But one also needs to not indulge in overkill, and as invited as it would be, for me, to slap another big honking obituary up and call it a day, I detected the tang of mothballs, and thought better to set this aside for some future day when I'm caught flatfooted and need something to post. That day is today.
Bob Hope, the top gag man of the 20th century, an immensely popular comedian who knew how to make America laugh and entertained U.S. troops overseas from World War II to the eve of the Gulf War, died Sunday two months after his 100th birthday.
He succumbed to pneumonia at his home in Toluca Lake, Calif., with his wife of nearly 70 years, Dolores, and his family at his side. A priest celebrated mass in his bedroom. Hope's daughter, Linda, described the scene as "beautiful" and "serene."
"I think all the good vibes he put out during his lifetime came back to take him up. He really left us with a smile on his face and no last words. . . . He gave us each a kiss and that was it," she told reporters.
Known for his ski-slope nose and his rapid-fire delivery of an endless supply of one-liners, Mr. Hope, who got an important early professional break in Chicago and adopted children here, was one of the few funnymen able to nimbly jump from one entertainment medium to another: He was a big star on Broadway, on radio, in movies — in fact, he was among the top box office stars of the 1940s and 1950s — and on television.
He starred in the popular "Road" series of movies with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, beginning in 1940 with "The Road to Singapore." He wrote 10 popular books between 1941 and 1990.
More than a mere celebrity, Mr. Hope became a cultural icon, the country's mainstream court jester, master of ceremonies to the establishment, golf partner of the powerful. He was welcomed at the White House by 11 presidents, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. He was entertainment's most decorated and honored man, according to the Guinness Book of Records, with more than 1,500 awards.
All the while, Mr. Hope made sure to give back to his audience — he made 22 overseas Christmas tours and starred in 1,000 USO shows, even after his popularity declined among the young and he found himself criticized for his right-wing beliefs.
Too sedate to be considered a first-tier comic genius such as Charlie Chaplin or Groucho Marx, Mr. Hope was the embodiment of ordinary America. Time magazine once summarized his appeal as "vibrant averageness." New York Times critic Vincent Canby dubbed his style "Inoffensive Contemporary."
Still, his energy attracted praise from unexpected quarters. "The man drives himself and is driven," Nobel laureate John Steinbeck once wrote of Mr. Hope. "It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard and be so effective. There's a man. There is really a man."
Mr. Hope was a consummate businessman, parlaying his decades of star salary into an immense fortune. Forbes magazine wrote in 1983 that he was worth $200 million. After further research, Forbes revised its figure to $115 million. Later, Hope was asked for a figure of his own. "I'm fine until June," he said with a deadpan look.
He bought hundreds of acres of prime San Fernando Valley real estate when it was farmland, and sold it for sometimes 100 times what he had paid for it. At times he owned parts of the Cleveland Indians and the Los Angeles Rams.
His awards are numerous: four special Academy Awards, an Emmy, a Peabody, an Order of the British Empire, the French Legion of Honor, the Congressional Gold Medal, given by John F. Kennedy, and the Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson. He received 54 honorary degrees. The Chicago Horticultural Society named a fern in his honor, and the Navy named a ship for him.
In 1997, Congress granted Mr. Hope a unique tribute: It designated him a U.S. armed forces veteran, an honor extended to no other non-military person in our nation's history.
On Monday, President Bush ordered flags to be flown at half-staff on all federal buildings and U.S. posts around the world. "America mourns the loss of one of its great treasures," Bush said.
Mr. Hope hosted the Academy Awards 18 times between 1940 and 1978.
He was born Leslie Townes Hope in Eltham, England, the fifth of seven sons of William Hope, a stonemason, and Avis Townes, a singer. When he was 4, the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio.
Mr. Hope worked as a delivery boy, dance instructor, soda fountain clerk and shoe salesman. He was an amateur boxer under the name Packy East. Leslie was changed, first to Lester, and then to Bob.
His professional stage debut was in vaudeville, in a dancing act with Lloyd Durbin in a Fatty Arbuckle Revue in 1924. Mr. Hope began his move upward in New Castle, Ind., when he was asked to announce the schedule in a vaudeville house. Mr. Hope joked around while making the announcement and impressed Chicago agent Charles Hogan, who offered him a gig at Chicago's Stratford Theater, at 65th and Halsted on the South Side.
Mr. Hope said he struggled through hard times in Chicago. "I was in debt," he once recalled. "I had holes in my shoes."
He ran into an old friend in Chicago. "I was just about to give it up and go back to Cleveland when this friend of mine passed by," Mr. Hope said. "He said, 'What are you doing?' I said, 'I'm dying.' " The friend bought Mr. Hope a meal.
