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The armies he entertained became his postwar army of fans. Hope's early memoir, I Never Left. Home, sold 1,600,000 copies, royalties for which he turned over to the National War Fund. By 1949, his movies—Monsieur Beaucaire, The Paleface, Sorrowful Jones, My Favorite Brunette—had established him as Hollywood's top box-office draw. The next year, he decided to get into TV "before Milton Berle uses up all my material." NBC paid him $40,000 for his first special. That same year, he won a Peabody Award for The Quick and the Dead, a four-part radio documentary on atomic energy, produced by Fred Friendly.
College Rounds. Nowadays, Hope has given up radio, but has increased his TV specials to nine a year, in addition to guest shots. Just a few weeks ago, busy as he was putting together his Viet Nam touring company, he taped a Hollywood Palace show with Crosby for ABC as well as his own NBC Christmas show. He also cranks out a movie a year, the last few of which have been excessively cornball—an embarrassment to his old fans. The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Farrell, which he just wrapped up this month with Phyllis Diller, is likely to be more of the same.
It may be that Hope gets more kicks from working live than on film. "You do a movie," he says, "and you have to wait to find out if it's any good. But personal appearances, that's instant satisfaction." He likes to perform in public for young people, and lately has been making the college rounds. A recent opener at U.C.L.A.: "Before it's too late, I want to make one thing clear—the only thing I'm recruiting here tonight is laughs."
And he'll go to remarkable lengths to get them, too. Once, Hope's plane circled for hours over a camp in Alaska before it was finally guided to a safe landing by a searchlight from a nearby mountain. After the performance ("Brace up, you're God's frozen people!"), Hope asked about the searchlight crew, pushed up to the outpost and performed a second show—for two lonely, grateful men. In 1963, just before his annual Christmas tour, Hope suffered a blood clot in his left eye. Doctors saved his sight with laser-beam surgery. While he was recuperating, his U.S.O. company went on without him to Ankara. Hope flew to Germany where an Air Force plane picked him up and ferried him to Turkey. "He looked like a sick man," says one of his assistants, "but when he walked on the stage, the roar that went up from those people was probably the world's greatest therapy. From that moment on you could physically see the change He was his old self, rarin to go."
Writers Squad. To the show-business professionals who have watched him work, Hope's old self is a remarkable study in technique—the powerful pause, the swift switch in subject matter, bridged by "And I wanna tell you —. " or "And how about ..." Although he is an extraordinarily witty man offstage, his schedule requires the support of a squad of writers who whack out jokes literally by the thousands.