The world knew him as an unusually durable and extravagantly wealthy entertainer, but Bob Hope — who in his 100 years conquered every show business arena from vaudeville to Broadway and radio to TV — played a far greater role in American life than his one-liners might have suggested.
His death late Sunday of pneumonia at his home in Toluca Lake, Calif., less than two months after he passed the century mark, closes one of the most celebrated chapters in American show business and underscores the genius of a British-born comedian who played the role of an American Everyman with uncommon versatility and virtuosity.
Hope entertained every president from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, he made a suffering nation smile during the grim years of the Depression, and he performed for American troops in every conflict from World War II to the 1991 Persian Gulf war, often at considerable physical peril. Throughout, Hope stood as a considerable social force in American life.
The Guinness Book of World Records calls Bob Hope “the most honored entertainer in history,” but the phrase doesn’t fully do justice to the man’s influence on life in America through much of the 20th Century. Nor do the five special honors he earned from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, including the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, his two Peabody Awards for excellence in broadcasting, the Order of the British Empire, the Congressional Gold Medal, the Medal of Freedom, the French Legion of Honor or the 50-plus honorary doctorate degrees that Hope acquired during a career that spanned approximately seven decades.
The real measure of Hope’s influence is in the work itself. The numbers alone are staggering: 285 NBC-TV specials, 1,145 broadcasts on NBC Radio, nearly 60 years’ affiliation with the Peacock Network, beginning with his radio appearances in 1938.
No other performer can claim to have had the No. 1 show on radio in the 1930s and to have lent his voice to “The Simpsons” in the 1990s. No other entertainer can boast of having worked with Jerome Kern and Cole Porter during the first glimmers of Broadway’s Golden Age as Hope did in “Roberta” in 1933 and “Red, Hot and Blue” in 1936 and to have clowned with the Muppets several generations later in “The Muppet Movie” of 1979).
The fact that 20th Century America’s quintessential entertainer was born in Eltham, England (on May 29), only adds a further degree of improbability to the man’s unlikely ascent.
When he was 4, his stonemason father and his mother moved Hope and his six brothers to Cleveland in 1907, and by age 12, young Leslie Townes Hope had won a Charlie Chaplin imitation contest. By 1920, he had become a naturalized American citizen, and after dropping out of high school, Hope tried his luck as a stage dancer, newspaper reporter and amateur prizefighter who threw punches under the name Packy East.
Hope’s glass jaw persuaded him that the stage might be safer than the boxing ring, so he headed to Roaring ’20s Chicago, where vaudeville houses, burlesque rooms and stage shows lit up the Loop.
“I started as a dancer, you know, teaming up with a guy named Lloyd Durban,” Hope told the Tribune in 1990.
“We told little jokes and got little laughs,” Hope recalled.
“Then I decided to become a monologist, but I couldn’t get any work. I used to stand in front of the Woods Theater building on Randolph, right across the street from Henrici’s. People used to eat in the window there, and I would just watch them and wish I was eating too.
“Things got so bad, I was thinking of giving up right there in front of the Woods Theater. Not giving up on life, just going back to Cleveland, where I could get a full meal and have my laundry done.
Big break in Chicago
“Finally I lucked out and got a master of ceremonies job at Chicago’s Stratford Theater.”The pay wasn’t bad, Hope said, and the education was unbeatable. The fast tempo of life in Al Capone’s Chicago became part and parcel of Hope’s act, making him possibly the first rapid-fire monologist in American comedy.
“I can tell you in one word why he made it,” comedian George Burns told the Tribune in 1993.
“The word is `monologue.’ Hope learned how to do a monologue, people laughed and he got paid. If the people don’t laugh, you don’t last. If the people don’t love you, you don’t stick around.
“But Hope’s monologues — nobody did it that way before him.”
Hope credited broadcaster Walter Winchell’s machine gun-style delivery as his central inspiration, though he acknowledged that he had to slow the tempo a bit once he began working outside the big towns.
“Once I opened in Ft. Worth, doing the same act I had done in Chicago, and I wasn’t getting any laughs,” Hope remembered in the Tribune interview.
“So the man who was running the [national] circuit came into my dressing room and said, `What’s the hurry, fancy pants?’
“And I said, `What are you talking about?’
“So he said, `These people in Ft. Worth are nice people. They have been out in the sun all day, and they come in to see you, but you’re going a little too fast for them. This ain’t Chicago, you know.’
