Celebrating 100 Years of Hope

When Bob Hope and his wife, Dolores, were sailing back to America on board the ocean liner Queen Mary at the beginning of September 1939, the mood was subdued. After all, World War II had just broken out.

Hope was not about to take this lying down. He went to the ship's captain and got permission to put on a show that night. He quickly wrote material for it himself. The anecdote was emblematic of everything he was to do to keep the American people, and his native Brits, laughing for the almost seven decades.

Success came gradually but not too easily to Hope, and he was just starting to make his name as a major Hollywood star when war broke out. His national radio show had been launched three years earlier and was doing well, but not that well. It was the war that made him not merely one of the biggest stars in American show business history but a beloved national icon.

The late Otto Friedrich, in his classic history of 1940s Hollywood, "City of Nets," caught the essence of Hope's appeal. He was no comedic "natural" like Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin or Jack Benny. On the radio, he leaned heavily on his team of scriptwriters. And even on the road, the nature of his comedy routines was broad, obvious and predictable: He had a ridiculous nose, he couldn't get the girls, he was more jealous of his friend Bing Crosby than Daffy Duck was of Bugs Bunny. Most of all, he was a coward. It was as popular a routine, and as opposite from the truth, as the warm-hearted and generous Jack Benny's lifelong masquerade as a skinflint.

But none of that mattered, as Friedrich wrote. "Crowds of lonely soldiers greeted every one of his vaudeville turns with wild applause. They loved Hope for coming to see them, and he loved them for loving him."

For an extraordinary six decades, he went on to spend Christmas on the road in the most remote and war-torn corners of the earth. Wherever U.S. soldiers were doing dirty thankless jobs, from Korea to Vietnam to Beirut to the 1991 Gulf War - he was already 88 by then - you would find Bob Hope, cackling about his own cowardice.

He stumbled into his lifelong vocation by accident, as so often happens in life. He started out as just a supporting comedian to the Hollywood big guns - Cary Grant, James Cagney and others - on a three-hour touring show in April 1942, five months after the United States was pulled into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Groucho Marx was the superstar movie comic on the three-month tour. Hope wasn't a top-biller. He had the usually thankless job of just introducing everyone else.

The tour lasted three months and was a huge hit wherever it went in the continental United States. All the other stars, satisfied with doing their patriotic duty, then happily went home to Hollywood. All except Hope.

As Friedrich wrote, he "couldn't stop." In a single month, he entertained at 65 military bases, an average of more than two shows a day, not to mention all the grueling travel in between.

When the American Army went off to fight in Europe, Hope trooped off after them. Again Friedrich: "Hope became a man possessed. He did three or four shows a day, all across Western England, through Wales, in Northern Ireland, then back to London. He made a special effort at hospitals, clowning through ward after ward. Another favorite theme was how terrible his own jokes and performances were. He liked to ask patients, "Did you see our show - or were you sick before?"

The British people, who had seen their own previously beloved entertainer Gracie Fields leave the country for the duration of the war, took their native-born but now all-American Hope to their hearts too, and they've kept him there ever since.

Friedrich quoted actor Burgess Meredith - younger generations of Americans remember him as The Penguin in the 1960s "Batman" comedy TV series - writing to silent movie star Paulette Goddard of how the millions of young American soldiers preparing to fight and die on and after D-Day regarded Hope. "The boys in camp stand in rain, they crowd into halls so close you can't breathe, just to see him. He is tireless and funny, and full of responsibility too, although he carries it gaily and lightly."

Sophisticated literary figures shared this assessment. The great Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Steinbeck concluded: "He has caught the soldier's imagination. He gets laughter where-ever he goes from men who need laughter."

When the GIs went into North Africa and then into Sicily, Hope went in there after them. He survived being dive-bombed by Luftwaffe Junkers, 88 during a show in Palermo. He said the experience reminded him of his first disastrous tour in vaudeville.

It was during a three-month tour during which he entertained in 250 army bases, a killing average of usually three shows a day in different locations, and covered 20,000 miles. At one of them, Friedrich relates, a heckler shouted at the 40-year-old entertainer, "Draft-dodger! Why aren't you in uniform?"

"Stung, hurt, Hope remained the consummate professional. 'Don't you know there's a war on?' he shouted back. 'A guy could get hurt.'"

Happy 100, Mr. Hope.