Hope: Entertainer of the Century (65 page)

Dealing with the Chinese authorities was a chore. They insisted on approving the entire script, which meant late nights going over the day’s work, explaining jokes, and often fighting to keep them in. (For example, Hope made a wisecrack about a Chinese alcoholic drink: “I had one Mao-Tai, and my head felt like the Gang of Four.” The censors made him take it out.) The Chinese crews that the authorities forced Hope to use weren’t accustomed to the Americans’ fast pace, and they seemed to purposely slow things down.
“The Chinese were very, very difficult,” said associate producer Marcia Lewis. “They wanted a successful show, but they didn’t want to look cooperative.” Some of the performers were balky too. The owner of the trained panda complained that he wasn’t getting paid enough and said he would allow the show to use only half of the panda’s act. After wrangling with him,
Linda Hope agreed to take just the last half—but had the cameras record all of it, knowing that the animal would have to do its whole act from beginning to end anyway.

The crew had to resort to cloak-and-dagger tactics to get around some of the bureaucratic problems. After the Chinese found out that Hope had taped a sequence at the Democracy Wall, where Chinese citizens were allowed to post complaints about the government, they demanded the videotape of the segment. Director Bob Wynn wouldn’t give it up. Then, after secretly sending it back to the United States in the luggage of a Los Angeles TV crew that was covering the trip, he gave the Chinese a blank tape instead—knowing they did not have the equipment needed to play it.

Relations between Linda, who shared a producer title with Lipton, and her father grew more tense as the trip went on. Bob was annoyed at the many delays and the rising costs, and Linda bore the brunt. Their arguments—often out on the hotel balcony, because Hope thought the rooms were bugged—became so heated that director Wynn had to step in and act as mediator. The final straw came at the airport in Shanghai, as the troupe was getting ready to leave for home. The Chinese demanded another videotape, of a Coke commercial that Hope had done at the Great Wall, as well as the equipment to play it on, which had already been loaded on the plane. As Linda argued with the officials and the plane sat on the ground, Bob stewed.
“Dad was really aggravated with it,” said Linda. “And he was aggravated with me—‘Just give them the tape!’ ”

The three-hour special that resulted,
Bob Hope on the Road to China
, was more of a diplomatic triumph than an entertainment one. Hope opens the show in front of the Great Wall, singing, “We’re off on the road to China,” to the tune of “The Road to Morocco,” with new lyrics penned by Lipton. Hope has a few pointed monologue jokes that somehow eluded the censors: “Housing must be a problem here. By the time I got to my hotel there was a family of four living in my luggage.” But for the most part, the diplomatic niceties and travel-brochure boosterism make the show a little numbing. (“The Chinese are easy to like,” says Hope. “They’re ready to smile, they’re courteous
and helpful, and they make every effort to understand us.”) What’s more, the telecast, which aired on Sunday, September 16, 1979, was a disappointment in the ratings, ranking just twenty-sixth for the week.

Yet the China trip seemed to whet Hope’s appetite for more diplomatic ventures abroad. He wanted to go to Moscow for the 1980 Olympics, but that was scuttled by the US boycott of the games following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Instead, during the diplomatic chill that ensued, Hope went to Moscow to do a show for US embassy personnel. When Iranian revolutionaries stormed the US embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two Americans hostage for more than a year, Hope proposed a trip to Tehran to do a Christmas show for the hostages.
An aide to President Carter worked with Tony Hope to try to arrange that or some other role for Hope in ending the hostage crisis, but nothing came of it. Hope had more success as an ambassador for golf: in September 1980 he went to London to host the first edition of the Bob Hope British Classic, a British counterpart to his popular Palm Springs pro-am tournament.

With the passions of the Vietnam era fading, there seemed to be more of an effort to recapture and pay homage to the Bob Hope of old. In April 1979 the Film Society of Lincoln Center staged a gala tribute to Hope, hosted by Dick Cavett—a big fan since junior high school, when he saw Hope give a concert in Cavett’s hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska—and with Diane Keaton, Shelley Winters, Kurt Vonnegut, and Andy Warhol among the twenty-seven hundred fans in the audience. The centerpiece of the evening was a sixty-three-minute retrospective of Hope’s film work, narrated by Woody Allen, who called Hope his favorite comedian and showed how strongly his own screen character had been influenced by Hope in such films as
Monsieur Beaucaire
,
My Favorite Brunette
, and the
Road
pictures.
“When my mother took me to see
Road to Morocco
,” said Allen, “I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.”

