Hope: Entertainer of the Century (51 page)

His cheapness was legendary, if sometimes exaggerated. As producer of his own shows, he watched over expenses like a hawk, signed all the checks, and could balk at the cost of a cab ride or late-night pizzas for the crew editing his specials. Director Sid Smith, who worked on Hope specials in the 1980s, once submitted a $39 receipt for a taxi ride to the airport. Hope objected that the same trip only cost him $27.
“I never put in another expense account in all my years with Bob Hope,” said Smith. Bob Alberti, Hope’s musical director in the later years, once finished a recording session in New York City after midnight and had to deliver the audiotape to Hope at a production studio across town.
When Alberti arrived and turned in his cab receipt, Hope asked why he couldn’t have taken a crosstown bus.
Even a family member, after a stay at the Toluca Lake house, was startled to get a bill from Hope’s office—for a $3.75 long-distance phone call he had made while there.

Lachman and others would leave tips for Hope at restaurants, just to make sure he didn’t shortchange the waiters. Often it wasn’t stinginess so much as sheer inattention. Hope once walked into the officers’ club at Keesler Air Base in Mississippi and ordered “drinks on the house.” Then he left, forgetting to settle the tab.
“We were paying it off for the next year,” recalled an officer’s wife who was there.

Bob Mills, a Hope writer in the 1970s and 1980s, saw Hope’s frugality as a function of his competitiveness. Hope hated to miss out on a deal or to feel that he was being taken advantage of. When his writing staff convinced him in the 1980s to get a fax machine (ending the tradition of personally dropping off jokes at the Hope compound), they bought the boss an expensive, fully loaded machine, while the writers got cheaper models at the fleet rate. When Hope found out about it, he asked why he hadn’t gotten the same good deal.
“Why did he care? He cared because we are sitting here with a deal that he didn’t get,” said Mills. After he explained to Hope why he needed the more expensive machine, the boss appeared satisfied. Then he thought for a minute and asked, “Why do I need a separate phone line?”

At the same time, Hope raised millions for charity (most of it through the Bob and Dolores Hope Foundation, which he set up in 1962) and was generous in helping out relatives and friends—supporting
family members who were broke, staking former colleagues in business ventures, and giving work to old vaudeville pals such as Charlie Cooley and Jack Pepper. Hope appreciated professionalism and would reward it. When Arlene Dahl failed to show up for a guest appearance on one of Hope’s TV shows in the mid-1950s, Hope got Janis Paige to fill in at the last minute. She quickly learned Dahl’s part in a sketch and rehearsed a new musical number. Later she got two paychecks—hers, and the one that Dahl was supposed to get.
“Thanks a lot, kid,” Hope wrote in a note. He stayed loyal to his longtime agents, Louis Shurr and Jimmy Saphier, even when MCA made a pitch to take over all of his representation. After Hope read the proposed contract, he asked if MCA would be willing to buy out Shurr and Saphier. “Name a figure,” came the reply. Said Hope,
“Well, if they settle for anything less than ten million dollars, I’ll never talk to them again.” That ended the discussion.

He had a Depression-era mind-set. He never forgot his family’s hand-to-mouth existence, and his years of struggle in vaudeville. Though his real estate holdings and other investments made him one of the wealthiest people in Hollywood, he never thought of himself as rich.
“Emotionally he’s still the vaudevillian who fought his way up during the Depression,” said Lachman. “To vaudevillians, and to Hope, the only thing that matters is how much money you’ve got in your pocket, how much food in the kitchen, how much you can charge and get away with. The rest is crap.”

Hope ran his sprawling enterprises like a mom-and-pop operation. Though he paid decent salaries and gave generous Christmas gifts to his employees, he provided no medical insurance or retirement benefits for his office staff until the 1990s. He was a hands-on manager of his many ventures, and only he knew the full extent of them.
“Dad was always of the mind to divide and conquer,” said his daughter Linda. “He would have all these different compartments and different people handling different things. And he was sort of the hub of the wheel. He knew the whole picture, but not too many other people did. And he kind of liked it that way.”

