Hope: Entertainer of the Century (50 page)

As his sixtieth birthday approached, the life milestones were starting to accumulate. In June 1962, his son Tony graduated from Georgetown University, with plans to go to Harvard Law School in the fall. Hope gave the commencement address, accepting an honorary doctorate in front of three thousand graduates, family members, and friends gathered outdoors on the tree-lined campus.
“I can’t wait till I get home and have my son read this to me,” Hope said of the Latin diploma. “I did recognize one word—something about ‘negligence.’ ”

Later that summer his brother Jack, a drinker who suffered from liver problems, went into a hospital in Boston for an operation to remove his spleen. After the surgery his organs began to fail and he fell into a coma. He died on August 6, 1962. His unexpected passing was a blow to Hope, who depended on his easygoing and well-liked brother, less for his titular role as producer of Bob’s TV specials than as an adviser, fixer, and all-around security blanket.
“He was just a doll,” said Jack Shea, a director of Hope TV shows in those years. “He was the only person who could go in and tell Bob he was full of it.”

Three months later another key member of Hope’s inner circle,
longtime publicist Mack Millar, died suddenly of a heart attack. Millar was an old-school hustler, pals with the veteran newspaper columnists who were rapidly being replaced by younger and less compliant TV journalists. Still, he was one of Hope’s most loyal and hardworking advocates, and a mainstay of his powerful publicity team since the early days in Hollywood. Unfortunately, he wasn’t around to see the culmination of one of his biggest projects: his campaign to get Hope the Congressional Gold Medal.

The bill to award Hope the medal was finally extricated from committee and passed by Congress in June 1962. President Kennedy promptly signed it into law. But it hit yet another snag when Congress failed to pass an appropriations bill that included $2,500 for the medal. That left the award hanging for months. Hope was on a fishing trip with his family in British Columbia in September 1963 when a call came that the medal would finally be presented to him at the White House in two days. He hurried to Washington with the family and was at the White House for the ceremony on September 11.

President Kennedy made the presentation before a crowd of two hundred congressmen and other dignitaries on the White House lawn, reading an inscription that praised Hope for his “outstanding service to the cause of democracy throughout the world.”
“This is one of the only bills we’ve gotten by lately,” the president joked, getting a big laugh before handing off to the comedian being honored. Hope noted that Kennedy had seen him entertain in the South Pacific when the future president was a PT boat captain during World War II. “The president was a very gay and carefree young man at that time,” Hope said. “Of course, all he had to worry about then was the enemy.” After the ceremony, Milton Berle, who was there for a White House lunch, playfully grabbed the award from Hope and exchanged a few quips with him, giving reporters some fodder for their morning stories. It was a great day for Hope, who cherished the award as the highest recognition of his achievement as a humanitarian and entertainer. “I feel very humble,” Hope said, “although I think I’ve got the strength of character to fight it.”

•  •  •

Hope was well past humility. In the 1950s, despite his success in movies and radio, he was still something of a comedian on the make, trying to prove himself in the new medium of television. By the early sixties, his dominance in TV was no longer in doubt. He was NBC’s biggest ratings powerhouse and most indispensable star. In 1961
Variety
did an analysis of the ratings for the sixty-eight Hope specials since his first one aired in April 1950. Hope won his time period fifty-seven times—a level of consistency that no other TV star could match over such a long stretch.
“Hope is the closest anybody has come to batting 1000, over a more-than-decade span in walloping the competition,” the trade paper marveled.

On camera he was thicker around the middle, a little graying at the temples. The posture was more regal (always a half turn to the right, so the camera would highlight the curling-up-to-the-left smile), the pauses longer and more defiant, almost daring the audience not to laugh. His shows took on a more formalized, almost institutional quality: Hope’s annual presentation of the Hollywood Deb Stars, for instance (a selection of up-and-coming movie starlets that Hope began featuring back in the mid-1950s), or, beginning in the 1960s, the college football all-American team, with a Hope one-liner for each player as he trotted onstage to be introduced. The old variety-show format was starting to look a little stodgy. Well after most other NBC shows had switched to color, Hope’s remained in black and white, probably because it was cheaper. (He finally made the changeover in December 1965.) His humor too was sounding more middle-aged, with smug, older-generation quips about rock ’n’ roll fads such as the twist (“the only dance I know where you wear out your clothes from the inside”) or sketches about those crazy, nonconformist beatniks, always with Hope in his fake goatee, doing hepcat jive talk.

