Hope: Entertainer of the Century (32 page)

It was a shrewd appeal to patriotism in what was essentially a contract dispute. For six months there was a stalemate, as Hope refused to work.
My Favorite Brunette
was shelved. (Hope made a picture with the same title three years later, but with a different script and another costar, Dorothy Lamour.)
Road to Utopia
, which had finished shooting in February 1944, was held back from release, ostensibly because Paramount had a logjam of wartime films. Moviegoers were about to experience something they hadn’t since Hope made his feature-film debut in
The Big Broadcast of 1938
: after the release of
The Princess and the Pirate
in the fall of 1944, more than a year passed without a Bob Hope picture.

While Hope was fighting with his movie studio, he was embroiled in a different sort of dispute over his radio program. In November 1944 an editorial in the
Pilot
, the weekly newspaper of Boston’s
Roman Catholic archdiocese, raised objections to the sexually suggestive jokes that Hope was doing for his military audiences. The editorial called Hope’s material “artful filth,” claiming it encouraged promiscuity among married servicemen and put lewd thoughts into the heads of young, impressionable ones.
“Some of the servicemen are boys barely past adolescence,” the Catholic paper said. “Their mothers knew that they were delivering their cherished sons to danger of death. They accepted that. But they never supposed that their boys would be exposed to ‘entertainment’ which might ruin their souls.”

Battles over Hope’s allegedly lewd material had been going on for years, though mostly behind closed doors. Notes from a 1942 meeting of NBC executives revealed that serious consideration was given to pulling Hope’s show from the air after complaints from several New England stations about his off-color jokes. One NBC executive even proposed leaking news of the stations’ complaints to the press, to pressure Hope and other radio comics to tone down their material:

I think if we came out with some publicity, stating that 11 New England stations threaten to cancel a certain program of a certain well-known comedian and give the reasons for it, you are not hurting the comedian and you are making four or five of them [radio comedians] sit up and take notice, why then you are drawing first blood in this and they are on the defensive. And I don’t know that [CBS] would be willing to take a show that we threw off the air or which we cancelled because we wouldn’t go for stuff which we regarded as being lewd.

There’s no evidence NBC came close to acting on this rather outlandish suggestion. But the Catholic complaints, aired in public, presented a more delicate problem for Hope.
“I think it is only fair to me to point out that if my shows were offensive,” he responded carefully, “I could hardly have reached the position of where a great nationwide audience hears my radio program regularly, considering what public taste means.” The controversy percolated for several weeks. Another Catholic paper, Chicago’s
Novena Notes
, published the results of a poll of ten thousand readers, who voted Hope the entertainer who
“most
consistently violates” Christian principles. (Milton Berle was second.) Both supporters and foes inundated Hope with letters. (
“Risqué stories—phooey!” said one defender. “I’ll bet that editor loves them.”)
Boxoffice
magazine came to his defense, declaring the attacks
“as unfair a charge against a great entertainer and a good American as has been treated to printer’s ink in many years.” In the end, the campaign made little dent in Hope’s enormous popularity. For the 1944–45 season,
The Pepsodent Show
finished first in the Hooper ratings by its biggest margin ever—drawing 34.1 percent of the radio audience, more than 3 points higher than the show in second place,
Fibber McGee and Molly.

The only thing that could possibly slow down the Bob Hope juggernaut was his health. In May 1944 he
had to take off five days for an eye operation—its exact nature unclear, but possibly the first sign of the eye problems that would plague him in later years. In January 1945 Hope’s doctor, Hugh Strathearn, raised concerns about an electrocardiogram that, while in the normal range,
“showed that you have been under a terrific strain, as far as your heart muscles are concerned.” In a letter to Hope, who was traveling, the doctor added, “I do not feel that this condition is serious at this time, but I do think that it would be wise for you to plan to cut down on some of the activities which keep you under a nervous tension, and take a good rest when you come back to California. . . . After all, no human being can stand the strain that you must have been under the past few years.”

