Hope: Entertainer of the Century (49 page)

The Facts of Life
began with a script by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank about two married suburban neighbors, bored with their respective spouses, who try to have an affair. Panama and Frank originally wanted to cast William Holden and Olivia de Havilland as the couple, but had trouble selling it to a studio. Then they had the idea to refashion it for two comedians: Bob Hope and Lucille Ball.

Hope was wary of the idea at first.
“It’s a little straight, isn’t it?” he said of the script. But he told Panama and Frank that he would
do it if Lucy agreed. Ball, Hope’s favorite costar, had largely dropped out of movies since her huge success on TV with
I Love Lucy
and was now partners with her (soon-to-be ex-) husband, Desi Arnaz, in Desilu Studios. She had her own reservations about the film, worried that it would turn into a typical Hope farce.
“I don’t want it to be the
Road to Infidelity
,” she told the screenwriters. But she agreed to do it, and the movie began shooting in June 1960, with co-screenwriter Frank as the director.

The production had its share of problems. Climbing into a rowboat for one scene, Ball slipped and fell, gashing her leg and bruising her face so badly that the production had to shut down for two weeks. While she was recuperating, Frank sprained his ankle on the golf course, and Hope jammed his thumb in a door. The film also posed creative challenges for the two stars. Ball, a more meticulous actor than Hope, worked hard to create a realistic character distinct from her farcical TV persona:
“Was I Lucy? Was I Lucy?” she would ask after scenes. At times she pushed director Frank too far. “If you want to direct the picture, I’ll go play golf,” he snapped one day when she became too overbearing.

Hope, on the other hand, had to be steered away from his natural inclination to go for the easy laugh. In one scene, the couple check into a motel to consummate their affair, and the script has Hope making small talk when he enters the room—nice closet, good lamp—to show his nervousness.
Hope wanted instead to come into the room and surreptitiously test out the springs of the bed. Frank indulged his star by shooting both versions; Hope’s got more laughs, but Frank ended up using his own.

The Facts of Life
is an enjoyable romantic comedy, proof that the two comic stars can handle relatively sophisticated adult material. It is handicapped by Hollywood’s 1950s prudishness about sex (there is none) and by its farcical predictability (on the night of their assignation, Hope’s convertible top won’t go up and they’re drenched in the rain). Hope is restrained and credible in a role that, for once, suits his middle-aged spread, and he has some funny moments: stuck at a Boy Scout meeting, for example, when he’s late for a rendezvous with
Ball, squirming as he has to sit through a Scout’s interminable report on smoke signals. But Ball outshines him nearly all the way; indeed, she exposes some of his limitations as a serious actor. Every nuance of her character’s conflicting emotions is registered in her animated face, body language, and line readings. Hope’s inner life, hidden beneath his cool-wiseacre façade, is pretty much a cipher.

Yet
The Facts of Life
, released in November 1960, earned a healthy $3.2 million at the box office, more than any other Hope film since
The Seven Little Foys
. Rare for a Hope film, it even picked up five Academy Award nominations, including one for Panama and Frank’s screenplay. (The film won one Oscar, for Edith Head’s costumes.) It was a promising step forward for Hope as a film actor, a move into more intelligent, age-appropriate romantic comedy. Unfortunately, it was the last good film he would ever make.

The start of the 1960s augured big changes for both Hope and the nation. He joked often about the charismatic young senator from Massachusetts who was running for president in 1960: “Do we really want a president who rides for half fare on the bus?” When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, the generational shift registered acutely for Hope—from Dwight D. Eisenhower, Hope’s personal link to World War II, to a new and unfamiliar band of Ivy League–educated New Frontiersmen.

Hope, now fifty-seven, was becoming keenly aware of the passage of time. When he was entertaining the troops in Germany in 1958, a young solider came up to him and brought greetings from his father, who had seen Hope at Guadalcanal. “I entertained his father
! That one line really aged me,” said Hope. His old movies were now on TV—Paramount had sold all of its pre-1948 films, including most of Hope’s classics, to television for $50 million (
a deal that Hope publicly complained about, since it gave the actors no residuals)—and the contrast between the brash young movie star of the 1940s and the paunchier, middle-aged Hope was there on the small screen for all to see.

