That Old Feeling: Hope-ful Memories

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That Old Feeling: Hope-ful Memories
Richard Corliss reconsiders Bob Hope
By RICHARD CORLISS



Thanks: Bob Hope, 1903-2003


Monday, Jul. 28, 2003
Bob Hope was the man everyone was supposed to like. In a career that spanned three-quarters of a century, he left his indelible mark, big-time, in six major media: vaudeville, Broadway, radio, movies, pop music and television; no other showman had success of that breath or duration. He was Hollywood’s designated greeter, heckler and eulogist. From 1940 to 1978 he emcee’d 17 Academy Award shows: nine by himself, eight others as co-host. (Billy Crystal is a distant second with seven, Johnny Carson next with five.) It’s one of many Hope records — along with honorary degrees, miles traveled as an entertainer, consecutive years with a single network (61 with NBC) — that will never be broken. Leonard Maltin said Hope “may be the most popular entertainer in the history of Western civilization.”

For 70 years — from his teens until his age finally passed his body temperature — Hope was ever on the move. He did concerts, hosted charity golf tournaments, did everything, went everywhere. Marlon Brando once said, dismissively, that Hope “would go to the opening of a phone booth.” Sure, if it was on a military base. An indefatigable ambassador for the USO (United Service Organization), he played to more than 10 million GIs in wars hot and cold from 1941 to 1991. “If I could live my life over,” he said not long ago, “I wouldn’t have time.” He was the salesman who had to stay on the road to stay alive and push his product. No, but I wanna tell ya, ladies and gentlemen, right heah: it’s Bob “American Icon” Hope. Yes sah!

In months before his death today at age 100, Hope was a frail creature confined upstairs in his Toluga Lake mansion, attended by nurses while his younger (94!) wife Dolores entertained guests. But for decades, on movie and TV screens, Hope was the young man in a hurry, propelled by ignorance and ego. In this guise, he embodied an utterly American comic figure — the brash buffoon, confident against all evidence that he would triumph — that influenced the personas of stars from Woody Allen to Steve Martin to Jim Carrey. As much as the Hope character was a loser, Hope himself was a winner: rich, laureled, happy. Or at least smiling. Neoning his letterbox grin, he got audiences to smile back, by the millions and across the generations.


THE OFFICIAL FUNNYMAN

Hope received more decorations than any civilian in U.S. history. He was an honorary knight of Great Britain and a Papal Knight of the Vatican. Months ago, with his centenary approaching, 35 states chose to designate May 29th as Bob Hope Day. Queen Elizabeth and George W. Bush, monarchs of his birth nation and his adopted one, sent him congratulatory messages. The burghers of Los Angeles recently gave a new name to that sacred showbiz intersection, Hollywood and Vine — Bob Hope Square.

Bob Hope: Square. That says it, for those who came of age during the Vietnam War. He was square, and worse: a complacent, reactionary cheerleader-in-chief for the befuddled, immoral, rearguard vision of America. In a way, he was as controversial as Leni Riefenstahl, the German director, and Hitler favorite, who outlived most of her detractors by the time she turned 100 last August. But Hope was closer to home. It’s not a great exaggeration to say that, for the peaceniks of Vietnam, Nixon was Hope’s Hitler. (If the bombing sorties escalated, so did the rhetoric.)

Hope was the culture that the counter-culture was counter to. He was defiantly old-fashioned, remorselessly Republican, at a time when comedians were supposed to have stopped telling somebody else’s jokes and, like Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, extract stinging social criticism from their roiling insides. Even if he’d wanted to, Hope couldn’t have done that. He had no inside. He was all surface, polish, flash: the tailfin on a gas-guzzler.

How was Hope hated back then? Listen to Peter W. Kaplan read off the indictment, in a 1978 Film Comment essay (the best I know on Hope): “Old Ski-nose — how detestable! Standing with Nixon, standing with Johnson, wearing hippie wigs for howling crowds of middle Americans; no worse symbol existed of our humor, no man more eager to promote all the wrong things.” Kaplan then lists the charges against Hope: “the reactionary apostle, the golf shoes, the putter, the Texaco sign and the fatigue uniform ... the grisly moment of ‘Say and there are so many Birds in the White House now I understand there’s a strategy to bomb Hanoi with eggs.’”

But Kaplan doesn’t leave Hope with eggs on his conscience. As much as he deplores the comic’s autumnal political shtick (or did deplore it, 25 years ago), he loves the import of Hope’s movie character, and the lithe grace he lent it. Kaplan finally calls Hope “the most representative and influential force in talking comedy pictures at the moment of their greatest popularity. He created the type that, more than any spokesman for his times, made the jokes we wanted to hear. They were very funny.”

Like Bing Crosby — his pal, golf buddy, comic sparring partner and fellow icon — Hope is due for a reconsideration. In this column we’ll do our best to be fair, precise and appreciative to a guy who had all those medals but, as a superb showman, deserved a little more respect.


BECOMING BOB

As an entertainer, Hope was le tout package. He sang, danced, told jokes perfectly, could occasionally play it straight. If he’d had the time, interest or nerve, he might have made a great Archie Rice, the music-hall monster of John Osborne’s “The Entertainer.”

He had “it” — visually, verbally and kinetically. Hope’s profile was its own apotheosis, its own parody, and so arresting in its simple lines and cartoon contours that it could have been fashioned by Tex Avery or Al Hirschfeld or Raymond Loewy. He came to movies in the first decade of sound; they had voices then, distinctive enough to give full employment to impressionists. (Who’s worth mimicking today, besides Jack?) Hope’s vocal precision and Tommy-gun delivery earned him the sobriquet “Rapid Robert.” He was fast on his feet too. Woody Allen and Dick Cavett are just two of Hope’s admirers who emphasize the clarity and eloquent wit of his body language. Now strut, now cringe. Bluster; wheedle. A lifetime of showbiz savvy backed up each move and moue.

He didn’t come from show people. Hope gives a hint of his pedigree in some 1969 banter included in “The Best of Bob Hope: The Ultimate Collection,” a valuable new three-disc DVD of Hope TV clips and early radio and movie work. Chatting with actress Romy Schneider, he says, “You started your career in films at the age of 14. Isn’t that a little early to pick a vocation?” Romy muses: “Well, I think children often turn out to be what their parents were. My parents were actors in Vienna. What were yours?” “Butchers in Cleveland,” Bob snaps, “and let’s change the subject.”

Leslie Townes Hope was born in the South London neighborhood of Eltham, one of seven kids in a family whose patriarch, William Henry Hope, was restless, cantankerous, alcoholic. A stonemason by trade, William shipped out to the U.S. and found a job in Cleveland with his butcher brothers. The rest of the brood joined him in 1908, when Leslie was four-and-a-half. (In the biography “Bob Hope,” author Peter Carrick claims that the boy changed his Christian name when he got annoyed that the alphabetical reading of his name, “Hope, Leslie,” provoked his classmates to “hopeless” gags. Believe who will.)

Bob, from now on, was soon entertaining on street corners and in saloons to swell the family purse. Like Pittsburgh-born Gene Kelly — another 40s star who blasted out of Broadway into Hollywood with a wide, welded-on, slightly suspect smile and the forward-leaning urgency of the desperate go-getter — Hope was a hoofing prodigy who taught dance in a grimy mid-Eastern city before figuring he could be a headliner, not a tutor. He tiptoed into vaudeville, teaming with various friends in dance acts, then segued to comedy duos, where he usually played the straight man. “When I started in vaudeville,” Hope recalled on one of his TV specials, “the only thing that kept me alive was the vegetables the audience threw at me.” That’s a joke, son. He was doing fine.


BROADWAY BOB

Hope hit Broadway in the late 20s, just as the ranks of stage actors were thinning as they were lured to Hollywood to make the new talking pictures. The peculiarity is that Hope, with his jaunty looks and clarion pipes, wasn’t immediately drafted into movies — he’d be 35 before he made a feature out there. Meanwhile he built his craft in other media. On stage, where he hadn’t yet developed the coward character, Hope was more a Coward character — as in Noel. “I was an entirely different fellow on Broadway,” he told Brooks Riley in a 1979 Film Comment interview. “I was very chic and very subtle; I wouldn’t do a double-take for anything.”

