Hope: Entertainer of the Century (23 page)

Hope and Crosby wanted to re-create the wisecracking spontaneity of their stage appearances together. So they treated the Butler-Hartman script as merely a jumping-off point. They brought in gag writers from their radio shows to add new jokes, tossing them in willy-nilly during rehearsals.
“For a couple of days,” Crosby recalled, “when Hope and I tore freewheeling into a scene, ad-libbing and violating all of the accepted rules of movie-making, Schertzinger stole bewildered looks at his script, then leafed rapidly through it searching for the lines we were saying.” Lamour, who prided herself on knowing her lines, was nonplussed when Crosby and Hope kept departing from the script she had learned.
“I kept waiting for a cue that never seemed to come,” she recalled, “so finally, in exasperation, I asked, ‘Please, guys, when can I get my line in?’ They stopped dead, broke up, and laughed for ten minutes.” She finally gave up trying to learn the script in advance. “I would read over the next day’s work only to get the idea of what was happening. What I really needed was a good night’s sleep to be in shape for the next morning’s ad-libs.”

Butler and Hartman were not happy when they saw the shambles Hope and Crosby were making of their lines.
“If you recognize any of yours, yell bingo!” shouted Hope when the writers showed up on the set. They complained to the studio, but got nowhere; Hope and Crosby’s antics, unorthodox as they were, seemed to be working. Hope described the creative process that began on
Road to Singapore
and was honed in succeeding
Road
pictures:
“I had a great staff [of writers] on radio . . . all these marvelous people. I would give them the script, and they would bring the jokes in, and I would edit them and call Bing into my room and say, ‘What do you think of this? What do you think of that?’ We’d go to the set, and the stagehands were waiting for us to do nutty stuff. We wouldn’t disappoint them.”

They were playing to the crew, the writers, and anyone else who was on the set.
“The
Road
pictures had the excitement of live entertainment,” Hope said. “Some stars banned visitors, but Bing and
I liked to have people around. New visitors sparked new gags.” One visitor was an ex-vaudeville song-and-dance man named Barney Dean, whom Bob had first met at the Stratford Theater in Chicago. A short, bald-headed Jewish immigrant from Russia, born Barnett Fradkin, Dean showed up on the set of
Road to Singapore
one day selling Christmas cards. He made Crosby and Hope laugh, and Crosby persuaded Paramount to hire him as a writer on the film. Dean did little actual writing, but he would kibitz on scenes, occasionally suggesting a line or bit of business and in general keeping Bob and Bing amused. Dean was legendary among Hollywood gagmen for his ad-lib wit. (Once a policeman stopped him for jaywalking across Hollywood Boulevard.
“How fast was I going, Officer?” said Dean.) He became a regular member of the
Road
picture crew, and a frequent companion for Hope when he toured—writer, court jester, and all-purpose good-luck charm.

Hope and Crosby were fortunate to have a director who indulged their loosey-goosey style. For one scene, Hope recalled, Schertzinger shot just one take, yelled, “Cut and print,” and started to move on. An assistant director pointed out that Hope had stepped out of the light for a few seconds and asked if Schertzinger didn’t at least want to reshoot part of it from other angles, to cover himself. “No,” said Schertzinger.
“That scene was like a piece of music; it was well orchestrated and it flowed beautifully. Maybe the flutes were off-key or the cellos didn’t come in at the right time. But the total performance was great.”

No one knew that
Road to Singapore
would be the first of a series, and the film in some ways is atypical of the
Road
pictures that followed. Crosby is clearly the central character, with a conventional backstory. He plays Josh Mallon, the son of a shipping magnate (Charles Coburn), who chafes at going into the family business, spurns an engagement to his high-society fiancée, and escapes to a South Seas island with his free-spirited pal Ace Lannigan (Hope). His father’s efforts to bring Josh back home provide a framing device for the comic adventures—a plot obligation jettisoned by future
Road
pictures, in which Hope and Crosby were simply plopped down in an exotic setting and let loose.

But
Road to Singapore
introduces most of the key elements of the series’ successful formula. Hope and Crosby are usually hucksters or con men of some sort, trying to earn money by duping the locals. At some point they meet up with Lamour, who becomes both a partner and an object of romantic rivalry, with Crosby nearly always the victor. When danger threatens, Bob and Bing play a childlike game of patty-cake, distracting the villains just long enough to sucker punch them and make their escape. There are four or five songs, including at least one romantic ballad for Crosby and Lamour, and a buddy number for Hope and Crosby.

