Hope: Entertainer of the Century (58 page)

It didn’t seem to matter that the shows were growing more rote and predictable, with their old-fashioned variety format, hokey sketches, and cue-carded patter between Hope and his guests. The monologues were still topical, and occasionally funny, but there were an awful lot of potted jokes about Jackie Gleason’s weight and Dean Martin’s drinking and Zsa Zsa’s husbands. Hope’s musical guests would sometimes include a Smokey Robinson or Ray Charles, but mostly he stuck with middle-of-the-roaders such as Tom Jones, Eydie Gormé, and Andy Williams. He did one show paying tribute to old-time vaudeville, with guests George Burns and Lucille Ball; in another he reprised his original stage role in
Roberta
, in a live performance taped at the Bob Hope Theater at SMU. (With Hope playing the same role that he had originated thirty-five years earlier, it was a stodgy relic—and Hope’s lowest-rated show of the season.) Sometimes the comedy material was literally recycled: in one February 1971 sketch, Hope played a man being roped into marriage by his fiancée, with Petula Clark taking the role that Rosemary Clooney had played in the virtually identical sketch back in 1954.

His jokes about the counterculture were sounding increasingly smug and out of touch. “Hey, did you read about that rock festival in upstate New York that was attended by four hundred thousand hippies?” he said in his 1969 season opener, a month after Woodstock. “It was held in a cow pasture. I can’t think of a better place for it. Four hundred thousand hippies. Since the dawn of man that’s the most dandruff that was ever in one place.” He poked fun at the feminist movement in an October 1970 special, imagining what would happen if women took over the country. It was not a pretty sight. Hope meets a new female network chief, played by Nanette Fabray, who dusts the
furniture during their meeting, and the Indianapolis 500 is canceled because “all thirty-nine women drivers crashed into the pace car.” The show prompted an onslaught of angry mail. “I am not part of ‘women’s lib,’ ” said one letter writer, “but I have never felt so insulted nor so infuriated.”

The critics were getting snippier too. A review in the
Hollywood Reporter
called his March 1970 special
“one of those curiously lackadaisical Hope efforts of late, in which he seems to be living a cruel fantasy that he’s Dean Martin.” Another
Reporter
critic, reviewing Hope’s special the following month, said it looked as if
“everyone has hurriedly gotten together to do the show between holes at Lakeside.” Jimmy Saphier, Hope’s agent, sent both reviews over to the boss, with a note:
“They are so prejudiced and vicious and unfair that there may be something more here than meets the eye. I don’t know Tichi Wilkerson Miles [the
Reporter
’s editor], but if you know somebody who knows her well, she should be spoken to.” No telling if she was, but she did get some letters in Hope’s defense.
“This kind of bitchy, ill-tempered effluvium hardly qualifies as a review,” one reader wrote of another
Reporter
attack on Hope’s poor material. “Anyone who knows anything at all about Mr. Hope’s career knows that his writers have helped make him one of the wealthiest men in all of show business.” The author, using a pseudonym, was Charlie Lee, one of Hope’s writers.

His movies were no better: increasingly tired farces, with Hope looking more disengaged than ever, and doing little business at the box office. In the vapid, sitcom-like
Eight on the Lam
, released in 1967, he plays a single father running from the law with his seven kids and housekeeper Phyllis Diller. In 1968’s
The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell
, he’s an army sergeant trying to get beer and girls for his men on a South Pacific island during World War II—a dated service comedy that was Frank Tashlin’s last film. Hope’s 1969 film
How to Commit Marriage
at least tried to look a little more with it. Hope and Jane Wyman play a middle-aged couple who decide to divorce, but hold off so as not to set a bad example for their newly engaged daughter. The twist is that the daughter’s fiancé is a straitlaced classical pianist who is rebelling against his father, a pot-smoking, free-love-spouting
rock-music producer, played by Jackie Gleason. The film’s satire of the peace-and-love generation was hackneyed even then (a new-age guru touting “peace through protein”; rock groups with funny names like the Five Commandments and the Post-Nasal Drips), but the movie did marginally better at the box office, and Gleason’s energy at least forced Hope to pay more attention.

During the summer of 1970, Hope again found himself in the center of the Vietnam fray. Following another wave of campus protests in response to the US invasion of Cambodia in May—and the killing of four students at Kent State University by members of the Ohio National Guard—backers of President Nixon organized a daylong series of patriotic events across the country on July 4, dubbed Honor America Day. Though billed as a nonpartisan celebration of America, the event was another effort to blunt the antiwar protests, orchestrated behind the scenes by the White House.

