Hope: Entertainer of the Century (62 page)

Hope didn’t have much to say when Nixon finally resigned in August.
“It was so sad for that poor bastard,” he told the
Washington Post
a few months later. The two talked on the phone in December, Hope related, and Nixon seemed “very depressed. . . . I said, ‘When are you going to come out to the Springs and play some golf?’ He said, ‘It’ll have to be quite awhile.’ ” They met at a party in Palm Springs in March 1975, and Hope tried to cheer up Nixon with jokes:
“I told him
The Towering Inferno
was the burning of the White House tapes. He didn’t think that that was too funny.”

Hope stayed friendly with the disgraced ex-president and in later years continued to stand by him.
“I just think that Nixon got himself into a tough spot,” Hope said, when asked about Watergate in 1977. “They hired those Mack Sennett burglars who went over there. When they got caught, Nixon tried to protect the staff—what you and I would do up to a point—and then he got to where he didn’t know which way to go. If he knew the Supreme Court was going to let him down, he would have burned those tapes just like that.”

With Nixon’s resignation, Hope lost a friend in the White House, but he gained an even better one. Hope had known Gerald Ford only slightly before he became president, but the two soon bonded over golf. Ford was a good golfer—capable of driving 250 yards, though he had a penchant for errant shots that gave Hope a chance to recycle the bad-golfer jokes he had once used for Spiro Agnew: “It’s not hard to find Gerry Ford on the golf course. Just follow the wounded.” The Fords vacationed in Palm Springs during their White House years, dining with the Hopes often, and retired to the area afterward, sealing the friendship.
“Of all the Presidents,” said Hope, “he is the one I can call a pal.”

Hope was trying to keep a lower political profile in these years, hoping to put the partisan rancor of Vietnam behind him. But echoes of the Vietnam turmoil were hard to escape entirely. In April 1975 he found himself back at the center of a political storm, quite unexpectedly, at the Academy Awards.

Hope had not hosted an Oscar show since 1971, when his cracks about sexually explicit Hollywood films (“I go back to the kind of movie when a girl says, ‘I love you,’ and it’s a declaration, not a demonstration”) made him seem a little more old-fashioned than the Academy was perhaps comfortable with. But he was asked back as one of four hosts for the 1975 ceremony, along with Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, and Sammy Davis Jr. Hope’s jokes about the year’s big films were mostly innocuous. (“I think
The Godfather Part II
has an
excellent chance of winning. Neither Mr. Price nor Mr. Waterhouse has been heard from in days.”) The trouble came a few minutes after his opening monologue, when the award for best documentary feature went to
Hearts and Minds
, Peter Davis’s sharply critical account of the US involvement in Vietnam.

The timing was piquant. Two years after the US withdrawal, South Vietnamese forces were rapidly collapsing in the face of a final Communist offensive. Three weeks later, on April 30, 1975, Saigon would fall, forcing the last US embassy personnel to make an ignominious escape by helicopter. “It is ironic that we’re here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated,” producer Bert Schneider said in accepting the award for
Hearts and Minds
. Then he read a telegram from the Vietcong delegation to the Paris peace talks: “Please transmit to all our friends in America our recognition of all that they have done on behalf of peace. . . . These actions serve the legitimate interests of the American people and the Vietnamese people.”

The statement caused a stir in the hall—and a bigger one backstage. Hope was furious that Schneider had used the Oscar podium to deliver what Hope considered a propaganda message from America’s enemies. He told Howard Koch, the show’s producer, that the Academy should issue its own statement disavowing Schneider’s remarks. “Don’t you dare!” cried Shirley MacLaine, a prominent opponent of the war. But Hope scrawled out a statement on his own, gave it to Frank Sinatra, who was about to start his portion of the evening, and insisted that he read it on the air. “If you don’t read it, I will,” said Hope.

