Hope: Entertainer of the Century (69 page)

Except that it wasn’t a farewell. Hope refused to quit, continuing to do specials that tested the creativity of Linda and NBC to find formats that would demand little of him. More shows were essentially compilations of old clips, or “young comedians” specials, in which Hope would simply be trotted out to introduce a lineup of new stand-up comics. His Christmas show in 1993 was a visit to the Hope home (actually an NBC studio set) for a family get-together, featuring Hope’s children and grandchildren and drop-ins by such stars as Loni Anderson, Barbara Eden, and Joey Lawrence, with Bob largely an onlooker. For friends and fans alike, the spectacle was getting painful.
“Bob Hope could have done what Johnny Carson did—kind of step aside,” said David Letterman in a
Rolling Stone
interview. “I watched a lot of his early films over the holidays on AMC, and, Jesus, talk about a guy who was sharp and on the money and appealing and fresh and charismatic. Then I saw Bob Hope’s [Christmas show] and it was tough to watch. If it had been a funeral, you would have preferred the coffin be closed. I mean, can he be gratified by that?”

The family gently tried to coax him into retirement.
“I said, ‘Dad,
you don’t want to keep on with this,’ ” Linda recalled. “ ‘This is not you. You don’t want people to remember you at less than your best.’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah, but I’ve got a deal with NBC.’ He was just so habituated to doing this kind of thing that I think it was very difficult for him to let go of it.” Handling him, never easy for his producer-daughter, became even tougher. During the taping of a young-comedians special in 1994, Dave Thomas witnessed a tense encounter when Linda tried to set up a shot for her father to say a quick good-night. “I’m not doing that
!” he snapped at her. Linda backed off and went on to other matters. A few minutes later, Hope took the microphone, the cameras scrambled into place, and he wrapped up the show with a few jokes. “Now that’s the way I say good night,” he told Thomas, as he sat back down. “Not like goddamn Walter Cronkite.”

He continued to make his annual appearances at the Bob Hope Desert Classic, hitting a drive on the first tee to launch the tournament, before retiring for the rest of the event. He had one last hurrah in February 1995, when three living presidents—Clinton, Ford, and Bush—played a round with Hope and the tournament’s defending champion, Scott Hoch. Though he could barely play anymore,
Hope puttered around the course with them, hitting most of his drives from the middle of the fairway and skipping a couple of holes. His friend Andrew Coffey, who was at the wheel of his golf cart, had to drive halfway onto the greens, so Bob wouldn’t have to walk too far to putt. Hope was ready to quit after nine holes, but President Clinton was enjoying it so much he said he wanted to play eighteen. “Dammit,” Hope grumbled, as he returned to the course. Hope retired after a few more holes, and President Bush won the presidential match with a round of 92, beating Clinton by a stroke.

Clinton, a lifelong fan of Hope’s, had first met the comedian in the late seventies, when Clinton was Arkansas governor and they had dinner together on the town square in Fayetteville after a Hope appearance at the University of Arkansas. A few months after the Palm Springs match, they had another chance to bond on the golf course when Hope was traveling to Washington and called Clinton at the White House to ask if he had time for nine holes.
“I practically fell out
of my chair,” Clinton recalled. “But it happened to be a day when I had some free time. So I cleared the schedule and took him out to the Army Navy club [in Arlington, Virginia] because it was close.” Though the ninety-two-year-old Hope could barely see, he could still hit the ball. On a narrow 173-yard par three, with woods on the left and a steep hill on the right, Clinton was astonished to see Hope drive the ball dead straight onto the green.

“He could see the ball below his feet, but he had no distance vision,” Clinton said. “We got up to the green, and the young fellow who was with him was helping him aim his putts. And I said, ‘Bob, you have a twenty-foot putt, slightly uphill, and it’s gonna break about six, maybe eight inches max, to the left.’ He said, ‘I got it.’ The guy lined him up, he hit the ball to two inches, and tapped in for a par. For a guy his age, it was just amazing.”

