Hope: Entertainer of the Century (48 page)

Hope’s Christmas tours to entertain the troops were by now national events, coordinated by the Defense Department and the USO and watched by some of the biggest audiences in television. In December 1958, a year after his successful tour of Korea and the Far East, Hope was booked on an equally ambitious tour of North Africa and Europe. This time, however, he ran into a problem that had been looming for years, but that he had managed to keep at bay: his health.

The trip had an especially grueling itinerary of eight countries in just twelve days. To join him, Hope wanted to book a major European sexpot such as Brigitte Bardot or Sophia Loren, but the best he could get was an appearance by Gina Lollobrigida, who was shooting
Solomon and Sheba
in Spain and agreed to meet the troupe for one day, for $10,000 in cash up front. To fill out his troupe, Hope brought along Molly Bee, a singer on Tennessee Ernie Ford’s TV show, and folk singer Randy Sparks, along with the reliable Jerry Colonna, the inevitable Hedda Hopper, and the indefatigable Les Brown and his band.

The trip ran into problems from the start. Hope and company took off from Burbank on December 17 in two Air Force planes, headed for McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, but one of the aircraft had engine trouble and had to return to California. After a day’s delay, the reunited troupe flew to the Azores and then headed for Morocco, on a flight so stormy that even Hope, usually able to sleep through anything, couldn’t catch a nap. He arrived in Morocco exhausted, then went straight to a charity golf match, followed by a visit to King
Muhammed’s palace, a tour of Rabat, and a show in the evening. The next morning he was back on a plane to Spain. During the first seventy-six hours of the trip, Hope figured he got only seven hours of sleep.

He was being greeted by the commanding officer at the Morón Air Base in Spain, when he suffered his first dizzy spell.
“The walls of the room we were standing in started closing in on me,” he recalled. “I shook my head to clear it, but the haze was still there.” He was taken to the base hospital for an examination, but after some sleep felt well enough to join that night’s show, which the rest of the cast had started without him.

He soldiered on as the tour resumed its relentless pace: to Madrid, where Lollobrigida made her guest appearance; to Naples, where they did two Christmas Eve shows in the rain aboard the aircraft carrier
Forrestal
; and to Frankfurt, Germany, where they were feted at a reception thrown by General F. W. Farrell. There Hope had another attack, passing out in the middle of the party. His earlier health scare had been kept quiet, but this one was in public and in front of the journalists along on the trip, and it soon became worldwide news.

Hope vetoed the idea of another hospital visit and, after a night’s sleep, again felt well enough to continue, doing a show at Rhein-Main Air Base and then flying with the troupe to West Berlin. There he got a call from Dolores, who had read the news of his illness and was worried. He told her that he was fine.
“Stop lying to me and put your doctors on the phone,” she said. Hope struggled through three more days in Germany and a trip back home through Scotland and Iceland. Dolores was waiting to greet him at the Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank with all four kids, a Christmas tree, and an appointment to see his doctor, Tom Hearn.

Hearn found Hope’s blood pressure elevated and ordered him to rest. But the comedian was soon back at work, overseeing the editing of footage from his Christmas tour. The dizzy spells continued, felling him during a golf game with his friend and PGA tour pro Jimmy Demaret. Now convinced that the ailment related to his eyesight, Hope went to an eye specialist, who diagnosed a blood clot in his left eye and
prescribed blood thinners and more rest. Hope canceled a promotional trip to Florida, but continued to work on his next NBC special. During a rehearsal he suffered yet another attack, and his doctors, concerned about the eye’s worsening condition, sent him to New York for a consultation with Dr. Algernon Reese at New York’s Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center.

News of his worsening eye problems prompted alarmist headlines.
“Bob Hope to Fly East in Fight to Save Eye,” read one. Doctors in New York confirmed the diagnosis of a blood clot—a blockage in a retinal vein, which caused hemorrhaging and thus his blurred vision. They thought it could be cleared up without surgery, but warned that he could lose his eyesight unless he seriously cut back on his activities.

