HAPPY
BIRTHDAY, BOB HOPE
My
Times with Bob Hope
On
& off the Christmas card list with the great comic
By
RON MILLER
Bob
Hope turned 97 on May 29. I don't know what sort of party his friends and
family will be throwing this time -- or if there even will be one.
Whatever happens, I don't think the press will be invited, which means I
won't be there to wish him a happy birthday. I mean, I'm not even on his
Christmas card list anymore.
Don't
laugh. I really used to be on his Christmas card list, along with a lot of
other press guys. And, because I was a nationally syndicated writer, I was
on another special list: The people who were invited to his home for
private interviews.
Hope
cultivated the press. He had guys working for him who kept him up to date
on who needed cultivating at any given moment. One of them was Ken Kantor,
a dear friend who had handled public relations for the Hope TV specials at
NBC in the 1970s. When NBC retired Kantor, Hope immediately un-retired him
and put him to work on his payroll, doing the same job he'd done for NBC:
handling guys like me.
So,
when my newspaper sent me to live and work out of L.A. in 1983, Kantor saw
to it that I joined the exclusive roster of columnists he called when Hope
was ready to do one-on-one interviews. If Hope had anything really big
coming up, I'd go to his house on Moorpark in the Toluca Lake district of
North Hollywood, right next to Burbank, and we'd have lunch while I taped
an interview. If I needed to talk with him quickly about something
specific, I'd call Kantor and arrange a phone interview.
I
haven't seen Hope privately since he turned 90 in 1993. NBC cut him loose
not long after that, which irritated him no end. He wanted to go on with
the network where he'd spent an amazing 50-plus years as a star, but the
network wanted to court younger viewers.
I
suspect Hope isn't the same man he was when I was a frequent guest at his
beautiful English Tudor home in the valley. I know he's grown very hard of
hearing and no longer has that brisk walk that used to awe everybody who
ever saw him striding through a shopping mall or crossing a golf course.
He doesn't host reporters much these days. At 97, who needs them?
Hope
is an immortal. He is one of the towering public figures of the 20th
century who has crossed over into the 21st, knowing his legacy of humor
and public service won't ever be forgotten. He's safely enshrined on Mt.
Olympus while he's still breathing.
As
for me, I now look back on those years of easy access to this incredible
character as a time when a writer's dreams could come true. I treasure
those moments the way a modern politician might treasure his private
moments with a Harry Truman or an FDR. And, I might add, Hope knew those
guys pretty well, too.
Meeting
Bob Hope face to face for the first time could be awfully intimidating --
not because Hope was such a difficult guy, but because he was such a
famous one.
The
late Brandon Tartikoff, who was president of NBC Entertainment at the
time, once told me how he felt when he first met Bob Hope in 1980.
Tartikoff was then 31 and had just been put in charge of NBC's
entertainment division while Hope was 76 and had been a show business
immortal for at least a decade before Tartikoff was born. He was the
reigning star at NBC, so the young executive was expected to call on Hope
and introduce himself.
"I
was more than a little in awe of him," Tartikoff said, "but, as
it turned out, we just sat around and told jokes."
For me, the situation was much simpler, despite the fact Hope was, to me,
the godhead of American comedy. After all, I didn't have to break the news
to Hope that I was his new boss. When I showed up at his home in 1983 for
our first face to face interview, he knew I was a reporter, so I was home
free. Hope liked having reporters around, which automatically made him
unique. His old pal and frequent biographer, Bob Thomas, the Associated
Press columnist, was just leaving when I showed up that day, but Hope
wanted us both to see some funny clips he'd found of Will Rogers, so we
all went up to his bedroom and laughed at them together.
Like
Tartikoff, I was amazed to discover Hope was a regular guy. He could kick
butt when he had to and he could order people around pretty good, but, in
more than a decade of frequent personal contact with him, I never saw any
evidence he had an ounce of pretension anywhere in his body.
"He's
not a guy who's always on," Tartikoff observed, which we both knew
was kind of unusual for a show business legend who already had transcended
plain old fame and become an American cultural icon.
If
you're from my generation, you don't want to picture a world without Bob
Hope. That's like driving up to see Mount Rushmore, then discovering
they've removed George Washington's face from the lineup.
