The New York Times

Bob Hope, Before He Became the Comedy Establishment

By Todd S. Purdum

April 20, 2003

He was not really a singer, but he introduced a handful of standards in a pitch-perfect voice. He was not really a dancer, but held his own as a hoofer with Cagney and Baryshnikov.

He was never nominated for his acting, but presided over more Oscar ceremonies than anyone and was among the top box office draws of his day. He never had a regular television series, but his specials were smash ratings hits, and the creators of "M*A*S*H" and "Gilligan's Island" cut their teeth as his radio writers. He lent jokes to Franklin D. Roosevelt, played golf with Bill Clinton and entertained the troops in every American war, from Pearl Harbor to the Persian Gulf.

He was born in London the year that the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk — and on May 29 he will turn 100.

Anyone under 50 may think of him, if at all, as the Vietnam hawk who backed Richard M. Nixon, taunted protesters, twirled a golf club and read from cue cards as he grew gradually more out of touch with the times. His nimble mind is now adrift and his once-restless frame is limited at last to the bedroom of his sprawling estate in Toluca Lake, the Los Angeles neighborhood where he has lived for 65 years.

But Bob Hope ruled the world.

"When you're an innovator, and you get old, people forget that you're an innovator, you know?" Jay Leno says in "100 Years of Hope and History," a two-hour retrospective to be broadcast tonight on NBC, 53 years to the month after Mr. Hope's television debut on Easter Sunday, 1950. "And there's a whole generation of people that just remember Bob Hope as `Didn't he used to do some shows for the soldiers?' And they forget. I mean, he's probably the greatest American entertainer of the 20th century."

Mr. Hope was always best known for what Time magazine called his "vibrant averageness." As early as 1947, Variety criticized his unwillingness to "veer an inch from his time-tested routine," and concluded: "Question simply is: Who's going to outlive the other, Hope or the listening public?"

By lasting so long, by taking sides on one of the most divisive political issues of his day and by performing, in his last active years, more or less on autopilot, he helped obscure his own most brilliant work and lost a new generation of audiences. But his comic heirs were paying attention, and in tonight's special, performers from Conan O'Brien to Drew Carey, Mel Brooks and Steve Martin attest to his inspiration.

"I just see an enormous skill and hilarity to his delivery, and his persona, and the character that he developed over the years, and the superbly flippant style that coped with every situation," said Woody Allen, who began successfully sending gag lines to Mr. Hope as a teenager. "To me, he was a guy who was very, very facile with his dialogue, and never, ever at a loss for a very funny remark to make in any situation, no matter how harrowing, or romantic, or downtrodden or exuberant.

Mr. Hope all but invented the role of wisecracking emcee, first in vaudeville, then on radio, at 17 Oscar ceremonies over 38 years, and in 286 television specials, including the first Western entertainment broadcast from China, featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Big Bird, and innumerable personal appearances featuring the top entertainers, athletes and politicians of the moment. In more than 50 films, often with his friend Bing Crosby on the "Road to Zanzibar" — or Morocco, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bali or Utopia — he perfected the role of braggart-coward who seldom got the girl but never stopped trying.

"When I look at some of my movies, some of the early ones especially, I can just see myself `doing' him unabashedly," Mr. Allen added in a recent interview. "And for people that know me, like Diane Keaton, they can just see it clear as a bell."

With his rapid-fire delivery, inimitable timing and slightly nasal voice, Mr. Hope insisted, always, on a live audience, so he could punch a monologue up or ratchet it down as he read his listeners' reactions. Mr. O'Brien speaks of the "backtracking" style, in which Mr. Hope's film characters' conceits suddenly crumble in perfect deadpans or double takes.

He was the first to sing Ira Gershwin's "I Can't Get Started," Cole Porter's "DeLovely," plus "Two Sleepy People," "Silver Bells," "Buttons and Bows" and "Thanks for the Memory," which won the Oscar as best song in his debut film, "The Big Broadcast of 1938," and promptly became his theme song in 59 unbroken years under contract to NBC.

He pierced an era of prudery with a raciness less popular figures could not have dared. On a 1940's radio broadcast, when Dorothy Lamour said she was just pulling his leg, Mr. Hope replied: "Dottie, you can pull my right leg, and you can pull my left leg, but don't mess with Mr. In-Between!"

Mr. Hope was the first comic to acknowledge that he relied on a stable of writers, and he meticulously cataloged the inventory in 88,000 alphabetized, cross-referenced pages of jokes now in the Library of Congress, along with letters, scrapbooks, medals and an assortment of Hope-iana.

"We wrote jokes about his writers," said Larry Gelbart, who went to work for Mr. Hope in 1948 and whose writing credits include the television version of "M*A*S*H" and the movie "Tootsie." "He knew there was a good joke in having writers. He played off everything. He used every part of his life. His life was his own straight line. Actually, he was wittier and smarter off stage. We sort of wrote to a Hope paradigm. His jokes weren't known for their wit; they were known for their breadth and width and range of subject matter. People loved him because he was so publicly being the fool we all privately are."

