Hope: Entertainer of the Century (36 page)

The only sour note involved Lamour, who was upset when she found out the three-way production deal did not include her.
“They could have considered a four-way split, but no one ever asked me,” she wrote in her memoir. “My feelings were hurt. (And, as it would prove later, so would my pocketbook.)” It confirmed her growing feeling that she was an unappreciated third wheel on the
Road
picture express, and she nursed the resentment for the rest of her life.

Her relations with Hope remained friendly, if hardly close. (She and her husband, Bill Howard, lived nearby in Toluca Lake—“two blocks from his garbage entrance,” she liked to say.) But Crosby was openly disdainful of her, barely acknowledging her when they met at public events.
“Crosby’s attitude toward Dorothy Lamour was deplorable,” said Frank Liberman, Hope’s longtime publicist. “He didn’t even
try to hide his feelings about her in public. Bing felt that he and Hope were the mainstays of the
Road
pictures and that Dorothy was just ‘a dumb, lucky broad.’ ”

Yet Crosby was aloof with a lot of people, and even Hope could feel dissed by him. On November 2, 1947, the Friars Club threw an all-star roast for Hope, with Jack Benny, George Burns, Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, and George Jessel among the stars on the dais. Crosby was supposed to be there too, but he didn’t show up. When reporters pressed him about it later, Crosby defended himself coolly:
“My friendship with Bob doesn’t depend on appearing at testimonials for him.” Some said that Hope was hurt by the no-show, and he may well have been. Though he always had words of affection for Crosby in public, in private he was less charitable. Many years later, shortly after Crosby died, Hope was sitting in an NBC editing room, looking over film clips for a TV special he was preparing on their screen work together. Associate producer Marcia Lewis was startled when Hope turned to her and made a blunt admission:

“You know,
I never liked Bing. He was a son of a bitch.” In all their years of working together, Hope said, “He never had Dolores and me to dinner.”

•  •  •

The year 1948 marked a turning point for Hope on several career fronts. In the fall, he finally made a major overhaul of his radio show, the first since it went on the air in 1938. He starred in just one feature film during the calendar year, but it was an important one:
The Paleface
, his biggest box-office hit to date and a film that signaled a new direction for him on-screen, both for good and ill. And at the end of the year he was called on to entertain US troops overseas during an international crisis, launching a Christmas tradition that would define the rest of his career.

On his way back from London in November 1947, Hope met with Pepsodent’s Luckman, and
the two at least temporarily patched up their differences. Hope agreed to cut back on the show’s traveling and to make major changes for the following season. He also promised to steer clear of any more controversy over his material.
“Bob is very
much worried about the bad press he has been getting of late, and means to do everything he can to keep himself above criticism from here on in,” Hugh Davis, an executive at Pepsodent’s ad agency, Foote, Cone & Belding (the former Lord & Thomas), wrote in a memo. The critics’ gripes about the show were finally starting to be reflected in the ratings, which had fallen from first place to fifth for the 1947–48 season. Lever Brothers was reportedly close to dropping Hope altogether (though other sponsors, among them Campbell’s soup, were ready to snap him up). In the end, Lever decided to stick with Hope for another season, but switched products on him. Instead of Pepsodent, the brand he had been associated with for a decade, Hope would in the fall be pitching Swan soap, which Lever was promoting hard in an effort to catch the market leader, Ivory.

Hope was hardly the only radio personality feeling pressure in 1948, the breakthrough year for television. The new medium, whose development had been put on hold during World War II, was making rapid progress in the first years after the war. Hope was an early pioneer, serving as host on January 22, 1947, of Los Angeles’s first commercial television broadcast, over Paramount-owned station KTLA. “This is Bob First-Commercial-Television-Broadcast Hope,” he said, opening the show in front of a makeshift curtain, with an industrial-size bank of cameras and klieg lights pointed at him, “telling you gals who’ve tuned in, and I want to make this emphatic, if my face isn’t handsome and debonair, please blame it on the static.” Only about five hundred TV sets were able to pick up the crude broadcast, which was sponsored by a local Lincoln-Mercury dealer and also featured such Paramount stars as Dorothy Lamour, William Bendix, and director Cecil B. DeMille.

Hope, like most of radio’s other top stars, was holding back from taking a full plunge into TV. Although the new medium was gaining viewers fast, radio still had the bulk of the audience and the advertising dollars. It took an entertainer who had enjoyed little success on radio and thus had little to lose to be the groundbreaker. On Tuesday night, September 14, 1948, Milton Berle made his debut as host of a new weekly variety series on NBC-TV, the
Texaco Star Theater.
The show
was an instant hit, igniting the sales of TV sets and launching a scramble by the four major TV networks—NBC, CBS, ABC, and DuMont—to roll out full schedules of national programming.

