Hope: Entertainer of the Century (57 page)

National Unity Week—cast as a nonpartisan event, but clearly orchestrated by the White House—was overshadowed by the November 15 peace march, which drew 250,000 people, the largest crowd ever to march in the nation’s capital. But Hope’s involvement in the White House–backed effort to blunt the protest seemed to be a tipping point. The comedian who wanted to be loved by everyone was now a symbol of a war many people hated.

Suddenly, Hope found himself a target of protests.
“Where There’s Death, There’s Hope,” read a leaflet handed out to students arriving for a Hope appearance at the University of Michigan. At the University
of Washington in Seattle, seven hundred protesters staged a peace vigil outside the auditorium where Hope was appearing.
“Hell, I’m for peace, but not at all costs,” Hope told a reporter afterward. “Why don’t they march against the North Vietnamese?” Some colleges canceled Hope appearances, for fear of the protests he might spark.

Like his friend Agnew, Hope blamed the press for overplaying the antiwar protests.
“It’s those small minorities on campus that make the headlines,” he said in response to a student reporter’s question at Clemson University. “The news media are guilty of blowing this kind of disturbance way out of proportion.” At a press conference for National Unity Week, he even lashed out at his own network, claiming that an NBC News report on unequal treatment of black soldiers in Vietnam used
“rigged clips” and was “not honest.” (NBC News president Reuven Frank sprang to the show’s defense:
“I have no doubt that Hope spoke his criticism of our Vietnam coverage sincerely. But his comments are wrong.”)

Family and health concerns distracted Hope for much of 1969. The hemorrhaging in his left eye returned, and he was hospitalized twice for treatment, in January and May. Then in June, while he was accepting an honorary degree at Bowling Green University in Ohio, he got word that his oldest brother, Ivor, seventy-seven, had died suddenly of a heart attack in Cleveland. Only a few days after the funeral, his youngest brother, George (still employed by Bob as a “production coordinator” on his specials), died of lung cancer, at age sixty. Shaken by the loss of two siblings in just a week, Hope cut short a four-day engagement at the Pikes Peak Festival in Colorado Springs, returned to Palm Springs, and took most of the next month off.

In August the Hopes celebrated a happier family occasion, the wedding of their youngest daughter, Nora, to Sam McCullagh, an assistant dean of admissions at the University of San Francisco. Nora, who was a favorite of her father’s but whose relations with her mother were strained, had graduated from San Francisco College for Women and worked for a time in New York City, before returning to San Francisco to marry McCullagh, whom she had dated in college. Their wedding reception in the Hopes’ backyard was a more modest affair than
the extravagant party for Linda seven months earlier. Still, Bob did his usual stand-up routine, Dolores sang “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” and the 250 guests included such notables as Stuart Symington and Phyllis Diller.

Hope’s 1969 Christmas tour was a departure in two ways. For the first time, it was a round-the-world trip, with stops in Berlin, Italy, and Turkey before the usual series of shows in Thailand and Vietnam. And for the first time, Hope and his troupe (which included perky pop singer Connie Stevens, Teresa Graves of
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
, and the Golddiggers, the singing-dancing troupe from the
Dean Martin Show
) got an official presidential send-off, with a formal dinner and performance at the White House—a sign that President Nixon was actively embracing the Hope tours as part of his campaign to rally Americans behind his war policies.

At the dinner in the Blue Room, Stevens sat next to Nixon at one end of the table, while Hope sat at the other end beside the first lady (who asked Hope for his autograph).
One of the Golddiggers caused a minor disturbance when she unfurled a napkin with a
STOP THE WAR
slogan on it. Undeterred,
Hope and his entertainers did a run-through of the show for the Nixons and a VIP crowd in the East Room. Hope got laughs with jokes about administration figures such as Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Attorney General John Mitchell. “She’s the one who makes Agnew look like Calvin Coolidge,” Hope quipped. The next afternoon the troupe took off from Andrews Air Force Base, with Secretary of State William Rogers, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, and General Westmoreland on hand to wish them bon voyage. Hope, who woke up late and was complaining about his eye again, was so late getting there that Rogers had left.

