Hope: Entertainer of the Century (54 page)

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Hope had no way of knowing, when he made his first trip to Vietnam in December 1964, that the battle against a stubborn Communist insurgency in the remote jungles of Southeast Asia would become the longest war in American history, or that he would return there every Christmas for nine straight years and become embroiled in the most divisive political fight of a generation. The country’s, and Bob Hope’s, Vietnam nightmare didn’t begin in earnest until 1965, when President Johnson, in response to mounting Communist attacks on US bases in the region, sent combat troops there for the first time and began a rapid buildup of forces. The US military presence in Vietnam grew from less than thirty thousand troops at the beginning of 1965 to nearly two hundred thousand by year’s end. The escalation sparked antiwar protests back home, and opposition from such public figures
as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a foretaste of the convulsive political battles ahead.

A political, social, and cultural revolution was brewing in the country, but for Hope it was simply more comedy material. He joked about long hair on men (“It’s very confusing; everybody looks like Samson and talks like Delilah”), and protests on college campuses (“The Defense Department gave me a choice of either combat zone—Vietnam or Berkeley”), and those crazy mop-tops from England, the Beatles (“Aren’t they something? They sound like Hermione Gingold getting mugged”). In his one movie released in 1965,
I’ll Take Sweden
, Hope played the father of a very now teenager (Tuesday Weld), whom he transplants to Sweden to get her away from her motorcycle-riding boyfriend (Frankie Avalon), only to run headlong into the swinging Swedish sex scene. The ham-handed sex farce (
an “altogether asinine little romp,” said the
New York Times
) placed Hope firmly on the Geritol side of what would soon be called the generation gap.

For the Defense Department, however, Hope was still the go-to guy as a morale booster for the troops, wherever they might be. Near the end of April 1965, President Johnson sent fourteen thousand marines to the Dominican Republic to help quell a left-wing uprising that some feared might result in “another Cuba” close to US shores. Three months later, after order had been restored, Hope arrived with a troupe of entertainers, headed by his
I’ll Take Sweden
costar Tuesday Weld. He did six scheduled shows and three impromptu ones in three days. When he saw signs on the streets of Santo Domingo saying
YANKEE DOGS GO HOME
!, he opened his show with “Hello, Yankee dogs
!” and got a big laugh. In those days, it was still a joke.

With the buildup of US forces in Vietnam, there was little doubt that Hope would return there for his 1965 Christmas tour. He again assembled a big cast packed with pulchritude, including Carroll Baker, the sexy, blond star of
Harlow
and
The Carpetbaggers
; Joey Heatherton, a miniskirted go-go dancer from the
Dean Martin Show
; Anita Bryant, the former Miss Oklahoma returning for her sixth Hope Christmas tour; Kaye Stevens, a redheaded comedienne who did a
faux striptease to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”; and the new Miss USA, Diana Lynn Batts. Also along on the tour: singer Jack Jones, the dancing Nicholas Brothers, perennial sidekick Jerry Colonna, Les Brown and his band, twenty-six production people, three writers, two hairdressers, a makeup artist, a publicist, and Hope’s trusty masseur, Fred Miron.

They took off aboard a Lockheed C-141 transport plane and made a refueling stop on Wake Island, before landing in Bangkok, Thailand.
It was a rough trip from the start. Les Brown’s band members, onstage for hours in the broiling sun without protection, got terrible sunburns. Trumpeter Don Smith’s lips swelled so badly he couldn’t touch his mouthpiece, and Joey Heatherton had to cut her performances short because of sun blisters. Hope had a nasty accident just before a show in Korat, Thailand, when he was jostled off a narrow, overcrowded stage and tumbled backward five feet to the ground. Though his fall was broken by a security man standing nearby, he tore two ligaments in his left ankle and was hobbling for the next several days.

The already worn troupe flew into South Vietnam’s Tan Son Nhut Air Base on Christmas Eve, the plane doing a steep dive into the landing strip—a routine security precaution that always rattled Hope and his gang. After a press conference and lunch with General Westmoreland, they did a show for ten thousand troops on a nearby soccer field, with a temporary stage set up on the bed of a military truck-trailer. In his monologue, Hope captured some of the cynicism already building over a war that was proving to be more complicated than advertised: “The situation’s improved; things couldn’t be better.” Beat. “Well, who am I gonna believe—you or Huntley and Brinkley?” He told the troops, “Last year you were all advisers. And now that you see where it’s gotten us, maybe you’ll keep your trap shut.” Nor did he ignore the antiwar demonstrations that were getting more attention back home: “You men have a very important job: making the world safe for our peace pickets.”

