Quotes of the Day

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.”

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.”

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.

Part Two: Bobbin' Along

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss reconsiders Bob Hope