Most crucially,
Road to Singapore
establishes the contours of the Hope-Crosby screen relationship. They’re close friends, but always at odds. Hope is the patsy, Crosby the schemer. Hope is a worrier, brash but insecure, all nervous motion. Crosby is the cool customer: easygoing, self-possessed, unflappable. Hope is an overeager puppy with women, chasing but rarely catching them. Crosby merely has to take out his pipe and give them a
bu-bu-boo
, and the girls can’t resist.

Road to Singapore
doesn’t have the comic highs of the later
Road
pictures; there’s too much plot and not enough nuttiness. Lamour plays a native girl rescued by Hope and Crosby from her bullwhip-wielding boyfriend (Anthony Quinn). She moves in with them as their (chaste) housekeeper, and the three try to make money by hawking a bogus cleaning solution to the locals, predictably ruining the suit of an unsuspecting customer (Jerry Colonna). In the farcical climax, they find themselves in the middle of a native wedding ceremony, where Bing is picked by one of the local girls for marriage and they must make a fast escape—not just from the natives but from Josh’s father and fiancée, who turn up in the jungle looking for him.

The delights of
Road to Singapore
are in the margins: the fizzy, freestyle repartee between Hope and Crosby. There are relatively few actual jokes. (Trying to wrestle a sailfish into their fishing boat, Crosby shouts, “He won’t give up!” Hope responds, “Must be a Republican!”) The laughs come from the way they bounce off each other so effortlessly, in their idiosyncratic, jazzy slang—so natural that it sounds ad-libbed, but so fast and perfectly timed that it can’t be. After they
arrive at their tropical isle destination, for example, the two travelers check their money supply in a few throwaway lines:

BING:
“How much you holdin’ there, Bubbles?”

BOB:
“We’re loaded, chum. A dollar twenty-eight.”

BING:
“One-two-eight.”

BOB:
“Net.”

BING:
“Well, that should be enough to light a fire under a couple of short beers.”

Or, more elaborately, a scene in which the boys decide that Lamour’s overeager housekeeping is ruining their laid-back bachelor lifestyle, and they have to tell her to leave. Crosby forces Hope to break the bad news—and then, after Lamour has left and both of them are feeling remorseful, tries to take the credit:

BING,
seated and puffing on his pipe:
“You know, I thought I handled that pretty well, didn’t you?”

BOB,
stopping short, in the midst of moving their furniture back in place:
“You did what?”

“I handled the situation here pretty well.”

“What was
I
doin’ in there?”

“Well, you were weakening, I’ll tell you that. I had to back you up.”

“I only gave her the whole idea! I packed her bag and put her on the bus!”

“Yeah, but I was the menace, I was the heavy in the whole piece.”

“I had my whip, right there, I just gave it to her like that!”

“I was the man who really accomplished the final brush-off.”

BOB’
s
exasperation turning to sarcasm:
“Oh, you want the bow? Take a bow.”

BING,
obliging with a flourish:
“A little light bow—ta-da.”

BOB,
now spent, giving up and settling back into a chair:
“That’s fine, that’s fine—you did it all!”

“I think so.”

“I’m snookered again.”

“Possibly.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Thank you. Good night.”

“Leave a call.”

The exchange is propelled by nothing but the momentum of two performers feeding off each other, like riffing jazz musicians. None of the dialogue is in the film’s shooting script—it was apparently improvised on the set. Crosby is hilariously smug, but Hope’s exasperation is the real engine for the comedy. Dressed in a long-sleeved black T-shirt—which flatters his fit, five-foot-eleven-inch frame—he paces frantically, bends insistently over Crosby, uses his hands to italicize points (poking Bing in the chest, miming the cracking of a whip). The lines aren’t funny in isolation. Often they don’t even make much sense (“Leave a call”?). But it is character comedy of a high order.