At their first stop in Germany, Hope was joined onstage by sexy Austrian actress Romy Schneider—and in the audience by Dolores and their son Kelly, now in the Navy, who came over to meet him. Hope did a show aboard the aircraft carrier
Saratoga
in the Mediterranean, and another at Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey, where the
WELCOME BOB HOPE
banner was the same one they had used when Hope was there in 1963—the 3 changed to a 9. Then it was on to Thailand
and Vietnam, where Hope returned to familiar spots such as Long Binh, Lai Khe, and Da Nang, but ventured farther north than ever before, to Camp Eagle near Hue, just seventy-five miles from the DMZ.

The real star of the 1969 tour was Neil Armstrong, the astronaut who had just walked on the moon. (NASA opposed sending any of the Apollo astronauts to Vietnam with Hope, but
President Nixon insisted on it—and threatened to fire any NASA employee who objected.) Armstrong was a big hit with the troops, bantering onstage with Hope and answering questions from the crowd, a few of them pointed. “I want to know why the US is so interested in the moon and not the conflict here in Vietnam,” asked one serviceman. Armstrong replied evenly that the American system “works on many levels” to promote peace, and that “one of the advantages of the space activity is that it has promoted international understanding and enabled cooperative efforts between countries.”

In his closing remarks on the NBC special showcasing the tour, Hope once again made a plea for support of the war, trying to shift the focus from politics to the men doing the fighting: “One of the things that never changes is the unbelievably good spirit of our fighting men. Yes, in all this sorry business, it’s the guys who are making these sacrifices who complain the least.” Over shots of US soldiers with Vietnamese orphans, he continued, “The number of them who devote their free time, energy, and money to aiding Vietnamese families would surprise you. And don’t let that image get tarnished by the occasional combat-disturbed casualty who may freak out and create the horrible headline”—a reference to the My Lai massacre of South Vietnamese civilians, which had recently come to light. “These are the men who lay their lives on the line every day. And in return they ask for one thing: time to do a job. For us to be patient, to believe in them, so they can bring us an honorable peace.”

The 1969 tour, however, was most notorious for an incident that called into question just how in touch Hope really was with the troops he claimed to speak for. At his first show in Vietnam, before ten thousand men of the First Infantry at Lai Khe—so near the fighting, said Hope, “we had to give the Vietcong half the tickets”—Hope told the
troops he had just been at the White House and assured them President Nixon had “a plan to end the war.” He was greeted with boos.

The extent of the booing was disputed. The first reports called it a “barrage of boos.” Hope, along with his publicist and later biographer Bill Faith, who accompanied him on the tour,
described it as only a “smattering.” Richard Boyle, a war correspondent for
Overseas Weekly
, recounted a more threatening scene in an interview with
Rolling Stone
a few years later (though he recalled it as taking place at Long Binh, not Lai Khe):
“After about fifteen minutes of Hope’s show, he was being drowned out by the boos. When the TV cameras panned the crowd, the GIs were standing up and giving the finger and making power salutes. Then the troops started throwing things and tried to rush the stage. They brought out about fifty-four MPs to guard the stage, and it was getting very menacing . . . pretty close to a riot. Hope, who was visibly shaken, had to stop the show and leave.”

Connie Stevens, who was there, confirmed that the booing was loud enough to drive Hope from the stage—and that he turned to her in distress.
“I happened to be walking by the stage,” she said. “And he said, ‘Connie, come here,’ and he threw me out there.” She wrestled with the unruly crowd for a few minutes and only managed to settle them down when she began singing “Silent Night.” Yet the boos, she claimed, were a reaction not to Hope, but to his invocation of Nixon and his supposed plan for ending the war: “They weren’t booing Bob. They were booing the idea that there was any help coming. The war had gone on too long. They were frustrated at what he was saying. They didn’t want to hear it.” Yet the outburst clearly took Hope by surprise. “It threw Bob, because I don’t think he had ever experienced anything like that,” said Stevens. “And I think that was a rude awakening for him.”

