Hope from the Cheap Seats

"So, what's it going to take for you to start writing for your web site, Reed?" a friend asked. "Has somebody got to die?"

As it turned out, yes.

But even then, writing about Bob Hope wasn't easy. A lot of other people have written about him. There was a columnist on Microsoft's Slate web site that said Hope was not, and never had been, funny. There were people writing a review of Hope's career that knew how big it was, and described him in terms of his bigness. And scattered here and there were a few individual pieces from people that knew comedy, and declared Hope the pioneer who paved the way for modern stand-up comedians.

In the end, the only thing I can do - and try to do without referring to me every other word, as Harry Knowles does - is to try to talk about Hope the way I experienced him. Which, except for one occasion, was on television.

Hope on TV

In the early 1960's, Hope was the big man on television. He was the biggest American comedian, an institution, and who can avoid watching an institution? He appeared only about six times a year, mostly on specials NBC. His specials were big and glossy, but slow-moving. They used NBC's huge studios in Burbank, and had lots of deep, wide sets and lots of fancy lighting. But they were slow-moving and ponderous. A traditional weekly show like The Kraft Music Hall or The Andy Williams Show was a speed demon by comparison.

He didn't have the big stars on his shows, either. His usual guest stars were pretty but shallow women like Anita Bryant, Zha Zha Gabor or Ann-Margaret, who could do punch lines. It was a time-tested routine; Hope would brag about his male power and the women would say something...withering. And he'd reliably hire the hot young (inexperienced and easily manipulated) female stars like Brooke Shields, for even more sexual innuendo.

Hope's male guests were old knockabout second bananas like Jerry Colonna, who was no threat to Hope, or the male equivalent to Anita Bryant, young non-rock singers like Frankie Avalon or Fabian. Hope did spend money on certain comediennes, all of whom were the old style "she's ugly but she's funny" funny women. He started off with Martha Rae, but as Rae got old, Hope supported an unknown comedienne named Phyllis Diller to take her place.

Hope never had established, identifiable guest stars for a reason. He never wanted anyone to show him up. More so than any other superstar, Hope was paranoid about someone looking better than him. He often did it by heaping huge bunches of guest stars together, like all the leading ladies from his movies or 25 known comedians, having them step on camera for a quick line, their name supered under their picture, some canned applause and a quick exit.

Hope was a comic, not a comedian. The difference is, a comedian uses his entire body. Hope simply told jokes - with a rare gift of perfect timing - but he didn't do much else with his body. He read lines off cue cards (refusing to use the more modern TelePrompEr). Some of the jokes were added at the last minute by his writers.

Hope's other regular TV outing was as host of the Oscars. Remember that in the early 1960's, the movie industry didn't advertise on TV. The studios didn't want movie stars on TV because they didn't want to help their competing medium. All that changed when Hope hosted the Oscars.

Hope joked about all the big celebrities and their movies, and since I hadn't seen most of those movies, his jokes explained who all these mysterious people were. He was the greatest host the Oscars ever had, and his Oscar shows were the most enjoyable TV he performed in.

Big Nose on the Big Screen

Then, there were Hope's movies, also mostly seen on TV. The Bob Hope in these films was different than the joke guy on TV. Hope always played an ordinary slob, perhaps a guy with a bragging problem, who wound up having to pretend to be heroic, romantic and amazing. In Casanova's Big Night he was a humble tailor who is forced to play the great lover and swordsman. In Paleface he's a medicine show salesman who has to play a frontier hero.

In all these movies, Hope brags when people admire him. Then, someone demands that he act heroically - Casanova is challenged to a duel, the gunfighter must face down a badguy - and he shivers in his boots. He's always tied to a beautiful woman or two, with one of them his co-star. These films, which someone called "Hope's cowardice comedies," were perfect character pieces.

The "Road pictures" with Bing Crosby took a slightly different tack to mocking Hollywood adventure movies. Hope and Crosby's characters, whatever their real job occupations, were vaudeville performers - the career in which both men actually got their start. And they hinted at what vaudeville was really like behind the footlights - as much as movies allowed them to tell.