There had been comedy teams in movies before, of course, and fast-paced dialogue, but this was something new. The interplay between Groucho and Chico Marx, say, or George Burns and Gracie Allen, had an abstract, almost surreal quality. The witty repartee of 1930s screwball comedies such as
My Man Godfrey
or
Bringing Up Baby
was too polished and stylized to be mistaken for anything but movie dialogue. Hope and Crosby seemed like ordinary guys—like Hope and Crosby, in fact—perfectly attuned to each other’s thoughts, moods, obsessions, and vulnerabilities. In later
Road
pictures they would loosen up even more, breaking down the fourth wall and talking to the camera. But even here, still hemmed in by the conventions of 1930s romantic comedy, they are a breath of fresh air, with a spontaneity and intimacy that the movies had never before seen.

Road to Singapore
opened nationally in March of 1940 and broke two-year box-office records in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami. Hope helped out by plugging the film constantly on his radio show.
By April, Paramount was already planning a sequel, reuniting the trio in a film originally called
Blue Lagoon
, before someone realized the obvious and retitled it
Road to Zanzibar
.
Road to Singapore
wound up earning $1.6 million at the box office—Hollywood’s
highest-grossing movie of 1940. The teaming of Hope and Crosby was a smash.

Their real-life relationship was a little more complicated. Hope and Crosby got along well, enjoyed working together, and shared a passion for golf. (Crosby was the better golfer—a three-time winner of the Lakeside club championship—though Hope could occasionally beat him.) But they were not close friends. Though they lived near each other in Toluca Lake, the families rarely socialized. (Bing and his wife, the former actress Dixie Lee, had four sons before Bob and Dolores adopted their first child.) The two men were, moreover, sharp contrasts in temperament. Hope loved being a Hollywood star, enjoyed socializing, and was a workaholic who got antsy on vacations. Crosby seemed more ambivalent about his fame, was often lackadaisical about work, and enjoyed getting away from the Hollywood scene—with his racehorses at Del Mar or, in later years, in Northern California, where he moved with his second wife and family.
“Bing loved to hunt and fish, and Bob wouldn’t be caught hunting or fishing anything but a golf ball. Bob had no interest in horses,” Dolores told Crosby biographer Gary Giddins. “They lived entirely different lives, but they respected each other and loved working together.”

Many in Hope’s entourage did not like Crosby, finding him cold and standoffish. Hope, though hard to get close to, at least had a superficial bonhomie. Crosby kept his distance from all but the closest friends.
“Bing was a cold tomato,” said Sherwood Schwartz. “He was aloof. Bob was friendly. He’d say hello to everybody. I saw many people come up and put an arm around Bob, say, ‘How you doing?’ I never saw anybody touch Bing.” Once, when they were leaving their hotel in New York City after an appearance together to promote
Road to Singapore
, Crosby saw Hope stuffing some fan mail into a pillowcase.
“What the hell are you doing that for?” he asked. Hope said he was taking the letters back home so that his secretary could answer them. “I’ll show you what I do with my fan mail,” said Crosby. He felt through some envelopes, found a quarter in one that had been enclosed by a fan for postage and photos, pocketed the change, and tossed the letter into the wastebasket.

In many ways Hope looked up to Crosby. Bing was college educated, well read—on radio and in movies he often affected a comically erudite British accent. Bob was a high school dropout who read little but the sports pages and the show-business trades. Bing was a bigger star, and Hope envied his clout and his business savvy.
“Bob wanted everything that Bing had, and more,” said Hal Kanter, who was a writer for Crosby before Hope hired him away. They ribbed each other like brothers—Crosby joked about Hope’s nose and his stinginess, Hope made cracks about Crosby’s broad hips and slow racehorses—but the jokes could touch a nerve. Once, when Hope was a guest on Crosby’s radio show in San Francisco, Crosby’s writer Bill Morrow, who got perverse enjoyment out of mocking Hope, wrote some jokes about Hope breaking out of his cage on the plane and being fixed up on a blind date with an ape from the zoo. Hope thought it was too insulting, and he exploded.
“It was the only time I saw Bob really get mad,” said Kanter. “He threw down the script: ‘What are you doing to me?’ ” Crosby had to calm him down and tell Morrow to cool it.

Yet they brought out the best in each other, both onstage and off. Hope loosened up Crosby, unleashed his sense of humor. Crosby gave Hope a role model, both as a businessman and as a manager of his own career. Crosby was arguably the greater artist. But Hope was more driven, more responsive to the changing entertainment landscape, and, in the end, had a broader and more lasting impact on the world of show business. He simply tried harder.