My
Lunch at Home
With Bob Hope
By
JOHN STANLEY
Reprinted with permission
from www.TheColumnists.com
FEW days after my
interview with Bob Hope, an NBC publicist called to tell me how
lucky I'd been on that spring day back in 1993. "Count your
lucky stars. That was a good day when you were there," she
said. "But if you'd come one day later . . . that wasn't such a
good day."
There had been stories about Hope's failing health even
back then, but I had detected nothing major during our two hours
together. He'd even led me up a flight of stairs, singing a little
ditty, seemingly spry and agile and as dapper as any day in his six
decades as an entertainer.
In retrospect, I suppose one does count one's lucky
stars just to get an interview with Hope, but at the time it was all
part of a newspaperman's job. It was my wife who told me later that
I was luckier than most. She said breaking bread at high noon with
the star in his Toluca Lake mansion had to be the American
equivalent of taking four o'clock tea with Queen Elizabeth in an
opulent little nook at Windsor Castle.
I got to thinking about it and realized she was right.
Both are British-born, for one, and both qualify as royalty, though
of a different type. Hope became a king in his own land as the
eternal stand-up comedian firing out topical one-liners, never
relinquishing his crown, always coming back indefatigably to do one
more TV variety show, play one more benefit golf tournament or do
one more USO tour for American troops. He definitely sat on a
self-made throne for decades.
And there was certainly something stately and palatial
about the seven-acre spread where Hope hung his golf hat and stored
his irons back in '93, although there wasn't a trace of pomp or
pageantry in how the comedian greeted guests. Hope looked the
essence of relaxation. He was dressed in casual style, wearing a
white cotton golf shirt, brownish-gray slacks and pristine white
Reeboks. He was standing in the front room before high glass windows
that afforded a view of rolling lawns, an Olympic-size swimming pool
and a forest of tall trees, behind which Jonathan Winters' own
mansion was hidden. Although he was about to turn 90, he looked trim
and fit and boasted he had just returned from a robust round of golf
at a nearby course.
"Have you had your iron today?" he quipped.
Hope strolled across the room, his body loose and his
chin tilted, that ski-jump nose upturned. He made quips in his
familiar, happy-go-lucky style. It wasn't so much the punchline, but
the energy he put behind it. As if he was convinced it was funny and
it didn't matter what you thought. He gestured to a dining table set
up near the window and waved his hand toward the lavish grounds,
where a gardener was trimming hedges.
"Claudette Colbert sat in that same chair you're
in now, and asked me, 'How can you
afford
all that lawn?'" he told me.
A mild breeze wafted through an open window as he began
a light lunch of diced chicken in white sauce, a simple lettuce and
tomato salad and a custard dessert topped by a single strawberry. He
waved his spoon at me.
"You're lucky I'm eating today," he said.
"Normally I don't have any lunch. Gotta go light."
Hope had become hard of hearing and occasionally, with
the sound of a distant lawn mower coming from outside, leaned
forward to say "Eh?" Finally he pushed his plate away.
"What does it mean to be 90? Hah! I'm puzzled myself. I keep
asking myself that. 'What does it mean?' I go out and hit the golf
ball a little better than I did at 80. I practice every day and
don't have any sore muscles. I never thought when I was young I
should be old. Now that I'm old, I wonder when I'm supposed to get
decrepit."
Reporters love
their subjects to be overly articulate and insightful and sagacious,
so they can go home with profound answers to "salient"
questions. Hope didn't fill that bill at all. About the milestones
in his life, he just kept saying, "I was lucky," as if
luck accounted for everything in his career.
About The Colgate Comedy Hour, his radio show of
three decades, he shrugged and said, "All I know, I had the
greatest writing staff, all kids out of college -- Norman Panama,
Melvin Frank, Melville Shavelson. And we did what people were
talking and thinking about. Speed was one thing we concentrated on.
Hit 'em quick. Do it fast. Yeah, I guess we were just lucky. But you
know, there is this thing about comedy. Timing, definitely timing.
In acting, everything is in the eyes. The eyes tell the story. When
I see pieces of my old pictures once in a while, I realize I'm
dreaming with my eyes on that screen. It makes me laugh, it's so
silly."
Hope once said, "Laughter opens up the
arteries," and I asked him if he still believed that. "You
bet I do," he said. "Laughter is the greatest thing in the
world for you. Humor is something you turn to in a dark moment. A
little love, a little laugh every day and you're way ahead of the
rest of the world. That's a motto I still believe in."
You can't talk to Bob Hope without talking about Bing
Crosby, a golfing and acting crony with whom Hope had a long-running
feud on radio and TV, albeit a friendly one. He admitted Crosby was
an inseparable part of his career.
"We started out doing radio together and then the Road
pictures," he said. "There was always a chemistry there.
You know, Bing used to walk through the pictures. But then, I'd give
the writers little suggestions and make notes in the margins of the
scripts and show them to Bing and he'd say, 'That's great!' and he'd
pep up and take more interest in what we were doing. Working
together was a challenge for both of us. We were always on our toes,
trying to top each other, on camera and off. But it was never
malicious. We were playing to each other. We were having a
ball."
At first, while he talked about Crosby, Hope's voice
was warm and filled with nostalgia.
But
it took on a heavier tone when he began to describe how, a few
months before the crooner's death in 1977, Crosby fell through an
opening on a Hollywood stage while doing a benefit. A stagehand had
forgotten to close a trapdoor and Crosby had stepped right into the
hole while crossing the stage. Hope saw him going down "like a
ton of bricks." He ran downstairs and found Pearl Bailey
cradling Bing's head in her arms.
