Funny Man : At 83, Bob Hope Is Still Playing for Laughs

Independent television producer Linda Hope has just been asked to envision a project she might do with her father, comedian Bob Hope. Off the top of her head, she weaves a scenario: It would be about an aging man who makes desperate attempts to attract a younger woman to boost his failing ego.

“I would like to see him expose the softer, gentler side of himself,” she says excitedly. “I would like to see him take risks. His image is very much that of the lady-killer--your basic Loni Andersons and Brooke Shields and all these young girls kissing him. That’s not something that really happens to most people who are 83, 84. It could certainly have humor, but you’d have to be able to see the underbelly, see the pain, for it to really work.”

Has she ever proposed such a story line to him? “Not in as many words,” she admits, sighing. “But I have an idea that he’s really more interested in doing the expected thing. As the saying goes, ‘Why fool around with success?’ ”

She chooses her next words carefully. “What I see when I look at my father is this tremendous gift he’s been given,” she says. “I would love to get a little bit more of it out.”

Elliot Kozak, Bob Hope’s producer (and former agent), says that Hope regularly rejects such roles. “As soon as he gets a script like that, it’s like, no, he doesn’t want it,” Kozak says. “In my opinion he’s too youthful for that; I think it’d hurt his image. Hope is 83, but he looks and acts like he’s 60. I don’t think it would be believable for Bob Hope to play a George Burns role.”

Currently, Hope’s independent production company is working up two half-hour sitcom ideas, plus something they hope to make into a TV movie called “The Snitch.” “It’s about a guy who witnesses a murder and has to leave town because he can identify the killer,” Kozak says. “He has to get a new face, a new identity. He has to color his dog from white to red. . . . It’s funny, funny, funny.”

The Impresario

BOB HOPE IS SITTING in a thatched cabana on the island of Moorea in the South Pacific, chin cupped in one hand, holding a press conference with four reporters and as many photographers. From the neck down he looks like an average American tourist: gray Reeboks, baby-blue socks, khaki pants, and a white shirt, worn untucked, with a brown tiki-print stripe running down one side. His hair, once thick and combed patent-leather smooth, is sparse; what’s left of it is tinted a swampy brown. His razor-sharp profile--the ski-jump nose and shovel-shaped jaw--has softened with age. But from the collar up, he’s still one of the most recognizable men in the world.

Without being prompted, Hope has launched into a description of his first performance for President Franklin D. Roosevelt when something catches his eye. Through the open bamboo doorway of the cottage, Hope spots a shapely Polynesian girl, dressed in a white string bikini bottom and nothing else, wandering down the beach. He does a perfectly timed double take. His eyebrows waggle, and he leans in her direction like a plant straining toward the sun. He smiles now, humming a deep, rumbling version of “Hey, Big Spender,” the tune that taxi dancers sang to their prospective customers in “Sweet Charity.”

Hope’s last “Road” picture was nearly a quarter of a century ago. Bing Crosby is 10 years dead, and Dorothy Lamour is doing dinner theater. This bit of girl-ogling shtick could have played in almost any of Hope’s 58 films. At 83, Hope still adheres to the entertainer’s tenet that the show should never stop. He turns back with a mock frown. “I don’t know whether or not she heard me,” he says.

Hope is on the island for the taping of “Bob Hope’s Tropical Comedy Special From Tahiti,” an hourlong NBC television special airing Feb. 23 and starring Hope, singer John Denver, comedian Jonathan Winters, Miss America of 1986 Susan Akin, actress Morgan Brittany and actor Howard Keel.

Like Hope’s 200-plus other specials--he’s contracted with NBC for at least five hours a year--the show is being assembled with snap-together efficiency. Hope, billed as executive producer, also moonlights as head writer and occasionally as director and choreographer. He advises John Denver to soften his adenoidal bark. He dispatches writers to hastily reshape gags. For the closing segment, Hope redirects the camera angles himself: He has already been filmed walking toward the beach; why not head in the other direction so that the grassy, fog-capped mountains of Moorea serve as a backdrop?

