Hope: Entertainer of the Century (40 page)

His big troupe included cowboy singer Jimmy Wakely (who had accompanied Hope to Alaska the year before), dancer Judy Kelly, the Tailor Maids singing trio, a dance act called the Hi-Hatters, and Les Brown’s band. Also joining the entourage were Hope’s brother Jack, old vaudeville pal Charlie Cooley, four writers, and Hope’s masseur from Lakeside Country Club, Fred Miron. For a leading lady, Hope’s first choice was Jane Russell, but she again had to bow out because of a film commitment, so he asked singer Gloria DeHaven to come along for the first part of the trip, before Marilyn Maxwell could take over midway through the tour.

They stopped first in Hawaii, then island-hopped to Kwajalein, Guam, and Okinawa, before landing in Tokyo. Hope was a big celebrity in Japan, thanks largely to
The Paleface
, the most popular American film to open in the country since the war. (While he was
being driven through the Tokyo streets, a car full of Japanese fans pulled alongside and serenaded Hope with “Buttons and Bows.”) Hope and his entertainers were guests at a luncheon given by General MacArthur—another charismatic general who impressed Hope greatly.
“He held us spellbound,” Hope wrote in his newspaper column, “as he talked with authority and humor on subjects ranging from Bataan to baseball batting averages.” Hope visited injured American soldiers at Tokyo General Hospital (“Most of them are so young you’d think they were drafted on the way to school,” he wrote); flew to Yokota Air Force Base to entertain fliers under the command of General Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell; and did his weekly radio show for an audience of three thousand GIs in Tokyo’s Ernie Pyle Theater.

From Tokyo, Hope and his band crossed the Sea of Japan and landed at an airfield near Seoul, the South Korean capital that had just been retaken from the Communists. Military trucks carried them over ten miles of rough road to Seoul Stadium, where they entertained twenty thousand GIs in the frigid cold. Hope joked about a war in which the battlelines were shifting almost daily: “Some of these towns are changing hands so fast, one soldier bought a lamp with three thousand won and got his change in rubles. Seoul has changed hands so many times the towels in the hotel are marked ‘His,’ ‘Hers,’ and ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ ”

After Seoul, Hope crisscrossed the country, going as far south as Pusan and north across the thirty-eighth parallel to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital now in friendly hands. Hope heard that the First Marine Division, which he had entertained in Pavuvu during World War II, was at the port of Wonsan, and he asked if he could do a show for them. He and his troupe were flown to Wonsan in two C-54s, only to find the airport nearly deserted when they arrived. They were waiting in an empty hangar, wondering what to do, when some officers finally arrived, among them General Edward Almond.

“How long have you been here?” asked Almond.

“Twenty minutes,” said Hope.

“Are you kidding? We just made the landing.” Weather had delayed their arrival, and Hope’s troupe had actually beaten the Marines there.
“Bob Hope and Marilyn Maxwell in Wonsan before Leathernecks,” blared the headlines back home. Actually, the South Koreans had retaken the port two weeks earlier, so the marine landing was something of an anticlimax.
“The only thing we’re going in for is to give Bob Hope an audience,” grumbled one marine.

Hope did shows on the deck of the battleship
Missouri
and the aircraft carrier
Valley Forge
, then returned to Pyongyang to entertain fifteen thousand troops in front of the former Communist headquarters. The tour ended with a swing through Alaska and the Aleutians, where Hope did the last of four radio broadcasts from the trip. He returned home to a big reception at the Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank, with Dolores and all four kids there to greet him. Hope had traveled twenty-five thousand miles and done fifty-four shows in his four weeks abroad. He wasn’t the first Hollywood entertainer to go to Korea; Al Jolson had preceded him in September (and had suffered a fatal heart attack a couple of weeks later, caused at least partly by the strain of the trip). But Hope was once again in his glory, the nation’s most celebrated soldier in greasepaint.

Inspired by the trip, Hope resumed his wartime routine of bringing his radio show to a different military camp each week. For his Frigidaire TV special in November, he featured the entertainers from his Korean trip, showed film clips from the tour, and closed the show with another of his inspirational messages, full of patriotic swagger:

The Iron Curtain boys thought they’d thrown a Sunday punch when they backed us up to Pusan. But they forgot one little detail. Ever since Plymouth Rock, Americans have had something to fight for—and, yes, die for if necessary. It’s ten thousand miles from Westchester to Wonsan, but the flame of freedom in the human breast defies all distance and brings men together in a fight for the common ideal of a free and democratic world under God.

