WITH LAUGHTER, THERE’S HOPE : At 81, Comedian Claims the Keys to Longevity Are a Hectic Pace and Lots of Gags

Norman Cousins has made a crusade of the gospel that laughing is powerfully curative when you’re gravely ill. What now needs some celebration is the evident fact that creating laughter is the biggest aid to longevity since the water Ponce de Leon sampled in Florida.

“George Burns,” Bob Hope said the other day, “is thinking of running for President. He worries that it’s dangerous to have a kid running the country.”

Burns was 89 in January and maintains a performance pace that might tire a man half his age. “He’s just signed a new contract in Vegas for five years . . . with options,” Hope says.

Hope himself will be 82 in May, but he doesn’t look or act within 15 years of it. A week ago, he played nine holes in the Andy Williams Open in San Diego, flew to Tucson to do a show with Roy Clark that night (returning a guest-shot favor), flew on to Tulsa to work a Children’s Care Center benefit, dashed off to Little Rock to perform at a banquet for multimillionaire Sam Walton of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (“When E. F. Hutton talks, Sam yawns”), went on to Orlando the next morning to entertain at the dedication of the new Wyndham Hotel (“perfect casting--I’m 90% wind and 10% ham”), flew early the next (Sunday) morning to Sun City, Ariz., for a morning rehearsal and an afternoon performance, then at last came home to Los Angeles to start another week’s schedule.

On the past holiday Monday at least six secretaries were busy at Hope’s Toluca Lake complex, the phones ringing off the hook. Hope, looking pleased and calmed by the busyness, sat to a quiet lunch in the bay window overlooking his private greensward on which he practices pitch shots.

His complaint about the week of travel was that he’d missed his daily golf and had gained five pounds after having fought his weight down to 172, the lowest for him in 20 years.

“Bob Hope,” Burns observed at a benefit they both worked in Palm Springs recently, “will live to be a hundred--if he’s booked.”

“Oh, it’s true, it’s true,” Hope says; “all us old vaudevillians love to work and have to work. In the Springs that night, George did an hour. An hour! He was sensational. He sang a little, he told jokes, he danced--actually he sways a little. I said, ‘George, how can you do it? Where d’you get the energy to stand up there for an hour?’ He said, ‘Bob, I couldn’t do it if I didn’t get laughs.’ And that’s it, that’s the secret--that laughter is sweet medicine.”

The Palm Springs benefit, for the Eisenhower Medical Center, was in general something of a fiscal landmark. The tickets were $5,000 a couple--$25,000 if you attended a cocktail party at the Walter Annenberg estate before the dinner.

“I said it was the first benefit I’d ever heard of that was listed on the New York Stock Exchange,” Hope says. “I was late to the cocktail party and only had one glass of champagne. That worked out to $2,000 a bubble.”

Hope still does about 80 days of appearances a year, including annual stints of four to seven days in St. Louis; Westbury, N.Y.; Long Island; Valley Forge and Cleveland. He did five dates in England last year; a sixth was canceled by a bomb threat the week that another bomb narrowly missed Margaret Thatcher during the Tory party conference in Brighton.

His indefatigable writers provide topical and local one-liners for each show, but his act is built around special songs, including “I’m Available,” written for him by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston, and another called “Lazy.” He ends, as he has for 40 years now, with “Thanks for the Memory.” (He likes to remind you that he introduced another song that has become a standard: “I Can’t Get Started With You,” made famous later by Bunny Berigan.)

Hope continues to do regular television specials and indeed has one coming up Sunday night (on NBC, Channel 4 locally, at 8), with George Burns, Morgan Fairchild and the witchy Elvira among his guests in a series of skits parodying television. In one, Hope will play a second Mr. T, challenging the genuine Mr. T, another of the guests.

He is off to Florida at week’s end for a Parkinson’s disease benefit, to Texas at the start of March for an event in aid of the Bob Hope High School for handicapped kids. Hope could keep fairly constantly in motion just visiting the schools, hospital wings and other venues that are named for him, including the handsome Bob Hope Theater at Southern Methodist University, where he did a long seminar on comedy last year that was taped and is now being edited for use in other classrooms by Hope’s daughter Linda.

In the end, if it is the lure of laughter and applause that keeps Hope incessantly in motion (he is described in print as the richest entertainer in history), it is also, you have to believe, his pride in his own absolute professionalism.

Remembering the Paramount movies, Hope said the other day, “I was lucky. I got a break with very good stories. Construction is everything. I’ve been working now on a couple of projects with writers, and I keep saying, ‘Let’s fix up the back story. It’s got to be strong. You can’t walk on cake.’ ”

Hope shook his head. “You know ‘The Ghost Breakers’ in 1940 did $9 million, and Paramount was so happy that they broke out the champagne. And what did I see the other day that ‘Ghostbusters’ had done? $200 million. Can you believe that? Times do change.”

Actually, I’m not so sure it’s the times; I think it’s the money. There aren’t many verities, but Hope manages to be one of the few, tirelessly saucy in his 80s as he was as the new boy in “Roberta” half a century ago.

“So many actors are thinking of running for President,” Hope says, winding up lunch with a joke, “that they may put a marquee on the White House, with ‘Now Playing’ on it.”