Back at NBC, Hope’s specials—now mostly shunted to low-viewership Saturday nights—were getting the worst ratings of his career. After his ninetieth birthday special NBC was rumored to be ready to retire him, but the network was careful not to force the issue.
“Brandon Tartikoff regarded Bob Hope as an institution and part of the DNA of NBC,” said Ludwin. “There was never a thought of canceling him.” But clearly he couldn’t continue much longer. In 1995, as he was planning a trip to Europe for a special to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day, Dolores finally threw up her hands.
“We’re doing this one,” she said. “But this has got to be the last.” That December, for the first time since 1950, there was no Bob Hope Christmas special. An NBC spokesman explained that a mutual decision had been made to
“devote our energies toward specials in 1996.”

An exit plan was quietly worked out.
“There came a point where all the parties involved decided that it was really tough to go forward,” said Ludwin. “We discussed with Linda and the press reps how we wanted to handle it. Because when you’re dealing with someone who has been in business at NBC for six decades, you have to handle it diplomatically.” Ludwin remembered how Lucille Ball, when her ratings at CBS were falling, announced that she was leaving the network. “I thought to myself, ‘What a classy way to handle this. What network
could fire Lucille Ball? She had to fire the network.’ So I thought to myself, ‘That’s the way this has to be handled. No one can fire Bob Hope. He has to fire us.’ ”

One last special was scheduled: a retrospective of Hope’s presidential humor, tied in with his soon-to-be-published book,
Dear Prez, I Wanna Tell Ya!
On October 23, 1996, one month before the telecast, Hope took out a full-page ad in
Variety
, the
Hollywood Reporter
, and the
Los Angeles Times
—paid for by NBC—announcing that it would be his last NBC special. “Guess what?
I’ve decided to become a FREE AGENT,” the announcement read. “My thanks to NBC, for making it possible to be part of your lives all these years. It’s been a great ride. Now, caddy, hand me my 7-iron.”

His publicist Ward Grant stressed that Hope was not retiring, but would be touring to promote his new book, updating his autobiography, and overseeing the release of his specials on home video. Hope was resistant to the bitter end.
“It was sort of a mutual thing,” said Linda Hope of the retirement scenario, “although Dad was less mutual about it. If NBC had said, ‘We’ll do another year,’ Dad would have done it.”

Hope’s final NBC special,
Laughing with the Presidents
, aired on November 23, 1996. Tony Danza was the host, introducing film clips of Hope’s encounters with presidents and engaging in a bit of carefully edited conversation with him. The good-bye was painless, if anticlimactic.
“This TV entry? An amusing look at Hope’s tilting with Presidents,” said
Variety
in its review. “His comedy and his career? Both terrif.”

•  •  •

The last few years were not pretty. Hope’s eyesight and hearing were going, and signs of dementia were starting to appear. In his few public appearances, at various benefit dinners and ceremonial events, Hope could seem confused or disoriented. His short-term memory was spotty, and he had trouble recognizing people—though it was difficult to tell if the problem was his eyesight or his mind.

Remarkably, he could still pull himself together in front of a microphone. In January 1997 he appeared briefly onstage at a benefit
performance given by Dolores and Rosemary Clooney in Palm Springs. After Bob’s retirement, Dolores had decided to restart her long-dormant singing career, and she recorded an album of standards,
Now and Then
. She and Clooney then prepared a nightclub act together, which they debuted at Palm Desert’s McCallum Theatre, to a sold-out crowd. At the end of the show they called Bob onstage.

“Backstage he was not in good shape,” recalled Michael Feinstein, the cabaret singer, who became close to both Bob and Dolores in the later years. “We were worried. But, wouldn’t you know it, once he was introduced, he went right to center stage, took the microphone, and he was right there.” He joined Clooney in a duet of “It’s De-Lovely,” his old number from
Red, Hot and Blue
. The gimmick was that Bob merely repeated each
it’s
, with Clooney picking up the rest of the lyrics. Before they started, she took out her score and gave him one the size of a postage stamp. “Can you spare it?” Hope quipped.

At other times, however, he could seem like a very old man. He was in the audience when Rosemary and Dolores opened their show together at New York City’s Rainbow and Stars. Dolores appeared first, singing “Paper Moon” and “I Thought About You” and teaming with Clooney for Sondheim’s “Old Friend,” before turning the show over to Clooney, the headliner. The
New York Times
gave Dolores a nice review:
“Her timbre was clear and strong, her intonation pitch-perfect,” wrote critic Stephen Holden. But Hope couldn’t help upstaging his wife, even in his dotage. Bill Tush, an entertainment reporter who was covering the event for CNN’s
Showbiz Today
, recalled the uncomfortable scene when Hope, apparently unable to hear, began talking loudly during Dolores’s numbers. She gamely ignored him, before finishing her set and returning to the table.

