HollywoodOn Productions: Janet Donovan & Brendan Kownacki
“He was a happy guy. He enjoyed what he was doing. He enjoyed being famous,” Richard Zoglin told Hollywood on the Potomac about Bob Hope at a book party in his honor for the publication of HOPE: Entertainer of the Century hosted by Michael Kosmides, proprietor of CITIES, and Hollywood on the Potomac. “And there are a lot of stars you can’t say that about today. They’ve got anxieties and they’re complaining about the paparazzi. Bob Hope never complained. He loved being famous.”
“He was a hard worker and if you were paying attention, you had the opportunity to learn a lot from him,” said Tom Malatesta of his uncle Bob Hope. “I met Richard through a mutual friend who was also at Time, Inc. on the People side. I was interested in meeting Richard because I probably had talked to a half a dozen people, all of whom said they were going to do a biography on Bob Hope; but none of them did because none of them wanted to put the time and energy into the research, into the subject of which Richard has done such an exemplary job. Richard has covered entertainment, he’s covered stand up comics, and he’s been with Time, Inc. for a long time. Many years ago in my youth I was a Time Inc.er, so I appreciate the connection. I think he did a wonderful, detailed and thorough job on the subject. So God bless you and here we are.”
“Thank you. Thank you,” responded Richard. “This is my first visit to Washington for the promotion of the book and of course there is so much in Washington that has a connection to Bob Hope that it’s great to be here. It took me more than five years to write this book and since a lot of you are writers, I want you to know that Tom was your ideal source. He was so great. He talked to me at length about the family and was totally open, candid – no agendas, just terrific. The rest of the family cooperated with me too. Linda Hope was of course in charge of the estate and the legacy and could be difficult at times. It was tough. It was a lot of work dealing with the family. Tom was my guide through all of this. It was really the greatest experience of my life. I wrote this book because I thought that Bob Hope was such an important person and figure in entertainment which is why I call him the most important entertainer of the 20th century. And strangely enough, there hadn’t been a major biography of him. Scandalous books, yes, but a biography, no. I thought it was so needed that I set out to do it with some in-trepidation because the job, the project I felt, was a lot of weight for my shoulders to do the job right. The response has been great. I’ve had tons of nice reviews, compliments. The book is doing very well, is in its third printing and I thank you all for coming and am happy to answer questions.” In between courses, guests passed the mic for a Q and A. Some were too young to remember Hope while others were devoted fans.
HOPE: Entertainer of the Century
Steve Clemons: (The Atlantic) Q: “I’d love to ask you two different questions about Bob Hope that have nothing to do with being an entertainer. One is about his political affinities and the second is I remember when I lived in California he was one of the most successful real estate brokers. He was the biggest land owner in the San Fernando Valley as I recall. I met him once at a fundraiser dinner at the Nixon Library. I think it was 1993. He gave a lot of money in fact that night for it. He talked a lot about his close relationship and friendship with Richard Nixon which surprised me because I didn’t know at the time that Bob Hope was a conservative or a Nixonian. In fact, he was pretty devout. Do you cover that in the book?”
Richard Zoglin: (author) A: “I think one of the reasons that Bob Hope was a little off the radar for this generation – the newer generation – was because of what happened during Vietnam. He became very identified with the war and friendly with Nixon and became outspoken and supported the lore that, obviously in the sixties, was very controversial. He was conservative. I don’t think he was a particularly sophisticated political thinker. He palled around with the generals in Vietnam, he bought the line. He was a patriot. He was the World War II generation that felt he could not imagine that the United States would get into a war that it wouldn’t pursue to victory or couldn’t pursue to victory. The idea that Vietnam comes along and you’ve got protesters in the street, he really felt they were disloyal, he couldn’t abide that. He did something that he avoided for most of his career. Most of his career had been very down the middle in terms of his public persona. He made jokes about both sides, Democrats and Republicans. But I think he couldn’t restrain himself during Vietnam. He became an outright supporter of Nixon and the war. I think that turned off a good part of a generation to Bob Hope. He definitely was conservative and I think that, in those years anyway, it damaged his legacy with a certain generation.”
