Hollywood: Fish Don’t Applaud

In World War VI, when the spears and flaming arrows of neoprimitive nations start flying back and forth, Bob Hope will be up there near the front lines, entertaining the troops.

Hope is 60. His pace is, if anything, faster than it was when he was 20. As Moo Goo Gai Poo, he will play the ruler of Viet-Poo on TV this week, opposite Martha Raye as Mme. Poo. He is off to Australia next month and is planning a tour of U.S. bases in the Mediterranean area to entertain U.S. soldiers far from home on Christmas Day. Offstage as on, when strangers are around him, he can’t stop quipping. “Hey, I’m learning humility,” he will say. “I called up my agent today and asked if there was any more room on Mount Rushmore.”

Bob Hope actually belongs on some sort of Mount Rushmore, his nose cantilevered on reinforcing rods near Groucho Marx’s cigar and Jack Benny’s bow. Hope is the longest-running one-line stand-up snap-it-out comedian in the history of show business. His jokes now have more polish than brass, but they keep coming, with energy and perfect timing. He says he’ll never quit: “If I retired, I’d be surrounded by about nine psychiatrists. I’m not retiring until they carry me away, and I’ll have a few routines on the way to the big divot.”

Like What He Is. Last summer he hired a yacht for a vacation cruise of Canadian waters. But he was bored. “Fish don’t applaud,” he explains. Applause is the only income he really cares about. He particularly enjoys it in the form, say, of the medal recently pinned on him by President Kennedy for his countless appearances before U.S. servicemen during and since World War II.

Like few other comedians, he can function as master of ceremonies before a dinner of titans and financiers and never seem to be just a fast-talking gagman rung in for the night. He carries off that sort of thing with an offhand assurance that suggests he’s really one of the big tycoons who just happened to take the podium. Small wonder. That’s what he is. If anyone still wonders where the yellow went, Pepsodent’s aggressive young comedian of 1938 is now one of the largest individual holders of raw acreage in Southern California. He has thousands of acres in the San Fernando Valley and hundreds in Palm Springs. He owns 421% of two TV stations in Colorado worth more than $10 million. He gives away more than $100,000 a year through The Bob and Dolores Hope Charitable Foundation. He has just given $300,000 for a new Bob Hope Theater at Southern Methodist University. His golfing partners are people like Richard Nixon, Stuart Symington and Del Webb. He has successfully managed the transition from dash to dignity, maintaining his status all the while as the No. 1 comic in America.

Writers are his maintenance crew. Hope knows that his own native humor would never have got him out of Cleveland. He once waved a script at his writers and said, “This is all the talent I have, fellows.” For it, he pays eight of them more than $450,000 a year. Thus each Hope joke is worth roughly the cost of a natural pearl.

Shuffling Jokes. Leslie Townes Hope was born in England, and his family moved to the U.S. when he was four. He was one of seven sons of a possessive mother who had all the boys competing with one another for her affections, the winner being the one who got to go into downtown Cleveland with her on Saturdays. Something like this lingers on in Hope’s relationships with his writers. He watches over them as if they were children. He always knows where they are. No retreat in New York, Europe or the Far East is so secluded that Hope can’t track down one of his writers who happens to be hiding there. And he always has a favorite.

Just before a performance, Hope changes his tie, keeps shuffling and changing jokes, and squeezes his chief writer’s arm until the man’s fingers turn numb. Then onstage he bounces on the balls of his feet. His eyes sparkle when the audience laughs. If he hits dull spots, he never takes it out on his writers afterward. Once when an ad agency executive began complaining after a show, Hope told him: “Look, if you’ve got any ideas, go home and write them. If they’re any good, we’ll hire you. Otherwise, keep out.”

Bounce & Glitter. He looks 45, and, in the words of one of his writers, “he thinks he is 19.” He diets, drinks very little, and doesn’t smoke at all. Advancing age frightens him. So he seldom stops to think about it, zipping around golf courses or around the world, giving the winged chariot a run for its money. This has made him a transient in his own home. He jokes that the towels in his bathroom say HERS and WELCOME STRANGER. His wife spends most of her time working for Catholic charities. They have four children. The oldest, Anthony, is a student at Harvard Law. Gradually, over the years, whatever there was of the man behind the image of Bob Hope has disappeared. Hope has always insisted that the brittle, wisecracking, naive, play-it-loose, quick-lipped, harmlessly leering joker—the fellow who has been delivering all those after-dinner gags all these years—is the real Bob Hope. The audience before him is a blank wall, against which Hope tosses jokes that bounce and glitter for a second, then are forgotten. He has never wanted to go deeper, into his dience or into himself, and he hasn’t.

No Deeper. “Deep down inside, there is no Bob Hope,” says one of his friends. “He’s been playing Bob Hope for so long that everything else has been burned out of him. The man has become his image.”

His image is so much more than an image that it is in many ways an example. He is never bitter, as Mort Sahl or even Jack Benny can be. His wisecracking toys with the limits of tact and taste but never crosses the line. He won’t knock other stars, and he won’t listen to gossip. He is loyal to old retainers, some of whom have been hanging around him since vaudeville days. He is a kind of universal uncle, likable and humane. Everywhere, that is, but on a golf course. There he is an amiable, hard-eyed, all-American savage. You can wait until snow forms on your head before he will give you a putt.