“So I got smart and slowed down, and all of a sudden I’m a big national hit.”
Indeed, Hope’s facile stage banter, dexterity with an ad-lib and stage charisma made him a natural on Broadway.
Recordings from this period show that Hope’s comic style was already highly polished–the somewhat nasal vocal tone, the whimsical singing style, the swift way with a zinger all established that a unique persona had appeared on the American show-business landscape.
“I have been watching Bob on stage since at least 1933,” recalled his wife, Dolores Reade Hope, who married the entertainer in 1934, in a 1993 Tribune interview. “And it was obvious back then that when he found the stage, he found his gift.
“The way he moved, the way he looked, the funny expressions on his face, the intelligence of the jokes, the timeliness of his jokes, the constant ad-libs–no one was doing that before. He dominated the stage.”
Beginning with Hope’s feature-film debut, in “The Big Broadcast of 1938,’ in which he first sang the tune that would become his theme song, “Thanks for the Memory,” the man’s stage shtick was thoroughly identifiable. Even before he said one word, he beguiled the eye with his signature walk, a slightly preening series of steps that suggested the laughs were just around the bend.
“Hope’s got attitude, and he let people know it with that walk,” remembered longtime pal Phyllis Diller. “It was the same thing with [Jack] Benny.
“Just watching those guys walk … you knew they were thinking — or at least what the comic character they played was thinking: `I am the greatest, you can’t touch this, nothing can top this.’ And it cracks people up.”
But Hope was as much wordsmith as sly physical comedian, his comic patter making him a star on “The Bob Hope Pepsodent Hour,” beginning in ’38. Ad-libbing his way through lines conceived by some of the highest paid writers in the business, Hope became a national phenomenon on the eve of World War II.
While comics such as Red Skelton were determined to write all their own material, Hope never shied from hiring the best that money could buy, often paying writers out of his own rapidly growing salary.
“I remember running into him in the hallway at NBC, when we both had radio shows,” Skelton once said, “and I had heard that some of his writers had left, and Hope was down to seven.
“So when I saw him in the hall, I said, `Hey, Bob, I hear you are down to seven writers. For you, that’s practically like ad-libbing, isn’t it?”‘
It wasn’t until Hope teamed with the comparably popular crooner Bing Crosby, in seven “Road” pictures, however, that both attained superstardom. With Crosby repeatedly playing the suave lady killer and Dorothy Lamour as the mysterious, sarong-clad love interest, Hope inevitably emerged as the hapless fool destined never to win the girl.
The breakthrough was in the way Hope transformed his well-honed stage act to the big screen. From the first of the “Road” films, “The Road to Singapore” (1940), to the last, “The Road to Hong Kong” (1962), Hope epitomized the puffed-up egomaniac who wilts at the first sign of trouble.
“I was just lucky in developing that character,” Hope recalled. “In movies like `Monsieur Beaucaire’ and `The Paleface,’ I was always the blustering hero–until something happened, and then I turned into a coward. Which is very human, you know.
“`And somehow they liked watching Bing and me in action. We both had been big hits on radio — at one time in 1944, I was No. 1 in the world, while he was No. 2. So we already had a lot of popularity going for us.
“And then we just took over in Hollywood. When we were making those movies, we had fun. We were loose and crazy, and that’s what audiences liked. They liked to think that there was a lot ad-libbing going on — which there was.”
A lot of the “ad-libs,” however, had been written in advance by each star’s writers. When Hope and Crosby showed up for a day’s shooting, each drew from a vast supply of pre-fabricated zingers, the cameras running all the while.
“When Bing and Bob were shooting a picture at Paramount, that was considered the best show in town,” recalled Mort Lachman, a longtime Hope writer-director, in 1993.
“Everybody would come to the set, and Hope and Bing would both stun each other — and break each other up.”
That Hope and Crosby also broke “the fourth wall” — talking directly to the audience during a film — only added to the artistic importance of these movies. Never before had actors so brazenly broken out of character to address the audience, in the process commenting on each other’s private lives.
Hope’s greatest role in American life, though, stemmed not from radio or film but rather from performing for U.S. troops for roughly half a century. His appearances in battle zones from Europe to Korea to Vietnam — usually with stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield at his side — endeared him for years to soldiers and television audiences alike.
This second career, however, happened very nearly by accident.
