Hope: Entertainer of the Century (47 page)

Hope, accompanied by the two publicists, flew to Copenhagen on March 14, 1958, and from there boarded a Soviet airliner for Moscow. (The writers and Talbot came separately.) Before the flight their passports were checked three times: at the gate, at the bottom of the ramp, and at the top of the ramp. (
“This was to prevent us from changing identities halfway up the stairs,” Hope noted.) Arriving in Moscow, they were greeted by NBC’s Irving R. Levine and a handful of journalists, including two reporters for
Look
magazine, and taken to Moscow’s newest luxury hotel, the Ukraine, where most of the lobby furniture was still covered with sheets.

Hope met first with top officials from the Ministry of Culture and gave them his wish list for the visit: a tour of a Russian TV or movie studio, a visit with students at a Russian university, and a theater where he could do a monologue for an English-speaking audience. The Russians politely took his requests and granted none of them. His efforts to arrange a Moscow opening for
Paris Holiday
also came to naught. For the entire trip Hope suspected that his hotel room was
bugged. One night when he returned to the room, he found his suitcase open and his monologue jokes spread out over the bed.
“I still don’t know who went through those jokes,” Hope wrote later, “and I guess I never will unless Molotov starts doing my act in Pinsk.”

Hope began his sightseeing in Red Square, accompanied by Lachman and with Talbot filming as he visited such landmarks as St. Basil’s Cathedral and Lenin’s tomb, unnoticed by passersby.
“Can you believe it? Not one person knows who I am,” Hope marveled. “Congratulations,” replied Lachman. “Now you know what it’s like to be me.” Talbot was allowed to film freely in most of the approved locations, but when the group wandered off the itinerary to a nightclub to see a popular all-girl orchestra, he had to sneak in his camera and film surreptitiously while a reporter distracted the maître d’.

Hope attended a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet, saw a Russian jazz combo, and went to a Russian puppet show (though most of the footage of these acts used in the show was supplied by his Soviet hosts, shot a year earlier for the fortieth anniversary celebration of the Soviet revolution). When Hope was having no luck making arrangements for a theater for his monologue, US ambassador Llewellyn Thompson offered his residence, Spaso House, for the show. Three hundred people—mostly embassy personnel, their families, and other English-speaking residents of the city—were in the audience as a Russian camera crew filmed Hope making jokes about the Cold War, the cold weather, and his cold reception in Moscow. “I got a wonderful tribute at the airport,” he quipped. “They fired twenty-one shots in the air in my honor. Of course it would have been nicer if they’d waited for the plane to land.” He added, “Surprisingly enough, I’m not having any trouble with the language. Nobody speaks to me.”

Officials at the Ministry of Culture went over his jokes afterward and raised objections to several of them. One was a wisecrack about
Sputnik
, the Soviets’ new space satellite, orbiting the earth every ninety minutes or so. “The Russians are overjoyed at their
Sputnik
,” Hope said. “It’s kind of weird, being in a country where every ninety-two minutes there’s a holiday. Anybody without a stiff neck is a traitor.” The Russians were sincerely proud of their space achievement, he
was told, and “traitor is a very serious charge in Russia.” Hope tried to explain:
“What we are trying to do is to state in a humorous way how proud the people are of their
Sputnik
.” To placate the officials, Hope told them to submit a list of the jokes they were unhappy with and he would consider removing them. Like so much else in his bureaucracy-encrusted visit, the list never came through.

In all, Hope spent six days in Moscow. But he left without his film footage. Talbot had brought forty thousand feet of film from London, intending to process it back home, but the Russians insisted on using their own film and processing it there—adding another layer of uncertainty to the trip. Hope made Lachman and Larkin stay behind, to wait for the processed film and personally bring it back in their luggage. The writers arrived safely with it a day later. So did a bill from the Russians for $1,200, to cover the processing, camera crews, and film clips used in the show. Hope never paid the bill, claiming he didn’t get all the clips he ordered. (He did, however, get the title for a memoir he eventually produced on the trip,
I Owe Russia $1200
, ghostwritten by Lachman.)

