Comic of the century Bob Hope 1903–2003 BY STEVE VINEBERG

Bob Hope died on July 27, two months after his 100th birthday. His longevity wasn’t a surprise, any more than Irving Berlin’s was. (Berlin left us in 1989, also after making centenarian status.) These men were such stalwart Yankee institutions — the man who wrote "White Christmas" and "God Bless America," the man whose USO tours and NBC Christmas specials arced across several generations of servicemen and viewers — that in our minds their lives had long ago taken the shape of the 20th century. For my generation, who can just about remember the first TV sets our families ever bought, Hope represented the great cultural shift from radio to television. He first appeared on radio in 1935, and his weekly show, for Pepsodent, debuted three years later and finally shut down in 1955, four years after he’d begun to appear on the tube. He was an icon of our TV-addicted childhoods, like Sid Caesar or Jack Benny; then later, in the unhappy Vietnam years, he was the most visible icon of the conservative wing of show business, whose response to this war was, to our fury, no different from its response to World War II. We loved him because he linked us to our early pop-cultural consciousness; we hated him for an unchanging, uncomplicated patriotism that he had the bad taste to flaunt when it wasn’t fashionable. These elements were, of course, two faces of the same coin. Finally, he outlived our disgruntlement with him for continuing to be just who he was.

His style as a host didn’t vary much when he moved into television, though it’s more of a kick to listen to his early radio programs, when his voice was higher and lighter and his patter was speedier. His banter with his guests was genial and clubby — they cracked each other up. It was also a game of one-upsmanship, played with insults. Every late-night talk-show host from Johnny Carson on has offered what amounts to a variation on the style and tone Hope pioneered. Hope was more democratic, however: his writers supplied barbs for everyone on the show, not just him. Letterman has always needed to look smarter than his guests, but Hope’s appeal depended just as much on his being shown at a disadvantage, put upon by every celebrity who stepped onto his stage. It was an extension of his constantly besieged movie persona. In the Road pictures, which began early in his Hollywood career and remain the most beloved of his screen forays, it was always the laid-back, drawling lounge lizard Crosby who got the girl (Dorothy Lamour) while Hope raced around like a maniac, blinking, and whooping and making horrified faces. He might be as brash and hard-boiled and quick on his dogs as a traveling salesman, but he often played the patsy.

Hope came to movies from the New York stage. Warner Brothers starred him in a series of two-reelers in the mid ’30s, and those led to his Paramount contract in 1938. But by then he was already a Broadway musical-comedy star. There are so few songs in his later movie comedies that it’s easy to forget he originated the role of Huckleberry Haines in Jerome Kern’s Roberta, which Astaire played in the movie, or that he shared the stage with Jimmy Durante and Ethel Merman in Cole Porter’s Red, Hot and Blue.

You get a glimpse of that young, gawky Hope, a goofball with romantic ardor, in the 1934 short "Paree, Paree," a streamlined version of the Porter show Fifty Million Frenchmen where he plays the American-in-Paris part William Gaxton had done on the stage. His hair is slicked back like a jazz-age gigolo’s, and he towers awkwardly over his leading lady, Dorothy Stone, as if the difference in their heights embarrassed him. But when he sings "You Do Something to Me" in his soft, slightly tremulous tenor, tossing it off as if someone had just happened to sit down at the piano at a cocktail party and struck up a tune he knew the words to, you can tell he’d sung on Broadway.

Some of the brightest moments in his movie career were musical ones — "Thanks for the Memory" in his first full-length picture, The Big Broadcast of 1938 (the song became his theme), the sprightly "How’d You Like To Love Me?" with Martha Raye in College Swing (1938), the deliciously silly title song from Road to Morocco (1942), and later "Buttons and Bows," which he serenades Jane Russell with, accompanying himself on accordion, in the comic Western The Paleface (1948). In The Seven Little Foys (1955), playing vaudeville’s Eddie Foy, he gets to sing the old Bert Williams specialty "Nobody," and in the film’s highlight he trades soft-shoe licks with Jimmy Cagney, who does a cameo as George M. Cohan.

