Hope: Entertainer of the Century (42 page)

The production was a rare bonding experience for the Hope and Crosby families. Dolores came along, and she brought all four of the children, during their summer school vacations (Linda, the oldest, had just finished college). Crosby’s second wife, Kathryn—pregnant with their third child—also joined them, along with their three-year-old son, Harry Jr. The two families rented a house together in Surrey—an English estate called Cranbourne Court, with twelve bedrooms, a croquet court, and a staff of proper English servants. Each morning Bob and Bing would eat breakfast with the wives, take a chauffeured car to the studio just a few minutes away, and wrap up the workday at 3:00 p.m. so they could get in a round of golf. On Friday nights the
two couples went into London for dinner, took in the races at Ascot on Saturday afternoons, and spent one weekend together in the south of France.
“I haven’t seen this much of Bob since we were married,” Dolores told Kathryn.

The odd woman out on this final
Road
trip was Dorothy Lamour. She had not done a movie of any kind since
Road to Bali
and was living in Baltimore with her husband, Bill Howard. But she was understandably hurt to discover that a new
Road
film was being planned without her. In the brutal casting calculus of Hollywood, Lamour—at forty-seven, more than a decade younger than Hope and Crosby—was deemed too old to play the love interest for them anymore. She was replaced with Joan Collins, a striking, twenty-eight-year-old British film actress who had appeared with Hope in one of his TV specials.

At the last minute Norman Panama gave Lamour a call and said there was a part for her in the film. After he dropped off a script in Baltimore on his way to London, she was disappointed to find that it was only a cameo—a single scene with Hope, with a song—and refused to do it. A series of pleading phone calls from London followed, asking her to relent: Panama and Frank had promised United Artists that Lamour would be part of the film and desperately needed her.
“Realizing how important it was that I accept,” she wrote in her memoir, “and remembering all the good times we went through together, I came to their rescue—but at a price, with a few zeroes attached to it.”

The Road to Hong Kong
was a sad last wheeze for the memorable series. Hope and Crosby, nearly sixty, look too old to be playing footloose con men (Hope has put on more weight, but Crosby has aged more). Their banter occasionally has some of the old spark. (Bing: “Ask your patriotic conscience what to do.” Bob: “I already did.” “What did it say?” “Yankee go home.”) Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, among others, make cameo appearances, and Peter Sellers has a funny bit as an Indian doctor treating Hope for amnesia. The film also boasts one of the best buddy songs of the entire series—“Teamwork,” by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen.

But Hope and Crosby perform the number, significantly, not while riding a camel or on a carnival stage in darkest Africa, but over the
opening credits, dressed in gaudy striped jackets in a spotlight on a generic stage—a sort of abstract idealization of their
Road
-picture camaraderie. References to earlier
Road
pictures are sprinkled throughout the film. “Not dangerous?” exclaims Hope, after hearing one Crosby scheme. “That’s what you said when you shot me out of a cannon, when you dropped me in a tank with an octopus, when you had me wrestle a gorilla.” Yet the out-of-character asides and fourth-wall-breaking stunts that made the earlier films so much fun are, strangely, almost entirely missing. Instead, Bob and Bing are put through a silly, way-too-consequential Cold War plot, with a shadowy superpower called the Third Echelon trying to launch a rocket to the moon to enslave the world. Bob and Bing wind up substituting for two chimpanzees being shot into orbit, providing the pretext for some crude fast-motion slapstick, as the strapped-in astronauts are force-fed food and drink by robotic machines that go haywire.

The Road to Hong Kong
opened in May 1962 and got a deserved drubbing from the critics. Still, hopes for yet another reunion lived on. In the early seventies screenwriter Ben Starr wrote a treatment for a new film called
Road to Tomorrow
, but Hope scrapped it, and
Starr had to threaten to sue to get his money. Then Mel Shavelson came up with a new script, titled
Road to the Fountain of Youth
, which was gearing up to start production in 1977 when Crosby died of a heart attack in Spain. Even after that, Hope toyed with recruiting George Burns to play the Crosby role in one last entry in the series. Thankfully, it never materialized. The greatest buddy series in movie history was finally put to rest.

