Hope: Entertainer of the Century (37 page)

The movie had a hit song before it even opened. Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, Paramount songwriters who had done the music for
Monsieur Beaucaire
and
My Favorite Brunette
, were asked to write a song for Hope, playing a frontier dentist named “Painless” Peter Potter, to sing to Russell, as Calamity Jane. They came up with the bouncy “Buttons and Bows,” a comic lament for the delights of the “civilized” East, set to the clip-clop of a horse-drawn wagon. Impatient over the long delay before the film’s release, Livingston and Evans got Dinah Shore to record it for Capitol, and the song was No. 1 weeks before the film opened. (It later won an Oscar for Best Song.) Hope’s rendition, tossed off in a mock-Western twang as he sits on a buckboard playing a concertina—“Don’t bury me on this prairie / Take me where the cee-ment grows . . .”—is understated and almost anticlimactic, but nonetheless charming.

The Paleface
was a departure from Hope’s previous films. Shot in candy-colored Technicolor, it is bigger and broader, full of burlesqued gunfights and slapstick chases. Hope’s familiar nervous Nellie character seems quite at home in the land of cowboys and Indians, quaking in his boots one minute (“You’re not afraid are you?” “No, I can always get another scalp”), swaggering around town the next when he thinks he’s single-handedly fought off an Indian attack (Russell has done all the shooting). But
The Paleface
hits a few discordant notes that foreshadow a turn in Hope’s film comedy.

With a script by Edmund Hartmann (a Hope first-timer who had written for Abbott and Costello), Frank Tashlin (the former cartoon director who had worked on
Monsieur Beaucaire
), and Hope’s former radio writer Jack Rose, the laughs often depend on physical gags that are little particularized to Hope. In one running gag, for instance, Hope grabs the reins of his wagon and is yanked out when the horses bolt, dragged along the ground like a rag doll. It’s both jarring and a little unseemly; it could just as well come from a Three Stooges short. In another scene, Hope and Russell get married in a quickie ceremony. As they repeat their vows, the camera remains fixed on the couple’s hands—Bob fumbling with the ring, putting it on the wrong finger. After the minister pronounces them man and wife, he says, “And now the kiss.” There is a loud offscreen smooch. “Not me, you fool!” says the minister. It gets a laugh—but it’s pure, untethered nonsense. No matter how foolish or flustered a Hope character might be at the altar, he would never kiss the minister by mistake.

Still, the Western burlesque was a good showcase for Hope, and most of the critics loved the film.
“A triumphant travesty,” raved Howard Barnes in the
New York Herald Tribune
. “There could scarcely be a more joyful show for the Yule season.”
The Paleface
grossed $7 million at the box office, a new record high for Hope.

While he was gearing up for the Christmas release of
The Paleface
, Hope got a phone call that would alter the course of his career and revive his commitment to a mission that had seemingly ended with the war. Stuart Symington, secretary of the Air Force and a sometime
golfing buddy, asked if Hope would make a Christmas trip to entertain US troops taking part in the Berlin airlift.

The former German capital—partitioned by the Allies after the war, but surrounded by Soviet-controlled East Germany—had been under a Soviet-imposed blockade since the spring, with all road and rail access cut off. In response, Britain and the United States launched a daily airlift to keep the city supplied with food and other essential supplies. Symington told Hope that President Truman thought a delegation of entertainers at Christmas would be an important morale boost and a show of support from back home.

Though he
had been planning to take Dolores and the kids to Lake Tahoe for the holidays, Hope had little trouble saying yes. He quickly put together a troupe of entertainers, including most of his radio cast (minus Day, who had a film commitment), singer Jane Harvey, songwriter Irving Berlin, radio personality Jinx Falkenberg, and the Radio City Rockettes. Vice President–elect Alben Barkley and General Jimmy Doolittle also came along, courtesy of the US government, and so did Dolores—leaving the kids at home for Christmas.

They left a few days before Christmas, made a refueling stop at the US air base at Burtonwood, England, and then flew to Wiesbaden, West Germany, the embarkation point for planes carrying supplies into Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport. The group was scheduled to fly to Berlin on Christmas morning, but the weather looked bad, so Hope and a few members of his troupe were rushed onto an earlier flight there on Christmas Eve. The rest of the group (including
Dolores, who went to Christmas mass at 5:30 a.m., driven there in an Air Force jeep) flew in the next morning on a series of cargo flights.
“It was an adventure,” said Si Rose, one of three writers Hope brought along. “We were flying on a broken-down C-47. There was a board listing all the things that were wrong with the plane. We were standing up, not strapped in or anything, holding on to rods. We were all cargo.”

