gross $5 million at the box office, the most ever for a
Road
picture, or for any Hope movie to date.

•  •  •

With the war over, and his largely volunteer work for the USO completed, Hope focused once again on his finances. In January 1945 he signed a new contract with Pepsodent that raised his salary to $18,000 a week, guaranteeing him $7.5 million over ten years—
the largest contract for radio talent ever negotiated to that point. His 1946 income was
projected to reach $1.25 million. But he was pouring much of it into real estate and other investments, and in the spring of 1946 he found himself cash poor, unable to pay the $62,000 he owed in income tax.

For a quick payday, Hope got his agent Louis Shurr to book him on a personal-appearance tour in June. It was a fast-paced trip—twenty-nine cities in thirty days—in which Hope played auditoriums, stadiums, and state fairgrounds from Seattle to Topeka. His traveling company included sexy Latin singer Olga San Juan, his wartime tour buddy Jack Pepper, another former vaudevillian and old Cleveland pal named Eddie Rio, Skinnay Ennis and his band, and a bevy of Paramount starlets—more than forty entertainers in all.

They were ferried from city to city on two DC-3s, the first domestic vaudeville tour to travel by plane rather than train. The pace was frenetic.
Hope would typically arrive in town around noon, play a charity golf match in the afternoon, have a massage before dinner, put on a three-hour show in the evening, and often end the night at an after-show party thrown by a friend or local businessman. A phalanx of five Hope staffers, among them his brother Jack, handled arrangements and publicity for the tour at every stop.
“I can’t even remember what city I’m in,” Jack said in an interview with the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
. “I don’t even know where I’m going next. Tonight, for example, I’ll call Bob and tell him I’m through in St. Louis and ask where he wants me to go next. Your idea is as good as mine.”

The tour was a huge success,
grossing $500,000 in ticket sales (earning Hope $200,000 after expenses). Nearly as much as his World War II tours, his 1946 domestic tour was a defining event in Hope’s career. It rekindled his love of vaudeville-style road trips, even when the audiences weren’t raucous servicemen, and showed that they could be big moneymakers. It enabled him to get up close and personal with his fans—the show-business equivalent of retail politics, which Hope mastered better than anyone else in Hollywood. He would continue doing it for as long as he could still walk out on a stage. And even longer.

Hope, meanwhile, was busy getting his financial house in order.
He split his show-business endeavors into three corporate entities: one, Hope Enterprises (with twenty-five stockholders, among them Bing Crosby), for his movies and personal appearances; another for his books (a sequel to his wartime bestseller,
I Never Left Home
, was in the works, entitled
So This Is Peace
); and a third for records (Capitol was planning an album of highlights from his World War II broadcasts). His business arrangement drew widespread attention—“Hope Inc.,” read the headline in
Time
. Some cynicism began to creep into his press coverage.
“Wherever he goes, the whole board of directors ambles right along with him,” wrote Robert Welch, interviewing Hope for the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
in July 1946. “Even when he goes to the gentlemen’s retiring room he looks like a platoon. He is constantly surrounded with busy, worried and preoccupied people, with briefcases, papers and knitted brows.”

Yet Hope was a hands-on manager of his business affairs. Board meetings for Hope Enterprises would be held in his dressing room during the shooting of
Monsieur Beaucaire
.
“We made him remove the wig because it didn’t look dignified,” said his attorney, Martin Gang. Whenever Hope was considering whether to buy a piece of land,
he would always take a drive and walk the property himself. He was a micromanager of everything from his movie publicity campaigns to the placement of his newspaper column, It Says Here. The columns “have been doing pretty well here in Los Angeles lately, keeping it on page five,” Hope wrote Ward Greene, his contact at King Features, in
1946.
“If they would give me one spot and keep it there, I do think we could make it a habit.” After Hearst renewed Hope’s contract in October 1946, Greene wrote back, “Mr. Hearst is very pleased. He has instructed me to see that the papers carry your column in the news section and that the papers give it uniform position.”

Hope could indulge in some personal whims as well. In June 1946 he joined a syndicate headed by Bill Veeck and acquired a one-sixth share of the Cleveland Indians, Hope’s hometown baseball team, for around $1.75 million.
“I used to climb over the fence at League Park to see a ball game. I’d like to come through the front gate for a change,” Hope said. “Cleveland has been my home, I have other property interests there, and aside from my share as an investment, this is a matter of sentiment with me.” Investing in the Indians not only satisfied his hometown pride and his interest in sports, it provided years of good comedy material—especially when Crosby, around the same time, became part owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Hope took little active role in running the Indians. But he brought some Hollywood glamour to a franchise run by the most celebrated baseball promoter of his era. Veeck put Indians games on the radio for the first time; signed Larry Doby as the first black player in the American League; and famously (a few years later, when he owned the St. Louis Browns) hired a midget to pinch-hit as a publicity stunt. Under his guidance, the Indians rose from a lowly sixth place in 1946, when Hope acquired his share in the team, to the American League pennant in 1948. Hope came to Cleveland for the World Series, filling a box with family and friends as he watched the Indians beat the Boston Braves 4 games to 2.

•  •  •

Back home in Toluca Lake, the Hope family, like millions of others in America, were settling into a new postwar routine. First came expansion. Dolores had been eager for years to adopt another child, but the war had intervened. Finally, in the fall of 1946, she and Bob went back to the Cradle in Evanston to pick up a new two-month-old baby girl. Once there, they were told that a baby boy had also become available.
They decided to take both—naming the girl Honorah (Nora, for short) and the boy William Kelly (known as Kelly). Dolores had requested a baby of either Italian or Irish heritage; she got one of each.

Linda and Tony were grade-schoolers by now, a picture-perfect, blond-and-brunet matched set of Hollywood children, trotted out for photo ops when their father came back from overseas, dressed up in their best clothes for an occasional dinner at the Brown Derby, often accompanied by Louis Shurr, Bob’s man-about-town agent. Yet they had a more grounded, less pampered upbringing than many Hollywood children. They lived not in Hollywood or ritzy Beverly Hills but “over the hill,” in the less pretentious San Fernando Valley. Their Toluca Lake circle included a few show-business families (Jerry and Flo Colonna and their son Robert; John Wayne’s ex-wife Josie and their kids), but they largely avoided the catered birthday parties and junior social whirl that marked the childhood of so many Hollywood youngsters.
“We didn’t really do the Hollywood-celebrity-kid thing,” said Linda Hope. “I don’t know if it was something my parents decided between them, that they weren’t going to have us be part of the Hollywood scene. But I think they wanted us to grow up normal.”