Hope: Entertainer of the Century (38 page)

Paramount could afford to have a sense of humor. The accident came a month after the release of
Sorrowful Jones
, an unexpectedly big hit for Hope and a real advance for him as a screen actor—the first film in which he plays something close to a dramatic role.

Based on a Damon Runyon story first filmed in 1934 as
Little Miss Marker
, with Shirley Temple,
Sorrowful Jones
is hardly devoid of comedy. Indeed, screenwriters Ed Hartmann, Mel Shavelson, and Jack Rose added gag lines to suit Hope’s wisecracking screen personality, much to the dismay of some Runyon purists. Hope plays a bookie who finds himself saddled with a little girl (Mary Jane Saunders) when her father leaves her as a marker for a racing bet and gets bumped off by gangsters before he can retrieve her. The role was unlike any Hope had played before. Instead of his usual bumbling, girl-chasing coward, he is a hard-boiled, cynical, thoroughly citified Runyon wise guy. He even has a relatively adult, smoldering-at-arm’s-length romantic relationship—with his ex-girlfriend, now a local mobster’s girl, wonderfully played by Lucille Ball, in the first of four films she would do with Hope. They meet by chance, apparently for the first time in years, in front of a department store window, and the entire history of their relationship is told in one brief, brittle exchange:

“You know, it’s been almost four years since I saw you, Sorrowful. But I recognize the suit.”

“It’s been lucky for me—up to now. Some people seem to forget what some people spend on some people.”

“
Spend?
Where did you ever learn that word? I always figured you invented the dutch treat.”

The film’s chief love story, however, is between Sorrowful and little Martha Jane, the tyke in his care who disrupts his comfortably
disordered bachelor’s life. Their first night together in Sorrowful’s apartment is a Hope gem. Martha Jane bursts in on him while he’s undressing, and he scrambles for his pants like a ten-year-old surprised by his big sister. She asks where the bathroom is; he grits his teeth and stabs his finger toward the facilities: “Get you a floor plan later.” When she takes too long to get to bed, he barks at her in tough-guy Runyonese: “Hey, Shorts, drag your royal chassis outta there and hit the sack.”

Predictably, the little girl soon breaks down his resistance and awakens his fatherly instincts. Hope’s underplaying—with the help of a sensitive director, Sidney Lanfield—keeps the transformation honest and touching, especially in the memorable bedtime scene, when Sorrowful teaches the little girl to pray. It begins when he mentions God, and Martha Jane tells him casually, “My daddy says there’s nobody named God.”

SORROWFUL:
“When did he say that?”

MARTHA JANE:
“When my mommy went away.”

SORROWFUL
takes a moment to register this—the girl is an orphan:
“I guess your daddy got a bad break. But what he said wasn’t right. Not
just
right. He kind of forgot a little. I mean, there is somebody named God.”

“Do you know him?”

“I heard about him. And from what I hear he’s a pretty good sport. Always tryin’ to give a citizen a break. If there’s something you want and can’t promote for yourself, you ask God for it. And as often as not, he comes through.”

“Do you write him letters, like Santa Claus?”

“No. That’s where prayin’ comes in.”

The scene is beautifully played—not a hint of condescension or cuteness. Hope seems to be working it out for himself, even as he explains it in language that his little charge will understand. It’s Hope the communicator, sizing up his audience and talking its language. He would have made a good father.

Sorrowful Jones
skips along brightly toward a rather overwrought farcical-sentimental climax: Martha Jane has an accident and falls into a coma, and Sorrowful has to sneak her favorite racehorse into the hospital to save her. But the film is less treacly than the earlier screen version,
Little Miss Marker
, with Shirley Temple overdoing the adorableness and Adolphe Menjou as a more sorrowful Sorrowful.
Time
said the film
“lifts comedian Bob Hope out of an accumulated litter of silly scripts, props and costumes, and gives him a new grip on the US public’s funny bone.”
Sorrowful Jones
was the top-grossing film in the country for the month of July, and one of Hope’s biggest hits of the forties—the culmination of his long road from farceur to fully mature comic actor.