Beginning the military gigs
“The funny thing is, I didn’t even know anything about performing for the boys when I was first asked [in May 1941] to go down to March Field [in Riverside, Calif.],” Hope recalled in 1990.
“One of the sponsors of my radio show asked me to go, and I said, `What for?’ I didn’t know at the time that he had a brother down there in the service who needed some entertainment.
“So I got down there, and the captive audience was sensational. They laughed at everything! That’s my kind of audience.
“So I said to myself, `How long has this been going on?’
“Then the U.S. declared war in December of ’41, and suddenly it became dramatic to play for the boys.
“You got the feeling you were doing something for somebody. It’s a hell of a thing. For five years straight [during World War II], I traveled all around the world, every week at a different base.
“One time, when I was having an eye problem, one of the Marines wrote me a letter offering me one of his eyes.
“It makes you want to cry.”
And when President John Kennedy pinned the Congressional Gold Medal on Hope in 1962, Kennedy brought the comic to tears, saying, “I sat in the rain … in the South Pacific in World War II and watched your show.”
Why was Hope such a sensation performing for the troops?
“He just had this touch,” writer-director Lachman remembered. “See, Hope deals with the audience. Did you ever notice that there are certain professional comics who talk to the band, talk to the crew backstage? They’re afraid of the audience.
“Hope is the opposite. He counts the house, he asks for the lights to be up, he has to see your face, to see the audience. If there’s an empty seat in the house, he stares at it all night and says, `What happened here?’
“That’s what he did with the troops.
“And the troops were part of his success. When Hope first took the show to March Field, when he first went to the European theater, the African theater, he received tremendous support from the troops, and they were part of his success on radio.
“When they came home, they were a big part of his audience, so I think he always felt that he owed them.
“You could see that if you ever saw Hope work a hospital ship — that’s the most difficult thing to do. I can’t even think about it now.
“But he could do it, and he didn’t pull away from those [wounded] guys, he went right for them. And he worked from bed to bed, telling jokes in front of sights that you can’t believe.”
Along the way, Hope had several brushes with disaster himself, facing bombings in Sicily and Saigon; sniper attacks in Vietnam; and a miraculous landing after a near-crash on a flight to Alaska. Eventually times changed, and Hope’s hawkish views on the Vietnam War did not always play well to the American troops caught in that quagmire. In 1969, Hope heard loud booing during one of his nine trips to Vietnam.
“I told the soldiers at one camp they were going to be home for Christmas,” Hope later recalled ruefully, “and they knew better.” Yet, somehow, Hope’s appeal endured, his cocky walk, ski-slope nose and joke-machine soliloquies endearing him to new generations via TV specials and uncounted chats with Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show.”
The deaths of Crosby in 1977, Lamour in 1996, Burns in 1996 and Skelton in 1997 left him virtually alone among a generation of iconic entertainers who had come of age before and during World War II.
Crosby `was divine’
“I sure as hell miss [Bing],” Hope told the Tribune a few years ago.
“He was divine. I would join him in his dressing room every day with new material. I would say, `What do you think of this line, what do you think of adding that line?’
“One of the first directors we had said to us, `You know, I have the easiest job in the world. All I have to say is “start,” but I never know when to say “stop,”‘ because Bing and I would just keep ad-libbing.”
In 1996, Hope aired his last television special under his long-running NBC contract, “Bob Hope’s Laughing with the Presidents.” And in 1991, he played his last live show in the Chicago area, where he had launched his career more than 60 years earlier.
Headlining the fifth annual Garden Ball of the Alexian Brothers Medical Center in the grand ballroom of the Hyatt Regency O’Hare, Hope cracked jokes, sang tunes and soft-shoed his way across the stage. He was 87.
To the end, he addressed audiences with a delicate balance of wit, wisdom and warmth that few entertainers have approached.
“Jack Benny created his little family [of characters], George Burns had Gracie [Allen], but Bob was one of the first comedians to talk about what was going on in the country with the presidents, the politicians,” Linda Hope, one of Bob and Dolores Hope’s four adopted children, told the Tribune in 1993.
“When you think about it, Hope got us through a lot of the hard times. He started before the Depression and talked to us all the way through the wars and through the changes and the fads and the Hula-Hoops and hairdos and mini-skirts and Elvis and Madonna. He commented on all of that and helped us adjust to it.”