Sinatra, a former Kennedy pal turned Nixon supporter, obliged. Appearing onstage a few minutes later, he told the audience, “I’ve been asked by the Academy to make the following statement regarding a statement made by a winner. The Academy is saying, ‘We are not responsible for any political references made on the program and we are sorry they had to take place this evening.’ ”

Backstage, Shirley MacLaine tore into Sinatra: “You said you were speaking on behalf of the Academy. Well, I’m a member of the Academy and you didn’t ask me!” (Her brother, Warren Beatty, later
chided Sinatra from the podium: “You old Republican, you.”) The controversy percolated for days. Hope denounced Schneider’s statement as
a “cheap, cheap shot” and said he wrote his response after getting telegrams backstage saying that “millions of viewers and the parents of fifty-five thousand American boys did not appreciate the Academy being used as a platform for propaganda from Hanoi.” Yet even some of those critical of Schneider’s remarks objected that Hope and Sinatra had taken it upon themselves to deliver a statement on behalf of all three thousand members of the Academy. Finally the Academy issued a statement endorsing the Hope-Sinatra reply, pointing out that Koch, as the show’s producer, was “the Academy’s authorized representative,” and quoting bylaws stating that the “Academy is expressly prohibited from concerning itself with economic, political or labor issues.”

The fracas was a vestigial reminder of the country’s still-raw Vietnam wounds. But it soon died down, and so, eventually, did the passions. “Bob Hope’s so mad at me he’s going to bomb Encino,” Shirley MacLaine joked after the ceremony. But she bore no lasting ill will toward Hope, who had helped her raise money for charities and whom she genuinely admired.
“So he was screwed up about the war,” she said years later. “Who wasn’t?” Still, for the folks who put together the annual Oscar telecast, Hope was proving to be something of a liability. He would not be asked back as host for another three years.

•  •  •

By the mid-1970s, some of Hope’s oldest friends, colleagues, and support people were starting to pass from the scene. In December 1974, Jack Benny, Hope’s friend and onetime radio rival, died of pancreatic cancer.
“He was stingy to the end,” said Hope, in a eulogy written for him by Mort Lachman. “He only gave us eighty years, and it wasn’t enough.” Jimmy Saphier, the agent who had negotiated all of Hope’s radio and TV deals since 1937, suffered a stroke in his office and died in April 1974, of what was later diagnosed as a brain tumor. (Louis Shurr, Hope’s first movie agent, had died of cancer in 1968.) Marjorie Hughes, Hope’s loyal assistant for thirty-one years and the linchpin of his superefficient office operation, retired in 1973. (Hope Enterprises left her with no pension, and
she had to pester her former boss for
months about it. Hope wound up writing personal checks to support her in retirement.) Bob’s elder brother Jim, who oversaw the ranch Bob owned near Malibu dubbed Hopetown, died in August 1975—leaving Fred, back in Cleveland, the only one of Hope’s six brothers still alive.

And just before the start of the fall 1975 TV season, Hope had to say good-bye to many of the people who had worked with him for decades. He blamed it on his sponsor.

Hope had been shopping for a new corporate partner since 1973, when Chrysler ended its sponsorship of his TV shows (while continuing to sponsor his golf tournament). For two seasons Hope signed up sponsors on a show-by-show basis, among them Gillette, Timex, and Ford. Then, in early 1975, he negotiated a lucrative new deal with
Texaco. The oil company agreed to pay $3.15 million for seven hours of specials in each of the next three seasons, plus another $250,000 annually to Hope for commercials and other duties as corporate spokesman. In return, however, Texaco wanted Hope to make a thorough housecleaning of his creative staff. His shows had clearly fallen into a rut, and the demographics of his audience were skewing older and older. Texaco thought the shows needed fresh blood.

The plan was to cut back on the number of specials and to make them more “special,” hiring different producers for each. That meant saying good-bye to the man who had been producing all of them, Hope’s longtime writer and confidant, Mort Lachman. Hope also fired his entire writing staff—veterans who had been with him for years such as Charlie Lee, Gig Henry, Les White, and Norm Sullivan.
“It had to be done,” Hope told UPI’s Vernon Scott, “because I thought that after twenty-five years it was time to get a fresh format, some new ideas, a new style.” In addition, with Texaco promising more PR support, Hope laid off his two longest-serving publicists, Frank Liberman and Allan Kalmus.