In the world of comedy, too, times were changing. By the end of the 1950s, a new wave of stand-up comics was emerging from the folk clubs and hip nightspots of New York, San Francisco, and Chicago.
These comedians—Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart, Mike Nichols and Elaine May—rejected the impersonal, joke-driven style of Hope and the comics of his generation who came out of vaudeville and the borscht belt. The new comedians wrote their own material and developed more individualized styles: doing characters and improvising scenes, using stand-up comedy to explore their own lives, experiences, and neuroses, and to express their often dissenting social and political views.

Hope was a fan of many of these comedians (though he had few of them on his shows). He saw Bruce, the infamous “dirty” comic, perform several times and thought he was brilliant. Once in the early sixties he went to see Bruce at a Florida nightclub. Bruce introduced Hope in the audience and after the show ran into the parking lot to flag him down, asking Hope if he would give Bruce a guest spot on one of his TV shows. Hope laughed him off:
“Lenny, you’re for educational TV.”

Yet Bruce and the other new-wave comics were beginning to make Hope look old-fashioned. He was the older generation now, a friend of presidents and court jester for the Establishment—a symbol of everything the younger comics were rebelling against. It was not a role that Hope welcomed, or that would treat him very well.

For his 1960 Christmas tour, the Defense Department gave Hope a break from the arctic cold and the grueling long-distance treks through the Far East and Europe. His destination this time was the sunny Caribbean, for a visit to US bases in Panama, Puerto Rico, Antigua, and El Salvador. The climax of the trip, and its chief raison d’être, was a Christmas Eve visit to the US naval base at Guantánamo, on the southeastern coast of Cuba. Communist leader Fidel Castro had taken control of the island country and was ratcheting up anti-American rhetoric, nationalizing US businesses, and prompting fears that the Soviets were gaining a base of influence just ninety miles from US shores.

Hope brought a troupe of nearly sixty with him aboard the Military Air Transport Service (MATS) plane that left on December 19, among them Hungarian-born beauty Zsa Zsa Gabor, musical-comedy star Janis Paige, singer and former Miss Oklahoma Anita Bryant, and a young crooner named Andy Williams. The flight into Guantánamo
had some tense moments, as the pilot had to stick to the approved flying corridor or risk being fired upon by the Cubans. At one point, the entertainers looked out their windows and saw two Cuban planes flying alongside them.
“It was scary,” Janis Paige recalled. “There was an awful silence. Nobody knew what to say or what to do—when suddenly they peel off and in their place come four of our fighter planes, with the guys giving us the thumbs-up signal. You could see their faces, they were that close.”

But for many in the group, the most stressful part of the trip was dealing with the prima donna known as Zsa Zsa. Hope appreciated performers who could tough out the often harsh conditions, and he was usually lucky in finding them—troupers such as Frances Langford and Patty Thomas, who didn’t complain about the rough accommodations or having to do their hair and makeup on the fly. Even Jayne Mansfield, the blond bombshell who’d joined him on two previous trips, had her husband, Mickey Hargitay, along to buffer any diva behavior. But Gabor, a minor movie actress better known for her jewels, her accent, and her many husbands, was a high-maintenance problem, complaining about the accommodations, throwing tantrums in her dressing room, and monopolizing the hair dryer.

“Everybody hated Zsa Zsa,” said Andy Williams. “On the trip I got crabs from sitting on a toilet seat, and everybody signed a proclamation wanting me to sleep with Zsa Zsa, so I could give them to her.” Paige, the Broadway musical star who had top billing on the tour, was given the best quarters at Guantánamo, a small house on the base, while the rest of the troupe were assigned Quonset huts. Gabor flew into a rage when she found out, and assistant producer Silvio Caranchini had to plead with Paige to trade rooms with her.
“He said, ‘Jan, she’s throwing hysterics. She demands that she has to have your quarters. I’m asking you to do this for Bob’s sake,’ ” Paige recalled. “So I stayed in a Quonset hut with bugs that looked liked B-17s on the ceiling. It was hot and miserable. And she slept in an air-conditioned house that night.”

Hope did two shows at Gitmo, on the day before Christmas and on Christmas night. “Guantánamo,” he began his monologue, “that’s
a Navy term meaning ‘Hear you knocking but you can’t come in.’ ” In one sketch Hope and Williams played the husbands of two Waves (Paige and Bryant) who sneak them onto the base in violation of Navy orders. A few days after Hope’s return from his tour, outgoing president Eisenhower formally broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba, and Hope reedited the special to give even more time to the Guantánamo segments. The show, which aired on January 11, 1961, drew some of Hope’s highest ratings yet. Just a few days later John F. Kennedy took office.

