Hope: Entertainer of the Century (67 page)

Hope’s material, to be sure, was sounding awfully stale by this time. Producer Jim Lipton complained that Hope’s writers were feeding his complacency by giving him variations on the same lines over and over.
“I knew why they were doing it,” said Lipton. “Because Bob would choose them—he was familiar with them, and he liked them. But I said, ‘You’re doing him a disservice. It’s easier on you, but in the end it’s unfair to Bob.’ ” The writers faced their own challenges in keeping Hope current. Once they gave him a joke that included the word
Formica.
Hope didn’t know what it was.
“It’s fake wood,” Bob Mills told him. “You’ll never own any of it.”

Hope, moreover, could betray a tin ear when it came to contemporary sensibilities. On July 4, 1983, he entertained at a charity benefit aboard the
Trump Princess
in New York Harbor and ad-libbed a line he had just heard in the men’s room: “Have you heard?
The Statue of Liberty has AIDS. Nobody knows if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Ferry.” The wisecrack, reported the next day in the
New York Post
, prompted a flurry of angry letters from gay activists and others who found it insensitive, and Hope was forced to apologize.

Nowhere was Hope’s status as showbiz royalty more vividly on display than Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show
. Hope’s frequent guest appearances on the show clung to a familiar, almost comical ritual. He would walk out to the strains of “Thanks for the Memory”—sometimes unannounced, supposedly a “surprise” guest. After some banter with Johnny, sprinkled with obviously prepared gag lines, he would introduce a reel of taped highlights from his upcoming NBC special. Then he would scoot away, always with somewhere urgent to go. One of those who grew tired of the routine was Johnny Carson.

Hope and Carson were NBC’s two biggest stars, and they had much in common. They shared the same studio, designed for Hope back in the 1950s and taken over by Carson in 1972 when he moved the show to California, but always available to Hope for his specials. Their comedy styles were mirror images of each other: Carson did a more urbane and somewhat hipper version of Hope’s monologues—joking commentary on the news, topical but scrupulously nonpartisan. They were strikingly similar personality types as well: cool, remote,
and emotionally detached, ingratiating on the surface, but known intimately by only a few.

Yet there were crucial differences too. Carson was a drinker, a brooder, notoriously standoffish in social settings. Hope drank little, socialized easily, and loved being the center of attention. Beneath Carson’s smooth exterior, one could sense the angst. Hope’s superficial bonhomie hid no inner demons. Despite his debt to Hope as a performer, Carson never warmed to the older comedian, either personally or professionally. The
Tonight Show
host would often mimic and pay homage to the classic comedians he adored—Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, George Burns. He almost never referenced Hope.
“Johnny admired Hope’s place in show business,” said
Tonight Show
producer Peter Lassally, “but he was not a great admirer of his work.”

The coolness between them was in part a reflection of their rivalry. Carson was the only star at NBC who could challenge Hope for clout at the network. Yet Hope was still king, and Carson had to defer. Carson resented the way Hope could virtually book himself on the
Tonight Show
whenever he had something to promote, which seemed to be all the time.
“We’d get a request,” said Lassally, “and Johnny would go, ‘Again?’ And I’d say, ‘Do you want to tell him no?’ And he’d say, ‘No. You can’t turn down Bob Hope.’ ” Hope would bring in highlight reels from his specials that went on interminably.
“We’d say, give us two minutes,” said Jeff Sotzing, Carson’s nephew and a
Tonight Show
producer. “He’d bring in five minutes, cut together with a rusty knife. That was frustrating.” Once, after a Carson monologue that went over particularly well,
Hope asked during a commercial break if he could use some of the laughter on his upcoming special. Flabbergasted, Carson said okay; later, on Hope’s special, Johnny claimed he could hear Ed McMahon laughing at Bob’s jokes.

Worst of all, from Carson’s point of view, Hope was not a good guest. He came armed with scripted jokes and would rarely engage in any genuine conversation—especially in the later years, when his bad hearing complicated the give-and-take.
“There was nothing spontaneous about Hope,” said Andrew Nicholls, Carson’s former co–head writer.
“He was a guy who relied on his writers for every topic. Johnny was very quick on his feet. Very well read. He was a guy who learned Swahili, learned Russian, learned astronomy. He appreciated people who he felt engaged with the real world. There was nothing to talk to Bob about.”