Beverly Malatesta, Steve Clemons, Andy Oros and Lissa August
Richard Zoglin: “You want to talk about his real estate? I think he was really one of the smartest businessmen in Hollywood,” Zoglin added. “He made money early in his career in oil and he put a lot of it into real estate. He bought up thousands of acres in the San Fernando Valley and elsewhere in California. He was refuted to be at one time the largest private land holder in the state of California. I couldn’t quite check that out, I don’t know if it’s absolutely true, but he was close. He was a smart guy. He was also, talking about his business prowess, the first star to really become a business man with his own career. He set up his own production company, he was one of the very first to do that. He owned all his own material – his movies, his TV shows. Just one of the many things that Bob was is that he was a pioneer in Hollywood as a star and entrepreneur, an owner of his own material, master of his own destiny. He didn’t want to be a studio employee anymore. He was very successful at that. That was one of his many achievements.”
Karen Tumulty: (The Washington Post) Q: “Richard is my old time colleague and was my long-time editor at TIME. I have a couple of questions. As probably the only person at this table who actually went to a Bob Hope show (in the Philippines when I was in fourth grade. …. my father was stationed there) he was, as you get to in the book, both simultaneously so accessible we all felt like we knew him, and yet so opaque: Was that a factor of the media environment in those days, that you could do that? Or was there something in his specific gifts and nature that made that possible, that he could both feel like we knew him, but we didn’t?”
Pat Harrison, Richard Zoglin and Karen Tumulty
Richard Zoglin: A: “Yeah, there was a time when there was less press scrutiny of a star’s private life or the understanding that certain things would be off-limits. Bob I think was unusual, more so than most stars. I think he was a closed-off guy. He was very introspective. He was the last person in Hollywood I can imagine walking into a therapist’s office. He was just not that kind of guy. He could be very social, great with people, he loved being with people, but there was a wall. You couldn’t get very deep inside of Bob Hope. I don’t know if it was partly his British upbringing. He was born in England and maybe there was a little bit of that British reserve. Maybe something about his tough childhood, where he was one of seven boys in the family and didn’t get a lot of attention and maybe he just learned to keep things to himself. He was very difficult. Even people who worked with him a lot and knew him well or thought they knew him well, did not realize that they really didn’t know him very well. He was a difficult man to get inside. I think Tom, his nephew, would consent to that.”
Beverly and Tom Malatesta
Brendan Kownacki: (Hollywood on the Potomac) Q: “I wanted to ask you, as a younger person who actually loved Bob Hope for a long time and has always loved going on stage and hosting things and watching Bob Hope with my parent’s and my grandparent’s, how do we make sure that he keeps the credit for what he did instead of letting what he started be passed over for the people who came after him? I don’t think a lot of people in their twenties really ever think of Bob Hope, if they know his name at all. And as you mentioned, he was an innovator for much of what we see in Hollywood business these days – owning the rights to his own work and he’s one of the very first stars to really take up causes and what he did with the USO is revolutionary.”
Richard Zoglin: A: “Very simple. I spent a little time trying to make a case why he was so important. One of the things, I think you’re absolutely right, is the whole idea of public service. The amount of charity work that he did constantly, starting back when he was a Broadway entertainer in the 1930’s, the benefit dinners, constantly. Then when the war came, he was one of many stars who went overseas and entertained the troops, the one who no one connected with the troops quite the way he did or was as dogged and dedicated as he was after the war, in the ’40’s and ’50’s, and of course in the Vietnam years. I think it’s over-looked and I thought that one thing I wanted to do in the book was to point out that I do think that Bob Hope set a model, set a standard for Hollywood, telling Hollywood by his actions that you have an obligation as a star to do more than just make movies and sign autographs and buy big homes in Malibu or something. You have an obligation to use your celebrity to do good, to do work for causes, whatever the cause is, and the causes may be different today. George Clooney and Angelina Jolie, and the whole concept of the star using the celebrity to work for good causes, I do think they all owe a debt to Bob Hope. You’re right, it’s over-looked and I hope that in my book I at least open some peoples eyes to that. It’s one of the things that really made me excited about doing the book because I felt I was really helping people rediscover somebody who had been unjustly neglected for many years.”
Richard Zoglin
Tom Malatesta: (Bob Hope’s nephew) Q: And he walked around with a putter too, that’s the another thing. ….. Bob and golf. Can you talk about that?
Richard Zoglin: A: “I think Bob had a lot to do with the popularity of golf in this country if you think about it. It was Bob always talking about golf and making jokes about golf and playing in golf tournaments and having his own golf tournament. That coincided with the boom of golf in this country in the ’60’s, which were Arnold Palmer years and Nichlaus, and Bob Hope too was really important in introducing people to the game of golf. He was good at it.”
