Playboy Interview: Bob Hope

No one--not even John Wayne and certainly not Richard Nixon--can lay a better claim to the title of Mr. America than a fast-talking, swoop-nosed comedian who wasn't even born in this country. And yet during the past 20 years, he has unquestionably become a national monument, instantly recognizable and beloved by Americans everywhere and, more significantly, a symbol to the outside world (and to some in this country) of the traditional American spirit--optimistic, energetic, pragmatic and generous to a fault, but also proselytizingly patriotic, tiresomely wisecracking and dangerously simplistic, especially in the sensitive area of politics.

What foreigners may think of Bob Hope, however, doesn't concern most Americans, especially that segment of the population that deeply mistrusts not only foreigners abroad but ethnic minorities at home. To that America, Bob Hope speaks most eloquently; in fact, though he says he has never aspired to be anything but what he is--a gifted and supremely disciplined entertainer--he could conceivably run for President and win. After all, it's been pointed out, his colleagues George Murphy and Ronald Reagan made it from showbiz to high elective office on far less talent than he.

To bolster any possible political aspirations he might have, the story of Hope's early life is right out of "Horatio Alger." Born Leslie Townes Hope on May 29, 1903, in Eltham, a working-class suburb of London, he was the son of a stonemason, a hard-drinking, hard-gambling man who immigrated with his family to America in 1906 and settled down in Cleveland in search of a better life. He never found it, and it was his wife, Avis, the tough-minded daughter of a Welsh sea captain, who kept the family together by taking in boarders and sending Leslie and his four brothers out into the world as soon as they were old enough to walk. Young Leslie did time as a newspaper boy, a caddie, a butcher's helper, a shoe salesman and a stockboy; he also became proficient with a pool cue and by the age of 12 was hustling successfully. In between jobs, hustling and school, he sang on amateur nights at the local vaudeville houses, where his mother invariably led the claque and helped him win prizes. It seemed only natural to him that, after a brief and not too successful stint as a boxer, he'd wind up in show business.

He began in vaudeville, working with male and female partners, first as a soft-shoe dancer, then as a blackface comedian. Along the way, he changed his name and soon graduated to tabs--miniature musicals and variety revues that toured the various theater circuits--playing several shows a day. The pay was low and the life grueling, but the experience, Hope has always claimed, was invaluable. It was also during this period, while he was working a tiny theater in New Castle, Pennsylvania, that he stumbled onto his extraordinary talents as a monologist and ad-libber. Asked on short notice by the manager of the theater to introduce the other acts on the bill, Hope began lacing his improvised spiel with remarks that, to his gratification, made the often dangerously bored local audiences rock with laughter.

By the time Broadway beckoned and Hope went into his first full-scale musical, "Ballyhoo of 1932," as a solo performer, he was a seasoned veteran who had mastered all the basics of his profession and needed only a lucky break in the form of the right part in the right show to become a star. This came along in the fall of 1933, when he was cast as Huckleberry Haines, the fast-talking best friend of the leading man (Ray Middleton) in "Roberta," a hit musical with a score by Jerome Kern. Despite an unfavorable personal notice from the prestigious critic of The New York Times, Hope all but stole the show from Middleton and such other seasoned male troupers in the cast as George Murphy, Fred MacMurray and Sydney Greenstreet; his career was launched. He soon branched out into radio and films and began, with the help of a stable of top comedy writers, to produce the slick, lightning-fast stand-up monologs that became his trademark and made him a star.

The Bob Hope style, or what others have called his formula, was most fully developed and established on radio's "Pepsodent Show," which for over a decade, from 1938 on, kept the comedian among the top four laugh getters in the nation's living rooms. His chief rivals were Jack Benny, Fred Allen and Edgar Bergen; the critics generally considered him inferior to them, but he usually topped them in the ratings. While the other airwave comedians went to great pains to establish characters for themselves and to create the atmosphere of entire milieus, Hope ignored characterization, revealed little about himself or others on his show and created no small worlds for the imagination of his listeners to roam in. What made him unique was simply the monolog that opened every show, in which he peppered his listening audience with a barrage of quips that one of his writers once likened to "casting with a fly rod--flicking in and out." Neither his technique nor his material has ever pleased the intellectuals much, and such critics as John Lahr, whose father, Bert, was one of the great clowns of the American stage, have complained that he never displayed in his comedy "the kind of inner wound that makes an artist." Hope's comedy has always been considered in these circles to be artificial, the machine-made product of a team of gag writers, and Hope himself merely a slick-talking, glorified night-club emcee.

Apart from the fact that such criticism ignores the finely tuned sense of timing that it takes to deliver such monologs successfully--building and piling laughs on one another to a climax that enables the comic to exit deftly on the crest of a wave of applause--there's no denying that these machine-gun monologs have made him a multimillionaire. According to J. Anthony Lukas, writing a few years ago in The New York Times, Hope's image is one of "the guy in front of the drugstore, the fastest tongue in town. And his lines are brisk, flip wisecracks delivered with a mixture of breezy self-confidence and pouting frustration."

