Hope: Entertainer of the Century (46 page)

Written and codirected by former Hope writers Norman Panama and Melvin Frank,
That Certain Feeling
is a more sophisticated romantic comedy than anything Hope had done before. His familiar skittish, nervous-Nellie character now has real psychological underpinnings: he’s seeing a psychiatrist (a first for Hope) to deal with his pathological fear of confrontation. Sanders does a funny caricature of a smug, bleeding-heart New York intellectual, giving Hope’s deflating wisecracks more satiric bite. “When you pick up that pencil, my friend,” Sanders lectures Hope, “you draw Larkin, you think Larkin, you
are
Larkin.” Says Hope: “All right, but I insist on separate toothbrushes.”

In a superfluous subplot, Larkin adopts an orphan, played by Jerry Mathers, later of TV’s
Leave It to Beaver
. (Hope’s nine-year-old son, Kelly, also appears in one scene as Mathers’s playmate.) And a youthful, honey-voiced Pearl Bailey, in the thankless role of Larkin’s maid, gets a couple of nice songs, including the film’s title number, resurrected from a 1925 Gershwin musical. But the heart of the movie is the reawakening romance between Dignan and his ex-wife, and Hope plays it with restraint and feeling. This is one of his few screen romances that actually gives off some sexual heat, and he’s an indulgent straight man for Saint’s big comedy scene, when the neatly tailored ice princess gets drunk and flounces around her apartment in silk Chinese pajamas.

“He was very patient as an actor, very generous and giving,” said Saint, who also found Hope’s easygoing working style refreshing. In contrast to the intensity of Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando on the closed
Waterfront
set, Hope’s set was open and relaxed; one day an entire football team came to watch. “Thank God I had grown up in live television, where tours would come through and watch from behind the glass,” said Saint. “As an actress I had learned how to concentrate.”

As he did for
The Seven Little Foys
, Hope went all out to promote the movie, which opened in June 1956. He did four stage shows a day at the Paramount Theater for the film’s New York opening; made nearly
a dozen TV guest appearances; and hosted premiere screenings around the country to benefit United Cerebral Palsy. One of his NBC specials,
The Road to Hollywood
, was little more than a long plug for the movie. Thinly disguised as a tribute to Hope’s Hollywood career (with former leading ladies such as Jane Russell and Dorothy Lamour among the guests), the show featured Hope’s first use of one of his publicity innovations: a clip reel of flubs and outtakes from his new movie.
“Leave it to Bob Hope to show ’em how to plug a picture,” said
Variety
, in its review of the show. “If NBC is willing to give away 90 minutes of prime time for a plug, and audiences are willing to take it with the palatable grain of sugar it was mixed with, more power to Hope.”

Yet
That Certain Feeling
was a disappointment at the box office.
Variety
theorized that Hope’s movie wisecracks were
“too much the type of entertainment he offers on television.” More likely, the relatively sophisticated New York relationship comedy was a little too rarefied for Hope’s audience. Still, it was one of his most enjoyable and underrated films of the 1950s. After it, things began to go seriously awry.

The Iron Petticoat
began with a script by veteran screenwriter Ben Hecht (
Scarface
,
The Front Page
): a Cold War–era update of
Ninotchka
about a female Soviet pilot who defects to the West and has a romantic and ideological awakening while being shown around London by an American Air Force captain. Katharine Hepburn was cast as the pilot, and Cary Grant was originally envisioned as her costar. But when Grant turned it down, producer Harry Saltzman came up with the notion of pairing Hepburn, Hollywood’s classiest leading lady, with Hope, its most popular movie clown. Intrigued with the idea of working with Hepburn (as well as plans to shoot the movie in England), Hope signed on. Against the advice of friends, Hepburn agreed too.

It was an ill-starred project. Hecht and Hope were at odds from the start. According to Hope, the script was unfinished when he arrived in London for the start of shooting (Hecht no doubt rewriting it to suit the casting of Hope), and
Hope merely suggested a few “hokey thoughts” to help it out. In Hecht’s view, Hope was wreaking havoc on his script, bringing in gag writers to add jokes where they didn’t
belong. Hepburn was just as dismayed.
“I had been sold a false bill of goods,” she said later. “I was told that this was not going to be a typical Hope movie, that he wanted to appear in a contemporary comedy. That proved not to be the case.” Ralph Thomas, the film’s British director, was caught in the middle.
“After only two days I realized there was no point of contact between the two of them,” he said. “There was Bob inserting his one-liners—and she telling him, very forcibly, very chillingly, what she thought of his lack of professionalism.”

