Hope: Entertainer of the Century (34 page)

The family dynamic was, in many respects, not unlike that of many other postwar families. Bob was the busy working father, traveling for his job, gone much of the time, emotionally detached when he was there. (“Hello, Bob Hope,” Tony once called out when his father walked in to meet them in a restaurant.) Dolores took on most of the child-rearing and household-management duties. The children had governesses, who got them dressed for school and ready for dinner. But Dolores was the disciplinarian, enforcing strict manners and codes of conduct, strongly influenced by her Catholic faith.

“She wasn’t easy,” said Linda. “She knew what was right, and she had a very strict moral code and sense of honor and all of that.”
“Dolores had a voice,” recalled Rory Burke, songwriter Johnny Burke’s daughter, who regarded Dolores as a surrogate mother after her parents’ divorce. “She was very assertive. She didn’t like certain things—things that were shades of gray she saw in black and white. At the table
you had to have your manners. You didn’t reach. You wait for the food to be served to you. But she was very warm, funny. She had a batty side to her.”

“She was a mother of the period,” said Robert Colonna, another close friend of the family. “Very strict. We had to know how to behave, when to keep our mouths shut. A lot had to do with show business and the strictures of public life. And a lot had to do with her Catholicism.” (Her strict Catholic values didn’t prevent an embarrassing run-in with the law in the spring of 1946, when Dolores held an outdoor carnival on their lawn in Toluca Lake as a fund-raiser for some Carmelite nuns. The police were alerted that games of chance were being played, and the carnival was raided for gambling.)

With Dolores as the tough cop, Bob could play the childish cutup.
“My mother would say, you know, sit up straight, and my dad would be at the end of the table hunched over or in some wacky pose, so it was kind of counterproductive,” said Linda. He would entertain the kids by playing an imaginary friend, using the drapes as a curtain and adopting a falsetto voice: “Hello, Mr. Hope, this is Bessie. Can Tony and Linda come out to play?” Yet he was not a father to depend on for advice or heart-to-heart talks. “He was not somebody you’d sit and tell your troubles to,” Linda said. “Dad didn’t deal well with illness and other bad things. Not that he wasn’t caring. He’d just say, ‘You’ll work it out.’ ”

The Toluca Lake house was the center of a large and close extended family. Dolores’s younger sister, Mildred, lived just a few blocks away with her husband and two sons, and she was around often. The two sisters were a study in contrasts: Dolores was tall, attractive, with an almost regal bearing; Mildred was more plain-looking, feisty, outspoken. “Dolores was gracious, more formal,” said Tom Malatesta, the younger of Mildred’s two sons.
“Mother was a pistol. She liked attention. She’d speak her mind.” Mildred and Dolores’s mother, Theresa, who came out from New York in the late forties and moved in with Bob and Dolores, was another formidable presence in the household. She was tough and opinionated, a streetwise Irish Catholic with a sense of humor—the kids called her “Mrs. Malaprop,” for her frequent verbal miscues. Bob got along well enough with her, though having a
mother-in-law in the house may have been a source of some sensitivity. Hope was one comedian who
never
did mother-in-law jokes.

Bob was relatively close with his own brothers as well, giving most of them jobs or helping out financially at one time or another. Jack was on Bob’s payroll full-time. George, his youngest brother and former vaudeville stooge, worked for him from time to time as a writer and producer. Ivor, back in Cleveland, had a metal-products business that Bob backed financially. Younger brother Sid, who lived on a farm in northwest Ohio, would occasionally ask Bob for loans for various small-business ventures. When Sid died in 1946, of cancer at the age of just forty-one, Bob helped support his wife and children, who moved to Mount Gilead, Ohio, where they managed a motel and restaurant owned by Bob and his brother Fred. Fred, who ran United Provision Company, a successful meat-supply business with offices in both Cleveland and Columbus, was the one Hope brother who never needed Bob’s financial help.

Bob’s most complicated sibling relationship was with Jim, his cantankerous older brother, who had moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s, hoping to break into show business. Though he got some vaudeville and movie work (including a small role in a 1943 Monogram cheapie called
Spotlight Revue
), Jim sounded a bit desperate in 1946 when he wrote a letter asking for Bob’s help in finding a job.
“I’ve worn out four agents, patiently trying to get me picture work,” Jim wrote. “I’ve tried vaudeville, so far very little success. . . . Naturally I would like something in the studios or in Hollywood, [but] I don’t care what it is, so long as it’s an honest living for honest effort.”

