Hope: Entertainer of the Century (26 page)

As a service comedy,
Caught in the Draft
is merely serviceable, putting Hope through a predictable gauntlet of army indignities: peeling potatoes, pulling guard duty, trying to overcome his nerves at the rifle range. But Hope gives the character some real dimension and empathy, as he sucks it up and tries to prove—to his fellow soldiers, to Lamour and her father, and most of all to himself—that he’s not a coward and a bumbler. After he loses control of a tank and crashes it into the colonel’s car, there’s something touching about the way Hope surveys the wreckage, smartly salutes, and issues a crisp apology: “I’m terribly sorry about the car, sir. I hope you haven’t kept up the payments.”

Caught in the Draft
opened in June 1941 to terrific business. On July 4, it set an all-time box-office record for a matinee at New York’s Paramount Theater. With patriotic sentiment growing and broader slapstick comedies making a comeback, supplanting the more refined drawing-room comedies of the 1930s, Hope’s film was perfectly pitched to the mood of the country. It earned $2.2 million at the box office, more than any other Hope film yet.

Hope’s Hollywood winning streak continued with his next film,
Nothing But the Truth
, released in October. Directed by Elliott Nugent (who, after
The Cat and the Canary
, had taken a year off from Hollywood to star on Broadway in James Thurber’s
The Male Animal
), it gives Hope another chance to show off his maturing skills as a comic actor. Once again he gives a farcical character some human dimension, playing a shallow egotist who discovers unknown reserves of courage and moral fiber.

Hope plays a stockbroker who goes to work for a tony Miami brokerage firm. On his first day on the job he arrives in a dapper white suit, accompanied by a valet and looking forward to a cushy job. But he balks when his first assignment is to sell unsuspecting customers a worthless mining stock. After a debate with his colleagues over whether it’s okay to tell “necessary lies” to do business, Hope makes a bet that he can tell nothing but the truth for twenty-four hours. This puts him in a predictable series of tight spots. At a dinner party aboard the company yacht, he has to bite his tongue to avoid offending the
high-society guests at the table, including his boss’s pretty niece (Paulette Goddard, for once unaccompanied by spooks). His jutting chin never looked so defiant, or so vulnerable, as he tries to navigate the polite conversation without losing the bet.

“Cat got your tongue?” the hostess says after he’s been quiet for too long. “You haven’t said very much. And I’ve put you between two of Miami’s most attractive women. Don’t you agree?”

Hope, sitting between two dowagers, turns to look at one—then swivels his head an extra half-turn, pricelessly, looking for the person the hostess might be referring to. He recovers quickly: “Why, you’re right. I
haven’t
said very much.”

You can see the wheels turning, as he tries to maneuver through each treacherous conversational pass with evasions and euphemisms. Finally, he gives up and lets loose a torrent of truth-telling—blurting out that one guest at the table “couldn’t pass for thirty unless she had a bag over her head.” Scandalized, the haughty hostess lectures him, “We should weigh our words very carefully before we speak.” Hope cries, “I do!” Indeed, no one in movies weighed them better.

•  •  •

Al Capstaff, a producer on
The Pepsodent Show
, was the first to suggest to Hope that he broadcast one of his radio shows from a military camp. Capstaff’s brother was stationed at March Field, the Air Force base in Riverside, California, and the men there needed entertainment, Capstaff said. Hope was initially cool to the idea:
“Why should we drag the whole show down there?” But the appeal of a captive audience of a thousand bored servicemen—plus a chance to promote his upcoming movie,
Caught in the Draft
—helped change his mind.

On Tuesday, May 6, 1941, Hope and his radio troupe were bused to Riverside to do a remote broadcast from the base. Autograph seekers mobbed them as soon as they were inside the gates. Once they were onstage, nearly every joke was greeted with howls of laughter. “I want to tell you I’m thrilled to be here,” Hope said. “I came up to look at some of the sweaters I knitted.” And: “One of the aviators here took me for a plane ride this afternoon. I wasn’t frightened, but at two thousand feet one of my goose pimples bailed out.”