In Saigon, Hope and the entertainers once again stayed at the Caravelle Hotel, while the rest of the crew were put up at the Meyercord, a new, fortresslike hotel with concrete abutments and armed
guards on the balconies. Hope again attended midnight mass, which was conducted at the downtown cathedral by Frances Cardinal Spellman, the New York prelate who was also a frequent visitor to the troops in those years. With memories still fresh of the previous year’s hotel bombing, nerves were on edge. At five in the morning on their first night at the Meyercord, members of Hope’s troupe were jolted awake by the sound of an explosion. Fearing the worst, they burst from their rooms, half undressed—only to find out that the rope lowering a load of dishes from the rooftop garden had snapped, sending the dishes crashing to the concrete below.

Security precautions were high everywhere. On Christmas Day, Hope and company rode in helicopters to the First Infantry’s base at Di-An. With a Vietcong staging area just a mile away, a thousand soldiers were stationed around the base to protect it during the show. When Hope went to the latrine, an armed guard went with him; when Hope asked why, the guard told him the Vietcong were close and some “might even be in the audience.” Before the show got under way, an officer gave instructions to the crowd on evacuation procedures in case of a mortar attack. Jack Jones turned to bandleader Les Brown and said drily,
“In case of an attack, you can cut my second number.”

As Hope’s troupe moved around the country, the massive buildup of US forces was unmistakable. The day after Christmas they did a show for seven thousand troops at Bien Hoa Air Base; a year before, at the same base, the crowd numbered fifteen hundred. The troupe flew to Cam Ranh Bay, where docks, roads, and airstrips were under construction, to create what would soon be the biggest port in all of Southeast Asia. They visited An Khe, which had been nothing but virgin jungle six months before, but now was home to sixteen thousand troops and 480 helicopters. In Da Nang, Hope’s troupe did a late-afternoon show in the rain for eight thousand men, many of whom had been waiting in torrential downpours since eight in the morning.

On the aircraft carrier
Ticonderoga
, the entertainers had to compete with the roar of fighter planes taking off and returning from combat missions. At night they watched as one F-8 Crusader trying to land missed its arresting wires, overshot the deck, and plunged in
flames into the sea. They waited in horror as rescuers raced to find the pilot.
“Tension became almost unbearable,” Hope wrote later. “I heard a sound behind me, looked around and saw Joey Heatherton sobbing uncontrollably. Kaye Stevens was hanging on desperately to an officer’s arm, her face registering shock and disbelief. And to tell the truth I felt pretty weak myself.” There were cheers when the pilot, who had ejected just before the crash, was pulled from the sea unhurt. Hope later visited him in sick bay. “I can’t tell you how glad we all are that you decided to stick around for the show,” Hope cracked. He was so keyed up that he couldn’t sleep that night and found himself wandering the deck at two in the morning.

Hope was hardly the only entertainer going to Vietnam in those early years of the war; on his 1965 trip he ran into another USO troupe headed by Martha Raye, Eddie Fisher, and Hollywood “mayor” Johnny Grant. But no one connected with the troops like Hope. On the ninety-minute special drawn from his 1965 tour, the frequent cutaways to Hope’s audiences—soldiers laughing, applauding, cheering—may well have been edited to Hope’s best advantage. But the live, raw sound of the tremendous response could not have been doctored. The men roared as Joey Heatherton did a frenetic Watusi onstage and brought up several GIs from the crowd to join her. They laughed at the corny sketch in which Hope played a wounded soldier being treated by Kaye Stevens’s officious nurse and Colonna’s nutty doctor. They hooted in all the right places at the leering banter between Hope and Carroll Baker:

BOB:
“I loved you in
Harlow.
”

CARROLL:
“I was a little hoarse when I made that movie, didn’t you notice?”

BOB:
“I didn’t even know it was a talkie.”

The trip made a powerful impression on those who came along.
“It was one of the most emotional experiences I ever had in my life,” said Jack Jones. “I was a dove when I left. I became a hawk when I was there. It took me about two weeks to calm down.” Jones later
campaigned for antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy—and had a testy encounter with Hope over it when they ran into each other at a benefit in Washington, DC. But, like St. John and most of the other entertainers who traveled to Vietnam with Hope in the early years, he found the mission inspiring and Hope’s spirit uplifting. “What he was doing was nonpolitical,” said Jones.
“He was a happy, positive force.”