Steve Clemons: Q: Can you tell us about the nasty side of Bob Hope?
Richard Zoglin: A: Well, Bob could be cold, he could be difficult, he was demanding with the people he worked with and he was a little bit about how the world revolved around him. He was a big star and there was a narcissism there. He was a womanizer, that was common knowledge, but it was kept pretty quite. I’m sure Dolores knew about it and put up with it. Some people thought he was mean. He could be tough and he could be cold. On the whole, I think most of the people who worked with him liked him despite the flaws, despite the problems, despite the late-night calls in the middle of the night that he needed something first thing in the morning. Boy, I’m sure he wasn’t easy to work for.”
Steve Clemons, Andy Oros and Lissa August
Annie Groer: (The Washington Post) Q: “We know a lot about his comedies and all that. Did he ever do drama? I don’t remember ever seeing Bob Hope in a dramatic role.”
Richard Zoglin: A: “You know, he did do a couple of dramatic roles. Mid-career he really tried to expand a little bit. He did do a movie called The 7 Little Foys where he played Eddie Foy which was kind of comedy drama and there was definitely serious elements in it that ultimately where he sort of stretched himself. My favorite, maybe my favorite Bob Hope movie, is Sorrowful Jones. It’s a Damon Runyon story. It was based on the story Little Miss Marker which was a Shirley Temple movie and he made it. He’s a bookie who had to take care of a little kid and it’s kind of sentimental. There’s some dramatic scenes in there that are quite touching and I think they showed Bob had a range, but he wasn’t very ambitious about his film career so he kind of settled. He had a period in the 50s when he was kind of trying on some different kinds of films like The 7 Little Foys. But then, by the 60s, he was tired of that and it was back to sort of routine comedies that kind of got worse and worse. So I would say that he didn’t push himself that much in his film career but I could show you some scenes – some small scenes – that show that he could really act and he could act dramatic scenes as well as comedy.”
Bill Press (right center)
Bill Press: (Political Commentator, Radio Talk Show host & author) Q: “I sort of want to follow up to that question. He was star in so many different fields. I mean, he was on Broadway. He did movies. He did stand up comedy. He did radio. He did television and MC’d the Oscars, I don’t know how many times; so was there anything he couldn’t do and what was his strength? He couldn’t have been great at every one of those things. Was there any one thing that you think was his strongest suit?”
Richard Zoglin: A: “I’m glad you made that point because he is the only star of the 20th century to really be popular at the top, or near the top, of every one of the fields of popular entertainment of the century: Vaudeville, Broadway, radio, television, movies, and live comedies. I would say… you know, I think he was good at all of them. He was certainly successful at all of the them. My own personal take is I think as a stand up comedian his stuff today doesn’t really sound that funny. I mean it was top stuff then but it’s old fashioned today. It’s quick one liners and it’s not really the style of stand up comedy today. But I’ll tell you a little story. One of the reasons I wanted to do the book – my previous book was called Comedy at the Edge: How Stand Up in the 1970s Changed America – a book about the generation of stand up comedians from George Carlin… this sort of post Lenny Bruce generation: George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, down through Jerry Seinfeld, that kind of the era and I interviewed all of those people who were still around, was to know who their influences were. What comedians did they grow up with and who they modeled themselves after and loved and so forth. And they would name lots of people. A lot of them would say Lenny Bruce, but some of them would say the classic old timers, maybe Jack Benny or Groucho Marx, but nobody mentioned Bob Hope. Because Bob Hope is sort of taken for granted, maybe, he was a little off the radar and that made me angry because I’m thinking to myself Bob Hope really invented their art form. They ought to pay a little more respect.”
