In World War VI, when the spears and flaming arrows of neoprimitive nations start flying back and forth, Bob Hope will be up there near the front lines, entertaining the troops.
Hope is 60. His pace is, if anything, faster than it was when he was 20. As Moo Goo Gai Poo, he will play the ruler of Viet-Poo on TV this week, opposite Martha Raye as Mme. Poo. He is off to Australia next month and is planning a tour of U.S. bases in the Mediterranean area to entertain U.S. soldiers far from home on Christmas Day. Offstage as on, when strangers are around him, he can't stop quipping. "Hey, I'm learning humility," he will say. "I called up my agent today and asked if there was any more room on Mount Rushmore."
Bob Hope actually belongs on some sort of Mount Rushmore, his nose cantilevered on reinforcing rods near Groucho Marx's cigar and Jack Benny's bow. Hope is the longest-running one-line stand-up snap-it-out comedian in the history of show business. His jokes now have more polish than brass, but they keep coming, with energy and perfect timing. He says he'll never quit: "If I retired, I'd be surrounded by about nine psychiatrists. I'm not retiring until they carry me away, and I'll have a few routines on the way to the big divot."
Like What He Is. Last summer he hired a yacht for a vacation cruise of Canadian waters. But he was bored. "Fish don't applaud," he explains. Applause is the only income he really cares about. He particularly enjoys it in the form, say, of the medal recently pinned on him by President Kennedy for his countless appearances before U.S. servicemen during and since World War II.
Like few other comedians, he can function as master of ceremonies before a dinner of titans and financiers and never seem to be just a fast-talking gagman rung in for the night. He carries off that sort of thing with an offhand assurance that suggests he's really one of the big tycoons who just happened to take the podium. Small wonder. That's what he is. If anyone still wonders where the yellow went, Pepsodent's aggressive young comedian of 1938 is now one of the largest individual holders of raw acreage in Southern California. He has thousands of acres in the San Fernando Valley and hundreds in Palm Springs. He owns 421% of two TV stations in Colorado worth more than $10 million. He gives away more than $100,000 a year through The Bob and Dolores Hope Charitable Foundation. He has just given $300,000 for a new Bob Hope Theater at Southern Methodist University. His golfing partners are people like Richard Nixon, Stuart Symington and Del Webb. He has successfully managed the transition from dash to dignity, maintaining his status all the while as the No. 1 comic in America.
Writers are his maintenance crew. Hope knows that his own native humor would never have got him out of Cleveland. He once waved a script at his writers and said, "This is all the talent I have, fellows." For it, he pays eight of them more than $450,000 a year. Thus each Hope joke is worth roughly the cost of a natural pearl.