Hope: Entertainer of the Century (35 page)

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Hope stuck close to home in early 1947, shooting
Road to Rio
, the fifth in the series, in January and February and then spending six weeks with the family in Palm Springs, where he now owned a small house on Buena Vista Drive—the first of three homes Hope would acquire in the desert community, which was growing in popularity as a winter retreat for Hollywood’s rich and famous. There was talk of Hope’s
returning to Broadway in a new Irving Berlin musical, or
making a trip to Europe and North Africa in the summer, retracing his first World War II tour. But neither materialized. Instead, in June, Bob took Dolores and the two older kids on a vacation to South America. They visited Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and a half dozen other capitals; in Montevideo they
stayed at the palatial estate of Alberto Cernadas, the most recent husband of Hope’s former radio foil Patricia “Honey Chile” Wilder. On the boat ride back to New York,
Hope got so sunburned (aggravating it with a golf game when he got back) that he had to delay the start of his next film—
The Paleface
, ironically enough.

On radio, meanwhile, Hope was hitting a rough patch. First came more criticism from religious groups over his risqué material.
Jimmie Fidler, one of the many entertainment columnists with whom Hope was friendly, gave Hope an early warning of trouble in November 1946, passing along a letter from a Catholic high school student, who said her teacher had requested the class “not to listen to his program because it is so unclean.” Fidler told Hope, “It is one of many letters I have received, voicing the same charge. If such a thing as this should gather momentum, Bob, it could be disastrous.” In a poll of twenty thousand Catholic and Protestant college students in late 1947,
Hope was branded the most tasteless comedian on the air.

The bad publicity was upsetting to Hope—and, he felt, unfair. Hope’s material was often suggestive, but rarely over the line. On the few occasions when he let himself go, the censors were usually there to protect him. In April 1947 he hosted an hour-long radio special
for Walgreens drugstores, with Groucho Marx among the guests. The show was running long, and by the time Groucho was introduced, a half hour late, he was annoyed. “Why, Groucho Marx! What are you doing way out here in the Sahara Desert?” Hope asked, following the script. “Desert, hell! I’ve been standing in a drafty corridor for forty-five minutes,” Groucho ad-libbed. Hope cracked up, and what followed was
an innuendo-laden free-for-all between the two comics, little of which could be used on the air. (John Guedel, producer of the radio show
People Are Funny
, who was in the studio, was so impressed with Groucho’s ad-libbing that he created a game show for him,
You Bet Your Life
, which revived Groucho’s career.)

Hope’s biggest run-in with NBC censors, however, had nothing to do with racy material, only corporate sensitivities. On Fred Allen’s show of April 20, 1947, NBC censored about thirty seconds in which Allen made some wisecracks about an (unnamed) NBC programming vice president. The incident was widely reported, and Hope made a joke about it on his own show two nights later. Las Vegas was a town “where you can get tanned and faded [at the craps tables] at the same time,” Hope cracked. Then he added, “Of course, Fred Allen can get faded [censored] anytime.”
The network bleeped out Hope’s line.

The network’s hypersensitivity (Red Skelton was also censored on the same night for making a wisecrack about the Allen incident) prompted derisive criticism in the press. NBC president Niles Trammell eventually issued a conciliatory statement, calling the censoring of Allen’s original lines a mistake. But Hope got into more hot water a few weeks later, in a segment with guest star Frank Sinatra. In saying his good-nights,
Hope told Sinatra, “I’ll be seeing you tomorrow night on your show.” The line got bleeped because Sinatra’s show was on CBS, and NBC had a ban on plugs for the rival network. (NBC didn’t apologize for that one, reiterating its policy against cross-network plugs.)

Hope’s battles with the network got plenty of publicity, but didn’t do much to perk up a radio show that was beginning to sound a little tired. In the fall of 1946 Hope tried freshening up the old format with a new bandleader (Latin nightclub star Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball’s husband, who replaced Skinnay Ennis); a new sidekick, Vera Vague
(another shrill, man-chasing spinster character, played by Barbara Jo Allen); and a few new comedy twists, such as a recurring bit in which Hope has conversations with his “conscience.” (It didn’t last long.) In a more important symbolic break with the wartime years, Hope said good-bye to the singer who had been identified with him for five years, Frances Langford, replacing her with a series of guest vocalists.