The two brothers were drawn into an embarrassing legal dispute in 1942, when Jim’s first wife,
Marie, who had done secretarial work for Bob, claimed she had been underpaid and sued for $2,900 in back wages. (Bob countersued for $1,425, which he claimed Marie owed him as repayment for a loan. The suit was settled out of court.) And the brothers had an awkward near-encounter in the spring of 1946, when Jim and his second wife, Wyn, were doing a small-time vaudeville act in Spokane, Washington. During his 1946 tour, Bob was booked in Spokane at the same time, and he was surprised to learn
from a reporter that Jim was doing a show in town too, billing himself as Bob Hope’s brother. Apparently miffed that Jim might be trying to cash in on the family connection,
Bob turned down the paper’s request for a photo of the two together and left town without speaking to his brother.

Bob later regretted the snub. “It was a silly thing, silly and thoughtless,” he told his biographer William Robert Faith. “As I look back, I remember thinking something secret was going on. But I was wrong.” Bob eventually came to Jim’s aid, giving him a job managing the White Oak Ranch, one of the large tracts of land that Hope acquired years later in the Santa Monica Mountains.

•  •  •

Paramount released
Monsieur Beaucaire
, the first film Hope had made since the end of the war, in September 1946. It was an auspicious return for him—a first-rate production, with a good supporting cast, a relatively sustained and coherent story, and plenty of opportunity for Hope to demonstrate his growing assurance as a comic actor. It remains one of his most celebrated films and inaugurated a rich, new postwar phase in his movie career.

Loosely adapted from a Booth Tarkington novel and play set in eighteenth-century France (filmed once before, in 1924, as a swashbuckler with Rudolph Valentino), the film had a bumpy road to the screen.
Producer Paul Jones didn’t like the original script by Panama and Frank and assigned a new writer to it. After Panama and Frank complained to the Writers Guild, the studio (backed by Hope) forced Jones to revert to their original script. Then, when the finished film, directed by comedy vet George Marshall, got a tepid reception at a test screening, the studio brought in Frank Tashlin, a director of Bugs Bunny cartoons at Warner Bros., to punch it up with more physical gags. The result was a Hope romp that had more formal integrity than most of his films—no talking animals, no asides to the camera—and plenty of good laughs too.

Hope plays a barber in the French court of King Louis XV who is sentenced to the guillotine for insulting the king. A duke helps him escape to Spain, where the two trade identities, pursue their separate
romantic liaisons (Hope is after a court chambermaid played by Joan Caulfield, who has, conveniently, also been banished to Spain), and get entangled in a plot by a devious Spanish general (Joseph Schildkraut) to start a war between the two countries. The powdered wigs and poofy shirts suit Hope’s comedy well, emphasizing the classic roots of his farcical character: the poseur, always playing a role (swordsman, lover, hero, even the king) to hide the timid “real” self underneath. Even the most predictable gags seem somehow ennobled—the inevitable comic turnabout, for example, when his girlfriend suggests that they elude the bad guys by splitting up:

“We’ll never make it together. You go on alone.”

“What, and leave you behind? Never!”

“But you must!”

“I said never!”

“They’ll cut you to pieces!”

(Beat. Gulp. Dropping the pose.)
“I’ll send for you.”

The sheer brilliance of Hope’s voice as a comic instrument is often overlooked: that sharp, crystal-clear tenor, slicing through the confusion even when he’s swallowing his words, gasping in panic, or fleeing up a staircase. Hope’s physical comedy has the same kind of precision and clarity: powdering the king’s wig, for example, and blubbering his apologies as he powders the king instead. Or in the climactic sword fight (one of Tashlin’s additions), as he wields nearly every instrument in the court orchestra to pummel the villain: wedging the fellow’s head between the strings of a harp, slamming a piano lid on his hand, and conking him on the head with a bull fiddle that has attached itself to Hope’s back.