Hope agreed to cochair the event along with the Reverend Billy Graham, and to host an entertainment gala on the Capitol Mall in the evening.
“This is one day we’re not trying to sell any political message,” Hope insisted at a press conference. But opponents such as radical activist Rennie Davis charged that the event was
“designed to show a phony national consensus for Richard Nixon’s foreign and domestic policies.” In response the organizers recruited some prominent Democrats to endorse the event, among them Senators George McGovern and Edmund Muskie. But Honor America Day became another lightning rod for antiadministration protests.

The festivities began on the morning of July 4 with an interfaith religious service and an address by Graham on the Capitol Mall.
Demonstrators trying to disrupt the event started early as well, with a band of a thousand Yippies staging a “pot smoke-in” and bathing nude in the Reflecting Pool. When Kate Smith began to sing “God Bless America,” antiwar chants nearly drowned her out. Protesters and police clashed throughout the day, with at least thirty-four people arrested and twenty policemen injured. When
Hope was driven to the site in the afternoon, for a run-through of the evening’s show with
bandleader Les Brown, a group of hippies stood by hollering at him. Hope invited them to the show.

Some 350,000 people, mostly families with no interest in demonstrating on one side or the other, crowded onto the Mall in the evening for Hope’s show. “What a gathering,” Hope said when he came onstage. “Nixon took one look at the crowd and said, ‘My God, what has Agnew done now?’ ” The entertainers on the bill were mostly old-timers, known conservatives, or people who owed Hope favors—among them Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Dinah Shore, Glen Campbell, Pat Boone, and Connie Stevens. Hope was distracted by sporadic disturbances throughout the show.
When it was over, demonstrators broke through a police cordon and pounded on the trunk of the Chrysler limousine that was driving him back to safety. Hope was the emcee for what was looking more and more like a national nervous breakdown.

Even once-friendly venues were becoming trouble spots for Hope. The Oscar ceremony in April 1970 was a microcosm of the nation’s cultural divide: new-generation films such as
Easy Rider
and the X-rated
Midnight Cowboy
were competing for awards, while John Wayne, nominated for
True Grit
, was greeted at the theater by a picket sign reading
JOHN WAYNE IS A RACIST.
“This is not an Academy Awards, ladies and gentlemen; it’s a freak-out,” said Hope, one of sixteen “friends of Oscar” who shared hosting duties that year. A
Time
magazine reporter watched the ceremony at an Oscar party at the home of producer Don Mitchell and writer Gwen Davis, attended by a gaggle of Hollywood insiders. The mostly liberal crowd booed when Wayne won for Best Actor. And when Hope closed the show with a plea for the nation to come together (“Perhaps a time will come when all the fighting will be for a place in line outside the theater”),
Shirley MacLaine yelled at the TV screen, “Oh, shut up, Bob Hope.”

In the ultimate insult, even Hope’s cherished bond with the troops was called into question. Kenneth D. Smith, chief of the Special Services agency for the entertainment of troops in Europe, complained to reporters in Ohio that not enough young entertainers were willing to go to Vietnam, and that
old-timers such as Bob Hope were
“unacceptable” to the younger generation of soldiers. The comments caused an uproar in the Hope camp and prompted some fast damage control. The Pentagon issued a disclaimer, Smith said he had been misquoted, and a USO spokesman wrote a letter to
Variety
asserting that Hope was still “socko” with the troops.
“I have seen Bob Hope operate in three wars,” wrote Colonel Edward M. Kirby, “and if there is anyone in show business who is persona grata it is Bob Hope, the nearest thing to a court jester of class and distinction.”

The press, meanwhile, was taking a more skeptical look at the nation’s court jester. In a
New York Times Sunday Magazine
profile, journalist J. Anthony Lukas suggested that some of Hope’s own writers were uneasy with his political activities and felt he was growing out of touch with the servicemen in Vietnam.
“He just doesn’t understand how the GI of today feels,” said one unnamed Hope writer. “When he sees a V sign in his audience he thinks two guys want to go to the bathroom.” Hope was furious at the Lukas article.
He talked to his attorney Martin Gang about a libel suit and demanded that his New York publicist, Allan Kalmus, supply a list of all the people Lukas had talked to. Nothing came of it.

