Hope: Entertainer of the Century (17 page)

Like
Anything Goes
,
Red, Hot and Blue
had a madcap plot involving gangsters and society swells. Merman played “Nails” Duquesne, a former manicurist now a rich widow, who teams up with an ex-con (Durante) to stage a national lottery aimed at finding Hope’s old hometown sweetheart—a girl whose identifying feature is a waffle-iron brand on her rear end. The show continued Hope’s streak of good luck
with musical numbers, teaming him with Merman on the song that became the show’s most enduring standard, “It’s De-Lovely.” His light touch and crisp articulation got the most out of Porter’s fizzy lyrics and provided a nice counterpoint to Merman’s voice and bombastic stage presence. (The two made a recording of the number—the only one that remains of Hope’s Broadway work.)

Merman had her problems with Hope. She hated improvising onstage and was thrown off when he would clown around during their numbers. Once, during “De-Lovely,” she turned around to find him lying down on the stage.
“He lay down by the footlights, with me standing behind him,” Merman recalled in her autobiography. “I controlled myself with an effort that almost busted my stay strings, but afterward I had a heart-to-heart talk with [producer Vinton] Freedley. ‘If that so-called comedian ever does that again,’ I said, tight-lipped but ladylike, ‘I’m going to plant my foot on his kisser and leave more of a curve in his nose than nature gave it.’ ” Asked about the incident later, Hope admitted,
“I probably kidded around with her too much,” but claimed the lying-down incident came not in “De-Lovely” but in another number, “You’ve Got Something,” a weaker song that “needed some help.”

Yet Hope admired Merman as a performer—and possibly as more than that. He used to walk her home from the Alvin Theater on Fifty-Second Street, dropping her off at her parents’ apartment at 25 Central Park West, before continuing on to his place a couple of blocks up. Hope’s longtime publicist Frank Liberman, in an unpublished memoir of his time with Hope, recalled: “In a rare moment of introspection,
he told me that he and Ethel, both in their early thirties [Merman actually wasn’t yet thirty] and with raging hormones, would walk home and make love standing up in darkened doorways on Eighth Avenue. They’d then proceed to their separate apartments.” Of all Hope’s reported liaisons, it surely ranks as one of the unlikeliest.

Red, Hot and Blue
, which opened on October 29, 1936, had a bumpy ride with the critics, who found the book idiotic and the score a comedown from
Anything Goes.
Yet the stars won praise, and Hope got his share of it.
Time
found him
“coyly engaging”; the
Times
“generally cheering”; and the
Evening Journal
“urbane, sleek, and nimble of accent. He knows a poor joke when he hides it and he can out-stare more of them.” A few brief clips of his performance exist—
silent footage shot by a young theater enthusiast from Jacksonville, Florida, named Ray Knight, whose home movies constitute the only filmed record of many Broadway shows from the 1930s. Hope is dapper and handsome, if a bit more filled out than in his vaudeville days (“the
roly-poly Bob Hope,”
Time
described him), prancing across the stage in a double-breasted suit with chin tucked in, a tight smile on his face, and the confident, wide-swinging gait that would later become a trademark.

The show lasted for most of the season, closing in April 1937, after 183 performances. The producers reopened it for a two-week run in Chicago, then it expired for good, bringing down a final curtain on Hope’s Broadway career.

It was a great run, lifting Hope out of the vaudeville trenches and turning him into a front-rank Broadway star. But Broadway, in some ways, was an aberration for Hope: a high-style interlude on the way from vaudeville to the more informal, naturalistic, and personal comedy style he would develop on radio and in films.
“I was an entirely different fellow on Broadway,” he told an interviewer. “I was very chic and very subtle. I wouldn’t do a double take for anything.” More important, in terms of his comedy evolution during the New York years, were his many appearances at charity events (
of the 125 major benefits in New York City during the 1936–37 season, Hope appeared, either as emcee or a performer, in fully half of them) and on the radio, where he was finally gaining some traction. In May 1937, just after
Red, Hot and Blue
closed, he landed another weekly radio gig, as host of a new NBC Sunday-night show called
The Rippling Rhythm Revue
, sponsored by Woodbury soap and featuring Shep Fields and His Rippling Rhythm Orchestra. By that time, however, Doc Shurr was already negotiating for Hope’s next big career move: into the movies.

For most of his time in New York, Hope had maintained at least a pretense of disdain for Hollywood. The memory of his failed screen test in 1930 still burned, and he took the pragmatic approach that
even a lucrative Hollywood contract would bring in less than the $5,000 a week he was making in his peak New York years.
“Hollywood was for peasants, I decided. New York was my town,” Hope said. “The New Yorkers were sophisticated enough to understand and enjoy my suave, sterling style. Hollywood was Hicksville.”

But in July, Shurr got an offer from Paramount to cast Hope in
The Big Broadcast of 1938
, a musical-comedy revue starring W. C. Fields. Hope’s part, as a radio broadcaster on an ocean liner embarked on a transatlantic race, had originally been offered to
Jack Benny, who turned it down because he thought it was too similar to one he had played in another film,
Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round.
Shurr had to work hard to get Hope to accept, making his case in a telegram from Hollywood to his brother Lester, who worked with him back in New York:
“Please advise Bob this is the great opportunity he has been waiting for, and we shouldn’t let money stand in the way, as we can’t afford to lose this proposition on account of a few thousand dollars.”

In a follow-up telegram a day later, Shurr pressed the case: “Advise Bob Hope part Paramount has for him in
Big Broadcast
is light comedy lead and will give him every opportunity to show his ability as comedian and chance to sing several songs. . . . Zukor, LeBaron and Harlan Thompson [the studio chief, head of production, and the film’s producer, respectively] most enthusiastic in Bob’s future and will give him every opportunity to score.”

Hope eventually agreed to the deal, signing a contract with Paramount for three pictures a year at $20,000 per film, with an option for seven years. But the option deal meant little since the studio could essentially drop him at any point. So when he and Dolores boarded the Super Chief for the cross-country train trip to California in early September 1937, he was not at all sure the move to Hollywood would be for good.
“We’ve always hated the idea of leaving New York,” Hope told a reporter before he left. “And this may not be permanent—probably won’t be.”

But it was.

Mitchell Leisen didn’t have much fun working on
The Big Broadcast of 1938
. The Paramount contract director, a former costume and set designer, was best known for stylish romantic comedies such as
Hands Across the Table
and
Easy Living
(the latter, with a script by Preston Sturges, one of the high points of 1930s screwball comedy). Now, however, he was stuck directing the fourth in a middling series of musical-comedy revues, which had begun in 1932 with
The Big Broadcast
, starring Bing Crosby. The top-billed star for the new film was W. C. Fields, returning to the screen after a year’s health layoff, and the cantankerous comedy veteran gave Leisen nothing but trouble.
“The most obstinate, ornery son of a bitch I ever tried to work with,” said Leisen, who was so bored with some of Fields’s recycled comedy routines that he fobbed them off on another director, Ted Reed. The film’s initial screening for Paramount executives was
“my most embarrassing moment,” Leisen recalled. “The only part that was any good was ‘Thanks for the Memory.’ ”

Leisen had ordered up the song from Leo Robin and Ralph
Rainger, the Paramount songwriting team who had written “Please” for Bing Crosby and “Love in Bloom,” Jack Benny’s theme song. Leisen wanted a number for Bob Hope and Shirley Ross, cast as a divorced couple who find themselves together on the same ocean liner embarked on a transatlantic race. The song, Leisen told the composers, needed to reveal the feelings that the couple still had for each other, but subtly and with humor.
“It’s not easy to say, ‘I love you,’ without
saying
it,” said Robin. “But we’ll see what we can do.”

The songwriters spent three weeks working on the number. After they were done, they worried that it wasn’t funny enough. But when Leisen finished listening to the song for the first time, he was wiping away a tear. “No, it’s not funny,” the director said, “but I’ll take it.” He told them to slow down the tempo and asked for some additional lyrics. Then he made them promise not to come to rehearsals until he was ready to shoot the scene.

Rather than prerecord the song and have the actors lip-synch on camera, as was the usual practice, Leisen convinced the studio to let him record it live, to give it more feeling. That meant having a full orchestra onstage, and three cameras rolling simultaneously to capture the actors’ reactions in real time.
“I rehearsed Bob and Shirley over and over, until they could give it just the mood I was trying to get across,” Leisen said. Ross was a rising young singing star at Paramount, with several films under her belt, including
Waikiki Wedding
with Bing Crosby. But Hope was a neophyte in films, and Leisen took him out to lunch to give him some pointers. “In pictures,
everything comes through the eyes,” he said. “Try to think through your eyes.”

When Leisen was finally ready to shoot the number, he called in Robin and Rainger. By the end of the scene, Ross was nearly in tears, and so were the songwriters.
“We didn’t know we wrote that song,” they said.

The number is set in the ship’s bar, where Hope, playing a radio announcer named Buzz Fielding, meets his ex-wife, Cleo, for a friendly drink. After some talk about a bet Hope has made on the ocean-liner race, they drift into reminiscing about their failed marriage. Ross mentions that she just found “that green tie of yours” while cleaning out
an old trunk. “You know something, Buzz?” she adds wistfully. “I kinda miss your singing in the bathtub.” Hope joins in the reverie: “Good old bathtub.” And she: “Good old singing.” They toast, and then Hope begins the song:

Thanks for the memory

Of rainy afternoons, swingy Harlem tunes

Motor trips and burning lips and burning toast and prunes

[She] How lovely it was . . .

The melody glides up the scale with each line, reaching the top at the final “lovely.” The lyrics, bandied back and forth by the two ex-spouses, tick off random memories from their marriage, in classic “list song” fashion. The wit lies in the juxtaposition of the romantic high points and the mundane low ones:

[She] Thanks for the memory

Of faults that you forgave, rainbows on a wave

[He] And stockings in the basin when a fellow needs a shave.

With gentle irony, the song pokes fun at the stiff-upper-lip sophistication of this “modern” couple, who can’t quite acknowledge their own emotions:

[She] We said goodbye with a highball

[He] And I got as high as a steeple

But we were intelligent people

[She] No tears, no fuss, [together, toasting] hooray for us.

When he saw himself on screen later, Hope cringed at how literally he had taken Leisen’s advice about using his eyes:
“When I saw the rushes, I was astonished at my galloping orbs. I did everything with them except make them change places.” Hope does appear a little too stage-directed, raising his eyes dreamily toward the sky or forcing a laugh, and Ross actually delivers most of the emotion in the number,
her face registering various shades of amusement, annoyance, hurt, and romantic longing. But Hope is charming. He is fully inside his character—toying distractedly with the lemon in his drink, slumping his chin onto his shoulder like a daydreaming kid, shooting an occasional alert glance at Ross in response to one of her lines. At a few points they slip out of the song into brief bits of spoken dialogue:

[She] Letters with sweet little secrets

That couldn’t be put in a day wire

[He] Too bad it all had to go haywire

That’s life, I guess. I love—

Here Hope turns to Ross and finishes the sentence in his normal conversational voice:
“—
your dress.” “You do?” she responds, flattered. He: “It’s pretty.” She: “Thanks”—and then picking up the melody once again—“for the memory . . .”

This blend of song and conversation, one of the number’s most engaging devices, artfully connects the stylized lyrics with the real, evolving emotions of the couple singing them. At another point, Ross reminisces about “China’s funny walls, transatlantic calls,” and Hope comes back with “That weekend at Niagara when we hardly saw the falls.” Ross again steps out of the melody, reacting to the obvious sexual allusion with a dreamy, sincere “How lovely that was.” Hope responds with a clipped, amusingly smug “Thank you.” The memory of their best night together, evoked in a perfect confluence of song, dialogue, and acting.

In the final verse, the emotional arc is completed. The tone is more intimate, with a sweet diminuendo:

[She] Strictly entre nous, darling how are you?

[He] And how are all those little dreams that never did come true?

[She] Awfully glad I met you, [He] Cheerio, tootle-oo.