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To judge from some early radio work, Hope still had things to learn. As emcee of Bromo Seltzer’s “The Intimate Review” (a 1935 show included on the “Best” DVD), he declares, “This is the voice of inexperience, Bob Hope,” and for once it’s not a joke. After spitting out a joke in the opening monologue Bob will laugh, nervously, and louder than his studio audience, which apparently numbers around six. With contributions from singer Jane Froman and the Al Goodman Orchestra, the show is more music than comedy, if that’s what Bob’s doing. “Hope,” he reminds his listeners, a little desperately. “You spell it with an H, not a D.” He would have to go to Hollywood, hire a slew of sympathetic gagmen and hook up with Bing Crosby before he developed his full radio plumage and panache.

While in shows and on the air he got extra money and exposure starring in two-reel comedies. “Paree Paree,” a 1934 short also on the DVD, reveals Bob (he’s 30 or 31 by now) still as an agreeable but not mesmerizing jeune premier. Again he shows signs of nervousness, clenching his fists or clutching a desk top. He had yet to learn how much the camera went for him, and that his comic attack could be more forceful, almost predatory, without alienating the moviegoer.

In the 1936 “Calling All Tars,” about two girl-crazy guys mistaken for sailors, he’s the straight man to knockabout comic Johnnie Berkes and to a series of sharp-tongued Daisies. (“You look good enough to eat,” he tells one girl as they stand outside a restaurant. “Well, I do eat,” she ripostes. “Let’s go in here.”) There’s lot of crude physical humor — some of it perhaps unintentional, as when Bob’s hand lingers in Berkes’ butt-crack as they struggle to get into a shipboard hammock — that climaxes with the fellas blowing up the ship and landing on a deserted island. That’s where Hope’s career might have gone if he’d kept making movies like this one.


MOVIE BOB

“Who is this character,” Kaplan asks of Hope, “for whom not a word is casual or unprofessional, of whose spoken lines not a one is ever thrown away (they cost money), and whose humor is oriented almost completely toward a success which he pretends never to attain but which he know he has in greater excess than almost anyone who laughs at him?”

That’s the Movie Bob, who burst into superstardom during the war. Kaplan: “Frank Tashlin saw that the two most popular performers (male) to come out of World War II were Hope and Daffy Duck.” (Tashlin would say that, since he had made Daffy Duck cartoons at Warners before directing Hope in four movies; but the statement is arguably true.) “Both braggarts, both self-centered, both divided between what they wanted to be and what they wanted to be seen as being.” The genius was in letting the audience in on the joke. Hope knew they would laugh harder if they could see the absurdity in what his character wanted to be seen as being.)

He knew that a movie star needed identifiable quirks, little trademarks, winks to the audience, and Hope had two: the mirror and the growl. “The growl? That was hiding in my body for years. GrrrrrrrrrrrrOOOOOwwwww! I do that today and say, ‘Remember when I used to growl? Grrrooooowww. It’s losing its bite a bit.” There’s the sense a Hope character loves himself because he’s afraid no one else will — he has enough to go around. So “I would never miss a mirror,” he told Riley. “I’d walk by one, stop, go back, ‘Oh yeah, how are you?’ People love that; they love it when you’re brash.” Little by little, Hope amassed these shticks into a pile to be ignited by the flame of his personality.

Bob bloomed in his seventh Paramount picture, “The Cat and the Canary.” In this 1939 thriller-comedy he’s become that two-faced comic icon, the vain coward. One function of this vanity is bravado. In “Canary” he seems to shrug off fear when Nydia Westman asks him, “Don’t big empty houses scare you?” and he parries, “Not me. I used to be in vaudeville.” But the next moment he subverts movie-hero machismo by saying, out loud, “I’m so scared my goose pimples have goose pimples.”

The Hope character is forever vacillating between cringing and strutting, sometimes in the same sentence. In “The Road to Utopia,” he walks into a tough bar and, without thinking, orders, “Lemonade”; seeing the contempt of the drinkers around him, he quickly snarls, “In a dirty glass.” (A great gag, repeated in “Son of Paleface.”) But the true Hope is the fellow who’s man enough to admit he’s a mouse. As he pithily puts it in “The Paleface,” “Brave men run in my family.” It’s all a function of the character’s selfishness. A tight situation with a pretty girl should stir his protective impulses, but there’s only one pelt he wants to save. In “My Favorite Spy,” Hedy Lamarr cozies up and purrs, “The closer I get to death, the more I realize I love you.” Hope: “The closer I get to death, the more I realize I love me too.”

Kaplan writes that Hope embodied his coward persona “with the confidence of one who knew that harm could never really come to him. He could wisecrack to gorilla and cutthroats and it was clear to the audience that th whole crew was simply working as employees of a benign American company. ... The position of the inept showoff — white body among the brown, smooth among the hairy, clumsy among the competent, cowardly among the brave — is Hope’s creation for the white middle-class American who wasn’t quite sure he was ready, by the time of World War II, to face death.”


AUTEUR? AW, BALONEY!

Hope fronted lots of entertaining films. Start with the 1939 “Never Say Die,” which climaxes in a shoot-out Hope can win if only he remembers his second’s instructions (“There’s a cross on the muzzle of the pistol with the bullet and a nick on the handle of the pistol with the blank”). Thumb a ride on the five “Road” pictures he starred in with Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. Savor the “Paleface” tandem, and the “Favorite” trio (“Blonde,” “Brunette,” “Spy”); they’re all easy to take. But they don’t inspire many critics to dithyrambs of analysis; there’s no Hope cult. This is because — well, they’re no masterpieces, but also because they don’t fit the modern definition of movie art, even popular movie art. They’re anti- or un-auteur.

In today’s Hollywood, stars almost automatically are on call for eccentric directors working outside the system. Nicole Kidman, just off an Oscar for Best Actress, announced last week at Cannes that her film “Dogville” would be the first of three she’d make with nutsy Danish auteur Lars Von Trier. In the old days, though, few top stars were seduced by the foreign-auteur lure. Ask Hope bout Kurosawa, and he would’ve said, “Dolores drives one, but I’ll stick with my Chrysler.” Hey, Bob, wanna work with Bergman? Listen to him go all wolfish: “GrrrrrrrrrrrrOOOOOwwwww! Ingrid can get notorious with me any day.”

Even in the matter of choosing American comedy directors, Hope was too conservative or myopic. He was at Paramount when Preston Sturges in his sublime prime (1940-44) and never linked up with him. (Sturges’ two regular male leads, Joel McCrea and Eddie Bracken, could be seen as variations on the Hope character: one surlier, the other more nakedly insecure.) Leo McCarey, who had directed Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers, teamed twice at Paramount with Bob’s pal Bing on two laughie-weepies, “Going My Way” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” that Hollywood threw Oscars at like quoits. Yet Hope stuck to the likes of Sidney Lanfield, Elliot Nugent and George Marshall — none of whom got noticed, or had any reason to be, by the double-domers at Cahiers du Cinéma.

Hope’s movies were not really directed so much as they were assembled. The director was the foreman in a building project; the screenwriter was the architect, and Hope’s gag writers (who added many “ad lib” bits of business to the script) were the interior decorators. Like most stars who straddled radio and film, Hope relied on his writers; unlike many stars, he often repaid the debt publicly. “Those great guys, my writers,” he apostrophized at the end of his 25th anniversary NBC special in 1975. “Who knows? Without them we might be celebrating my 25th anniversary as a used-car salesman.”


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HOPE SINGS ETERNAL

We know Hope as a movie actor and TV headliner. We take on faith his eminence in vaudeville, the theater and radio. But Bob Hope ... pop star? You bet. He introduced more hit tunes than any other comedian. Two, “Thanks for the Memory” and “Buttons and Bows,” won Best Song Oscars, back when there was real competition for that award. He was no serious competition for Crosby, but the salesman in him know how to put across a lyric. His singing voice — an engaging light tenor that was trilly in his youth, more mellow as he aged — had the same clarity and confidence as his speaking voice. He could play a song straight or (when Bing was around) goose it into parody.

