Hope: Entertainer of the Century (31 page)

In the spring of 1944 Hope shot another film for Goldwyn, initially called
Sylvester the Great
and later changed to
The Princess and the Pirate
—Hope’s first costume picture and his first movie in color. But his war-related activities were taking up more and more time and attention. He hosted a bond drive and charity golf tournament with Crosby at Lakeside and did several more
Command Performance
broadcasts for Armed Forces Radio. In March he made a four-day tour of US military bases in the Caribbean. And he prepared to make his next major overseas tour, during his radio show’s summer vacation, this time to the Pacific theater.

His last show of the season was scheduled for June 6, 1944. Early that morning, Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy, launching the long-awaited invasion of Western Europe. Hope
scrapped the show he had planned, from the Van Nuys Air Field, and instead delivered a tribute to the invasion forces of D-day. His wartime prose was never more eloquent, his brisk, plain-spoken delivery rendering it even more powerful:

What’s happened during these last few hours not one of us will ever forget. How could you forget? You sat up all night by the radio and heard the bulletins, the flashes, the voices coming across from England, the commentators, the pilots returning from their greatest of all missions, newsboys yelling in the street. And it seemed that one world was ending and a new world beginning, that history was closing one book and opening a new one. And somehow we knew it had to be a better one. We sat there, and dawn began to sneak in, and you thought of the hundreds of thousands of kids you’d seen in camps the past two or three years. The kids who scream and whistle when they hear a gag and a song. And now you could see all of them again, in four thousand ships in the English Channel, tumbling out of thousands of planes over Normandy and the occupied coast. And countless landing barges crashing the Nazi gate and going on through to do the job that’s the job of all of us. The sun came up, and you sat there looking at that huge black headline, that one great black word with the exclamation point—
Invasion!
The one word that the whole world has waited for, that all of us have worked for.

It was only fitting that Hope, the man who had brought the war home to America, would be the one to capture the nation’s relief and pride in the military triumph that would help bring it to an end.

Much was still left to do in the Pacific, however, where the United States was embarked on a painfully slow, island-by-island march toward what seemed an inevitable invasion of Japan. Again Hope assembled an entertainment troupe and headed for the action. Langford and Romano were back, and Colonna, who had to pass on the European trip the year before, was on board this time. For some added sex appeal, Hope hired Patty Thomas, a pretty, leggy dancer who had
been working in USO shows in the States and got the job after an interview with Hope. He added one more member to the troupe: his crony, sometime writer, and
Road
picture jester, Barney Dean.
“We had Barney along in case we had to trade with the natives,” Hope cracked.

The group left San Francisco on June 22 aboard a C-54 medical transport plane. They stopped first in the Hawaiian Islands, where they spent nine days and did some thirty-five shows, the largest for twenty-five thousand civilian employees at the Pearl Harbor Naval Yards. Then they flew off to Christmas Island and began hopscotching islands on the “pineapple circuit.”

Ferried around by a Catalina seaplane, they went to Kwajalein, Bougainville, and Eniwetok (where Navy lieutenant Henry Fonda was stationed), doing five, six, or even seven shows a day. They visited the site of bloody battles such as Tarawa and Guadalcanal, doing shows near unmarked graves and pillboxes full of weapons abandoned by the Japanese. Hope joked often about the tiny islands and the swampy, bug-infested conditions. “You’re not defending this place, are you?” he cracked on one. “Let them take it!” Hope picked up jungle rot on the trip, a skin disease that would plague him for years.

For Hope the most memorable stop was the island of Pavuvu, where the Marine First Division was preparing for an attack on Peleliu, a nearby Japanese stronghold. For six months the fifteen thousand men there had seen no entertainment. The island was so small there was no airstrip, so Hope and his crew had to fly in on tiny Piper Cubs, the men cheering as each plane buzzed the baseball field. Eugene B. Sledge, one of the marines who was there, described Hope’s visit in his classic combat memoir,
With the Old Breed
:

Probably the biggest boost to our morale about this time on Pavuvu was the announcement that Bob Hope would come over from Banika and put on a show for us. . . . Bob Hope, Colonna, Frances Langford, and Patty Thomas put on a show at a little stage by the pier. Bob asked Jerry how he liked the trip over from Banika, and Jerry answered that it was “tough sledding.” When asked why, he replied, “No snow.” We thought it was the funniest thing we had ever heard. Patty
gave several boys from the audience dancing lessons amid much grinning, cheering and applause. Bob told many jokes and really boosted our spirits. It was the finest entertainment I ever saw overseas.