Yet he seemed incapable of cutting back. In January 1945, Hope traveled East for several war-related benefits and to accept the Gold Medal of Achievement from Philadelphia’s Poor Richard Club. He did more shows for Armed Forces Radio, including a celebrated musical parody of Dick Tracy for
Command Performance
, with an all-star cast that included Bing Crosby, Jimmy Durante, Judy Garland, and Dinah Shore (Hope played Flattop). He even became a newspaper columnist.

After seeing the columns that he had sent back from his 1944 Pacific tour for the Hearst syndicate, William Randolph Hearst personally urged Hope to continue them when he returned. Now Hope (meaning his writers, of course) was turning out a five-day-a-week
column called It Says Here, with breezy observations on everything from buying tires and picking out a Christmas tree to visiting a veterans’ hospital in Atlanta. More than seventy newspapers picked up the column, and
Hope got 50 percent of the gross proceeds. At a time when several other Hollywood stars, such as Orson Welles and Gracie Allen, were experimenting with newspaper columns, Hope’s was, as usual, the most successful, and it continued for several years after the war, until he walked away from it in the early 1950s.

On March 15, 1945,
Hope returned to host the Academy Awards ceremony, after a year off. (Jack Benny had replaced him for the 1944 awards, explaining, “I’m here through the courtesy of Bob Hope’s having a bad cold.”) The event was no longer a banquet, but now took place at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and for the first time it was broadcast nationally, by ABC radio. Hope, who took over the show after director John Cromwell handled some of the early awards, was in fine form throughout. When eight-year-old Margaret O’Brien was given a special Oscar, Hope lifted her up so she could reach the radio microphone. After holding her for a few seconds, he quipped, “Would you hurry and grow up, please?” When Paramount’s production chief Buddy DeSylva came up to accept the Best Picture award for
Going My Way
, Hope got down on his hands and knees, pulled out a handkerchief, and started shining DeSylva’s shoes—a reference to the star’s well-publicized dispute with the studio. When his friend Bing Crosby won the Best Actor award for
Going My Way
, Hope cracked that Crosby winning an Oscar was “like Sam Goldwyn lecturing at Oxford.” But Hope got an award too—his second honorary one, a life membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, presented to him by Walter Wanger. “I guess I get the consolation prize,” Hope said.

The impasse with Paramount came to an end on May 6, 1945, when
Hope signed a new seven-year contract that allowed him to set up his own production company. Hope Enterprises, the new company, was allowed to produce one film a year on its own and to partner with Paramount on the rest. A few stars—notably James Cagney and Bing Crosby—had already set up similar production companies. But Hope’s very public victory in his battle with Paramount was considered a
watershed.
“When a star of Hope’s stature announces he doesn’t want to work for nothing, who can blame him?” wrote Florabel Muir in the
New York Daily Mirror.
“Which is why we are going to see more and more top stars going as independent as they can.” And they did. Over the next decade more top actors such as Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas started their own production companies, and by the 1980s nearly every major star in Hollywood had a production deal modeled on the one that Hope set up in 1945.

Before returning to the Paramount lot, however, Hope had more war work to do. World events were moving swiftly. On April 12, President Roosevelt died suddenly from a brain hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia. Hope gave up five minutes of airtime on his show the following Tuesday for an address to the nation by the new president, Harry Truman. On April 30, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, and a week later Germany surrendered unconditionally, ending the war in Europe. Yet Hope pressed on. On May 12 he was in Washington to host a three-hour NBC radio show kicking off another war bond drive. Afterward, Hope got a tour of the White House from President Truman and did a show for the new first family. Hope finished his radio season on the road, then prepared for one last wartime tour—to entertain the American troops still in Europe, now an occupying force itching to come home.

One familiar companion was missing. Frances Langford had parlayed her wartime popularity into a summer radio show of her own (after a legal battle with Pepsodent, which claimed she was exclusively bound to Hope’s show) and couldn’t join him on the tour. In her place, Hope brought along a pinup-pretty, redheaded singer named Gale Robbins, along with Colonna, Romano, Patty Thomas, and Jack Pepper. With fewer restrictions on the size of his troupe, Hope also added two more singer-musicians, June Bruner and Ruth Denas, and even a writer, Roger Price.