In early days, Hope was as much a song-and-dance man as a comedian. All six of his Broadway shows were musicals, including Jerome Kern’s “Roberta” (whose cast included Lyda Roberti, Sydney Greenstreet and a young George Murphy). Through his growing celebrity, or maybe through dumb luck, he got to introduce some hit songs. In “Ziegfeld Follies of 1936” he and Eve Arden sang the Vernon Duke-Ira Gershwin “I Can’t Get Started With You.” In Cole Porter’s “Red, Hot and Blue,” Bob and Ethel Merman duetted on “It’s De-lovely.” His first film for a major studio, the Warner Bros. two-reeler “Paree Paree,” was a compression of Porter’s “Fifty Million Frenchman,” and it allowed him to bring the instant standard “You Do Something to Me” to the screen.

He kept the streak going when he got to Hollywood. His early films with Shirley Ross produced three immediate hits — “Thanks for the Memory” (by Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin ), “Two Sleepy People” (Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser) and “The Lady’s in Love With You” (Loesser and Burton Lane) — that survive as pop classics. The “Road” movies put the accent on comedy, in songs as well as dialogue, but Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke wrote bright material for Bing and Bob, and “The Road to Morocco” (“Like Webster’s dictionary, we’re Morocco-bound”) hit #21 on the charts.

As a singer, he was a team player; most of his best-remembered songs are duets: with Ross, with Crosby, and with the Clark Sisters backing him on Jay Livingston and Ray Evans’ “Buttons and Bows,” the easy-gaited Western lament of a home-sick city slicker (“My bones denounce the buckboard bounce/ And the cactus hurts my toes”) that helped make “The Paleface” one of Hope’s top box office attractions. Another Livingston-Evans composition — “Silver Bells,” from “The Lemon Drop Kid” — became a Christmas perennial, especially on Hope’s holiday shows, where he performed it as a duet 17 times, the last (in 1993) with Dolores.

Hope snagged “Thanks for the Memory” when Jack Benny turned down the second comic part in “The Big Broadcast of 1938,” and when Dorothy Lamour, the film’s female lead, graciously declined to filch it from Bob and Shirley. Over the decades it became a showbiz exit anthem, a gracious adieu; but it’s really a divorce song. It paints, with daubs of comedy and poignance, the meeting of ex-lovers who choose, briefly, to remember the good times not the bad. At the end, unwilling to let the sweet illusion evaporate, she and he swap lines...

Ross: Strictly entre-nous,/ Darling, how are you?
Hope: And how are all those little dreams/ That never did come true?
Ross: Awfully glad I met you.
Hope: Cheerio and toodle-oo.
Ross: Thank you —
Hope: Thank you so much.


Today we can acknowledge with amazement Bob Hope’s influence on American comic stylings and express our gratitude for the slick pleasure he gave the world. Hey, Bob, I wanna tell ya: thank you so much.

Sempers,

Roger

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That Old Feeling: Bobbin’ Along
Richard Corliss on Bob Hope’s TV travels
By RICHARD CORLISS

Monday, Jul. 28, 2003
“How d’ya like this little juke box for Easter I have on?” a tuxedoed Bob Hope asked in the opening monologue of his first TV show, on April 9, 1950. “Pretty formal, huh? Of course, the real reason I’m wearing this little outfit is the fact that a lot of performers die on television, and if it happens to me I wanna be prepared.” He needn’t have worried. The 284 NBC specials he would host over the next 43 years averaged a 40-plus Nielsen share, making Hope, unquestionably, the highest-rated star in television history.

“The Best of Bob Hope: The Ultimate Collection” compiles more than six hours of video and audio material, most of it from “Best of” clip shows: the 1975 “Highlights of a Quarter Century of Bob Hope on Television” (82 guest stars in two hours); the 1970 “The Bob Hope Christmas Special: Around the World With the USO”; the 1993 “Bob Hope’s Bag Full of Christmas Memories”; the 1995 “Bob Goes to War”; and a throwaway blooper show. Watch these to see the longevity and limitation of America’s most decorated comedian. I wonder if, in his invalid days, Bob did.



MOVIE SHTICK

The Bob Hope you know from TV was younger, and so, so much better, in a decade of Paramount movie comedies. The first Hope film I’ve seen that displays his trademark persona is the 1939 “The Cat and the Canary.” In this old-dark-house comedy melodrama he plays radio actor Wally Campbell, whom one character snidely subs “the original flutterbrain.” He’s already the chatty coward: “I’m not really frightened. I’m just naturally nervous.” He analyzes his behavior for leading lady Paulette Goddard: “I always joke when I’m scared. I kind of kid myself into being brave. Ain’t that silly?” In early Paramount films Hope had played the straight comic; in “The Cat and the Canary” he was the lead. That meant he and the writers could help shape the material as they did Hope’s radio show scripts. There’s a topical political joke (Nydia Westman: “Do you believe in reincarnation — you know, that dead people come back?” Bob: “You mean like the Republicans?”) as well as gags about Jack Benny and Bob’s favorite sport, golf. All that’s missing from his soon-to-be-familiar repertoire is a joke about Bing.

Which is odd, since one of the characters, the murderer’s first victim, is named Crosby. Crosby had already established his screen and radio character: the smooth, genially aloof crooner. The great luck was that his persona and Hope’s should prove so perfectly complementary when they were paired in the 1940 “Road to Singapore — the first of seven “Road” movies” — and that their styles played off each other so adroitly. They worked together with the easy camaraderie of an old vaudeville team (and often began their movies with a peppy song-and-dance routine). Hope called this synchronicity “the mesh thing.” It has hardly an equal in comedy-movie history. In 2001, for a TIME.com consideration of Crosby, I wrote the next three paragraphs about the “Road” movies:



Superficially they were breezy comedy-adventures, Kiplingesque tales of two pleasant wastrels in a far-flung land. But they were really extensions of Crosby’s and Hope’s radio programs and personae: variety shows that were clogged with topical gags, inside jokes about golf and the horses, and light mocking of the stars’ cartoon physiognomies (Crosby’s ears, Hope’s nose and chin). Crosby is heard singing off-camera and Hope asks, “Who’d be sellin’ fish at this hour?” Another time Bob cracks, “Next time I bring Sinatra.” The proceedings were unabashedly ridiculous: in one of many self-referential asides, a talking camel (never mind) dryly observes: “This is the screwiest picture I was ever in.”

The “Road” films (the five major ones are the ’40s visits to Singapore, Zanzibar, Morocco, Utopia — Alaska — and Rio) were screwy, all right, but pretty shrewd as character comedy of a high, broad stripe. With the help of their writers, Crosby and Hope perfected two hardy comic types: Bing the lordly overdog, smart and charming enough to get other folks to volunteer for the sucker’s game; and Bob the scruffy underdog, too used to losing, too stubborn to give up. Bing was Bugs to Bob’s Daffy; Dean Martin to his Jerry Lewis; Bill Murray to Hope’s Martin Short; and, in “The Mask” and “Me, Myself & Irene,” Jim Carrey to Jim Carrey.

Bing is the sharpie, the con man, the cad to men and women alike. He sells Bob into slavery in “Morocco,” picks Hope’s pocket of his boatfare in “Utopia,” forces him into a dangerous highwire bicycle act in “Rio.” Crosby never apologizes for his dastardly doings, and the plot rarely smites him with a climactic comeuppance. ... “You know, way down underneath I’m honest,” Bing says in “Utopia.” Hope replies, “Yeah, but on top you’re a rat.” That was Bing in many of his movies: the rat on top.



I’ll just add that the prime “Road” movies were the five in the 40s: “Singapore,” “Zanzibar,” “Morocco,” Utopia” and “Rio.” — in seven years. Each movie sent these Yankee lads into some exotic clime to make light mockery of the locals: Orientals in “Singapore,” Africans in “Zanzibar,” Arabs in “Morocco,” Eskimos in “Utopia,” Latins in “Rio.” (Never to Europe: there, the natives would condescend to Bob and Bing.) I suppose that, in retrospect — or politically-correctrospect — the movies can be accused of racialism. They certainly celebrated the smooth wit and fast banter of these two Yanks; who wouldn’t want to imitate them? In that sense, America’s cultural imperialism never had two sunnier salesmen.



