Last night KPBS presented a show I’d seen advertised on the Orange County PBS station in the Los Angeles Times and had been curious about but so far had managed to miss: an American Masters documentary on Bob Hope. It was basically well done and crowded as much as possible of Hope’s decades-long career in two hours, but it suffered from what was probably an unavoidable flaw: there was virtually no sense of who the “real” Bob Hope was under the persona he created as an entertainer. Though director John Scheinfeld (who I’m presuming also wrote the show, since no outside writer is credited) didn’t duck the allegations of marital infidelity — the show mentions the affair Hope had in the 1940’s with starlet Marilyn Maxwell but does not make the claim I’ve seen elsewhere that Paramount set up an entirely separate dressing room for Hope, aside from his usual one, in which he could have quickies with various actresses and other woman on the Paramount lot — that’s about the only behind-the-scenes glimpse of what Hope was “really” like aside from the three characters he created, the nebbishy coward he played in films, the wisecracking radio comedian and the thoroughgoing patriot who did all the USO shows for America’s servicemembers in every war the U.S. fought from our entry into World War II in 1941 to the first Persian Gulf War in 1991.
The show did not mention one of the things I most admire about Hope —
that despite his reputation for political conservatism in other respects he was
anti-racist way before
anti-racism was cool. Billie Holiday had very nice things to say about Hope in her autobiography Lady
Sings the Blues (though, oddly, she never
covered Hope’s signature song “Thanks for the Memory” — a pity, since she could
have done wonders with it!), and Hope hailed African-American comedian Willie
Best as the greatest natural talent he ever worked with and insisted that Best
be billed under his actual name and not the demeaning “Sleep ’n Eat” moniker
he’d been billed with in his pre-Hope movies. Like the American Masters documentary on Bing Crosby, this one on Hope also
annoyed me by hailing the Road
movies as major innovations in screen comedy, particularly the way in which
they “broke the frame” and allowed both Hope and Crosby to address the audience
directly and remind them they were just watching a movie — without mentioning
the person who actually had that idea. His name was Victor Schertzinger, and he
directed the first two Road
movies at the end of his career (he died in 1942), but he had “broken the
frame” in his previous films (notably Something to Sing About, the little-known and quite good musical he made
with James Cagney at Grand National in 1937, a film Cagney admired so much he
devoted a whole chapter of his autobiography to it) — and Schertzinger’s frame-breaking
continued as an integral part of the Road films even after he died and other directors (mostly Norman Z. McLeod
and Hal Walker) took the series over — and McLeod had also previously directed
the Marx Brothers, who also “broke the frame” in early-1930’s films like the
McLeod-directed Horse Feathers.
This isn’t the only example of “first-itis” in this show — “first-itis” is my
term for the tendencies of biographers in all media to assume and state that
whoever they’re biographing was the first person to do something when in fact
quite a few people were doing it before them (my most egregious example was
that all the obituaries for Ray Charles said his 1954 hit “I Got a Woman” was
the first time anyone had turned gospel music into a pop hit — Sister Rosetta
Tharpe had done it in 1941 with “Shout, Sister, Shout”), including making the
argument that Hope was the first person to do what we think of today as
stand-up comedy and also the first one to tell topical jokes and include
political commentary in his act.
John Scheinfeld does acknowledge that Will Rogers was doing political
jokes before Hope but claims he doesn’t really count because he was delivering
them in his folksy “country” persona
— though the records I’ve heard of Rogers indicate that he was in his own way a
far more slashing political comedian than Hope; whereas Hope tried to stay
even-handed (at least until the 1960’s, when he was appalled by the
counter-culture and seemed to regard opposition to the Viet Nam war as a
personal insult), Rogers was an out-and-out progressive, and his comments,
particularly on the environment and on America’s treatment of its Native
population (Rogers was part-Cherokee and he let everyone know it), ring true today whereas most of Hope’s political jokes have become
dated. Hope’s political jokes got nastier in the 1960’s, when he not only took
sides with the mainstream pro-war, anti-hippie, anti-dissent culture against
the counterculture but became quite vehement about it: there’s a clip here of
him talking about the Woodstock festival right after it happened in which he
says, “It was held in an old cow pasture. Just the right place for it, don’t
you think?” There’s also an even more bizarre excerpt from one of the tapes
made at the White House during the Nixon administration in those bizarre years
from 1971 to 1973 when Nixon essentially had himself bugged 24/7 and recorded
virtually every White House meeting and phone call (thereby generating the
evidence that ultimately led to his forced resignation to avoid impeachment),
in which Hope is visiting the White House and he and Nixon are egging each
other on about hatred of the anti-war protesters and a determination to
continue and escalate the bombing of North Viet Nam until the war is “won.”
Hope would probably have had a hard time staying at the top even without the
generation gap — seeing his later close-ups in the 1980’s it’s all too obvious
that he’d aged, and though they are mercifully unmentioned here by the 1960’s
Hope’s film career had degenerated into dreary, unfunny would-be farces like Call
Me Bwana, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!
(which Harry and Michael Medved and Randy Dreyfuss listed in their 1978 book The
Fifty Worst Films of All Time) and Cancel
My Reservation that made the age both of
their star and their script formulae all too apparent.
There were quite a few
interviewees, including Woody Allen (shown both in his younger days doing a
guest shot as host of The Tonight Show in 1971 and inviting Hope on as one of his guests — and telling Hope a
lot of Bananas was ripped off
Hope’s films — and as what he looks like now), Conan O’Brien (who said he never
paid attention to Hope until he heard Woody Allen in an interview saying Hope
had been his great inspiration and influence, and he liked Allen so much that
made him look more seriously at Hope and eventually learn from him), and even
Kermit the Frog (voiced by whom,
one wonders, now that his creator Jim Henson is long since dead), along with
Hope’s daughter Linda (adopted, as were Hope’s three other children, because
his wife Dolores Reade Hope couldn’t bear any of her own) and some of his old writers. The story ends up
frustrating because there doesn’t seem to have been a ‘real” Hope; whatever he
was like beyond the parts of his personality he drew on to create the “Bob Hope
character,” he rigidly concealed them even from his closest associates and
friends — anyone coming to this film hoping to find Hope’s “Rosebud” will be
disappointed. In an age in which celebrities not only share their personal angst with their audience but often rely on it to create,
Hope’s rigid line between his onscreen and offscreen personalities (and his
success in doing so, to the point that even his death, which usually loosens
acquaintances’ tongues and makes them feel like they have permission at last to
tell the world what so-and-so was “really” like) marks him as the product of
another era, a world of image-makers in which celebrities were protected by the
big companies they worked for and only what they and their bosses thought would
be “good” for their careers for people to know about them ever saw the light of
day.
