Hope: Entertainer of the Century (16 page)

Say When
opened on November 8, 1934, and got surprisingly good reviews. Walter Winchell called it the
“merriest laugh, song and girl show in town,” and Hope’s contribution was duly noted.
“Mr. Hope, as usual, was amiably impudent, never offensive and a likable and intelligent clown, equal to all the emergencies of Broadway operetta,” wrote Percy Hammond in the
Herald Tribune.
None of this assuaged Richman, who quit the show after eight weeks, forcing
Say When
to close prematurely in January.

That was enough time for Hope. In December, before the show closed, Hope landed an audition for his first weekly radio job: as emcee of
The Intimate Revue
, a Friday-night variety show on NBC sponsored by Bromo-Seltzer. Worried that he didn’t have enough material for the audition, Hope got Richman to drive him out to his Long Island estate and let him go through Richman’s extensive joke file and pilfer what he wanted. Hope got the job and for years afterward credited Richman as
“the guy responsible for my success in radio.”

The Intimate Revue
lasted only thirteen weeks, and Hope’s uneasiness with the new medium was apparent. It was primarily a music program, featuring the classically trained songstress Jane Froman and Al Goodman’s mellow-toned orchestra. “Every week at this time, we present a show as sparkling and as easy to take as Bromo-Seltzer,” went the show’s weekly sign-off. The easy-to-take part usually trumped the sparkle. Hope carried most of the comedy, which consisted of weak sketches (Hope as a South Pole explorer, or the head of a travel agency, or Sergeant Hope of the Mounted Police) and strained banter with his on-air companions on topics such as the best way to dunk a doughnut. In one recurring bit, Hope delivered jokey “society notes” in a fast-paced, Winchell-like staccato: “Flash! Miami Beach! Young
Puppy Wellington, missing for three days, lost his trunks while bathing and was forced to keep running in and out with the tide.” Hope didn’t yet have the confidence or the technique to recover when the jokes fell flat; often the only titters heard in the studio were those coming nervously from Hope himself.
“Hope is intermittently very funny,” said
Variety.
“At other times either his material falters or his delivery is a bit too lackadaisical. . . . Hope is easy to take but hard to remember.”

The best thing to come out of
The Intimate Revue
for Hope was a new comedy sidekick—a Southern-fried Dumb Dora by the name of Honey Chile. She was played by a sixteen-year-old Macon, Georgia, beauty named Patricia Wilder. Bob had met her in Louis Shurr’s office and was taken with her dark-haired good looks and
“thick, spoonbread Southern accent.” He tried her out in his act at the Capitol Theatre and liked the way she won over the crowd with her first line—wandering out to center stage and drawling, “Pahdon me, Mistah Hope. Does the Greyhound bus stop heah?”

He brought her on
The Intimate Revue
, playing straight man to her goofy non sequiturs. (“Where you from?” “The South.” “What part?” “All of me.”) Wilder’s laid-back, countrified insouciance made her an audience favorite, even outshining Hope.
“Bob Hope is a likeable fellow personally, and I’m sorry to say he hasn’t clicked so well on the air,” noted the
New York Radio Guide
on March 30, 1935, predicting that Hope would “be off the program soon. At this writing, the new talent hasn’t been selected, but I’d like to suggest they keep Honey Child and give her some good material.”

Both were off the air in April, when
The Intimate Revue
was canceled. But Hope wisely brought back Honey Chile when he landed his next radio job the following December, as emcee for a CBS variety show sponsored by the Atlantic Oil Company.

On the
Atlantic Family Show
, Hope played second fiddle to the program’s ostensible star, tenor Frank Parker. Sketches were often built around the straitlaced Parker’s courtship of his on-air fiancée, Sue Fulton—Frank and Sue are weekend guests at a colonial mansion, for example, or Frank shops for Sue’s Christmas present, with Hope as a wisecracking store clerk. (Parker: “Would you help me around
the store?” Hope: “Why, are you drunk again?”) When the show was renewed in the spring, Parker left to take a job on orchestra leader Paul Whiteman’s program, and Hope inherited the starring spot. He brought in three writers to help improve his material, added a couple of supporting players, and gave Honey Chile more to do. And he began to develop a more distinctive radio personality.