STAR SHTICK

Hope might have been a conventional leading man, if not for his nose — and the prosperous fun he made of it. As far back as his early radio days, the nose was a running gag (especially when Bob had a cold, and let’s pretend I didn’t say that). Crosby made frequent mock of it in the “Road” movies, and kept at it on a radio broadcast in 1951: “Has your nose always been like that, or did you have that ball-point put on it?” By the time he landed on TV, nose jokes were as much an institution as Hope was. A standard bit had Hope go nose to nose, smack up against another male star’s face, to set up the laugh. In one such face-off, Jack Benny abruptly complained,“He cut me!”

You could almost hear the writers schvitz with glee when the guest was someone with a snout as prominent as Hope’s. They’d have Tony Bennett dub Bob “the proud bird with the golden snorkel.” Jimmy Durante (with whom Hope teamed for a 1957 novelty tune called “Blame It on the Proboscis”) would proclaim, “In the face of superior weaponry, I surrender.” One skit had Hope and Danny Thomas play gangsters. Again the stars mash faces, and Hope snarls: “I could let you have it between your eyes, but I see you’ve been punished enough there already.” To which Thomas ripostes: “You should talk. They can’t hang a coat on mine.”

This ostensibly good-natured raillery was a staple of radio and early TV comedy. It grounded the repartee when this week’s guest star was already established as his own caricature. Actors gamely allowed themselves to be reduced to humors (Orson Welles’ artistic pomposity, Benny’s stinginess) or to some physiognomic eccentricity (Crosby’s stuck-out ears, the bags under Fred Allen’s eyes).

Throughout the 40s, Frank Sinatra’s youthful skinniness had been the butt of much raillery in all popular media, including movie cartoons; the Tex Avery classic “Little ’Tinker” has a Sinatra figure disappearing behind a microphone pole and falling between the cracks in a stage floor. In an early-50s stint guest shot, Frank listens politely as Bob swears he will never again make Sinatra jokes — which he immediately repeats: “the pooped-out Pinza, a breadstick with lungs.” Hope goes on to compliment Sinatra on his record-breaking engagement at New York’s Copacabana night club. No, but the prices were mighty steep steep there. “I walked in a Republican and came out a Democrat,” Hope says. “It’s the first time in night-club history so many people paid a cover charge to see a minimum.” (An older, heavier Sinatra visited Hope and make his own joke about his once-svelte self: “When I weighed 60 pounds, had a gang o’ hair and looked like my own X-ray.”)

He could be crueler about the famous when they weren’t there. In 1984, after Vanessa Williams stepped down as Miss America when Penthouse threatened to publish figure studies she’d posed for years earlier, Hope called her resignation “a photo finish,” and said, “She claims she’s got nude photographs of Bob Guccione.” Around the same time, at the apogee of Culture Club’s fame, Hope dead-panned to guest Milton Berle: “I hear when they built Boy George they used you for a blueprint.”

And he continued to rag celebs, whether or not they’d been on his show, just for looking funny. Woody Allen had done nothing notorious (yet) and had proclaimed his admiration for Bob. In his first films Allen was already trying to be a hamische Hope; Peter Kaplan wrote that “Allen’s feminized version of urbane charm crossed with the insatiable and unconsummated lust of an obsessive masturbator are inventions that stem from Hope.” Woody revered Bob as much as he did Groucho Marx; his tiny tragedy was that he possessed neither the comforting looks and delivery of the one or the rough, stalking grace of the other. Yet on a 1969 show Hope called Allen “the little spider monkey with the falsetto voice,” and added, “I always thought the tiger in his tank was a rental.” Why make jokes that appear to go out of their way to be hurtful? Any comic will tell you: because they’re funny! A Hope writer would concoct an insulting gag about a famous person, and if it made Bob laugh, he figured the audience would go for it too.


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POLITICAL SHTICK

The same standard applied to the political jokes that were a staple of Hope’s TV monologues. If we split the 20th century into thirds, we can say that Will Rogers was the preeminent political humorist of the century’s first third, and Hope had the second third to himself. The final slice would go to Johnny Carson and his avatars, Jay Leno and David Letterman — with Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” pointing the way to a millennial freshness of wit and perspective.

Of the main political roastmasters, only Rogers was forthright about his affiliation: “I belong to no organized party. I’m a Democrat.” Hope, Carson and the rest were ostensibly nonpartisan (though Leno, in his early stand-up years, had a noticeably progressive tinge). The same for the two clowns now occupying the Weekend Update desk on “Saturday Night Live”; if they ever stopped giggling at the jokes they read, they’d might notice how lame and irrelevant they have become. Stewart is the anomaly: he strikes a distinctly (and to me quite melodious) leftist tone. I can’t explain the high quality of the writing on “The Daily Show,” or the general uniformity of its political POV. For the simple fact is that producing four or five news-related comedy monologues a week requires that you take your political creatures in whatever field you find them. And then you milk them to death. Letterman still can’t let go of Bill Clinton — he’s as obsessed with the ex-President as Rush Limbaugh is — though he is as reluctant as Limbaugh to put the current Presidents war adventures into critical perspective.

I think this timidity relates a fear of seeming to take sides. Except for Stewart, the comedy talk-show hosts don’t joke about issues; they make fun of politicians’ personal quirks. This is celebrity, not political humor. A sampling of Hope’s TV monologues reveals, surprisingly, that his political jokes were less squeamish than those of Dave and Jay. The sharper gags he would expectorate at the audience, then stare them down, Jack Benny-style, to see if they got it. Sometimes the jokes were cynically nonpartisan. In a skit with John Wayne, the Duke asks rhetorically, “Whatever happened to truth in advertising?” and Bob parries, “They canceled it. It’s an election year.”

But election year or not, he would run the current U.S. President through a not-very-rough hazing. On his 1952 Christmas show: “Senator McCarthy and Harry Truman were going to exchange gifts, but the Post Office wouldn’t let either one of them mail it.” 1961: “President Kennedy has already sent a message on the teletype. He wired Khrushchev: ‘Get out of Berlin, get out of Vietnam and get out of Cuba.’ Khrushchev wired back: ‘Never mind that. How can I get out of Russia?’” In 1966, before a trip overseas by Lyndon Johnson: “LBJ is gonna visit all our allies over there. He may be back the same day.” 1975, after a trip overseas by Gerald Ford: “The President had a very successful trip to Japan. They were very happy to meet the man who runs the country they own.” Hope went where the news was. In the early 70s, he made Mao-Kissinger jokes. (A skit from that period features Shirley Jones supposedly on the phone with Kissinger: “Acapulco? I thought you were in Peking? [Pause.] Oh, I see. She’s prettier than Chou En-lai.”) Visiting Turkey, Hope lightly mocked Islam when he announced that he was going to a mosque a second time: “I’m not overly religious. I just want my shoes back.”



OLD SHTICK

As the decades wore on, Hope’s TV shows increasingly became a repository, a reliquary, for vanished forms of entertainment. In 1954 he did a tap dance with a very young, pre-movies Shirley MacLaine (she was about 19). During the routine, they swap patter: Bob asks, “You sing?” and Shirley replies, “No — you dance?” A few years later, Hope paired for another charming dance bit with sinfully cute Natalie Wood (also about 19). In both these routines he is expert on his own and generous to his partner — the old vaudeville hoofer helping the new kid on the stage. On the specials, Hope would often encourage his more venerable guests to reprise their music-hall shtick. When Red Skelton did it, you could see why vaudeville died.

