Bob Hope springs eternal

In a business in which age was mostly a guarded secret, Bob Hope

always laid it out straight. He was born in Eltham, England in 1903,

and when he hit 100 a few months ago, the world knew. And when he

died this week, the world mourned.

He was an icon to three generations of American soldiers and

sailors, and although I never crossed his path in the Pacific in

World War II, I was privileged to know him a little because I did a

lengthy profile of him 30 years ago for Good Housekeeping magazine.

His death sent me to my files and stirred some vivid memories of

those days I spent with him at his home in Toluca Lake.

He was 70 then, and didn’t look it. There was an obvious paunch

and thinning hair, but his step was light, his eyes wary and cool,

and the wise cracks at instant recall. He was still as devoted to

working as the rest of us are to eating, and when I asked him why,

considering he had about the same financial needs as Howard Hughes,

he told me: “I’d have to buy an applause machine just to get me up in

the morning if I ever stopped working.”

But he also had to underwrite the business of being Bob Hope,

which involved three different sets of press agents, a bevy of

secretaries and assorted aides operating under the title of Hope

Enterprises Inc. in a suite of offices adjacent to the eight-acre

Hope estate in the unfashionable San Fernando Valley, miles distant

from the opulence of Beverly Hills, where most of his co-stars lived.

The entrance to the Hope estate was through an outbuilding that

included a walk-in vault housing Hope’s correspondence and comedy

files, an office for his wife and a spacious, paneled room where Hope

could work surrounded by the artifacts of his travels and his career

that are mounted in display cases that take up three walls of the

room.

Hope’s home was open and bright with the entire backside paneled

in glass and overlooking the swimming pool and a 200-yard practice

golf hole. The art was tasteful and right for the walls it adorned,

the decor understated, the feeling warm.

When I suggested it would be tough leaving this spread for the

colossus he was then building in Palm Springs, Hope shrugged and said

he regarded moving there like playing permanent hooky.

I was armed with dozens of old photographs supplied by Hope’s

friends and associates, and he responded to them with honest delight

-- and always a story. There was, for example, his first love and

vaudeville dance partner, named Mildred Rosequist. When Hope wanted

to take their act on the road, Mildred’s mother said an emphatic

“No.” Thirty years later, Mildred resurfaced in the audience of a

Hope TV show and told him afterward: “If my mother was alive, I’d

punch her right in the mouth.”

And then there was another early member of Hope’s vaudeville act

who got ptomaine poisoning from a piece of pie in Huntington, W.Va.

-- Hope was clear on such details -- and died. Said Hope, “Maybe

you’d better not mention this because nobody there will ever eat pie

again.”

So it went through the recollection of a life. Hope had one-liners

to capture the essence of almost every memory, and it is doubtful if

Hope, himself, knew if the comments were spontaneous or parked in the

vast warehouse of jokes he carried about in his head for a century.

Most of the comedians I interviewed during this period were not funny

in conversation. They tended to be dour and downbeat. Hope was

different. He was animated and raunchy with a remarkably appropriate

story for every occasion.

American fighting men and women in three wars loved him, and he --

in turn -- loved them. I firmly believe that Hope was the only

civilian in history who was capable of standing military protocol on

its head and getting away with it. In one of his early performances

for troops in World War II, he invited enlisted men confined to the

rear of the audience to come forward and fill in empty seats in the

officers’ section. The response was so wildly enthusiastic that Hope

made a regular practice of putting dogfaces into the prime seats

thereafter.

“I’ve played before millions of GIs in every part of the world and

in every theater of three different wars,” he told me, “and I could

never define any substantial differences between the guys in any of

those wars. We would go on with shows that couldn’t even be assembled

at the Hollywood Bowl, and you could just feel the electricity. I

used to step back when somebody else was on and just look at the

faces in the audience. What exciting moments those were. And the

reception and the faces never changed one iota, from war to war or

place to place.”

Not all the memories brought up by the photographs inspired jokes.

Hope was especially sensitive to the perceptions of him as a hawk

during the three wars he entertained American troops.

“I never heard one piece of criticism about World War II,” Hope

said, “but in Vietnam, we were criticized for going over to entertain

when all we ever wanted to do was make the burden lighter for the

guys who were making the real sacrifice. A lot of kids back home

seemed to think that I was running the war. Well, maybe we didn’t

demonstrate or join parades, but we were all antiwar. Whenever people

asked me if this was my last trip to entertain GIs, I would tell them

that I hoped this would be our last war.

“I once got a letter from a woman who said, ‘You entertained my

husband in Korea and now my son is in Vietnam, and I wish you could

please go to his camp somehow.’ It makes you feel like going to bed

for awhile.”

One thing is certain. If Bob Hope could have summoned the energy

to go to Iraq, he would be there today. He might not have approved of

the war, but if there were GIs far from home in sore need of the

therapy Hope offered, he was on call. Only the playing of taps for

Bob Hope could have changed that pattern.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.