Zoglin: “What did he do best? He invented an art form. When he came on the radio in 1938, there were stand up comedies, there was Vaudeville. There were guys who did jokes on stage, but they were always very sort of formula types, packaged lines or comedians with a partner like Burns and Allen, that kind of Vaudeville kind of schick. And then Bob Hope came on the radio, and there was Jack Benny who did a radio show but he was the cheap character but with his little circle of regulars. Bob Hope didn’t have that so he said to his writers, and he hired a whole bunch of them, this show is going to rise or fall on the jokes. We’re going to have to have a really good opening monologue and read the papers and give me jokes from what’s going on in the world, in the news, in Hollywood, in the weather, you know, Bob’s own life, whatever. So he did topical monologues and believe it or not, nobody else was doing that. You know, jokes about what was going on, and so that is what everybody does today and they didn’t do it before Bob Hope. So that’s why I say he really invented modern stand up comedy and he did that great and nobody could deliver a monologue the way Bob Hope did. The material was sometimes weak and when you look back at it and stuff from the 50s and 60s it sounds very dated and corny but he created a style. He’s the father of all the stand up comedians.”
Bill Press: Q: The Oscars… how many times?
Richard Zoglin: A: “The Oscars he did 19 times, 19 times either as host or co-host. Isn’t that amazing? Nobody comes close. He started in the days… in the early 40s when the show wasn’t even on the radio, it was just a dinner in Hollywood….and then it was on the radio and then he hosted the first televised show which was 1953 and it was a huge, huge rating success. And I think you have to say that Bob Hope really made the Oscars such a popular event just by his handling of the show. It was entertaining. But also he did those jokes about the stars of Hollywood, what’s the gossip and all that, and I think that really introduced the country to Hollywood, to that exotic place where stars live and have expensive homes and bad marriages and whatever and our conception of Hollywood, to a large degree, grew out of Bob Hope’s monologues. He was our little window into that world once a year at the Academy Awards. So again, his contribution is endless.”
Matt Cooper, Pat Harrison, Richard Zoglin and Karen Tumulty
Pat Harrison (CEO CPB): Q: “One of the things I’m interested in is when somebody reaches the peak of power, popularity and are used to all of this and then time moves on, how did he handle a sort of changing society? What did he do with all of this intensity and talent?
Zoglin: A: “Well, things did change for him in the sixties and seventies with Vietnam. When he was in radio and early movies he was almost radical. He was a bad boy on radio. You know, he had censors and he was a fast-paced, young guy. I think he appeared as a young performer for many years, and then suddenly, in the ’60s, he turned around and he’s like the older generation. I think that was difficult for him to take. He didn’t realize that he had become the older generation, he wasn’t the hip guy anymore. But he was amazing, he had so much energy, and he was so addicted to performing that he just looked for wherever the venue was. He didn’t have to keep up all this live performing he did, concerts, a hundred-fifty or two hundred concerts a year when he was in his ’70s. It was unbelievable. He didn’t have to do that, but he was addicted to it. He was on TV, did regular specials on TV, and still doing movies up to the early ’70s.”
Andy Oros, Lissa August, Matt Cooper, Pat Harrison, Richard Zoglin and Karen Tumulty
Zoglin: “That’s the way he kept himself going and young, but he didn’t know when to quit. He’s one performer who probably should have retired a little earlier than he did because he was still performing into his 90’s. He had a 90th birthday party on NBC, a three-hour special, a very nice special in 1993, with all the stars paying tribute. It was wonderful, and I think that NBC probably expected that would be it, but, nope, Bob came back. He was still doing specials after that, even though he was really no longer capable of even really doing a monologue. He died at age 100 in 2003. He was still doing specials. His last special was 1997 or ’96, so he was 93. He hung on too long, and I think that that, a little bit, damaged his legacy too. A lot of younger people remember that dottering old guy who couldn’t read the cue cards very well. His eyesight was going, his hearing was going. When he was on Johnny Carson, he could hardly hear the questions, but he loved performing, he couldn’t give it up.”
Andy Oros: (Director of International Studies, Washington College) Q: “You got us to the ’60s and ’70s, how about bringing that to the 21st century, building on an earlier question. Congratulations on the third printing of your book which has gotten a lot of play. I would imagine that a lot of the audience and a lot of the questions asked about Hope’s life are from people who remember watching The Bob Hope Show. There’s also a new generation that maybe saw videos or have seen him on YouTube. I just wonder, in all these book talks you’ve given, what have you found among younger people who are interested in Hope? What have you been surprised about in talking to people that wouldn’t have seen him live?”