Weeks after their show on Pavuvu, the assault on Peleliu began. An operation that was supposed to take four days stretched out for two months—one of the bloodiest battles of the war, with more than sixty-five hundred men killed or wounded. Months later, Hope was visiting a hospital in Oakland when one of the patients called out, “Pavuvu!” Hope went over to shake the man’s hand and found out the ward was full of marines who had seen Hope at Pavuvu and survived the campaign. One injured soldier awakened after an operation to see Hope standing over the bed. “Bob!” he exclaimed.
“When did you get here?”

In the tight-knit family of traveling entertainers, Hope was nicknamed Dad, and Langford was known as Mother. Thomas, the youngster in the group (she celebrated her twenty-second birthday on Pavuvu), developed a close, sisterly bond with Langford. They shared bedrooms and often went to the bathroom together in the rough-hewn latrines, where the men would put up a sheet to give them privacy. Frances gave Patty advice on clothes (slacks, not skirts, and sweaters for the cool nights), food (eat as little as possible before flying), and avoiding sticky situations with the sex-starved servicemen—a little-mentioned peril for female entertainers traveling through the war zone.
“You had to be careful,” said Thomas. “Not talk to them alone, only in groups. These kids wanted to meet someone. But I wouldn’t dare lead them on. One guy came up to me and said, ‘I’d like to ---- you.’ He was beaten up by the other soldiers.”

(The GIs weren’t the only problem for Thomas. She also had to fend off advances from Colonna, until Hope stepped in to help.
“Bob would tell people, ‘This is my girl.’ I was not Bob’s girl, but he did that for my protection.” When she got back to the States, Thomas made a point of assuring Dolores that any rumors about them weren’t true. Dolores was satisfied. “Honey, I know what you’re like,” she said. “I’ve seen you in church.”)

The few film clips from his Pacific tour show how confident and
charismatic Hope was onstage—tanned, often chewing gum, hair slightly mussed, as deft a straight man as he was a gagster. He and Romano had an easy, bantering relationship, doing patter songs together or parodies of the Ink Spots along with Colonna. Hope matched dance steps with Thomas, whose skimpy outfits and knockout figure always got a big reaction. Said Hope, introducing her to the crowd, “I just want you boys to see what you’re fighting for.”

The sex was never far from the surface, but Hope somehow made it seem innocent and wholesome. When Langford, who would close the show with some rewritten lyrics to “Thanks for the Memory,” got to the lines “I wish that I could kiss / Each and every one of you,” Hope stepped up to the microphone and cried, in mock-horror, “You want to get us trampled to death?” For men trying to survive grueling conditions in lonely outposts, sometimes days away from battle, it must have been marvelous.

After six weeks of island hopping, the troupe flew to Australia for a few days of shows. There, they had their closest call of the trip. Flying from Brisbane to Sydney, Hope asked the pilot of the Catalina seaplane if he could take the controls. While the plane was on automatic pilot, one engine conked out and the plane began dipping. Patty Thomas was looking out the window and saw black smoke.
“Hey, Dad, I think we’re in trouble,” she said to Hope. “We’re only working on one propeller!” The pilot hurried back to the cockpit and ordered the passengers to jettison whatever they could—luggage, souvenirs, cases of liquor.
Barney Dean, who was petrified of plane flights even in the best of circumstances, told Hope to dump his wallet, since it was the heaviest thing on the plane.

The pilot located a small body of water near the village of Laurieton and maneuvered the seaplane to an emergency landing, skidding to a stop on a sandbar. A fisherman saw them and rowed over to rescue them. The first thing he asked for was some American cigarettes. Hope and his troupe did a show that night at the local dance hall in gratitude. The crash landing made headlines all over Australia, as well as back in the United States. When Hope flew the next day to
Sydney, a mob of thousands was there to greet him at the hotel, pressing in so hard that Hope had to be rescued by the military police.

After Australia, Hope and his troupe continued on to Hollandia, New Guinea, recently recaptured from the Japanese. During the day they did a show for twenty thousand troops, the biggest crowd Hope had ever entertained in a war zone, and at night did a second show for five thousand Seabees. Then they hopped onto PT boats to entertain in the tiny Woendi islands. Among those in the audience, Hope learned years later, was a PT boat captain named John F. Kennedy.