The Korean War dragged on for nearly three more years, settling into a stalemate and provoking a political firestorm when President Truman fired General MacArthur for “insubordination.” Hope stayed
away from the political controversy, but he was privately frustrated at the lack of military resolve.
“I always had the feeling that if the US had used the air power it had standing by in Japan and the Philippines to bomb across the Yalu River line, a lot of American lives would have been saved,” he wrote later. “But it would have meant attacking Red China, and that was a political no-no.” For Hope the battle lines were as clear-cut as they were in World War II. One of his writers, Larry Gelbart, came back with more ambivalent feelings about the war. His experiences traveling with Hope in Korea—especially their visits to mobile army hospital units near the front lines—supplied the raw material for his hugely successful antiwar sitcom of the 1970s,
M*A*S*H.

•  •  •

By the early 1950s, Hope’s image and attitude were undergoing a subtle but unmistakable shift. For much of the 1940s he was something of a renegade: an irreverent radio comedian and movie star, full of American moxie and impudence. Now he was show-business royalty: feted by generals, honored by presidents, entertaining queens. He grew more protective of his image and reputation, sensitive to criticism, notoriously litigious. In June 1950, he was
sued for making jokes—by the Forrest Hotel in New York City, which claimed Hope had defamed it with some wisecracks about his stay there when he was playing the Paramount Theater. In November, Hope sued
Life
magazine for making jokes—in an article called “Radio’s Seven Deadly Sins,” by TV critic John Crosby.
“Writers got $2,000 a week in Hollywood for copying down Fred Allen’s jokes and putting them on Bob Hope’s program,” Crosby wrote.
Hope sought $2 million in damages, claiming the line gave readers the serious impression that he was a plagiarist. (
Life
’s editors smoothed things over, and Hope
eventually dropped the suit. His attorney Martin Gang said in a statement, “Hope had become convinced that the offending paragraph had been left in the story inadvertently and that there was no intention to harm him.”)

With a greater role in producing his own films, Hope grew bolder in throwing his weight around. Just before he left for Korea in October, Paramount screened his just-completed film,
The Lemon Drop
Kid
, which the studio wanted to have ready for a Christmas release. But Hope was unhappy with several scenes, and he insisted that Frank Tashlin, who had helped punch up
Monsieur Beaucaire
, be brought in again for rewrites. This time Tashlin was also allowed to direct the new scenes—infuriating director Sidney Lanfield, who never forgave Hope for taking the film out of his hands.
“He was the worst egomaniac I ever worked with,” Lanfield told author Lawrence Quirk, “a back-knifing son of a bitch, mean as sin. His way was the only way. I tried to buck him, and he took it out on me.”

Another sign of Hope’s growing power was the openness of his philandering. A tacit acceptance of Hollywood stars’ extramarital activities was standard operating procedure in that prefeminism era. But the ability of Hope, along with his army of publicists and protectors, to keep his very open affairs out of the press was a real achievement. When rumors of his relationship with Marilyn Maxwell were rampant during the filming of
The Lemon Drop Kid
, Hollywood gossip doyenne Louella Parsons devoted a column to dismissing them. “In an exclusive interview with Dolores Hope,” she wrote,
“I have learned that there is absolutely no truth to the current rumors that Bob Hope and his leading lady, Marilyn Maxwell, are serious about each other just because they have been seen together so much.”

Keeping Hope’s womanizing under wraps was part of the job description for members of his entourage. Frank Liberman, a former studio publicist who began working for Hope in 1950, recalled an early conversation with Hope’s longtime agent Louis Shurr.
“Our mission in life,” Shurr told him, “is to keep all news about fucking and sucking away from Dolores.” Mark Anthony, an old friend from Cleveland who later took charge of arranging Hope’s tours, as well as many of his assignations, said,
“The boss knew a number of people, including newsmen, who were wise to his playing around on the side, but he counted on their loyalty to keep it quiet. When I told him he was pushing his luck, he would say, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and I figured if he didn’t, I wouldn’t.” Still, many in his inner circle were shocked at how brazenly Hope chased women. “You didn’t know him in his frisky days,”
Charlie Lee, an acerbic British writer who joined Hope’s staff in 1950, confided years later to a younger writer. “If the guy had any class, he’d commit suicide.”