The image grew and flowered not only in radio but in most of Hope's 71 films. It was first used to perfection in "The Big Broadcast of 1938" (in which Hope also sang his theme song, "Thanks for the Memory," for the first time) and was most fully exploited in the famous series of "Road" pictures that co-starred him with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. In these movies, Hope was more often than not the loser; Crosby usually got the girl and almost all of the songs. But it was Hope--as the falsely cocky, girl-crazy, basically cowardly fast talker, always ready to cut corners, always on the lookout for the main chance and never able to resist a joke, even when about to be dismembered by a gorilla--who got most of the laughs and with whom the American audience immediately identified. "In movies, Bob is sort of the American Falstaff," one of his PR men said recently. "He always survives because he never stops trying, he never gives up, no matter how badly things may be going for him, no matter how long the odds against him. He really believes the cavalry is going to come charging to his rescue any minute."

When Hope went into TV, he had to try a new approach. "I honestly think that the secret of TV is being relaxed, casual and easy," he once observed. He slowed down what he called his "bang, bang, bang" delivery and concentrated more on putting across his personality, which remained basically what it had become back in the Thirties in radio and movies. He also wisely limited his TV appearances to a series of specials every year, so that, alone of all the major comedians, he has remained in consistent public demand year after year for over two decades. The only other exposure he received on the tube was his annual stint as emcee for the Academy Awards, a task that--until it ended, at least temporarily, a couple of years ago--presented vintage Hope to an estimated 60,000,000 viewers. His two Christmas shows, filmed at U. S. military bases in Vietnam in 1970 and 1971, drew the largest viewing audiences for specials in the history of the medium.

Though these two shows suggest the esteem and affection in which the comedian is held, they are also at the heart of the considerable criticism he has received over the past few years for his hawklike stance on Vietnam and his open identification as a leading spokesman for the political right. His detractors say that, though it's perfectly true that Hope has been entertaining regularly at American military bases at home and abroad for 31 years, ever since World War Two, he has exploited his most recent trips to Vietnam by making highly successful and commercially lucrative network television specials out of them. He is an outspoken admirer and close friend of Vice-President Agnew, as well as a crony of most of the other major conservative figures in American life, from Westmoreland to Wallace, and he seems totally unsympathetic to ethnic minorities and young people, with all of whom, it is said, he is painfully out of touch. Even in his comedy routines, he pays only lip service to objectivity, favors his own side and puts down everyone else, while never digging at all below the surface into the more painful areas of life probed by social commentators such as Mort Sahl and the late Lenny Bruce.

Though Hope's friends say that he donates about $1,000,000 a year to various charities, his so-called humanitarianism, for which he has received an honorary Oscar and dozens of other awards, has also been questioned. Hope is supposed to be one of the richest men in the world (worth, according to one published estimate, at least half a billion dollars) and, though generous enough with his time, he is reputedly a notorious tightwad who would never dream of putting his money where his mouth is. Even his personal life has come under attack: Though he has been married for 39 years to Dolores Reade, a former night-club singer, and together they have raised four adopted children, it's no secret that he is almost never home and that his wife, a devout Roman Catholic, is most often seen in the company of aged Jesuit priests.

To quiz him on the above and related matters, Playboy assigned William Murray to interview the 70-year-old star. Murray reports: "Getting to sit down with Bob Hope is a lot harder than getting an audience with the Pope. It's not that he doesn't want to see you; it's only that the man is hardly ever in one place for more than a day or two, and then he's always surrounded by people--his friends, his writers, his personal staff, his agents and managers and flacks and the boys from the network. It took me three months and the efforts of his son Tony and his two PR firms to get me to him. When a meeting was finally arranged, I was told by someone on his staff that I could have a total of one hour at lunch with him, between rehearsals for his first TV special of the season. I explained I'd need at least two taping sessions of a minimum of several hours each and the poor guy recoiled in horror. 'If I tell Bob that,' he said, 'he won't see you at all.' I decided to take my chances and rely on my famous charm.

"I needn't have worried. Hope is, first and foremost, an entertainer. Get him talking about showbiz and you can take it from there. I also came away, after several long sessions with him over a period of three weeks, liking the man a lot. We talked mostly in what he calls his game room, a bright, airy place in the big house sprawled over seven acres of North Hollywood land that he bought for practically nothing more than 20 years ago. Out the window I could see the fairway of his private one-hole golf course and a corner of a huge swimming pool. Hope bounces as he walks, hums little tunes to himself, seems to vibrate quietly in his chair, as if he's consciously, like a trained athlete, working all the time at keeping himself loose. For a man his age, he's in superb condition, the jowls of his famous profile firm and his flesh tone that of a man in his early 50s. His tongue is still in great shape, too; in the ten hours we talked, he proved time and again--entertainingly--that he doesn't need his writers around to sound like a comedian, and a great one."

[Q] Playboy: You've been involved in every facet of show business for so long that a lot of people now think of you as an American institution. Do you think of yourself as one?

[A] Hope: Hardly--although I have a few jokes I'm leaving to the Smithsonian. Then I think maybe if they went up on Mount Rushmore and retouched Lincoln a little bit and gave him a ski nose, I could sneak in there. You know, I can't take a question like that seriously. I'm just worried about my next show.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any political ambitions?

