Hope: Entertainer of the Century (41 page)

Hope’s 1951 trip was the first of four visits he would make to England in four successive years. He felt a bond with the country of his birth, where he was nearly as popular as he was in the United States. (A
Motion Picture Herald
poll
ranked him as Britain’s No. 1 box-office star of 1951, followed by Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne.) London also had a great music-hall tradition, and Hope longed to play the Palladium, the last outpost for full-time vaudeville entertainment on either side of the Atlantic. But when the dates he wanted in April were already promised to Judy Garland, he agreed instead to a two-week engagement at the smaller Prince of Wales Theatre.

He gave himself a televised going-away party: a TV special for Frigidaire on April 8, 1951, that featured an all-British cast of guest stars, including Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, the husband-wife acting couple then appearing on Broadway in
Bell, Book and Candle
. In a sketch with Arthur Treacher, Hope shops for clothes for his trip, and in a big finale an all-star parade of “surprise” visitors—among them Ed Wynn, Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Jimmy Durante, and Frank Sinatra—drop by Hope’s stateroom to wish him bon voyage.

He sailed for London aboard the
Queen Mary
and did three one-nighters—in Manchester, Blackpool, and Dudley—before making his way to London for the Prince of Wales engagement. On the bill with him were British comic actor Jerry Desmonde and an array of vaudeville acts, including a trick cyclist, a juggler, and a one-legged dancer named Peg-Leg Bates. Some of the London critics griped that Hope went on too long and that his material
“had lapses into
feebleness, surprising in a man who travels with a small army of gag men.” But the two-week run was a sellout, and the Brits were impressed with his vaudeville pluck.
“If little that Hope gave us was either inimitable or dazzling,” said the
Guardian
, “much in the act was delightfully funny and as truly the stuff of the music hall as any film star has yet offered us.”

Hope got an extra round of applause for donating the proceeds from the engagement to charity. A year earlier, on the Paramount lot, he was introduced to a diminutive Anglican priest named James Butterfield, who ran a center for underprivileged boys in South London called Clubland. The building had been badly damaged during the war, and Butterfield was trying to raise enough money to rebuild it.
Hope impulsively promised that the next time he came to London he would do a benefit for the club. True to his word, he donated the bulk of the $50,000 he was paid for the Prince of Wales engagement, handing over a check personally on a visit to the club in its seedy South London neighborhood. One of the reformed delinquents who accepted Hope’s gift talked years later about how much the gesture meant.
“Bob was really great to us kids,” said actor Michael Caine. “You can always send money. But to leave the West End and come right down to the Walworth Road, which isn’t the Beverly Hills of London, takes a really charming man.”

Hope finally made it to the Palladium a year later, headlining a two-week engagement in August 1952 with singer Betsy Duncan, and again in September 1953, with Gloria DeHaven. He built up a loyal support staff in London—a publicity team, two writers to help him tailor his material for his British audiences, and an agent, Lew Grade, who arranged British and European bookings. Hope’s visits were widely covered in the British press and his London shows were nearly all sellouts.

There were some bumps, however. During his 1951 trip, Hope played in the British Amateur Golf Championship in Porthcawl, Wales, a year after Crosby had entered the same event. But Hope didn’t play well, and the following year a columnist for the
London Star
publicly urged him not to come back: “Last year
Hope never looked
like a serious contender. His first match was a nightmare of gagging and tomfoolery. He departed leaving behind many sighs of relief.”

Hope responded with jokes (
“How hard can you hit a wet tea bag?”), while friends such as David Niven and golfer Jimmy Demaret wrote letters in his defense. But Hope skipped the tournament in 1952 and instead played a benefit match with Crosby against two British entertainers, Donald Peers and Ted Ray, at the Temple Golf Club in Maidenhead. That evening Crosby made an unbilled guest appearance with Hope at a benefit he was emceeing at London’s Stoll Theatre—the first time Crosby had ever appeared on a London stage.

•  •  •

Hope’s movies in the early 1950s were a mixed bag. Some harked back to his modest black-and-white comedies of the 1940s; others were more lavishly produced Technicolor farces, replete with sight gags typical of his broad, increasingly degraded later comedies.
Fancy Pants
, his 1950 Western comedy, was an unfortunate example of the latter, with Hope out of his comfort zone playing a British butler in the old West, Lucille Ball miscast as a frontier gal, and a lot of people getting hit over the head with crockery.
The Lemon Drop Kid
, released in April 1951, was a middling example of the former: another Damon Runyon story, featuring Hope as a racetrack tout who claims to get his tips directly from the horses, but with more farce and less warmth than
Sorrowful Jones.

