Hope for Humanity

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For fighting men, this grimmest of wars is in one small way also the gayest. Never before have the folks who entertain the boys been so numerous or so notable; never have they worked so hard, traveled so far, risked so much. In the Middle East last week were Jack Benny, Larry Adler with his harmonica, Al Jolson with a harmonium; Ray Bolger was in the South Pacific, Judith Anderson in Hawaii. A while back Martha Raye went to the foxholes of Tunisia; and in New Guinea a show went on within earshot of the Japs. From the ranks of show business have sprung heroes and even martyrs,* but so far only one legend.

That legend is Bob Hope. It sprang up swiftly, telepathically, among U.S. servicemen in Britain this summer, traveling faster than even whirlwind Hope himself, then flew ahead of him to North Africa and Sicily, growing larger as it went. Like most legends, it represents measurable qualities in a kind of mystical blend. Hope was funny, treating hordes of soldiers to roars of laughter. He was friendly--ate with servicemen, drank with them, read their doggerel, listened to their songs. He was indefatigable, running himself ragged with five, six, seven shows a day. He was figurative--the straight link with home, the radio voice that for years had filled the living room and that in foreign parts called up its image. Hence boys whom Hope might entertain for an hour awaited him for weeks. And when he came, anonymous guys who had had no other recognition felt personally remembered.

Head & Heart. This tearing trip--about 250 camp and hospital shows in eleven weeks--was no floodlighted 100-yd. dash, but just a fast lap in a very long race. In 1941 Hope got an Oscar "for humanity," for a record-breaking 562 benefits in two years. Probably the first entertainer to work with the armed forces, Hope has also been the most frequent. Using trains, cars, trucks, tanks, jeeps, Hope has played in virtually every U.S. camp, last fall hopped off with his USO team (Singer Frances Langford, Guitarist Tony Romano, Comic Jerry Colonna) to tour Alaska. When, at the last moment, it looked as if the tour would fall through, Hope wired Lieut. General Simon B. Buckner: WE SING, DANCE, TELL STORIES; HAVE TUXEDOS; WILL TRAVEL; CAN WE PLAY YOUR CIRCUIT? They played it straight through to tiny posts in the Aleutians where men almost never get leave.

But the British circuit was tougher, with Hope & Company (Comic Jack Pepper substituting for Jerry Colonna) "resting" from camp shows by bobbing up in hospitals, dropping in on ack-ack crews, sloshing across rainswept heaths to entertain soldiers on maneuvers. Hope's gags got around so fast he had to keep changing them, and he and Scriptwriter Hal Block ground out new ones in bumpy transit, or in hotel rooms long past midnight.

There were gags of all nations. Hope joshed the British: "Churchill certainly travels; he's been in Casablanca more than Humphrey Bogart." He ragged the Scots: "That blackout's wonderful; you should see the Scotchmen running around developing film." The real show, however, was for the Yanks, and he knew what they wanted: "Were the soldiers at the last camp happy to see me! They actually got down on their knees. What a spectacle! What a tribute! What a crap game!"

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.

With gags alone, no matter how expertly fired, no comic can hit even a gag-loving nation between the eyes. Gags are too brassy, fleeting, unvisual. The true clown or jester tops the gag man by being both a richly eccentric character and a vividly expressive type--Chaplin is The Little Man, Durante The Wild Man, Ed Wynn The Perfect Fool. Hope has no eccentric character; but by giving his gags dramatic value he made himself a type--the dumb wise guy, the quaking braggart, the lavish tightwad. But this type somehow dissolves into a far broader and more significant one--thanks to his vibrant averageness, Hope is any healthy, cocky, capering American. He is the guy who livens up the summer hotel, makes things hum at the corset salesmen's convention, keeps a coachful of passengers laughing for an hour when a train is stalled. With his ski-slide nose and matching chin, he looks a little funny but he also looks normal, even personable, seems part of the landscape rather than the limelight.

And though he hugs the limelight with a showman's depthless ego, in Hope himself is a hunger, or perhaps a final vanity, to reach people as a human being. For a performer who scarcely takes time out to live, perhaps it is the only way of being one.

Hare & Tortoise. In his job, the great ad-libber leaves nothing to luck. He wins by being hare & tortoise both--by carefully plugging along with the help of a batch of scriptwriters and a roomful of filing cabinets, then racing ahead on his own sharp wit. In any Pepsodent broadcast, it's a wise crack that knows its own father.

For every broadcast, Hope's scripters scout for atmosphere, poke into the files for gags that can be retrimmed, dream up new ones. Then they put their heads and hoards together, producing a script that Hope proceeds to tear apart--cutting, sharpening, fitting to character. Finally, before the Tuesday night broadcast (NBC --10 p.m. E.W.T.), there is a Sunday night sealed-in-the-studio tryout at which the audience acts as blue pencil and Hope runs hog-wild.