He was always busy. His appearances at home carried a sense of
occasion. When he arrived at family dinners, nearly always late, the clan would often stand to greet him, or his daughter Nora would sing a joking welcome song for him. When the larger extended family got together at the holidays, he could be funny and voluble or drift into stretches of impenetrable silence.
“Even within the family it felt like he was special,” said Justine Carr, a cousin. “It didn’t feel like he was a dad; he was always Bob Hope. Everyone was on notice when he was around—waiting to see, was he going to be attentive, or aloof?”

“He was an impersonal guy in a lot of ways,” said nephew Tom Malatesta. “I think everything else in his life was not as important as what he was doing for a living. Could he sit at the table and tell jokes and entertain? Absolutely. But that’s what he did. He was Bob Hope, twenty-four/seven.”

One houseguest who got an inside look at the Hope home life in those years was John Guare, the future playwright (
The House of Blue Leaves
,
Six Degrees of Separation
), who was best friends with Hope’s son Tony at Georgetown. After graduating in 1963, Guare drove cross-country with Tony and was about to start an intern job at Universal Studios when he got his draft notice. While he was trying to sort out his draft status and enlist in the reserves, Dolores gave Guare an open-ended invitation to stay with the family in Toluca Lake. He wound up living there for nearly ten months.

His first Hope family dinner was memorable.
“We sat down for dinner, and everybody turned quiet,” Guare recalled. “Suddenly doors open on either side of the fireplace, and maybe eight men come in with enormous white cards, with jokes written on them. They stood around us at the table, and one by one Mr. Hope would say, ‘Yes, no, yes . . .’ No reaction to the jokes—just ‘That’s funny’ or ‘No, put that over there.’ He was building his act. And that’s what you did for dinner.”

Yet Guare found it a warm and bustling household, thanks largely to Dolores and her spirited family—her mother, Theresa, who lived with them, and her sister, Mildred, who was often around. Both were streetwise, no-nonsense New Yorkers who helped keep the home lively and grounded.
“You could imagine Theresa out on the sidewalk on Tenth Avenue playing cards with the girls,” said Guare. “They were
rich people; they were stars. But in a sense they weren’t used to it. They had this glamorous house, but they were determined to keep the Tenth Avenue–ness of it.” Dolores ran a tight ship, with a large household staff and a sign-up sheet for family members who would be joining for dinner, and even when Bob was around, one had a sense that his bags were never unpacked. But any tension over his frequent absences was kept well hidden.
“It was not a house full of undercurrents,” said Guare. “There was not a threat in the air, or wariness. It was a genuinely pleasant house.”

Another outsider who got a close-up glimpse of the Hope household in those years was Tony Coelho, an aspiring seminary student and later a six-term California congressman. After graduating from Loyola University in 1964, he was diagnosed with epilepsy, a disease that disqualified him from seminary school and estranged him from his parents, Portuguese-born Catholics who regarded it as evidence of possession by the devil. Unable to get a driver’s license or a job, Coelho was close to suicide when a psychologist at Loyola connected him with Dolores Hope. She offered to give him a place to live while he tried to piece his life together.

Coelho spent nine months with the Hopes, living in their guest suite above the garage and becoming close friends with Kelly, the one Hope child still living at home. It was a heady experience: dinner with Martha Raye, phone calls from Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson during the 1964 presidential campaign. (Hope was a Goldwater supporter; Johnson was trying to make sure that support stayed private.) The Hopes had other houseguests, among them a Standard Oil heiress who hired a pianist to play for her while she painted in the Hope backyard.
“They obviously had a lot of money,” said Coelho. “But they didn’t flash it or try to impress you with it. They were regular people, fun to be around.”

The stay helped turn his life around. “The Hopes were very supportive, just by accepting me. After going through suicide and family rejection and questioning the Church and my religion, all of a sudden getting this opportunity—I was just overwhelmed.” After Hope suggested that Coelho go into politics instead of the ministry, he landed a
staff job with a Democratic congressman from California, Fred Sisk. When Hope found out, he was dismayed that it was a congressman he’d never heard of. “If I knew you were serious about it,” he told Coelho, “I could have got you with somebody who had a name.”