Matt Cooper, Pat Harrison, Richard Zoglin and Karen Tumulty
Zoglin: A: “I think that YouTube is a big help because you can see a lot of stuff on there. I don’t think there’s a huge awareness of Bob, that everybody knows who Bob Hope is. I think they’ve seen clips. There’s the clip from the movie set of Seven Little Foys where he dances with James Cagney on top of a banquet table, which is very popular on YouTube. When I talk to young people, I try to say, ‘Go look at some of the early movies, from the early ’40s.’ In fact, I’m going to the Library of Congress in Culpeper, Virginia tomorrow. That’s where I do all my research, all Bob Hope’s papers are there. They’re doing a weekend of Bob Hope movies and I’m going to introduce one of them. I got to pick the movies; actually, they picked the movies, but I helped. In the early ’40s, late ’30s, Bob Hope really brought something new to movies. He was really a kind of radical. If you look at the early road pictures, the chemistry between Hope and Crosby was so great and fresh at that time; at a time in the ’30s when movie comedy was very stylized with art deco sets and those sort of romantic comedies that were very scripted and stylized. Bob and Bing, they weren’t exactly ad-libbing, but it sure sounded like ad-libbing. They were so natural and quick. Also, they would step out of character, they would make jokes about their outside lives or their movie careers. It’s very modern-looking, if you look at those movies today. That’s what I like to tell younger people, to just put yourself in that era and look at those movies and see how they were really innovative back then.”
Courtesy of Seven Little Foys Production:
Karen Tumuly: Q: “I get two questions. You mentioned Hope and Crosby. Both of them helped launch each other, they both were really accessible, beloved figures who had a dark side. Their feud became a punch line in Bob Hope’s jokes. Did they ever get over it? Did they ever reconcile? Was this real, or was it a joke?”
Zoglin: A: “Their feud was joking. They were friends, though not close friends. They were very different kind of people. They loved working together and they were a great team. The kind of banter between them was part of the act, I think. They were opposites. Bob was very social, outgoing, loved being out there, loved being a star. Bing was more ambivalent about his stardom and more reclusive almost. He left Hollywood midway through his career in movies, to the Bay area. He didn’t show up for things. When they had a big Friars’ Club Roast for Bob in the late ’40s, everybody in Hollywood was there, the whole comedy establishment, Jack Benny, George Burns, George Jessel, and so forth. Bing was supposed to be there and he didn’t show up. He said, ‘You know, my friendship with Bob doesn’t depend on me showing up to events for him.’ That was Bing. It’s interesting that Bob’s little entourage, people who worked with Bob, didn’t like Bing. He was a cold fish. He was standoffish, and Bob was, though hard to get to know well, superficially very friendly and warm. They had an albeit close relationship, but not that close.”
Bing’s 50th anniversary special, aired 3/20/77:
Janet Donovan: (Hollywood on the Potomac) Q: “I want to ask Tom if he found out from Richard anything that he didn’t know about his uncle. And I want to ask Richard if he found out from Tom something he didn’t know?
Tom Malatesta: A: “I would say that Richard found out everything that he was suppose to find out. No, I’m kidding. I think he did a wonderful job on research as I said previously. I didn’t notice anything that was not covered in that book. He was not out to make a sensational story about the man. He was out to do the facts and I think he did a wonderful job on that. I do have a follow up though: It’s about celebrity in 2015 versus celebrity in the 50’s and 60’s, and it seems that in America today we are obsessed with celebrity and with stardom and everything that goes with them or pretends to go with them. And I was kinda interested, while we are talking before, if there was a difference between celebrity then and celebrity now? Could a Hope come along now in the vernacular of 2015 business success? Or is what is prominent and popular today just worlds away?”
Zoglin: A: “I’m not sure how to answer that one, but I’ll try. I think it’s very hard for someone to be the kind of all encompassing star that Bob Hope was, the way that Bob Hope blanketed American culture of the 50’s. I don’t think that anybody can do that today. He really was the American star. He was, as you know, the best known entertainer around the world. He was number one in every medium around the country. I think it was the early 50’s when he is big in television, big in movies … and it’s hardly now like that, it’s much more segmented of course. There are huge people in the rock roll rock world…… a lot of people don’t know … and TV stars, you know cable stars that on shows that are only watched by ten percent of the country I guess. And then I think that we the media gain attention of stars you know by all of the internet and everything in social media. I mean we just know a lot more about the ours celebrities than Bob would have tolerated or been comfortable with. He was able to escape that since that was in an era where you could create your public image and keep your private life separate. He did a great job on that with the help of his entourage. I don’t think he could get away with that today and I don’t know Bob would have used social media, actually he probably would have. The great thing about it was that he really kept moving with the times. He kept looking for the next thing. When he was in radio and TV was coming along, he was a radio and a big movie star and he in 1950 did his first TV special and no other major radio star was doing television. The people who were doing television were people like know Milton Berle who didn’t have a radio career or much of a radio career. Bob Hope wasn’t afraid to go to the next thing and the studio was mad at him because Hollywood studios hated television. It was, you know, it was gobbling up the audience and they didn’t want their stars doing television. Bob Hope didn’t care. He wanted to do it ’cause he knew that’s where the audience is going. So I kind of think that if he were around today he would be experimenting with the new media too. But I don’t think that you can have the kind of all enveloping stars the way Bob Hope was.”