Other gags could have come from ancient stand-up routines; they had more whiskers than the Smith brothers. (Hope: “That’s irrelevant!” Durante: “No. Irrelevant eats peanuts.”) But a late-50s sketch — with Hope on stage promoting his protégé, a singer from the movies, and young comics Dan Rowan and Dick Martin heckling from the audience — shows a bit of the verve of an actual old Hope vaudeville routine. Hope: “This man is a great singer! Rowan: “He’s a louse!” Hope: “Who called my singer a louse?” Martin: “Who called that louse a singer?” Hope: “Just a second. This man’s a genius.” Rowan: “He’s a bum!” Hope: “A bum? This man is of the cinema!” Martin: “Oh — a cinema bum!”

In a 1979 Film Comment article on Hope, Dick Cavett cited the way Bob, in his films, “looks off-screen the way a vaudevillian looks into the wings to punctuate a laugh.” That sideways glance, a Hope trope from way back, could be many things: the movie equivalent of playing to the band, or a conman’s avoiding eye contact with his mark after he’s made the score. On TV, though, it was just one thing: a sketch-saving glance at the cue cards or the crawling TelePrompter that no one ever thought to place within natural eye-line range. (On one show he tells a stale joke, and when it flops he asides: “I gotta get younger idiot cards.”) If you thought that the recent “Saturday Night Live” cast had invented the indolent TV comedy habit of sight-reading their lines instead of performing them, know that Hope was there first, and stayed longer. And could read better. “I’m the best feed in the world,” Hope told Brooks Riley, “because I know how to throw a straight line delivered by somebody else.” That was true in his prime, but by the later TV years he often glazes over when guest star tell extended anecdotes; his smile becomes a rictus.

Not that his guests gave him much feedback. The old stars, like Lucille Ball and Milton Berle, would show up, their voices an octave deeper, their eyes glued to their own cue cards, their gift for approximating spontaneity long since rusted over. Hope’s later TV shows were often a mausoleum of mid-century star power, with the coffin lids ripped open to expose the dust and disuse. It’s understandable that a performer who was in his 60s, 70s, 80s — 90s, at the end of his run — would lose some of his vitality, his avidity for an audience’s love. (That he knew he’d had for decades.) But it’s clear that the fast-spieling, eye-rolling fiction known as Bob Hope was a role he had tired of playing; he kept at, I suspect, because it was his job, and he didn’t mind perpetuating the Hope legend.

Problem was, this was the wrong legend: not the snappy radio comedian, or the brash movie actor, but the TV star who phones it in, interested in nothing but getting back on the links or, in the final years, to bed. Hope may spring eternal, but Hope had no eternal spring. TV was the long, profitable autumn of his career. He had budded on Broadway, bloomed on radio and in the movies, then withered, slowly, on the TV specials. The curse on his reputation — one reason his centenary didn’t strike sparks with people my age and younger — is that we know Hope, if at all, mainly from this desultory, often lazy work.



CHRISTMAS WITH THE TROOPS

A Hope season for NBC would comprise eight or nine specials, with two invariable slots: a Christmas show and a mid-January record of his visit to whatever troops Bob could find. The December broadcast would begin with a monologue featuring a few seasonal jokes. (From the 50s: “A Christmas present. That’s the thing you get for somebody that you hope is getting something for you that costs as much as. If not more than. And never does.” From the 70s: “Christmas is pretty strange in Beverly Hills. When Santa lands on your roof, you’re expected to provide valet parking.”) Then he’d amble through some sketches, usually labored, with guest stars. The highlight, especially in retrospect, was the annual introduction of the Football Writers Association’s All-America Team. Baby brutes like Dick Butkus, Ed Marinaro, Walter Payton, or a cool glider like Lynn Swann, stepped forward in their college uniforms and their now-preposterous coiffures to be the butt of Bob’s banter. On the 1984 show, William Perry, soon to be dubbed “the Refrigerator,” laughs heartily when Hope looks at Perry’s 320-pound bulk (big then for a defensive lineman) and asks: “Did the bus come in you?” There’s also the creepy moment, from 1967, when a young but instantly familiar face announces that he is “O.J. Simpson, University of Southern California.” Hope explains blithely: “That O.J. stands for Orenthal. He runs the 100 in 9.4., and with a name like Orenthal you have to run fast.”

By the time the Christmas show aired, Hope would already be abroad, on one of his dozens of USO tours. That’s when he could come alive for an audience — not a few hundred civilians in a Burbank studio but 15,000 GIs in hostile territory. Hope’s only weapon was the golf club he leaned on; the sound of distant rifle fire was his rim shot. But in these shows, the old man appears younger, sharper, energized by the roars of laughter and his pleasure in fulfilling a comic’s mission.

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[thedrifter]

Hope’s first big tour was in the summer of 1944, when he took singer Frances Langford, dancer Patty Thomas, the comic tenor Jerry Colonna and guitarist Tony Romano (along with writer Barney Dean) to the Pacific. Now the caricature gags were given a military twist: Hope caresses Colonna’s fertile mustache and Jerry warns: “Careful, careful — snipers.” It was on this tour that Hope stood next to the shapely Thomas and uttered his most famous wartime famous quip: “I just want you boys to see what you’re fighting for.”

Hope went from famous to notorious in the Vietnam years, when the pacifist Left saw him as an enemy for rah-rahing the war and making jokes about bombing civilians. These gags, hmmm, are not on the DVD. The ones that are suggest Hope had a more rounded take on the war than his opponents thought. In 1968, he jibed at the inability of America’s local ally to subdue the Viet Cong. “But I envy you guys,” he said with souflée sarcasm. “Now that the South Vietnamese have taken over, you can just sit around all day and do nothin’, huh?” In Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, a few miles from the Laotian border, he acknowledged the Viet Cong’s perseverence: “If you listen carefully, you can hear the neutral troops carrying neutral ammunition down the neutral Ho Chi Minh Trail.” And in Chu Lai, he anticipated the “Apocalypse Now” surfing scene by paying tribute to “one of the prettiest beach resorts in Vietnam. Even the Cong is crazy about it.”

Hope could expressed optimism, obliquely. 1969: “Now we’re in the midst of a 24-hour Christmas truce. Isn’t that beautiful? I like a war with a commercial break.” But as the war dragged on and dragged 3-1/2 million lives into the Big Muddy, Hope directed his softy bullets at military and political targets. In a skit with Teresa Graves, Hope asks her about her TV show “Laugh-In.” “It’s really nutty,” Graves says. “You never know what’s gonna happen, or why it’s gonna happen, or what you’re doing it for.” Bob drawls: “You’d be very happy in the service.” As Richard Nixon assumed control, and the Paris Peace Talks stalled, and more Vietnamese and Americns died, Hope visited U Taphao in Thailand. “I didn’t really expect to be here this year,” he told the boys. “The Paris Peace Talks were going so well. Hey listen, if you’re wondering what’s going on with the Paris Peace Talks, here’s the latest, up-to-the-second flash on what they’re doing over there. [Long silence.] That was it.” Then, taking a potshot at Vice President Agnew, Hope added that Nixon was looking for a new negotiator in Paris: “He can’t send Spiro. He’d start another war.”



OLD SOLDIER

Through wars and not-quite-wars, from the 40s till the 90s, Hope took his troupe to the troops, ever the salesman, ever on the road. (In his last Christmas special, Hope and his wife Dolores played host to celebrities at their Toluga Lake chateau. Non-star Joey Lawrence tells Dolores, “This is the first time I’ve ever actually visited your home.” Mrs. Hope replies, “Four more times and you’ll be tied with Bob.”) Finally he was making jokes about his age. When he was 85 and visiting troops in the middle East, he said to the GIs: “I told the USO I think I’m getting too old to be traveling the Persian Gulf for Christmas. They said, ‘Baloney. The Ayatollah’s older than you, and he spends every Christmas there.”