Dolores almost certainly knew about his sexual escapades, but she played the role of good wife to perfection. On the rare occasions when a reporter got near the subject, she would dance around it gracefully—though with more candor as the years went on.
“I think he’s a great man,” she told
Life
magazine in 1971. “No person living has the kind of unspotted life that is the perfect example of clean living.”
“If he’s had romances, I don’t know about it,” she told a
Washington Star
reporter in 1978. “I have read it in the paper. The paper loves to print things like that.” Yet asked if she thought Bob was “one hundred percent true-blue,” Dolores replied, “I doubt it. I think he’s perfectly human and average and all that.” When John Lahr raised the subject of Hope’s womanizing in a 1998 profile of Hope for the
New Yorker
, Dolores gave this sweetly accepting response:
“It never bothered me because I thought I was better looking than anybody else.”

Clearly, she did what was needed to keep together a marriage that offered many compensations and was, in most other ways, sincerely close. She knew Bob was a rover from the start, she would tell people in later years, and simply made the best of it. “You can do anything you want,” she told him, “as long as you don’t bring any of it home.” Said Linda Hope,
“I’m sure that my mother knew what was going on. And she just decided that he was worth going through whatever she had to go through, to have the life and be Mrs. Bob Hope. But I don’t think any of [the other women] had the significance to him that she did and that the family did. The stability, coming from a large family himself, was sort of an anchor that allowed him to go and do the kinds of things that he did.”

If there were tensions in the marriage, they were kept well hidden from outsiders. Rory Burke, who as a child spent a good deal of time at the Hope house, caught a rare glimpse of discord—a sarcastic crack from Dolores, a snappish response from Bob, and quick orders for the children to leave the room. Most of the time, however, Dolores
maintained a brave front.
“She had grace under fire,” said Burke. “She turned away from it. The main message was, you make your bed, you stay in it. If you’re Catholic, you never get divorced.”

Catholicism was Dolores’s refuge and solace. She attended mass once a day, sometimes more, at St. Charles Borromeo Church, down the street from their house in Toluca Lake. She raised money for Catholic charities and surrounded herself with men of the church (like another family, the Kennedys, whose friendship with Catholic prelates seemed a way of atoning for family indiscretions). She had a passion for decorating and channeled her energies into the Toluca Lake house, undertaking a series of renovations, which she would typically have carried out while Bob was traveling. He joked that he hated to go away because he never knew what the house would look like when he came back.

But he did go away, often. In the spring of 1951 he spent a full two months abroad, on a personal-appearance tour that took him to London, Ireland, France, and Germany. Dolores had gone with him on his three previous non-wartime trips to Europe—in 1939, 1947, and his 1948 Christmas trip to Berlin. But this time she stayed home. His traveling companion, instead, was his costar on the tour Marilyn Maxwell.

Hope’s intimate relationship with Maxwell was well-known to most of the people who worked with him. Writers traveling with Hope would find Maxwell in his hotel room when they met him there for meetings. On the road for a military-camp show, publicist Frank Liberman once saw Hope and Maxwell check in for the night at a cheap motel decorated with tepees and a neon sign reading
SLEEP IN A WIGWAM TONIGHT.
The two were together so often that people on the Paramount lot began referring to Maxwell as Mrs. Hope. For a time, according to some, she thought she might be.

Just how serious Hope was about Maxwell is hard to say. Twice married (she and her second husband, Andy McIntire, split in early 1951) and a former girlfriend of Frank Sinatra’s (who was said to be jealous when Hope took up with her), Maxwell was unusual among Hope’s girlfriends in being a high-profile leading lady, rather than one
of the lesser known chorus girls, beauty queens, and showbiz wannabes he more typically hooked up with. Liberman, the publicist who helped cover up his affairs for many years,
called Maxwell the second most serious of Hope’s many girlfriends. (First place went to Rosemarie Frankland, a British-born beauty queen Hope was involved with in the 1960s.) Maxwell was one girlfriend who could hold her own with him onstage: until their relationship ended in 1954 (when Maxwell married her third husband, TV writer Jerry Davis), she and Hope appeared together, on radio, TV, and the stage, nearly two hundred times.