Hope: Entertainer of the Century (45 page)

“I can’t tell you how happy I am to be up here on the moon with you,” Hope says in his opening monologue, standing in front of a curtain on the makeshift stage in the converted gym at Thule. “It’s the only place in the world where you get a good-conduct medal just for being alive.” A half dozen dancing girls, dressed in parkas and skating skirts fringed in white fur, sing, “Why do they call it Greenland when everything looks so white?” Holden, adopting his swaggering, cigar-chomping
Stalag 17
persona, joins Hope for some repartee and later runs around supplying the props as Hope and Whiting do a patter-and-song number, “Make Yourself Comfortable.” In a sketch, Hope and Holden (joined by the scruffy Robert Strauss, one of Holden’s costars from
Stalag 17
) play stir-crazy servicemen who vie for the chance to give a tour of the base to Ekberg (as a
New York Times
reporter!). The familiar jokes about lonely, sex-starved servicemen, along with the sight of big Hollywood stars working with makeshift sets and community-theater production facilities, were a warming touch of home for the men stuck in this forlorn outpost. The special that was edited from the trip drew more viewers than any other Hope TV show yet, with a whopping 60 percent share of the viewing audience.

Hope recognized a winning formula when he saw one. The following year, in the midst of filming
The Iron Petticoat
in London, he took a break at Christmas to do some shows for the US troops stationed in Iceland, bringing along blond British sexpot Diana Dors as a guest star. Excerpts from the shows were edited into a special that Hope had already recorded back in Hollywood.

The Iceland trip was notable mainly for a mishap that didn’t make it into the show. Among the entertainers Hope brought along was a blond, five-foot-ten-inch strongwoman named Jean Rhodes, who bent steel bars and did a bit with Hope in which she lifted him on her shoulders while they sang “Embraceable You.” Her tacky vaudeville act (testimony to Hope’s low standards for entertainment when it involved curvaceous gals) went well enough until the last show, when Rhodes lost her balance after lifting up Hope, plunging him headfirst to the floor. He cut his nose and wrenched his neck and was flown immediately back to London for X-rays. There were no broken bones (and he was well enough to host a British TV show the next day), though Hope later speculated that the accident may have triggered the eye problems that began to plague him a few years later.

The trip that decisively established Hope’s Christmas tours as an annual tradition came a year later, in December 1956, when he made a more extensive tour of US bases in Alaska. His top-billed guests were Hollywood star Ginger Rogers and New York Yankees slugger Mickey Mantle (who played a mama’s boy Army recruit in one sketch, with Hope as his hard-bitten sergeant). The entertainment seemed a little retro for an audience of young servicemen in the early years of rock ’n’ roll: Hope donned top hat and tails for a dance number with the forty-five-year-old Rogers; housemother Hedda Hopper was back, gossiping about old Hollywood; and Hope’s idea of a young act for “you cats who dig talent” was pert vocalist Peggy King, from the
George Gobel Show
, who sang “I’ve Grown Accustomed to His Face.” Still, it was a glittery package of stars, songs, and comedy, for an audience that was starved for it.

His popular Christmas shows helped send Hope’s ratings soaring.
For the 1955–56 season, his specials aired on Tuesday nights, sponsored by Chevrolet and alternating with Milton Berle and Martha Raye. Hope was the only one of the three who regularly beat the hot new sitcom airing opposite them on CBS—Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko in
You’ll Never Get Rich
. For the 1956–57 season, still sponsored by Chevrolet, Hope moved to Sunday nights, alternating with Dinah Shore and Ray Bolger, and drew even mightier ratings. By early 1957 his shows were averaging 41 million viewers a week, and
Variety
was marveling at his staying power after seven years on television.
“In an era when even the best of ’em consider they’ve ‘had it’ after a three-four-season TV span, the multiplying payoff on Hope’s seven-year itch for the Top 10 continues as the TV Ripley of the Decade.”

Hope’s shows in these years were probably the best of his TV career. The sketches, though hardly comedy classics, were more elaborately staged and better written, at their funniest when spoofing current movies and TV shows: a 1956 parody of
The Desperate Hours
, for example, with Hope in the Bogart role as an escaped convict holding a suburban family hostage, but having trouble getting their attention away from the TV set. Or Hope as a Colonel Parker–like rock ’n’ roll impresario, trying to turn meek Wally Cox into a teen idol. (When Cox asks where all his money has gone, Hope responds indignantly, “Have you ever heard my honesty questioned?” Cox: “I’ve never even heard it mentioned.”)