[A] Hope: No way.

[Q] Playboy: And yet you've been linked very closely in recent years with men like Nixon and Agnew, whose views presumably you share.

[A] Hope: From F.D.R. on, I've been very friendly with all the Presidents and the men around them, and I've found that they're really all great Americans. Every time I went to Washington, I used to drop in on J.F.K. and swap jokes with him. He was a great audience for comedy; he spent a lot of time in Congress. But I'm also an Agnew man and a Nixon man. And a Reagan man and a Rockefeller man and a Connally man, so during the next election I'm moving to South America. That's how chicken I am.

[Q] Playboy: You didn't say you were a Kennedy or a McGovern man. All the politicians you say you support are conservatives.

[A] Hope: Look, I don't want to get into that. Every article about me recently has been spouting the same bullshit about my politics. They hook me into it on account of Agnew and the Vietnam war. The only reason I was for Nixon and this Administration was because I knew that's who would end this war and get those kids back home. None of those jerks walking around with those signs was ever going to end the war. I knew Nixon was the only person who could do it, and it should have been done eight years ago. As for my politics and all that, I vote for the man and only for the man. I'm an American above everything, and that's another reason I've hated to see this political garbage going on that's been breaking up our country, this political soap opera we've been sitting through.

[Q] Playboy: You mean Watergate?

[A] Hope: Yes. I've been watching The Washington Squares. Every time I see Sam Ervin, I get the feeling that Gomer Pyle has aged. I love to watch him dust off the furniture with his eyebrows. And that Senator Baker, he's a very personable guy. The two of them will do great if minstrel shows ever come back. Ervin's taught me a lot about how to be a chairman. You have to wait for your laugh before you hit the gavel. They're all beauties, though. Some days you take a look at that group up there and you feel the whole mob should have Snow White in front of them.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of impression did the witnesses make on you?

[A] Hope: I thought Ehrlichman was marvelous. And Peterson was great. I love people who aren't awed by that committee. They go in there and stand up and tell their story. Like Peterson said, if the politicians had kept their hands off of it, the Justice Department would have handled it just fine. This is like the McCarthy era. I did a joke about Joe McCarthy one time and a judge in Appleton, Wisconsin, which was McCarthy's home state, wrote in the local paper, which he owned, that I was a Communist. So I wrote him back and told him simply that telling jokes was my racket. After that, he wrote in his paper that Bob Hope was a pretty good American and we became friends. I send him Christmas cards and he sends me cheese.

[Q] Playboy: Then you agree with President Nixon that the matter should be handled in the courts?

[A] Hope: Sure. I think dragging this thing on for years and years is giving dirty politics a bad name. Every Administration has been plagued by some kind of scandal or other. The whole thing has had a Mack Sennett feel to it. Actually, I don't know whether they ought to get them into court or Central Casting. I understand Screen Gems wants Ulasewicz for a series. Why would anybody want to bug Democratic headquarters to steal McGovern's campaign plans? That's petty larceny at most.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you think the Watergate committee has served a legitimate function?

[A] Hope: Hell, yes, but it's been dragging on and on and it's not good for the country. I know that the committee is stuck with a lot of television make-up, but I think they ought to sell it to somebody and get on with the real business at hand.

[Q] Playboy: How about your own television make-up? Have you made your last trip overseas to entertain at our military bases?

[A] Hope: As far as any kind of formal trip is concerned, yes. I can't say absolutely that I've made my last trip, because, if anything happened and they asked me to go, I would. But on a regular basis, I'm through. In fact, I'm doing a book called The Last Christmas Show, which tells the story of the last trip.

[Q] Playboy: How many trips have you made?

[A] Hope: Well, I went overseas six times during World War Two and 23 or 24 times between 1948 and 1972, maybe 30 trips in all. My golfing buddy, Stuart Symington, started the whole thing about the Christmas trips by inviting us to go to the Berlin airlift in '48 and then took us to Alaska the next year. From then on, we were locked in by the Defense Department. In fact, we got hooked on the box lunches ourselves. A different kind of trip, one that stands out in my memory, was the Victory Caravan in 1942, which was our own private train that began in Washington and went all over the country for about three weeks, playing everywhere to standing-room-only crowds; the idea was to get people to buy Victory Bonds. We had 25 stars on board. Cary Grant and I were the double emcees and we had Pat O'Brien, Laurel and Hardy, Crosby, Merle Oberon, Claudette Colbert, Jimmy Cagney, Charles Boyer--25 stars; you never saw anything like it in your life. And Groucho used to run around the train and needle everybody. I remember we had a guy named Charley Feldman on board, who was known as "the good-looking agent"--he looked a little like Gable--and Groucho came down the aisle one morning, saying, "The cars got so mixed up last night Charley Feldman found himself back in his own bed." God, it was fun! After that I began going overseas for the troops.

[Q] Playboy: You've been getting some mixed reactions to your more recent tours, both here and abroad, and there were reports that, in a couple of places at least, you were actually booed.

