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There was one camp Hope did not get to—so to catch his performance 600 men tramped ten miles across the moors, could not get within earshot, started tramping back again. After the show Hope heard about them, tossed his gang into jeeps, overtook the hikers and, in a drenching downpour, clowned for 40 minutes.
Sometimes head & heart worked together. When a wounded kid in a hospital busted out crying while Frances Langford was singing, Hope broke the agonized silence that followed by walking up & down between the beds saying: "Fellas, the folks at home are having a terrible time about eggs. They can't get any powdered eggs at all. They've got to use the old-fashioned kind you break open."
Guns for Gags. The North Africa-Sicily circuit was toughest of all. Bombed in Algiers, Bizerte, Palermo, Hope once almost dislocated his hip, once got jammed between two targets—an airport and an ammunition dump. In a Palermo hotel, he and Block were writing a script during a dive-bombing. Commented Block: "We did a show and ran for our lives." Cracked Hope: "I've never done anything else."
In an open Sicilian gully, Hope had his greatest and most grateful audience: 19,000 weary men just back from battle. In exchange for gags like "I led such a sheltered life I didn't go out with girls till I was almost four," the veterans gave him captured Lugers, dirks, Mussolini medals, tried to give him machine guns.
Double-Draw. Last week Hope was back home again to resume another life in which he is tops. Between radio and cinema, he bests all rivals as a double-draw; the name Hope has become a radio synonym for Tuesday night, has helped make the Road to Morocco almost as famous as the Road to Mandalay. Yet his huge mike-and-movie success is less than a lustrum old. And it is so huge it obliterates all memory of Hope as a vaudeville headliner and a Broadway star.
But vaudeville is the key to Hope, even though he has recently had the lock changed. He is first & foremost a gag man, with a gag man's brash ability to keep moving, ad-lib, hit back; above all, with a gag man's sense of timing. Says Hope: "I was born with timing and coordination." Artistically he was born with little else—no special trick of speech, gift of pantomime, sense of character. Quite inartistically, indeed, he was born with a kind of strenuous averageness—which paradoxically managed to set him apart.