For latter-day fans such as Woody Allen,
Monsieur Beaucaire
was a high point of Hope’s comic acting (and an obvious model for the nervous, cowardly character Allen played in such early films as
Bananas
and
Sleeper
).
“He was a wonderful comic actor,” said Allen. “He’s totally committed to his character: he’s scared when he’s supposed to be scared, leching when he’s supposed to be leching, playing someone
more grand than he is. He was not a sufferer, like Chaplin, or even as dimensional as someone like Groucho Marx, who suggested a kind of intellect. Hope was just a superficial, smiling guy tossing off one-liners. But he was amazingly good at it.” Even his best films were never more than competent vehicles for him, and Hope was rare among top Hollywood stars in that
he never worked for a major director. But none of his comedy contemporaries—Groucho Marx or Jack Benny or Red Skelton—could match his command of both verbal and physical comedy, or his ability to create recognizable, sympathetic, and very human characters in essentially farcical movies.

“
Monsieur Beaucaire
, as now enacted by no less a clown than Bob Hope, is an item that bears a fair comparison with the best of screen travesties,” wrote Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times.
“Charlie Chaplin as Don Jose in
Carmen
or Will Rogers as
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
have only the advantage of fond memory over Mr. Hope’s barber in Madrid.”
“That rumbling yesterday,” wrote John L. Scott in the
Los Angeles Times
, “wasn’t thunder or an explosion; it was laughter shaking the walls of Paramount Downtown and Hollywood theaters, where Bob Hope’s newest comedy
Monsieur Beaucaire
began runs which will prove extensive and profitable.” The film earned a solid $3 million at the box office, proving that Hope’s wartime break from Paramount had done little to dampen his popularity.

His next film,
My Favorite Brunette
, was another milestone: the first picture produced by Hope’s own company, under the deal he had worked out with Paramount in 1945. With a financial interest in the film, Hope stuck to business on the set.
“He used to say that he carried two watches with him, one set to Paramount time and the other to his own,” said Dorothy Lamour, his costar. “He kept comparing them in order to discover how much time he’d be wasting if he were working for Paramount. It was a joke, but we didn’t mess around as much as usual.” His attentiveness paid off: Hope brought the film in for $1.69 million—
$72,000
under
budget.

Hope also made sure the first movie from his own production company got a full-court press of publicity. Paramount orchestrated a promotion in which fourteen brunette beauty queens were selected
from around the country, brought out to Los Angeles by train, and feted with parties and radio appearances. Pepsodent ran a contest on Hope’s radio show asking listeners to complete a jingle beginning “My favorite brunette is . . .” and giving away four Chevrolets every week to the winners. For the film’s Hollywood opening, Hope hosted an all-star show to benefit the Damon Runyon Memorial Cancer Fund, broadcast nationwide on ABC and around the world over Armed Forces Radio.

The title had been floating around for a couple of years—first attached to the film with Paulette Goddard that had been scrubbed when Hope went on strike, then for a movie with Hope and Signe Hasso, which eventually became
Where There’s Life
, released later that year. Directed by Elliott Nugent from a script by Edmund Beloin and Jack Rose,
My Favorite Brunette
was obviously meant as a companion piece to Hope’s 1942 hit
My Favorite Blonde
. But the two films are quite different: the first a breezy spy caper, the second a more heavy-handed parody of private-eye films.

The movie starts, a little jarringly, with Hope on death row, narrating the story in flashback. He plays Ronnie Jackson (one of the least inspired of Hope’s character names), a baby photographer who longs to be a private eye. He gets his chance when the gumshoe next door (Alan Ladd in an unbilled cameo) goes on vacation. “It only took brains, courage, and a gun,” Hope says in the tough-guy voice-over. “And I had the gun.” Lamour is the inevitable mystery woman who shows up in the office and lures him into a dangerous spy plot. Peter Lorre plays a knife-throwing villain, and Lon Chaney Jr. takes a break from horror films to play the bad guys’ slow-witted muscleman. The movie has some funny sequences, such as a scene in which Hope, the bumbling investigator, searches for clues in an empty house and keeps overlooking the one that Lorre keeps surreptitiously shoving in front of his face. And Crosby gets another cameo at the end—playing the prison executioner who is thwarted when Hope gets a last-minute pardon. “Boy, he’ll take any kind of part,” quips Hope.

But the noirish parody isn’t Hope’s strong suit, and the film isn’t as fleet and fun as some of his others of the period. Still, it pleased his fans (
“The best picture Monsieur Robin le Hope has ever made in
his happy and prosperous life,” said Louella Parsons) and was another hit at the box office. And for the first time, Hope was getting a piece of the action.