The early 1960s, with a glamorous and youthful new president in the White House, were Camelot years for Hope as well. Kennedy and his circle gave Hope a rich new load of comedy material. He joked about the president’s wealth, his family, his hair, and his Ivy League brain trust. “There are so many professors in the cabinet,” Hope said, “you can’t leave the White House without raising your hand.” He took note of the president’s political battles, such as his face-off with the nation’s steelmakers over rising steel prices: “Kennedy is still mad,” Hope said. “He just ordered a plywood Chrysler.” When the president’s youngest brother, Ted Kennedy, won a Senate seat from Massachusetts, Hope told an audience overseas, “It’s been a slow year back home. Only one Kennedy got elected.” As Cold War flash points proliferated around the globe, Hope defused the tension with homegrown wisecracks: “There’s trouble in Cuba, Laos, Vietnam. Things are so bad, last week Huntley tried to jump off Brinkley.” When the Soviets launched their first cosmonauts into orbit and fears mounted that America was losing the space race, Hope tried to buck up morale with gallows humor: “It just proves one thing: their German scientists are better than our German scientists.”

He was more than a comedian; he was a national institution. NBC paid tribute to his life and work in an hour biographical special, featuring behind-the-scenes footage from his 1960 Caribbean tour, interviews with associates such as Mort Lachman and Jimmy Saphier, and reverent narration by the mellow-toned Alexander Scourby. It was Hope’s apotheosis as the nation’s comedian laureate. He narrated a TV documentary on Will Rogers, reinforcing his generational link to the
beloved humorist. He continued his tours of military bases during the holidays—back up north to Labrador and Greenland in 1961, another swing through Korea and the Far East in 1962. One of the men who kidnapped Frank Sinatra Jr. in 1963 told an FBI agent that the gang had first considered snatching Hope’s oldest son, Tony, but opted for young Sinatra instead because
“Bob Hope is such a good American and had done so much in entertaining troops.”

The awards and honors poured in, growing ever more weighty and prestigious. The senior class at Notre Dame named him the 1962 Patriot of the Year. He was the first actor to get the Screen Producers Guild’s Milestone Award, in a ceremony beamed to US armed forces around the world and highlighted by a congratulatory phone call from President Kennedy.
“If there is anybody who has, and still is, doing more to project a shining image of Hollywood,” said
Variety
, “and he doesn’t answer to the name Bob Hope, who could that party be?” After some initial resistance, the Senate voted to award him the Congressional Gold Medal, in recognition of his work entertaining the troops. But the measure got bottled up in the House Banking Committee, over concerns that singling out Hope (only the third show-business personality to receive the award, after George M. Cohan and Irving Berlin) would open the floodgates to too many other entertainers. Hope was the only comedian in America who could prompt a congressional fight.

As an entertainer, he was in a class by himself. Other comedians played nightclubs or the big Las Vegas showrooms. Not Hope. He preferred stadiums, civic auditoriums, state fairgrounds—venues more fitting for a comedian of the people. He did a week of shows at the 1962 World’s Fair
in Seattle, drawing crowds so big that an extra matinee had to be added and overflow spectators were seated in boats moored on a lagoon below the stage. In October 1962 he gave another command performance at the London Palladium, entertaining Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip with jokes about America’s own royal family: “We don’t have titles in the United States. No, sir, in America we have just two classes—the people and the Kennedys.” And Bob Hope.

Yet he was still the hardworking vaudeville trouper, traveling the
country for one-nighters—both paid concerts and unpaid charity gigs, raising money for local hospitals and Boys Clubs, supporting the projects and worthy causes of friends. One of his favorite cities was Dallas, where his pals included Bob Bixler, a former vaudevillian who did PR for him, and Tony Zoppi, a columnist for the
Dallas Morning News
,
who would take Hope on late-night jaunts to Jack Ruby’s nightclub. When Hope canceled a January 1962 concert at the Dallas Coliseum, Bixler prevailed on him to help bail out the local promoter who got burned, Iva D. Nichols of the Dallas Theater Guild, by doing a makeup concert in June.
Hope did the show, unaware that Nichols was being pursued by the IRS and numerous angry creditors. On the night of his concert, federal marshals and sheriffs deputies were at the box office confiscating the ticket proceeds. Hope ended up getting only $4,500 of the $10,000 fee he was promised and found himself dragged into an embarrassing local scandal.
“Let’s face it, Bob,” an executive for Neiman Marcus, another participant in the show, wrote him later, “both of us got had.”