The TV special edited from his Soviet trip,
Bob Hope in Moscow
, aired on Saturday night, April 5, 1958, and was one of his finest achievements. Clips of Hope sightseeing in Moscow are interspersed with footage of Soviet entertainers—ballerina Galina Ulanova, violinist David Oistrakh, Russian circus clown Oleg Popov, a selection of folk dancers from various Soviet republics. Hope’s voice-over plays on American stereotypes of the stolid Russians and stern Soviet dictatorship. Over shots of a beefy all-female orchestra, Hope comments, “They’re playing this year’s hit tune, ‘When My Tractor Smiles at Me.’ ” As he gets ready to visit Moscow State University, he notes that it is “located on Stalin or Lenin or Bulganin Boulevard—I’m not sure which, I haven’t seen today’s newspaper.” He has self-deprecating fun with his anonymity on the Moscow streets. As he is wandering through Red Square, a crowd of pedestrians approaches. “We’ll cut across the square, if we can just get past this pack of autograph hounds,” Hope narrates. The group walks right through him, oblivious. “Hmmpf. Guess they never heard of me.”

He closes the show with a call for understanding between the two Cold War superpowers: “For five days and nights I stared and I walked and I wandered. It’s a strange city. I missed the street signs, the advertisements, the neons gleaming in the night, everybody owning their own car.” The words were almost surely written by Lachman—Hope’s most trusted writer, whose thoughtful manner and big, round glasses got him nicknamed the Owl. As the street scenes of Moscow dissolve into shots of smiling Russian children, Hope concludes hopefully:

I found out that the little kids with the fur hats and the sticky faces have no politics, and that their party line is confined to “please pass the ice cream.” You know, it would be wonderful if these children would someday grow up in a world that spoke the same language and respected the same things. . . . Take these characters right here. In a few years they’ll be in school. Will they teach him that Communism is his friend, his salvation? And that democracy is his deadly enemy? Twenty years from now, will he be a violinist? A shopkeeper? A teacher? Or will he be the one at the countdown who pushes the button which shakes the crust of the earth? I certainly don’t envy Mr. Dulles the job at hand. But it would be nice if somebody could work out a plan for peaceful coexistence, so that human beings like these don’t become obsolete.

The critics had their reservations about Hope’s stab at international diplomacy.
“I wish there’d been a lot more Russia and a lot less Hope,” said Cecil Smith in the
Los Angeles Times
. The
New York Times
’ Jack Gould complained that Hope’s chauvinistic wisecracks at the expense of the Soviets were in poor taste. But Hope’s achievement was hard to dismiss.
“Who would have thought even a few years ago,” said Gould, “there could be such a change in the world climate that a viewer would be hearing Mr. Hope broach such subjects? In the universality of cultural artistry there indeed may be a ray of hope for a divided world.”

Bob Hope in Moscow
drew solid, if not sensational, ratings, won a Peabody Award for its “contribution to international understanding,”
and had a highly publicized rerun telecast on NBC the following January. The show was the first of several groundbreaking cultural exchanges between the United States and Soviet Union. In June, Ed Sullivan presented the American TV debut of the famed Moiseyev Dance Company; a year later impresario Sol Hurok brought the Bolshoi Ballet to New York City. And in September 1959 Soviet premier Khrushchev made his much-heralded first visit to the United States.

Hope was among the Hollywood celebrities invited to a lunch for the Soviet leader when he visited the Twentieth Century–Fox studios in Los Angeles.
Sitting next to Mrs. Khrushchev (with Frank Sinatra on her other side), Hope suggested that she and Mr. K. ought to visit Disneyland. Khrushchev requested a visit, but the LA police turned him down (claiming it could not guarantee security), and the Soviet premier had a highly publicized temper tantrum. “What do you have there—rocket launching pads?” he bellowed to reporters. Hope would later joke that his casual comment to Mrs. Khrushchev started the Cold War. Not quite—Khrushchev had in fact requested the Disneyland trip well before the luncheon—but Hope’s landmark show from Moscow surely melted some of the ice.

•  •  •

“Guys ask me all the time about what happened to Sid Caesar or George Gobel or Jackie Gleason or Wally Cox,” Hope said in a 1957 interview, trying to explain the secret of his long-running TV success. “You’ve got no idea what a tremendous strain it is trying to be funny week after week. The American audience is the sharpest, most sophisticated, and fickle audience in the world. You can’t get away with old jokes, old routines, second-class material. Trying to satisfy the public—honestly, it can tear you apart.”