On the very same Tuesday night that Berle made his TV debut, Hope introduced his revamped radio show for Swan soap. He had done a thorough housecleaning over the summer, hiring an almost entirely new writing staff, and dumping his two main sidekicks, Jerry
Colonna and Barbara Jo Allen, as Vera Vague. (Colonna, who had been with Hope for ten years, was ready to leave and strike out on his own, according to his son Robert, but the parting must have been difficult, both for him and for Hope, who genuinely liked Colonna and valued his contribution to the show’s success.) Only Les Brown and his orchestra were kept on. Brown’s Band of Renown was known for its high-quality players and clean-cut image—no drugs, no drinking—and they were one of the few traditional big bands to survive much beyond World War II. Hope would keep the group, and their easygoing, unobtrusive bandleader, close by his side for virtually the rest of his career.

At Brown’s urging, Hope also added a new singer to the show: Doris Day, who had sung with Brown’s band during the war (they had a hit recording of “Sentimental Journey”) and who replaced the guest vocalists who had filled in ever since Langford’s departure in 1946. Several other newcomers were added to the show, including Irene Ryan, the latest incarnation of the shrill, wisecracking spinster character that Hope was so fond of; a young baritone from Cleveland named Bill Ferrell; and a new announcer, Hy Averback. Even Hope’s signature opening monologue had a fresh coat of paint. Now it was repackaged as “Bob Hope’s Swan’s Eye View of the News,” with announcer Averback introducing each news headline ticker-tape style—Truman campaigns for reelection, Detroit unveils its new cars, the Soviets blockade Berlin—followed by a string of Hope jokes on the subject.

The newly revamped Bob Hope show debuted on September 14 and was marginally improved. The writing was a little sharper, and Day’s addition was a big plus: she had a fresh, girlish soprano—in contrast to the smoky contraltos (Frances Langford, Dolores Reade) that Hope seemed to favor—and was a lively companion for Hope in
sketches. Some reviewers noted his efforts to avoid stirring any controversy:
“He is definitely out to remove any basis for criticism of the ‘color’ of his material,” wrote one, “even if it means bending over backwards to do so.”

He was still cautious about political material. Hope did surprisingly little, for example, on the 1948 presidential race between Harry Truman and New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. But after Truman’s upset victory, Hope had plenty of fun with the pollsters (George Gallup’s reaction to the results, said Hope: “That’s the last time I take a house-to-house survey; from now on I’m gonna ask
people
”) and the surprised first family. “Now Margaret Truman has to go back to the White House,” Hope said. “And she had it all set to be the fourth Andrews sister.” His most memorable postelection quip, however, was the one-word telegram he sent to the White House on the morning after Truman’s victory. It read, simply,
“Unpack.”

In overhauling his show, Hope also streamlined his working process. His staff of writers was downsized from a dozen to just six, working in three teams. There was more division of labor: rather than having each team write a draft of every sketch (Hope would then mix and match the best material), each sketch was now assigned to just one writing team. All the writers still contributed to the monologue, which drew the lion’s share of Hope’s attention. Every week he would suggest five or six topics, and each writing team would turn out a dozen jokes or more for each. Hope would then assemble the writers in his wood-paneled office—now located in a new office wing, which was added to the Toluca Lake house in 1948—and go through the resulting pile of a couple of hundred jokes. He would put a check next to his favorites; read over them a second time and put a cross through the check for the ones he liked best; and, on a third read-through, draw a circle around the best of those. The final selections would then literally be cut into strips and spread out on the floor or a pool table, so they could be put in final order.

“He was trying something quite novel for him,” said Larry Gelbart, one of the new writers who joined the staff in 1948. “He was used to having a platoon of writers and didn’t enjoy a particularly good
reputation among writers. But he was terrific with us. He was a great editor. He knew what he should do and knew what he shouldn’t do. He cared about the rest of the show, but nothing received the personal attention and that kind of involvement that the monologue did.”

