Hope: Entertainer of the Century (44 page)

In place of his November special, Hope told NBC, he would put together a big event for December: an international variety special featuring entertainers never before seen on American television. He arrived in London on October 15, two weeks before his Palladium appearance, and began lining up stars for the show. He hired the 182-member Cologne Choir after hearing them at Festival Hall. He flew to Paris (almost getting thrown in jail because he left his passport in London) and recruited Maurice Chevalier to make his American TV debut. While there he also signed up twenty-one-year-old ballerina
Liane Dayde, whom he saw at the Paris Opera Ballet, and later added his old cohort Bea Lillie, traveling all the way to Glasgow to do rehearsals with her.

The special was filmed over two nights, November 7 and 8, by a BBC crew at the Empire Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush.
“In television in America we’ve got to such a difficult state with these big commercial shows that you see the same stars on four or five shows in the same week,” he told the audience. “It’s become impossible to do anything new. That’s why we are over here.” The show was edited in the United States and telecast on December 7, accompanied by a network publicity campaign heralding it as “the first truly global television show.”

The ratings were only fair, and the critical response polite at best.
“As an evening’s entertainment, it should have been received in good grace if not with screams of joy,” said
Variety.
But Hope was proud of the show, which gave him a chance to reaffirm his status as an international star and champion of global understanding.
“Entertainment will continue to be the common denominator expressing mutual comprehension among the world’s peoples,” he told a reporter. “There’s only one world for television.”

Yet Hope was restless, making noises about slowing down. He turned down lucrative offers from Texaco and General Motors to sponsor his TV shows for the 1955–56 season,
saying he wanted to take a break from television. He may simply have been playing hard to get in advance of negotiations for a new contract with NBC. But it’s possible he was also feeling a whiff of mortality. In January 1955 his pal Charlie Yates, an agent who had helped Hope in his early vaudeville days, dropped dead of a heart attack while playing golf with Hope in Palm Springs.
“It didn’t really affect me for three days,” Hope told the AP’s Bob Thomas. “Then the shock set in. I was terribly upset. I began to feel all sorts of pains and things wrong in my body.” Even after the doctor gave him a clean bill of health, Hope decided he should take it easier.
“The gang at Lakeside will tell you that Bob Hope is dead serious about slowing down,” reported
Variety.
“Too many of his friends have crossed the border and, while still in his early 50s, he feels that the grueling pace of past years may catch up with him too.”

In mid-1955
Hope agreed to a new five-year contract with NBC, which called for a scaled-back schedule of only six specials a year. Hope may well have wanted to slow down, but he also realized that the key to survival on TV was limiting his exposure, and making his fewer appearances as special as possible. It was a shrewd calculation that would pay off in the years ahead.

•  •  •

In early 1954,
Mel Shavelson and Jack Rose, two of Hope’s favorite writers, came to see him in Toluca Lake, bringing along a quart of ice cream as a peace offering. They told him about a movie they wanted to do: a biography of Eddie Foy, the turn-of-the-century vaudeville star who created an act with his seven children after their mother, an Italian dancer he had met and married in vaudeville, died of cancer. They wanted Hope to star as Eddie Foy.

Hope liked the idea. He had seen the Foys in vaudeville and welcomed a chance to do a challenging, semidramatic role. Then the writers told him their conditions. Shavelson wanted to direct the film himself (he had never directed a movie before), and Rose wanted to produce it (he had never produced a movie before). “That’s okay,” said Hope. “My last picture was so lousy, you guys can’t possibly do one lousier.” There was one more condition: Paramount agreed to back the film, but only if Hope took no money up front, just a share of the profits. After some consideration, Hope agreed to that as well—the first time he had ever done a movie for no salary—and the film was produced jointly by Paramount, Hope Enterprises, and the partnership of Shavelson and Rose.

The Seven Little Foys
was the first film in which Hope played a real-life character, and he did some homework for it, reading up on Foy and watching old silent movies of him. He also brushed up on his dancing, especially when James Cagney agreed to a cameo in the film as George M. Cohan—reprising his Oscar-winning role in
Yankee Doodle Dandy
—for a scene in which he challenges Foy to a dancing contest at the Friars Club. (
Cagney took no salary for the part. When he was a starving Broadway chorus boy, he explained, the Foys would invite him to their house in Westchester County for Sunday dinner.
Often it was the only good meal he got for a week. This was his payback.) The filming took place in August and September of 1954. During it, Hope paid a visit to his friend Barney Dean, who was in the hospital dying of cancer—sad motivation for the dramatic scenes he was in the midst of shooting.