[A] Hope: Well, that's all from politics. It bugs me to think that we have American kids over there fighting, kids who've been asked to go over there and fight for their country, and for some reason it's wrong to go over and entertain them. That's all we've ever done. In World War Two they cheered, and I've been lucky enough to have received every medal that's ever been given out by the Government. Take a look at the people who criticize; look at their records. An awful lot of great Hollywood people have been on those trips.

[A] Five years ago I took the Golddiggers, and one of the biggest thrills was introducing them in Danang and watching the expressions on those kids' faces. It's an exciting thing to be overseas and see a show that has Ziegfeld Follies proportions, with great big beautiful girls. Last year I took along 12 of the most gorgeous girls, called the American Beauties. For these kids there is nothing you can do better than that. They fight to get into the shows. And we went everywhere, even up to one small base in Alaska where they'd written us, begging us to come. We had trouble landing there. The ground was so cold the plane refused to put its tail down. What a bleak outpost! The big thrill there was to wake up in the morning, count your toes and get up to ten. The guys screamed when we played there; they had to to keep warm. Anyway you feel lucky that you're able to do it, and anyone who says anything about any of these trips, well, in my book he's a petty jerk.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you think that most of the criticism was motivated by sincere opposition to the Vietnam war?

[A] Hope: Sure. They linked me with the war. But I hate war. I wouldn't get near any kind of conflict if I could help it, and I've had a couple of rough scrapes; but this has been the greatest part of my life and anybody who has ever gone with me knows what it's all about. The emotion and the gratification are fantastic. From the time you get on the plane to the time you get back, you feel you're a sacred cow. They just give you everything and they love you for coming. Look, I didn't go to Vietnam because it was Vietnam. I go to the camps where our guys are and because they're screaming for us. We get requests all the time. But we've had it now, unless there's a new crisis somewhere and we're really needed.

[Q] Playboy: But how do you feel about the war itself at this point?

[A] Hope: I'm concerned about Cambodia now. I guess nobody else is, so I don't know why I should worry. I'm concerned that if we lose Cambodia, the Commies will get a foothold there and maybe start the whole thing over again. I hope not and pray not.

[Q] Playboy: Is it any business of ours what form of government other countries choose to live under?

[A] Hope: Let me explain one thing about South Vietnam. When you get guys like Eisenhower and his staff, Kennedy and his staff, Johnson and his staff, all of whom thought it was important enough to save this little nation from communism or enslavement, then you have to think maybe they know something. When we were in Thailand, the king would invite us into the palace and he'd say, "Thank God the U. S. troops are here, because otherwise the Communists would take over." The same people who didn't like what happened in Hungary and Czechoslovakia don't think about this. Unless it's happened to you, you don't think much about it. But that's why our Presidents sent the troops in there. They're brilliant enough to know what they're doing and why. They did it to save this country and all of Southeast Asia and I'm concerned now that, if we run into problems elsewhere, we'll have to go back in. We're patriotic enough in this country that if somebody hurts us in some way, sinks a ship or something, we'll go back in and it'll start all over.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the President has the constitutional right to wage war without the consent of Congress?

[A] Hope: When you say the President, you're not speaking about one man. The President has a fantastic group around him. And he invites the leaders of both parties and the Joint Chiefs and everybody has his say. Eisenhower was a great military leader, but he didn't wage war on his own. Neither did Kennedy, and neither did Johnson, and it was Johnson who sent in most of the troops. They have great staffs, and they call on everybody for advice. Of course, the President is the Commander in Chief, so he's got to issue the order. But he doesn't sit alone in a room and say, "I want to wage war."

[Q] Playboy: But doesn't the Constitution specify that the Congress must declare war before American troops can be committed to large-scale action abroad?

[A] Hope: It's true that we haven't declared war. The Korean War was a police action and so was this one. That was the problem. If we had declared war, this thing would have been over in a year, because the military would have taken over. We'd have gone all out and--bang, bang, bang--it would have been over. We wouldn't have lost any international prestige and we'd have saved about half a million lives, as well as a lot of our international prestige.

[Q] Playboy: That's debatable. But what do you think we ought to do now in Indochina?

[A] Hope: As I said, I'm very concerned about the Cambodian situation. I have a lot of friends in Washington--a couple of very big ones, and I don't mean the President, but a couple of guys I play golf with--and I'm going in there next week and I'm going to sit down and ask them, just for my own understanding, what's going to happen. I heard one of these big guys say the other day that Cambodia is going down the drain. Well, if Cambodia goes down the drain, then you tell me what the hell is going to happen with Thailand. They're worried as hell about it. I don't think we have to worry too much, but what about our kids? I'd like to see us never have another war. That would be great, just great. If we handle things right now, especially this situation, then I don't think we'll ever have another war.

[Q] Playboy: One of the pledges Nixon made when he was elected in 1968 was to bring the country together. The most recent polls would suggest that he hasn't, because a majority of the public isn't satisfied with the job he's doing and doesn't believe he's telling the truth about Watergate. How do you feel about his performance?