Despite his reputation for cheapness, Hope paid his top writers well. Gelbart and his partner Larry Marks, who had worked together previously on the radio show
Duffy’s Tavern
, started out at $750 a week and worked their way up to $1,250. If Hope could get away with less, he did. Mort Lachman, an aspiring journalist from Seattle who joined the staff as an apprentice in 1947, started at just $75 a week. The writers were on call for anything Hope needed—monologues for his personal appearances, newspaper and magazine articles that carried Hope’s byline, punching-up duty on his movie scripts. At almost any hour of the day or night Hope might call with a request for a new joke—“I need a bigger kid for the finish”—or to summon them for a meeting in the morning: “Ten o’clock. Tomorrow. My house. Bring your own orange juice.”

Hope kept a close eye on every aspect of the show, and that included the freebies that the writers often got from companies in return for plugs on the air. “In those days
there were product payoffs,” said Si Rose, another young writer who joined the staff in 1948. “We’d get a General Electric gag on, and one of us would get a refrigerator. Bob found out and got in on the deal. Or a script would have a line about a hotel, and he would make it a line about a specific hotel in Palm Springs. He didn’t need any of this stuff. But he was greedy. He wanted in on everything.”

For all his demands, he was not a difficult boss, and most of the writers enjoyed working for him. But his ego needed tending.
“He was demanding, but not temperamental,” said Gelbart. “He only got angry with me twice. Once I made a joke about his nose. That was personal, and he took it as such. Then one day we were writing a monologue for the opening at Santa Anita racetrack, and I wrote three lousy jokes: ‘My horse is so old, they’re betting him to win, place, and live.’ Hope picked ’em, and I said, ‘You’re kidding! It’s gonna sound like a goddamn Hope monologue!’ He really got pissed.”

Day, his new singer, found Hope a “joyous man to be around. He radiated good cheer.” But she was bothered by the sycophantic treatment by his underlings. After each broadcast, she wrote in her memoir:

Bob’s staff would circle around him and tell him what a dynamite show it was. Week after week they’d squeal with delight after every show and Bob preened in the glow of their hyperbole. . . . I knew very well that some of those shows were quite awful. Allegedly funny lines that weren’t funny at all. And I couldn’t believe that Bob, wise about show business as he is, didn’t know it—but I guess it was easier for him to defer his judgment to the uncritical accolades of his aides.

As the ego got puffed up, so did the sense of entitlement, especially when it came to women. The writers had to tolerate Hope’s many sexual escapades, which he felt little need to hide. “When we traveled on the road,
we’d always see a gal with him,” said Rose. “We’d laugh because she often didn’t even have a bedroom; she’d be in a cot. Or we’d see her riding on the train when we were going on a radio tour. The miracle of the century is how he never got caught.”

Some in Hope’s entourage joined in the fun, but others were put off by it. On a trip to New York City with Hope, Rose once walked into the star’s hotel room and found an “orgy” under way. “Broads all over the place,” Rose recalled. “Some of the guys are participating. Bob’s eating ice cream. One of his assistants is on the floor boffing this girl. It was revolting. Ugly stuff.” Rose left and returned to his hotel room, joining his wife in bed. A few minutes later, the phone rang. Assuming it was Hope, Rose told his wife to answer and say he was out. She picked up the phone, heard the familiar voice, and said, “I thought he was with you, Bob.” Hope didn’t skip a beat: “Oh, he must be in one of the other rooms. I’ll find him.”

It became a famous anecdote in Hollywood comedy circles, repeated often—though with varying details, attributed to different writers, and with the orgy left out. But the point was always the same: Hope, hearing a wife say she didn’t know where her husband was,
automatically assumed he was tomcatting around—and instinctively covered for him, as his writers so often did for him.

•  •  •

The Paleface
was shot in the late summer of 1947, but Paramount waited more than a year to release it, until just before Christmas in 1948. The studio had come up with the idea of doing a Western comedy teaming Hope with Jane Russell, the buxom brunette who had made an R-rated screen debut in Howard Hughes’s
The Outlaw
. Russell—who had done only one other film, a bomb called
Young Widow
, also for Hughes—was forever grateful to Hope for giving her a chance to show off her comedy talents, and to escape the mercurial, director-devouring Hughes. His films took months to shoot; on Hope’s set,
“they did one take, and if it worked, fine. If not they did two,” Russell recalled. “I thought I had died and gone to heaven.” Even Hope’s lackadaisical working style was refreshing. One afternoon, as director Norman Z. McLeod was getting ready to shoot a scene, Hope suddenly announced he was through for the day and left for a golf game. The soft-spoken McLeod waited until the star was across the soundstage and out of hearing, then commanded, in a voice barely above a whisper,
“Bob, you get back here!” Russell and the crew cracked up.