The program will follow a now-institutionalized format: Hope will open with an eight-minute monologue. He’ll close with his theme song, “Thanks for the Memories,” the lyrics reworked to fit the location. (“ Mahuru ,” he’ll say, “means thank you .’ ”) And sandwiched in between, he and the other stars will lip-sync songs to a prerecorded sound track; when they clown around in sketches, they’ll read every line from cue cards.

Hope has often said that the secret to his television success is that “we never do the same show twice.” But in recent years, critics have bemoaned the shows’ predictability and puzzled over their enduring appeal. Even the network has started to worry a bit about Hope’s popularity after his half-century in show business. “We’ve had to be extremely careful in the last several years about where to schedule them,” an NBC executive admits. “There might have been a time when you could broadcast a Bob Hope special any day of the week, any time of the night, and pull in an audience regardless of the competition. Now we’re looking at protective time frames.”

Seven weeks later, Hope’s annual December special, “Bob Hope’s Bagful of Christmas Cheer,” ends up as the highest-rated of 10 holiday specials that week.

The Veteran

“I DON’T THINK I WILL ever retire,” Hope boasts. “When I’m dying, with my last gasp, I’ll say, ‘Let me say a coupla words’ or ‘I just thought of something.’ I think just sitting back and grumping up is the dumbest thing in the world. Your brains go dead.”

His servant, Karl, has just served an afternoon meal of creamed chicken, peas and rice in the dining room of his 15-room home in Toluca Lake. Paintings of the comedian as a younger man, including an oil by Norman Rockwell, fill the walls. Across the car-filled driveway is a guest house that serves as Hope’s two-secretary office, complete with two walk-in vaults storing 49 years of Hope’s comedy material, and a trophy room with glassed-in shelves lined with medals, awards and war mementos.

At home, Hope seems closer to his real age than when he’s working. He avoids the starchy toupees and too-hip clothing that some aging entertainers favor. But for the camera, he wears a thin layer of tan pancake makeup, and feathery brush strokes on the top of his balding head give the illusion of hair.

“I can tell you this,” Hope says, leaning in conspiratorially. “But not for. . . .” He points to the tape recorder. He repeats a slightly blue joke that his agent, Frank Rio, recently told him. At the punch line, he roars so enthusiastically that it sets off a coughing fit, but his flinty, brown eyes are fixed, gauging the response of his listener. His joke-telling comes complete with calculated pauses and classic Hope tics: You can almost imagine him adjusting his tie or smoothing his hair.

“I can’t do dirty words (in my act),” he says. “Sure, I can get away with a ‘making love’ because audiences today are subjected to such material. On cable you can hear things you don’t believe. Not long ago I saw Richard Pryor doing ‘Live on Sunset Strip.’ Do I have to tell you there’s a lot of stag humor in that? When I was in vaudeville, you couldn’t say damn . They wouldn’t let you do it. They had censors.”

During Hope’s radio days, he regularly ran afoul of censors. Four years ago, NBC had him excise a cocaine joke from one of his specials. “They were very tough on that. But we don’t even put ‘em in anymore,” he says. “I don’t think it’s good for kids to hear people laughing about drug jokes.”

Does the same go for ethnic humor?

“No,” Hope explains patiently. “You don’t do that because you don’t want to offend anybody that way. If you offend a certain part of the population, you can really get in trouble.” For example? “You know how popular Polack jokes were?” he says. “You’d walk (on stage) and say, ‘I wanna tell you a Polack joke,’ and some guy in the audience would say, ‘Wait a minute. I’m a Polack.’ I’d say, ‘OK, I’ll tell ‘em slower.’ ” Hope laughs, slapping his hand on the table. “Funny jokes. But they got on me; they got on Texaco (his longtime sponsor). They don’t have any sense of humor about that. So I had to eliminate all that stuff. But you don’t miss it after a while. After all, you wouldn’t rap an Italian; you wouldn’t rap a Chinaman; you wouldn’t rap a Mexican. They’d jump all over you.”

Last July 4, Hope quipped to a roomful of $1,000-a-plate guests aboard the yacht Princess that the Statue of Liberty had AIDS. He said: “Nobody knows if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island ferry.” Then he performed the cancan with Gen. William C. Westmoreland and former New York Gov. Hugh L. Carey.