Janet Donovan: Q: “Can we talk about Vietnam more, since it’s the 40th anniversary of the end of the war and he entertained the troops there?”
Courtesy of BobHope.com
Bob Hope Christmas with Marines at Da Nang:
Zoglin: A: “Vietnam, yeah well…. I said you know that I think it was a big sort of turning point for him. He went to Vietnam nine straight years starting in 1964 and it’s really interesting to follow his shows. First of all, they’re great documents of the war. I mean you watch those shows and you see those men, and you see how the crowds grew and the jokes he was doing, and he was not ignoring the unrest back home. He would make jokes about the world protesters, he really was chronicling the times and those shows were how Americans learned about the war. I mean at Christmas, you know those shows got huge audiences. His 1970 Christmas special was the highest rated television program of all time up to that point. I mean, the highest rated show ever and it’s still today the 4th highest rated entertainment show separating out sports. You know it make sounds when it got more audience than the last episode of Mash, last episode of Dallas and the last episode of Roots. And number four is Bob Hope’s 1970 Christmas Special, so you know people in America liked it whether you were for the war or against the war. If you are for the war, you got a patriotic sure boost from watching his shows. If you were against the war you would see those huge crowds of ten thousand men and say what a waste. Whatever, it kind of satisfied everybody and everybody watched. And so I don’t think that it was crucial for those times although he did become a partisan and it sort of damaged him with a lot of generations but he felt he was doing good work and he was. I mean people still went with him, even stars who were kind of opposed to the war…… the ones I talked to like Jill St. John for example who later you know, were anti war people. They went to Vietnam and they said he was not a hawk. He loved the troops and he really did a great job; so unfortunately he got caught up in the political times. But you know, the motives I think were great and the job he did was wonderful.”
Photo courtesy of www.express.co.uk.
Annie Groer: Q: “Was there ever a time that his philandering threatened his marriage or was Dolores, you know, like Tammy Wynette – standby your man? Was that like normal?
Zoglin: A: “Let’s get down to the basic question. I mean Bob’s pretty well known for playing around from what seems like the beginning of his marriage. I think that Dolores had to know. She would never talk about it. She was very very private about those things, but it’s interesting as the years went on and it came to her doing interviews in her later years she was asked about Bob’s womanizing and she kinda dance around the question in a way that you get that she knew what’s going on. But she was very good about it, and I think that … look, you know, it was in a different era and he felt he was entitled but to his credit … I think that they had a good marriage. I think he we could say that. You know they were close. I think they we’re best friends. He never left her, she stood by him. She was a strong a person and did a lot of charity work. I think she was a major adviser for him, a sounding board. So it was a good marriage, if you can separate out that part of it.”
Tom Malatesta: A: “I think to your point specifically it was no secret to anybody that he enjoyed the company of other woman from a very young age. I would say I was in maybe 6 to 7th grade for me when I heard things … people talk. There’s not a lot to hide North Hollywood California. It was a very small community. Saint Charles Borromeo School was a small community where the two people that got the most attention were Annette Funicello and Bob Hope when they drove to the studio down Moorpark Street. So, there were a lot of families who were involved in working at the studio and so there were really no secrets. An observation from a family point of view and I think from the stance of outsiders is that they had some sort of a connection. Delores and Bob were on the same page I don’t know what trade offs went on or any of that stuff but they were clearly a team. He had his job, she had her job and whatever the other stuff was, it was there. It was present. I think like probably anybody else it would be tough for her to deal with it all the time. But somehow it just existed, everybody knew about it and Bob was Bob. I don’t know how else to explain it. I think the kids had a tough time with it. I think my cousins had a very tough time with it and I think that when they were younger you know you kind of live in a bubble, they buy into the dream and then you read the press and you read about all this stuff and then you find out it’s just not reality and you have a tough time with it. Everyone I knew, knew about it. My mother had a very difficult time because she and Dolores were very close, but somehow you just kind of trudge on through.”
