OLEAN -- By the time you read this, Bob Hope will have been dead a week, but what's a week compared to a century of laughs and warmth?
The comedian -- who passed quietly with pneumonia in his California home at 100 years of age on July 27 -- kept an entire nation feeling good about itself for so long that he deserves some mention in a space usually reserved for futile carping about lightweight politicians.
Hope saved a lot of lives. Literally. Ask any combat veteran. His USO shows in four wars and within firing distance of the enemy were so funny, so edgy, so adrenaline-filled, and so spontaneous, American soldiers felt he was one of them. After his show, they just knew they could make it home. He could make fun of himself so easily, it immediately set the audience at ease, no matter what the danger.
In Vietnam, when the North Vietnamese would start mortaring his perimeter, Hope would say, "I wonder which one of my movies they've just seen?"
As if his films were so bad they could provoke warfare.
Actually, they were quite good. College kids have barely heard of him, but he was a huge box office draw, and deserved it. He hosted more Oscar award nights than anyone (18) and boasted nearly 70 movies, 500 television specials, and almost 1,200 radio shows. He was the only actor I ever saw who could steal scenes from animals.
When I was a kid, he starred with the King of the Cowboys -- Roy Rogers -- in some turkey western called "Son of Paleface." Roy's famous horse, Trigger, was in it too, of course, and in one scene Hope has to bunk down with the horse. They get in a fight over the only blanket -- first the horse tugging it away, and then Hope. The horse was good. Hope was brilliant.
My personal thoughts, however, always go back to Palm Springs -- where he founded and for years hosted the Bob Hope Desert Classic celebrity golf tournament. Hope was a four-handicap golfer. He could hit. For years in the early 1990s, I took winter vacation there.
It wasn't so much that I like watching golf (although that was pleasant, too). It was the wide swath of sports stars that Hope attracted to the tournament to play with the pros. Most of the gallery would trail Jack Lemmon or Kevin Costner or some great-looking boxer like Oscar De La Hoya.
But if you got there on Thursday and Friday, you could walk 18 holes with baseball greats from the 1950s right up until the present -- conversing with them in relaxation. In just nine holes, you could have substantial conversations with Jim Palmer or Tom Glavine or Roger Clemens or John Smoltz or Yogi Berra.
OK, OK, so I'm a sucker for jocks, but only in baseball.
Hope, until he was about 97, would pitch right in with the fun. He shot par on a long three at 94 at Bermuda Dunes, I think it was. Stiffed it to just short of the pin, two putted, then smiled to the crowd as if any nonagenarian could do that.
My clearest memory of those tournaments, however, is of Hope about two years after that, hitting the ceremonial opening tee shot as always. He could barely get out of the cart, he was so feeble, but some flunky teed it up for him and the gallery, sensing a souvenir, closed in down the fairway to make it a very narrow path of green. It didn't matter. Hope popped one up about 30 yards, barely making the ladies' tee.
He was clearly upset. Hope's minder, in golf slacks and blue blazer with coiffed white hair -- I suppose his title was executive male nurse or foremost secretary or something -- gruffly tried to hustle the aging comedian back to the golf cart. Hope broke away somehow, and the minder was distracted for a few seconds by trouble with the cart.
Hope quickly pulled a mulligan ball -- a do-over shot beloved by duffers (and President Bill Clinton) -- out of his pants pocket. That famous devious smile lit his face.
His fluid grace returned for one last time as he bent over and teed up the second ball. The gallery, meanwhile, had surged forward to glimpse the famous man, and had melted from both sides of the fairway into one loud crowd.
There was NO fairway. Hope addressed the ball squarely with his driver. The gallery figured out what was going on and frantically tried to part. Too late. Hope lashed a screaming blue darter right down the middle. How it missed everyone is a miracle. This was no popcorn drive. The celebrity seekers were still diving for cover as it trickled to a stop about 170 yards down the fairway.
Hope smiled, put the club over his shoulder, and sauntered back to the cart with that famous walk. He looked, for a brief three or four seconds, about 25 years old. The man had presence. The New York Times managed to nail it in his obit, describing him as "so buoyant he was like a living flotation device."
He could ad lib with the best of them, but Hope always employed a large stable of gifted joke writers -- right up until his last years. When he turned 100 in May, one of them, or the great man himself, came up with a typical Hope quip: "I'm so old, they've canceled my blood type."
Of course, not everyone loved his flip humor and lines that would be considered somewhat "incorrect" today. But for most of the last century, we were more sensible than to become obsessed with victimhood, and Hope would capitalize on that. His "Road" movies with pal Bing Crosby -- all over the tube this last week -- were well-timed, full of sharp ad libs, and still stand up as funny. Their filming used to draw huge crowds of colleagues, friends and fans to the soundstage. Once a gaffer lit up a huge mob of Hope's laughing pals. He thought they were extras for the next scene.
Hope's best ad libs were full of street vernacular and tavern slang.
Playing a spy, Hope is advised by a furtive fellow actor to run from danger.
"Run?" asks an insulted Hope. "Do you think I'm yellow?"
A gunshot rings out. Hope, sticking out his hand, pauses for once last observation before booking down the street: "Shake hands with a lemon!"
The Library of Congress has 85,000 pages -- 85,000 pages! -- of such stuff. Amazing. Some of the more carefully crafted lines carried fine political points, although Hope usually avoided taking hawk-dove sides when he was lifting soldierly spirits. Once, during the endless Vietnam War, which the White House and Pentagon insisted wasn't a war, Hope delivered this opening stage line to the exhausted troops: "Technically, we're not at war, so remember that when you get hit, technically, it doesn't hurt." They roared.
Hope -- the fifth of seven sons -- was born in England, and moved with his family to Cleveland when he was four. He clearly loved this country.
So prestigious was Hope in the 1960s that friends used to urge him on television to get involved in politics. Johnny Carson once inquired if anyone had ever suggested he run for president. Yes, Hope replied, but his wife, Dolores, didn't want to step down a class in housing.
She's 94 now. They celebrated 69 anniversaries along the way. Their two adopted sons and two adopted daughters are leaving middle age for senior citizenship, too. They must hope they have their father's stamina. When he was 86, he did 200 nights of comedy on the road. I'm a quarter century younger, in good health, and I can barely make it to the office five days in a row.
I'm teaching a freshman class this fall on "Media Culture," and I know just what I'm going to do. I'm going to show them Bob Hope movies. He can teach them pace and timing. He can teach them how to get to the important part of the narrative quickly and with clarity. He can also teach them there's truth in humor, and humor in truth.
Bob Hope, Buddy Hackett, Katherine Hepburn -- substantial chunks of the American culture my generation loved are falling away this summer like calving glaciers. But oh, such brilliance when they were here.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | August 5 2003 |