Actually,
the Rushmore imagery is apt. Though Hope was born an Englishman, he was as
quintessentially American as George Washington. This is the man who
entertained generations of American troops from the 1940s through the
1970s because he so loved the people of this country he came to at the age
of 3. So, if they ever put up a Mount Rushmore of American comedians, his
should be the first face they carve. Washington may have been the father
of our country, but Hope was the father of our comedy -- and you can hear
his echo in anybody who does one-liners today, on the stage or around the
water cooler.
Relentlessly
topical, Hope was as relevant as Will Rogers, but purposely un-folksy. He
once told me he'd spent years on the road searching for his comedy style.
Once he found it, he defined the 20th Century American attitude: Brash,
impertinent and forever smart-mouthed.
Hope
could only have thrived in a democracy like ours. Hitler, Stalin or Saddam
Hussein would have sent him to the firing squad before his first, "I
just wanna tell ya," but American presidents loved him. I know
because he had a room off the staircase in his Toluca Lake home that was
filled with gifts, letters and awards from every U.S. President since
F.D.R. They were offended if he didn't nail them in his monologues.
Hope
has been a part of my life so long that I can almost remember humming
"Thanks for the Memory" in the womb. He was already a famous
movie star the year I was born -- and that was 61 years ago. I grew up
copying his radio one-liners and fantasizing myself in the middle of his
frantic, surreal "Road" pictures. In that setting, a cowardly
dude with no muscles and a weird nose had a good chance of winding up
smooching Dorothy Lamour or hugging Jane Russell, then wolf-growling an
aside to the camera, suggesting it wasn't going to end there.
The first time I actually saw him in person, he was hustling down a
hallway at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles in the late 1970s,
heading for an NBC press conference. I'd waited for him by the door to
grab a few quick quotes on his way in, but he was distracted. Natalie Wood
was just leaving her press conference and he ducked by me to give her a
great big hug. Who on Earth would blame him?
That
day he was in rare form. Today's youngsters may not know it, but Hope was
once the bane of radio's censors. He got away with one-liners that he
later admitted he tried just to get the attention that rocking the boat
usually gets. Asked if he set some kind of example for the blue comics to
come, Hope admitted that was probably true.
"I'm
guilty in a way," he said, though he pointed out his marginal
material was tame by today's standards. "On radio, if I said Kate
Smith was trying to get her moon over the mountain, the censor would run
back and tell me I couldn't say that. Today's it's a straight line."
Over
lunch one day, I asked Hope what kept his feet on the ground when just
about everybody he met treated him like the second coming. He explained it
quite logically: He was a nothing for so many years on his way to the top
that all he had to do was think back to those days for a shot of instant
humility.
"I
came up slow," he told me. "I played all these little
towns."
What you got if you
were on Bob Hope's Christmas Card list
At
one point, he was half of a dance act with George Byrne. After they did
their act, the theaters had them come back on stage to dance with Daisy
and Violet Hilton, who were Siamese twins. "That's the only reason
they booked us," Hope explained, " -- so we would come back
after our act and dance with these Siamese twins, who were darling
girls."
If
you're wondering just how well Hope knew those Siamese twins, just keep on
wondering. He had a reputation as a "ladies' man," but I never
asked Hope anything about his sex life for fear he'd actually tell me
something I didn't want to hear. I'll admit it right here and now: I
respected Hope like I respected my Dad. I never wanted to know anything
about my Dad's bedroom ways because I liked the image I had of him and
didn't want to mess with it. That's the way I felt about Hope, so I never
asked him about Daisy and Violet or if he ever found out what Dorothy
Lamour had under that sarong.
Instead,
I often asked Hope about his salad days in show biz. Patiently, he told me
how he got into what we now call standup comedy by accident. One day he
was asked to go on stage to introduce Scottish comic Marshall Walker, but
he cracked a joke about him in the process. It got a big laugh, so he
started adding jokes to his introduction. Pretty soon, he was just telling
the jokes.
Even
after he discovered his real calling, Hope had trouble earning a decent
living. His childhood and youth were spent in poverty, so nearly starving
was nothing new. That day he told me his youthful dream was to become so
famous that he'd someday earn $1,000 a month. At the time he told me that,
though, Hope was earning about $1,000 a minute.