Hope had one more movie left to come in 1949,
The Great Lover
. It’s relatively minor Hope, but a delightful film nonetheless, and a fitting coda to Hope’s extraordinary decade. Directed by Alexander Hall (who had, coincidentally, directed the original
Little Miss Marker
), the film in some ways is a look back for Hope, to the comedy-thrillers that were his bread and butter earlier in the decade, but with some fresh twists. Hope plays a newspaper reporter chaperoning a Scout troop on a tour of Europe. On the boat going home he gets entangled with a murderous cardsharp (Roland Young) and a gold-digging European duchess (Rhonda Fleming, the latest Paramount beauty to get matched with Hope). Hope is boyishly engaging as he tries to elude the watchful eyes of the straight-arrow Scouts while making time with the down-on-her-luck duchess. Released near the end of 1949,
The Great Lover
wasn’t as big a hit as Hope’s two previous films,
The Paleface
and
Sorrowful Jones.
But
the three combined to boost Hope, for the first time, into the No. 1 spot in two annual film-industry polls of the top box-office stars of the year.

Hope’s decade was capped off with another phone call from Stuart Symington. Hope had attended a Hollywood screening of
Twelve O’Clock High
, the story of the World War II hero Air Force general Frank Armstrong Jr., and Symington wanted to know if Hope would spend Christmas entertaining the troops now under Armstrong’s command up in Alaska.
Hope was hesitant, saying that he couldn’t be away
from his kids for a second Christmas in a row. Symington said to bring them along. Dolores was game, and Tony and Linda were excited at the prospect of a snow vacation, so the family (minus the toddlers, Kelly and Nora) made the trip together.

With just a few hours to put together a troupe, Hope recruited Patty Thomas, his dancing companion from World War II; cowboy singing star Jimmy Wakely; and Les Brown’s pianist Geoff Clarkson. Then he called up his head radio writer, Norm Sullivan, and told him the writers would have to put together the following week’s show on their own because Hope was going to Alaska. After a pause, Sullivan deadpanned,
“We’ll move your pin on the map.”

Hope and the family flew aboard Armstrong’s B-17 to Seattle, where they caught Symington’s plane to Anchorage. From there, Hope did twelve shows in three days and had five Christmas dinners. “You know who you are, don’t you?” Bob told the troops freezing in twenty-below temperatures. “God’s frozen people.” He caught a cold on the trip and by the end could barely talk. When he climbed aboard the plane headed home, he said,
“Get me some soup and some sleeping pills.”

The brief trip was an important one for Hope, solidifying his status as the Pentagon’s go-to entertainer and Hollywood’s ambassador of holiday cheer for US troops around the globe.
“The Bob Hope Christmas stint for the troops in Alaska had the entire Pentagon going sentimental with delight,” reported
Variety
, “and reminiscing over last year’s junket at the height of the Berlin Air Lift—a trip still remembered here as an all-time high in public relations.” Berlin, however, had been a special assignment—Hope heeding his country’s call in a world crisis. The Alaska trip was more in the realm of routine duty, establishing the Christmas tradition that would become Hope’s calling card.

As the 1940s ended, Hope was riding higher than ever.
“His professional jaunts have astonished several branches of science, having the same kind of monumental energy normally associated with nuclear fission,” the
New York Times
wrote in January 1950. “Today Hope’s backlog of good will and public favor is of a size and quality most public figures can only dream about.” He was the No. 1 movie
star in America, a stage entertainer without peer, and still one of the most popular stars on radio, who was about to enter the medium that would replace it. What’s more, he had laid the groundwork for his annual Christmas tours to entertain the troops, the patriotic missions that would ensure his legacy—and, two decades later, unexpectedly tarnish it.

Bob Hope drove fast. Passengers in the car with him would sometimes be hanging on for dear life when he was speeding along the highway between Toluca Lake and Palm Springs, a trip he made often. But Fred Williams, his hard-drinking writer pal, was dozing in the front seat next to him in January 1950, on the way back from Palm Springs after a weekend of golf and working on script revisions for Hope’s film
Fancy Pants.
Doing 75 mph on rain-slicked Highway 60, Hope suddenly swerved and lost control of his Cadillac, which hit a ditch and rolled over, throwing both men from the car.

