Hope: Entertainer of the Century (19 page)

Hope eventually gets sprung from jail and boards one of the ocean liners, serving as radio broadcaster for the race and emcee for the shipboard entertainment. He has some uninspired comedy business with a sidekick played by Ben Blue, does a comedy bit with his old radio foil Honey Chile, and shows off some steps in the big waltz number. But his duet with Ross in “Thanks for the Memory” is the film’s high point. Al Jolson had actually introduced the song on radio the previous December, predicting that it would be the
“big hit tune of 1938.” But it took Hope and Ross’s lovely handling of it on-screen to make the prediction come true.

The movie got mixed reviews.
“All loose ends and tatters, not too good at its best, and downright bad at its worst,” scoffed Frank Nugent in the
New York Times.
But nearly everyone singled out Hope and Ross’s number as the film’s bright spot.
“You’ll rave over Bob Hope and Shirley Ross warbling ‘Thanks for the Memory,’ ” wrote Ed Sullivan. Hedda Hopper proclaimed,
“Bob is our American Noël Coward.” The song
spent ten weeks on radio’s
Your Hit Parade
, three weeks in the No. 1 spot. What may have put it over the top was a love letter from Damon Runyon, who raved about the song in his syndicated newspaper column, the Brighter Side, on March 13, 1938:

Our favorite gulp of the moment is something called “Thanks for the Memory.” A gulp is a song of the type that makes you keep swallowing that old lump in your throat. We have always been a dead cold setup for a good gulp. . . . Mr. Hope is no great shakes as a singer,
though he is as good a light comedian as there is around. He sort of recites his lyrics, but he does it well, and that Miss Ross really can turn on when it comes to singing a gulp. If we had a lot of money we would hire the pair of them to go around with us singing “Thanks for the Memory” at intervals for the next month.

The Big Broadcast of 1938
was Paramount’s biggest box-office hit of the winter season—and the highest grossing of all the
Big Broadcast
films (though it would be the last). The studio publicity machine churned out stories by and about the film’s new star:
Hope on the differences between Hollywood and Broadway, for example, or Hope’s guide to comedy slang. He became a hot attraction at benefit dinners around town: emcee for a Film Welfare League dinner in February, host of a Temple of Israel benefit in March, guest of honor at the Professional Music Men of America banquet in April, where he was made an “honorary crooner” for singing “Thanks for the Memory.” Hope was doing a monologue at the Turf Club Ball in Del Mar when Al Jolson turned to George Jessel and said,
“Move over, boys.” It was the old guard acknowledging a new star had arrived.

On-screen, however, Hope had trouble following up his
Big Broadcast
success. His second film,
College Swing
, which opened in April, was another star-packed musical comedy, with Gracie Allen as a student at a fusty New England college who must pass her final exams to earn an inheritance. Hope’s part was originally so small that he
went to producer Lewis Gensler—who had worked with him on Broadway in
Ballyhoo of 1932
—to get it beefed up. Cast as Gracie’s tutor and business manager (George Burns is also in the film, but on this rare occasion is not Gracie’s partner), Hope has mostly straight-man duty—
“a pleasant comedian completely bested by bad material,” wrote Howard Barnes in the
New York Herald Tribune.
But Hope does get rewarded with the film’s best musical number: a peppy Burton Lane–Frank Loesser duet, “How’d Ya Like to Love Me,” which he sings with Martha Raye as they cavort around his office, tear through assorted props, and exit through a glass door, munching bananas.

Hope’s next film,
Give Me a Sailor
, teamed him with Raye again. He and Jack Whiting play a pair of brothers in the Navy who battle over two sisters: one a good-looking prima donna (Betty Grable), the other a plain-Jane homebody (Raye). It is mainly Raye’s picture, with Hope doing his best to make sense of a frantic and convoluted plot that culminates with Raye’s winning a “beautiful legs” contest (in a movie with Betty Grable!). Hope shows some spirit, and even a little emotional depth, as a guy who discovers that the ugly duckling is really a swan. But it was another slapdash B-picture, which got a tepid reception and did little for Hope’s prospects.

In the spring, Paramount was dithering on whether to pick up Hope’s option for another year. There was talk that studio executives thought he was too similar to Jack Benny, or that his sashaying walk (which seemed modeled on Benny’s) made him look too fey. Shurr tried to shop Hope to other studios, but all he got was
an offer from Universal for $10,000—just half of what he was getting at Paramount—to costar in a picture with Loretta Young. And Young vetoed him in favor of David Niven.