The Lemon Drop Kid
does, however, boast one classic sequence: Hope and Maxwell’s performance of “Silver Bells,” the pretty, waltz-time Christmas song that Livingston and Evans had written to order for the movie. (It was originally called “Tinkle Bells,” before someone thought better of it.) Hope was unhappy with the original staging of the number—he and Marilyn Maxwell sang it in a gambling parlor, with the gamblers providing choral accompaniment—and
got his rescue man, Frank Tashlin, to totally reconceive it. Hope’s instincts were right. The new scene, with the camera following the couple as they stroll along a snowy, movie-set re-creation of the New York City streets at Christmastime, has a lovely, nostalgic glow, and “Silver Bells” soon became a holiday standard, a perennial feature of Hope’s Christmas
TV specials, and a close second to “Thanks for the Memory” as Hope’s great contribution to the American popular songbook.

My Favorite Spy
, released in December 1951, was another throwback to Hope’s classic style: the third in the
My Favorite
series, but actually an improvement over the last one,
My Favorite Brunette
. Hope has a role that is right in his wheelhouse—a cheesy burlesque comic named “Peanuts” White, who is a look-alike for an enemy spy from Tangier—and costar Hedy Lamarr, the Vienna-born beauty whose movie career was on the wane, shows a surprising flair for comedy. But Hope’s next film,
Son of Paleface
, was a more significant harbinger of things to come. A sequel to his hit 1948 Western spoof, the movie did a robust $3.4 million at the box office (one of the top-ten grossing films of the year), tickled most of the critics (
“95 minutes of uninhibited mirth,” said
Variety
), and remains one of the most popular Hope films of the fifties. Yet it doesn’t hold up well and marks another step in the dumbing down of Hope’s movie comedy.

He plays the son of his
Paleface
character, “Painless” Peter Potter—a snooty Harvard grad who has come West to claim his inheritance. Again Hope meets up with Jane Russell, this time playing the ringleader of a gang of gold thieves (a bigger star now, she has much more to do in this film, including a couple of musical numbers), as well as Roy Rogers, as a federal marshal on her trail. Playing a puffed-up “Harvard man,” sneering at the townspeople while they’re laughing behind his back, Hope is more effete and buffoonish than ever before. Russell, dressed in busty dance-hall outfits, looks ready to devour him. (Her steamy come-ons and revealing outfits
prompted the Catholic Legion of Decency to slap the movie with an “objectionable” label, for “suggestive costuming, dialogue and situations.”) In one creepy scene,
Hope even finds himself in bed with Trigger, Roy Rogers’s horse.

Son of Paleface
was the first Hope film directed in full by Frank Tashlin, and the former cartoon director loads it with slapstick gags and camera gimmickry. When he first arrives in town, Hope loses control of his jalopy and sprays all the townspeople with mud. When he downs a strong drink, his body spins around like a top, steam blows out of his ears, and his head disappears into his torso. In a big chase
scene, he trips the Indians by throwing banana peels in their path; in another he escapes by flying his car across a giant chasm, with the help of an umbrella. Some of this gets laughs, but it demeans Hope. Never before has he seemed so incidental to his gags.

“Let’s see ’em beat this on television!” says Hope in the movie’s last scene, as his car rears up on its hind wheels, like Trigger. And television, to be sure, was consuming most of Hope’s attention in these years.

His flirtation with the new medium did not sit well with Paramount, which feared that its No. 1 comedy star was damaging his value on the big screen by doing television. But Hope too was hesitant about fully embracing the new medium. Like other radio stars, he feared getting overexposed on TV, which had shown how quickly it could burn up material and burn out performers—even Milton Berle’s ratings were already slipping badly. In the 1951–52 season Hope hosted a couple of half hours for Chesterfield, his radio sponsor, including a December show from the deck of the USS
Boxer
, an aircraft carrier just back from Korea. But when Chesterfield wanted to put him on a more regular schedule, appearing once a month on Thursday nights (alternating with the popular police show
Dragnet
), Hope turned it down and said he was going to lay off television, except for occasional guest shots, for the rest of the season.