Though
the notorious Broadway columnist Walter Winchell savagely derided Hope
when he made his movie debut in some comedy short subjects, Hope probably
has had the best press relations of any major show business figure. He
didn't like a 1980 Rolling Stone profile that he believes was a hatchet
job ordered by the editors and he denounced a recent book that suggested
he was a major womanizer of Clintonesque proportions, but otherwise he
wasn't ever really hounded by scandal-seekers.
There's
good reason for that: Hope always made himself available to promote his
projects, no matter how small, which meant he got to know literally
thousands of journalists. He always treated them like friends, so they
reciprocated. (He also was famous for sending out gifts to reporters until
new ethics codes caused journalists to send them back.) Did they cover up
for Hope when he was playing around? It wouldn't surprise me. If they did
it for Jack Kennedy, why not Hope?
For
years, Dorothy Lamour, the primary love interest from Hope's old
"Road" pictures, lived just a block away from Hope's house in
Toluca Lake. One night Hope was hosting some press guys at his house and
they asked him if he'd introduce them to Lamour. Drinks had been consumed
and nobody realized how late it was when Hope and five reporters began
knocking on Lamour's door.
"My
husband and I were already in bed, but we had to bring everybody in for
drinks," Lamour recalled over lunch with me in 1991. She still
remembered what Hope said when she opened the door a tiny crack and
demanded to know who was there.
"Don't
you recognize my nose?" Hope asked.
In
1988 I got to see Hope in action. It was a taping of an NBC special
commemorating his 85th birthday and 50 years with the network. Every show
business legend was on hand that night in Burbank, including George Burns,
Milton Berle, Lucille Ball, Danny Thomas, Steve Allen, Jay Leno, Sammy
Davis Jr. and Jimmy Stewart. Hope was in the middle of it all as the star,
but he also was calling the shots on literally everything.
If
I didn't believe he was a perfectionist before, I did after he made former
First Lady Nancy Reagan do a retake when she sang "Thanks for the
Memory" to him. He told her she was slightly out of tune. Just to be
fair, he made his wife, Dolores, do a retake on her song, too.
"He
always wants to do more," Brandon Tartikoff said of Hope's work
ethic. "He goes over everything."
Tartikoff
said he didn't always see eye to eye with Hope, but hoped they'd never
have a real showdown because "Hope has seniority."
The
last time I saw Hope for lunch was in 1993 as he prepared for the fanfare
surrounding his upcoming 90th birthday. He had slowed down a good deal,
was very hard of hearing and was giving the hired help a bad time, ringing
his little bell for service of one kind or another almost constantly. I
had to work hard to get my questions over, but, as usual, he answered them
all fully, often with colorful anecdotes.
Though
Hope was a reservoir of show business stories, he wasn't the least bit
mired in nostalgia and, even on the verge of 90, was much more concerned
about what he was going to be doing next than what he'd done in the good
old days. He said he was in good shape medically and credited it to eating
dried fruit regularly -- and having checkups. He was up to date on all the
news and could talk with some authority about the new comics making the
rounds.
As
for his well-known penchant for political conservatives, Hope never
bad-mouthed a liberal in my presence. He dearly loved Jack Kennedy and
openly called him his favorite among the presidents he'd known. He also
adored the Trumans, calling them "great Americans." He had
supported George Bush for president, but when I asked him about the
Clintons, he said, "They'll do fine."
Ironically,
Hope was one of those once rumored to be a potential buyer of NBC. In our
last meeting, I asked him if he'd ever seriously considered it. He laughed
and said, "What would I do with a network?" A few years later,
when NBC dropped him, he might have had a better answer for that.
Hope
has never really announced his retirement from show business. Nobody
thinks he will either. Milton Berle once suggested waiting for Hope to
retire was "like leaving the porch light on for Jimmy Hoffa."
I'm
guessing Hope is working on a new monologue right now. After all, this is
an election year and he's certainly not going to let a couple of
characters like George W. Bush and Al Gore get away unmolested.
I'm
also hoping Bob is making big plans for his birthday, like maybe inviting
some old pals over to help him blow out the candles. That's the hard part
about getting to be 97, though: You have a lot less wind, but a lot more
candles to blow out. I'm thinking he's probably working on a good
one-liner about that, which may or may not involve the name Monica
Lewinsky.
©
2000 by Ron Miller
Reprinted by permission of www.thecolumnists.com.
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