Kevin Chaffee: (Senior Editor, Washington Life) Q: “Bob Hope was one of the wealthiest men in Hollywood. I’m wondering about his philanthropic ways.”
Zoglin: A: “He did a lot of things. He donated a lot of land to the the Eisenhower medical center in Palm Springs. He donated a lot of his land to the State of California after a big to do over the environmental issues. He was starting to sell it off to developers, but when that became a political issue in California, he either donated it or sold it way below market value. It was a lot of land, so it preserved a lot of park land in California. In San Fernando, in the valley, in the Santa Monica mountains, mostly there – a little bit in Palm Springs. His philanthropic work was just all through his life. He would drop everything to do a dinner. There were charities like cerebral palsy and stuff like that throughout his whole life that he would always be there for them. Then, of course, the troops, all the work that he did for the troops, unpaid, traveling every Christmas. I think he was the model of philanthropy.”
Matt Cooper: (Contributing Editor, Newsweek): Q: “What was his view of the comedians in the 60s, 70s, 80s? Did he dig Mort Sahl, did he like this Cosby kid? How did he see his heirs?”
Zoglin: A: “Good question. First of all, Bob never said bad words about another performer. He was very nice to performers. He honestly, I think, did like a lot of them. He was a fan of Lenny Bruce, believe it or not. He went to see Lenny Bruce several times. He knew that Lenny’s doing stuff that he would never do, but he appreciated what Lenny was doing. He saw Lenny maybe in the early 60s in Miami, I think, somewhere in Florida, saw him at a club. Bob was there and he went to see him, just sat in the audience near the back. Lenny knew that he was there and introduced him from the audience. At the end of the show, Bob takes off and gets into his car to go and Lenny Bruce, after his set, after he takes his bows, runs out into the parking lot trying to flag down Bob Hope. He says, “Bob, Bob, why don’t you have me on your show?” Bob laughs and says, “Lenny, you’re for educational TV.” He did really like him. I don’t know what he thought of George Carlin, Pryor. I think that he probably wasn’t a huge fan of some of those guys. The counterculture attitude probably turned him off a little. He was clean cut on stage, but boy he could tell dirty stories in private, so it’s not as if Bob Hope was that squeaky clean.”
Matt Cooper, Pat Harrison, Richard Zoglin and Karen Tumutly
Steve Clemons: Q: “I’m going to ask the weirdest question of the night. Did you see the movie The Interview with Seth Rogen and James Franco? If not, then you won’t be able to answer this question. I know this will sound odd, but when I saw The Interview, I thought it was a Bing and Bob movie on the road to North Korea. The exchange between them was very much like that. This is the way my mind works. I did see Seth Rogen and James Franco as the new Bing and Bob, and it’s because I had watched … like Karen I was a DOD dependent I had watched on Armed Forces TV network a lot of Bing and Bob movies over and over and over again. They were drilled into you as you were growing up. I’m just wondering, I’ve never talked to James Franco and Seth Rogen about this, but are there any contemporary entertainers today that actually say they were inspired by Bob Hope, that you know of?”
Zoglin: A: “Sadly, I don’t think you hear many young performers cite Bob Hope. I think the influence is there, but they don’t realize it because he’s a couple of generations back. The two, I wouldn’t call them younger generations, but certainly two people who credit Bob Hope explicitly all the time is Woody Allen, which is surprising. Woody Allen says that his own characters in his early movies, Sleeper and Love and Death and stuff, particularly with Diane Keaton, he always says was patterned after Bob Hope. Bob and Bing. Diane Keaton was the Bing Crosby character to Woody Allen’s Bob. Dick Cavett is a huge fan of Hope’s. I did a great interview with him. He loves my book which is nice. Even David Letterman did an interview back in the 90s, when Bob was still performing. This was in Rolling Stone and Letterman said, ‘It’s sad to see Bob kind of still performing when he’s not really capable of it, because man, did that guy have it.’ He says, ‘I was just watching a couple of his movies.’ So David Letterman would really understand that. I don’t know if Jimmy Fallon knows who Bob Hope is. I really don’t.”