The bad press made Hope more defensive and intemperate. In an interview with the
Washington Post
, Hope called campus violence “a ridiculous thing” and said he was speaking out because he felt the United States was being undermined by left-wing dissenters and the press.
“I just hated to get involved in politics,” he said. “I stayed away from it until this past year, when I figured that it had to be pretty important. I got a very negative feeling that the country was getting very little support from the news media.” In an interview with London’s
Guardian
newspaper, he insisted,
“It’s not American students who are blowing up buildings or shooting people. It’s the Communists who are doing it.”

He spent a week in London in November 1970, but got only a brief respite from the political fire. He hosted two benefits for the royal family, including a cabaret show for the World Wildlife Fund that attracted a galaxy of European royalty. (“I’m the only one here who doesn’t have his own army,” quipped
Hope.) He was the guest of honor
for a segment of the British
This Is Your Life
, with all four Hope children and other relatives and old friends flown in to pay tribute. (Hope, inevitably, learned of the show in advance and faked his “surprise” reaction.) He capped off his busy week by emceeing the Miss World pageant, an event that usually produced a glamorous guest for his Christmas tour. This year, however, it produced only chaos.

Shortly after Hope took the stage at the Royal Albert Hall,
he was interrupted by a handful of women’s liberation activists, who set off noisemakers and smoke bombs, threw tomatoes across the auditorium, and unfurled signs attacking the beauty contest for “selling women’s bodies.” Hope, who had braved Vietcong rocket fire in Vietnam, was forced to flee the stage under the feminist barrage. When order was finally restored, he returned and wisecracked, “I’ll say this, it’s good conditioning for Vietnam.”

Talking to reporters afterward, he called the fracas
“the worst theatrical experience of my life.” As for the feminists’ complaints about beauty contests, he was dismissive:
“You’ll notice about the women in the liberation movements, none of them are pretty, because pretty women don’t have those problems. I don’t get it.” He clearly didn’t.

A month later he was headed back to Vietnam, for the seventh straight year. Once again, it was a round-the-world jaunt, including stops in Germany and the Mediterranean. With most big stars staying away, his relatively low-wattage cast included dancer Lola Falana, singer Gloria Loring, and Cincinnati Reds catcher Johnny Bench. In response to news reports of widespread marijuana use among soldiers in Vietnam, Hope was big on pot jokes that year. “I hear you go in for gardening,” he said at one show. “The commanding officer says you all grow your own grass.” Bantering with Johnny Bench, Hope cracked, “Where but in baseball can you spend eight months on grass and not get busted?”

‘
“I didn’t talk to the military brass about doing it,” Hope told AP reporter Bob Thomas, who asked about the pot jokes. “I just went ahead. I think it’s better to get this thing out in the open. Then it can be treated as the problem it is.” NBC didn’t agree: the network ordered the marijuana references edited out of the special, a rare instance of
censorship of Hope’s Vietnam shows. This time the press jumped to Hope’s defense.
“Hope is not only an entertainer and his trip not just a show in the usual sense,” said Jack Gould in the
New York Times
. “He also doubles as a reporter, a journalist in greasepaint, and the public would seem entitled to share in what he found out.”

Hope, the journalist in greasepaint, was typically upbeat in his report to the nation on his January 14, 1971, special. Again he used scenes of orphaned Vietnamese children—youngsters who “will have to rebuild and live in the Vietnam of tomorrow”—to make his case for uniting behind the war and pursuing it to an honorable conclusion, an echo of President Nixon’s refrain of “peace with honor.” “Everyone agrees that this most unpopular of wars has lasted too long,” Hope said. “But now for the first time we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

At least one home viewer gave the show a rave.
“I thought your closing remarks on the recent NBC broadcast of the highlights of your Christmas tour were sensational,” President Nixon wrote Hope. “Your eloquent call for unity was deeply moving, and I wanted to add the Nixons’ congratulations to the many others you must be receiving.” Other viewers, however, were starting to feel some battle fatigue.
“The growing unpopularity of the war in Vietnam seems to have stolen some of the bloom off the rose insofar as Bob Hope’s annual Christmas season trek to entertain the troops is concerned,” wrote
Variety
. “The electric excitement of past treks did not come over the tube this time.” Still, the show drew another huge rating—44.3 percent of the nation’s TV homes, just a shade behind the previous year’s all-time high.