No movie he had done meant more to Hope than
The Seven Little Foys
, and when it was released in May 1955, he went into overdrive to promote it. He made a tour of Australia in conjunction with the film’s world premiere—the first time an American star had ever come to Australia to open a major Hollywood film. Back in the United States, Hope went on a four-week, twenty-five-city promotional tour for the movie, doing live stage shows and TV interviews in every city he visited. Paramount estimated that Hope’s personal stumping added $1 million to the film’s box office.
“I think the way things are going, an actor is very foolish not to help sell his pictures,” Hope told Louella Parsons. Hollywood was discovering the potential of using stars to promote their own films with personal appearances and media interviews—sellebrities, they were dubbed—and Hope, once again, was a pioneer.

The Seven Little Foys
earned $6 million at the box office, Hope’s biggest hit in years. Its mix of comedy and sentiment left a few critics uneasy, but most of them generally admired the movie and praised Hope’s performance.
“A commanding abandonment of the buffoon,” said
Variety.
The
New York Daily News
raved,
“Hope can now hold up his head with Hollywood dramatic thespians; for the first time in his career, Hope isn’t playing Hope on the screen.” In truth, Hope isn’t exactly playing Eddie Foy either. He does a sort of half impersonation—imitating Foy’s hoarse, laid-back, cigar-chomping swagger, but never quite disappearing into the role. He’s still best being Bob Hope—trading wisecracks with his acerbic kids, and in the justly celebrated dance sequence with Cagney, in which they match steps atop a banquet table. (Cagney is clearly the better dancer, but he graciously allows Hope to outshine him.)

Hope’s innate charm cheats a bit on the dark side of Foy’s character—his self-regard, his emotional detachment, and his inattention as a father. But his stoic underplaying is effective in the big
courtroom scene in which Foy laments his failings as a father, the culmination of his battle for custody of the kids against his former sister-in-law. He’s even better in the quieter, earlier scenes when Foy comes home from traveling to find that his wife (whose illness he has willfully ignored) has died in his absence. Hope silently goes from bedroom to bedroom to check on his sleeping children. One daughter rouses from her sleep and asks groggily, “Who is it?” Hope’s blank, poignant response: “Nobody.”

The film may have had more real-life resonance than Hope was willing to admit. “How can you stay all these years with this man?” Foy’s sister-in-law complains to his wife at one point about his frequent absences. “A stranger in his own home. A visitor to his children. Nothing to show how he feels.” It’s almost too obvious to note the parallels to Hope’s own family life in the middle of the 1950s.

The older kids, Tony and Linda, were now attending Catholic high school in Hollywood. The younger two, Nora and Kelly, were in grade school and struggling to get attention (Nora, the more outgoing, with better luck than Kelly). Quality time with their father, always at a premium, grew even scarcer as their home life became grander and more public.
“The family changed in the 1950s,” said nephew Tom Malatesta. “Bob became enormous. There were more people around the house with bigger names. At a party Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio might walk in the door, or Ray Milland or Lana Turner. It was a larger environment, and the family relationship was more formal. More people came into the intimate setting.”

There was occasional family time—fishing trips to British Columbia or Colorado, and the annual get-together of the extended family during the Christmas holidays, when relatives from Cleveland would come to town for a New Year’s party and pile into a chartered bus for a trip to the Rose Bowl, with a police escort and seats on the fifty-yard line. Dolores, as always, picked up the slack when Bob was away, keeping the house organized and the kids in line.
“She looked at the report cards and got us to school on time,” said Kelly Hope, “and made sure the lunches were ready to go, and whoever was going to pick us up at three o’clock, and what doctor did we have to go to and why. For lack
of a better word, she ran the show.” Dolores could be tough, and her discipline unforgiving. Once when Kelly misbehaved, all the furniture was removed from his bedroom as punishment, except for his bed and a lamp. And their father’s mere presence could be intimidating: when playing hide-and-seek in the library, the kids would often be shushed because Bob might still be sleeping in the bedroom above.