“Oh, that ,” Hope says, when asked about the joke, which provoked a flurry of angry letters in newspapers across the country. When pressed he admits: “I made a boo-boo. It was like an intimate thing, and somebody there reported it. But I was commenting on the disgust of that joke. I said, ‘Can you imagine anybody telling that joke?’ But it was kinda sneaky on my part,” he adds, with a sheepish grin. “I thought the joke was funny.”

In the warm afternoon light, Hope suddenly looks flushed. He peels off his white cardigan. “You know, I’ve worked with so many gays over my years on Broadway, knew so many of them, liked so many of them.” He brightens, as if reminiscing about a better time. “I used to do a joke about this chorus boy that married the chorus girl, and after their marriage they went to their apartment, and she took off her wedding gown and he put it on. It was a big laugh. In those days they didn’t have the feeling they do now,” he says, looking tired again. “It’s one of those things, (gays) are fighting back.”

The Patriot

FEW SUBJECTS SEEM to open Bob Hope up as much as his misty, heartfelt recollections of his years of doing shows for the armed forces. They are something he calls “the emotional part of my life.” His stories abound with life-endangering airplane flights to remote islands and lonely soldiers desperate for distraction. “Bye,” Hope ends one anecdote, miming a serviceman’s mournful wave. “Bye, bye. . . . And you just wanted to cry. They’d sat through rain and everything, and now we’re leaving ‘em there.”

The USO Christmas Tours didn’t begin until 1948, with the Berlin Airlift. But his first troop show came seven years earlier, when a radio producer persuaded a reluctant Hope to entertain GIs at March Field near Riverside. Hope knew a captive audience when he saw one; he started traveling every weekend to nearby bases. In December, the United States entered World War II. “Now,” Hope says, “it was dramatic .”

In 1954, while performing with actors William Holden and Anita Ekberg in Thule, Greenland, Hope began the tradition of taping the shows, then selling them as specials to NBC. Today, no one is entirely clear on who paid for what. Hope says he paid all production costs. But in 1959 a clause was added to his contract: Charges to him for services by NBC technicians were frozen at 1959 rates. The USO says it occasionally paid the actors a small per diem. And everyone agrees that the Pentagon paid for transportation and most lodgings. In the end, Hope’s publicist insists, the comedian lost money on the shows--$975,826.52 from 1956 to 1973, to be exact.

One common misconception about the USO specials is that they raised money for the organization. But Hope did help raise $10 million to build the Bob Hope USO Center in Washington, and last year he donated to the organization all proceeds from his best-selling book, “Confessions of a Hooker: My Lifelong Love Affair With Golf.” “I can tell you one thing,” says Kevin McCarthy, the USO’s director of communications. “Bob Hope has donated a lot of money to the USO. How exactly it was donated, I don’t really know.”

Hope’s initial USO tours made him a national hero. But his trips to Vietnam in the early 1970s provoked widespread criticism. “Until then,” says William Faith, author of “Bob Hope: A Life in Comedy,” “(the public) saw him as a kind of elder statesman without a portfolio, someone hopping around the world being a good ambassador. Then, instead of insisting he was a comedian, taking potshots where he thought they belonged, he became fairly partisan. Suddenly, he was an ambassador for a single cause. That’s where I think it weakened him. I think the cause that Hope espoused became so controversial and was perceived by so many people as immoral.”

When Hope is asked whether during that period he felt betrayed by his fans, he grows agitated. “Well, you felt kind of sorry for these people that were doing that. They couldn’t have been very patriotic. We were absolute heroes until the Vietnam War, until they lost in the Tet Offensive. Then people said, ‘Get out of Vietnam.’ They even asked why did I go? As though the guys weren’t there anymore,” he says, choking with anger. “That’s when the guys really needed it. Because there was some doubt in their minds that people back here knew what the hell was going on.”

Did anyone ever criticize him to his face?

