Hope: Entertainer of the Century (63 page)

Hope was especially eager, in the post-Vietnam years, to repair his image on college campuses, to show that he could still communicate with the young people who had turned against him because of his support for the war. His April 1975 special,
Bob Hope on Campus
, consisted mostly of a live performance at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, where the audience was friendly and most of the gags were about the school’s basketball team (John Wayne played Coach John Wooden in one sketch). But the show also included clips of Hope talking informally with small groups of students on other college campuses, such as Vassar and Columbia—awkward encounters, with Hope posing prepared questions such as “Is pot passé?” and “Who would you sooner be, Jonas Salk or Catfish Hunter?” (One student’s reply: “Jonas Salk. Because he made it possible for more people to
be
Catfish Hunters.” Right answer.)

Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976 marked a new and unfamiliar challenge for Hope. A friend to every president since Truman, Hope was now faced with a president he had never met—one who didn’t even play golf. The former peanut farmer from Georgia, who came from nowhere to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, provided Hope with plenty of gag material. He joked about Carter’s Southern roots (“When he prays, he calls God by his first name–Y’all”), his toothy smile (“He went to the dentist today to get his teeth cleaned; should be out by August”), and his colorful brother, Billy, the first presidential sibling with his own beer. But Hope, for the first time in many years, was left off the invitation list for the president’s inauguration.

Not that Hope needed the extra activity. He was doing fewer
specials now (four per season, down from six or seven), but working even harder to promote them. Before each one, he would do a round of phone interviews with TV columnists; make guest appearances on other variety shows; sit for interviews with talk show hosts such as Mike Douglas and Phil Donahue; and make his now-ritual drop-in appearance on Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show.
Hope continued to develop movie projects, commissioning a script for the Walter Winchell biopic from writer Sidney Boehm, which he found too “negative,” and then a second one from Art Arthur, which came in at an unwieldy three hundred pages. Plans were announced for a Bob Hope Museum, to house Hope’s voluminous collection of memorabilia—which he first wanted to build on fifty acres of his Malibu property, then on a plot of land in Burbank that he owned adjacent to NBC headquarters. Like so many other Hope projects, it never got off the ground.
“The problem with Dad is that he would have these ideas,” said Linda Hope. “And he would call you from Peoria, Illinois, and say, ‘I think we’ve got to get on this thing and start developing this or doing that.’ And then he would be gone for a week or two weeks, and he’s home for a few days, and in the meantime he had to do his real TV work, and he really had no time to develop the kinds of things that he may have dreamed of. He didn’t have time.”

By 1976 Linda was working for her father full-time. Her marriage to Lande (with whom she had a son, Andrew) had ended in divorce the year before—a split that took him by surprise.
“I was in England writing a show,” said Lande. “I came home to an empty house. She left me a note. It was all calculated and all devastating.” (Linda later had a long-term gay relationship with TV producer-director Nancy Malone.) She always had an ambivalent relationship with her father; getting his attention was sometimes so frustrating, she told a friend, that she would purposely bounce checks, just so he would call her into his office to scold her. But after the divorce, she needed work, and her father put her in charge of program development for Hope Enterprises.
She was paid little (only $600 a week at first), but she did a good job, overseeing the development of
Joe & Valerie
, the one series Hope’s company managed to get on the air.

Her brother Tony might have seemed the more logical Hope child to enter the family business. He worked for a while in business affairs at Twentieth Century–Fox and served as an associate producer on the TV series
Judd, for the Defense
and the 1971 Australian film
Walkabout.
His father depended on Tony for business advice, and some friends thought they recognized some of Bob’s comic genes. Hal Kanter liked to tell the story of an encounter with Hope on the Paramount lot in the early 1950s. Kanter was wearing a bright red tie with red socks, and when Bob passed by, he commented,
“My God, Kanter, that’s the longest red tie I’ve ever seen.” Years later, Kanter was at the Twentieth Century–Fox studios, again wearing bright red socks with a red sweater. This time Tony Hope saw him and wisecracked, “That’s the longest red sweater I ever saw.” Tony insisted he had never heard his father’s line.