In truth, Hope got away with plenty of old jokes—tired, knee-jerk gags about Gleason’s weight and Benny’s cheapness and Crosby’s many kids—and his material was often second-class. But throughout the 1950s his TV popularity never flagged. He outlasted every TV trend and fad: the rage for Westerns and big-money quiz shows, the emergence of sitcoms and the glut of me-too variety shows. He stayed in the top ten despite changing nights, challenging time periods, and
revolving sponsors. In the fall of 1957,
Timex replaced Chevrolet as Hope’s sponsor—paying $360,000 for an hour of airtime, highest ever for a variety show—but dropped him after just one month, upset over his guest appearance on a Frank Sinatra show, which was partly sponsored by Bulova, a Timex competitor. (Hope’s agent Jimmy Saphier claimed Hope did the show only after being assured that the Bulova ad would not air until after the show’s closing credits.) NBC had to postpone Hope’s November special while another sponsor was found. Plymouth eventually picked him up for the rest of the season, before Hope switched to yet another car company, Buick, for the 1958–59 season.

One reason for his durability was his wise decision to carefully ration his TV exposure. Where other comedians, such as Caesar and Berle, did weekly shows and either burned themselves out or overstayed their welcome, Hope limited himself to just six or eight specials a year and tried to make them as special as possible—with big-name guest stars, foreign locales (he did two shows from London in 1955, another from Morocco after shooting
Paris Holiday
in 1957), and special events, including a reprise of his stage role in
Roberta
at the St. Louis Muny Opera, taped in the summer of 1958 and broadcast as his season opener in September.

Just as important was Hope’s dogged and creative efforts to promote his shows.
“It’s getting out there in person and selling each show like there’s not going to be any tomorrow,” Hope told Pete Martin in the
Saturday Evening Post.
“I get behind every show I’m in and push it as if it’s a new musical comedy or a new feature-length movie.” Before each special Hope would get his publicists to line up phone interviews with TV columnists around the country, and the one-on-one conversations would generate reams of coverage. “I sit in my office out there in Burbank and shove those calls through,” he said. “It’s a wonderful idea. They ask me about my next show, and I tell them a few intimate things about it. Then they give the fact that I called them a lot of space.”

The quality of his shows in these years was spotty. The best sketches poked fun at popular TV shows and trends (Hope playing
a tough private eye, for example, working “the most crime-ridden street in Hollywood—eighteen crime shows on one block”). The attempts at more ambitious social or cultural satire were pretty crude. When women were still a novelty in politics, Maureen O’Hara played a newly elected congresswoman, who interrupts a meeting with a top Army general to paste Green Stamps in her coupon book and suggests decorating Army tanks with wallpaper. When beatniks became a media obsession, Hope donned goatee and beret and played a bass-playing hipster, waiting in the maternity ward for his jive-talking wife to deliver their new baby. (The baby has a goatee too.) But the seat-of-the-pants spirit of the comedy, the self-mocking ad-libs making fun of the bad jokes or missed cues, even the tacky production values, all enlisted the audience in the artifice. This wasn’t satire; it was show business.

The monologues were still the high point, a running chronicle of the headlines and hot topics of the era. When Soviet No. 2 man Anastas Mikoyan made a diplomatic visit to the United States, he “brought back everything he could that might give them a clue to our defenses,” said Hope. “They’ve been up in Siberia for three weeks now trying to launch a Hula-Hoop.” When President Eisenhower took a vacation in the California desert, Hope joked, “He wanted some peace and quiet, and La Quinta is the perfect hideaway. The Russians can’t find it; the Democrats can’t afford it.” In the wake of his trip to Moscow, Hope savored his role as a comedy statesman, and the quips sometimes turned serious. During Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the United States, Hope closed one show with praise for a trip that allowed the Soviet leader “to show his sharp mind and tongue to the American people. Freedom of speech is a basic American principle, and so Khrushchev was allowed to come to this country to speak his mind and attempt to sell us Communism. I just hope that when our president visits Russia, they give him equal time to sell freedom.”

Hope’s stature in the show-business world was never higher, ratified by a growing stack of awards: a Meritorious Public Service Citation from the Navy, the Murray-Green Award for community service from the AFL-CIO, a humanitarian award from the American College of Physicians for “healing without resorting to pills or medicine.” He
was named honorary mayor of Chicago and hosted a TV special for the Boy Scouts’ new Explorer program. He set attendance records almost everywhere he went, from the Canadian National Exposition in 1957 to a concert at the Lubbock Coliseum in 1958, the biggest one-nighter in the city’s history. He told his publicist Mack Millar to make inquiries about getting him a Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for his work entertaining the troops. When the White House initially turned down the request, explaining that it would be unfair to single out Hope when so many other entertainers had done their share,
Hope told Millar (without irony) to try for the Nobel Peace Prize.