“I had a couple of people call me a warmonger,” he says acidly. “They sent me a note that said, ‘You’re our No. 1 target.’ I gave it to the FBI, and they chased them out of town. They were all drunks, you know--bums. Probably guys that were defectors or something.” Hope was distraught when a teen-ager once approached him while he was leaving an ice cream store in Van Nuys and asked him if it was true that he sponsored the Vietnam War. “I said: ‘Where did you hear that?’ and he said: ‘Oh, I read it somewhere.’ And I said, ‘Let me tell you something, son. Did you ever see my show? I took laughs to Vietnam.’ ”

He is asked how he would have ended the Vietnam War.

“If the White House had just let all the B-52s in Thailand, all the B-52s in Guam and all the Air Force go in,” he says, “they would have won the war in 10 days and saved 3 million lives.” Then he adds glumly, “ I was anti-Vietnam. Who the hell wanted to go to Vietnam?”

The Millionaire

BOB HOPE STRUCK it rich in 1949, when he, Bing Crosby and William Moncrief Sr. invested in what turned out to be a 100- barrel-an-hour oil well. Hope used his third of the oil sales--$3.4 million--to buy real estate.

Through the years, Hope has found published claims of his wealth to be exaggerated. In 1967, Time magazine said Hope’s fortune was “approaching $500 million.” In 1983, Forbes estimated it at $200 million. Hope finally challenged Richard Behar, a Forbes staff writer. “If my estate is worth over $50 million,” Hope said, “I’ll kiss your ass.”

Behar located 86 parcels of Hope-owned land in Southern California. Hope’s most commercially valuable land holding turned out to be a 57,557-square-foot lot across from NBC, where Hope once planned to erect a museum of his memorabilia. (Hope now says that he’s assembling two Bob Hope museums--one in Palm Springs, the other in Orlando, Fla.) His Palms Springs home, which is roughly the size of the Cinerama Dome, has been valued at $5 million to $6 million.

Though Behar verified that Hope is worth “at least $115 million,” he still suspects that there were holdings he didn’t discover. “I feel in my heart,” Behar says, “that he’s probably worth more. But then again, I didn’t find it.”

Behar’s total didn’t include the estimated $4 million Hope receives annually for his NBC specials. Nor did it include the paychecks from the various corporations--from Amway to Texaco to California Federal--for which Hope gives commercial endorsements. Then there are the 100-plus personal appearances he does every year: Hope charges $75,000 apiece for his speeches and lectures and for about one-third of his charity performances.

“I’ll tell you something,” Hope says. “I had a hell of a time here when (Forbes) came out with that $200 million. I had relatives come out from every part of the country; they were eating my hedge out front.” Later, Hope produces a thick manila folder bound with a rubber band. On the front it says “Money Requests.” The list of charities that he contributes to fills four typewritten, singled-spaced pages: United Cerebral Palsy, the American Diabetes Assn., the Boy Scouts of America, the American Cancer Society. More appeals for donations flood in every day.

When asked for a ballpark estimate of his net worth, Hope smiles. “I’m fine until June,” he says. “And I don’t go to ballparks. But I’m OK; don’t worry about me.”

The Brother

WHEN BOB HOPE TALKS about his life, it is generally articulated as a series of quick anecdotes. But what comes through in conversations about his past is an occasional bitterness: With his steel-trap memory, no slight has faded.

Hope’s mother, Avis Townes, was a concert singer before she got married. His father, William Henry Hope, was a stonemason and an amateur comedian. Bob was born May 29, 1903, in Eltham, England, and was given the name Leslie Townes Hope. He was the second-youngest of seven brothers. His only sister, Avis Emily, was lost while still in her infancy. “She died before I was born. They ate her, I think,” Hope jokes.

In 1907, the family moved to Cleveland. Hope still remembers being processed through Ellis Island. “I wouldn’t let them vaccinate me,” he recalls. “I ran all over the ship. Woke the cattle up and everything.”

All the brothers held down part-time jobs, and early on, young Leslie displayed a knack for entertaining. He was the kind of boy who would win contests imitating Charlie Chaplin. He had inherited his singing voice from his mother and picked up tap-dancing at Sojack’s, the local dancing school.