In frigid Berlin, Hope went to meet incoming airlift pilots, before doing a big show at the Titania Palast theater, an old vaudeville house. He talked about his flight through the tightly guarded air corridor:
“Soviet planes started to buzz us, but the first Russian pilot took one look at me and said, ‘They’re okay—look at the hammerhead and sickle.’ ” Barkley, a former senator from Kentucky, told the airmen trying to outlast the Russian blockade that they were taking part in
“the greatest filibuster of all times.” Irving Berlin closed the show by singing “White Christmas.”

General Lucius Clay had an after-party at his West Berlin quarters for Hope and visiting dignitaries, among them Walter Bedell Smith, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Riding back to the hotel with Dolores, Hope insisted on making one more stop. An Army sergeant who hosted a radio show in Berlin had asked if Hope would drop by the studio for an interview. Though it was after midnight,
Hope asked his driver to find the radio station. With gasoline in short supply in Berlin, the car ran out of fuel a few blocks from their destination—forcing Bob, Dolores, and the driver, flashlight in hand, to trudge the last few blocks in the snow to the station, where Hope took over the mike from the startled DJ.

Hope and company returned to Wiesbaden and made stops in London and Paris before flying back to New York on New Year’s Eve. The following May the Soviets lifted the blockade, ending one of the first major confrontations of the Cold War. Hope had played his part.

•  •  •

Just a few days after returning from Berlin, Hope began a busy stretch of domestic travel. In January and February of 1949, he and his radio cast went on a thirty-three-day, thirty-four-city tour across the South, East, and Midwest, playing big venues such as the Boston Garden and the Orange Bowl in Miami. He was back on the road in April for another, even more jam-packed tour—twenty-one cities in just over two weeks. He and his troupe flew from city to city aboard a United Airlines DC-6. At the time such short-hop air travel was rare for entertainers, and United used Hope’s tour as a promotional tool.
“Here is a perfect example of how air travel opens new opportunities for the entire show business,” read an ad in
Variety
, accompanied by a photo of Hope posing with United pilots.

In her memoir, Doris Day, who suffered from stage fright even in
the best of circumstances, recalled the nerve-rattling flights and the hectic scenes on the ground when they landed:

We often flew through storms and turbulence that had me praying more than once. We made landings where I couldn’t see the airfield until I was on the ground; sometimes the pilot had to circle a few times to find the landing strip. Then when we thankfully got off the plane, there would invariably be a mob of people waiting at the bottom of the steps. Bob was first off and I was in back of him with my hands full of traveling gear; as his fans moved in and mobbed Bob, I’d always get clobbered by the backwash of his faithful, virtually shoved off the steps, and an hour or so later, still spooked by the harrowing airplane ride and the clobbering fans, I’d have to go out on the stage of whatever mammoth auditorium we were playing with my pipes in good condition and my personality bubbling. I really learned what the expression “tough it like a trouper” means.

Something else may have contributed to Day’s stress on the tour. Around the studio Hope liked to tease her with sexual banter—he called her “jut-butt”—but it may not have been entirely innocent. Hope claimed to a friend years later that he and Day had a brief romantic fling while they were touring together in 1949. If so, it was uncharacteristic of Hope, who usually avoided entanglements with his movie and radio costars, and it didn’t last long. When they returned home to Burbank, Dolores was at the airport to greet them, giving Bob an ostentatious welcome-home hug. According to Hope, Day saw the gesture as a wife’s symbolic marking of her territory, and she ended the relationship then and there. Day never commented on the alleged affair.

Not all of Hope’s extramarital activities were discreet. During a stop in Dallas in the spring of 1949, Hope met a blond twenty-one-year-old Universal starlet named Barbara Payton, and
the two began a relationship that lasted for several months. According to Payton, one of Hollywood’s most notorious party girls, and her biographer, John O’Dowd, she followed Hope around the country, moved into a furnished apartment that he rented for her in Hollywood, and, when the
affair ended in August, was paid off by Hope to keep quiet about it. If so, it didn’t stop Payton—whose film career was tainted by scandal and over by the mid-fifties—from selling her story to
Confidential
magazine in 1956, a rare breach in the wall of secrecy that surrounded Hope’s sex life.