Lamour never got over the feeling of being left out, her contribution to the series unappreciated to the end. Hope treated her better than Crosby did, giving her occasional guest spots on his TV specials in later years, as his career soared and she played dinner theaters. But when he included her in a 1966 special called
Bob’s Leading Ladies
, she was offended to find herself just one of a dozen former movie costars given equal billing. “That was demeaning to her,” said a friend. “She wasn’t part of the crowd.” Her resentment boiled over at a dinner at New York’s Lincoln Center in the 1980s, when she let forth a
tirade at the mention of Hope’s name.
“He still holds Hollywood like King Kong in the grip of his hand,” she vented, according to film critic Carrie Rickey, who was at her table. “He treated all women with contempt. He never paid me any respect for my role in the
Road
movies and never helped me find work later. I was a totally replaceable part.” It was always about the boys.

•  •  •

In July 1952, NBC asked Hope to do a series of daily five-minute monologues for its coverage of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions—the first political conventions to be televised nationally. Political material was becoming a bigger part of Hope’s comedy repertoire: jokes about President Truman’s testy relations with Congress, for example, or General Eisenhower’s move into politics. “I happen to know why he’s running for president,” Hope said of Ike. “It’s the only way to get out of the Army.” As usual, Hope took aim, not at his targets’ political views, but rather at superficial aspects of their popular image, such as Eisenhower’s military background. “The Democrats are really determined to win this election,” he said. “They’re afraid if they don’t win, Eisenhower will put ’em on KP.”

When Hope took on more controversial figures, he was careful to avoid offending—usually poking fun at the mere fact that they were controversial. “General Eisenhower said that if he was elected, he was going to give General MacArthur a very important job,” Hope said. “Do you think we need an ambassador at the north pole?” Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunts were lampooned with gibes that even McCarthy could laugh at: “Senator McCarthy is going to disclose the names of two million Communists. He just got his hands on a Moscow telephone book.” There were endless jokes playing off the color red: McCarthy investigating red caps at the train station, or Congress appropriating money “for Red Skelton to dye his hair black.” The Army-McCarthy hearings, said Hope, were “a new kind of television show. It’s sort of a soap opera where everyone comes out tattletale gray.”

Hope kept his own views on McCarthy private, but they surfaced unexpectedly in an audience question-answer session at the London Palladium in 1953. When one audience member asked what he
thought about McCarthyism, Hope replied with unusual candor:
“I think it’s Americanism. Some people think McCarthy is wrong. Personally I think he’s right ninety-nine times out of a hundred.” Many in the audience booed, and Hope shut up after that.

For the 1952–53 season, Hope finally committed to a regular monthly TV show: as one of the rotating hosts (along with Martin and Lewis, Abbott and Costello, and Eddie Cantor) of NBC’s popular
Colgate Comedy Hour
on Sunday nights. Hope’s Colgate hours regularly trounced the tough competition on CBS, Ed Sullivan’s
Toast of the Town
. Then, for the 1953–54 season, General Foods sponsored him in a once-a-month variety hour on Tuesday nights, alternating with Milton Berle’s
Buick Show
. Hope consistently outperformed Berle, and for the season ranked fifth in the Nielsen ratings. In those two years Hope ended any doubts that he was in television to stay and established the variety-show format that he would stick with for the rest of his TV career.

He was hardly an innovator. While Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca were pioneering satirical sketch comedy on
Your Show of Shows
, and Martin and Lewis were bringing their improvisational anarchy to the
Colgate Comedy Hour
, Hope merely transferred his old radio format to television: an opening monologue, scripted patter with his guest stars, a song from the musical guest, and two or three comedy sketches. The shows were more elaborately produced than his early Frigidaire specials, often with a choreographed musical opening (a baseball-themed number for opening day, for example, or an Irish dance for St. Patrick’s Day). Hope was now fully at ease with the camera: striding confidently to the microphone with his long-gaited, slightly effeminate, palms-facing-backward walk; reeling off the jokes at a brisk, metronome-steady pace; setting his jaw and locking in his gaze as he waited for the laughs, then breaking into a crooked, upcurled-to-the-left smile when they came, as they nearly always did.