In the spring he starred in two installments of TV variety shows with rotating hosts, the
All-Star Revue
and the
Colgate Comedy Hour
, one filmed at the Presidio in San Francisco and the other at a Douglas Aircraft plant. And in June he and Crosby, making his television debut, were cohosts of a fourteen-hour televised fund-raiser—one of the first nationwide telethons—for US athletes headed to the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki. The show was carried on two networks, CBS and NBC; attracted dozens of top stars; and toted up more than $1 million in pledges (though only $300,000 was actually raised, an embarrassing shortfall that forced the fund-raisers to scramble for more donors to get the athletes to the Olympics).

The show was most memorable, however, for the rare sight of Hope getting upstaged. The manic comedy team of Dean Martin and
Jerry Lewis were at their peak of popularity—starring in hit movies, drawing top ratings on TV’s
Colgate Comedy Hour
, and attracting huge crowds for their nightclub appearances and stage shows. (Their week at New York’s Paramount Theater in July 1951 grossed $150,000—$30,000 more than the record Hope had set a year earlier.) Hope saw their potential early on, inviting them as guests on his radio show in 1948, before their first movie was even released. But when he introduced them on the telethon, Lewis’s frenetic, demented-child antics so unnerved Crosby that he fled backstage, leaving Hope to vainly try to get a word in, before he too gave up and left them alone onstage. The contrast between show-business generations—“It’s time for the old-timers to sit down!” cried Lewis—was hard to miss. Martin and Lewis brought a jolt of anarchic energy to TV. Hope and Crosby, with their easygoing japery, were starting to look a little tired.

That impression was reinforced, alas, on their sixth
Road
picture,
Road to Bali
. Released in November 1952, five years after their last
Road
trip, to Rio, it was the first
Road
film in color, and the first of the television age. (Hope and Crosby even shot seven TV commercials to promote the movie.) But for the first time, the series was showing signs of wear.

It was another three-way joint production, between Hope, Crosby, and Paramount, and Lamour again felt left out. When she was asked to join Hope and Crosby in recording an album of songs from the film, she refused.
“I didn’t think it fair that I get less for the album than they did, and told them so,” she said. “It was never mentioned again.” Later she found out they went ahead and did the album with Peggy Lee. “It would have been nice if I had been informed,” she commented sourly.

Most of the familiar ingredients of the series are here. Hope and Crosby once again play a small-time vaudeville team on the run—this time from Australia to the South Seas, in search of sunken treasure. The best laughs come from the stars’ self-mocking asides. When Crosby and Lamour (back in a sarong as a South Seas princess) head offscreen together for a number, Hope turns to the camera: “He’s gonna sing, folks. Now’s the time to go out and get popcorn.” While they’re trekking through the jungle, a hunter walks on, fires his rifle,
then leaves. “That’s my brother Bob,” explains Crosby. “I promised him a shot in the picture.” A few minutes later there’s a clip of Humphrey Bogart lugging his boat through the swamps in
The African Queen.
“Boy, is he lost,” says Hope.

The trouble with
Road to Bali
is that it’s almost all diversions. The plot is virtually nonexistent, and the interplay between Hope and Crosby, both looking a little paunchier, lacks the improvisational zip that enlivened their earlier films. More than ever, the film seems to exist largely to indulge and showcase its two stars—a Scottish number called “Hoot, Mon,” for example, so they can dress up in kilts. Still,
Road to Bali
did relatively well at the box office, and it would have been a respectable wrap-up for the great series. Unfortunately, there would be one last unnecessary chapter.

It took another decade to unfold. Plans for another
Road
film were in the works almost as soon as
Road to Bali
opened. A screenplay called
Road to the Moon
, written by Ken Englund (who had worked on Hope’s first film,
Big Broadcast of 1938
), was set to be filmed in the fall of 1953, but it was shelved. The series lay dormant until eight years later, when Norman Panama and Melvin Frank wrote an entirely new script, still featuring a space trip, but now titled
The Road to Hong Kong.
With their film work getting more scarce, both Hope and Crosby were eager to recapture a little of their past glory, and the movie was scheduled to be shot for United Artists in the summer of 1961, at Shepperton Studios in London.