[A] Hope: I think he has a tremendous record, I really do. What he's done with the Russians and the Chinese has taken a lot of the heat off. It was a great job. That and the fact that he brought back 500,000 of our men from Vietnam are enough to make me like him very much. The fact that the polls show that a lot of people don't believe him doesn't mean a hell of a lot. For one thing, the polls are often wrong. It's like the Nielsen ratings. They call up eight people and ask them what they liked on television last night. Three of them were out seeing The Devil in Miss Jones, four of them were taking a nap so they could wake up later and watch Johnny Carson and the other one doesn't have a television set. The only time to believe any kind of rating is when it shows you at the top. They should get off Nixon's back and let him be President, because he's a damn good one. He's also got a great-looking nose.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think should be done with the young people who refused to have anything to do with the war?

[A] Hope: I do feel they should serve their country in some way, because it's not fair to the people who did go over there and serve. I've got compassion for everybody, but I've been in places where you see American fighting boys who've been badly hurt. It shakes you up.

[Q] Playboy: You seem to get most of your ideas on public issues from conversations with high-ranking politicians and military men. Do you feel you might be out of touch with ordinary people and especially the young?

[A] Hope: Oh, no. First off, I catch a lot of flack from my own kids, who tell me we ought to just slap the Reds on the wrist and run, and see what happens. It's hard for me to win an argument in my family, because two of my kids are lawyers and another one is married to a lawyer and they have two little briefs. But they're all fans of my trips, because they've all been along on them. They've been with me in the burn wards and intensive-care wards and seen the kids suffering and dying. We argue about a lot of things but not about the trips.

[Q] Playboy: Aside from the young men you've played to in Army camps, do you think you're popular with young people? Do you feel close to them?

[A] Hope: NBC took a poll recently and found that, because of my pictures' being on TV, even little kids of eight and nine buy me. The other night, when we taped our first special for the new season, I looked out into the front rows and there were all these kids screaming. I grab all of them. I go and I play the colleges and afterward we have a kind of forum and talk about everything. They ask me about everything, including the war and the killing, and so on, and it gives you a great chance to talk to them. If you talk to young people in a big group, you also find that the sense of fairness in them will come out. They won't let any one guy try to ride over you. And I take my own polls, you know. I ask for votes on whether the kids thought we were doing the right thing in Vietnam or wherever and, you know, the majority of those kids have said we were doing the best thing possible. I love to talk to the kids. I get a great kick out of that, the rapport you reach with them and feeling them out and finding out what they're thinking about. It really gives me a charge.

[Q] Playboy: What about some of the things young people are into--such as open marriage and women's lib and the gay liberation front? Can you relate to all that?

[A] Hope: I'm an excited spectator, and they're all great monolog subjects. Like: I haven't known any open marriages, though quite a few have been ajar. And: When those women throw away their brassieres and then ask for support--I love it. But I think people can get too carried away with this sort of thing. I can't understand why Raquel Welch would want equality with Don Knotts. And I haven't noticed any big changes in Dolores yet. She still hasn't burned her credit cards.

[Q] Playboy: What about the trend among the young to turn back to Jesus?

[A] Hope: Anything that gets them into a straight line helps kids like that, as long as they don't overdo it. About three years ago, Dolores and I--Dolores is so religious, you know, she's something else; we couldn't get fire insurance for a long time because she had so many candles burning--well, anyway, we're getting off this plane and this kid comes up to us and he says, "Get with Jesus!" When we get outside, he comes up to us again and says, "You gotta get with Jesus, because that's where it's at!" I call him over and I say, "Look, you got with Jesus and it's a great thing and we know all about it. But don't sell people off it. Play it cool!" Because, you know, this guy is yelling. Anyway, he hasn't heard the good news and the bad news. The good news is that Jesus is coming back, but the bad news is that he's really pissed off.

[Q] Playboy: You've always been a quick man with a quip, but it's been said that you rely heavily on your writers. How many do you have working for you?

[A] Hope: Seven right now. If I do a picture, I might add three or four more. I've had a lot of good writers working for me and two or three of them have been with me for years--one guy, Les White, since 1932, off and on. At one Writers Guild show, they asked all the writers who had ever worked for Bob Hope to stand up and about 100 guys came up on stage. I've had fabulous writers. I put them to work in teams and then they bring it in and we put it all together and rewrite whatever we want to do and rehearse and see if it plays and then rewrite again. We can come up with jokes in 15 minutes just talking in my dressing room and save a situation.

[Q] Playboy: What's the secret of your comedy? The material?

[A] Hope: The material has a lot to do with it, but the real secret is in timing, not just of comedy but of life. It starts with life. Think of sports, even sex. Timing is the essence of life, and definitely of comedy. There's a chemistry of timing between the comedian and his audience. If the chemistry is great, it's developed through the handling of the material and the timing of it, how you get into the audience's head. The other night I was at some big dinner here and the guy who was introducing the acts had this very high voice. Well, when I got on I said, "I'm glad I was introduced before his voice changed. He sounds like Wayne Newton on his wedding night." Well, you can't get a better start than that. Here was something that was in the minds of all those people sitting there and when you deliver it to them with the right timing and the right delivery, the light goes on in their heads and you're coming down the stretch. All the good comedians have great timing.

[Q] Playboy: But you couldn't get along without your writers.