A tough
Rolling Stone
profile in 1980 rehashed some of the old Vietnam resentments, but other journalists seemed willing to let bygones be bygones.
“Oh, go on, highbrows, take your great comedians and your intellectual clowns—but look at what America thought was
really funny: Bob Hope,” wrote Peter Kaplan in a fond 1978 profile in
New Times
magazine.
“Age cannot wither, nor custom stale, the charm of Bob Hope,” wrote Tom Dowling, in the
Washington Star
, during Hope’s seventy-fifth birthday festivities. “[He] is, in short, a totem of every virtue held dear by the Elks, Moose, Kiwanii, Rotarians, Eagles, Odd Fellows and USO-ers. He’s likable, quick on his feet, dependably salty when with the boys, safely correct when ladies are in the room, and a font of uplifting public-spiritedness when impressionable kiddies have their ears perked up. Like all men you can count on, he’s as comfy as an old shoe.”

By this time, he was an old shoe with a closet full of Guccis. In 1968,
Fortune
magazine put him on its list of the sixty-six wealthiest people in America, with a net worth estimated at between $150 million and $200 million—the richest entertainer in Hollywood. Hope routinely claimed such estimates were exaggerated, and since most of his holdings were in real estate, it was always hard to know precisely. But in 1979, after years of avoiding ostentatious displays of his wealth, he and Dolores oversaw the completion of their hilltop mansion in Palm Springs, which to many was the epitome of extravagance.

Construction on the house, on hold since the 1973 fire, finally resumed in 1978. Given the do-over, Dolores set about making changes in Lautner’s severe modernist design, to cut costs and make it more user-friendly. She enclosed some open space (the original design necessitated going outside to get from the kitchen to the living area), made some changes in the exterior, and reduced the size of the upstairs. Lautner objected to many of the changes, and Dolores fired him—finishing up the house with another architect, and the help of her friend and decorator Laura Mako.
“Mrs. Hope was kind of a frustrated architect,” said Dolores’s longtime assistant Nancy Gordon. “She had a very keen eye, and she was forever moving walls around here and there. I’m sure Lautner was frustrated. But she got what she wanted.”

The house was still quite a statement, with its swooping, mushroom-shaped roof that reminded many of the TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport. It had a sixty-foot-wide central skylight, lavish
separate bedroom suites for Bob and Dolores, two swimming pools (one indoors and one out), a small chapel for Dolores, a one-hole golf course for Bob, a massive outdoor fireplace, and an expansive slate patio, where party guests had a breathtaking view of the valley below. Many friends and family missed the old house on El Alameda (which the Hopes kept for guests), with its homier atmosphere and serve-yourself Italian dinners. Bob was one of them.
“I love that little house,” he told Andy Williams, a Palm Springs friend. “But Dolores wanted to have that big airplane hangar.”

But he got used to it. The Hopes moved into their new Palm Springs home in late 1979, threw a spectacular party there every year during golf-tournament week, and spent most of the winters there for the rest of their lives—a pleasure palace at last befitting Hollywood’s royal couple.

For Bob Hope, who loved entertaining, craved live audiences, and could not conceive of a life in which he was not constantly in the public eye, retirement was never a serious option. His compulsive performing and need for applause became something of a punch line of its own.
“Bob Hope would go to the opening of a phone booth in a gas station in Anaheim, provided they have a camera and three people there,” Marlon Brando once sniffed. The joke was that Hope would hardly have disagreed.
“Hell, if I did,” he’d say when asked about retiring, “I’d have to have an applause machine to wake me up in the morning.”

By the start of the 1980s, however, age was finally starting to wear him down—his hearing getting worse, his paunch bigger, the spring in his step decidedly less springy. Yet except for his ongoing eye problems, and a minor “cardiac disturbance” in October 1978—paramedics were rushed to his hotel room when he felt dizzy following a performance in Columbus, Ohio—he was a remarkably healthy man. He almost never got colds. Though he was a night owl, rarely going to bed before one in the morning, he never had problems sleeping. His mornings would
typically start late, between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m., with a breakfast of
stewed fruit, decaffeinated coffee, and a B-complex multivitamin, which included 500 mg of vitamin C. He was a meat-and-potatoes man, with a special fondness for lamb chops and a weakness for desserts, especially lemon meringue pie. Even in his old age, he kept his dancer’s body well toned with golf and daily massages; made a practice of hanging from a pair of rings each day to relax his back; and walked at least a mile or two before bed, no matter where he was in the world.