But the following season even that mildly innovative spirit seemed to be gone. Arnaz was replaced by Les Brown and his more traditional big band, and the show’s formula was sounding increasingly stale and predictable: the weekly back-and-forth jousts with “Professor” Colonna; the man-chasing gags from Vera Vague; even the “Poor Miriam” musical jingles for Irium, the new whitening ingredient in Pepsodent—sung by a group called the Starlighters, which included a young Andy Williams.

The critics were starting to grouse.
“You could enjoy it if you had not heard it the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth times,” wrote the
New York Times
’ Jack Gould, reviewing the premiere of Hope’s ninth season, in September 1946. A year later,
Variety
was even more cutting. “Here’s the epitome of radio’s
‘sad saga of sameness,’ ” began its review of Hope’s season opener in 1947:

Apparently it’s just too much to expect that Hope would veer an inch from his time-tested routine. His answer, it goes without saying, is: Why get out of the rut when there’s pay dirt in it? And top pay dirt at that! By Hooper’s count, too, Hope seems to be justified. His routine is apparently one of the things we fought the war for, like Ma’s apple pie. Question simply is: Who’s going to outlive the other: Hope or the listening public?

Hope’s ratings were still strong (though no longer consistently No. 1), but he was encountering something he hadn’t since
The Pepsodent Show
first went on the air back in 1938: a growing sense that Hope was old hat.

Hope’s relations with his sponsor were also deteriorating. Pepsodent chief Charles Luckman—now the president of Lever Brothers,
the British conglomerate that had acquired the toothpaste company—was Hope’s original radio patron and considered himself a fan and a friend. But he and Hope were increasingly at odds—over Hope’s demands for more money (
“I can tell the seasons of the year and the Crossley ratings just by the tone of Hope’s voice when he phones me for a raise,” Luckman said), his resistance to making changes in the show after the war, and more recently his constant traveling. Hope liked taking the show on the road, where he always got a great reception from the live audiences. But each location show cost about $25,000 more than a studio show, and Luckman thought it was getting too expensive.

The travel issue came to a head in November 1947, when Hope was invited to attend the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth in London and to headline a gala for the royal family at the Odeon Theater. Luckman objected to the trip since it would take Hope away from the studio for three weeks. But Hope refused to cancel, promising to do his radio shows from London while he was away. Luckman’s fears were realized when the transatlantic crossing aboard the
Queen Mary
was delayed, and Hope
had to miss the first week’s broadcast—the first time in ten years that Hope was a no-show on his own radio program. (Eddie Cantor replaced him, joined by an array of NBC guest stars, including Red Skelton, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Amos and Andy.)

The London trip may have been a flash point for Pepsodent, but it was a triumph for Hope. He brought along Dolores, as well as three writers (among them
Fred Williams, an alcoholic rapscallion who keeled over drunk in front of the royal family in the lobby of the Odeon Theater), and the Odeon show was a hit with the royal audience.
Queen Elizabeth reportedly “laughed so hard at some of Bob’s cracking that she nearly split her seams.” After the show, Hope presented the royal family with a book of autographed photos of Hollywood stars.

As Hope was leafing through the book, King George piped up,
“Look at him. He’s hurrying to get to his own picture.”

“Why not?” Hope replied. “It’s the prettiest.”

“Is Bing’s autograph there too?”

“Yes, but he doesn’t write. He just made three
X
s.”

The ad-lib session between Hope and King George made headlines around the world.

While he was in London, Hope met with US Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who asked if Hope would make an impromptu trip to West Germany, to do some shows for US occupation forces there. Dolores objected that he was too exhausted, but Hope jumped at the chance to entertain his favorite audiences once again. He did several shows in Frankfurt and Bremerhaven for the troops, before his voice gave out and he had to cancel the last couple of appearances. He flew back to London, where he broadcast one more radio show before taking a flight back to New York. Dolores returned separately by ship.

Hope was thrilled to be called into service by his country once again. Back in Los Angeles, he held a press conference to talk up his trip and urge more US aid to Europe.
“The most important thing for us in America today is to maintain our friendship with the people of Europe,” he told reporters. “We have to support the Marshall Plan. This is a wonderful Shangri-la we’re living in over here, and we should share it with the Europeans before other forces move in and make them our enemies.”