Hope’s eye troubles prompted an outpouring of concern from his fans. He got thousands of get-well cards, many with medical advice or suggestions of doctors for him to see.
Several people offered to donate (or sell, at prices ranging from $3,000 to $50,000) one of their own eyes, to replace the orb that ailed Hope. Shaken by the seriousness of his condition, he talked frankly about his need for rest.
“If I had taken a day off in Spain or Africa, I think I would have been okay, but I worked when I was sick,” he told Louella Parsons.
Hope “seemed depressed” as he discussed his condition with UPI’s Vernon Scott, who found a changed attitude in the comedian.
“He’s quieter now. Less brash,” wrote Scott. Hope seemed determined, finally, to cut back on his frenetic pace. “Nobody moved as fast as I did,” he said. “My physical problems began a few years back when I was doing morning and evening radio programs, a weekly television show, movies, and personal appearances. . . . It was ridiculous. I used bad judgment. The folly was I couldn’t keep the money and I was fighting myself on all mediums.”

Yet Hope’s idea of a slower pace was still enough to wear out most performers. He continued to do his monthly NBC specials for Buick (which continued to bury the competition in the ratings) and made personal appearances throughout the year, including a two-week run at the Cain Park Theater Summer Festival in Cleveland. But he put all his movie work on hold, canceled a promotional tour for his recently completed film
Alias Jesse James
, and spent more time resting in Palm
Springs—even cutting back his golf games from eighteen to nine holes. During the summer he and Dolores vacationed in Scotland, and he took the family on a fishing trip in British Columbia.

It might have been a nice time to bond with the children, but he was past that. The two oldest kids were in college now—Tony at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and Linda at Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles. The two youngest, Nora and Kelly, were just entering their teens, grabbing what little quality time they could with the Hollywood superstar who sometimes showed up for dinner. “Nora was better able to get his attention,” said a cousin. “She laughed at his jokes. She was cute, very vivacious, funny. Kelly was at sea. He was not doing well in school. Being the son of Bob Hope was a difficult role for both of them.”

Although Tony accompanied his father on Hope’s 1957 Far East tour, and Linda appeared with him in 1956 as a mystery guest on the TV game show
What’s My Line?
, Hope didn’t push the kids to join him in show business. But it was hard for them to escape the shadow of his overwhelming fame.
“I felt, growing up, that people were always looking past me, at him,” Linda said years later. “I remember inviting people over to the house, as kids always do, and them making a big fuss, and the parents wanting to get inside and see as much as they could. They were more interested in the whole Bob Hope situation, and they weren’t being my friends.” While at Mount St. Mary’s, Linda—an attractive blonde whose cool good looks reminded some of Grace Kelly—was nominated for homecoming queen of nearby Loyola University. “I was just thrilled that finally
my
moment had arrived,” she said. “And then I found out that I could be guaranteed to be picked as the queen if my father would show up.” He didn’t, and she wasn’t.

•  •  •

After a year of sporadically enforced rest because of his eye problems, neither Dolores nor his doctors were happy when Bob insisted on doing another Christmas tour at the end of 1959. The trip was at least more manageable—a relatively short jaunt to Alaska (just admitted to the union as the forty-ninth state), with Jayne Mansfield and young film star Steve McQueen along for the ride. Hope turned the trip into
a reunion of his old World War II troupe, bringing along Frances Langford, Patty Thomas, and Tony Romano as well as Colonna, by now a regular on Hope’s tours. When Les Brown’s band was not available, Hope even got Skinnay Ennis, his first radio bandleader, as a replacement, just for old times’ sake.

The publicity-savvy Mansfield hogged most of the spotlight, posing for photographers with a lion cub and taking the stage in a gown so low-cut the men nearly rioted. (When Hope asked if they wanted her to sing, one yelled out, “Just let her breathe!”) At a show in Fairbanks, Hope had another flare-up of his eye problems. When AP reported the story,
Hope chewed out Bill Faith, the NBC publicist who had let the news slip out. But otherwise the trip went off without incident, and the show that resulted, which aired on January 13, drew Hope’s highest ratings of the season.

His TV popularity continued to soar—not just on his own show, but also on the many variety shows where he made guest appearances. In February 1960,
Variety
did an analysis of the ratings for TV’s most frequent guest stars. Hope was ranked No. 1—beating not only such TV personalities as Jack Benny and Red Skelton but also top movie stars such as Rock Hudson, Ingrid Bergman, and Jimmy Stewart.
“Bob Hope is the champ of them all in audience pulling power,” said
Variety
, “emerging as television’s No. 1 personality.”