Hope recalled,
“I got goose pimples myself from the roar that followed that one. Then I started to understand. What I said coincided with what these guys were feeling, and laughter was the only way they could communicate how they felt to the rest of the country. I was their messenger boy.” Hope returned to the studio the following week, but he missed the fired-up military crowds and went back on the road for several more troop shows—at the San Diego Naval Station, the Marines’ Camp Roberts in San Luis Obispo, and the Army’s Camp Callan in Torrey Pines—before the season ended in June.

To get a reaction from the men, Hope would send out an advance team of writers to find out the popular hangouts, names of commanding officers, and other local gossip so that he could plug them into the monologue.
“It was our job to talk to the men, and anyone else, to find out which captain they didn’t like, or what terminology we could use,” said Sherwood Schwartz. “We were all civilians. We didn’t know about army stuff at the time.” A line on one show made a reference to the “head of the Navy,” and it got an unexpected laugh—Hope and company didn’t know that
head
meant “bathroom.”
Even the term
GI
, standing for “government issue,” was not in common usage until Hope began using it to refer to the soldiers. For a nation being dragged reluctantly toward war, Hope’s shows played an important, if rarely acknowledged, role in getting Americans accustomed to the military mind-set, and providing a link to the servicemen who would soon be defending them on the battlefield—his own contribution to the war mobilization effort.

One member of Hope’s troupe who was a particular hit with the servicemen was his new singer—a pretty, petite brunette named Frances Langford. She had grown up in Florida and originally wanted to be an opera singer before a tonsillectomy changed her voice from soprano to contralto and she switched to pop. Langford began singing on radio and had appeared in a few movies, but she reached her career apotheosis when Hope began using her on his radio show in the spring of 1941 and made her a regular the following season. Langford had a mile-wide smile and a brassy, emotionally charged voice that could carry over an expanse of thousands of men. She was sexy, but had the
openhearted wholesomeness of an older sister. Along with his other contributions to the war effort, Hope had discovered the iconic singing voice of World War II.

With a string of hit movies, a radio show that was moving up steadily in the ratings (
The Pepsodent Show
finished in third place for the 1940–41 season, trailing only Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen), and the start of his military-camp shows, Hope was riding higher than ever. But he didn’t rest. Even as his career was still in its formative stages, Hope set himself apart from nearly every other Hollywood star by the aggressive and creative ways in which he sought to promote himself and market his fame.

Hope noticed how many fan letters he was getting, many with requests for bios and photos, and over the summer he came up with the idea of writing a humorous memoir, timed to come out at the start of his fall radio season. Pepsodent, seeing the promotional possibilities, agreed to back the project, and Hope’s writers spent the rest of the summer churning out a ninety-six-page, joke-filled paperback called
They Got Me Covered.
Pepsodent printed 4 million copies and sold them for ten cents apiece (plus a box top from a tube of Pepsodent toothpaste). Free copies were handed out to Hope’s studio audiences; Paramount distributed ten thousand more to the press to promote his fall movie
Nothing But the Truth
; and Hope flogged the book constantly on his radio show. It was a marketing masterstroke.

The book gave Hope not just his first brand extension, but an early opportunity to take control of his own life story. The accounts of his boyhood in Cleveland and early show-business career are lighthearted, gag-filled, and all but useless for anyone looking for real insights into Bob Hope:

I was such a beautiful baby. My parents had me kidnapped twice a week just so they could see my picture in the papers.

I remember my first appearance as a comedian. I had them rolling in the aisles. Then the usher came and took away the dice.

Fan mail is like bread and butter to an actor. That reminds me—we’re having postcards for dinner tonight.

Hope would write other, marginally more revealing memoirs in later years. But he was already constructing a wall around his private life and taking charge of his public image. In July 1941 he was the subject of a laudatory profile in
Time
magazine, but he was unhappy because of a few comments about his wealth and his reputation for cheapness. Asked by
Time
how much he earned in a year, Hope replied,
“You can say it’s about a quarter of a million, and I don’t like it.” The magazine estimated his net worth at around $800,000 and noted, “Around the Paramount lot he is known as a ‘hard man with a dollar.’ ”

Nothing got under Hope’s skin more. He had his publicists feed stories to the press about his charitable donations (a reported $100,000 in 1940) and his busy schedule of benefit appearances. Crosby even wrote a letter to
Time
, identifying himself as the source of the “hard man with a dollar” crack, but insisting that the reporter had not recognized it as a joke.
“It’s not very often that I get mad,” he wrote, “but to speak of the ‘appealing avarice’ of Hope, the one man in the business who does not deserve such snide reporting, is fantastic.” But the portrait stuck: Hope’s wealth and reputed tightness with money became touchstones for nearly every profile of him.