Stevens, whose younger brother was serving in Vietnam, never spoke with Hope about the incident afterward. But she was already having her own doubts about the war. She was disturbed at a scene of jubilation she witnessed at one camp when some captured Vietcong soldiers were brought in. When she went to see the commotion, she found a couple of frightened kids of fourteen or fifteen being held up
as trophies.
“They were severely wounded and they were shaking and they were babies,” she recalled. “I said, ‘You guys, stop this, turn the cameras off.’ I just didn’t like it. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, is this what this war is about?’ I couldn’t go along with that.” Like Jill St. John after Hope’s 1964 tour, she tried voicing her opinions at a press conference. “I was asked not to attend any more press conferences, right then and there.”

When the booing incident was reported, Hope was infuriated.
“A few kids, about five, went ‘Boo!,’ which they will do, you know?” he said. “If you say, ‘Second Lieutenant,’ they go ‘Boo!’ ” Yet in an account of the episode in his 1974 memoir
The Last Christmas Show
, Hope conceded that he had problems with the crowd that day at Lai Khe, calling it
“the coldest, most unresponsive audience my show had ever played to.” He found out later that many of the soldiers “were in a state of shock” because they had come to the show directly after a fierce morning of fighting that had resulted in many casualties. “It had been a wipeout day for a lot of them,” he said. “They had lost a lot of friends, and they had been rushed in from a firefight to catch my show. After a morning like that, who could expect them to be in a mood for laughing it up at my jokes?”

Whether overblown or not, the booing incident exposed an undercurrent of frustration among at least a portion of the servicemen Hope entertained. Some of their gripes were trivial: complaints about being shunted to the back rows, for example, so that injured soldiers could be placed up front for the cameras. Some charged that entire units were ordered to attend Hope’s shows, whether they wanted to or not, to ensure huge crowds for TV. Most of the soldiers looked forward to Hope’s appearances; they appreciated the gags, the girls, and the break from their grinding routine. Others were more cynical.
“Our response to him came out of fear and loneliness—convicts in a prison would have done the same thing,” said Ron Kovic, the author of
Born on the Fourth of July
, who served two tours of duty in Vietnam before suffering injuries that left him a paraplegic. “I remember not wanting to go to the show, and the men who did go came back very cynical. People
didn’t laugh at his jokes; the war wasn’t funny anymore, and a hundred Bob Hopes wouldn’t have made any difference.”

Some even questioned Hope’s patriotic motives. As far back as the 1950s there were suggestions that Hope’s military tours were big moneymakers for him. To be sure, the TV shows were produced and owned by Hope’s company, a profit-making enterprise. But Hope always insisted that his Vietnam shows actually lost money. Although the military picked up the costs of travel and accommodations, Hope Enterprises still paid the sizable talent and production costs, which were much higher than for a typical studio show. According to figures supplied by Hope Enterprises to NBC in 1971, Hope’s company made a profit of $165,000 on its five one-hour variety specials for the 1970–71 season. His one ninety-minute Christmas special from Vietnam, however,
showed a loss of $274,000. Hope, of course, earned his own fee for these shows (around $200,000 per show during the Vietnam years), and the trips had incalculable public-relations value for him. Yet Bob Hope had easier ways to make money than by spending two grueling weeks a year traveling through military camps in a war zone.

What’s more, while the shows clearly served Hope’s purposes, they also were serving the needs of a huge audience back home. For supporters of the war, Hope’s specials were a patriotic booster shot; for opponents, a reminder of the vast waste of men and resources wrought by the war; for everyone, a communal wallow in the quagmire that was tearing the nation apart. The ninety-minute NBC special edited from his 1969 Christmas tour, which aired on January 15, 1970, drew an almost inconceivable 46.6 rating—meaning that 46.6 percent of all TV homes in the country were tuned in to Hope on that Thursday night. It was the largest audience for any entertainment show in television history.

•  •  •

A peculiar irony of the Vietnam years was that, even as Hope became an increasingly partisan and controversial figure, his TV popularity was never greater. Chrysler ended his weekly dramatic anthology series in 1967 after four seasons, but the company remained the sponsor
of his comedy specials, which continued to draw spectacular ratings. Maybe it was the “silent majority” speaking, or simply the escape that Hope’s shows provided from the stressful, politically explosive times. During the 1966–67 season Hope’s specials averaged an impressive 29.3 Nielsen rating—higher than TV’s top-rated weekly series,
Bonanza.
For the 1969–70 season, his average rating soared to a phenomenal 32.3—the highest of Hope’s career.