“Thanks for the Memory” saved Hope again. Paramount had the rights to a play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett about a bickering married couple called
Up Pops the Devil
. To get some more mileage out of the song that had launched Hope in movies, someone had the bright idea to retool the story as a vehicle for Hope and his
Big Broadcast
costar Shirley Ross and retitle it, shamelessly,
Thanks for the Memory.
In June of 1938 the studio gave the film a green light and picked up Hope’s option at the same time.

Secure in his future at the studio, at least for a while, Hope got set for a busy summer. In June he reprised his Broadway role as Huck Haines in the West Coast premiere of
Roberta
at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. As soon as the ten-day engagement was finished, he flew to New York to headline a stage show at the Loews State Theatre, with former child actor Jackie Coogan as his featured guest star. Hope basked in his return to the New York vaudeville stage, sprinkling his monologue with cracks about his budding movie career (
“Paramount
signed me in one of my weaker moments—I was starving”) and his new Hollywood surroundings (
“Everyone goes to bed at nine o’clock out there—with each other”).

Most notably, he closed the show with new lyrics for what had become his signature song:

Thanks for the memories

Good audience of the State, your welcome has been great

I hope I can return again on some near future date

I thank you so much

It was the first of thousands of renditions of “Thanks for the Memory” that Hope would use to close his TV, radio, and stage shows for the rest of his career. Only a few months after introducing the song in
The Big Broadcast of 1938
, Hope had discovered its amazing adaptability, as well as its value as a branding tool. Robin’s delicately ironic lyrics would be replaced time and again by greeting-card sentiments, syrupy tributes, and outright plugs. But “Thanks for the Memory” proved to be the most enduring and versatile theme song in show-business history. And it was all Hope’s.

•  •  •

Back in Los Angeles, Bob and Dolores were settling into their new life. Bob joined Lakeside, the golf club in Toluca Lake that Crosby had introduced him to, and whose members also included many other golf-playing (non-Jewish) Hollywood celebrities, among them Douglas Fairbanks, Wallace Beery, W. C. Fields, and Oliver Hardy. The Hopes rented a house on Navaho Street, just a few blocks from the club, while they looked to build a permanent home in Toluca Lake, just over the hill from Hollywood.

To help manage his expanding career, Hope gave a call to his brother Jack, who was back in Ohio working in their brother Fred’s meat business. Three years older than Bob, Jack was the sibling he felt the closest to. They had shared a bedroom as kids and once stayed together in the same New York City hotel room when both were looking for work. (They had
only enough money for one pair of dress pants,
so they would trade off wearing it for job interviews.) Jack, an affable, blond-haired ladies’ man, who was in between two of his eventual five marriages, quit his job,
hopped in his 1937 Pontiac, and drove out to Los Angeles. Bob put him to work in various roles—producer, advance man, consigliere, and all-purpose assistant, another member of Hope’s growing entourage who would remain with him for life.

In the meantime, Hope finally got the break he had been waiting for in radio. Early in the summer of 1938 Saphier closed a deal to give Hope the starring role in a new comedy-variety show sponsored by Pepsodent and scheduled to air Tuesday nights on NBC starting in September.

Pepsodent and its ad agency, Lord & Thomas,
had considered Milton Berle and Fred Allen for the job, and they were taking something of a risk with Hope. They thought he would appeal to a young audience, but feared that his cocky, fast-talking radio persona might be too abrasive for Middle America. They told Saphier that Hope needed to be more self-deprecating—that he should make himself the butt of jokes, the way Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen did. Saphier relayed this in a letter to Hope, stressing that he should take care
“to prevent your being a smart aleck . . . as only sympathetic comedians have a chance for long life on the air.”

In launching his new show, Hope had a daunting task. Most comics in radio came equipped with an established character or familiar running gags: Jack Benny’s cheapskate, or the comic sparring matches between Edgar Bergen and his monocled dummy, Charlie McCarthy. Hope had no such crutches; he had to build his show practically from the ground up, with jokes drawn, not from the comedian’s self-contained radio community, but from the outside world.