In April 1960 he got another crack at the biggest TV guest spot of all: host of the Academy Awards show. He had not hosted the ceremony on his own since 1955 (when he grappled playfully over an Oscar with Best Actor winner Marlon Brando). For the next two years his sponsor, Chevrolet, barred him from the Oscar show because rival Oldsmobile was one of its sponsors. He returned as one of multiple hosts in both 1958 and 1959. But the 1959 show was a notorious disaster. In a once-in-a-lifetime miscalculation, the show came in twenty minutes
short
, and Jerry Lewis, the last of six hosts, was forced to ad-lib desperately to fill the time—stretching out a closing sing-along to “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” clowning around and picking up a baton to conduct the orchestra himself—until NBC
mercifully cut away. Reviews of the show were scathing. The following year, Hope was back as host all by himself.

“Many changes have been made since our last show,” Hope said at the start of the April 4 telecast from the Pantages Theatre. “We have a new director, a new producer, and a new watch.” He was sharp and fully in control. The show was taking place during an actors’ strike. “What a country,” said Hope. “Only here would you wait in your swimming pool for the boss to improve working conditions.” One of the year’s Oscar-nominated films was
On the Beach
, based on Nevil Shute’s bestseller about nuclear Armageddon. “The Russians loved it,” said Hope. “They thought it was a newsreel.” He was ubiquitous throughout the evening: introducing each presenter, sprinkling in quips everywhere, both planned and unplanned. When the Best Short Subject award was announced, Ann Blyth accepted for the absent winner, while a bald-headed man was left wandering uncertainly onstage, apparently thinking the duty was his. Hope gently ushered the confused man offstage: “There’s nothing left over.”

As if to thank him for his job in righting the ship, the Academy gave Hope another honorary Oscar—the prestigious Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
Ben-Hur
was the evening’s big winner, taking home a record eleven awards, but the applause for Hope was the longest and loudest of the night.

Hope would return as solo host of the Oscars for seven of the next nine years, the greatest run of any host in Academy history. His monologues became don’t-miss events: an eight-minute encapsulation of the major films, hot trends, and celebrity gossip of the year in Hollywood—written and rewritten by Hope and his regular crew of writers (with help from others, such as Oscar-show specialist Hal Kanter) right up until airtime and guarded like a state secret.

He joked about big-budget movie spectacles (“Right now Sam Spiegel has more men under arms than NATO”), Liz and Dick’s affair on the set of
Cleopatra
(“I don’t know how the picture is, but I’d like to make a deal for the outtakes”), the growing sexual frankness on-screen (“One picture got the seal of approval, and the director said, ‘Where
have we failed?’ ”). He came armed with good lines, but he had the quickness and agility to handle the unscripted moments too. When a gate-crasher disrupted the 1962 ceremony, bounding onstage to give Hope a bogus Oscar, the host was unflappable: “Who needs Price Waterhouse? All we need’s a doorman.” When the winner of a short-subject award went on too long in his acceptance speech (in the days when acceptance speeches were rarely longer than a few seconds), thanking his wife, his son, and a friend back in Bronxville, Hope commented impeccably, “Well, that saves a telegram.” Even as the shows grew longer and drearier, Hope made them sparkle.

By early 1960 Hope was back to a nearly full schedule of work. He signed a new five-year contract with NBC, after the usual protracted negotiations. He was the network’s eight-hundred-pound gorilla, and he could be demanding and peevish when he didn’t get his way. When NBC couldn’t deliver a Saturday-night time slot that Hope wanted for one of his specials, his agent Jimmy Saphier raised a ruckus and threw Hope’s weight around.
“Don’t you think this is a rather strange way for NBC to treat its number one piece of talent,” he wrote the network, “particularly in view of the fact that your contract with Bob Hope is in its final year?”

After a self-imposed layoff of more than a year, Hope’s movie career was also getting back on track. His last film before the layoff,
Alias Jesse James
, was released in March 1959, and the Western spoof—with Hope playing a New York insurance man who mistakenly sells a policy to Jesse James, then has to go out West to try to keep him alive—was a mild uptick from the disastrous
Paris Holiday
. Following it, a year and a half later, came a movie that showed a new side of Hope on-screen.