Hope: Entertainer of the Century (68 page)

“Starting in the late eighties, it was affecting the work,” said NBC’s Rick Ludwin. “It would take him longer to do the monologue. He’d stumble over things. He’d get a little frustrated with himself. There was such goodwill on the part of the audience that they forgave him—they still loved that they were being entertained by Bob Hope. But the postproduction on the show became more difficult, to sort of Scotch-tape together the monologue and have it appear as much as possible to flow logically.”

The man once known as Rapid Robert was running down. His physical limitations were hard for him to accept, and he grew testy about them. Taping a sketch with Brooke Shields for one show, Hope kept missing his cue, and Shields tried to help by sneaking the line to him under her breath. Hope blew up at her.
“He got really mad at me,” she recalled. “ ‘What are you doing that for, you little idiot?’ I just burst into tears because he had never yelled at me before. And
then I realized he was mad at himself because he didn’t hear the cue. I thought I was helping him. And it seemed that I was disrespecting him.”

On the
Tonight Show
, his hearing problems were making his guest appearances even more of a trial than they already were. He often had trouble picking up Carson’s questions, and Johnny had to stick precisely to the notes his staff gave him; if he asked a question out of order, Hope might answer a different question. Still, Hope kept coming on the show, his frailties on full display for the national TV audience.
“If I ever end up like that, guys,” Carson said to his writers, “I want you to shoot me.”

Carson retired gracefully in 1992. But Hope soldiered on, battling not just his failing faculties but also network inattention. Writer Gene Perret had painful memories of one of Hope’s last monologues.
The fading star was shunted to a new studio, and when he arrived to do his monologue, a tiny crowd of only around fifty people was waiting in the audience. (NBC claimed the buses hadn’t shown up.) Hope struggled to get any reaction from the sparse crowd, as Perret watched uncomfortably from the wings. Finally Hope stopped midway through, in distress, and called Perret over, asking him for some last-minute jokes about an award Johnny Carson had just been given by the outgoing president, Bush.

Perret quickly came up with a few lines (“Those lame ducks stick together”), and Hope got at least a few laughs before wrapping up the monologue. But afterward, when Perret asked Hope if he wanted to go over the videotape, as they usually did to start the editing process, Hope demurred, saying, “We’ll do it later.” For Perret, it was a poignant sign of defeat. “He knew it was a bad monologue. It was sad.”

•  •  •

Along with the procession of awards and tributes that filled Hope’s waning years were a couple of unwelcome distractions. One was a nasty dispute over something Hope had hoarded, and mostly guarded from public view, for years: his land.

By the 1980s the bulk of Hope’s real estate holdings lay in the
mountainous areas north and west of Los Angeles, a 240-square-mile area designated in 1978 as the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area. A state agency called the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy was seeking to buy up as much of this land as possible, to preserve its pristine views, hiking areas, and endangered wildlife. But Hope, who had watched the land appreciate wildly in value since he’d bought it in the 1950s and 1960s, was starting to sell it to developers—at prices far higher than what the conservancy could afford.

Several parcels had already been sold off. Hope got $13 million for one tract near Malibu Creek State Park, from a developer who built condominiums on it, and $10 million for another 195 acres in Calabasas, where a housing development was planned.
But what set off a firestorm was a deal to sell the Jordan Ranch—a twenty-three-hundred-acre parcel in the Simi Hills north of the Ventura Freeway, which Hope had bought in the 1950s for a reported $300,000. In 1987 a Maryland-based developer called Potomac Investments acquired an option to buy the land from Hope for $25 million, pending approval of its plans to build a PGA-owned golf course on it, along with a development of more than eleven hundred homes.

Years of complicated negotiations followed, involving the developer, zoning officials, environmentalists, and Hope’s lawyers. The plans for developing Jordan Ranch had a major stumbling block. The area lacked an access road to a major highway, and the only place to build one was through Cheeseboro Canyon—on land already owned by the National Park Service. So a land-swap compromise was proposed. The Park Service agreed to give up a fifty-nine-acre sliver of Cheeseboro Canyon to allow the developers to build an access road. In return, Potomac would donate the undeveloped half of Jordan Ranch—a picturesque area known as China Flat, long prized by environmentalists—to the state so it could be preserved as parkland.

The proposed deal split the environmental community. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the Sierra Club backed the plan, reasoning that giving up a small slice of national-park land in return for preserving China Flat was worth it. But other environmentalists
hotly opposed the deal, arguing that the government had no right to give up any national-park land to pave the way for a housing development in the area.

