This American icon, born Leslie Townes Hope, came from Eltham, a suburb of London; his father was a Welsh stonemason, a maker of architectural decorations. When this Victorian trade fell out of favor, the elder Hope took to drink; in 1908 the family immigrated to America and ended up in Cleveland. Hope delivered newspapers, worked as a caddie, in a butcher shop and a stockroom, sold shoes and boxed briefly before removing his ski-jump nose from danger in the ring. He took dancing lessons, dropped out of high school and entered provincial vaudeville. Eventually he landed in New York, where his big break came in Jerome Kern’s musical “Roberta.”
Hope embodied the growth of American show business, moving from vaudeville to Broadway to radio to movies to television. He helped enrich the golden age of radio comedy, when worlds were transmitted through the voices of Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Ed Wynn, Ed-gar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Fibber McGee and Molly. He broke through to stardom in 1938 on his Pepsodent-sponsored show, with that machine-gun monologue: a barrage of showbiz gags and topical jokes, the innocuous antecedent to the edgier, more knowing styles of Leno and Letterman.
This success led to his first feature movie, “The Big Broadcast of 1938,” in which he sang the legendary duet with Shirley Ross on “Thanks for the Memory,” which became his signature song. In the seven “Road” movies with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, Hope fashioned his classic persona: the cutesy coward, the bumbling braggart, the schnook who loses the girl to the debonair Crosby. In all, Hope made more than 50 films; then, in 1947, he gingerly entered the new medium of television and conquered that, too, staying with NBC for an amazing five decades.
But it was his worldwide shows for the U.S. armed forces that made Hope a kind of permanent chief executive by acclamation. In World War II, the wars in Korea and Vietnam–even Desert Storm–and in the times of peace in between, Hope traveled millions of miles, sometimes risking his life, to present shows before huge audiences of military personnel, who laughed at his gibes at officers and cheered the glamour girls and sports heroes he brought with him.
Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton befriended, honored and golfed with him. The only hitch in this apotheosis came when the antiwar counterculture turned against his hawkish conservatism during the Vietnam War. Attending a Notre Dame football game in 1970, Hope, who had reportedly called the war “a beautiful thing,” was booed lustily when he went onto the field at halftime. Shocked and chagrined, he tried to close the generation gap in subsequent appearances in South Vietnam. For the first time, drugs appeared in his routines; he drew cheers when he suggested to the GIs that instead of taking pot away from them, the Army “should give it to the negotiators in Paris.” In 1971 he got the government to arrange a meeting for him with North Vietnamese officials. Hope offered $10 million for the release of all POWs, and proposed to sponsor a relief fund for Vietnamese children. Critics called this grandstanding, but it got him back on the Gallup poll’s list of the “10 most admired men.”
The kid who had come to America in steerage had become the most popular star in his adopted country. He had gotten rich from show business and investments in oil and real estate. He was a legendary penny pincher–and legendary, too, for his massive philanthropies. He hobnobbed with kings and cardinals. It sometimes seemed as if he’d ambled through the entire 20th century with a golf club in his hand, a sheaf of written-to-order wisecracks in his pocket and that so-false-it-was-true grin on his face. The accounts of his several hospitalizations, late in his long life, always had Bob Hope sitting up in bed and joking with his doctors. Even those of us conditioned to be cynical about anything we were told by spokespersons and publicists always believed every word.
