HOPE, Leslie Townes ("Bob")

(b. 29 May 1903 in Eltham, England), stand-up comedian, comic actor, philanthropist, beloved entertainer, successful television performer, noted traveling entertainer of American servicemen and service-women in times of war and times of peace, and recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal (1962) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1969).

Hope was the fifth of seven sons of William Henry Hope, a stonemason, and Avis (Townes) Hope, a singer. In 1907 the family moved to Cleveland. Hope disliked school and left Fairmont High School when he was in the eleventh grade. In 1920 he became a naturalized American citizen.

When film star Fatty Arbuckle was looking for talent for a 1924 road show, Hope and a buddy, Lloyd Durbin, dreamed up a comic dancing routine that Arbuckle loved. Durbin contracted tuberculosis and died before he and Hope were to appear in a Broadway show in New York. Hope's manager found him a new partner, George Byrne; after unpleasant years in New York, Hope went solo.

Hope married the aspiring actress Dolores Reade on 19 February 1934. They would adopt four children. During the early 1930s Hope honed his act in vaudeville, but he was always ambitious, and by 1935 he had made his way into the Ziegfeld Follies, working with Fanny Brice. He made his first appearance on radio in 1935 in the show Atlantic Family. His rapid-fire delivery of jokes made him a hit, and in 1938 he had his own show on NBC. That year he appeared in the motion picture The Big Broadcast of 1938, and instead of doing comedy, he sang "Thanks for the Memories," which became his signature song for radio and television specials. By the time he made his first road picture, he had been in seven movies, but the Road to Singapore (1940), with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, was a huge success; this was followed by Road to Zanzibar (1941), and Hope became an established movie star with significant drawing power.

The United States entered World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan on 7 December 1941, and in 1942 Hope tried to enlist in the army. He was denied enlistment on the grounds that he would do more good in the United Service Organization (USO), entertaining and raising the morale of troops engaged in the war. He was often in danger, nearly killed now and again, and he became a folk hero. His 1944 book I Never Left Home was a funny and endearing best-seller that added to the public's love for him.

By 1960 times were happy, and Hope's humor was becoming deeper and more probing into attitudes of the public and current events. In September 1962 President John F. Kennedy presented Hope with the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest expression of national appreciation for distinguished contributions. Hope would later receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon B. Johnson. On 8 November 1962 Hope's manager, Mack Millar, died. Hope himself had a serious ailment that almost stopped his career; vascular blockages in his left eye were making him dizzy and blinding him. Just standing up was difficult. Even so, Hope made arrangements to do a USO tour of military bases in the Pacific, including South Vietnam, which by then had several thousand U.S. advisers. The Pentagon canceled the South Vietnam appearance because of the danger it posed to Hope, but while performing at Iwakuni Air Base in Japan on 22 December 1962, he received a petition that seemed to have been signed by nearly every troop in South Vietnam, asking him to come; the Pentagon still said no. The television documentary of the Christmas 1962 trip was broadcast in January 1963 and received a Golden Globe Award.

Each Christmas season thereafter, Hope managed to entertain in South Vietnam, bringing with him a host of volunteers from stagehands to movie stars. In 1963 he became a spokesman for Chrysler and hosted specials on NBC sponsored by Chrysler. The most popular of these were the January shows of his Christmas season tours to military bases, performing to audiences of anywhere from twenty-five to tens of thousands, often putting himself at risk. At least once the North Vietnamese tried to blow up Hope and his entire crew, missing by about ten minutes. To Hope's horror, a man he deeply liked, President Kennedy, was assassinated on 22 November 1963. Hope wanted to attend services for the president, but his left eye had suffered ruptures, and he had trouble standing and walking. On 6 December 1963 he underwent an experimental operation in San Francisco in which veins behind the eye were cauterized by laser beams. The procedure was repeated several times before surgeons declared that there were no more veins to work with.

During engagements at colleges Hope would end his show with a few words urging his audience to support the soldiers in South Vietnam. He seemed haunted by what he had seen and never really revealed all. When Hope was on the Tonight Show, host Johnny Carson asked him about the accuracy of incidents shown in the motion picture Apocalypse Now (1979)—Hope pointedly and repeatedly changed the subject.

Hope had been in remote encampments where snipers were killing Americans. He had toured hospitals and clinics, shaking hands with men whose intestines were hanging out; he remembered a man who had been injured in the explosion intended for Hope, smiling with blood streaming down his face as shards of glass were pulled out of his head and wishing Hope a hearty "Merry Christmas." By 1968 he wanted America to pull out of South Vietnam in an honorable manner that would not encourage Communist aggression elsewhere. Even though popular sentiment in the United States had turned heavily against American involvement in South Vietnam, Hope's television shows drew ever higher ratings. His January 1970 special about his Christmas 1969 tour of South Vietnam set a new record for an entertainment show's viewership; almost 65 percent of all televisions in America tuned in.

After the 1960s Hope's motion picture career slowly waned, with the chance of making one more road picture ending when Bing Crosby unexpectedly died in 1977. Hope loved to dance, but walking upright became increasingly difficult. He managed to continue shooting stand-up routines for television specials into the late 1980s. By the early 1990s Hope's wife began to take over much of the on-screen workload while Hope remained seated.

Even in the twenty-first century, Hope is remembered fondly. In 2002 a chapel at the Los Angeles National Cemetery was named after him. During the twentieth century public opinion polls always rated him America's favorite comedian, and often he was named America's favorite person. His legacy is one of compassion and of selfless giving, some fine motion pictures, and some of the best television shows ever made. He was almost certainly twentieth-century America's comedian of choice.

Hope wrote or cowrote ten books, nine of which are memoirs or autobiographies. I Never Left Home (1944), about his work for the USO during World War II, was a best-seller and was his most loved book well into the 1960s; So This Is Peace (1946) continued in the same vein as its predecessor; Have Tux, Will Travel (1954), with Pete Martin, describes Hope's busy, frenetic life; I Owe Russia $1,200 (1963) tells of Hope's tour of the Soviet Union; Five Women I Love: Bob Hope's Vietnam Story (1966) is a memoir in the style of I Never Left Home; The Last Christmas Show (1974), with Martin, refers to Hope's trips to Vietnam; The Road to Hollywood: My Forty-Year Love Affair with the Movies (1977), with Bob Thomas, is an excellent account of Hope's motion picture career; Confessions of a Hooker: My Lifelong Love Affair with Golf (1985), with Dwayne Netland, is funnier than it is informative; Don't Shoot, It's Only Me: Bob Hope's Comedy History of the United States (1990), with Melville Shavelson, is an account of Hope's career in the context of historical events. William Robert Faith, Bob Hope: A Life in Comedy (1982), offers a good account of the most active years of Hope's very active life.

Kirk H. Beetz