“He was very kind to me,” said Coelho. “He seemed to be a guy who knew himself and was in control of himself. I never felt that he was hiding anything. The only thing I picked up was that he was protecting himself. I think he always expected people to take advantage.” When Coelho moved out, Hope sent him to a Bank of America branch and told him to borrow as much money from Hope’s account as he needed. Hope asked only one thing in return: that Coelho promise never to write anything about his time living there. “There was no contract; he knew that he couldn’t stop me,” said Coelho. “But I felt it was interesting that he had to ask. It told me that he had been hurt. I don’t think he let many people get to know the real Bob Hope.”

•  •  •

As he entered his sixties, Hope continued his almost superhuman work pace: star of TV comedy specials and host of a weekly drama series, a couple of feature films a year, and a full schedule of personal appearances that kept him constantly on the move. Requests for his presence to help one worthy cause or another poured in at a rate of fifty a day, and he accepted as many as he could pack in.
“Your hospital needs a new wing? Your church a vestry? You’ve got a flock of juvenile delinquents and no gymnasium? Or a Man of the Year Award that’s not working? Your man is Bob Hope,” wrote Dwight Whitney in a
TV Guide
profile. “At times the world seems made up exclusively of ‘people I can’t disappoint.’ ”

The nonstop travel satisfied an ex-vaudevillian’s love of the road (and gave him more freedom for his extramarital dalliances), but it became a drain on his time and energy.
“It was something that obviously called out to him,” said his daughter Linda. “But many times he would leave his television shows and films sort of orphan children out there. They kind of got done, but they weren’t necessarily his main interest.” Movies had always been Hope’s top priority; he considered himself a Hollywood star first, while TV was simply what he did for a living.
By the 1960s, the movies too seemed to be getting short shrift. The scripts were getting worse, and Hope’s performances more perfunctory and distracted—a far cry from the energetic, committed comic actor of twenty or even ten years earlier.

After his well-received 1960 romantic comedy
The Facts of Life
, Hope continued to flirt with more mature romantic-comedy roles, but with much less success. In
Bachelor in Paradise
, released in November 1961, he plays an author of bestselling books about his globe-trotting bachelor lifestyle. When he is forced to return to the United States because of income tax problems, his publisher convinces him to move into a California bedroom community and write about American suburban mores. There he encounters a lot of nosy neighbors and randy housewives (and one conveniently available single, played by Lana Turner). But the comedy is mostly hackneyed sitcom stuff: washing machines overflow when they’re filled with too much detergent, dinners go up in smoke when the oven is left on too long, and neighbors are always walking in on each other without knocking at just the wrong moment. Hope delivers his wisecracks mechanically and can’t muster a real reaction to anything on-screen. Never before has he seemed so disengaged.

Following his reunion with Crosby in
The Road to Hong Kong
, Hope starred in another romantic comedy,
Critic’s Choice
, released in April 1963. Adapted from a Broadway play by Ira Levin, it casts Hope as a New York theater critic who must decide whether to review a play written by his wife (Lucille Ball in her fourth and last film with Hope). The part seems all wrong for Hope—the last person one could imagine sitting down to write a theater review—and the contortions to turn it into a Hope vehicle destroy any sliver of credibility. In a ludicrous slapstick climax, he shows up sloshed for his wife’s Broadway opening (one of Hope’s rare drunk scenes), gets shunted to the balcony because the show has already started, winds up dangling from his heels over the orchestra seats—and still manages to get back to the office in time to write a devastating pan of the play for the morning paper.

In
Call Me Bwana
, released two months later, Hope was at least more in his comfort zone. He plays a travel writer who is sent to Africa by the US government to find a moon rocket that has crashed in the
jungle. The character harks back to Hope’s lecherous cowards of old: a timid New Yorker whose bogus adventure-travel books were actually written from the safety of his apartment. “The only wild animal I wanna see is the cigarette girl at the Stork Club,” he says. “And I carry a gun when I’m with her.” But with a lumpy script, lazy direction by Gordon Douglas, and a costar, Anita Ekberg, who provides little but decoration, the safari hits a dead end pretty quickly. The self-indulgence of the whole enterprise is epitomized by a cameo appearance by Arnold Palmer, who shows up in the middle of the jungle for a game of golf with Hope. He’s there because Hope needed a golf partner during the filming.