Hope’s 1949 personal-appearance tours were huge moneymakers for him, grossing a total of $870,000, of which Hope kept 75 percent.
“You can’t make money like that on Broadway. You can’t make money like that anywhere,” Hope told John Crosby of the
New York Herald Tribune
. At a time when Hollywood was having anxiety attacks over the threat from television, Hope’s success was viewed as a heartening sign that movie stars could still be big draws with the public.
“The Hope success should inspire some of our other better entertainers,” said the
Hollywood Reporter
, “to get a show together and go out, first, of course, to grab some good moola, but more important to hypo show business generally that now needs all the dynamite that can be blasted at the public to get them going back to the theaters.”

Between his radio show, his movie work, and his lucrative concert tours, Hope was probably earning more money than any other star in Hollywood. He was investing much of it in real estate. He also owned a stake in several broadcasting ventures, including DuMont Television and KOA radio in Denver. And in 1949, with his friend Crosby, he got into the oil business.

Years earlier, he and Crosby had met a Fort Worth oilman named Will Moncrief at a golf benefit in Texas. They stayed in touch, and in mid-1949 Moncrief cut them in on
a deal to lease seventeen hundred acres of West Texas oil land. Hope put up $50,000, and another $50,000 when the first well came up dry, before they hit a gusher that was soon producing a thousand barrels a day. Hope, always a hands-on businessman, flew to Texas for a weekend in August to inspect the well. (Crosby, just as characteristically, stayed home fishing.) It was one of Hope’s shrewdest investments. When he and Crosby sold out in the early 1950s, each earned a windfall of $3.5 million.

Big money was still being tossed around in radio as well. In late 1948 and early 1949, CBS chairman William Paley launched a series
of talent raids on rival NBC, offering lucrative contracts to lure away many of the network’s top comedy stars, including Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Red Skelton, and Burns and Allen. After he added Bing Crosby to his stable (hiring him away from ABC, where Bing had moved his radio show in 1946), Paley set his sights on Hope, envisioning a Hope-Crosby tandem airing back-to-back on CBS.

It’s not clear how far the negotiations went, but Hope was one major NBC star who stayed put. His instinctive loyalty to the network that had helped make him a star doubtless played a role. But
NBC also stepped up as it hadn’t for some of its other defecting talent, promising to bankroll various Hope Enterprises projects and dangling a seven-figure salary when Hope made the all-but-inevitable move into television. Hope never seriously considered switching networks again.

Relations with his sponsor, Lever Brothers, weren’t quite so tranquil. In the spring of 1949 Hope got into
another fight with Luckman, this time over the taping of his radio show. Though most radio programs were still broadcast live, some stars (notably Crosby, who owned a piece of the Ampex audiotape company) were beginning to record shows in advance, and Hope wanted the option of doing the same when he was traveling. Luckman objected, complaining about the cost and worrying that radio listeners wouldn’t sit still for “canned” shows. The dispute went to an arbitration panel, which ruled against Hope. Lever renewed its sponsorship of Hope’s show for the 1949–50 season—encouraged, possibly, by a Gallup poll in September that named him America’s favorite comedian (beating Milton Berle, the new TV sensation, by a two-to-one margin). But the disputes were taking their toll, and it would be Hope’s last season for his longtime sponsor.

Back at Paramount, Hope spent most of the summer of 1949 filming
Where Men Are Men
(later retitled
Fancy Pants)
, a remake of
Ruggles of Red Gap
, the 1935 Charles Laughton comedy about an English butler in the old West. While shooting a scene in which he rides a bucking mechanical barrel, Hope was thrown off the machine, fell six feet to the floor, and was knocked unconscious. A stay in the hospital revealed no serious injuries, but he needed a week off to recuperate from the bruises. Hope got plenty of publicity mileage out of
the accident, writing an open letter to studio chief Henry Ginsberg:
“If your economy-minded production heads had used a real horse instead of putting me over a broken-down barrel I would not have landed on my back on Stage 17 with an injury which you will see from the bill was not cheap.”