"I had forgotten whether to cut a steak with a knife or drink it out of a spoon," Mr. Hope quipped.
The job at the Stratford, which was supposed to last a week, lasted six months. "When I came out of there, I had everything," he said.
He debuted on Broadway in "Sidewalks of New York" in 1927. His first big Broadway role was in "Ballyhoo" in 1932. Stardom came a year later in "Roberta."
While performing in "Roberta," Mr. Hope met his future wife, a nightclub singer named Dolores Reade. Mr. Hope invited her to see his show, the story goes, and she went, thinking he was in the chorus, only to discover he was the star.
The couple married on Feb. 19, 1934, and adopted four children — Linda, Tony, Kelly and Nora — from the Cradle adoption agency in Evanston. The marriage endured, despite Mr. Hope's notorious womanizing. "He's a rover by nature. . . . There were times I wanted to pack it in," she once told an interviewer.
Mr. Hope debuted on radio on the "Capital Family Hour" in 1932. He bombed. His first few radio outings in the early 1930s were bad enough to earn him the nickname "Bob Hopeless."
Pepsodent Toothpaste saved him, however, allowing him to build his own show in 1938. Tuesday nights quickly became "Bob Hope Night" in America, as the country laughed at Mr. Hope's antics with bandleader and singer Skinny Ennis and comedian Jerry Colonna. Pepsodent sales jumped from sixth place to first.
The same year, Mr. Hope debuted in movies. His signature song, "Thanks for the Memory," was from his first major film, Paramount's "The Big Broadcast of 1938." He starred in 54 feature films, the last starring role being "Cancel My Reservation" in 1972. He made two later cameos, in "The Muppet Movie" and "Spies Like Us."
Mr. Hope began entertaining troops, grudgingly, on May 6, 1941, in California. But he soon took to the practice, and his status as a beloved star was cemented in World War II. He performed in as many as seven shows a day, eating with the troops, taking time to talk and sing with them. He continued entertaining soldiers after the war, beginning a tradition of going overseas at Christmastime when he performed for troops running the Berlin airlift in 1948.
He hosted his first network television special on Easter Sunday, 1950. (By no means his first appearance on television, however. He debuted on the CBS experimental station, W2XAB, in 1932.) In all, he starred in more than 300 specials for NBC.
Popular throughout the 1950s, Mr. Hope's star set a little in the 1960s as the public began to embrace comedians who wrote their own material, such as Woody Allen, or who told stories instead of jokes, such as Bill Cosby, or were not afraid of risque material, such as George Carlin.
Mr. Hope always relied on a stable of writers, many of whom had been with him for decades. He rarely spoke from his own actual experience, and never at length. And he avoided all but the mildest winking references to drugs or sex.
He also began speaking out, politically, opposing the political protest surrounding the Vietnam War, and coming to the defense of the military and his Republican friends such as Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.
The man loved by America was shocked to find himself the object of scorn.
"The funny thing about Bob Hope is that he's not very funny," Look magazine wrote in 1968. "Practically every funny thing he says — in performance and private conversation — comes from seven well-oiled, well-paid writers who supply him enough gags to fill the file cabinets both in his office and in his mind."
Even the military, which Mr. Hope had selflessly supported for years, turned on him as the war in Vietnam dragged on. Mr. Hope, who had received a two-minute standing ovation from 12,000 Marines in Da Nang in 1969, found himself being booed in 1970, his patriotic speeches met with stony silence. The Pentagon's chief of European entertainment services noted that Mr. Hope "fails to bring laughs and applause from soldiers turned on to pot smoking and rock music."
Mr. Hope stuck to his views and kept entertaining troops. He was so taken with the plight of U.S. prisoners of war that, at one point, he made overtures to the North Vietnamese government, attempting to buy back our POWs with his considerable fortune. He was rebuffed.
As the difficulties of the Vietnam era passed, Mr. Hope settled into a comfortable position as the elder statesman of the World War II generation, beloved by those who grew up with him and appreciated by those who valued his wartime work and his charitable efforts, which were many.
Mr. Hope endowed the Eisenhower Medical Center. He donated the land — 80 acres near Palm Springs, Calif. — for the center to be built, and supported it through his Bob Hope Desert Golf Classic.
Mr. Hope was a 12-handicap golfer who once scored a hole-in-one on the 220-yard fifth hole at Butler National Golf Course in Oak Brook.
Mr. Hope lived in California, and had three grandchildren.
A memorial service is scheduled for Aug. 27. His burial, tentatively set for Wednesday, will be private and for immediate family only. His daughter said that when Mr. Hope was asked in his waning hours where he wanted to be buried, he replied with a joke: "Surprise me!"