But Hope seemed most touched, moved, scarred, by his first South Pacific visit in 1944. In a 1995 TV clip show included on the DVD, he recalls that he did a show for sailors on Mios Wundi Island near New Guinea. Lt. John Kennedy was in that audience, and 19 years later, in the White House, President JFK presented Hope with the Congressional Medal of Honor. Bob also shows clips of a performance for Marines on Pavuvu Island. He adds: “Of the 15,000 kids who cheered us in Pavuvu, 40% never got home.” At the end of the war reverie, Hope tells the audience: “All of us were left with memories. These are mine.” The camera closes in as, in his mottled hand, the 92-year-old Hope holds a photo of a dashing young man in uniform. It is his younger self: Bob, in his late 30s or early 40s, full of vitality and assurance, and ready — like the America he represented — to conquer the world.

http://www.time.com/time/sampler/art...0.html?cnn=yes


Sempers,

Roger

[thedrifter]

Appreciation
Comedian Of a Century
From Vaudeville to TV, Bob Hope Was a Master of His Times



The most famous comedian ever is gone, impossible as it may seem after a century in which Bob Hope's visage was as familiar as any president's, if not more so. (1953 File Photo)

By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 29, 2003; Page C01


In the summer of 1980, Bob Hope was 77 years old, had an estimated worth of more than $250 million, and was asked whether he ever thought about death.

"Dying? I died in Philadelphia one time," he said with his lopsided, lubricious grin. Then, more seriously: "Well, with the friends of mine that have died -- with Bing and John Wayne and Jack Benny -- you naturally think about dying, you know? And so what? Big deal. You die, so, you die. There's nothing you can do about that."

His grandfather died "one month short of 100," Hope said and, asked if he wanted to beat that score, he smiled slyly again and said simply, "Isn't that wild?" It was quite wild, really -- a wild hundred years, and Hope did outlast even his British grandfather.

But yesterday, as it knew one day it must, America had to face a day without Hope. The most famous comedian ever died Sunday night at one of his homes, in Toluca Lake, Calif., of pneumonia, two months past his hundredth birthday. He is probably shaking Grandpa's hand right now and saying, "Eat your heart out."

Hope came frequently to Washington -- "I like to be near my money," he said once -- and was famous for hobnobbing with virtually every president since FDR. No matter how many dignitaries or fellow performers graced a stage with him, Hope usually seemed the biggest star there. Of course we loved him; he made us laugh, longer if not harder than any other citizen of his time. What a long time it was -- a time of tears, of terror, of crimes against humanity too numerous to mention. But with Hope around, we had a way out.

Bob Hope tried to make every season a season of joy. In fact, he insisted on it.

Sometimes the odds seemed insurmountable, the world too dark and bleak, but he pulled many a giddy rabbit out of many a stern silk hat: These were the jokes. Hope sprang eternal, just like in the cliche, and Hope was good for the soul -- each of ours and our country's. He's the only comic whose face might reasonably be added to those of the presidents on Mount Rushmore.

If there were a Mount Laughmore, of course, his would be the biggest face up there, and birds would be nesting in the curve of his illustrious ski nose.

Postponing Bob Hope's demise seemed important even though, for most of the past decade or so, he was too ill to perform, or even to be seen in public. One by one, his faculties left him, associates said. But his was one of the last great names from a generation of show-business stars who'd kept America going through two World Wars, a Great Depression and all the interstitial calamities. He was a last link to vaudeville, to the golden ages of Hollywood and television, and to the kind of artist who had to be able to do a little bit of everything well -- sing, dance, act -- and one thing spectacularly.

Not even baby boomers who fondly remember his old NBC variety specials may be fully aware of Hope's scope. He made 60 movies, some of them now-classic comedies like "The Princess and the Pirate," "The Paleface," "Son of Paleface" and the elegantly jaunty "Road" series with his friend and fellow multimillionaire, Bing Crosby. In "Road to Morocco" and their other films together, the two stepped out of character to mock each other's radio shows, comment on the plot and wink playfully at the audience.

In the title song to "Morocco," which they sang early in the film, aboard a camel crossing the desert, the stars tell the audience they're not worried "because we read the story and we end up safe at home." The films were rife with remarks the team often ad-libbed during production. In one film, as romantic music sneaks onto the soundtrack, Hope tells the audience that obviously Crosby is about to sing and so it would be a good time to go out for popcorn.

Initially Hope was a romantic if wisecracking leading man in light musical comedies, first on Broadway and then on film. There was nothing funny about his introduction, with Shirley Ross, of the song "Thanks for the Memory" in the film "The Big Broadcast of 1938," an all-star romp set aboard an ocean liner. The tune became Hope's unmistakable signature theme, but in its first performance, still touching when viewed today, it is a bittersweet look back by a divorced couple on the romance and marriage that have sadly died.

Hope may never have made a film that now has the artistic cachet of "To Be or Not to Be," the Ernst Lubitsch satire starring Jack Benny, but his best movies were prime examples of hard-boiled, fast-paced, crackling American comedy. His co-stars included Lucille Ball, Jane Russell, Dorothy Lamour, Gracie Allen, Janet Leigh, Roy Rogers and Trigger and, in the rarely seen 1956 film "The Iron Petticoat," Katharine Hepburn, whose death preceded Hope's by only a few weeks.

This, however, was apparently not one of Hope's more felicitous alliances. In a 1990 interview, Hepburn said flatly, "It was not a success. It's a different medium if he's in it, let me say. . . . Bob sold himself, and I was trying to sell the story."

In most of his comedy films, Hope played a new American archetype, one that many future comic actors would imitate: the irrepressible cluck whose stabs at courage, honesty and humility all widely miss their mark. Hope's character was usually corruptible yet lovable, a fast-talking con artist and consummate bluffer who got the girl largely because she took pity on him. Hope played the part with self-mocking charm and, of course, the utterly sublime timing that was his greatest professional asset.

A fetish for endurance was another. Hope succeeded in movies, also triumphed in radio and then, on Easter Sunday in 1950, he turned to television, a medium that would also be his to command. His first special aired live from the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York. Hope strode out in top hat and tails and asked, "Which camera's working?"

The top hat and tails? "This is what Grover Whalen wears to bed," he said, referring to the overdressed dandy then known as New York's "official greeter," and beginning Hope's long tradition of topical humor on TV. He elaborated on the outfit: "A lot of performers 'die' on television," Hope said, "and if that happens to me, I want to be prepared for it."

In 1980, he smiled when he remembered that first big TV appearance. "I got in a cab a few days later, and the cab driver said, 'Bob Hope, huh?,' " Hope recalled. "I said, 'That's right.' He said, 'You gonna do another television show?' I said, 'That's right.' He said, 'Your first one wasn't too good, you know.' I said, 'Who asked you?' He said, 'I'm the public!' "

Hope laughed loudly at the thought. "Oh Christ, I fell on the floor! I went right to NBC and hired a guy called Tom Petty who I'd just worked with on the movie 'Sorrowful Jones' . . . and we did that bit to open the second show -- the same dialogue, only with more jokes. But it never played as funny to me as it did in that cab."

He developed a repertoire of phrases with which to begin jokes and make the transition from one to another with the utmost snap; many began with "But I wanna tellya." In a typical topical quip from one of his '60s shows, Hope starts out: "Hey, how about that Mao Tse-tung?" When the laugh didn't come immediately, Hope had a devilish way of staring the audience down, and if that still didn't elicit chuckles, he'd joke about the joke not working and win the laugh at last.

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[thedrifter]

In time, and with the advent of videotape, the specials became perhaps less special than they had been; Hope's monologues were stuffed with 40 or 50 jokes, which would then be mercilessly edited down for broadcast. He would tape the monologues using Johnny Carson's audiences after or before the taping of Carson's "Tonight Show." If the specials became mechanical and predictable, Hope's essential rascality nevertheless survived. It was always there, even if it became tamer with the passing decades.

Hope's most celebrated TV specials, of course, were those in which he ventured to foreign lands to entertain Americans serving in the armed forces. He logged millions of flying miles with his traveling vaudeville revues, always including glamorous sex symbols among the ensemble -- from Rita Hayworth to Brooke Shields as the years, and the wars, wore on.

Some of the public affection for Hope soured during the Vietnam era, when he came across as partisan and hawkish, but politically he was full of surprises. Though he'd been a supporter of Richard Nixon and had a reputation as a right-winger, Hope was so shocked by the assassination attempt on his friend Ronald Reagan in 1981 that he came out, at least briefly, in favor of gun control, a gesture that brought an inevitable condemnation from the National Rifle Association.