“Mrs. Hope joined Bob at his table and Rosemary sang,” Tush recalled. “Then I could hear him—‘What are you doing? Stop that!’ I looked, and she was rubbing his head, lovingly. ‘Stop kissing me. Stop that!’ It really got embarrassing for everybody, and finally they got up to leave. I couldn’t help but look. When he stood up, his pants were undone. He pulled them up to button them. Meanwhile Rosemary kept the show going. Mrs. Hope and a handler helped Bob out. He
was stooped over and still yelling things out, like ‘Leave me alone! I’m okay!’ Out the door they went, and that was the last time I saw Bob Hope. What a way to remember.”

At home he settled into a comfortable routine. He still slept late, waking between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m. His caretaker, J. Dennis Paulin, would read to him from the morning
Los Angeles Times
, and large-print editions were made of business documents that he needed to see. He would watch
Jeopardy!
on TV (with headphones, so he could hear) and still took his late-night walks, though they were usually indoors now—up and down the aisles of the local Vons supermarket in Toluca Lake, or, when he was in Palm Springs, through the terminal building of the Palm Springs Airport. Sometimes, in Toluca Lake,
Paulin would let him take the wheel of his golf cart and drive the five blocks to Lakeside for a couple of holes of golf. Paulin had a key to the back gate and could cut onto the course and look for a vacant hole where Bob could play, then take him back to the clubhouse for a fake Brandy Alexander. In 1996, after a lifetime of dilatory churchgoing, Hope acceded to his devout wife’s wishes and was baptized into the Catholic Church.

Reports of his failing health, along with photos showing his stooped frame and red-rimmed eyes, would occasionally surface in the tabloids, with dire headlines about his “tragic last days.” On June 4, 1998,
AP actually reported his death by mistake, when an advance obituary for him was inadvertently posted on the Internet. When the House Republican leader, Representative Dick Armey, heard the news, he passed it on to Representative Bob Stump, the Republican chairman of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, who delivered a eulogy on the floor of the House. “We’re all going to miss him,” said Stump, praising Hope as “the best friend anyone in uniform ever had.” When reporters began phoning, Linda calmly informed them that her father was having breakfast.

He made a few trips to Washington for events honoring him—including a visit to the White House, where President Clinton signed a congressional resolution making Hope the first Honorary Veteran of the US Armed Forces—but Dolores did most of the talking. After returning from a trip in June 2000, for the opening of the Bob Hope
Gallery of Entertainment at the Library of Congress, Hope had a major health scare. Some renovations at the Toluca Lake house were not finished, and the Palm Springs house was closed for the season, so when he returned, Hope moved temporarily into the old house on El Alameda street. There he began having stomach pains and was rushed by ambulance to the Eisenhower Medical Center, suffering from gastrointestinal bleeding. Family spokesmen minimized the event, but he was seriously ill.
“He was in very critical condition,” said Paulin. “It was a pretty harrowing event.” Hope recovered, but after that needed full-time nursing care.

He lingered for three more years—bedridden most of the time, but brought out by Dolores in a wheelchair for family get-togethers. In July 2001, Pentagon officials came to the house in Toluca Lake to present him with the Order of Horatio Gates Gold Medal, for his work raising the morale of US soldiers around the world. In April 2003, as his hundredth birthday approached, NBC marked the occasion with one more tribute special,
100 Years of Hope Humor.
He got more than two thousand birthday cards—from President George W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth, among others—and at least thirty-five states proclaimed his birthday “Bob Hope Day.”
“His eyes light up with each thing I tell him,” Linda told
Variety
, “and they bring a big smile to his face.” On the day he turned one hundred, the milestone his grandfather never quite reached, he had his favorite dinner of roast lamb with mint jelly.

He lived just two months longer. On Sunday night, July 27, 2003, with family members and a few household staff gathered at his bedside in Toluca Lake and Dolores holding his hand, Bob Hope died peacefully, officially of pneumonia. The family waited until early morning to notify the police, who had a security plan in place and set up roadblocks around the house to keep away gawkers and the press. Some TV news crews beat the roadblocks and camped outside anyway.