Dolores tried to shield them from the perils of being a celebrity’s child—the constant press attention, the schoolmates who wanted access to their famous father, and sometimes worse. When
Confidential
magazine in 1956 published Barbara Payton’s steamy account of her five-month affair with Hope in 1949, Dolores had to warn the children in advance.
“This trashy magazine is coming out with an article about your dad,” Linda recalled her mother telling them. “I just want you to know, in case they bring it up at school or some of your friends say something. But it’s not true. You know your dad, and that’s what’s important.”

Just how well they knew him was harder to say.

On November 14, 1955,
Bob Hope applied for a visa to visit the Soviet Union. The request, made at the Soviet embassy in Washington for himself and a TV crew of ten, might have seemed strange coming from a staunchly anticommunist Republican at the height of the Cold War. Hope often cast the rigid and ruthless Soviet dictatorship as a comic villain in his monologues. “I saw a Russian ad for cold cream,” he joked when the Soviets aired their first TV commercials. “It had a picture of a beautiful girl, and underneath it said, ‘She’s lovely, she’s engaged, she’s gonna be shot in the morning.’ ” But for Hope, entertainment always trumped ideology, and he wanted to score another show-business coup by becoming the first entertainer to do an American TV show from behind the Iron Curtain.

He got the idea while he was in London in the fall of 1955, shooting his movie
The Iron Petticoat
, in which Katharine Hepburn played a Soviet pilot who defects to the West. Hope, quixotically, wanted to shoot the movie’s ending at a Moscow airfield. The US
State Department turned down the request, even before the Russians had a chance to say no. Then, intrigued at the idea of bringing Soviet entertainment to American audiences, Hope sent his brother Jack to Brussels to get footage of the Moscow Circus, intending to use clips of the troupe (“the
greatest I’ve ever seen,” Hope said) in one of his TV specials. But both NBC and his sponsor, Chevrolet, vetoed the idea, apparently fearful of the political fallout.

Hope’s next idea was to bring a TV crew to the Soviet Union to shoot an entire special there, featuring Soviet artists and entertainers who had never performed in the West.
“I’ve seen many a curtain go up in my time,” he said. “My greatest thrill would be to see this one, the Iron Curtain, go up.” At a time when the Cold War was at its frostiest, the idea would take two and a half years to come to fruition. But it was the centerpiece of Hope’s efforts in the 1950s to secure his role as America’s leading show-business emissary to the world.

Hope had not taken an entertainment troupe abroad since his Far East swing during the Korean War in 1950. Then, in late 1954, Secretary of the Air Force Harold Talbott asked Hope if he would make a New Year’s Eve trip to Greenland, where five thousand US troops were manning a Strategic Air Command post at Thule Air Base, part of the nation’s early-warning system against a potential Soviet nuclear strike. The lonely and forbidding outpost was 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, but Hope jumped at the chance.

To join him, he recruited a big Hollywood star, William Holden (winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor that year for
Stalag 17
); two of his World War II traveling companions, Jerry Colonna and Patty Thomas; his radio singer, Margaret Whiting; and newspaper gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who did double duty by writing about the trip in her syndicated column and joining Hope onstage for some banter about Hollywood. He tried to get Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood’s top glamour girl of the moment, but she was embroiled in a contract dispute with her studio, Twentieth Century–Fox, and
didn’t even return his phone calls. (Monroe was the one major Hollywood sex symbol Hope never appeared with.) Instead, as the requisite piece
of cheesecake, he tapped a well-endowed former Miss Sweden whom he had met at a Big Ten Football Conference banquet in Los Angeles, named Anita Ekberg.

In a brief trip of just forty-eight hours, Hope and his troupe landed at Thule (pronounced
TOO-lee
) in thirty-six-below weather and for two days never saw the sun. They did two shows, one at a gymnasium at Thule on New Year’s Eve and a second the next day in Goose Bay, Labrador. Both were filmed and later edited together into an hour show for NBC’s
Colgate Comedy Hour
, which aired on January 9. The telecast
drew a protest from the cameramen’s union, which was unhappy that government crews had been used instead of union cameramen. (Hope said he had nothing to do with the decision; he prided himself on supporting unions and regularly refused to cross picket lines.) But it was a landmark for Hope: the first time one of his military tours was televised.