The dispute boiled over in early 1990, covered extensively in the local press and on TV news. Hope was cast as the environmental villain, a greedy landowner who cared more about golf courses than protecting California’s natural beauty.
“No one has a larger ownership of land in the Santa Monicas, and yet has not given up one inch,” said Margot Feuer, of the Save the Mountain Park Coalition. “What is it that drives this man?” An editorial cartoon in the
Los Angeles Times
showed a map of the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area, with the topographical details replaced by an eighteen-hole golf course. The caption: “Faith, Hope and Damn Little Charity.” One Saturday morning protesters showed up in front of Hope’s Toluca Lake home:
HONK IF YOU THINK BOB HOPE HAS ENOUGH MONEY
read one sign. The controversy raged in the letters columns of the
Los Angeles Times.
“Hope doesn’t owe anyone anything,” wrote one reader. “But if he doesn’t see the desperate need to maintain a buffer of open space around Los Angeles and more importantly, respond with a gift of land to the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreational Area, I for one am going to be sorry I ever went to any of his films, or watched any of his numskull TV specials. Thanks for the memories! Thanks for nothing!”

Hope was dismayed to find himself in the role of an environmental meanie. He had a perfect right to profit from the land investments he had made decades ago, he argued.
“I didn’t hold it for twenty-five years and pay taxes on it just to give it away,” he told a reporter. His lawyers reminded people of all the work Hope had done for charity and claimed that he had already given away fifteen hundred acres of his land in various places, including the eighty acres in Rancho Mirage that he had donated for the Eisenhower Medical Center.

But the environmental protests succeeded in scuttling the land-swap deal, and Hope soon backed down. After another round of negotiations, a new deal was worked out, with Hope and the developer making major concessions. Potomac agreed to move its housing development and golf course out of Jordan Ranch altogether, combining
it instead with another development being planned for Ahmanson Ranch, in Las Virgines Canyon. At the same time, Hope agreed to sell all of Jordan Ranch, along with the rest of his property in the area—including the 4,369-acre Runkle Ranch farther north and 339 acres overlooking the ocean in Malibu’s Corral Canyon—to the government for parkland. Hope would get $29.5 million, substantially below the land’s market value, and the state would get a huge swath of mountain and canyon land protected from developers for good.

More zoning battles, objections from environmentalists, and lawsuits followed. But Hope was instantly transformed from environmental villain into public-spirited land donor. “In preserving these open spaces,
Bob Hope is making a special gift to all Californians,” said California governor Pete Wilson, when the deal was signed in November 1991. For Hope, the financial sacrifice must have been painful, but it was worth the restoration of his public image.
“The knocks he’s taken from environmentalists for not wanting to give up the properties for so long finally got to him,” a Hope associate told the
Los Angeles Times.
“Here you have this national hero who has given generously of himself his entire life, and I think he figured the criticism just wasn’t worth it.”

Hope’s image took some blows on another, more personal front around the same time, as some serious breaches appeared in the cone of silence that had long shrouded his extramarital sex life. First, in 1991, one of his former secretaries, Jan King, regaled readers of the
Globe
tabloid with an account of Hope’s womanizing, which she helped cover up for years. Two years later, Arthur Marx, drawing on King’s account as well as his own interviews, published a gossipy tell-all biography,
The Secret Life of Bob Hope
.

Marx’s bio, brought out by the small New Jersey publisher Barricade Books, was an uneasy mix of gossip and reporting, sloppily written and wildly unbalanced—with pages and pages devoted to minor Hope dalliances as if they were Soviet spy cases. Hope refused to comment on the book, and his publicist Ward Grant dismissed it as
“just a lot of old stuff, nothing new.” One libel suit was brought against it, by Hope’s former son-in-law, Nathaniel Lande, who disputed some allegations about his relationship with the family and won a $10,000
judgment in a jury trial. Yet Marx’s account of Hope’s womanizing was never seriously challenged, and most of those in Hope’s inner circle who would talk candidly agreed that it rang true.