In his monologues, Hope seemed more conscious of his role as a comedic barometer of current events and national concerns. “There’s been a lot of exciting news these past couple of weeks,” Hope began one monologue in the fall of 1955. “The stock market is holding its own, Archie Moore is holding his head, Perón is holding the bag, and Eddie and Debbie are holding each other, for release at a more convenient time”—surely the only comedian who could combine a defeated heavyweight boxer, an ousted Argentine dictator, and a newlywed Hollywood couple into one gag line. He took note of world crises (“How about that Suez Canal?”) and presidential politics (“Adlai made so many campaign promises, Ike voted for him”). He poked fun at big-money quiz shows and Hollywood epics such as
The Ten
Commandments
and, endlessly, Elvis Presley, the pelvis-shaking rock ’n’ roll sensation who was about to go into the Army. “He’ll be the only private the Army ever had that can roll the dice without taking them out of his pocket,” said Hope. And: “Can’t wait to see Elvis on guard duty, yelling, ‘Halt, who goes there, friend or square?’ ” And: “Elvis is asking for a deferment, on the grounds that it would create a hardship for Ed Sullivan.”

Sometimes the jokes could ruffle feathers. In 1956, when Britain’s Princess Margaret broke off her engagement to the divorced Captain Peter Townsend under pressure from the Church of England, Hope joked about the thwarted affair as he prepared for a trip to London. Among the sights he was looking forward to seeing, he said, was “Buckingham Palace, the guards out front, and Margaret’s handkerchief drying out the window.” His quips
drew protests from both Canadian and British fans, who thought Hope was disrespectful. He got complaints of a different kind from NBC station executives, who objected to his frequent use of product names in his jokes—plugs that often resulted in free merchandise for Hope and his writers.

Hope may have felt entitled to a few perks, for he claimed that he was losing money on his television work. Hope Enterprises received a fixed amount from NBC for each special, meant to cover the talent, writers, and other production costs.
When Hope looked at the books in the fall of 1956, he realized that he was losing money on the deal—a total of $93,000 in the red for his first three NBC specials for the 1956–57 season, according to his accounting.
“I’m a hit but going broke, as far as TV is concerned,” he told reporters. “I wish I could afford TV, but judging from the losses so far this season, I don’t think so.”

It was somewhat disingenuous; even if the shows were running a deficit, Hope personally was still raking in plenty from the network—upward of $1 million a year. But it was a fine negotiating tactic. In early 1957 Hope got NBC to renegotiate his contract, retroactive to 1955.
Under the new deal, NBC would pay $15 million for forty TV specials over five years—an average of $375,000 for each show. With the specials budgeted at around $130,000 apiece, that meant
Hope cleared at least $200,000 per show, putting his yearly income from NBC at around $1.5 million. As part of the new deal, NBC also pledged to invest $10 million in five Hope films, thus becoming a partner in his moviemaking for the first time.

Hope would renew his contract with NBC every five years, and he always drove a hard bargain. Hope was such a ratings powerhouse that NBC had little choice but to make him happy, and he squeezed the network wherever he could. NBC had a rate card for the use of its production facilities, for instance, and the costs went up steadily over the years—for everyone but Hope, whose charges were grandfathered at the mid-1950s rate. NBC designed an entire studio to Hope’s specifications, with the seats steeply raked so that the audience would be as close to him as possible. (It later became the home of Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show
, but was always Hope’s for the asking.) What’s more, as a sweetener for each contract renewal, Hope would demand a side deal in which NBC purchased one piece of property from him—a way for him to realize some profits from his steadily appreciating real estate holdings.
“The land purchase was done directly between me and Bob,” said Tom Sarnoff, NBC’s West Coast vice president of business affairs during most of those years. “He was a tough negotiator. He knew what he wanted.”