Hope’s fourth film of 1941, the year that vaulted him to the front rank of American entertainment stars, was
Louisiana Purchase.
It was a screen adaptation of Irving Berlin’s Broadway musical, with Hope playing a Louisiana businessman caught up in a graft investigation. Though a relatively big-budget production with a Broadway pedigree, it was Hope’s weakest film of the year—with one of Berlin’s most negligible scores, and the tedious Victor Moore taking up way too much screen time as a graft-investigating senator. But Hope gives the film his all, particularly in a climactic filibuster on the floor of the Senate (with its obvious echoes of Jimmy Stewart in
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
), and the movie, which opened on Christmas Day, earned $2.75 million at the box office, another record high for a Hope film.

It was an amazing year for Hope. He was
Paramount’s No. 1 star and ranked fourth on
Variety
’s annual list of Hollywood’s top box-office draws—behind Gary Cooper, Abbott and Costello, and Clark Gable. According to SEC figures, he earned $294,000 for his movie
work in 1941—second only to Bing Crosby, with $300,000. A poll of 450,000 radio listeners named him the top comedian on the air, beating out Jack Benny for the first time.
Radio Daily
gave him its “No. 1 Entertainer” award, and the Women’s Press Club even named him the “most cooperative star in Hollywood.” In December the
Los Angeles Times
ran an adulatory story on him, portraying an upbeat Hollywood star at the top of his game:
“Other top-line funnymen either complain of overwork or feel that stage and screen have passed over their ‘real’ dramatic talents. Bob thinks his work is swell, life is grand, everything is hunky-dory. And he doesn’t want to play
Hamlet.
”

It was the last time for a while that he could appear so carefree. The
Times
story appeared, by chance, on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. Hope was at home, having just finished working with his writers on his radio monologue, when Dolores came into his bedroom to tell him the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Hope thought it was a joke at first, and it still hadn’t quite sunk in when he went to a Hollywood Stars football game in the afternoon. At halftime an announcement was made for all men in uniform to report to their units. Hope went ahead with the usual Sunday night run-through of his radio show (
“We were all too shocked to react normally by canceling it,” he said) and told jokes about Christmas shopping as if nothing had happened. “The audience laughed in little spurts,” he recalled, “on the edge of their seats in case they had to make a hasty exit.”

The show never aired. Hope’s Tuesday-night broadcast was preempted for an address to the nation by President Roosevelt, telling the country to get ready for war.

Hollywood was a changed place after Pearl Harbor. For days following the attack, Los Angeles was on edge—fearful that the Japanese, having so brazenly attacked our naval base in Hawaii, might next target Southern California, where two-thirds of the nation’s aircraft production was located. There were rumors of Japanese planes buzzing California. Blackouts were ordered, and radio stations were shut down. Japanese Americans were rounded up, suspected of being potential saboteurs. The Army moved uninvited into the Walt Disney lot in Burbank so that it could stand watch over the huge Lockheed plant nearby. The studios, meanwhile, made contingency plans to pool their facilities in case of an enemy attack—
“to ensure completion of films in event of loss of life during production of any important screen personalities,”
Variety
reported.

The start of the war didn’t mean a halt to making movies. On the contrary, Hollywood quickly reassured itself that continuing to make them was more important than ever.
“Sacrifices will have to be made,”
Daily Variety
editorialized on the day after Pearl Harbor, “but the show
industry must keep functioning, to preserve morale, to keep up the spirits of this country and its allies with top-rung entertainment and beneficial propaganda.” Yet, like the rest of the country, Hollywood had to adapt to the new wartime restrictions. All guns used on movie sets were confiscated. With rubber and gasoline strictly rationed,
car chases were banned. For security reasons, shots of airports, harbors, or bridges were forbidden, as was the filming of battle scenes after 5:00 p.m., so as not to alarm civilians.