Mort Lachman, a longtime Hope writer and producer, said simply: "I'll tell you what kind of a boss he was: insatiable. There were never enough jokes. We didn't call them jokes. We called them `crumbs for the bear.' "

Mr. Hope's son Tony, at 62 the second oldest of four adopted children and a lawyer in Washington, said: "Part of the American spirit has always been to poke fun at the pompous. That seems to me to be the cornerstone of his humor, to align himself with the view of the common man and pull the pompous down to that level by saying what the common man would've said if he'd had another 15 seconds to phrase it."

Mr. Hope, the son of a hard-drinking stonemason, came to the United States when he was 5 and grew up in Cleveland, saddled with the name Leslie Townes Hope, which became Lester, then Les and finally Bob. He hustled at various jobs and survived two bouts as an amateur boxer, known as Packy East.

He soon wound up in dancing school, then teaching dance, then, in 1920, dancing professionally with his girlfriend, Mildred Rosequist, whose mother told her "he'd never amount to anything." For the next dozen years, in one dance act or another, he toured the country until his big break on Broadway in Jerome Kern's 1933 musical "Roberta."

That same year, he met a sultry nightclub singer from the Bronx named Dolores Reade. When he walked into the Vogue Club on West 57th Street, she was singing "It's Only a Paper Moon," and this February they celebrated their 69th anniversary.

But the Hopes' home life was not perfect and Mrs. Hope, still spry and singing at almost 94, put up with a lot. At his busiest, Mr. Hope was on the road perhaps 250 nights a year and he was famous for having a roving eye, and then some. Graydon Carter, now editor of Vanity Fair, spent the night at Mr. Hope's Palm Springs house when he was writing a magazine piece about him in 1983.

"I'm sound asleep and I see Bob at the door and he's got pajamas on and he starts coming over toward the bed, and he leans down really close to my face and taps me: `Do you want to go into town and pick up some girls?' " Mr. Carter recalled. "He was 80 at the time."

One of his best movies, "The Seven Little Foys" (1955), the true-life tale of an absentee father and feckless husband who took his children on the vaudeville circuit to keep from losing custody of them after their mother's death, has bittersweet autobiographical overtones. In one scene, a little Foy in long johns sarcastically demands of his famous father, "Button me up, Eddie Foy!," an echo of how young Tony Hope once greeted his father in the dining room at the Pebble Beach Country Club: "Good morning, Bob Hope!" he cried.

"Loud," Tony Hope recalls, still chuckling at the memory. "He got mad."

Linda Hope, who has worked off and on as her father's producer, said the absences were hard because the time with him was such fun. "When we were very young, and especially during the war, he was traveling extensively and we were at the Burbank airport, and sometimes we didn't know whether it was to wave hello or goodbye."

Ms. Hope said she had talked often with her father about his long support for the Vietnam War, in which she had friends who died. "He said, `I don't care what you feel about whether we should be there or not; I deal with the fact that they are there, and my feeling is if they are there and they're defending their country, we need to be behind them.' "

In this Mr. Hope anticipated the collective national regret that attended the opening of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall and that animates today's protesters against the war in Iraq, whose slogans amount to "Oppose the war, support the troops."

His Vietnam humor could be mordant. "Technically, we're not at war," he told the troops in his 1966 Christmas special. "So remember that when you get shot: Technically, it doesn't hurt."

To read the files of letters from G.I.'s that Mr. Hope saved over the years is to sense the extraordinary bond they felt with him. One wounded Navy man, after two years in a hospital in World War II, signed his letter simply, "Your shipmate."

As he aged, Mr. Hope collected more honors than any entertainer in history, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, even if he became less entertaining. "I do think that, eventually, he reached the point where he became so identified, and deservedly so, with the establishment that it hurt him," Mr. Allen said.

He never tried to take on an Oscar-caliber character role, though his children once tried to option John Osborne's "The Entertainer," the story of a faded English music hall comic that earned Laurence Olivier an Oscar nomination in 1961.

"Vulnerability was not something that he allowed people to see too much," Linda Hope said. "I can sort of understand that, too, because as an entertainer he couldn't have done what he did with the soldiers and bases and hospitals and all of the horror that he saw firsthand if he allowed himself to be particularly vulnerable and emotional. And I think very early on he developed this way to get through the material, and not touch the areas that, if you're a really great actor, you have to touch."

Mr. Allen said: "He was never as deep a thinker as Chaplin. He never had quite the literary intelligence of Groucho. There was not much suffering in his movies, really, and they will never have the depth, the dimension of some others. But his work is truly wonderful."  

In a ceremony yesterday, the intersection of Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles was named Bob Hope Square. Mr. Hope did not attend.

The New York Times

Bob Hope Turns 100, With Quiet Thanks for the Memories

By Charlie LeDuff

May 30, 2003

LOS ANGELES, May 29 — For the "Greatest Entertainer of the 20th Century" one expected a little more.