Brendan Kownacki: Q: “I’d like to ask something similar, but different. How do you think that Bob’s friendships within Hollywood, with Bing Crosby and Johnny Carson, some of those other contemporaries, lines up to the type of working relationships we see among people working together often in Hollywood today? Some of the romancers, if you will, of Hollywood, and how does that compares to the 50s up till 2015?”
Zoglin: A: “I’ve heard other people I know who just went to see, not this one, but one of the Seth Rogen movies. It’s Crosby and Hope, I mean it is very similar. That buddy style, I think, is definitely is a precursor and a model for the Seth Rogen gang. I think it’s still around today even more so.”
Steve Clemons: Q: “When Steve Jobs picked Walter Isaacson to do his biography, Walter pondered it for a long time before accepting it and set certain ground rules for that. Did Hope ever actually go out and say, I need to have my legacy and story told by someone and reached out to pick someone to do that?”
Zoglin: A: “He did write a pretty good memoir in the 50s, that he wrote with a ghost writer. That’s kind of his story up till the 50s. Then there was a book in around 2000, I think early 90s. Bill Faith, one of his former publicists, wrote a book with Bob’s cooperation and he had access to the papers and stuff, but it was written by one of his former publicists, so there. I don’t know how much approval Bob had over the book, but it definitely felt a little bit sanitized. I think he was just as happy to keep his life story quiet. I don’t think he’d be particularly happy with the book because it tells too much. He probably didn’t care to have his bad attitude laid out there for everybody to see.”
Michael Kosmides: (CITIES) Q: “Growing up and watching Bob Hope specials on NBC, he was a brilliant comic and he was also very family friendly. Seeing that your previous book was about the 70s stand-up comedy scene, which was the opposite of family friendly, how would Bob Hope have viewed the comedy of people like George Carlin and Richard Pryor?
Zoglin: A: “I think he was very understanding of comedians. I think he liked a lot of comedians. I think he would have been a little put off by some of the counterculture, you know pushing the edge sort of thing. You know who he liked in Las Vegas? He liked to see Shecky Greene. I think he saw that he couldn’t do that kind of stuff, but he appreciated Shecky Greene. I’ll tell you another person he liked. Do you remember SCTV? Dave Thomas did the greatest impression of Bob Hope. Bob Hope is a person very difficult to do impressions of. Hardly anybody did him. Dave Thomas did a great Bob Hope, and Dave Thomas became kind of friendly with Bob in the later years. He once showed Bob his sketches on SCTV, they’d done several sketches where Dave Thomas played Bob Hope, and he showed them to Bob. He sat there nodding, not laughing, but nodding, appreciating. I think he would have been sympathetic to a lot of the current comedy stuff. Those years with Carlin and Pryor, they represented an attitude that he was resistant to, the anti-war anti-counterculture sort of thing. That would have been, maybe, a problem.”
Bob Hope, Entertainer of the Century with Dorothy Lamour and Bing Crosby. Photo credit: Paramount Pictures
Annie Groer: Q: What’s your next book?
Zoglin: A: “I’m trying to come up with it. It’s hard. You know why? Everything after Bob Hope seems like an anticlimax, so it’s a little hard. I might not do a biography again, it might be something else. Anyway, one of the things about doing the book was I really felt this great responsibility to tell the story fairly. I had to work with Tom and family members who helped. Linda Hope was cooperating with me on the book and she was very protective of Bob’s legacy, but let me do my job. That was very nice. I knew that there would be things in the book that she would be uncomfortable with and things that maybe she would prefer not to be in there. Maybe there are things that Tom is uncomfortable with, I don’t know. The idea that I was able to do the book and paint the whole picture, warts and all, and still have the family members happy with the book and feel I did a good job, it’s a very satisfying feeling. As journalists know, when you deal with sources, you have to pump them for all the information you can, but you have to keep your distance and keep your independence. I was able to do that. That’s the most satisfying thing, that I was able to get the cooperation and tell the whole story and still people didn’t feel like I took cheap shots or didn’t tell the story honestly.”
Other guests present were Betsy Rothstein, The Daily Caller, Kristen Holmes, CNN, Lissa August, TIME and Erica Moody, Washington Life. The book was published by Simon and Schuster.
One on One with Richard Zoglin:
