Photography by SUNSET BOULEVARD/CORBIS SYGMA
|
Fanfare for the Common Ham
By David Dudley, May-June 2003
Laugh with him or at him, but give him his due: Bob Hope created comedy as we know it.
|
Mort Lachman learned everything he needed to know about Bob Hope the first time they met.
This was 1947, and Lachman had lucked into a $75-a-week job as a gagman on Hope's top-rated radio show. At his first meeting, Hope wanted a joke fixed and soon had a dozen writers barking lousy punch lines at him. The quiet Lachman—Hope would later nickname him "The Owl"—was mortified by the cacophony; he scribbled his line on an envelope. Hope grabbed it, crumpled the envelope, and tossed it away. "Get stationery," he muttered. "This is a network show." Then Hope turned to the room. "Hey, boys, I got an idea!" And he pitched Lachman's line.
It got a big laugh, and the writers broke into applause. Hope turned to Lachman and said under his breath, "Didn't know I was this funny, did you?"
Fifty-seven years later, The Owl can't remember that first joke. Instead, he remembers his thieving boss strutting into the room. He remembers the naked gall, the snarky aside, the deadly timing. And most of all, the unrepentant joy at getting away with it. "That smile! That confident swagger!" Lachman says. "If there's anyone who's the opposite of me, it's Bob Hope."
Lachman turned in several decades of service as Hope's head writer, director, producer, and go-to joke doctor. Today, at 85, Lachman calls Hope "the bravest man in the world.... Hope would go any-f***ing-where for a laugh."
That is as fitting a tribute as any for Leslie Townes Hope. Bob—he has said he thought the name had "more 'Hiya, fellas!' in it"—wanted laughs and wasn't particular about how he got them. He turned comedy into a high-volume industry, employing brigades of writers to crank out disposable, populist gags. Hope's appetite for adulation dovetailed nicely with mid-century America's hunger for easy laughs. But then, he had the best timing in the business.
So, as Hope turns 100 on May 29, the official end of the Bob Hope Century will be accompanied by a publicity offensive—dubbed "100 Years of Hope and Humor." This is to be the moment when Hope is forever fixed as Mr. Entertainment. It hardly seems necessary: He is already the most honored entertainer on the planet, according to Guinness World Records. He has four stars on Hollywood Boulevard, two honorary Oscars, a pair of knighthoods (from the British Empire and the Vatican), and a Congressional Medal of Honor. One might think that Bob Hope is not a man in need of a PR blitz.
But while his success was never in doubt, his comic legacy may be. Three years ago, when the American Film Institute listed the 100 greatest film comedies, there was only one Hope picture—Road to Morocco, way down at number 78. It was a telling slight. Hope might get aircraft carriers named after him, but somehow it's Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton who are enshrined in the pantheon. And this will not do for Mr. Entertainment, as Hope's family is aware. "I'm the keeper of the flame," says Linda Hope, Bob's eldest daughter. "I feel like I have to keep him out there."
It's a cool evening in Toluca Lake, the North Hollywood suburb where Hope and his wife, Dolores, have lived since 1938. Traffic hisses faintly outside the walls of his seven-acre grounds. There's a light on in Hope's bedroom suite, the window at the end of the chateau-style home. Peering up from the yard, you can see a wall of black-and-white photos—autographed shots of presidents and movie stars. Outside is a patio where Hope watches crows flock in the eucalyptus trees that border his property.
Ward Grant, Hope's PR man, walks through the rose garden and talks about the 90th birthday party here. "Oh, that was a lulu," Grant says. He sketches out the scene—the big tent out past the pool, the Old Hollywood guest list, Rosemary Clooney singing at the piano.
Grant has been the family publicist since 1972, and lately his task has been an odd one. Hope is now too frail to receive journalists, so Grant sells Hope to a public that has known his name forever. Grant sprinkles Hope's one-liners through the press releases that accompany every honor. Grant fields the calls when someone mistakenly reports Hope's demise. And Grant makes the case that the funniest Bob Hope was the one we'll likely never see again, the one working a live audience. "He would take that audience in his arms," Grant says. "They were crying in the aisles."
In between the specials Hope mounted for NBC during the '60s, '70s, and '80s, he maintained a punishing performing schedule, playing benefits, college shows, and civic auditoriums across the nation. This, improbably, was where Hope would do his best material. He made Grant prevent any taping, because he wanted to keep the jokes fresh. "I'd throw myself in front of the cameras," Grant remembers. It kills him now, because this stuff was pure gold, and now it's gone.
