Hope: Entertainer of the Century (27 page)

With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the national debate over whether the United States should get involved in a “foreign war” came to an abrupt end. Now was the time to band together in an all-out war effort, and Hollywood was eager to play its part. Many stars—Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, William Holden, Tyrone Power—enlisted in the service. Directors such as William Wyler, Frank Capra, and John Ford got officer commissions and went overseas to make war documentaries and propaganda films. Those who stayed home found other ways to contribute. John Garfield and Bette Davis helped set up the Hollywood Canteen, a former livery stable on Sunset and Cahuenga Boulevard converted into a recreation center for servicemen, where movie stars pitched in as waiters, dishwashers, and even dance partners for the boys getting ready to be shipped overseas. Clark Gable was recruited to head the actors’ division of the Hollywood Victory Committee, which lined up stars to travel the country selling war bonds. (Coming back from one of these tours in January 1942, Gable’s own wife, Carole Lombard, was killed in a plane crash.) Hollywood beauties such as
Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner sold bonds by offering kisses in return for pledges of $25,000 or $50,000. Dorothy Lamour reportedly sold $30 million worth of bonds in just four days.

At thirty-eight, married, and the father of two, Bob Hope was safe from military service. (With the start of the war, the age of eligibility was raised from thirty-five to forty-five, but in practice no men over thirty-five were ever drafted.) And given his radio show’s many visits to military camps, no star had staked out a clearer role for himself on the home front. But Hope, surprisingly, took a little while to realize it. For the first few weeks after Pearl Harbor, his show remained in the studio,
trying to conduct comedy business as usual. “We feel that in times like these, more than ever before, we need a moment of relaxation,” Hope said, opening his first show to air after Pearl Harbor. “All of us in this studio feel that if we can bring into your homes a little laughter each Tuesday night, we are helping to do our part.”

Yet he could hardly ignore the war. Hope’s radio monologues were now peppered with jokes about blackouts, gas rationing, and other wartime privations, such as the ban on women’s girdles to save rubber. Then, on January 27, Hope took his radio show to the San Diego Naval Base and followed it with six straight weeks of military-camp shows. After returning to the studio for one week, he went back on the road and continued to do shows for military audiences virtually nonstop until the end of the war.
Jack Benny, Hope’s chief radio rival, did some shows at military bases too, but he found the raucous crowds too disruptive of his timing and carefully scripted material. For Hope, louder, looser, and faster on his feet, they were energizing.
“I find these audiences of soldiers and sailors like a tonic,” he told a reporter. “They get so excited at times that they can’t resist trying to join in the performance themselves, which is okay with me because then you know you are getting audience response.”

The servicemen loved him. Hope spoke their language, sympathized with their gripes, and brought sexy movie stars for them to ogle. He would introduce himself by explicitly identifying with whatever group or base he was visiting—“This is Bob Soldier-in-the-Desert Hope,” or “This is Bob San-Diego-Naval-Base-Hospital Hope.” When he was entertaining marines, he’d make jokes about the Navy; in front of Navy men he’d take potshots at the marines. In front of everyone, he would dwell on topic A: sex. “I really don’t think there are enough girls around this base,” he joked in San Diego. “Today I saw twenty-six sailors in line to buy tickets to see a hula dancer tattooed on a guy’s chest.”

Offstage too Hope was at the front lines of Hollywood’s war effort. When the studios made plans in January for a Red Cross War Emergency Drive, Hope helped rally studio employees at Paramount.
“We are all soldiers now,” he said at an organizing meeting. “It is the
part of some of us to fight with dollars instead of guns.” He traveled with Crosby for a series of exhibition golf matches to raise money for war relief. For a match in Sacramento he formed a twosome with Babe Ruth, playing against Crosby and California governor Culbert Olson.
In Houston, the crowds packed the fairways so tightly that Hope and Crosby barely had room to drive. One Hope shot hit a spectator standing in a sand trap and bounced onto the green. When he found his ball, Hope shouted, “Who do I pay? Who do I pay?”