He made dozens of movies: nutty ones in the late ’30s with the likes of Raye and W.C. Fields and George Burns and Gracie Allen, seven Road pictures with Bing and Dotty, vehicles throughout the ’40s that were often immensely likable and in which he was often hilarious. The balance of his comedies was considerably worse in the ’50s, when he starred repeatedly in stinkers like Here Come the Girls and Paris Holiday, and in the ’60s just about everything he turned up in — Critic’s Choice, Call Me Bwana, I’ll Take Sweden, Boy, Did I Get the Wrong Number — was nightmarishly awful.

But when you look at the movies Paramount built around him in the first decade of his Hollywood tenure, it’s remarkable how many were fun and how many directions they took him in. The period farces (1944’s The Princess and the Pirate, 1946’s Monsieur Beaucaire) never worked out too well, though the image of the inescapably contemporary Hope in wigs and tight velvet pants was good for a few giggles. And he was far too pragmatic a presence for the heavy-handed Damon Runyon whimsies he was sometimes mired in (1949’s Sorrowful Jones, 1951’s The Lemon Drop Kid). But he played nervous-wreck roles like the millionaire hypochondriac in Never Say Die (1939), where he’s saved by that joyous life force, Martha Raye, and nearly-straight romantic-hero roles in movies like The Ghost Breakers (1940), opposite Paulette Goddard. The latter isn’t much of a film, but her working-class earthiness is a tart match for his sardonic one-liner style.

Hollywood had a fondness for mixing genres in the late ’30s and the ’40s, so Hope got to star in comic haunted-house pictures (The Ghost Breakers was a follow-up to his first outing with Goddard, 1939’s The Cat and the Canary) and comic spy thrillers (1943’s They Got Me Covered, 1942’s My Favorite Blonde — which reworks The 39 Steps and features the same blonde, Madeleine Carroll) and comic noirs (1947’s My Favorite Brunette, which is a very funny parody of a Philip Marlowe thriller). One of his most enjoyable pictures, the 1941 Caught in the Draft, is a sort of proto-Stripes, with Hope as a movie star who joins the Army to win the girl (Lamour), taking his agent (Lynne Overman) and his assistant (the irresistible Eddie Bracken) with him for company. Caught in the Draft was released months before Pearl Harbor, so it’s blissfully devoid of wartime sentimentality — Hope inevitably redeems himself with some 11th-hour heroics, but he never goes soft. The movie’s a forgotten classic. Every now and then he tried his hand at straight acting: in The Seven Little Foys, as Gentleman Jimmy Walker in Beau James (1957), opposite Lucille Ball in The Facts of Life (1960). It wasn’t his strong suit, but he was better at it than he’s gotten credit for — he wasn’t afraid to go for Eddie Foy’s beer-soaked sour-spiritedness.

And though it’s exquisitely stylized — high comedy — his finest moment on screen has real emotional resonance. It shows up in that delirious merry-go-round of a movie, The Big Broadcast of 1938, which settles down long enough for Hope and Shirley Ross to sit at the bar of a ship and indulge in a musical reminiscence of the topsy-turvy marriage that fell apart when he cheated on her. "Thanks for the Memory," with its bittersweet Ralph Rainger melody and its sophisticated, Noël Coward–ish lyrics by Leo Robin, is a brittle, weren’t-we-fools duet tinged with erotic longing and authentic regret. When Ross sings, in her elegant, champagne-and-tears contralto, about "letters with sweet little secrets/That couldn’t be put in a day wire," Hope counters, "Too bad it all had to go haywire," just brushing the emotion. He does the same again when, in answer to her "We said goodbye with a highball," he confesses, "Then I got as high as a steeple/But we were intelligent people." By the end of the song, she can’t stand it any longer: she breaks down, unable to finish the last phrase, and he consoles her in his arms: "Darling, I know, I know." That’s the Bob Hope I’ll always love best.