When Hope was a sophomore, he dropped out of high school. For a while he tried working as an amateur prizefighter under the name Packy East, but his beefy competitors were too much for the skinny teen-ager. After a few beatings, he switched to teaching dance. His first girlfriend, Mildred Rosequist, was one of his most promising students. The two of them worked up an act, but Rosequist’s mother forbade her daughter to go on the road with him. “Twenty, no, 30 years later, Mildred came to see me at NBC,” he recalls, gloating. “After she saw the show, she came backstage and said, ‘If my mother was alive today, I’d slap her right in the mouth.’ ”

Hope left home at 21 and landed a job in a touring musical comedy called “Hurley’s Jolly Follies.” While in elementary school, he had changed his first name from the flowery Leslie to Lester, to keep his classmates from teasing him. Now he altered his name once more; “Bob” would look better on a theater marquee. In 1927, on his own again, he got his first big break as a chorus boy in a Broadway revue called “Sidewalks of New York.”

By 1933, Hope was starring in a Broadway musical comedy called “Roberta” and was having a heady romance with the high life--a chauffeur-driven Pierce-Arrow, a Central Park West apartment and a seemingly endless stream of showgirls. But Hope says that his fickle heart was tamed the moment he saw Dolores Reade--a nightclub singer with a smoky voice and a heart-shaped face--step on-stage at the Vogue Club. They were married in Erie, Pa. After a two-day honeymoon, he was back on-stage.

As his career continued to build steam, Hope spent less and less time at home while Dolores raised their four adopted children--Linda and Anthony were adopted in 1939, Nora and son Kelly in 1946. But Hope enjoyed the stability of a place he could return to. His mother, his staunchest fan, had died shortly before his marriage, and when asked if his brothers provided him with moral support, he turns flip. “Supportive?” he says. “They were thrilled because I was supportive of them.

“I was the only one who had that kind of success,” he says. “They were all working pretty good, but I got lucky and got into the money pretty fast. Important money.” Included in Hope’s litany of favorite tales are stories of his brothers’ attempts to exploit his fame. “After I became a hit, my second-oldest brother (Jim) tried to get into show business, a comedy act. But he didn’t have the material,” he says, stifling a giggle. “When I played up in Spokane and he was playing in another theater, they billed him as ‘Bob Hope’s brother: Jim.’ ” Did he help his brother out? “Yeah, I helped him out,” Hope says. “I helped him out of show business.”

Despite his success on stage and in radio, Hope at first fared less well in Hollywood. In 1930, he had an unsuccessful audition for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. “I thought, ‘Who needed the place? It’s for oranges,’ ” he says. “I was mad from that time until 1936, when they came to see me in the ‘Ziegfeld Follies’ singing, ‘I Can’t Get Started With You’ to this beautiful redheaded gal named Eve Arden. They said, ‘How would you like to come out and do a picture?’ ” His feature debut, “The Big Broadcast of 1938,” went so well that he stayed.

Hope was 37 when he and Bing Crosby were cast in their first team comedy, “The Road to Singapore.” It was in the “Road” series that Hope would develop his breezy screen presence--a light-footed physical confidence and spontaneous-sounding delivery that would inspire a generation of imitators.

Hope keeps a Kareem-sized ersatz Oscar statue in his trophy room, as well as his two “special” awards, two “honorary” awards and a Gene Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the motion picture academy. Not one of the awards is for a particular film performance. “I’ve made more comedies than anybody,” he says angrily. “Why do they have a category for everything except comedy? There are only three or four pictures that would come in for any serious consideration: ‘Facts of Life,’ which I made with Lucy (Ball), ‘Beau James,’ ‘The Seven Little Foys’ and maybe ‘Monsieur Beaucaire.’ But nobody ever submitted them. You know, darling, you really have to go on a campaign for that.”

Does he feel badly about being overlooked?

“I should say not,” he says. “I got the money. How do I justify it? It’s work, and I got the money.”

The Private Man

PUBLICIST KEN KANTOR suggests that the comedian give a tour of his house. It’s like a docent-led excursion, with Hope walking energetically ahead, pointing out rooms and sharing bits of information. The living room, bedroom and study are all displayed with the same brisk efficiency one might accord a historical landmark.

