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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 didnt 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. Thats 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, youre expected to provide valet parking.) Then hed amble through some sketches, usually labored, with guest stars. The highlight, especially in retrospect, was the annual introduction of the Football Writers Associations 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 Bobs banter. On the 1984 show, William Perry, soon to be dubbed the Refrigerator, laughs heartily when Hope looks at Perrys 320-pound bulk (big then for a defensive lineman) and asks: Did the bus come in you? Theres 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. Thats when he could come alive for an audience — not a few hundred civilians in a Burbank studio but 15,000 GIs in hostile territory. Hopes 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 comics mission.
Hopes 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 Colonnas 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 youre 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 Americas local ally to subdue the Viet Cong. But I envy you guys, he said with soufle 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 Congs 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 were in the midst of a 24-hour Christmas truce. Isnt 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. Its really nutty, Graves says. You never know whats gonna happen, or why its gonna happen, or what youre doing it for. Bob drawls: Youd 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 didnt really expect to be here this year, he told the boys. The Paris Peace Talks were going so well. Hey listen, if youre wondering whats going on with the Paris Peace Talks, heres the latest, up-to-the-second flash on what theyre 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 cant send Spiro. Hed 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 Ive ever actually visited your home. Mrs. Hope replies, Four more times and youll 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 Im getting too old to be traveling the Persian Gulf for Christmas. They said, Baloney. The Ayatollahs 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.