At the end of April, Hope joined the Hollywood Victory Caravan, a star-packed variety show booked on a whistle-stop tour of thirteen cities in three weeks, to raise money for the Army and Navy Relief Funds. The all-star troupe—which included Cary Grant, Groucho Marx, Claudette Colbert, Merle Oberon, James Cagney, Betty Grable, and Laurel and Hardy, among others—set out by train from Los Angeles on April 26 and arrived in Washington three days later to start the tour. Hope, who was too busy with his radio show for the cross-country train ride, hopped a plane instead and met them in Washington, in time for a welcoming tea at the White House, hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt.

Their first show, at Washington’s Capitol Theatre, was a little ragged and under-rehearsed, running nearly three hours long. But Hope, sharing emcee duties with Cary Grant, was a hit.
“If anything it was Bob Hope’s Victory Caravan,”
Variety
said in its review. “As long as Hope was on the stage, the show had zest and lift. With his departure it dropped to varying levels of mediocrity.” The caravan continued on to Boston and Philadelphia, made a swing through the South and Midwest, and finished up in San Francisco on May 19. The trip was grueling enough for most of the Hollywood stars-turned-vaudeville vagabonds. But for Hope, typically, it was little more than a part-time job. He broadcast his radio show from various stops on the tour, played in more exhibition golf matches, and entertained at dozens of military bases along the way. And when the caravan was over, Hope kept on going—doubling back through the South and East, doing his radio show along the way and winding up the season at Mitchel Field on Long Island and the submarine base in New London, Connecticut.
His camp-show broadcasts helped propel his radio show into first place in the Hooper ratings in June, the culmination of a remarkable four-year climb. The BBC picked up transcriptions of his show, and Hope became a radio hit in Britain as well.

After ten weeks of traveling and appearances at nearly a hundred military camps,
Hope came home physically exhausted. His doctors warned him to slow down. But there was little chance of that. The rush of adrenaline that Hope got from being onstage was multiplied by the wild reception he got from the servicemen—and the feeling that he had found his role in the war effort.

•  •  •

The war didn’t deter a record crowd of sixteen hundred from packing into the Biltmore Bowl for the annual Academy Awards banquet on February 26, 1942. But it cast a sobering light on the affair. In keeping with the national mood of austerity, the Academy urged attendees to avoid fancy formal wear (though several actresses came in evening gowns anyway). The guest of honor was former presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, author of a new bestselling book urging international cooperation called
One World
, whose speech was broadcast nationally on CBS radio.

Hope, emceeing the event for the third year in a row, revealed a Willkie button under his lapel. “I haven’t given up yet,” he joked. “And there’s one for Hoover under it.” The wartime anxieties didn’t deter him from his usual Hollywood wisecracks. About a recent air raid in Los Angeles: “That was no air raid; that was John Barrymore coming home from W. C. Fields’s house.” When Hope presented a fake Oscar to Jack Benny, for impersonating a woman in
Charley’s Aunt
, Hope quipped, “Benny will no longer play any of these female roles because the government’s taking his rubber girdle away from him.”

Hope’s own movie career, meanwhile, was rolling along. He was developing a consistent screen character—the wisecracking, girl-chasing, blustering coward—but the movies themselves had a pleasing variety: service comedies, buddy movies, comic horror films, retro-thirties romantic comedies. With
My Favorite Blonde—
which began shooting
just before Pearl Harbor, finished up in January and was released in April—he discovered a new genre that showed him off especially well: the comedy spy caper.

The movie had its origins in Hope’s radio show. His obsession with the glamorous, blond British actress Madeleine
Carroll became a running gag on the show, and one day Carroll, a fellow Paramount star, telephoned to thank Hope for all the publicity. She suggested they ought to do a picture together, and Paramount liked the idea. As a vehicle, the studio chose a script by two of Hope’s former radio writers, Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, rewritten by Don Hartman and Frank Butler, the
Road
picture team. Sidney Lanfield, a comedy veteran working with Hope for the first time, got the director’s assignment. The result was one of Hope’s best films of the early forties.