They took the slow route to Europe this time, sailing aboard the
Queen Mary
—the ship Hope had last taken in 1939, when the first guns of World War II were sounding. They visited air bases in England and did a show for ten thousand GIs at London’s Albert Hall,
then went to Paris, which was crawling with American entertainers, from Mickey Rooney to Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Hope entertained the 438th Troop Carrier Group in Amiens, near the site of the Normandy landing, then headed south to Arles and Marseille. He was emceeing an all-star benefit at a soccer park in Nice when
he spotted Maurice Chevalier in the audience. The French star had drawn harsh criticism for cooperating with the German-backed Vichy government during the war. But when Hope called him to the stage, the former Paramount star got a warm reception and sang a medley of his songs. Chevalier never forgot Hope’s kindness.

Hope and his troupe then flew to Bremen for a tour of occupied Germany—Hope sending back dispatches for his newspaper column at every stop. They performed for throngs of US troops in Potsdam, Heidelberg, and Berlin. Unlike on his previous tours, however, Hope found many of his GI audiences restless, distracted, eager to get home. At one stop, Hope referred to the American soldiers as “occupation troops” and was greeted with a howl of protest. “Well, that’s what they told me,” he responded weakly.
“Everything was different from the last time we’d played the European theater,” Hope wrote. “Last time the men who saw our shows were hopped up with the anticipation of impending combat. They wanted to like everything. This time they listened to us while packing.”

The war ended in the middle of his tour. Hope was playing Ping-Pong in his billet in Nuremberg when the word came that Japan had surrendered. An announcement was made to the crowd gathered at Soldiers Field, formerly Nuremberg Stadium, for the GI Olympics.
“Those boys in the stadium rose twenty-five feet in the air and yelled for twenty minutes,” Hope wrote in his column. “What a thrill it was to hear those American cheers for victory in a place where Adolf used to hold yearly heiling practice.”
Hope’s official itinerary had him continuing on the tour for two more weeks, but he wrapped up early, flying back to New York on August 21 and returning to California a week later. It’s not clear why Hope cut his tour short. The end of the war may have taken the wind out of his sails, or he may simply have been worn-out. But his great World War II adventure was over.

It had been a transforming experience for Hope. He carried the memories, and the patriotic glow, of his World War II tours with him forever. He brought back souvenirs—a piece of Hitler’s stationery from the Führer’s Berlin bunker, a photo of General Patton peeing in the Rhine that Patton himself had given him. Hope had a photographic recall of places and dates, the officers he had met, and the units he had entertained. He got letters, thousands of them, from servicemen and their families, thanking him for being there. He answered nearly all of them, often with personal comments and jokes, establishing a permanent bond with the soldiers who had seen and been moved by him.
“It was a pleasure to hear from you and as much of a surprise,” one GI stationed in Iran wrote him in December 1944, after getting one of Hope’s personal replies. “Can’t we become pals and write? I’ve always enjoyed your screen and radio acting, but never once did I think that you would step down to write to a common US soldier.”

Hope’s wartime tours, critics would later point out, were also a brilliant career move. Hope cloaked himself in patriotism at a time when patriotism was in fashion, and it made him the most popular entertainer in America. He would try to re-create the experience again and again, in times that had changed without his realizing it. Yet no cynical view of his motives, nothing that happened later during the Vietnam years, could diminish his extraordinary achievement during World War II. He grabbed the moment, and the mission, as no other entertainer ever had.

Now all he had to do was learn how to live with peace.

“Well, here I am starting my eighth year for the same sponsor,” said Bob Hope, opening his new season for Pepsodent on September 11, 1945. “I reenlisted.” The war was over, but as far as his radio show was concerned, Hope was still on a war footing. He broadcast his first show of the season from the Corpus Christi Naval Training Station and continued traveling to military bases throughout the fall—the Victorville Army Air Field, the Santa Ana Army Separation Center, the battleship
South Dakota
in San Francisco Bay. In the euphoria that followed the war’s end, the military crowds were so raucous and responsive that even Hope was taken aback. “Is it that good, really?” he mewled after the outburst for one mild joke on his season opener.