Bob Hope, the top gag man of the 20th century, an immensely popular comedian who knew how to make America laugh and entertained U.S. troops overseas from World War II to the eve of the Gulf War, died Sunday two months after his 100th birthday.
He succumbed to pneumonia at his home in Toluca Lake, Calif., with his wife of nearly 70 years, Dolores, and his family at his side. A priest celebrated mass in his bedroom. Hope's daughter, Linda, described the scene as "beautiful" and "serene."
"I think all the good vibes he put out during his lifetime came back to take him up. He really left us with a smile on his face and no last words. . . . He gave us each a kiss and that was it," she told reporters.
Known for his ski-slope nose and his rapid-fire delivery of an endless supply of one-liners, Mr. Hope, who got an important early professional break in Chicago and adopted children here, was one of the few funnymen able to nimbly jump from one entertainment medium to another: He was a big star on Broadway, on radio, in movies — in fact, he was among the top box office stars of the 1940s and 1950s — and on television.
He starred in the popular "Road" series of movies with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, beginning in 1940 with "The Road to Singapore." He wrote 10 popular books between 1941 and 1990.
More than a mere celebrity, Mr. Hope became a cultural icon, the country's mainstream court jester, master of ceremonies to the establishment, golf partner of the powerful. He was welcomed at the White House by 11 presidents, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. He was entertainment's most decorated and honored man, according to the Guinness Book of Records, with more than 1,500 awards.
All the while, Mr. Hope made sure to give back to his audience — he made 22 overseas Christmas tours and starred in 1,000 USO shows, even after his popularity declined among the young and he found himself criticized for his right-wing beliefs.
Too sedate to be considered a first-tier comic genius such as Charlie Chaplin or Groucho Marx, Mr. Hope was the embodiment of ordinary America. Time magazine once summarized his appeal as "vibrant averageness." New York Times critic Vincent Canby dubbed his style "Inoffensive Contemporary."
Still, his energy attracted praise from unexpected quarters. "The man drives himself and is driven," Nobel laureate John Steinbeck once wrote of Mr. Hope. "It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard and be so effective. There's a man. There is really a man."
Mr. Hope was a consummate businessman, parlaying his decades of star salary into an immense fortune. Forbes magazine wrote in 1983 that he was worth $200 million. After further research, Forbes revised its figure to $115 million. Later, Hope was asked for a figure of his own. "I'm fine until June," he said with a deadpan look.
He bought hundreds of acres of prime San Fernando Valley real estate when it was farmland, and sold it for sometimes 100 times what he had paid for it. At times he owned parts of the Cleveland Indians and the Los Angeles Rams.
His awards are numerous: four special Academy Awards, an Emmy, a Peabody, an Order of the British Empire, the French Legion of Honor, the Congressional Gold Medal, given by John F. Kennedy, and the Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson. He received 54 honorary degrees. The Chicago Horticultural Society named a fern in his honor, and the Navy named a ship for him.
In 1997, Congress granted Mr. Hope a unique tribute: It designated him a U.S. armed forces veteran, an honor extended to no other non-military person in our nation's history.
On Monday, President Bush ordered flags to be flown at half-staff on all federal buildings and U.S. posts around the world. "America mourns the loss of one of its great treasures," Bush said.
Mr. Hope hosted the Academy Awards 18 times between 1940 and 1978.
He was born Leslie Townes Hope in Eltham, England, the fifth of seven sons of William Hope, a stonemason, and Avis Townes, a singer. When he was 4, the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio.
Mr. Hope worked as a delivery boy, dance instructor, soda fountain clerk and shoe salesman. He was an amateur boxer under the name Packy East. Leslie was changed, first to Lester, and then to Bob.
His professional stage debut was in vaudeville, in a dancing act with Lloyd Durbin in a Fatty Arbuckle Revue in 1924. Mr. Hope began his move upward in New Castle, Ind., when he was asked to announce the schedule in a vaudeville house. Mr. Hope joked around while making the announcement and impressed Chicago agent Charles Hogan, who offered him a gig at Chicago's Stratford Theater, at 65th and Halsted on the South Side.
Mr. Hope said he struggled through hard times in Chicago. "I was in debt," he once recalled. "I had holes in my shoes."
He ran into an old friend in Chicago. "I was just about to give it up and go back to Cleveland when this friend of mine passed by," Mr. Hope said. "He said, 'What are you doing?' I said, 'I'm dying.' " The friend bought Mr. Hope a meal.
"I had forgotten whether to cut a steak with a knife or drink it out of a spoon," Mr. Hope quipped.