His pace was faster now, his voice brittle and smart-alecky, drawing out the end of his punch lines like a carnival huckster. As in vaudeville, he tried to build up his pompous character so that others could cut him down to size. One of his sidekicks, for instance, a rube character named Skunky, brings a horse into the studio. Hope asks why. Skunky replies, “He figures if you’re a radio comedian, he’s wastin’ his time pullin’ that plow around.” In his routines with Honey Chile, Hope’s ripostes to her nonsense (“You know, Honey Chile, a mind reader would only charge you half price”) were usually topped by her sucker-punch comebacks:

BOB:
“I wish you’d be careful. Anything you say will be held against you.”

HONEY:
“Anything I say will be held against me?”

BOB:
“That’s right.”

HONEY:
“Mink coat.”

Wilder became so popular as Honey Chile that she was soon gone, leaving for Hollywood in the summer of 1936 when RKO offered her a movie contract. Hope kept the character but replaced the actress, hiring a Dallas beauty named Margaret Johnson as the new Honey Chile, and then (when Johnson also left for the movies) replacing her with Claire Hazel. Hope and Wilder reunited later in Hollywood, when she made a couple of guest appearances as Honey Chile on his radio show and in two of his early movies. But her film career didn’t go anywhere, and in the early 1940s Wilder returned to New York, where
she became a flamboyant, Holly Golightly–style fixture on the Manhattan nightclub scene. Later she moved to Europe, married an Austrian prince, and became a well-known international hostess. Wilder denied
that she and Bob were ever romantically involved, but they remained lifelong friends; Bob and Dolores would pay occasional visits to her home in Marbella, Spain, or attend parties she threw in the South of France, and she continued to write him long, effusive letters—always signed “Honey”—nearly until her death in 1995.

The
Atlantic Family Show
had a nine-month run on CBS, Hope’s longest radio stint to date. He turned up frequently in the radio columns, which chronicled his show’s changing cast and time slots, repeated his best jokes, and fed his reputation as the hardest-working comic on radio.
“It’s all right for the established comedians to take ‘time out’ for the summer to relax,” he told an interviewer, explaining why he wasn’t taking a summer vacation, as most radio stars did. “They’ve captured their listening public and merit a rest. But I’m a comparative newcomer to the airwaves and am glad I have the opportunity to keep plugging.”

He worked hard to court the press and cultivate his image—which didn’t always bear much resemblance to the real Bob Hope. First he made up bogus details about his supposedly titled English background. Then he gave himself an Ivy League makeover. For a
Radio Stars
profile in September 1936, Hope greeted the interviewer in his Central Park West apartment dressed in a yellow sweater, with two Scottie dogs on his lap and a fat book called
Education Before Verdun
on the coffee table.
“He just doesn’t look like a comedian,” the reporter observed. “He’s still in his twenties [actually thirty-three] and his cheeks are rosy and a couple of boyish cowlicks keep his brown hair from being the plastered cap he has tried to make it. He might be a tennis pro or a Yale undergrad or even a young doctor—but never a zany of the mikes.”

He was getting some buzz as a radio up-and-comer.
“Before 1940, don’t be surprised if Bob Hope turns out to be the ace comic of radio,” wrote one prescient radio columnist, Dick Templeton, in March 1936. “That may sound like a long shot and a long time prediction, but if it does happen, then Bob will have realized his ambition.”

It would happen. But first he had a couple more stops on his Broadway tour.

•  •  •

In the fall of 1935, Hope signed on for his fourth Broadway show in as many seasons. This time he was cast in the
Ziegfeld Follies of 1936
, a new edition of the lavish, showgirl-studded revues staged by Florenz Ziegfeld every season from 1907 to 1925 and sporadically after that. The 1936 show was the second to appear since Ziegfeld’s death in 1932 and was produced by his widow, Billie Burke, along with Lee and J. J. Shubert. The show’s main attraction was Fanny Brice, the longtime
Follies
star, and it also featured Josephine Baker, the celebrated chanteuse just returned from Paris; singer Gertrude Niesen; the dancing Nicholas Brothers; and a statuesque young singer-comedienne named Eve Arden. George Balanchine choreographed the ballet sequences, Vincente Minnelli designed the scenery, and Vernon Duke and Ira Gershwin wrote the songs. The show was so jam-packed with talent that some cast members had to be dropped during the Boston tryouts, among them ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy.

Even in this heady company, Hope was a standout. He had two numbers with Brice, one in which he played a Hollywood director to her famous Baby Snooks character, the other a send-up of British snobs called Fancy, Fancy. Best of all, he was handed what would be the show’s biggest hit song, “I Can’t Get Started.”