He plays a small-time vaudeville song-and-dance man who does a cheesy act with a roller-skating penguin. Carroll is a British secret agent who shows up at his dressing-room door (“Too late, sister, I’ve already got an agent,” he tells her) and drags him into a Hitchcockian spy plot. The MacGuffin is a brooch with a secret code, needed to launch a fleet of British bombers from an air base in California. Carroll surreptitiously plants the brooch on Hope, then accompanies him on a cross-country train trip to deliver it, with enemy spies in hot pursuit. (The silly premise was close enough to reality to disturb
some British military officers, who complained about the film’s suggestion that the launching of an RAF fleet would be dependent on such a harebrained scheme.)

My Favorite Blonde
puts a comic twist on a familiar Hitchcock formula: the average Joe drawn unwittingly into life-or-death intrigue. Some of the scenes consciously echo
The 39 Steps
, the 1935 Hitchcock film in which Carroll raced around the Scottish countryside with Robert Donat, trying to foil an enemy spy ring. Hope does an amusing parody of their stiff-upper-lipped derring-do: he’s a quavering, reluctant hero who wants no part of the adventure but is too moonstruck by Madeleine to avoid it. Their first encounter in his dressing room is Hope at his babbling, glassy-eyed best:

MADELEINE:
“Do you know what it feels like to be followed and hounded and watched every second?”

BOB:
“Well, I used to. Now I pay cash for everything.”

MADELEINE
(urgently): “Look at me.”

BOB
(hypnotized): “I’m looking.”

MADELEINE:
“You’ve got to trust me.”

BOB:
“I’m not through looking.”

Hope gets the most out of every gag line, even the most obvious ones. Being dragged away by the authorities: “They can’t do this to me! I’m an American citizen! I pay taxes!” Beat. “Well, I’m an American citizen.” But the film also shows off his skills as a physical comedian as never before. Riding the train in one scene, he hides behind a newspaper as a trio of threatening characters silently join him in the compartment. Hope fidgets, peeks timidly from behind the paper, fans himself nervously with his hat, opens his cigarette case, and spills all of them on the floor. It’s Hope’s version of a classic comic archetype—the childlike naïf, flustered by an intimidating adult world—harking back to Chaplin and ahead to Jerry Lewis.

Though Hope stays admirably committed to character, he steps outside of the film at several points, with self-mocking references to his offscreen life and career—a device that would become common in his films. At one point he turns on the radio and hears an announcer introducing
The Pepsodent Show.
He quickly switches it off. “I can’t stand that guy,” he snaps. And Crosby turns up for the first of many unbilled cameos in Hope films, as a truck driver who gives Hope directions to a Teamsters picnic. After getting the directions and giving Bing a light for his pipe, Hope walks away, then stops and does a double take. “Couldn’t be,” he mutters, before moving on.

“Not only the funniest Bob Hope picture, but the funniest comedy within memory—that is the verdict of New York critics (and of New Yorkers) on
My Favorite Blonde
,” reported the
Los Angeles Times
when the film opened in April. “Unless everybody hereabouts is wrong, this is an almost perfect feature.”
It broke records for its four-week run at
the Paramount Theater in New York and outdrew Hope’s previous hits
Caught in the Draft
and
Nothing But the Truth
at theaters around the country. Once again, it was an escapist comedy with potent echoes of the real world. Though conceived before the United States was drawn into the war, Hope’s comic face-off with the vaguely identified (but obviously German) spies was a welcome release for a nation now fighting real-life foreign enemies.

The early months of 1942 were the darkest of the war. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan’s war machine moved with frightening speed—overrunning Hong Kong, Burma, Thailand, Singapore, and the Philippines in a matter of weeks. American merchant ships, speeding across the Atlantic to supply the European Allies with war matériel, were being sunk by German submarines faster than new ships could be built. With America’s war-production efforts still gearing up, a much-anticipated counteroffensive by the Allies was many months away.

Hollywood’s first efforts to bring entertainment to the troops were, by necessity, confined to the home front. The United Service Organizations (USO), created in 1941 by six nonprofit groups to provide recreation and entertainment for America’s men in uniform, set up clubs near military camps around the country where soldiers could eat, drink, and dance with local volunteer girls. Later, through its Camp Shows subsidiary, run by Abe Lastfogel, head of the William Morris talent agency, the USO began sending stars such as Al Jolson, Mickey Rooney, and Martha Raye on entertainment tours of domestic military bases.