But Tony’s career in show business came to an abrupt and not very happy end. In 1973 he teamed up with Barney Rosenzweig, a TV producer who had worked with Tony at Fox, to produce an independent film called
Who Fears the Devil?
It was a strange movie, based on a series of fanciful folktales by Manly Wade Wellman about an Appalachian balladeer who is transported back in time. After Rosenzweig kept lowering the budget to try to get backers, Tony Hope agreed to finance the film with $400,000 of his own money.

The production was beset with problems. Arlo Guthrie was originally cast in the lead, but he didn’t work out and had to be replaced by an unknown. The dailies were not good, and the screenwriter pleaded for the director to be replaced. After it was finished, the film couldn’t find a distributor, and Rosenzweig began peddling it himself, booking it in college towns across the Southeast—a grassroots technique that had been used successfully by the 1971 independent hit
Billy Jack
. But the movie died quickly, and Tony Hope lost his entire investment.

He took it hard.
“He felt he failed, and he became bitter,” said Rosenzweig. “We were having breakfast a year or two later. He said, ‘Barney, we can’t do this anymore. Because when I see you, I think of the movie, and when I think of the movie, I want to throw up.’ ” For the son of Bob Hope, the failure must have been especially difficult.
“It had to be tough for Tony,” said Rosenzweig. “Bob Hope was a tough taskmaster. I’m sure his father was brutal to him about it.”

The whole episode left Tony—then living in Malibu with Judy and their two young children—broke and in debt, with no bailout coming from Dad.
“Bob and Dolores thought everyone could make it on their own,” said Judy Hope. She went back to work as a lawyer, making the long commute to downtown Los Angeles, while teaching part-time at Pepperdine University in Malibu. Then, in April 1975, a malfunctioning furnace in their home caught fire, and the house burned to the ground. Suddenly homeless as well as broke, Tony and Judy picked up and moved the family to Washington, DC.

Judy, who had connections in the Ford administration, went to work at the White House and became a partner in the law firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky and Walker. (She later worked on President Reagan’s Commission on Organized Crime and in 1988 was nominated for a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The nomination was blocked by Senate Democrats.) Tony, meanwhile, bounced around in various jobs with such companies as Mutual of Omaha and Touche Ross. In 1986 he moved back to California to run for Congress, but lost in the Republican primary to an opponent who branded him a carpetbagger. Later he became the first head of the Indian Gaming Commission under President George H. W. Bush. But there was a sense of potential never quite realized.
“Bob called Tony a lot,” said Judy Hope. “When he wanted to buy a piece of property, Tony would go and look at it. When he had a radio station in Puerto Rico that had some problems, Tony worked them out. His dad trusted and relied on him. In a way, he shortchanged his own career for his dad.”

•  •  •

Hope’s writing staff was going through a transition in the late 1970s. Old-timers Gig Henry and Charlie Lee were still around, but newcomers were filtering in. Gene Perret was writing gags for Phyllis Diller in 1969 when he sent three hundred unsolicited jokes to Hope for one of his Oscar appearances. Hope used ten of them on the air and told Perret,
“It looks like you’ve been writing for me all your life.” Perret continued writing jokes for Hope over the next few years, while on staff at
The Carol Burnett Show
, before joining him full-time in the late seventies. Bob Mills, a lawyer turned gagman, was writing for Dean Martin’s celebrity TV roasts in 1977 when Hope hired him for a special.
“I’ve got six more weeks on my Dean Martin contract,” Mills said. Hope replied, “You work on Dean Martin during the day, don’t you? Well, you can work on my stuff in the evenings.” Mills stayed with Hope for fifteen years. Sitcom veterans Seaman Jacobs and Fred Fox also joined the staff, and later Martha Bolton, Hope’s first full-time female writer. Other younger writers came and went, some hired for individual shows, others for a season or two.

All had to adapt to Hope’s idiosyncratic working style. Even veteran writers never got more than a one-year contract, which kept them on their toes and enabled Hope to dump writers who weren’t measuring up. (For years some of the writers were even represented by Hope’s own agent Jimmy Saphier—a conflict of interest if there ever was one.) The writers got used to the 24/7 schedule, the late-night phone calls, the oddly solitary working life. Unlike on other comedy shows, where writers would sit around a table and bat out scripts together, Hope’s writers mostly worked alone, coming up with jokes on their own, then dropping them “over the wall” at Hope’s Toluca Lake home office, where they might get chased by one of Bob’s German shepherds.