Hope’s political views were well in the mainstream internationalist spirit of the times. Though always a political conservative, Hope liked and admired President Truman—joking often about his fights with Congress, his Missouri roots, and his daughter Margaret’s musical ambitions. (The jokes about Margaret drew angry mail from some listeners, who thought Hope was disrespectful.) He was a strong anticommunist, but again hardly outside the mainstream in those early Cold War years, when fears of the Soviet threat were at a peak. “The Russians say they can’t do anything until they get international cooperation,” went a typical Hope joke. “International cooperation—that’s ‘Show us how to make the atom bomb and we’ll show you where New York City used to be.’ ”

In the fall of 1947, when Congress was probing alleged Communist infiltration in Hollywood (an investigation that resulted in the blacklisting of the so-called Hollywood Ten), Hope took his show to
Claremore, Oklahoma, the birthplace of Will Rogers. In paying tribute to the beloved political humorist, Hope did little to disguise his anti-Red sentiments:
“The only sad thing about coming to Claremore,” he said, “is that Will Rogers isn’t here to say a few things about our troubled times with the tolerance and humor that made him an all-time great. ‘I see by the papers,’ he might have said, ‘they’ve uncovered a few Reds out in Hollywood. Personally I’ve never preferred my politics in Technicolor, and when boy meets girl in the movies, I like to have them riding on the Freedom Train.’ ”

Hope was growing bolder in speaking out—cloaking himself in the unabashed patriotism of the war years, even as the world was growing more complicated. He was still groping for a role for himself in the postwar years, and fighting a perception that he and his radio show had not changed with the times.

In one area, however, Hope’s audience was happy to see how little things had changed.
Paramount had initially vowed that
Road to Utopia
, filmed in 1944 and released in early 1946, would be the last of the
Road
pictures. The movies were getting too expensive, and working around Hope’s and Crosby’s schedules too difficult. But the two stars wanted to continue, and they worked out a three-way coproduction deal with Paramount to film a fifth in the series,
Road to Rio.
Released at the end of 1947, it was another first-rate comedy, and one of the most successful of the whole series.

With a financial stake in the film, Hope and Crosby were unusually businesslike on the set: no more extended lunch breaks or afternoons playing hooky on the golf course.
“Bing and I hardly left the set, except to go to the men’s room,” said Hope. “At precisely sixty minutes after lunch was called, Bing would say, ‘All right, let’s get moving. What are we waiting for?’ ” Yet the film, directed by Norman Z. McLeod (whose comedy credits included two early Marx Brothers films and W. C. Fields’s masterpiece
It’s a Gift
), was a relatively elaborate production, with a large supporting cast that included the Andrews Sisters (who sing “You Don’t Have to Know the Language”) and the Wiere Brothers, doing a funny turn as a Brazilian street band impersonating American jazz musicians. Hope even threw in a part for his radio pal
Colonna, who leads a cavalry charge that comes up empty in the film’s last reel.

The boys, once again, are carnival entertainers, with Hope again conned by Crosby into performing a daredevil stunt, this time riding a bicycle across a high wire. (“You know, this picture could end right here,” he quips while hanging on for his life.) Bing and Bob stow away on a ship to Rio and meet Lamour, who shows a mysterious split personality: flirting with them seductively one minute and rejecting them coldly the next. Turns out she’s been hypnotized by her evil aunt (Gale Sondergaard) so that she will go through with an arranged marriage. “I found myself saying things I didn’t know why I was saying them,” she says, emerging from one of her hypnotic trances. Hope: “Why don’t you just run for Congress and leave us alone.”

Hope is fast, funny, and fully engaged, nailing every exasperated reaction and outshining Crosby almost every step of the way. (In their song-and-dance routines, Hope shows off some still agile hoofing, while Crosby merely goes through the motions.) The film is the most polished and least manic of the
Road
pictures, with more care taken in setting up the story and the running gags. If
Road to Utopia
was Hope and Crosby’s
Duck Soup
—their surreal high point—
Road to Rio
is their
Night at the Opera
, the
Road
film for everyone. It took in $4.5 million at the box office—the top-grossing movie for all of 1947.