He was a man of action, seemingly never bothered by stress or self-doubt. “Damn it, make a decision,” he once told a family member who was hesitating over a business deal. “If it’s a wrong one, we’ll make another.” His recipe for a long life, he told a
Saturday Evening Post
interviewer in 1981, was to stay busy and get things done.
“Procrastination is the number one cause of tension,” he said. “It causes more heart attacks and strokes than anything else. You always worry about the things you put off. . . . I’m a great believer in getting things taken care of fast.”

In 1983, the year he turned eighty,
Hope made 174 personal appearances—including 86 stage shows, 42 charity benefits, 14 golf tournaments, 15 TV commercials, and 11 guest appearances on other TV shows, in addition to the 6 specials he did for NBC. He remained a hands-on manager of his own career.
“The thing that impressed me about him,” said Rick Ludwin, the NBC program executive in charge of Hope’s specials in the 1980s, “here was a man who had already been a superstar in every form of entertainment there ever was, and yet he always made the phone calls himself. For every show, he would personally approve the print ad. The promo people would go over to his house, show him the mock-up of the ad and the rough cuts of the [on-air] promos, and he would make suggestions. And then the morning after a show aired he would call himself to get the overnight ratings. At that age, with that level of success, he was still out there hustling.”

With his daughter Linda now running Hope Enterprises and serving as executive producer of his specials, the push to make them big
events continued. There was a steady stream of tributes, anniversaries, retrospectives, and birthday celebrations. In January 1981 Hope hosted a two-hour special to mark his thirtieth anniversary on NBC-TV, a black-tie affair with such old friends as George Burns, Martha Raye, and Milton Berle in the audience, giving him an obligatory standing ovation and joining him for bits onstage. That October he went to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to host the dedication of the Gerald Ford Presidential Library, another black-tie affair, with President Reagan, Lady Bird Johnson, Henry Kissinger, and a gaggle of world leaders on hand. (“That’s why I’m up here,” said Hope. “I wasn’t big enough to be in the audience.”) He did a show marking the sixtieth anniversary of the National Football League and another commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of NASA. During the 1980 presidential campaign, he starred in a scripted show in which he’s drafted to run for president—with Johnny Carson putting his name in nomination, Tony Randall playing his campaign manager, and a host of other stars making cameo appearances.

His ratings were up and down, but at their best—especially the birthday specials and his Christmas shows, with Hope’s annual introduction of the college football all-American team and the traditional “Silver Bells” duet with one of his guest stars—they were rare bright spots for NBC, which had sunk to a dismal last place in the network ratings.
“We had so many problems at NBC when I got there, but he wasn’t one of them,” said Fred Silverman, the former CBS and ABC programming whiz who became president of NBC in 1978 (and left three years later with the network still in third place). “You knew you would get a great rating with Bob’s shows. We’d put them in sweet spots on the schedule.” Hope was also great for the network’s corporate image—always ready to appear at an affiliates’ convention, press junket, or testimonial dinner, doing his bit for the network he stayed loyal to for more than fifty years.

Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980 was a welcome restoration for Hope. After four years of Jimmy Carter, whom Hope never warmed to (a president who didn’t play golf!), the White House
was safely back in Republican hands. What’s more, Reagan was an old friend from their early days in Hollywood, and a frequent target of Hope jokes since his days as California governor. Hope entertained at the 1981 Inaugural Ball (though Johnny Carson landed the emcee gig) and had little trouble refreshing fifteen years of Reagan material for the new resident of the White House. Hope joked about the president’s Hollywood background (“Reagan has been rehearsing for the inaugural all week—he wanted to do it in one take”), his advancing age (“He’s the only candidate who calls me Sonny”), and his wife Nancy’s ritzy taste in White House decor. Yet Hope was a court jester careful not to offend. After making some cracks at a 1981 USO dinner about the first lady’s plans to buy expensive new china, Hope wrote Reagan a note to make sure no feathers were ruffled:
“I know that Nancy was shook up a little bit by some of those dish jokes, and I realize that I laid it on a little too strong. You can rest assured that I will not do another dish joke as long as I live.” Reagan’s good-natured reply:
“Please don’t concern yourself about the humorous barbs you directed toward the new White House china—after all, if you can dish it out, we can take it!”