“I remember how my head jerked, and how I thought, ‘This is it. I’m going to die,’ ” Hope recalled. “I remember everything that happened until I got hit on the head and blanked out.” He was standing in the mud by the side of the road testing his golf swing when a passing motorist stopped to help and drove them to a hospital in Riverside. Williams had only bruises, but X-rays showed that Hope had suffered a broken collarbone.

It was a shaky start to a promising new decade, one in which Hope
would master a new medium, say good-bye to an old one, and pioneer a new kind of stardom—enterprising, relentless, spanning all media, embracing a public role as well as that of mere entertainer. Show business had seen nothing like it.

The accident forced him to scuttle plans to play in Bing Crosby’s celebrity golf tournament in Pebble Beach and to cancel a few weeks of public appearances. But in early February he was back on the road: flying with Dolores to Washington, where he picked up an award from the Air Force for his work during the Berlin airlift, appeared at a Women’s National Press Club luncheon, and emceed another White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
“Never trust a politician who knows how to measure your inseam,” Hope cracked about the former haberdasher now in the White House, as President Truman laughed along on the dais.

Then Hope prepared for a return to vaudeville. In March, he was booked for a two-week stage show at the Paramount Theatre in New York City, accompanying the premiere of the Paramount film
Captain China.
Unlike his personal-appearance tours of the late forties—hopping from city to city, doing mostly one-nighters—this would be an old-style, continuous vaudeville run: six forty-minute shows a day, the sort of grinding schedule few Hollywood stars would take on. Hope was guaranteed $50,000 per week, plus a percentage of the gross receipts—more money than a performer on Broadway had ever before been paid. Joined onstage by his favorite glamour girl of the moment, Jane Russell, along with Les Brown’s orchestra, Hope reveled in the chance to revisit his vaudeville roots, polish his stage skills, and get some face time with his fans.
“I started in this sort of racket, and I feel that you’ve always gotta go back to where you came from every so often, to sharpen up,” he told the
New York Herald Tribune
. “At the end of this run, I should have improved my comedy timing and everything else about the act, under all kinds of conditions.”

His show was a smash hit. Despite bitter-cold weather in New York City and brownouts due to a coal strike,
Hope set house records for the opening day, opening week, and second week of his Paramount run.
“Where was Hope when the lights went out?” trumpeted an NBC
ad in the trade papers. “Packing them in at the Paramount.” When the two-week engagement was finished, Hope took the show on the road for another week, traveling to Cincinnati, St. Louis, and several more cities.

For the tour Hope added a new performer—a young Italian American singer he had seen at Pearl Bailey’s nightclub in Greenwich Village, who was going by the stage name Joe Barry. Hope told him he ought to change it to something closer to his real name, Anthony Benedetto—and suggested Tony Bennett.
“It was very intuitive and correct,” said Bennett, who would always credit Hope with giving him his first big break in show business, along with his stage name. “He took me on the road for six or seven days and ended in Los Angeles, where he introduced me to Bing Crosby. It was the first time I ever sang in front of a huge crowd.”

Hope made one other important change in his stage show on the road. Because of a movie commitment, Jane Russell couldn’t stay on, so Hope replaced her with a twenty-nine-year-old blond singer and actress named Marilyn Maxwell. Born in Clarinda, Iowa, as Marvel Marilyn Maxwell, she had traveled the road with her mother, a piano accompanist for the dancer Ruth St. Denis, and started in show business as a big-band singer. She puttered around Hollywood, getting supporting parts in mediocre films through much of the 1940s, before landing her best role as the sultry girlfriend of Kirk Douglas’s ruthless boxer in the 1949 film
Champion.
Maxwell filled all the résumé requirements for a Hope stage partner: sexy good looks, a pleasant singing voice, and a “fun girl” who could trade quips with him. Maxwell became one of his favorite partners onstage, on radio, and later on TV. She also, most likely at some point in 1950, became his girlfriend.

•  •  •

By early 1950, any doubts that television was going to transform the entertainment world were all but gone.
In May 1948, four months before the debut of Milton Berle’s
Texaco Star Theater
, there were only 325,000 TV sets in American homes, nearly half of them in the New York City area.
By the end of 1949, that number had grown to more than 4 million. Within another year it had nearly tripled again, to
11.6 million.
The radio audience was dropping just as swiftly, from an 81 percent share of the broadcast audience at the start of 1949 to just 59 percent at its end.