The Pacific tour generated nearly as much attention back home as Hope’s tour of Europe and North Africa had the year before. King Features, the Hearst newspaper syndicate, asked Hope if he would send back some dispatches from his trip, and midway through the tour (with help from a war correspondent, Frank Robertson, he met in Australia) Hope turned out several newspaper columns recounting his experiences. The War Department nixed Pepsodent’s request to let Hope broadcast his radio show from the trip. But on August 12, he hosted a special NBC broadcast from a naval hospital “somewhere in the South Pacific.” After joking about the bug-infested islands and harrowing plane flights (“It was so rough the automatic pilot bailed out”), Hope concluded with a sober tribute to the men he had visited, and an appeal to the nation to pull together for final victory:

Sure, a lot of citizens in the States have it pretty tough, with the rationing of meat, shoes, gasoline, and other items. But we’ve been deprived of these things while at home. How’d you like to be deprived of these things while crouched in a foxhole, ducking that lead with your initials on it? Where a bottle of Coke or a beer is a luxury, and hot water and linen are a dim memory, and your bathroom just ain’t. . . . We’ve seen kids smile for the last time, and other boys spending long, monotonous, pain-filled hours fighting for their lives, after fighting for yours. Ladies and gentlemen, it might surprise you to know that these boys, who have made the sacrifice, are also buying bonds. Think it over.

Throughout the war, President Roosevelt had sought to convince the nation that the battles overseas and the war effort back home, from recycling rubber to buying war bonds, were inextricable, all part of the same great national crusade. Hope, with his blunt, no-nonsense wartime prose, brought that message home like no one else.

The long trip back to the United States went through Wake Island and took fifty hours. In all, Hope’s Pacific tour had encompassed thirty thousand miles and 150 shows in eight weeks. Arriving in Burbank on Saturday, September 2, at the Lockheed Air Terminal, Hope was welcomed home by Dolores and the kids, along with a gaggle of reporters and photographers. His bags were filled with souvenirs of the trip—Japanese swords and guns, a native chieftain’s cane. Four-year-old Tony greeted his father, “Good-bye, Daddy.” Dolores had to explain:
“He’s so used to seeing Bob going away, he can’t get used to his coming home.”

•  •  •

Though his wartime tours were a high point of his performing life and a mission he passionately believed in, they were a financial sacrifice for Hope. The USO paid its performers only a nominal amount, and by spending two months out of the summer entertaining the troops overseas, Hope was giving up a lot of potentially lucrative paydays. Still, he was one of Hollywood’s top earners in these years. He was making $100,000 per picture, and that, combined with his radio show, stage appearances, and other ventures, brought his income close to $1 million a year. But Hope was chafing under the three-picture-a-year pace that Paramount was keeping him on—and was dismayed that so much of the money he made was going to the government in taxes.

His lawyer, Martin Gang, suggested a creative solution. Hope could improve his bottom line, Gang said, by setting up his own production company and, instead of getting a salary, taking a share of the profits from his films, thus allowing him to pay taxes at the lower corporate rate. Hope liked the idea and took Paramount chief Y. Frank Freeman to lunch to propose it. Freeman, a gentlemanly Southerner, listened politely, but refused flatly:
“I don’t see how we can let you do that, Bob.”

Hope responded by going on strike. He refused to do the next two
films that Paramount had lined up for him: a cameo appearance in
Duffy’s Tavern
(an all-star screen version of the popular radio series) and a starring role, with Paulette Goddard, in a film called
My Favorite Brunette.
When Hope didn’t show up for the scheduled first day of shooting on
Brunette
, on Monday, November 6, 1944, the studio suspended him.

Hope quickly took charge of the spin, claiming that
he
was suspending the studio. He was too busy with his war-related work, he said, to do three films a year for Paramount.
“Just now I’ve been to Toronto, New York, Akron, Chicago, and Topeka—all war-benefit appearances,” he told a reporter. “In the next month I do six more shows—three in Chicago and one each in Atlanta, Cleveland, and Independence, Kansas. . . . And I’ve got five or ten wires on my desk, asking me to give shows at other service camps along the way. These things are important. There are thousands of kids waiting there.” In an interview with the
Los Angeles Times
, he added,
“I’m not underrating the importance of motion pictures to a career. But there is a big horizon to the present situation that has to be recognized. Now is the time above all others to give to the war effort, and if what entertainers do is helpful and morale building, then this is the time for them to concentrate on that sort of helpfulness.”