The job at the Stratford, which was supposed to last a week, lasted six months. "When I came out of there, I had everything," he said.
He debuted on Broadway in "Sidewalks of New York" in 1927. His first big Broadway role was in "Ballyhoo" in 1932. Stardom came a year later in "Roberta."
While performing in "Roberta," Mr. Hope met his future wife, a nightclub singer named Dolores Reade. Mr. Hope invited her to see his show, the story goes, and she went, thinking he was in the chorus, only to discover he was the star.
The couple married on Feb. 19, 1934, and adopted four children — Linda, Tony, Kelly and Nora — from the Cradle adoption agency in Evanston. The marriage endured, despite Mr. Hope's notorious womanizing. "He's a rover by nature. . . . There were times I wanted to pack it in," she once told an interviewer.
Mr. Hope debuted on radio on the "Capital Family Hour" in 1932. He bombed. His first few radio outings in the early 1930s were bad enough to earn him the nickname "Bob Hopeless."
Pepsodent Toothpaste saved him, however, allowing him to build his own show in 1938. Tuesday nights quickly became "Bob Hope Night" in America, as the country laughed at Mr. Hope's antics with bandleader and singer Skinny Ennis and comedian Jerry Colonna. Pepsodent sales jumped from sixth place to first.
The same year, Mr. Hope debuted in movies. His signature song, "Thanks for the Memory," was from his first major film, Paramount's "The Big Broadcast of 1938." He starred in 54 feature films, the last starring role being "Cancel My Reservation" in 1972. He made two later cameos, in "The Muppet Movie" and "Spies Like Us."
Mr. Hope began entertaining troops, grudgingly, on May 6, 1941, in California. But he soon took to the practice, and his status as a beloved star was cemented in World War II. He performed in as many as seven shows a day, eating with the troops, taking time to talk and sing with them. He continued entertaining soldiers after the war, beginning a tradition of going overseas at Christmastime when he performed for troops running the Berlin airlift in 1948.
He hosted his first network television special on Easter Sunday, 1950. (By no means his first appearance on television, however. He debuted on the CBS experimental station, W2XAB, in 1932.) In all, he starred in more than 300 specials for NBC.
Popular throughout the 1950s, Mr. Hope's star set a little in the 1960s as the public began to embrace comedians who wrote their own material, such as Woody Allen, or who told stories instead of jokes, such as Bill Cosby, or were not afraid of risque material, such as George Carlin.
Mr. Hope always relied on a stable of writers, many of whom had been with him for decades. He rarely spoke from his own actual experience, and never at length. And he avoided all but the mildest winking references to drugs or sex.
He also began speaking out, politically, opposing the political protest surrounding the Vietnam War, and coming to the defense of the military and his Republican friends such as Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.
The man loved by America was shocked to find himself the object of scorn.
"The funny thing about Bob Hope is that he's not very funny," Look magazine wrote in 1968. "Practically every funny thing he says — in performance and private conversation — comes from seven well-oiled, well-paid writers who supply him enough gags to fill the file cabinets both in his office and in his mind."
Even the military, which Mr. Hope had selflessly supported for years, turned on him as the war in Vietnam dragged on. Mr. Hope, who had received a two-minute standing ovation from 12,000 Marines in Da Nang in 1969, found himself being booed in 1970, his patriotic speeches met with stony silence. The Pentagon's chief of European entertainment services noted that Mr. Hope "fails to bring laughs and applause from soldiers turned on to pot smoking and rock music."
Mr. Hope stuck to his views and kept entertaining troops. He was so taken with the plight of U.S. prisoners of war that, at one point, he made overtures to the North Vietnamese government, attempting to buy back our POWs with his considerable fortune. He was rebuffed.
As the difficulties of the Vietnam era passed, Mr. Hope settled into a comfortable position as the elder statesman of the World War II generation, beloved by those who grew up with him and appreciated by those who valued his wartime work and his charitable efforts, which were many.
Mr. Hope endowed the Eisenhower Medical Center. He donated the land — 80 acres near Palm Springs, Calif. — for the center to be built, and supported it through his Bob Hope Desert Golf Classic.
Mr. Hope was a 12-handicap golfer who once scored a hole-in-one on the 220-yard fifth hole at Butler National Golf Course in Oak Brook.
Mr. Hope lived in California, and had three grandchildren.
A memorial service is scheduled for Aug. 27. His burial, tentatively set for Wednesday, will be private and for immediate family only. His daughter said that when Mr. Hope was asked in his waning hours where he wanted to be buried, he replied with a joke: "Surprise me!"
— Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 29, 2003
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are vetted and posted at the discretion of the proprietor. Comments that are not submitted under a name of some sort run the risk of being deleted without being read.