•  •  •

In the mid-1980s, with Hope’s ratings starting to sag, NBC scaled him back to just four specials a year: a fall season opener, a Christmas show, the annual birthday special in May, and one more show slotted into February or March. Each summer Hope would meet with NBC programming executives—headed by new entertainment chief Brandon Tartikoff—to bat around theme-show ideas for the coming season: Bob tries to buy NBC, for example, or starts his own Ted Turner–style news network, or (around the time of the Iran-contra hearings) gets investigated by Congress. One year
Tartikoff even suggested that Hope try to book the pope as a guest for his Christmas special. (Hope could deliver presidents, but Pope John Paul II gave him a pass.) In January 1986, Hope starred in his one and only TV movie,
A Masterpiece of Murder
, playing a washed-up cop who teams with a retired cat burglar (Don Ameche) to solve crimes.

“I’m still with NBC for three simple reasons,” Hope said at the start of the 1985–86 season, his thirty-sixth with the TV network: “the creative atmosphere, the fine working conditions, and the pictures I took at the 1950 Christmas party.” He could still deliver big ratings on occasion. His birthday special in May 1986—from the Pensacola Naval Air Station, with Elizabeth Taylor and Don Johnson among the guests—drew a 39 percent share of the viewing audience, the highest of any Hope special in five years. But his routine shows were no longer doing well, and with NBC back on top of the network ratings race (led by its hit sitcoms
The Cosby Show
and
Family Ties
), programmers had to be careful where they scheduled them.
“There might have been a time when you could broadcast a Bob Hope special any day of the week, any time of the night, and pull in an audience regardless of the competition,” an NBC executive said in 1987. “Now we’re looking at protective time frames.”

The shows themselves were growing increasingly leaden: tired gags, corny sketches, with Hope looking more disengaged and cue-card-dependent than ever.
Variety
, reviewing his 1989 special from the Bahamas, chided Hope for
“permitting his team of writers to throw together such a generally dismal collection of excuses for gags and uniformly horrible skits which could have been bettered by a reasonably talented high school sophomore.”

Yet the shows were big moneymakers for Hope. When he went to overseas locales such as the Bahamas and Tahiti, the local tourist board would typically pick up the travel and hotel costs (even though the network budget already allotted for them) and also pay Hope an extra fee for “promotional” work. That would cover most of the show’s production costs, leaving virtually the entire license fee paid by NBC (around $1 million per hour) as clear profit for Hope.
“The whole show would cost him essentially nothing,” said Kozak. “We made out like bandits really.”

Hope’s fee for personal appearances was up to $75,000, and he was raking in even more money from commercials. In addition to his work for Texaco, Hope became a TV pitchman for California Federal Savings, and in the mid-1980s he signed a five-year deal to appear in ads for the Silver Pages, a new telephone directory from Southwestern Bell aimed at senior citizens. Kozak negotiated a sweet deal: Hope got $1 million a year for just a couple of days’ work, and when Southwestern Bell ended the campaign prematurely, after three years, the company had to pay him $500,000 just to get out of the contract. (Kozak, who often felt underappreciated, was miffed at Hope’s blasé reaction to the windfall.
“He just takes the check,” said Kozak. “No ‘thank you.’ I was so pissed that he didn’t acknowledge what a hell of a deal that was.”)

The legacy burnishing, meanwhile, continued at a steady clip. NBC renamed a street near its Burbank headquarters Bob Hope Drive. A retirement community for Air Force veterans in the Florida panhandle was christened Bob Hope Village. In January 1988, Hope was guest of honor for the opening of the Bob Hope Cultural Center, a sixty-six-acre arts complex in Palm Springs—with President Reagan
among the bigwigs in the audience, Van Cliburn playing the national anthem, and another slew of Hollywood stars on hand to pay their respects. He made
The Guinness Book of Records
as the recipient of more honors and awards than any other entertainer in the world. (Hope’s publicists were always thinking.
In the mid-1970s, the town of Hope, Arkansas—later to become famous as Bill Clinton’s birthplace—invited Hope to its hundredth birthday celebration. Frank Liberman replied that Hope might come if the town would change its name to Bob Hope, Arkansas.)