[A] Hope: Every comedian needs writers, because to stay on top you always need new material. It's like getting elected to office. You're going to get elected if you say the right things--but only if you say them right. The great ad-libbers are the guys with the best timing, like Don Rickles. I showed up in the audience one night at NBC, where he was cutting everybody up on the Dean Martin Show. I walked in after the show had started and the people in the back saw me and began applauding and then the audience in front turned around and they applauded and I was taking it big. Rickles backed away to the piano and when everything quieted down, he walked up to the mike and said, "Well, the war must be over." It was just magnificent timing and it hit very large. Timing shows more in ad libs than in anything else.

[A] Back in 1952, I was doing a 15-minute daily show and I had a question-and-answer period with the audience. Most people ask how old you are and all the usual stuff, which is all fun, because I have stock lines for a lot of it, but one night this guy got up and waved his hand and he said, "Which way does a pig's tail turn, clockwise or counterclockwise?" It was such a wild question that the audience laughed like hell, and when they finished laughing I said, "We'll find out when you leave." And the theater rocked, it just rocked. It was so good that after that, I put a plant in the audience in some of those shows to get that laugh again.

[Q] Playboy: You've been attacked from time to time for telling ethnic jokes, most recently for one in which your central character was called a Jap. Do you think ethnic humor can be demeaning?

[A] Hope: It can be, but mostly it has to do with who's telling the joke. I get into trouble when I do it, because I'm supposed to be one of the top guys. The other night in Jersey, I heard some guy do 15 minutes of Polack jokes and nobody said a word. I did two or three Polack jokes at the Garden State Art Center and the guy who owns the local newspaper rushed up and demanded an apology. Everybody in the country tells these jokes, but if I do them, somebody jumps. Usually, I try to even them up. Like I say, "Do you know how a Polack lubricates his car? He runs over an Italian." But then you have the Italians against you and that's not good if you want to eat in New York. I once did a joke about the Mafia joining forces with the gay lib group in New York, so that now with the kiss of death you get dinner and an evening of dancing. I did that joke in Madison Square Garden and immediately I heard from two groups of gay activists. They were going to come around and beat me with their purses. But a lot of it depends on where you do these jokes. You can do a lot of things in a place like Vegas that you can't do on TV.

[Q] Playboy: Wouldn't you like to have more freedom on your own TV shows?

[A] Hope: No, you've got to think about the Bible Belt. They've got a hot finger and they can click you into oblivion faster than the NBC censor. But one of the really great things about TV is that the kids have rediscovered a whole lost era of comedy by seeing all these old films on TV. For them, it must be like the first time I saw Charlie Chaplin. I waited an hour and a half in a doorway once just to see Chaplin walk out of a building in New York. I couldn't believe he was really human. That's what television does today and everybody thought it was such a bad deal that our pictures were being shown on the Late Show and we weren't getting any money for it. But it was the greatest public-relations thing we ever had. I'd like to see a special comedy channel created on TV, where all these great clowns like Jackie Gleason and Red Skelton and Sid Caesar, who have been sitting around for a couple of years, could do their stuff. I think the Government should subsidize them, instead of some of this garbage you see on the educational channel. We spend so much money on stupid things, why not entertain the public?

[Q] Playboy: Governments aren't noted for having a sense of humor.

[A] Hope: Maybe not, but I can hear a lot of laughing in the background around tax time. Laughter is important for the country because laughter is therapy--it makes you forget meat. If you can laugh once or twice a day, it relieves a hell of a lot of tension.

[Q] Playboy: You were in one movie with W. C. Fields, probably the most iconoclastic comedian we've ever had. Was he your kind of comic?

[A] Hope: That was my first picture, The Big Broadcast of 1938, and I got to know Fields a little bit. He didn't ordinarily talk to many people, you know. He was a strange cat and had his own little group. I was in his dressing room one day when a nice little man from the Community Fund, a charity we all used to give money to, came by and he said, "Mr. Fields, we haven't received your donation." And Fields said, "Well, I only believe in the S.E.B.F. Association," and the nice little man from the fund office said, "What is that?" And Fields said, "Screw Everybody But Fields." I think he liked me because he'd heard some of my one-liners. He liked my joke about the drunk who came down to the bar in the morning and asked for a Scotch and the bartender said, "With soda?" and the guy said, "I couldn't stand the noise."

[Q] Playboy: Who makes you laugh today?

[A] Hope: Oh, I laugh at a lot of people, I really do. We have one writer named Charley Lee--we call him Grumpy; he makes me laugh. A lot of my writers make me laugh. They have great senses of humor. Shecky Greene and Don Rickles and Benny and Jessel, they all make me laugh. When Jessel rattles his medals, I fall down. Jimmy Durante doubles me up; he's one of the greatest guys around. I used to laugh a lot at Groucho when we hung around together. He'd come to my parties half an hour early. I'd say, "What are you doing?" and he'd say, "I want to break in the room." Funny, really funny.

[Q] Playboy: Do any of the younger comics make you laugh?

[A] Hope: God, yes. Mort Sahl and Woody Allen, they're great. But my favorite was Lenny Bruce. The first time I ever saw him was about 14 years ago. I was working at Paramount in a picture and he was playing in a little Hollywood club, sort of a converted grocery store. I went over there for the first show and the place was about half filled and we had a great time. He did one routine where he called the Pope on the phone and told him he could get him on the Ed Sullivan Show if he wore the big ring and would send him some eight-by-ten glossies, and two or three people got up from the audience and walked out. Of course, today that seems so tame.