Hope began accumulating real estate on a large scale in the 1950s, using the money he and Crosby earned from their lucrative Texas oil wells. In 1955, Hope bought a 1,695-acre ranch in Ventura County from Jim and Marian Jordan, radio’s Fibber McGee and Molly, for $400,000. Hope picked up several more large parcels over the next few years in the San Fernando Valley, Malibu, and the desert communities around Palm Springs, as well as smaller pieces in Arizona and Ohio. He also owned several undeveloped lots in Burbank, including one adjoining NBC’s headquarters and another next door to Universal Pictures—the site of a golf driving range run for years by Hope’s brother-in-law and eventually sold to Universal, which turned it into the entrance to its new theme park. He bought most of this land cheap and held on to it for years.
“Bob was known to hang on to his real
estate,” said Art Linkletter, who partnered with Hope in several deals. “In fact, I stopped doing deals with him because he never wanted to sell anything.” At his peak Hope owned more than ten thousand acres of Southern California real estate, reputedly more than any other private landowner in the state.

He had an array of other investments as well. He was still part owner of the Cleveland Indians, and in 1949 he bought an 11 percent share of the Los Angeles Rams football team. He headed a group that owned Denver TV station KOA and in 1957 acquired WREX-TV in Rockford, Illinois. Yet he always downplayed his business successes, complaining about how much he had to pay back to the government in taxes. (Hope, with his old-fashioned, Main Street approach to business, never went in for sophisticated tax-shelter arrangements, which might have reduced his tax burden.) He loved to gripe about the business opportunities he’d passed up—an offer to get in on the ground floor of Polaroid, for example, or the time Walt Disney asked if Hope wanted to invest in the big theme park Disney was building in Anaheim. Hope turned him down, convinced that Disneyland would be a flop. If he had only said yes, Hope would tell friends, “I could have been a rich man.”

The business that took up most of his time and attention, however, was the enterprise known as Bob Hope. He gathered around him a large and devoted support staff: his two agents, Louis Shurr and Jimmy Saphier; attorneys Martin Gang and Norman Tyre of the law firm Gang, Kopp & Tyre (surely the most aptly named in Hollywood); and a corps of well-connected publicity agents. Hope’s brother Jack became the nominal producer of his TV shows, while old cronies from Cleveland and vaudeville, such as Eddie Rio and Mark Anthony, were brought on in various capacities. At the center of the operation was Marjorie Hughes, a prim and poised graduate of UCLA who joined his staff in 1942 and served as Hope’s chief assistant for thirty-one years. “Miss Hughes,” as she was always addressed by everyone in the office (including Hope), ran the office, oversaw his schedule, and helped answer his voluminous mail—answers that Hope would usually dictate
personally, but which always bore her delicate and dignified touch. Watching over it all was Hope, a hands-on CEO of the most sophisticated star-managing enterprise of the twentieth century.

•  •  •

It is hard to overstate Bob Hope’s achievement as a multimedia star in the 1950s. Success in movies and television in those years was almost mutually exclusive. Top movie stars (Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner—practically anyone you could name) almost never did television, while TV’s biggest stars, for the most part, had either left their movie careers behind (such as Lucille Ball or Red Skelton) or never had one to begin with (Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason). The only other stars besides Hope who achieved major success in both movies and TV in the 1950s were Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis—but Lewis’s TV career went nowhere after the duo split in 1956, and Martin didn’t get his own variety show until the late 1960s, when his movie career was winding down. No one came close to matching Hope’s two-decade run as a star of both major Hollywood movies and top-rated TV shows.

To be sure, by the mid-1950s Hope was no longer the box-office kingpin that he was back in the 1940s. But his 1955 hit
The Seven Little Foys
proved that he could still, with the right vehicle, attract big crowds to the theaters. What’s more, his critical and popular success with
Foys
, in a meaty, semidramatic role, encouraged Hope to stretch himself and look for more ambitious film parts. The second half of the 1950s was a time of experimentation for him—not always successful, but also not the mark of a comedian who was resting on his laurels.

That Certain Feeling
, his first film after
The Seven Little Foys
, was a return to more conventional romantic comedy. But it was unusual for Hope in being based on a Broadway play—
The King of Hearts
, by Jean Kerr and Eleanor Brooke, which ran for eight months in 1954—and casting him in a relatively realistic, contemporary role. He plays Francis X. Dignan, a neurotically insecure cartoonist who is hired to “ghost” the popular comic strip of a pompous colleague named Larry Larkin, played by George Sanders. The instigator of this arrangement
is Larkin’s assistant and fiancée, who also happens to be Dignan’s ex-wife—played by Eva Marie Saint, in her first movie after her Oscar-winning film debut in
On the Waterfront.