The jokes were timely and topical, a chronicle of the issues, news makers, fads, and fears of early-1950s America: the A-bomb and 3-D movies, Christine Jorgensen’s sex-change operation and Senator Kefauver’s organized-crime hearings, the Cold War and color television.
“NBC wants to get the color perfect before they release it to the public,” Hope said. “We don’t want the Russian who’s inventing it next week to make any mistakes.” (Hope was slated to host TV’s first commercial color broadcast, on November 17, 1953. But
the FCC at the last minute withheld its approval, allowing only a closed-circuit colorcast of the dress rehearsal. Hope was disappointed to miss out on the historic first—which came a week later on a Donald O’Connor–hosted segment of the
Colgate Comedy Hour
.)

On television, unlike radio, Hope couldn’t hold a script, so he read his lines from cue cards—scrawled out for him by Barney McNulty, an Army Air Corps veteran who used to transcribe Morse code messages in block letters. McNulty came up with the idea of using cue cards for Ed Wynn’s TV show in 1949, and he began doing them for Hope in 1953, putting them on stacks of thirty-by-forty-inch poster board. (
Hope wanted the cards as big as possible, so they would have to be flipped less often.) An affable Irishman, McNulty became another loyal member of the entourage, often a whipping boy for Hope when things went wrong on the set, and all but inseparable from him for the next forty years.

In later years, Hope was notorious for being tied to the cue cards for virtually every moment of his shows. But in the early fifties he wasn’t using them in sketches, and it showed. The skits were broad and crudely staged, with an overreliance on funny costumes and incongruous settings—Hope as a caveman, say, or a college frat boy, or a movie director named Orson Von Hope. But Hope was focused and well rehearsed, and at their best the sketches had the same wisecracking zing of his better movies of the period. In a 1954 bit with Rosemary Clooney, for example, he plays a turn-of-the-century bachelor who’s being roped into marriage by his high-society girlfriend:

ROSEMARY:
“Oh, Robert, don’t you realize we’re the only ones in our set that haven’t been married?”

BOB:
“Yeah, I was thinking about that.”

“What do you think we should do about it?”

“Join a new set?”

“Can’t you see what I’m hinting at? We have so much in common, haven’t we?”

“Well, it’s true that we have one important thing in common. We both like me.”

“We could be so happy together. The two of us could be one.”

“Won’t there be some parts left over?”

The unscripted moments were even better. Animals were always good for some unrehearsed laughs, such as a sketch in which Hope plays poker with Trigger, or a funny
This Is Your Life
parody in which Hope cracks up as a parade of trained dogs troop onstage to pay tribute to Lassie. Blown lines and mishaps were common, and the spontaneous reactions to them were often funnier than the scripted lines: Jack Benny, as a violinist who wanders into Hope’s New Orleans jazz club, breaking character to complain about his bad lines; or Fred MacMurray, as a college jock, grabbing a ukulele and serenading Hope’s girlfriend (Janis Paige), then flubbing a line and nearly crushing his two costars as they stifle laughter on a couch underneath him. The sight of big Hollywood stars grappling with an unpredictable live medium was part of the fun of these early fifties TV variety shows. And no one had more fun with them than Hope.

•  •  •

Even as he was growing more comfortable with television, Hope was hedging his bets in radio, continuing to host his Tuesday-night show even as the audience steadily dwindled. In the spring of 1952 Chesterfield pulled out as Hope’s radio sponsor, and for the first time in fifteen years he was left off NBC’s fall schedule. But General Foods picked up the show, and he was back on the air in January, now pitching Jell-O, the dessert product so long associated with Jack Benny. With a new sponsor came other changes. His show was moved from its familiar Tuesday-night slot, where it had been a fixture since 1938, to Wednesdays at 10:00 p.m. What’s more, Hope suddenly had a new radio program: a fifteen-minute daytime talk show, to air every weekday morning on NBC. Far from giving up on radio, Hope would now be on the air six times a week.

Hope’s move into morning radio was a sign of the medium’s desperation. As the audience for radio’s long-running nighttime hits was fleeing for television, there was a brief flurry of hopeful speculation that the old radio favorites could have new life in daytime. The model was Arthur Godfrey, who, in addition to his two prime-time TV shows, was the host of a popular morning show on CBS radio.
“It’s not only a challenge, but it gives Bob a better chance to get closer to the people,” said Hope’s agent Jimmy Saphier, explaining the rationale behind the morning show, “and it’s my strong conviction that daytime radio will outlast nighttime.” Hope, with his inexhaustible appetite for work, was game to try anything.