Bob Hope predates the airplane, the mass-produced automobile and the Panama Canal. The nutshell autobiography attributed to him is that he was born Leslie Townes Hope in England, raised in Cleveland, educated in vaudeville and groomed and polished in New York. And now the most famous intersection in Los Angeles carries his name.

Mr. Hope turned 100 today, and to mark the occasion, the junction of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street was christened Bob Hope Square. But the mayor of Los Angeles was not in attendance, nor was the governor of California, and there were no A-list celebrities or comedians expressing their indebtedness to Mr. Hope, now a frail man hidden away in his estate in the San Fernando Valley.

There was Mickey Rooney, an old pal, two city councilmen, an official from the city Department of Transportation and a Marine Corps brass band.

The tribute was not soul-wrenching or introspective or an effort to articulate Mr. Hope's place in the pantheon of American culture. One of the councilmen presented the Hope family with pumpkin bread. The official from the Transportation Department said his children enjoyed the old Bob Hope movies. Mr. Rooney was brief, recalling when Mr. Hope awarded him an Oscar. "He said, `Should I give it to you or to the statue?' " Mr. Rooney remembered. "I wonder what he meant by that."

Instead, for some of the few hundred in attendance today, the ceremony was as much a reminder of how fleeting fame is and how rapidly memories yellow as it was a celebration of a famous man.

"Bob gave and gave and gave and I really honor the man," said Joan Hicks, 78, a recent transplant from New York who is pursuing a second career as a puppeteer. "But the truth of it now is when you grow older, it all fades. People look at the old as old, but I look at it as a gift, honey."

Ms. Hicks remembers her days of youth and romance, the days when Mr. Hope was in his prime and she was turning heads. She organized parties in New York for the men returning from World War II. "I'm not stuck in the 40's," Ms. Hicks said. "People just assume I am."

She told of the young coeds with pierced navels who recently questioned why she dressed so old-fashioned, in a long skirt and filigreed blouse. "I said because it makes me feel beautiful. This is who we are. This is who I am."

Mr. Hope is the embodiment of her generation, Ms. Hicks said. He appeared in more than 50 movies, presided over 17 Oscar ceremonies and did nearly 300 television specials. He was a comedian who worked clean and worked for 70 years.

But humor grew raunchy and Mr. Hope grew old, and his legacy lies less in his movies than in his service to service members, having traveled 10 million miles and performed for 10 million troops in his career. In recognition, the White House today created the "Bob Hope American Patriot Award."

John Guinn, 53, saw Mr. Hope perform in Okinawa during the Vietnam War. "Yeah man, he was a great comedian," Mr. Guinn said. "But, you know, times change. Comedy reflects the world you're living in. America's a melting pot now. But yeah, Bob Hope was a great comedian."

And in that regard, there is a five-acre monument in the works on the San Diego shoreline to commemorate Mr. Hope's dedication to the nation's servicemen and women.

It will be in the shape of a five-pointed star, and on each point of the star will be a bronze statue of Mr. Hope depicting him on a one of his U.S.O. tours, in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the cold war and Operation Desert Shield.

Motion detectors will set off recordings of some of his speeches, perhaps something like this one from Mr. Hope's Web site (http://www.bobhope.com):

"A member of my staff asked me when I'm going to retire. I said when I can no longer hear the laughter. He said: `That never stopped you before.' "

A million dollars has been raised for the monument, called the Military Tribute to Bob Hope, though $4 million more is needed, said John G. Ibe, vice president of the foundation that is supporting the project. Mr. Ibe, 82, when asked why he was creating such a monument, explained it this way:

"During the war, I had a friend named Tom Jones from Independence, Mo., who served with me aboard the U.S.S. St. Lo. It was an aircraft carrier and the first American ship sunk by a kamikaze.

"Fifteen days before the ship sank, we saw Bob Hope in the Admiralty Islands. As we were going back to our ship, Tommy said that was his first live show in his life. He was 18. He says he thought every man who goes off to war should see Bob Hope. He just changed your attitude and helped you understand the reason you were there. That was Tommy's last show. He never lived to see another. That's why I'm involved the way I am."

For Mr. Ibe, Mr. Hope is nothing less than a pillar, a man who appreciated your fighting effort so much that he would fly into hostile territory to tell you so. He gave young men and women a sense of purpose.

But times change and so do sensibilities. Hugo Sanchez, 35, a construction worker on Hollywood Boulevard, said he had never heard of Mr. Hope. Mr. Sanchez's childhood in Guadalajara, Mexico, was filled with Mario Moreno, better known as Cantinflas, Mexico's greatest comic actor, the "Latin Charlie Chaplin" and a contemporary of Mr. Hope.

"Cantinflas was funny," Mr. Sanchez said. "But Bob Hope. Him, I no know him."

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Updated 21 May 2003