"Bing looked up at me and said 'I couldn't have
done [the fall] better in a Road picture, could I?' I think
that fall had a helluva lot to do with his passing. It was a drop
and a half he took. Damn, it was far."
Hope was at the Waldorf in New York, waiting to fly to
England, when he received word that Crosby had dropped dead of a
heart attack on a golf course in Spain in 1977.
"Would you believe it –I was going to London to
make Road to the Fountain of Youth with Bing. We figured it
would be our last Road picture, our swan song together. Of
course, it never got made. Who would you replace him with? Why would
you want to replace him? We shelved it. Meanwhile, the phone is
ringing off the wall at the Waldorf. Every reporter in America
wanted to get a quote from me about Bing. I had to get the hell
outta New York. I went down a special service elevator, the car,
boom, right to the airport, the plane and back to L.A. Yeah, Bing.
What a guy."
I really wanted Hope to say some deeply philosophical
things about his dedication to doing USO shows for American
servicemen, beginning in 1942 and continuing through the Persian
Gulf War. It had all been voluntary, and it hadn't been fun and
games flying into dangerous war zones and trying to entertain
thousands of troops. But as with all subjects in his life, Hope fell
back on simplicity.
"They were something, those shows for the boys.
That was a great privilege to do those shows. It was just something
I had to do. I couldn't say no. I was so damned lucky to fall into
that, to have the chance to entertain all those boys. When Phyllis
Diller went
on her
first tour with me, I said, 'Now you gotta see the hospitals, that's
part of why we're doing this.' She went in to see some of the
wounded boys and came out crying. 'I don't wanna do that again. I
don't wanna see them lying in bed all shot up.' I told her, 'You're
going to do it again. It's why we're here, remember? We're here for
them."
Hope acknowledged there were dangerous moments during
the foreign USO trips. "One time our radio went out when we
were flying through the mountains up in Anchorage and this general,
he put up the anti-aircraft lights and our pilot, thank God, saw
them and we went in safely. Another time we were sitting on the
runway, waiting to take off, when someone rushed aboard to tell the
pilots to shut the engines down. The wrong kind of jet fuel had been
put into the tanks and if we'd tried to take off, we would have been
cinders. If you were gonna quit, you would've quit then and there.
You couldn't worry about the danger. Yeah, we were lucky to fly that
far that long and live to talk about it."
Hope referred twice to a "drawerful of
letters" sent to him by parents of men killed in the wars, who
had seen his shows shortly before their deaths.
"They were so grateful that we'd given their sons
some fun, a little joy," he said. "But I can't read those
letters anymore. I gave them to my daughter Linda, and I hope she
can some day put a book together with all those letters. Those boys
deserve to be remembered."
You also can't talk to Hope without asking about his
wealth. Forbes magazine once placed his assets at around $115
million, and that included large amounts of acreage in Palm Springs
and the Santa Monica Mountains.
"It all started when an oil well hit a gusher in
'49," said Hope. "It was the first well to come in at
Skoura County, Texas. Bing and I, we'd put up a few hundred thousand
each. I was there to see the gusher come in. God, we were
lucky."
Lucky to the tune of about $4 million for each of them.
Hope used his share to buy up large sections of California real
estate.
Questions about Hope's "hawkish" attitudes in
the early days of the Vietnam war, about the unpleasant image of
Crosby that has emerged since his death, about his differences with
conservationists over the development of his land holdings -- all
wash over him as they had never happened.
"Naw, none of those things upset me. I made nine
trips to Vietnam. A small majority thought I was supporting the
Vietnam War. Hell, I was anti-war – who wouldn't be after seeing
all those boys shot up? As for the land, I gave some of it away [in
1990]. And I donated 80 acres for the Eisenhower Medical Center in
Palm Desert [in 1966]. You know something about money? Money means
one thing to me: doing the things I want to do and helping people I
want to help. If I didn't have that land, it wouldn't worry me. Bing?
Well, we all have our private side. Sometimes it's dark, but what
the hell. We have to be what we are."
Talk to Hope and invariably the subject of golf will
come up. A sport he had done much to promote, it was still a lively
topic in his life in '93.
"Golf was always a challenge to me. You're
fighting yourself with golf. When I shoot a good score, I feel
great. Some of my greatest moments have been on a golf course –
and some of my worst. But I really love it. My best game, without a
doubt, was in 1951, with a handicap of four. You know, we played,
Bing and I, back when people didn't know anything about golf. They
used to stand on the sidelines and yell, 'Sissy, sissy,' when we
took a swing. Later they didn't yell sissy when they had TV and saw
that a four-foot putt could be the difference between $5,000 or
$10,000 in prize money."
It was after
lunch that Hope asked me to follow him up a flight of stairs off the
kitchen. On the way up, he hummed that little ditty under his
breath.
Upstairs, in a corridor that led to bedrooms and a
small office where he fiddled with paperwork every afternoon, were
glass-encased photographs of all the Presidents since Roosevelt
posing with Hope, all of them autographed. And there were signed
photos of all the generals he had met during the USO tours. He
preened like a peacock. You could see he was proud of all this
entertaining-the-troops business.
He led the way to the front door, beginning to look a
little tired. But there was nothing tired about his voice:
"Bought half this place for $12,500 back in '38," he
volunteered. "Offered the same amount for the other half, but
got turned down. Ended up having to buy it for $40,000 a year later.
What a lesson in life that was. But hey, we all live and
learn."
With
so many milestones in his life, was there anything left to conquer
after 90? He thought that one over for a moment, then, in his
simplistic way, "Yeah, there is something. But what I'd like to
do is absolutely impossible. I'd like, just once, to win a golf
tournament . . . and maybe win one of those acting things . . . you
know, an Academy Award."
|
The Main Event