Hope, who never liked to bad-mouth a colleague, was polite in retrospect, saying
Hepburn was “a gem” during the filming. “She played the Jewish mother on the set, fussing over everyone who happened to sneeze.” Hepburn did not return the compliment, calling Hope “the biggest egomaniac with whom I have worked in my entire life.” Hecht, for his part, demanded that his name be removed from the credits and ran a full-page “open letter” to Hope in the
Hollywood Reporter
disavowing the film.
“This is to notify you that I have removed my name as author from our mutilated venture,
The Iron Petticoat.
Unfortunately your other partner, Katharine Hepburn can’t shy out of the fractured picture with me.” Hope replied with his own sarcastic ad: “I am most understanding. The way things are going you simply can’t afford to be associated with a hit.”

The Iron Petticoat
, which opened in December 1956, wasn’t a hit, or anything resembling a good film. Hepburn complained that Hope wanted to turn the picture “into his cheap vaudeville act with me as his stooge,” but her strident, humorless performance as the dogma-spouting Soviet pilot (with one of the worst Russian accents ever recorded) is what ruins the film. Hope at least tries to keep it grounded in recognizable human behavior, and he has some nice moments when Hepburn is offscreen—doing some deft flimflammery at the Soviet embassy, for example, to help her escape from the authorities who have arrested her. But the movie is heavy-handed and charmless, with not a smidgen of romantic chemistry between the two stars.
“The notion of these two characters falling rapturously, romantically in love is virtually revolting,” wrote the
New York Times
’ Bosley Crowther. “If this was meant to be a travesty, it is.”

Hope’s next project,
Beau James
, at least brought him closer to home turf. Mel Shavelson and Jack Rose, who had given him one of his best roles in
The Seven Little Foys
, came up with the idea of casting Hope as Jimmy Walker, the colorful and corrupt 1920s mayor of New York City, in a biopic based on a recently published biography of Walker by Gene Fowler. For an essentially dramatic role, it was especially well suited to Hope. Walker had been a songwriter before getting into politics (he wrote the lyrics to “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?”), and as New York mayor was a bon-vivant symbol of the Roaring Twenties, who let speakeasies flourish in the city, allowed Tammany Hall corruption to run rampant, and left his wife for a showgirl.

Hope does well in the role, his flip, wisecracking persona perfectly suited to the raffish mix of showbiz and politics that Walker embodied. The film’s depiction of New York City politics is simplistic but often witty—a montage of Walker campaigning across the city, for instance, tailoring his campaign song to each ethnic group he encounters. “What kind of mayor is this guy going to make?” asks one bystander. “A lousy mayor,” his campaign chief responds, “but what a candidate!”
Beau James
doesn’t ignore the corruption that marred Walker’s administration, or the personal indiscretions that enlivened it. (Alexis Smith plays Walker’s wife-in-name-only, and Vera Miles is the showgirl he has an affair with.) The problem, as in
The Seven Little Foys
, is that Hope’s opaqueness as an actor doesn’t give us much insight into Walker’s character or motives. Hope got respectful reviews, but the movie grossed just $1.75 million, his third box-office disappointment in a row.

Hope took his next movie into his own hands. He wanted to shoot another film overseas and came up with a bare-bones story idea in which he would essentially play himself, an American comedy star who sails to Paris in pursuit of a script for his next picture. Hope got United Artists to back the film, cast the French comedian Fernandel (who had guested on one of Hope’s TV shows from London) as his costar, and hired screenwriters Edmund Beloin and Dean Riesner to flesh out a script. He also decided, for the first time, to serve as his own producer—a decision he came to regret.