Hope was back overseas at Christmas in 1987, traveling to the Persian Gulf (with Barbara Eden, Connie Stevens, and his granddaughter Miranda along for the ride) to entertain US troops aboard warships sent there in response to a threat by the Ayatollah Khomeini to cut off oil shipments. “I think this is appropriate,” said Hope, aboard the USS
Midway
, “the oldest aircraft carrier meets the oldest operational comedian.” Assuming it would be his last Christmas tour, Hope followed up with a book,
Don’t Shoot, It’s Only Me
(written with Mel Shavelson), recapping his forty-plus years of entertaining the troops. Yet there would be one more, unexpected tour of duty: another Christmas trip to the Persian Gulf in 1990, where a US buildup of forces was under way in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

Hope by this time was eighty-seven and getting frail. His daughter Linda came along to provide support and produce the special, and Dolores joined them as well. Because of security precautions in the walk-up to the US invasion of Iraq, Hope and his entertainers (among them Ann Jillian, Marie Osmond, and the Pointer Sisters) were whisked from show to show by helicopter, often without being told their destination. Press coverage of the trip was severely restricted. (When reporters complained, Hope commiserated,
“I live for the press. That’s not my idea, believe me.”) In deference to Islamic customs, moreover, the single women in the troupe were not allowed to perform in Saudi Arabia at all, but confined to shipboard shows and a stop in Bahrain.

Yet Hope weathered the trip well.
“He was stronger than most of us,” said Gene Perret, the writer Hope brought along. “He worked hard, did the monologues. He would do dance numbers with the
women—which is not easy on a ship.” Hope made the usual wisecracks about US servicemen on a mission far from home (“Where else can you see signs that say
YANKEE GO HOME
signed by Yankees?”) and took a few jingoistic digs at Saddam Hussein (the Iraqi dictator should get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Hope said, “so we can all spit on it”). With the tight restrictions on what Hope could show of his travels, the ninety-minute special played more like a typical Hope variety show, with full-length numbers from most of the guest stars. Even Dolores, after being edited out of so many of Hope’s earlier tours, was showcased in two numbers, including a duet with Bob on “White Christmas.”

Hope’s usual patriotic closing had a prosaic, almost boilerplate quality: “Let’s pray that somehow or some way, we can destroy the menace that’s causing the trouble over there and it won’t be long before our servicemen and -women are back home where they belong.” But the response from the troops was enthusiastic, the ratings decent—and, for once, the war over quickly. The US invaded Iraq, launching the first Gulf War, just days after Hope’s show aired on January 12, 1991, and by April, Hope was able to host a homecoming special, featuring marines from the 29 Palms training center near Palm Springs, whom he had met in Saudi Arabia. Former president Ford and Jimmy Stewart were on hand for the show, and General Norman Schwarzkopf and Secretary of State Colin Powell sent messages of thanks. Hope hailed the successful military campaign as “a whole new concept in politics” because President Bush “did everything he said he was going to do.” Hope’s last war, at least, ended in victory.

•  •  •

By the late eighties, Hope’s physical decline was becoming noticeable even to casual viewers. Though he was still in overall good health, both his eyesight and hearing were deteriorating badly. He had another flare-up of his eye hemorrhaging in 1982, but this time in his right eye—previously his good one—and it seriously affected his vision. The cue cards had to be blown up extralarge so that he could read them, and they continued to grow as the years went on, the words scrawled
by Barney McNulty in such gargantuan letters that a single joke would sometimes take up three or four cards.

Hope’s hearing was getting worse as well. His ear specialist, Dr. Howard House, prescribed a hearing aid, but Hope was too vain to wear one. “I can still hear the laughs,” he would tell friends. He had trouble hearing normal conversation, and it became hard for him to pick up the musical cues when recording songs for his specials. He was wandering off the beat so often that musical director Bob
Alberti had to kneel beside Hope’s cue cards during the tapings, giving him a visual downbeat for each line. And still Hope would sometimes lose the beat.

Producer Jim Lipton noticed the deterioration in the last birthday special he produced for Hope, from Paris in 1989. The monologue went so badly that Hope had to stay behind in the theater to rerecord some of the jokes. Lipton had written new lyrics for “Thanks for the Memory” in French, spelling them out phonetically on the cue cards, but Hope couldn’t handle them. It was painful for both of them.
“Great job,” said Lipton, after Hope finished his monologue. “Aw, come on,” Hope said. “I used to be twice as fast.”