“Bob caved in,” said Elliott Kozak, Saphier’s former assistant, who had taken over his dealmaking duties. “It was too strong a deal. He didn’t stand up to it.” Kozak convinced Hope to rehire at least one writing team, Lee and Henry, to provide some continuity and veteran
support for the newcomers being brought in. Both Liberman and Kalmus, too, were back working for Hope within a year. But the split with Lachman was unavoidable, and painful. Hope, always averse to confrontation, gave Kozak the job of breaking the bad news. Lachman was surprised and hurt, but he took it stoically. When Hope took him to play golf and tried to explain the decision, Lachman cut him off.
“He was very sad, very close to a tear,” Lachman recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not interested in this whole conversation. Let’s play.’ We just played golf. And we left, and I told him we can still play golf anytime you call me. But it was a sad day.” (They remained friends and golfing buddies, and Lachman had a successful post-Hope career as executive producer of such sitcoms as
All in the Family
,
Kate & Allie
, and
Gimme a Break!
)

Hope’s first show under the Texaco banner, a belated season opener on October 24, 1975, was indeed more special, though hardly new: a two-hour compilation of highlights from his TV career, to mark his twenty-fifth anniversary on NBC. The three Hope specials that followed included a Christmas show, with guests Redd Foxx and Angie Dickinson; a concert special from Montreal, to raise money for the US and Canadian Olympic teams, with Bing Crosby among the guests; and a ninety-minute scripted show, in which Hope hosts a party at his home, where the guests (some fifty comedians, from Milton Berle to Freddie Prinze) are getting murdered one by one. The material was only marginally improved, but the shows at least had a fresher look, ratings were strong, and Texaco got its money’s worth: Hope did nearly all the commercials as well, touting the company’s oil-drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico, pitching Havoline motor oil, and singing the praises of the “owners of America’s oil companies”—stockholders like you and me.

The bicentennial celebration of 1976 gave Hope a chance to wave the flag once again, as host of a ninety-minute NBC special on July 4,
Bob Hope’s Bicentennial Star-Spangled Spectacular.
It was one of his better shows of the era, with Hope and Sammy Davis Jr. playing anchormen of a revolutionary-era newscast, a spoof of the comedy soap opera
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
, and a funny Hope takeoff of Johnny Carson as host of an 1876 version of the
Tonight Show
, making
jokes about Custer and griping about the tough studio audience. (“Better warm up the buckboard, Ed, they’re getting hostile.”) Hope closed with a sentimental, Norman Rockwellian tribute to the real “heroes” of America: “the guy in the bleachers with his kid, rooting for his team between bites on a hot dog . . . the man who fights the traffic every morning to get to work . . . These most uncommon common people are the heart of America, its hope and its future.” It was Hope’s plea to move beyond the divisive years of Vietnam and Watergate, and a heartfelt justification of his own life’s work:

I like to hold up a mirror to our lives and see the fun in everything we do. Over the years I’ve gotten more than my share of laughs—about you and me and America and the way we live. But when the houselights dim and the cameras are turned off, I’m just like the rest of you. Kid America? You bet your life. Love America? All the way.

For all the heat he had taken, Hope still saw himself as a unifying figure, an entertainer above partisanship—and, it seemed, above criticism. He hated bad reviews, and frequently got his writers and other staff members to write letters responding to them, often in the guise of ordinary readers or viewers, the voice of the people. During the bicentennial summer, he entertained at a state dinner in Washington for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, hosted by President Ford and the first lady. A few days after the event, which was televised on public TV, the
Los Angeles Times
ran two letters to the editor criticizing his performance.
“I was shocked, disappointed and dismayed by the whole miserable mess, which has most certainly damaged the cultural image and prestige of our country,” wrote one viewer. “Bob Hope should fire his writers, or, better still, retire gracefully.”

A week later the
Times
printed three letters in response. One reader, identifying himself as one of Hope’s writers (it was signed Charles Liebleck, evidently Charlie Lee), said that Hope “has entertained and brought the gift of laughter to more people in more places than any other single performer of our time” and pointed out that writing comedy is
“much harder than writing bitchy letters to a
newspaper.” A second letter came from Geoffrey Clarkson—the pianist in Les Brown’s band—who reported that he was at the state dinner and that
“the Queen and Prince Philip enjoyed the entertainment immensely.” A third letter asserted that Hope’s “humanitarianism and talent are unquestionable, and to have such a great man as Bob Hope belittled is abominable.” It was signed by Mark Antonio of Burbank, California—almost surely Hope’s crony and longtime assistant Mark Anthony.