His production team was stocked with people who had been with him for years: prop man Al Borden, who first worked with Hope on his Broadway show
Roberta
; assistant producer Silvio Caranchini and sound technician John Pawlek, who did the advance production work for his overseas tours; cue-card man Barney McNulty and longtime talent coordinator Onnie Morrow. The writing staff too congealed
into a tight-knit group that remained remarkably unchanged: Mort Lachman, Hope’s confidant and house intellectual, and his writing partner, Bill Larkin; Les White, who started out writing jokes for Hope in vaudeville, and his partner, Johnny Rapp; Charlie Lee, a corpulent, acid-tongued Englishman whom Hope nicknamed Lipton (because he drank tea), and Gig Henry, a former US intelligence officer in World War II; and Norm Sullivan, a crew-cut member of Hope’s original
Pepsodent Show
radio team and the only writer who worked solo.

The writers complained a lot, but they mostly enjoyed their indentured servitude with Hope. He was a demanding boss, insatiable for material and possessive of their time. But he always appreciated their skills, credited their work, and knew he couldn’t do without them.
“This is all the talent we have, fellas,” he once said, pointing to a script. Said Lachman,
“When things go wrong, Hope takes the whip. He’ll work you like a dog. But when the show’s over, he doesn’t get down on his guys. And he won’t let anyone else do it either.”

Lachman was the closest to him. They would play golf together in the afternoons; when
Hope would call and bark into the phone, “Now,” Lachman would rush over to meet him at Lakeside. Lachman was typically the last one left in Hope’s dressing room before a show, after everyone else had cleared out and Hope was making final edits to the script and maybe a last-minute change in his wardrobe. Waiting backstage to go in front of the cameras,
Bob would sometimes squeeze Mort’s arm until it was black-and-blue—before striding out in front of the audience, the picture of cool. Their relationship was not always smooth. After Jack Hope’s death, Lachman inherited many of the producing duties on Hope’s TV shows. But when Hope didn’t give him the title of producer (it went instead for a time to Hope’s youngest brother, George),
Lachman was miffed and quit to work for Red Skelton. Hope quickly made amends, and Lachman tore up his Skelton contract and went back to Hope.

Hope’s sponsors weren’t quite so loyal. As production costs for TV shows increased during the 1950s and early 1960s, it was becoming harder to find sponsors willing to take on one show for an entire season. Hope’s show was one of the costliest on TV—
around $350,000
per hour, plus another $50,000 that Hope demanded the sponsor kick in for publicity. That was
too steep for Buick, which ended its sponsorship of Hope’s shows in 1961 (switching instead to
Sing Along with Mitch
, which was cheaper). Hope shopped around for another company willing to sponsor him for the entire season. When he couldn’t find one, he relented and began making deals on a show-by-show basis. His first special of the 1961–62 season (which didn’t air until Christmas) was sponsored by Revlon, and later ones by Beech-Nut, Timex, and even, during the 1962–63 season, his old radio sponsor Pepsodent.

Then, in early 1963, Hope negotiated a major sponsorship deal with Chrysler. The automaker not only agreed to sponsor Hope’s entire 1963–64 season; it wanted to put him on the air every week, as host of a dramatic anthology series,
Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre.
Hope would film introductions for each of the weekly dramas and star himself in two scripted comedies during the season, along with six of his usual variety specials. The $14 million deal also made Hope Chrysler’s spokesperson and “image man,” the start of a fruitful, decade-long association with the automaker.

Hope’s
Chrysler Theatre
, which aired on Friday nights during the 1963–64 season, was one of several new network shows (along with
The Richard Boone Show
and
Kraft Suspense Theater
) that augured a brief comeback for the dramatic anthology series, in eclipse since the passing of the 1950s golden age of live TV drama. Hope had little to do with the dramatic hours, which were produced at Revue Studios (later Universal Television) and overseen by writer-producer Dick Berg. But they included such notable programs as
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, a TV adaptation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel, starring Jason Robards; an original teleplay by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright William Inge; and new work by such top writers as Rod Serling and Budd Schulberg. The scripted comedies that Hope starred in were negligible—laugh-track farces such as
Have Girls, Will Travel
, with Hope playing a frontier marriage broker, and
Her School for Bachelors
, in which he’s the editor of a
Playboy
-style girlie magazine. But with his name on one of TV’s most prestigious dramatic series—the
winner of three Emmy Awards in its first season—Hope’s TV profile was never higher.