Hope said he would speak personally to Reagan about the president's own views on the matter. "Yeah, because they tell me he's against gun control, and I want to talk to him about that. I want to get his reasoning on it, because I'm for gun registration. I don't think any jerk that's coked up or anything should be allowed to walk into a store and buy a gun and turn around and shoot 19 people, you know?"

Sadly it can be said that Hope outlived much of his audience, and today's generation of moviegoers and TV watchers have had little chance to appreciate his brilliance and its amazing durability. He outlived many of his fellow vaudevillians and movie stars, too, a kind of last lonely pillar of the old society that founded Hollywood and made it the greatest entertainment aggregation ever. But his films, many now available on home video, are cherished by those old enough to remember and will continue to be rediscovered by curious generations to come.

The world truly was Hope's stage, as well as his putting green, and he felt contagiously comfortable on it, whether entertaining the military or golfing with presidents or clowning it up at charity affairs. He was as at home on a dais as on TV and movie screens, and his years hosting the Academy Awards ("or as it's known at my house, 'Passover' ") were among the brightest in Oscar history.

It has been said that the greatest of clowns also must have the capacity to make us cry. Thus Groucho Marx doesn't make the grade, not by this standard anyway. And what about Bob Hope? Some might say he never made us cry, either.

Except that now, he has.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Jul28.html


Sempers,

Roger

[thedrifter]

In the Punch Line of Duty
For Generations of GIs, the Entertainer Brought Hope and Joy




Hope visits a U.S. base near the DMZ separating North and South Korea while in the country for a pre-Olympic show in May 1988.


By Ken Ringle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 29, 2003; Page C01


The thing to remember about Bob Hope entertaining the troops is that World War II lasted four years, Korea three and Vietnam nine. That's 16 years. But Hope went overseas for years and years after and in between those conflicts.

He went to Germany. He went to Greenland. He went to North Africa and the South Pacific and Saudi Arabia and Japan. If you were an 18-year-old draftee in the motor pool at some Godforsaken place on the Cold War perimeter far from home at Christmas, Bob Hope would show up with popeyed sidekick Jerry Colonna and enough pinup pulchritude to get your blood racing. And suddenly it wasn't so lonely anymore.

More important, while much of America was doing holiday business as usual and feeling warm and fuzzy, Hope reminded us via television that the price of all that security was being paid by guys doing what was then called their "service obligation." They may not have liked it, but it was understood as the cost of citizenship back before many people started getting cute with graduate school deferments and the National Guard.

Hope brought those people into our living rooms for Christmas (frequently along with a lump in the throat), and wherever he was, he always seemed to give his audience a roaring good time. He may have been on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier or at a jungle base making jokes about arriving between mortar rounds.

Sometimes he was dressed in fatigues and sometimes in costume, and usually he was swinging his golf club and cracking wise. But even his lamest jokes were met with cheers because the show was an incomparable pressure valve. It wasn't just more of the same old thing. It was a reminder of "the world."

"I met Bob Hope in New Guinea in 1943 or '44 when he came out there with Frances Langford to put on a show, and I can't tell you how much it meant," former Army Sgt. Carl Rehling of Churchton, Md., said yesterday. "New Guinea was the absolute backwater of World War II then. . . . I had malaria. . . . We never dreamed anybody would care enough to come halfway around the world to entertain us out there."

"I never saw a Bob Hope show -- they could never have brought him out to where we were," former Navy secretary James Webb, who served in the Marines in Vietnam, said yesterday. "But I have always felt a profound respect for him and a deep gratitude for what he did. In assembling that kind of talent and bringing it to the war zone, he allowed us to feel a continuity with soldiers from earlier wars, and also brought some reassurance that at least some members of the glitterati cared about what we were going through."

Hope's USO travels started in 1941 even before Pearl Harbor and continued through the Persian Gulf War in 1991 -- an itinerary that totaled more than 10 million miles, a USO spokesman calculated yesterday. The Christmas shows started in Germany with GIs involved in the Berlin airlift in 1948 and continued for the next 34 years.

During Christmas 1954, he made various sorts of history by bringing actress Anita Ekberg to thaw Thule Air Force Base in northwest Greenland and broadcasting his television show from there.

"Thanks to the USO, I have some wonderful memories," Hope said. "I've learned to say 'Kaopectate' in nine languages."

"Did you see our show?" he asked servicemen in hospital tents in Burma and Korea and Vietnam. "Or were you sick before?"

The legends of his service tours go on and on. Like the soldiers in North Africa who walked 10 miles to see his show only to get there after it was over. They were on their way back on foot when Hope heard about it, caught up with them with his troupe and gave the footsore soldiers their own personal performance.

Or the bomb that exploded in Saigon, missing him because he was 10 minutes late. "That used to happen to me in vaudeville," he quipped at the time. "The audience always tries to get you."

Though he was criticized as a war hawk by younger generations, most of whom never served in the military, Hope's humor was rarely political. He always pitched his shows toward enlisted men, making fun of officious officers and military snafus that proved as enduring as he was.

And Hope's Christmas shows could have a poignant antiwar effect as well. In the 1960s, viewers could chart the escalation of the Vietnam War by the staggering year-to-year growth of the crowd of servicemen to whom television showed him pitching his jokes.

So closely did he become identified with the nation's service personnel that in 1997 the Navy named a ship after him, and Congress proclaimed him an "Honorary Veteran of the United States Armed Forces."

Three years earlier he had traveled to Normandy to entertain veterans of the D-day landing force who had fought there 50 years before. His hearing was sketchy and his memory more so, but he got through the show with the help of his wife, Dolores, a few film clips and more than half a century of goodwill built up with his audience.

Whatever their age, GIs never seemed to forget that Hope could always have been at home with his family instead of entertaining them. He didn't need the fame or the money. He could have been playing golf.

In 1982 at the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, a soft-spoken African American from Baltimore named Joseph White stood by the Wall and quietly fielded questions from a reporter about the surreal nature of the conflict now long in his past.

The second time he was wounded was the worst, he said. He was struck by automatic weapons fire once in the head, twice in the left arm, once in the right ring finger, five times in each leg and five times in the stomach.

"I was ambushed on Christmas Eve," he said with a small smile. "I was on my way to Camp Eagle to see Bob Hope."


© 2003 The Washington Post Company


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Jul28.html


Sempers,

Roger

[thedrifter]

Pacific servicemembers, civilians share their memories of Bob Hope


By Wayne Specht, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Thursday, July 31, 2003


Troops and civilians in the Pacific on Tuesday gave thanks for their memories of comedian Bob Hope, who died Sunday at 100.

Sherry Jansen remembers missing a Bob Hope show in Bahrain during 1990’s Desert Shield build-up by just two days.

“I was coming in from Germany and heard he was going to present his Christmas show,” said Jansen, then an enlisted airman but now a secretary at Edgren High School at Misawa Air Base in northern Japan.

“He’s such an icon, and I wanted to see him so badly.”

Because Saudi Arabia banned women from traveling unaccompanied in the kingdom, the Pointer Sisters, Marie Osmond and the rest of Hope’s troupe remained in Bahrain.

“I got to meet Brooke Shields, who stayed behind,” Jansen said.

Air Force Staff Sgt. John Haynes, a former Desert Shield Network radio broadcaster, said seeing Hope in person “was one of the highlights of my Saudi deployment — and my life.”

Now a captain and chief of Misawa’s public affairs office, Haynes said Hope climbed aboard a flatbed truck during a visit to Eskan Village, the American enclave in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1990.

“He just started talking to the troops and told some jokes — it was like a mini-show for the troops,” he said.

Haynes recalled “there was a huge fight” over who was going to interview Hope. He lost, but said he later devised “a lame excuse so I could talk to him.”

“He went out of his way to shake my hand, and he introduced himself to me,” Haynes said.

H.W.B. Tinnirella, retiree activities program director at Misawa, said Hope always brought a touch of home. “He made the effort to get to the troops in the field, a lot of entertainers wouldn’t do that,” said Tinnirella, a retired chief master sergeant who spent 1965 in Vietnam, “but never got to see one of his shows.”