Even in his eighties, Hope still had a roving eye. His last girlfriend, according to both Marx and Hope publicist Frank Liberman, was Sandy Vinger, a former writer on his California Federal Savings commercials, who was his frequent companion in the 1980s. In 1994, when Hope was ninety-one, she filed a breach-of-contract suit, claiming that Hope had hired her in 1974 as an “assistant and companion,” on the promise that he would support her for life. The suit was dismissed in 1996 after an undisclosed out-of-court settlement. The amazing thing is how little of all this made its way into the mainstream press. Even in the age of tabloid television and a far-more-aggressive gossip industry, Hope’s all-American image, for most of his fans, remained unsullied.

Hope’s all-American family, meanwhile, was going through its own trials. His youngest daughter, Nora, had divorced her first husband, Sam McCullagh, after ten years of marriage (and one daughter, Alicia) and married Bruce Somers, the ex-husband of actress Suzanne Somers, a college friend of Nora’s. Her second marriage exacerbated Nora’s already-strained relationship with her mother. Dolores, the strict Catholic, disapproved of the divorce, and she didn’t get along with Nora’s new husband and three stepchildren. According to a friend of Nora’s, the discord came to a head when Dolores told Nora that Bruce and the stepchildren were not welcome at an upcoming holiday get-together. Nora never spoke to her mother again. She eventually cut off contact with her father and the rest of the family as well—even her brother Kelly, with whom she had been close.

The abrupt renunciation of her adoptive family was inexplicable to many in the Hope circle. Nora had been a favorite of Bob’s—high-spirited, fun, eager to please her dad. But she chafed under her mother’s stern discipline and was never comfortable living in the aura of her father’s celebrity. “I remember always Nora not being at all happy with the public persona and what was required,” said Linda Hope.
“Her dream was to marry a shoe salesman and live in a little
house with a white picket fence and have nothing to do with all the Bob Hope hoopla.” Nora’s friend pinned much of the blame for the rift on Somers, her second husband, who convinced her that the relationship with her family was toxic and that she needed to break from them.

For Dolores the estrangement was obviously painful. For Bob, maybe less so. Whatever angst it caused him was kept, as always, well hidden.
“I don’t think it really deeply affected him,” said Linda. “It affected my mother more. But maybe he just didn’t talk about it.” Nora later divorced Somers, sought out her birth parents, and continued to reject any attempts by friends and family to reestablish contact. She didn’t attend Bob Hope’s funeral, or Dolores’s eight years later.

•  •  •

Hope’s ninetieth birthday, on May 29, 1993, presented a challenge for NBC. A big celebration was clearly called for, but Hope’s eyesight and hearing were so bad that he could no longer carry a show on his own. Instead, the network prepared an elaborate three-hour special for which Hope would largely be a bystander. He and Dolores were seated at a table on a wing of the stage, as a parade of celebrities (including taped messages from President Clinton and all five living ex-presidents) paid tribute to him. To help him follow what was going on, and for the few segments in which he briefly participated, producer Don Mischer put a small IFB microphone in his ear, so that Linda, sitting in the control room, could brief him on who was there and what was happening.

Even Hope’s limited role caused some anxiety.
Johnny Carson agreed to do a monologue on the show (the first and only one he would do after leaving the
Tonight Show
) on the assurance that Hope would not do one as well; despite his frustrations with Hope, Johnny didn’t want the master to be embarrassed. George Burns, seven years older than Hope, was apprehensive about the small bit of comedy business that had been written for the two of them.
“I don’t know if I can do this because his timing is really off,” he told Mischer. In the end, Burns, seated next to Hope, did all the talking. When Hope got up onstage for a little patter with Dorothy Lamour, he stepped on one of her lines.

Still, the ninetieth birthday special—which aired Friday night, May 14, and beat the competition in the ratings—was a well-produced and entertaining show. Dance production numbers were interspersed with clips from Hope’s movies, TV shows, stage career, and overseas tours, introduced by guest stars ranging from Roseanne Arnold to Walter Cronkite. Dolores sang “Paper Moon,” the first number Hope had seen her perform in a New York nightclub back in 1933. Through some video trickery, Lucie Arnaz replaced Shirley Ross in the “Thanks for the Memory” scene from
The Big Broadcast of 1938.
Servicemen from each of the four wars in which Hope had entertained came onstage to convey their thanks. Longtime colleagues such as Barney McNulty, Hal Kanter, NBC’s Rick Ludwin, and even Hope’s handyman did brief walk-ons to wish him happy birthday. Hope took it all in amiably, smiling and nodding with approval, occasionally getting misty eyed, and gathering himself for a few words of thanks at the end. At three hours, the show seemed to never end, but it was a tasteful and often touching farewell.