•  •  •

Coping with enormous fame can be a challenge for any Hollywood celebrity. The adulation, the loss of privacy, the reluctance of underlings to tell you bad news, the shell that forms to protect against the onslaught of people who want favors or money—all can make it difficult, if not impossible, to stay grounded, human, in touch with the world outside of your own narcissistic bubble. In some ways, Bob Hope handled his fame better than most. He wasn’t insecure or uncomfortable in the limelight; he wasn’t a temperamental monster to work for; he didn’t turn to drink or drugs. He played around with women, but never broke up his family. He had a relatively unpretentious lifestyle: a house in Toluca Lake that was spacious but not flashy, pet German shepherds, utilitarian American cars (usually supplied by his sponsors) that he liked to drive himself. He was always happy to greet fans who approached him on the street or in airports, chatting with them and signing autographs.

Yet decades of being one of the most recognizable people in the world, combined with his natural English reserve and an aversion to introspection, led Hope to wall off a great part of himself from outsiders, even those quite close to him. In social settings he could be convivial and charismatic, but also detached and programmed—a rote “How about that” or “Innat great” substituting for real conversation. He would deflect probing questions with jokes or by changing the subject.
“He’s shallow in the sense that he’s never taken the time to look into himself,” said Martin Ragaway, who wrote for him in the early 1960s, “and he won’t let others do it either.” Being interviewed by reporters, he could be remote and ungiving.
“When he’s not quipping, his conversation is flat, faceless, withdrawn,” wrote a
Time
magazine reporter who spent time with him in 1963. “He appeared vague and preoccupied, lost in thoughts he couldn’t articulate. He was courteous, gracious and removed. He wasn’t uncooperative. One felt there just wasn’t much there.”

He had a temper, which could erupt when technical foul-ups or
other problems occurred on the set. He could get nervous before shows and had show-business superstitions—
no whistling in the dressing room or hats on the bed. But pressure never seemed to upset him or ruffle his cool. His calm self-possession had a way of assuaging the insecurities of others. Peter Leeds, a sketch actor who worked with him on TV and tours for years, recalled pitching Hope an idea for a TV show and getting no response for weeks. His anger steadily rising, Leeds finally blew his top and cursed out his boss. “Take it easy,” said Hope, unperturbed. “We’ll get to it.” Leeds was later horrified that he had exploded at Hope.
“If it were Danny Thomas or Milton Berle,” he said, “they would’ve thrown me out on my ear.” Hope didn’t.

Yet he expected deference. Art Schneider, who edited many of Hope’s early TV specials, was working late at night on a Christmas show when he got a phone call. “This is Bob,” came the voice on the phone.
“Bob who?” said Schneider, who also had a son named Bob. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” Hope snapped. Hal Kanter, who directed some of Hope’s filmed introductions for his Chrysler hours, had a tiff with the star over his wardrobe. Since the intros for several shows were taped in one sitting, Kanter told Hope he needed to change neckties for each. Hope dismissed the idea, saying no one would notice. After Kanter pressed the matter, Hope took him into his dressing room and lectured him,
“From now on, don’t argue with me in front of the help. Just do it. Do you get my message?” Kanter said he did—and quit.

Hope hated confrontations. When he was unhappy with a performer or a staff member, he got others to deliver bad news. He wanted to be loved by everyone. He couldn’t understand criticism and would complain to his publicists when he got a bad review or a negative story:
“Are you telling these interviewers how much I raise for charity each year, or how much I pay in property taxes?” (The standard answer for each was $1 million.) He never bad-mouthed fellow performers in public and chastised those who repeated nasty gossip.
“There’s always some guy who wants to chop a comedian,” Hope told a reporter. “I’ve met these guys everywhere. I’ve heard all the chops. I don’t go in for that. I can understand these guys because I was one of them.” He wasn’t any more. He was Bob Hope.