To do that, he needed writers, and he hired more of them than anyone else in radio. They were mostly young guns, writers who were hungry and not too expensive. He paid them as little as $50 or $100 a week—low for the time, but a sacrifice for Hope, since it all came out of his
starting salary of $1,500 a week.
“No comic had ever tried to maintain a staff that size, especially not out of his own end,” Hope said. “But I wanted to be number one, and I knew that jokes were the key. . . . All
these comedy minds were necessary if I was to carry out my plan, which was almost unheard of at that time. It was to go on the air every week with topical jokes written right up to airtime. And some even after.”

Hope’s charter staff of writers included Wilkie Mahoney, his
Hollywood Parade
cohort; Al Schwartz, who had written gags for Walter Winchell in New York; and the team of Milt Josefsberg and Melville Shavelson, who had impressed Hope with some material they wrote for his stage show at the Loews State. A few weeks into the season he added Sherwood Schwartz, Al’s younger brother, who was studying for a master’s degree in biological sciences at the University of Southern California; Norman Sullivan, another New York radio writer; and Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, two aspiring playwrights from Chicago who had written for Milton Berle. The staff would grow and evolve over the years, as some left and others replaced them, but this was the founding core of the biggest and most storied writing crew in all of radio.

For his new show, Hope also knew he needed a strong supporting cast. He looked first for a bandleader with some personality who could also serve as a comedy foil. After
coming close to hiring Ozzie Nelson, Hope settled on Edgar Clyde “Skinnay” Ennis, a drawling, rail-thin North Carolina native who had appeared in Hope’s film
College Swing
. As announcer, Hope chose honey-voiced Bill Goodwin, who could also banter with him and take part in sketches. For more comic support, he hired Jerry Colonna, a former trombone player who looked like a refugee from Mack Sennett silent comedies, with bulging eyes, a walrus mustache, and a sirenlike voice that could hold notes for longer than most opera singers. Colonna used to do Nelson Eddy parodies at parties, and Bing Crosby once brought him on his radio show,
introducing him as a famous Italian tenor making his US debut and even inviting prominent music critics to the show. (Some of them apparently thought he was for real.) Colonna had done a funny bit in
College Swing
, playing a zany professor of music who does a florid rendition of the Crosby song “Please,” and he was one of Hope’s most inspired additions. Rounding out the team of regulars was a close-harmony singing group, Six Hits and a Miss, who did backup vocals, an occasional
featured song, and the commercials on the show (which, as was common in radio, were all performed live).

The Pepsodent Show
debuted on Tuesday night, September 27, 1938, broadcast live from a rented NBC studio on Sunset Boulevard, at seven o’clock Pacific time—10:00 p.m. eastern time, following NBC’s popular comedy
Fibber McGee and Molly
. For his theme song, Hope had originally intended to use a rewritten version of “Wintergreen for President,” a song from the Gershwin musical
Of Thee I Sing.
But when he
found out the rights would cost him $250 a show, he opted instead for the cheaper, and more obvious, alternative, “Thanks for the Memory.” The vocal group opens the show:

We bid you all hello, and welcome to our show

May we present for Pepsodent, a guy you ought to know.

Hope then chimes in:

Ah, thank you, so much . . .

Tonight is the night and I hope you will tune in on us every Tuesday

Let’s make it your chase-away-blues day

By listening in, when we begin . . .

“Well, here we are,” Hope begins his first monologue, “with a brand-new sponsor, a brand-new program, a brand-new cast, and ready to tell some . . . jokes.” The pause is the first sign that Hope has taken his sponsor’s advice to make himself the self-deprecating butt of gags. (It’s also accurate; few of the jokes in the first show are new, or very good.) The show follows the usual format for comedy-variety shows of the era: an opening monologue, followed by a musical number from the house band (Ennis and his group do Irving Berlin’s “Change Partners”) and then Hope’s introduction of the week’s guest star—Constance Bennett, of the popular
Topper
films, on the opener. There are two comedy sketches: Bob and Connie go to a girls’ baseball game, and Bob plays the head of a detective agency assigned to find
a little girl’s lost basket (a play on Ella Fitzgerald’s hit song “A-Tisket, A-Tasket”). Colonna gets a featured spot, trading quips with Hope and then launching into a song with his trademark hyperextended opening wail—“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, sweet mystery of life . . .” The only topical joke is a throwaway gag in the baseball sketch. “Who’s that girl going around and around without stopping at home?” asks Bill Goodwin. “That’s Mrs. Roosevelt,” says Hope—a reference to Eleanor Roosevelt’s peripatetic travel schedule. Hope closes with a slower-tempo reprise of “Thanks for the Memory,” and that’s the show.