In vaudeville, the performers were regularly cheated out of their pay. They had to run from hotels, from the bill collectors, from the sheriffs, and from angry husbands. They had to live hand-to-mouth and by their wits, getting food, lodging and sexual relief where they could. Most performers didn't wind up in places as strange as Utopia, Morocco or Hong Kong, but every weekend was a new challenge. They couldn't talk about sex too much in these movies, but they did hint a lot.

Hope and Crosby were famous as a team, and they had a sort of chemistry together - Hope kidding about Crosby's gut, Crosby about Hope's nose. You'd hardly know that these two men weren't really friends, but had a cool, professional relationship. Their only social contact outside the movies was on the golf course.

Down the Ski-nose Slope

Even for someone who liked Hope, it was obvious he was losing it. For movies, I thought he started declining with The Facts of Life. He played a married man who decided to have an affair with the equally-married Lucille Ball. It was supposed to be a modern sex comedy (modern for the 1960's, mind you). But as the two would-be adulterers head for a getaway, they start having severe moral qualms - much as they like each other, they couldn't do their spouses wrong. They turn around and run into complications as they try to cover their tracks.

In the end of the picture, the two meet at a party, toast each other, then turn their backs on each other. Although I didn't realize it at the time, the film did demonstrate a "fact of life" - Bob Hope had become so big, he wouldn't play a character who did bad things, including having sex outside of marriage.

Hope's movies became more and more predictable. The gags, probably pulled out of Hope's massive cross-indexed joke files, were hung on flimsy plots with little real character. Hope was no longer the scrabbling little guy, the braggart who turned coward. More often, he played a well-off executive or professional who wound up in trouble - but trouble he didn't take seriously, as he wise-cracked his way through the situations. His films like Bachelor in Paradise and A Global Affair - both kind of dull today - are good examples.

His TV specials also began to get stale. He soon was reduced to trotting out the NCAA college football all-star team, and making a joke about each team member's home state or hobbies. This was dull and stupid, but Hope liked doing it. In a time when Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour were busting the boundaries, Bob Hope was retreating from them.

At War with the War

There was one thing Hope did that was praiseworthy, but in the end it became his undoing. It was Hope's trips to entertain the troops. He didn't always go to Vietnam; sometimes it was places like Thailand or Germany. But it was in Vietnam that he earned his reputation - for good and for ill.

Of all the right-wing celebrities that yakked about the war, like John Wayne, Angie Dickinson or Charlton Heston, Hope was the only one to put his beliefs on the line. They stayed in Hollywood. Hope went into the field hospitals and tried to cheer up the wounded and dying. Trying to be cheerful with a kid whose legs were blown off is nearly impossible, but Hope tried. And he insisted that the rest of his actors on the USO tour do the same. Whatever else I feel about Hope, and not all of it is good, I admire him for this.

Vietnam brought out something new in Hope - his humanity. He would end his Vietnam TV specials talking, mostly unscripted, about what he saw - the horrors of the war, and his hopes for peace. Sure, he was right-wing; he thought the way to peace was to bomb everything "to save American lives." (While killing millions of Vietnamese.) At least he didn't pretend, and his beliefs came from his heart.

But Vietnam warped everything in America, Hope included. The soldiers in the latter part of the war knew it was a futile, lying mess. They knew Hope was a big man, a friend of Presidents and politicans. They saw Hope giving them a pat on the head so they wouldn't mind dying so much. Some started avoiding Hope's show. Then, some of their commanders ordered them to attend the show, or else.

In 1970, at Lai Khe with the 1st Intfantry Division, soldiers started booing Hope's monolog, right after he said "I saw the President, and he has a plan to end this war." In 1971, in an incident the Army tried to hush up, Hope appeared at Long Bihn. Soldiers actually picketed the show, booed the officers and Hope, and started throwing things. MP's had to be called out to stop the show.

Hope might have seen it coming. In the early 70's there was a new comedian, only slightly younger than Hope, known primarily as a character actor. Don Rickles was brought to The Dean Martin Show and permitted to do his insult act, which was kept off TV for years. As a special favor, Martin gathered a small audience of NBC stars for Rickles to mock. Suddenly, about halfway through the act, Hope sauntered into the back of the celebrity seating. After the expected applause died down, Rickles stared at Hope and said, "Is the war over?" The audience went wild.

That was it, precisely. Bob Hope was no longer the Son of Paleface or Crosby's funny partner. A kid in an ice cream parlor in California came up to him and said, "Aren't you the guy who sponsors the Vietnam War?"