Hope too saw himself as a spirit lifter, not just for the troops in the field but also for Americans back home. At the close of his special, he made an emotional plea for support of the war, trying to recapture the patriotic spirit of his World War II appeals, even as he hinted at the divisions that were starting to grip the country. “You hear a few people say, ‘Get out of Vietnam.’ Here’s some of our kids who are getting out the hard way,” he intoned, over shots of the wounded men he had visited in military hospitals. He went on:

In their everyday job of fighting this treacherous war, they know there’s no alternative. They know that in this shrinking world, the perimeter of war is boundless. They know that if they backed off from this fight, it would leave all of Asia like a big cafeteria for the Communists to pick up a country at a time. There are no reservations in their dedication. Our fighting men have confidence in the decisions of their leaders. It’s hard for them to hear the rumblings of peace over the gunfire, but when peace comes, they’ll welcome it.

Patriotic rhetoric and foxhole humor, however, couldn’t hide the grim realities of this new kind of war. While Hope was in Vietnam,
Bing Crosby sent him a letter, through an old friend named Gordon J. Lippman, a colonel who was serving with the First Infantry at Lai Khe. Enclosed was a photo of Bing swinging a golf club and a joking message: “Dear Bob, don’t you wish you had a finish like this? And a waistline?” Bing asked Lippman to pass along the letter when Hope came through. The letter arrived safely, but before Lippman could deliver it, he was cut down by a sniper’s bullet and died thirty minutes later in the camp’s hospital tent.

The letter was delivered to Hope later in Toluca Lake, after he had returned home.

•  •  •

Hope’s Christmas tours, and the TV shows that resulted from them, were enormous undertakings. After the itinerary was set in the fall—by the Defense Department, in consultation with the USO and Hope’s people—two Hope advance men, associate producer Silvio Caranchini and soundman John Pawlek, would travel to scout the locations, set up production facilities, and gather local gossip and other tidbits for the writers to use in creating Hope’s monologues. For the entertainers and the crew, the trips meant two weeks of rough accommodations, sporadic sleep, and holidays away from the family.
Jack Shea, who directed most of Hope’s Christmas shows in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reluctantly told Hope after the 1964 trip to Vietnam that he could do no more of them; he needed to stay home with his family at Christmas. Hope was taken aback, then wistfully sympathetic. “I’m past that,” he said. Mort Lachman, Hope’s most trusted writer, took on the added duties of directing the Vietnam specials after that.

Each trip produced more than 150,000 feet of film, which had to be boiled down to around 8,000 feet for the ninety-minute special that would typically air on NBC in mid-January. That meant a two-or three-week siege of round-the-clock work, to wrestle the massive amount of material into shape.
“On January first I would take a thirty-day leave of absence from NBC to edit the show,” said film editor Art Schneider, who worked on many of them. “There was an enormous amount of film. It would be shipped to us, and we’d spend two twelve-hour days looking at every single foot of film. Bob would be there, Mort [Lachman], Sil [Caranchini], eight editors, and eight assistants. We used to edit at Universal. They would have cots, beds for us to lie down and sleep. I don’t think we even left for several days at a time. They’d bring in all the food we wanted, anything we wanted to keep us happy. Money was not spared. There was a big placard in the editing room, white letters on a black background: ‘We traveled thirty thousand miles to get these laughs. Don’t cut ’em.’ ”

The Hope Christmas specials are irreplaceable documents of the Vietnam era. The sight of Hope entertaining vast oceans of men brought home more vividly than anything on the evening news the enormity of America’s commitment in Vietnam. The TV specials were patriotic, corny, inspiring, self-serving—and unmissable. The show edited from Hope’s 1965 Vietnam tour, which aired on January 19, 1966, drew an Arbitron rating of 35.2, with a whopping 56 share of the viewing audience—the biggest audience for any TV show of the season, and the most watched Bob Hope show ever. A week after it aired, Senator Stuart Symington paid tribute in the
Congressional Record
to Hope, whom he had recruited for his first Christmas trip, to Berlin back in 1948:
“Because of his continued and patriotic unselfishness over the Christmas holidays for a number of years, and the happiness he has brought to millions of people in this country and all over the world, Bob Hope could well be the most popular man on earth.”