Hope made it to Korea during the war and even performed in Pyongyang.

Charles Ericson, who landed at Incheon in September 1950 and fought all the way to the Chosin Reservoir on the Chinese border, remembers seeing Hope somewhere between Seoul and Pyongyang. “He was part of America,” said Ericson, 72, of Port Orford, Ore. “He was one of a kind.”

Dan Bertrand, who fought with the 1st Marine Division, remembers soldiers of other countries coming to see Hope’s shows. “He was always a great comedian,” said Bertrand, 72, of Wenatchee, Wash. “He could make it work. If the general said something to him, he’d come off with something. It was a good show.

“That’s one bad thing — these guys that are here now won’t have a show like that at Christmastime,” Bertrand said. “It was like being home.”

Chief Master Sgt. Tait Solberg, manager of U.S. Air Force Band of the Pacific-Asia at Yokota Air Base, said he feels extremely fortunate to have played at three of Hope’s live shows for troops back in the United States some years ago. Solberg, then an Air Force saxophonist, remembers Hope’s ability to improvise.

“He could tell by the response from the audience what would be the best thing to say next,” he said. “He could tailor it to whatever crowd, his mind was that quick. He could grasp it and turn it into a memorable moment for all those people right there.”

Though other celebrities also performed at the shows, “people were there to see Bob Hope,” Solberg said. One of the highlights of his military career, he said, was to be on the same stage with Hope.

“The guy’s a legend. He’s an icon, almost, to the military. It’s sad to see somebody of that stature and impact not to be with us, and not to be able to look forward to his next performance.”

Army Lt. Col. Michael Dolby, 44, of Camp Zama, Japan, called Hope’s passing “a great loss.”

“When we think of the USO, the first person that comes to mind is Bob Hope. He’s just synonymous with entertaining the troops.”

Jennifer Svan and Jeremy Kirk contributed to this report.

Past Stripes full of Hope


Never at a loss for a quick joke, the sharp-minded Bob Hope relied on his knack for instant comedy even after a C-130 carrying him and his entertainment troupe suffered engine failure over Cambodia in 1968.

“Bob Hope flew in on three engines and ‘two burps,’” Stars and Stripes Vietnam Bureau reporter Sgt. Roger Neumann wrote in a Dec. 24, 1968, dispatch.

After the incident, Hope said he didn’t want to disappoint 20,000 GIs waiting for him at Long Binh Air Base in southern Vietnam.

“I heard a strange noise, the plane lurched, and one of the four engines stopped,” Hope told Neumann. “I jumped into Rosie’s [Troupe member and former pro football star Roosevelt Greer] arms and he held me and burped me twice.”

Hope turned 66 that year, and the show marked the beginning of his fifth tour of Vietnam and his 20th Christmas season overseas since 1948, Stripes reported.

Even actress Jane Fonda, then an anti-war activist, soft-pedaled criticism of the comedian during a 1971 press conference at Tokyo’s Foreign Correspondent’s Club during her “Free The Army” Pacific tour.

“Bob Hope is not the enemy. He is no more misguided than anyone has been in the past, or will be in the future,” said Fonda in criticizing Hope’s support of an American presence in Indochina.

Just before his 1972 Christmas show at Yokota Air Base, west of Tokyo, Hope told the Foreign Correspondents Club he thought it would be his last overseas tour given the Vietnam War was beginning to wind down.

“Now with the Vietnam skirmishes coming to an end, I think we’ll pull it in,” Hope told reporters.

But it would be another three years before the United States left South Vietnam.

— Wayne Specht


http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?...&article=16804


Sempers,

Roger

[thedrifter]

Thanks for the memories




1903-2003

Thanks for the memory
Of sentimental verse
Nothing in my purse
And chuckles
When the preacher said
For better or for worse
How lovely it was

Thanks for the memory
Of Schubert's Serenade
Little things of jade
And traffic jams
And anagrams
And bills we never paid
How lovely it was

We who could laugh over big things
Were parted by only a slig ht thing
I wonder if we did the right thing
Oh well that's life I guess
I love your dress
"Do You"
"It's pretty"
"Thanks"

For the memory
Of faults that you forgave
Of rainbows on a wave
And stockings in the basin
When a fellow needs a shave
Thank you so much

Thanks for the memory
Of tinkling temple bells
Alma mater yells
And Cuban rum
And towels from
The very best hotels
Oh how lovely it was

Thanks for the memory
Of cushions on the floor
Hash with Dinty Moore
That pair of gay pajamas
That you bought
And never wore

"Say by the way
Whatever became of those pajamas?"

We said good-bye with a highball
Then I got as high as a steeple
"Did you"
But we were intelligent people
No tears, no fuss
Hooray for us

Strictly entire nous,
Darling, how are you?
And how are all
Those little dreams
That never did come true?

Awfully glad I met you
Cheerio and toodle-oo
Thank you

Thank you s! o much


Sempers,

Roger

[thedrifter]

Bob Hope Eulogized As Legendary Figure
Associated Press
August 28, 2003


LOS ANGELES - Bob Hope was eulogized Wednesday as one of the legendary figures of the past century during a memorial Mass that drew Hollywood stars, politicians and generals.

"He knew how to use laughter to bring us joy," Roman Catholic Cardinal Roger M. Mahony told mourners including Hope's widow, Dolores, at St. Charles Borromeo Church in North Hollywood.

The 900 guests included former President Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, former first lady Nancy Reagan, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Hope, who entertained Americans through vaudeville, radio, movies and television, and boosted the morale of U.S. soldiers over 50 years of wars, died July 27 at age 100 and was entombed at San Fernando Mission Cemetery on July 30.

Mahony said Hope was often at St. Charles to help raise money for a school and other facilities, and the cardinal said he urged the comedian, who was raised Episcopalian, to become a Catholic. He said Hope replied: "I don't need to be a Catholic - Dolores (a Catholic) does enough praying for both of us."

The service began with an honor guard bearing the flags of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard, representing the men and women Hope entertained during his many USO tours.

A portrait of Hope in his later years, a sly half-smile on his lips, stood near the altar.

"He was one of the truly legendary figures of the 20th century," Feinstein said in her eulogy.

She reminded the audience of a telegram from Hope which Harry Truman kept under the glass of his Oval Office desk after his surprise victory over Thomas Dewey in the 1948 presidential race. The telegram contained one word: "Unpack."

"Vietnam was not a popular war with a lot of people," Myers said in his eulogy, "but Bob always stood by the service men and women despite the vituperation he received from anti-war demonstrators."

Humorist Larry Gelbart, a Hope writer for four years, said, "Bob defied you to take your eyes off him - or your ears."

Gelbart recalled asking Hope why he didn't take time off, perhaps to go fishing. Hope replied: "Fish don't applaud."

The service ended with a Marine bugler playing "Taps" and a choir softly humming "Thanks for the Memory," Hope's theme song.

Outside church before the Mass, Barbara Eden said her memories of Hope were "happiness and laughter" along with the image of him hitting golf balls off decks of aircraft carriers on USO tours.

"He was very businesslike, but he had a calmness about him that made everyone else's talent come through," she said.

"He was a tremendous force on Earth," Connie Stevens said.

"He was so special because he gave so much to everyone besides his humor," said Loni Anderson.

Tom Selleck recalled how Hope recruited him to appear on some of his shows. "Bob always called personally when he wanted you to work with him. It meant a lot and it made it hard to say no," Selleck said.

Other guests included Mickey Rooney, Dixie Carter, Hal Holbrook, Raquel Welch, Julie Newmar, Marie Osmond, Phyllis Diller, Ed McMahon, Gary Owens, Norm Crosby, retired Gen. William Westmoreland, former California Gov. Pete Wilson, and businessman Lee Iacocca.

Tributes continued later at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Dozens of notables offered reminiscences, and Les Brown's band, which accompanied Hope from the 1940s to the end of his career, performed a medley of songs from his stage shows and movies. The event ended with guests singing a version of "Thanks for the Memory" with the revised lyric "Thanks for the legacy."

Sempers,

Roger