My Itty Bitty Run-In With Fame

I saw Bob Hope live only once. It was at the Ohio State Fair in 1976, at a time when Vietnam and Watergate were long gone. One of the biggest state fairs in the country was an occasion for big stars, and Bob Hope was the headliner. After spending a day eating undercooked chicken (from Ohio's chicken farmer organization, no less) and seeing dealers in everything from knitted pillows to marijuana rolling papers, I got ready for the big show.

I waited in the sweltering sun, then in the cool evening, for Hope to come on. A local TV weatherman came on and was overawed; he called him "the great, great GREAT, Bob Hope." And finally, after a local band played a bit, there he was.

He looked older and smaller than I imagined from his TV appearances. He didn't move much, staying rooted to one spot. His jokes were bare-bones topical; he didn't do anything too modern or too cutting. (Maybe he thought it was a state fair, and that the folks there were hicks. Heck, this fair was in Columbus, a major city with a huge college.) He retreated from controversy. When he made a gay reference that didn't go over, he muttered "Actually, I really don't understand that kind of...stuff..." and resumed his act.

It was old material, too. His parody of his classic song "Buttons and Bows" had been on one of his Vietnam specials. It involved him, as a child, "dressing in my sister's clothes" - and "the neighbors said/he's one of those/he looks so cute/in..." He even refrained from saying "buttons and bows" at the end of the song, in the exact same place.

I left the show feeling a little disappointed, and very uncomfortable. This was legend? He didn't knock anybody's socks off. Everyone was extremely polite to him. He wasn't even as on-target as he was on his TV specials.

A few years later, I just missed seeing Hope one more time. He came to Florida to promote one of his books, and showed up on a public-service show on my TV station. I didn't work the day the show was recorded, so I missed the living Hope, but I saw the videotape.

The guy interviewing Hope was a stick-in-the-mud, a big wheel on the library board, and even the low-and-slow jokes Hope told went over his head. He left the building, as my bosses tried to keep pace with him, and someone shot a picture to show he was really there. In the picture, Hope looked like he had a stomach ache.

Good and Bad Memories

A collection of editorial cartoons about Hope's death showed Hope with Crosby in Heaven, Hope being booked for a show in Heaven, Hope playing golf in Heaven, all the things he was famous for in popular culture. What did you expect? Hope was the biggest comedian in America for decades.

All those gushing cartoons and all that praise came from Hope's bigness. It came from a lot of people who are impressed by bigness - mostly the news media. Obviously, if you're rich, you can buy your way into Heaven. Biggest isn't best, but try telling that to anyone in 2003.

That's not to say Hope's been universally praised. In 1998, there was a very unauthorized biography, "Bob Hope: The Road Well Travelled." The author, Lawrence J. Quirk, tells a lot of stories that Hope didn't make known. He dishes the dirt, and sometimes gets pretty snotty about it. However, if you read between the lines, there's some serious talk about the Hope most of us didn't see.

More recently, comedian Bill Maher has commented that Hope had sexual affairs, but the press was happy to cover them up - unlike what happened to Bill Clinton. Quirk's book doesn't deliberately count any specific affairs, but notes that Hope's wife Dolores was very cold to him near the end of his life.

There will probably be bigger revelations about Hope's private life, now that some people won't need to fear revenge. The only question I have is, will anyone care? There are several Bob Hope retrospectives out on tape and DVD. They aren't selling. I wonder if Hope's humor was so slight, especially in his declining years, that nobody really cares to watch it again.

It could happen. Eddie Cantor was a big guy in movies and radio, too. He entertained the troops in World War II. After his death in 1964, he disappeared. I doubt if you can name anything he did or starred in. That may be the fate in store for the career of Bob Hope.

Actually, that might be a kindness. The most memorable part of Hope's career were his "cowardice comedies" and his Road pictures with Crosby. They dealt with real life - his real life as a struggling performer who made it to the top of a frustrating business. His later stuff, the shows people were disappointed or even upset about, was formula comedy, copied off index cards onto cue cards and delivered with mechanical precision. Hope the comedy machine may have been forgettable. Hope the comic, the person who was unafraid to appear human in his early movies or in front of wounded men, will be remembered.