Hope carves up his movie scripts too--and if Bing Crosby is also in the picture, they go in for downright slaughter. To one scripter who turned up on the set of Road to Singapore, Hope hollered: "If you hear any of your dialogue, yell Bingo!"

Up from Knavery. The fifth of a stonemason's seven sons, Leslie Townes Hope was born in Eltham, England in 1904. (He later changed Leslie to Lester because it sounded more masculine, Lester to Bob because it sounded more matey.)

Then the Hopes migrated to Cleveland. There Bob ran around with a bunch of little toughies, filching apples from pushcarts, racking pool balls, selling papers (legend has it that John D. Rockefeller Sr. once rebuked Newsboy Hope for offering to trust him). He was also a choirboy until "in the middle of a lovely solo, my voice changed."

After leaving school, Hope lost an assortment of jobs by turning clown during business hours. He also tried the prize ring, proved to be "the only fighter that had to be carried both ways." When Bob was 21, a scandal-scarred Fatty Arbuckle came to Cleveland, hired Hope and a friend (George Byrne) to fill out his vaudeville act. Afterward the pair started hoofing through the hinterland. In a shabby theater in New Castle, Ind. came the turning point of Hope's career. He was asked to announce the next week's vaudeville bill, gagged the assignment to furious applause, turned monologuist on the spot. As a "single" with a flip, fast delivery, he landed a one-week job in a Chicago variety theater, stayed six months. From then on "one triumph led to another and I soon found myself only $4,000 in debt." By 1930 he had reached the top, was playing Broadway's Palace.

Vaudeville steppingstoned him into musicomedy where, after a couple of slow starts, he came up fast in Roberta, and the Ziegfeld Follies, was starred with Merman and Durante in Red, Hot and Blue. There after radio, and then the movies, made him rich.

Earlier they had only made him writhe. After a few guest spots on the air, in 1935 Hope landed a monologue for Bromo-Seltzer that was less fizz than fizzle. Tossed into a pallid Lucky Strike program early in 1938, he attracted attention but was hailed by Luckies' George Washing ton Hill as Bob Hopeless.

New Home. The turn came later that year, when Hope was signed by Pepsodent and told to build his own show. He used light timber--Jerry Colonna, who had been tromboning for CBS; Skinnay Ennis, who had recently formed his own band; the girls who became Brenda and Cobina. But he used skillful carpenters--a round dozen scriptwriters with whom he slaved for weeks. And Hope started ribbing himself. The show clicked almost from the start. Pepsodent's president took Hope on his yacht, remarked: "This is the ship that Amos 'n' Andy built." Said Hope: "If I'm on the Pepsodent payroll much longer, you'll use this as a tender."

Success in the movies came more slowly. Having achieved complete mastery over the air, Hope remained a flop on the lot. At last Paramount woke up, but it made Hope wake up also. Before handing him the lead in The Cat and the Canary, Paramount Producer Arthur Hornblow talked to Hope like a Dutch uncle, told him he'd do anything for a laugh--gore another actor, bolt clean out of character. Hope began, fumed Hornblow, by making audiences grin, ended by making them grit their teeth. The Cat and the Canary clicked: since then Hope has whizzed through many another comedy thriller (The Ghost Breakers, My Favorite Blonde, They Got Me Covered), strutted down the Road to Singapore, Zanzibar, Morocco.

Gags to Riches. When Hope went to Hollywood, he lugged with him $300,000 in annuities. Today he easily makes twice that much a year--at least three pictures at $125,000 each, around $7,500 a week from his broadcasts. He has no artist's denseness in handling cash. When a business agent asked a bank official to try to swing him the management of Hope's affairs, the official remarked: "Bob Hope should be handling yours."

Hollywood thought Hope conceited when he first arrived, today merely finds him a little vain. He is well liked, easy to work with, hard to rile, so fast with gags he is almost fatiguing. He can never resist one, recently phoned a Hollywood friend all the way from London to wheeze: "I saw Churchill last night--a great news-reel."

With his attractive wife Dolores Reade, a former nightclub singer whom he calls Mommy, and their two small adopted children, Hope lives unpretentiously in a rambling 15-room San Fernando Valley house that boasts neither swimming pool nor tennis court. His home life is best described as nonexistent. Said Hope recently: "When I get home these days, my kids think I've been booked there on a personal-appearance tour."

Inexhaustible, Hope piles job on job --work, which originally meant the path to glory, has become an end, a need, a form of excitement in itself. His camp tours, by putting him under incredible pressure, have given him an enormous lift. Pleased that he is first in the hearts of the service men, he can hardly wait to be off to the South Pacific. "When the war ends," Hope confesses freely, "it'll be an awful let-down."

* Two USO performers (including Tamara) were killed in the Lisbon Clipper crash.

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