He purchased the blocklong, six-acre estate in 1938, when Bing Crosby still lived around the corner. The home is modestly decorated, exuding the tidy, uninhabited ambiance of a first-class airline lounge at LAX. Chairs encircle two tables, situated in separate corners of the room, forming conversation islands. On a low coffee table are neatly fantailed issues of magazines, including some with Hope on the cover. Upstairs the atmosphere is more lived-in. Presents from a recent trip to Japan lie half unwrapped on the floor of Hope’s office. A comfortable-looking ottoman in the bathroom has a deep dip in its orange cushion. A tiny plastic sign that hangs from a doorknob bears the motto: “Shhh, Bob Is Sleeping.”

Near the end of the tour is a tiny anteroom with photograph-covered walls. “Here I am with Eisenhower, with Kennedy,” he says. Then he holds out a fistful of mail, picture post cards from Phyllis Diller; Hope has received more than 200 of them. One shows a photograph of a steaming geyser: “You can always tell when I’m cooking,” is scrawled on the back.

Hope leads the way back into the dining room, his footsteps echoing loudly in the cavernous hallway. One can’t help but wonder how many times through the years he must have given this tour to virtual strangers. How does one survive a constant lack of privacy?

“He’s a real simple person,” Kozak says. “In other words, he has everything. He doesn’t have to drive a Rolls-Royce to prove that he has success. He drives a Chrysler because Lee Iacocca sends him a new car every year. When he flies, he never complains about the food--like, if there’s not enough or it’s not good.

“This is a perfect example: I booked him on a one-nighter date in Kalamazoo, Mich., in the winter. The week before, I said to him, ‘Do you want me to go with you?’ and he said, ‘What for? It’s bad enough that I have to go, but why do you want to go?’ And he got on that plane to Kalamazoo, Mich., all by himself.

“Now, one of my oldest friends is Don Rickles, and he asked me one time, ‘How many people does Bob take with him when he goes on a trip?’ I said, ‘It depends. Sometimes none, sometimes one, sometimes two.’ And Rickles said, ‘What are you talking about? I take 10 or 12 people, and I don’t make half the kind of money Bob Hope makes.’ And I said, ‘You’re not the kind of man Bob Hope is. There’s a difference.’ ”

In the old Hollywood tradition, Hope has a carefully presented and protected image. It’s a smoke screen with a twist: While most performers prefer to distinguish between their two personalities--a private one and the characters they play--Hope has combined his personas. “The remarkable thing about Bob Hope,” it says in his press bio, “is that his private self is almost exactly the same as his stage presence.”

To maintain that image, Hope currently has at least five publicists working for him. He has a trio of comedy writers, two of whom wear beepers and are on 24-hour call so that he can request fresh material any time of the day or night, from anywhere in the world. One of the writers, Bob Mills, says: “There are two things he doesn’t skimp on: writers and publicists. Publicists are the lifeblood of the business, and writers are the lifeblood of his act.”

Mills, Gene Perret and Martha Bolton script Hope’s television specials and speeches for his personal appearances, as well as nearly everything else that bears the Hope imprint: eulogies, lectures, his bylined articles--everything. Since the very first “Road” picture, Hope has continued his habit of having his writers punch up his scripted dialogue with wisecracks and witty asides, occasionally without the director’s knowledge.

Curiously enough, despite Hope’s unmistakably colorful past, no one has ever written his unauthorized biography. Perhaps it’s because the public’s appetite for celebrity gossip has been satisfied by Hope himself. He has nine “self-penned” books, co-written with authors or ghosted by his writers. He’s currently working on a 10th volume, called “You Belong to the Public.” Like his stand-up routines, his biographies are self-deprecating and glib, yet not particularly revealing.

“He’s an extremely private man,” says close friend Phyllis Diller. “He doesn’t tell (the public) anything personal. Ever.” Does Diller agree with the one-persona theory? “Oh, that’s true, too,” she says. “You just can’t get it all. In other words, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

The Father

“I THINK WE MISSED HIM a lot when we were growing up,” Linda Hope says of her father. “The thing about him was that when he was there, the quality of time was so terrific that it did make you miss him when he wasn’t there.”

