Today's selection -- from
Hope by Richard Zoglin. Bob Hope was the most popular entertainer
of the twentieth century, the only one who achieved the highest level of success
in every major genre of mass entertainment: vaudeville, Broadway, movies, radio,
television, popular song, and live concerts. His undoing began with his
active support of the Vietnam war:
"By the time he died -- on
July 27, 2003, two months after his hundredth birthday --Hope's reputation was
already fading, tarnished, or being actively disparaged. He had, unfortunately,
stuck around too long. ...
"Hope never recovered from the Vietnam years,
when his hawkish defense of the war, close ties to President Nixon (who actively
courted Hope's help in selling his Vietnam policies to the American people), and
the country-club smugness of his gibes about antiwar protesters and long-haired
hippies, all made him a political pariah for the peace-and-love generation. His
tours to entertain US troops during World War II had made him a national hero.
By the turbulent 1960s, he was a court-approved jester, the Establishment's
comedian -- hardly a badge of honor in an era when hipper, more subversive
comics, from Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce to George Carlin and Richard Pryor, were
showing that stand-up comedy could be a vehicle for personal expression, social
criticism, and political protest. Even before Hope became a doddering relic, he
had become an anachronism.
|
|
| Bob Hope entertains the troops in 1971
at Cu Chi, in Vietnam |
"Yet the scope of Hope's
achievement, viewed from the distance of a few years, is almost unimaginable. By
nearly any measure, he was the most popular entertainer of the twentieth
century, the only one who achieved success -- often No. 1 -- rated success -- in
every major genre of mass entertainment in the modern era: vaudeville, Broadway,
movies, radio, television, popular song, and live concerts. He virtually
invented stand-up comedy in the form we know it today. ... A tireless stage
performer who traveled the country and the world for more than half a century
doing live shows for audiences in the thousands, he may well have been seen in
person by more people than any other human being in history. ...
"He
began in vaudeville, first as a song-and-dance man and then as an emcee and
comedian, working his way up from the amateur shows of his Cleveland hometown to
headlining at New York's legendary Palace Theatre. He segued to Broadway, where
he costarred in some of the era's classic musicals, appeared with legends such
as Fanny Brice and Ethel Merman, and introduced standards by great American
composers such as Jerome Kern and Cole Porter. Hope became a national star on
radio, hosting a weekly comedy show on NBC that was America's No. 1 -- rated
radio program for much of the early 1940s and remained in the top five for more
than a decade.
"He came relatively late to Hollywood, making his
feature-film debut, at age thirty-four, in The Big Broadcast of 1938,
where he sang 'Thanks for the Memory' -- which became his universally
identifiable, infinitely adaptable theme song and the first of many pop
standards that, almost as a sideline, he introduced in movies. With an almost
nonstop string of box-office hits such as The Cat and the Canary,
Caught in the Draft, Monsieur Beaucaire, The
Paleface, and the popular Road pictures with Bing Crosby, Hope
ranked among Hollywood's top ten box-office stars for a decade, reaching the
No.1 spot in 1949. ... 'I grew up loving him, emulating him, and borrowing from
him,' said Woody Allen, one of the few comics to acknowledge how much he was
influenced by Hope -- though nearly everyone was. ...
"When television came in, Hope
was there too. Others, suchas Milton Berle, preceded him. But after starring in
his first NBC special on Easter Sunday in 1950, Hope began an unparalleled reign
as NBC's most popular comedy star that lasted for nearly four decades. ... That
would have been enough for most performers, but not Hope. Along with his radio,
TV, and movie work, he traveled for personal appearances at a pace matched by no
other major star.
"On a podium, no one could
touch him. He was host or cohost of the Academy Awards ceremony a record
nineteen times -- the first in 1940, when Gone With the Wind was the
big winner, and the last in 1978, when Star Wars and Annie
Hall were the hot films. His suave unflappability -- no one ever looked
better in a tuxedo -- and tart insider wisecracks ('This is the night when war
and politics are forgotten, and we find out who we really hate') helped turn a
relatively low-key industry dinner into the most obsessively tracked and
massively watched event of the Hollywood year.
"The modern stand-up
comedy monologue was essentially his creation. There were comedians in
vaudeville before Hope, but they mostly worked in pairs or did prepackaged,
jokebook gags that played on ethnic stereotypes and other familiar comedy
tropes. Hope, working as an emcee and ad-libbing jokes about the acts he
introduced, developed a more freewheeling and spontaneous monologue style,
wh
ich he later honed and
perfected in radio. To keep his material fresh, he hired a team of writers and
told them to come up with jokes about the news of the day -- presidential
politics, Hollywood gossip, California weather, as well as his own life, work,
travels, golf game, and show-business friends.
"This was something
of a revolution. When Hope made his debut on NBC in 1938, the popular comedians
on radio all inhabited self-contained worlds, playing largely invented comic
characters: Jack Benny's effete tightwad, Edgar Bergen and his uppity dummy,
Charlie McCarthy, the daffy-wife/exasperated-husband interplay of George Burns
and Gracie Allen. Hope's monologues brought something new to radio: a connection
between the comedian and the outside world. ... His monologues became the
template for Johnny Carson and nearly every late-night TV host who followed him,
and the foundation stone for all stand-up comics, even those who rebelled
against him."
Hope: Entertainer of the
Century
Author: Richard Zoglin
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Copyright 2014 by Richard Zoglin
Pages 3-7
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