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Gold Rush. A few years later, Paramount cast Bob in The Big Broadcast of 1938. Hope remembers it as "the first major picture that didn't win me an Oscar—and they say history repeats itself." About all that anyone else remembers is the song that he introduced in it, Thanks for the Memory. In 1939, Hope, Crosby and Dorothy Lamour were signed for The Road to Singapore (two other comedy teams—Burns and Allen, and Fred MacMurray and Jack Oakie—refused to touch it).
As late-show fans of the Road cycle know, gags took precedence over plot, locale and plausibility. Lamour would pop up in snowy Alaska during the Klondike gold rush wearing a sarong. The main goal of Hope and Crosby seemed to be to step on each other's lines, and the script was a dead letter. Once, when the writer happened onto the set, Hope called: "If you hear any of your own dialogue, yell bingo." A typical exchange, from Road to Utopia —Lamour: "You're facetious." Hope: "Keep politics out of this." Yet by 1962, when the great chase and all the hokey detours finally ended with The Road to Hong Kong, the seven Road shows had grossed over $50 million.
Row, Row, Row. At the same time, Hope was concentrating on mastering radio. He had misfired on his first guest shots in the mid-'30s. "I tried to do a relaxed, slow format like Jack Benny," he says, "but it wasn't right for me." Slowly, he evolved the technique of the trip-hammer monologue that was to propel him to the top of the Hoo-peratings. On his premiere in 1938, he opened: "How do you do, ladies and gentlemen. This is Bob Hope." That was followed by a single laugh from a stooge in the studio. "Not yet, Charlie," said Bob, "but don't leave!" Later, he started like a string of Chinese firecrackers: "Hello, folks, this is Bob Pepsodent Hope." Pow, pow, pow—joke, joke, joke. And a lot of them were dogs, dogs, dogs. Some friends "had a very exclusive wedding," went one. "They threw a Chinaman with every grain of rice." Or: "I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that we're broadcasting from NBC's new Hollywood studios ... a big beautiful building. They tell me it cost more than Mrs. Roosevelt's annual train fee." And the one about the excessive gadgetry in the new cars: "I pushed one button and opened a WPA bridge in Salt Lake City."
Much later, during the Truman Administration, Bob told his radio audience: "I loved the April Fools' gag a fellow pulled in Washington. He walked into the White House and said he was from Missouri, and before he could holler 'April fool!' he was a Cabinet member." By that time, Hope and his sidekicks—popeyed, siren-throated Jerry Colonna, Brenda and Cobina, and Bandleader Skinnay Ennis—had turned Tuesday into Bob Hope night in the U.S. Every Wednesday morning in those days, the Dow-Jones stock ticker used to carry the best of his jokes. During his ten years as toothpaste salesman, he claims, Pepsodent leapfrogged from No. 6 in sales to No. 1.
Benefits & Bundles. The day the draft began in 1940, Hope stepped up to the front lines of G.I. audiences. Beginning in March 1941, his weekly broadcasts originated from military bases. By the time of Pearl Harbor, he had