The pace was intense.
“He liked people who worked fast,” said Perret. Hope might call for some jokes on a specific topic, then phone back a half hour later—no hello or greeting of any kind, just a command: “Thrill me.” Hope once told his writers that he was appearing at a psychiatrists’ convention, so they gave him a load of psychiatrist jokes. When Hope arrived at the event, he found out
the audience was actually a group of chiropractors. The writers had thirty minutes to come up with a new set of jokes. Mills was once hosting a backyard barbecue when he got a call from Hope and heard music in the background: he was in the wings of some distant theater, minutes away from going onstage. On the way in from the airport, Hope told Mills, the traffic was terrible because all the streets were torn up, and he needed a line about it to open the show.
“How much time do you have?” asked Mills. “About twenty seconds,” said Hope. Mills came up
with a couple of quickies (“between the hotel and here, the cabbie and I exchanged teeth three times”), then went back to his dinner guests. “I just made my entire salary for the year,” he told them.

The old-timers sometimes tried to get away with recycling jokes from Hope’s bottomless vault of funnies, but he had a photographic memory and usually rejected them. One time he asked his writers for some football jokes, and Mills sighed that he should just take some old ones out of the files. “Why do we have to write new ones?” Mills asked. Hope snapped,
“I pay you with new money, don’t I?” Yet Hope appreciated their hard work and didn’t get down on them if they came up short. Perret once turned in a load of jokes and Hope asked if they were brilliant. “They’re really not,” Perret said. Hope told him not to worry:
“The other guys will be hot.”

The writers were responsible for virtually everything Hope said or that appeared under his name. They wrote his TV shows, monologues for his personal appearances, magazine articles that carried Hope’s byline, jokes that were fed to columnists such as
Variety
’s Army Archerd, acceptance speeches, commencement addresses, and eulogies. When Hope was a guest on other TV variety shows, he would get the script in advance and have his writers add new lines that he could throw into the sketches during rehearsals. (His practice of rewriting the lines annoyed some producers, who crossed Hope off their guest lists as a result.) Mills once got a request from Hope for some jokes about Pentagon generals. Not seeing any military events on his calendar, Mills asked what the occasion was.
Hope said he was going to play golf with three generals and just needed some funny lines for conversation on the course.

Hope still moved at a pace that would have exhausted much younger men. He was on the road almost constantly—nearly 250 appearances in 1977 alone, from the National Dairy Congress in Waterloo, Iowa, to Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee celebration in London. His TV specials, as a result, were getting increasingly short shrift.

The monologues were still a priority. For each one, Hope would cull through hundreds of his writers’ jokes, picking the best thirty
minutes’ worth of material, then delivering it before a studio audience (usually Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show
audience, who would be asked to stick around for Hope after Carson’s show was finished) before winnowing it down to seven or eight minutes that would make the final broadcast. As for the rest of his TV hours, Hope was paying only minimal attention. He didn’t even try to learn his lines anymore; most of the rehearsal time was spent worrying about where the cue cards were going to be placed. He didn’t like rehearsals that ran long.
“Milton Berle liked to retake jokes—he’d say, ‘I can do that one better,’ ” said Sid Smith, who began directing Hope specials in the late seventies. “Hope liked to do it once, and that’s it. He didn’t want to lose the spontaneity of the joke.” He wasn’t happy with guests like Lucille Ball, who rehearsed obsessively and would often stop to make suggestions on how the scenes could be improved. Grumbled Hope during one rehearsal,
“She thinks I just got into this business.”

He was not a temperamental star, at least by most inflated-Hollywood-ego standards. He projected an almost preternatural calm, humming an unidentifiable tune to himself constantly. But technical flubs or unforeseen delays could make him testy, and his fits of temper could be formidable. Dennis Klein, then a young comedy writer (and later the cocreator of
The Larry Sanders Show
), was in the greenroom for a
Tonight Show
taping in the late 1960s on a night Hope was a guest. Hope was used to royal treatment at the
Tonight Show
: always the first guest, always leaving immediately after his segment was over, so that he wouldn’t have to move down the couch and listen to other guests. This time, however, Hope was taken by surprise when Carson announced the show’s first guest—not Bob Hope, but a monkey from the San Diego Zoo.