Linda Hope’s fondest childhood memories are of the years her father worked at nearby Paramount Studios. “We had a breakfast room on the ground floor that looked out on a little patio,” she says. “Every morning he’d go out the glass door, do a ‘Shuffle Off to Buffalo,’ then he’d be gone.”

In 1976, after Linda Hope’s six-year marriage to a television producer ended in divorce, her father offered her a job developing projects for Hope Enterprises Inc. Linda, who had studied film at UCLA, USC and in Paris, worked five years as a vice president and producer. Even though she left in 1981 due to “creative differences,” she remembers it as “a special time that I was really grateful to have had. I got to know him much better. I got to know him as a person more when I was working with him than I ever did in any of the other years.”

Asked whether she can pinpoint a specific incident during which she suddenly saw her father in a realistic light, she says: “One time we were out doing a show, taping in Palm Springs in the heat of the summer. My father had been sick right before that, which he never usually is. He was about 79 at the time, and I looked over. It was very, very hot, and there he was with no cold towel, no umbrella, nothing. All of a sudden I thought, ‘This is my dad. He’s out there and somebody should be taking care of him.’ I tried to do what I could for him, got him back to his trailer, cooled him off a bit.”

Linda Hope falters briefly before continuing with her story. “You know, sometimes, living with a legend, you don’t think of the simple, little things. I remember that incident as a time when I was touched by the fact that he was a human being.”

The Survivor

SOMEONE HAS TRACED two hearts on the mist-covered windshield of Bob Hope’s gold-colored Chrysler Fifth Avenue. It’s late at night, and Hope has just completed an evening walk. The winter air is crisp, and Hope is recovering from one of his rare head colds. Tonight he’s dressed like a small boy bundled up for the snow. To ward off the chill, he’s wearing, he says, “a T-shirt, a golf shirt and two sweaters,” in addition to black leather gloves and a royal-blue golf cap pulled low over his ears.

In 1966, Hope suffered the first of five eye hemorrhages, and since then he has carefully monitored his own physical condition. Along with playing golf, taking multiple vitamins and having a daily massage, Hope walks a mile or so every evening as part of his health regime. He is always accompanied by his night watchman or a friend. One might imagine these regular constitutionals as the time for contemplation, the few private moments that Hope can secure at the end of his always-busy day. Instead, the stroll is completed briskly in less than 30 minutes, with Hope humming “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and rushing across crosswalks at yellow lights. He still has time, though, to display an actor’s superstitiousness. “Bread and butter,” he says, grabbing a companion’s elbow to keep that person from walking around a telephone pole.

If anything is on his mind, it’s his friend Ronald Reagan. “I thought I treated him pretty good, doncha think?” he says. Hope’s Christmas special aired earlier in the evening, and because “everybody’s doing jokes, and I thought my jokes wouldn’t hurt him personally,” Hope had taken a few mild potshots at the Iran- contra scandal.

“I can’t believe what’s happened to this area around here,” Hope marvels, nodding at the passing houses. “It used to be a little rural place.” Tonight, he’s taking a walking tour of the Christmas decorations in his neighborhood. Tooling up and down the streets, he points out the Tudor house Bing Crosby once owned and the home where “What’s-his-name? The guy with the Polaroid”--”James Garner?”--”yeah, James Garner used to live.”

It has been a difficult month for the funnyman. Though he seems loath to discuss the topic of death, he admits, “It was pretty awful, I’ll tell ya. Five people died: Scatman Crothers, Cary Grant, Jerry Colonna. Now who were the others?”

“Horace Heidt and Desi Arnaz?”

“Yeah,” Hope says.

Hope showed his sorrow, like everything else in his life, in public. On Nov. 25, the evening of Colonna’s burial service, three network cameras and a handful of photographers covered the proceedings at St. Mel’s Catholic Church in the San Fernando Valley. Just before Hope began his prepared eulogy, the quiet was broken by the click of television lights snapping on. When he returned to his pew, the funereal silence was disrupted once again: Grief-stricken and perhaps a little confused, the mourners had broken into applause.