Hope: Entertainer of the Century (70 page)

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The funeral was low-key, with a hundred family members, household staff, and caregivers gathered at 6:00 a.m. Wednesday morning in the chapel at St. Charles Borromeo Church. Hope’s two sons, Tony and Kelly, and his grandson Zach, spoke briefly at the thirty-minute service.
Hope could have been buried with pomp at Arlington National Cemetery, or in the Hollywood showplace for dead celebrities, Forest Lawn. But Dolores opted for quieter dignity, and his flag-draped coffin was transported in a police motorcade to the San Fernando Mission Cemetery, in Mission Hills, California, where he was laid to rest.

A month later, on August 27, the family held a larger, invitation-only funeral mass at St. Charles Borromeo. The eulogists included Senator Dianne Feinstein and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mickey Rooney, Kathryn Crosby, Tom Selleck, Raquel Welch, Brooke Shields, Nancy Reagan, and former president Gerald Ford and wife, Betty, were among those in the audience. “He was leading us to something deeper than laughter—joy,” said Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles, who conducted the service. Later in the afternoon, a more raucous memorial was held at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, where friends and colleagues—including Sid Caesar, Jack Carter, Lee Iacocca, and Larry King—paid tribute with stories and jokes.
“I couldn’t be here in spirit, so I came in person,” said Red Buttons.

His oldest son, Tony, died unexpectedly of a heart aneurysm just a year later, at age sixty-three. Dolores lived long enough to celebrate her own hundredth birthday and then some (she died in September 2011, at age 102). Linda, the daughter who tended to her father so loyally in his final years, took charge of the legacy, orchestrating the tributes that dribbled on for years and tending to his estate, estimated at around $300 million at the time of his death.

His death triggered the usual round of media tributes that routinely follow the passing of any major showbiz celebrity: the front-page obituaries, the encomiums from colleagues and friends, the endless loop of film clips on the entertainment shows and cable news channels. There was more, befitting a national hero. The flags were lowered to half-staff. “Today America has lost a great citizen,” said President George W. Bush in a statement. Former president Clinton praised Hope’s “matchless legacy of laughs to people all over the world.” Nancy Reagan said, “Losing him is like losing a member of the family.”

Yet the response to Hope’s passing seemed restrained, almost dutiful. The master of comic timing had, quite simply, lingered too long, the memories of his great years tarnished by his long and very public decline.
The
New York Times
’ obituary for Hope had been sitting on the shelf so long that its author, former film critic Vincent Canby, had himself been dead for three years.
Time
magazine gave the comedian of the century a polite but meager one-page send-off. (The death of George Harrison, the third-best Beatle, rated a cover story.) NBC, having just aired its hundredth-birthday tribute to Hope in April—and rerun it on his birthday in May—opted not to gear up another one. Instead, on the evening after his death, the network ran a two-minute “salute” to Hope at the beginning of prime time—then returned to regularly scheduled programming.

In the years that followed, even the people most indebted to Hope seemed to take him for granted. Younger stand-up comics, when asked about the comedians who influenced them, would cite rebel role models such as Lenny Bruce, and occasionally an old-timer such as Groucho Marx or Jack Benny. Almost no one mentioned Bob Hope—an odd omission, considering that he essentially invented their art form. His movie work never enjoyed a revival-house rediscovery or received the kind of film-buff attention accorded more fashionable comics—W. C. Fields or the Marx Brothers—or the silent-film clowns. Unlike Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, and other comedy stars of TV’s golden age—who starred in sitcoms that lived on endlessly in cable reruns and thus gained new generations of fans—Hope appeared mainly in variety shows that have been out of circulation for years, leaving most younger audiences with little memory of him, except in his declining later years.

Yet the show-business world he left behind would not have been the same without him. Every late-night talk-show host who does an opening monologue is tilling the ground that Bob Hope first plowed. Every year’s burst of Oscar frenzy—the obsessive handicapping of nominees, tracking of odds, dissection of the studios’ Oscar campaigns—can be traced back, at least in part, to Hope’s role in making the Academy Awards show an annual must-see event. The entire
image-making industry that rules Hollywood—the publicists, agents, managers, and studio executives who create the stars, shape their careers, and protect their private lives—is an elaboration of the publicity and brand-building machinery that Hope pioneered.

His passion for public service had a lasting impact as well. During the Iraq War, comedians as distant from his sensibility as David Letterman and Stephen Colbert carried on his tradition of traveling to the war zone and entertaining the troops. When George Clooney, at the 2010 Emmy Awards, accepted a Bob Hope Humanitarian Award for his work for human rights and disaster relief around the world, he took a moment to credit the award’s namesake—Bob, and Dolores too—for their charitable work and for embodying, as Clooney put it, “the best version of the term
celebrity
.”

Even his long, long good-bye was somehow inevitable and fitting. Hope needed to keep performing because he couldn’t stop believing that the audience needed him. It was understandable for an entertainer who never forgot the days when a visit from Bob Hope meant everything to a lonely soldier on a distant battlefield, or an anxious family gathered around the radio in times of national crisis.

In 1943, on his first tour of England during World War II, Hope and his entertainment troupe were traveling from camp to camp through the moors of Devonshire. But they couldn’t go everywhere, and
one unit of six hundred men found out that Hope was going to miss them. Disappointed, they heard that he was doing a show ten miles away, and the entire camp, officers as well as enlisted men, marched the ten miles across the wild moors to see him. But when they arrived, they found that the show was indoors and packed to capacity, with no room for them. All they could do was turn around and start the ten-mile trek back.

After the show Hope was told of their disappointment. He commandeered a couple of jeeps, piled his troupe into them, and caught up with the soldiers, still trudging back to their camp. With a few boards laid out across the jeeps for a stage, Hope did a forty-minute show for the men in the driving rain. “I love the English weather,” he cracked, wearing a tin hat borrowed from one of the GIs. “It’s so
dependable.” By the end of the show, Frances Langford’s hair was streaming wet across her face, and Tony Romano’s guitar was so drenched he had to spend half the night drying it. The applause was like nothing they had ever heard.

“Never make ’em think you don’t care,” Hope once told a reporter, explaining why he always signed autographs. “Your time’s not your own. You owe ’em.” They owed him too. He may have taken a little too long to leave the stage, but at his peak—a peak that lasted longer than almost anyone else’s—he was the best version of celebrity. He was there in spirit. And he was there in person.

The house in Eltham, England, where Leslie Towns Hope was born.
(Photograph by author)

His parents, Avis and Harry, in Cleveland.
(© Hope Enterprises, Inc.)

A family portrait, taken in England: Leslie is front and center; younger brother Sidney, in a dress, is on Avis’s knee.
(© Hope Enterprises, Inc.)

With his first dance partner—and sometime girlfriend—Mildred Rosequist.
(© Hope Enterprises, Inc.)

Hope started out in vaudeville with partner Lloyd Durbin (left); the pair was broken up early by tragedy.
(© Hope Enterprises, Inc.)

Hope and George Byrne formed a successful comedy-dance team before Hope decided to strike out on his own.
(© Hope Enterprises, Inc.)