Back in the 1930s, Hope was dubbed "Rapid Robert" for his frenetic delivery and the unprecedented number of gags he could weave into a few minutes of monologue. His comedy was a miracle of craftsmanship over content; what revolutionized modern American humor weren't the jokes themselves but the bravura technique. Los Angeles comedy historian Ben Schwartz credits Hope with the very formula of modern standup comedy. "He shifted it from being theatrical to being personal," Schwartz says. "That's the real breakthrough—he could just be himself." Hope buried the baggy pants of vaudeville and inhabited a character who was peculiarly normal—he had what Time called, in 1943, "strenuous averageness." And Hope mined his laughs from real life: the local headlines, the weather, the President's golf game. The topical monologue style he perfected became the foundation of every late-night talk show and most standup routines, and the "quaking braggart" persona he inhabited was a profound influence on such acolytes as Woody Allen. ("There are certain moments when I think he is the best thing I have ever seen," Allen once said. "It's everything I can do at times not to do him.") Variations on Hope's persona are sitcom staples, thanks to practitioners such as Frasier's Kelsey Grammer. "I see Bob Hope in him all the time," says Bill Faith, Hope's PR man during the 1960s.
Hope was at various points number one in radio, film, and television, and his name appeared on best-selling books and a regular column, all cross-promoting Hope as the gold standard in American entertainment. "I'm also working on a plan where, when you close your eyes, I appear on the inside of your eyelids," Hope prophesied in 1954.
But, perhaps because of the breadth of his appeal—and the aggressive hucksterism that drove it—Hope never enjoyed the professional respect that some of his heirs do now. He never, for example, won an Oscar as a performer. Hope made no intellectual demands and sounded no existential truths. And unlike next-generation comics such as Lenny Bruce, Hope's humor revealed nothing of the joke teller except for the efficiency of his technique. "He's like a great Swiss watch—all the genius is on the inside," Schwartz says. "The outside just tells you what time it is."
Part of the problem may have been Hope's breezy command of his craft; like Cary Grant (who, Hope liked to point out, also never won an Oscar), he made it look too easy. This, apparently, was no act. Accounts of the off-duty Hope portray a preternatural positivity. "If he didn't want to talk to you, he whistled," remembers Faith. "Time after time I marveled at the inability of this man to accept the negative."
Hope's offstage enthusiasms were almost cartoonishly middle-American. He loved dogs and golf and watching football. And, like any good striver, the immigrant kid from England who grew up poor in Cleveland liked making money, too. Hope once was estimated to be worth $500 million—a figure that he took pains to deny. ("If I had $500 million, I wouldn't go to Vietnam—I'd send for it.") The reputation for stinginess is only partially deserved, friends say. Hope gave millions to charity but was a lousy tipper. "He doesn't know he's rich," Mort Lachman insists.
Reporters searched, mostly in vain, for turbulence beneath the placid surface, the dark place where Hope stashed the horrors he had seen in the frontline burn wards, or the memories of poverty and his father's alcoholism, or the guilt over those long absences and the affairs that were an open secret in Hollywood. But Hope leaves few clues with which to sound his depths. "It just ain't there," says Linda Hope with a shrug. "I never saw 'the secret darkness.' "
Back in 1943, when Hope returned from that first marathon of GI camp shows overseas, Time put him on its cover, and Hope discovered that he had become a hero, a symbol of American resolve. That wasn't the original idea: His one-man campaign to entertain the troops was initially less about patriotism than it was about milking a captive audience and his own honest hunger for easy laughs, as Hope himself admits in his memoir Don't Shoot, It's Only Me. "The civilian audience was tough and unreasonable," he complained. "They wouldn't laugh at the jokes unless they were funny."
Those troops embraced Hope because in a war-maddened world he seemed so blithely, obliviously familiar. Toting that golf club as if he'd just dropped in on his way to the Lakeside links near his house, Hope offered a glimpse of an American normalcy that was, somewhere, still alive.
In his living room, Lachman keeps a present that Hope recently sent him. It's a talking figurine, about 18 inches tall, depicting Hope in full soldier-in-greasepaint regalia—Hawaiian shirt, pith helmet, smirk, putter in hand. Press a button, and the doll launches into one of Hope's routines. It's a tape from a wartime broadcast. The gale of GI laughter distorts into a single, thunderous roar. Lachman smiles indulgently.
Like just about every other veteran, he has his Bob Hope memory, one from years before he knew the man. When Lachman was in the Army, he'd been based in Cold Bay, Alaska, and he remembers listening to Hope's annual Christmas broadcast, alone in the operations hut in that black northern night. "I just sobbed," he says. And then he puts the doll away, because if he keeps pressing that button, he'll start crying all over again.
David Dudley wrote about ElderCool for AARP Modern Maturity last year.
Now, laugh again at some of Bob Hope's classic jokes with our interactive Virtual Bob Hope application (Flash).
|