[A] I saw Lenny several times after that. The last time I saw him was at El Patio in Florida. I'd seen everybody else on the Beach and I just saw a little ad saying, "Lenny Bruce at El Patio," and I said, "We've got to go." We went out there and I sat way in the back. In those days, planes were falling going from New York to Miami, for some reason or other, so he walked to the mike and he said, "A plane left New York today for Miami and made it." That was his opening, not "Hello" or anything. And then he told the audience I was there and he shouted, "Hey, Bob, where are you?" And I said, "Right here, Lenny." And he said, "Tonight I'm going to knock you right on your ass." And he did. Funny material, this cat! He did an impression of Jack Paar on the toilet, looking around the curtain, talking, you know? Then he did a comic dying at the Palladium. Damn, he was funny! He was hilarious! Very sophisticated material, but he had something. He had so much grease paint in his blood, it came out in his act. That's what I loved about him. He talked our language.

[Q] Playboy: You've made a lot of movies over the years, but your biggest hits were in the Forties and Fifties. Do you think Hollywood has been going downhill since then?

[A] Hope: No question about it. The movie audience has shrunk from 80,000,000 to about 14,000,000. Partly it was television, but also it's the dirty pictures. They're doing things on the screen today I wouldn't do on my honeymoon. I can't believe what they're showing on the screen. I remember the days when Hollywood was looking for new faces. Parents aren't going to send their kids to see stag material, so they tie them down in front of the television set and tell them to look at those two old guys dancing on their way to utopia.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean by stag material? Would you consider Last Tango in Paris a stag movie?

[A] Hope: I want to see it, but I can't get a note from my doctor. Look, I don't object to dirty material. I love dirty jokes. I tell more dirty jokes than anybody. I tell them at the golf club, and when I get brave I'll tell one to my wife, if I have my track shoes on. But to expose this kind of stuff to kids I think is a shame. I also think our business has lost so much prestige overseas, because we used to send such fabulous pictures all over the world, and the pictures we make represent our country and the morals of our country. I think they should have special theaters just for that stuff--X-rated theaters.

[Q] Playboy: They do. That's where movies like Deep Throat are shown to adults only.

[A] Hope:Deep Throat--I thought that was an animal picture. I thought it was about a giraffe. I haven't seen it, but I've heard about it and I don't believe it. But my point is that mothers take their children to see a clean picture and they'll have a preview for next week showing people in bed doing all the acts. That's what I object to. People come up to me when I'm traveling around the country and they squawk like hell about it. Our business used to be a glamorous business. Now you don't see any big openings anymore. You know why? It's because a lot of people don't want to be seen going into the theater.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the recent Supreme Court decisions against hard-core pornography are on the right track?

[A] Hope: Oh, definitely. The hard-core stuff could harm kids. Pictures like Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones are dangerous pictures. I hear a lot of young couples are going to see these movies now, but we don't even know if they're married or not. It has to affect their lives in some way.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't it possible that people might learn something constructive by going to see a pornographic movie?

[A] Hope: I don't see how any public exhibition of this kind can do any good. I think it could lead to disaster in many cases. Today the sort of people who need help can go and buy a sex book. They don't have to go out in public and see that kind of thing on the screen. We now have sex books and sex counselors. For a few dollars, Masters and Johnson will come to your house and sit on your piano and do it.

[Q] Playboy: Much of what you say about America today seems to express a longing many people feel for a time when things were presumably better. Do you remember such a time? Do you think the mood of the country was better when you were young?

[A] Hope: Not to me. I wasn't that well known. I remember a time I was playing Evansville, Indiana. It was about my third date on the road after opening in Chicago. I rehearsed and then I went into the restaurant and bought a paper to check my billing. It said, "The Golden Bird," which was an act that had a bird that answered questions or something, and underneath that it said, "and Ben Hope." I threw up right at the table, and then I walked into the manager's office and I said, "What's the idea spelling my name Ben Hope?" And he said, "Well, what's your name?" I said, "Bob Hope." He said, "Who knows but you?"

[A] Times have changed for me since then, thank God. Last summer I played the Arlington Park Fair near Chicago and the theater is outdoors and it's raining. It's a pretty strong rain and Joey Heatherton is dancing in the rain, with 40,000 people sitting there and nobody's moving. They sat there and cheered. When I came out, I said, "Joey Heatherton dancing in the rain reminds me of Danang," and they all went "Ye-e-a-ay!" I guess they all remembered that. They are such a great audience today. I played a lot of different dates this summer and everywhere I went I felt things really couldn't be better. Naturally, a lot of things upset them, like Watergate, but basically they're great.

[Q] Playboy: What frightens you most about the country today?

[A] Hope: That I'll run out of tax money.

[Q] Playboy: Nothing about the state of our society today worries you?