He sings it to Eve Arden, the two playing a posh New York couple saying good night after an evening on the town. In Gershwin’s wistful-witty lyrics, Hope laments his inability to make any romantic headway with her: “I’ve flown around the world in a plane, I’ve settled revolutions in Spain/ The North Pole I have charted, still I can’t get started with you.” Arden ignores his entreaties, trying to hail a cab as he moons over her. When Hope starts panting, she quips, “What’s the matter? Have you been running?” (
Hope said he gave Arden the line after the doorman at the Winter Garden Theater suggested it.) When Hope finishes the song, she finally succumbs and they embrace—after which Hope straightens up, briskly adjusts his cuffs, and puts a comic button on the number: “That’s all I wanted to know. Well, good night.”

The number impressed two visitors from Hollywood, producer
Harlan Thompson and director Mitchell Leisen, who came to see the show one night. A year later they cast Hope in his first Hollywood feature,
The Big Broadcast of 1938.
His performance of “I Can’t Get Started” was surely on their minds when they handed him another wistful-witty romantic list song, the one that would launch his movie career, “Thanks for the Memory.”

Ziegfeld Follies of 1936
, after some delays and out-of-town tinkering, opened on January 29, 1936, at the Winter Garden Theater, to mostly excellent reviews.
“A jovial and handsome song-and-dance festival, glorifying the Broadway tempo and style,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in the
Times.
Though Brice got most of the praise, Atkinson noted that she “has a capital partner in Bob Hope, who is gentleman enough to be a comrade and comedian enough to be funny on his own responsibility.”

Hope loved his time in
Follies.
The Winter Garden Theater was right in the middle of the Broadway action. Bob would get haircuts across the street at the Taft Hotel, from a barber who shaved Walter Winchell and would give Hope all the theater gossip. He walked to the theater each night from his Central Park West apartment.
“It was a kick, whipping down to the theater and saying ‘Hi’ to the traffic cops and to people on the avenue and to the people in the show when you got there,” he wrote. “That was really living. There was always something going on.”

The show, however, ran into trouble because of Brice’s fragile health.
During a performance in Philadelphia, she took an overdose of sleeping pills—supposedly mistaking them for cold medication—and forgot the words to one of her numbers. The curtain had to be unceremoniously brought down on her, as the cast cringed in the wings. The Shuberts decided to close
the show in June and give her the summer to recover, then reopened in September. But Hope, along with Arden and several other cast members, decided not to stick around. He already had another Broadway show waiting in the wings.

It was a new Cole Porter musical, the composer’s much-anticipated follow-up to his 1934 hit
Anything Goes
. Originally titled
But Millions!
the show came from the same team of writers, Howard
Lindsay and Russel Crouse, and was intended to reunite the same three stars, Ethel Merman, William Gaxton, and Victor Moore. But Gaxton, a popular Broadway leading man at the time, backed out when he felt that Merman’s part was being elevated above his, and the role went to Hope instead. When Victor Moore also bowed out, his part was given to another, even bigger comedy star, Jimmy Durante.

The show, eventually retitled
Red, Hot and Blue
, had another rough voyage to Broadway. Merman and Durante had a famous battle over billing. Neither wanted the other to have the most prominent spot in the show’s advertising, listed either on top or on the left. A compromise was worked out in which both their names were printed diagonally, like a railroad crossing sign. (Hope settled for a line of his own underneath.) In its first tryout performances in Boston, the show ran more than three hours. Porter walked out in a huff when the music director criticized one of his songs, “Ridin’ High.” Durante, the big-schnozzed, raspy-voiced ham, was a loose cannon onstage. One night he appeared to forget his lines, walked to the orchestra for help, then finally called into the wings,
“Trow me da book!” Hope admired Durante’s chutzpah, even after discovering that the bit was entirely planned.

Butting up against two Broadway egos even bigger than his own, Hope had to fight for stage time. Lindsay and Crouse were having trouble coming up with an ending to the first act and after several tries finally settled on one that featured only Durante and Merman. This rankled Hope, and he got Doc Shurr to argue his case with the writers.
“I’ve been with Bob a long time,” Shurr said. “He’s going to feel bad about this. He’ll go on depressed, and if he’s not in that finale, maybe he won’t be able to give a good performance.” The writers relented and shoehorned Hope into the scene as well.