Filming was scheduled to begin in Paris in April 1957. But Fernandel, who spoke no English, didn’t see the script until Hope was about to arrive for the start of shooting, and he wasn’t happy to find that his role was clearly secondary to Hope’s. Hope made an emergency call to two of his writers, Mort Lachman and Bill Larkin, and ordered them to Paris, where they quickly reworked the script to pacify the French star—delaying the start of filming for ten days as the crew sat idle. The production fell further behind thanks to various technical snafus, bad weather (snow in May and a heat wave in June), and the French crew’s habit of starting work late and taking long lunches. “At present we’re three weeks behind on film and three weeks ahead on wine,” Hope joked at a benefit for French war orphans that he hosted while in Paris. When their twelve-week lease on the Boulogne studios outside of Paris was up and the film still wasn’t done, the crew had to relocate to another studio in Joinville to finish up. In the end, Hope claimed the production went $1 million over budget.

The results on-screen were just as discombobulated.
Paris Holiday
is a slovenly mix of Hope one-liners, silent-comedy set pieces for Fernandel (he pretends to be seasick, for example, to get some ship passengers to vacate a couple of deck chairs), and a slapdash story involving spies (among them Anita Ekberg) who are after the same film script that Hope is trying to buy. The film’s director, Gerd Oswald, appears to be missing in action, and Hope was apparently too distracted by the production problems to pay much attention to the comedy.
Paris Holiday
was not just Hope’s worst film to date; it was his laziest performance.

•  •  •

In December 1957, Hope made his most ambitious Christmas trip yet, a two-week tour of the Far East, with blond bombshell Jayne Mansfield as his top guest star and a far-flung itinerary that climaxed with a show before seven thousand infantrymen perched on a snowy hillside near the thirty-eighth parallel, the border between North and South Korea. The NBC special that resulted became the model for all of Hope’s Christmas shows that followed. Unlike his previous three Christmas shows from the Arctic—essentially Hope variety shows
done on location for military audiences—this one was a more elaborately produced travelogue: shots of the cast getting on and off planes, excerpts from their performances at each stop on the tour, all linked by Hope’s voice-over narration and ending with his patriotic tribute to “our boys in a foreign land, there to preserve our way of life.”

The trip was widely covered by several entertainment columnists whom Hope had cleverly invited along, and the special, which NBC aired on Friday, January 17, drew Hope’s highest ratings of the season. Hedda Hopper (who again doubled as a guest star and chronicler of the trip) hailed the selfless work Hope was doing, anointing him, more explicitly than ever before, as Hollywood’s finest role model for public service:

Each time I pack my bags and turn my back on the wreathed door and the piles of gaily wrapped gifts, I have a warmer, more satisfying feeling in my heart. I can remember a day when Hollywood didn’t think much about serious things. I remember the time of the mammoth Christmas party, the $5 Christmas card and the exchange of valuables which meant Yuletide in the movie colony. I remember too the first Christmas when a sober note was struck, when someone reminded us what we owed the rest of the world. The time was 1943 and, you guessed it, the someone was Bob Hope.

Hope’s status as Hollywood’s most celebrated public servant and goodwill ambassador, however, would reach its high-water mark a couple of months later. After more than two years of trying, Hope finally got approval to make his trip to the Soviet Union.

He had renewed his application for visas in November 1957, while he was in London for some personal appearances and a screening of
Paris Holiday
. He told Ursula Halloran, a pretty young publicist who had gone to work for him in New York, to pursue the request with the powers in Washington and asked NBC’s Moscow correspondent, Irving R. Levine, to press the matter from his end. Hope also appealed for help from the American ambassador in London, Jock Whitney, who personally brought up the trip with Russian ambassador Jacob Malik.
“What does your Mr. Hope want to do,” Malik said, “entertain our troops in Red Square?” Hope was disappointed that the approval didn’t come before he had to fly home from London. But a few weeks later, he was summoned to the Soviet embassy in Washington. The Soviets had approved his trip, and six visas were waiting for him.

The State Department gave its blessing for the trip—the first to be scheduled in the wake of a cultural-exchange agreement between the United States and Soviet Union, signed in January. Yet Cold War suspicions were still high, and the Russians placed severe restrictions on the trip. Hope was not allowed to travel outside Moscow. All negotiations for Russian talent had to be conducted through the Soviet government, and only Russian film crews could be used. Moreover, with visas for just six, Hope had to severely limit his entourage. He brought along two writers, Mort Lachman and Bill Larkin; two PR people, Ursula Halloran (with whom he was having a fairly open affair) and Arthur Jacobs (a United Artists publicity man whose job was to arrange a Moscow premiere of
Paris Holiday
); and a top cameraman from London named Ken Talbot.