[A] Hope: Let me tell you something. This country is so strong, our people are so strong, that nothing's going to happen to this system. They've enjoyed this system too much, and I think that when it gets down to the short licks, everybody's going to think the same. Now, the Democrats I know, they were saying it just the other day, we've got to stop making a public exhibition of the country's politics and get back to taking care of the nation's business. I think the people feel the same way, because I get around with a lot of the people and I talk to them and boy, they're strong. You should travel with me around this country and get into some of these cities and talk to these people and dig the way they feel. It's delightful to go into a residential section of Minneapolis or Oklahoma City or anywhere, I don't care where it is, San Francisco and Seattle, and see wonderful families living the good life, with two or three cars. They aren't going to let this stuff slip away from them. They're well established and they like this system we have, because we have the greatest system in the world. There's nothing like it and, though we may have our problems here and there, we're not going to let it get away from us. I know that. I meet these wonderful people and I get the feeling of them and what they are thinking about. Americans are a great people and they live great lives. You come away very proud of them.

[Q] Playboy: You're talking about the white middle class. How about the 25,000,000 poor whites, blacks, chicanos and Indians who don't feel they're part of the system--and might not even want to be part of it?

[A] Hope: Maybe the best thing about our system is the opportunity it gives people to make something of their lives. I think most people want the good life; they want to live in nice houses and eat well and have some of the material things. And if you don't want them, nobody's forcing you to have them, right? All our system offers anybody is a chance to make good and live well. It's not perfect, but it's the best there is. Let's face it, Bing was from a very poor Catholic family. And Frank Sinatra was from a very poor Italian family. In what other country in the world could a meatball and a piece of spaghetti command so much bread?

[Q] Playboy: If you couldn't be a comedian, what would you do with your life?

[A] Hope: I'd probably have a chain of restaurants or hotels, something like that, where I could appeal to the tastes of people. I've always thought about that, because I dig food and I've always noticed how different restaurants and hotels attract people. That's one thing I did in vaudeville. When the other guys were eating in the Greek restaurants, I would always find a tearoom and get the dainty food, because I loved that. I used to go up to the stagehands and say, "Hey, where's a tearoom around here?" They'd look at me like I was a fag, but today I've got the best stomach in town just from being careful.

[Q] Playboy: Is it true that you've given a lot of money to universities and schools?

[A] Hope: Yes, but the only thing I'll tell you about that is that they named an elementary school in San Antonio after me. The kids voted to name the school and I went down there and I got up and said, "I'm flattered because the kids themselves selected me. It just goes to prove how they'll always go for a person who is good-looking and talented, and whose name is easy to spell."

[Q] Playboy: Is it true that you're one of the richest men in the world?

[A] Hope: That's what they say. I wish somebody would tell me where all the money is. Some guy in a magazine article said I was the richest man in America after J. Paul Getty. Listen, Getty sends me a CARE package every year. This money talk about me is silly. I started working in vaudeville for five dollars a day and I have my house paid for and I'm a millionaire, OK, but this stuff they've been writing in the magazines is absolutely ridiculous. One guy said I was worth $500,000,000. It's become like some of the movie magazines you read. You know, "Does John Wayne sleep with a night light?" They just put this stuff in. It's a provocative style of reporting and it sells magazines. It's just like the dirty movies; it's all for the money. Say, you don't want me to pose for the centerfold, do you?

[Q] Playboy: It hadn't occurred to us.

[A] Hope: A couple of magazines have asked me to. I told them I wouldn't do it unless I could carry a catcher's mitt. I saw that one with Burt Reynolds. It didn't prove anything except that he's left-handed.

[Q] Playboy: So you're not worth half a billion, but you're doing all right. There was an item in a Los Angeles paper a while back saying that you had turned down $40,000,000 or so for 327 acres of prime Malibu land with ocean frontage. Is that true?

[A] Hope: When you're through with Playboy, would you like to be a real-estate agent? It's true, I do own some property in Malibu, but it's not exactly ocean frontage, except in case of a very high tide. Right now we can't do anything with the property because of the ecological restrictions. Not that I have anything against ecology. I'm looking forward to breathing again.

[Q] Playboy: When did you buy all that real estate?

[A] Hope: Oh, I've been buying since 1949. Crosby and I struck oil down in Texas back in the Forties. It was a big strike; we had a lot of wells and we made a good capital gain on it. To Crosby, it wouldn't have made any difference if he'd struck orange juice. He's been living on White Christmas for 20 years. I put the money I made in oil into property. That's where I got whatever I've got. All the rest of my money went to the Government, all the money I ever made from pictures and radio. The taxes grabbed me.

[Q] Playboy: What are your aspirations now?

[A] Hope: To keep working. I'm going to do a movie based on the life of Walter Winchell, either a movie or a two-episode television thing. I'm in love with the idea. I knew Winchell, I went through that whole era. I'll really enjoy that.

[Q] Playboy: You seem to be always involved in something and constantly on the move. Why?

[A] Hope: I've always lived that way. There's always so much to do. I've been in town a whole week this time and I don't remember ever being home this much. I'm always working on something--movies, specials, benefits, fairs, running out to wave at the tour bus. A star's work is never done.

[Q] Playboy: What about sex? Is there sex after 60?

[A] Hope: You bet. And awfully good, too. Especially the one in the fall.