Hope: Entertainer of the Century (53 page)

Inside the military too some grumbled that Hope’s tours were taking too much money away from other, more mundane but equally important projects.
“Hope did a valid service. But it was an expensive project, and it took a good deal of the budget,” said Dorothy Reilly, whose husband, Colonel Alvin E. Reilly, as head of entertainment and recreation for the Air Force, argued internally that the trips ought to be cut back. “That budget had to cover everything—libraries, R-and-R
centers. There were so many ways that money could be used.” She couldn’t forget the sight of thousands of GIs in Korea in 1957, waiting on a hillside for hours in the subzero cold while Hope and his troupe were preparing and rehearsing. “I thought it was kind of a selfish use of the military,” said Reilly.

What Hope needed to stifle the criticism was a real shooting war. And in 1962 he found one—in South Vietnam, where government forces were fighting a stubborn Communist insurgency backed by North Vietnam. The United States had only about nine thousand military “advisers” in the country, and the war was still beneath the radar for most Americans. But Hope made a request to go there as part of a Far East tour in December 1962.

Pentagon officials initially approved the trip, but at the last minute reversed themselves and nixed it as too dangerous. Hope went ahead with his Far East tour, visiting US bases in the Philippines, Guam, Okinawa, Japan, and South Korea. But the war in Vietnam shadowed the trip. At Iwakuni Air Base in Japan,
a marine who claimed he had “hitchhiked” from Vietnam gave Hope a scroll with hundreds of signatures from soldiers there, asking him to come entertain. Hope put in another call to the Pentagon, asking for last-minute permission to go, but again he was turned down.

Echoes of Vietnam also were unmistakable when Hope and his troupe visited that other divided Asian country, Korea. On the heavily guarded border between North and South, Hope saw a Christmas tree that had been planted by the United Nations and that the North Koreans were demanding be removed. “The commies just stared at us,” Hope said, narrating his NBC special on the tour. “They claimed it was a capitalist weapon. In a way they were right. . . . But that tree is still there. And while it stands, there’s hope for all.”

A year later, with the US military presence in Vietnam growing, Hope again asked to make a trip there at Christmas. Again he got an initial okay. But after the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963, in a military coup backed by the CIA, the Pentagon again called off the trip as too risky. Instead, Hope
switched the itinerary to the eastern Mediterranean, where Greece and Turkey were locked in a dispute over the island of Cyprus.

Just before the trip, Hope had another flare-up of his eye problems. On the advice of his doctors, he went to San Francisco to see another specialist, Dr. Dohrmann Pischel, who had developed a new laser treatment for his condition. Hope received two treatments in early December at San Francisco’s Children’s Hospital and was forced to lie nearly immobile in a darkened room for days. During his hospital stay, he got so many get-well calls that two extra switchboard operators had to be added to handle them. President Johnson, barely two weeks in office following the assassination of President Kennedy, sent him a handwritten get-well note:
“Christmas without Bob Hope is simply not Christmas. God be with you.”

Hope returned to Palm Springs to recuperate, and his Christmas troupe began the tour without him—flying to Turkey, with Jerry Colonna handling the emcee duties and teen-movie star Tuesday Weld as the top-billed guest. But Hope wouldn’t stay grounded. He joined the company in Ankara and continued with them to Greece, Libya, and Italy. In between shows he had to wear a pair of dark glasses with pinholes to protect his eye. Hope tired easily, and the trip was
“one of the roughest we’ve ever had,” said a veteran of his tours. But Hope got stronger as the trip went on, and for the last show, against doctor’s orders, he did a strenuous dance routine with old-time vaudevillian John Bubbles. The special that resulted drew some of Hope’s best reviews yet.
“Bob Hope is so established an institution that he necessarily runs the risk of being taken for granted; he shouldn’t be,” wrote Jack Gould in the
New York Times.
“His annual Christmas tour of overseas bases . . . remains one of the enduring demonstrations of the star’s special niche in contemporary Americana.”

Hope had no reason to believe the cheers wouldn’t continue the following year, when he finally got approval to go to South Vietnam. The intensifying war there still enjoyed strong support back home. After an attack on US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, Congress in August 1964 overwhelmingly passed a resolution authorizing President
Johnson to take any action necessary to counter threats to US forces or allies in the region. The war was not a major issue in the 1964 presidential election, which Johnson won in a landslide over Republican Barry Goldwater. By the end of the year the official US presence in the country was still only around twenty-three thousand men. For Hope, South Vietnam was simply another global hot spot where American troops needed a lift.

He assembled a large outfit of seventy-five cast and crew members, including five sexy females: red-haired movie starlet Jill St. John, Italian actress Anna Maria Alberghetti, Hope-tour veterans Janis Paige and Anita Bryant, and the current Miss World, Ann Sydney. Colonna was back as well, along with Les Brown’s band. The cargo also included nearly a ton of thirty-by-forty-inch poster board, which Barney McNulty would lug around from show to show and turn into Hope’s cue cards.

The troupe stopped first in Guam and the Philippines, then paid another visit (Hope’s fourth) to Korea. A helicopter carrying some of the entertainers developed engine trouble and had to make a forced landing in a blizzard, causing a show in Bupyeong to be delayed while another chopper was sent to rescue them. From frigid Korea they flew to sweltering Thailand, where they were invited to a formal dinner by the king and did shows at US air bases in Udorn, Takhli, and Ubon. Then, on Christmas Eve, they flew into the combat zone of Vietnam.

Hope had never faced more danger. His arrival in South Vietnam was shrouded in secrecy
“greater than that normally used to veil the movements of generals and cabinet officers,” UPI reported. His exact itinerary was kept under wraps until the last minute, and for each show a stage was set up in two different locations, to confuse the enemy and thwart any potential terrorist attacks. Director Jack Shea was told that
for every five thousand men Hope entertained, another five thousand were on alert outside the perimeter to protect them. But when Hope walked onstage at Bien Hoa Air Base—dressed in shirtsleeves, his tie loosened, wearing a baseball cap to shield his eyes from the sun, and casually twirling a golf club (the first appearance of
Hope’s favorite stage prop, two months before the first Bob Hope Desert Classic)—the response was tremendous.

“Hello, advisers,” Hope began, a sardonic reference to the euphemism for US troops, who were officially there only to advise South Vietnamese forces. He recycled a favorite line he used when venturing into hostile territory: “As we flew in, they gave us a twenty-one-gun salute. Three of them were ours.” He made jokes about the new kind of guerrilla war that was already confounding US military planners: “I asked Secretary McNamara if we could come here. He said, ‘Why not, we’ve tried everything else.’ ” Henry Cabot Lodge had just been replaced as US ambassador to South Vietnam. “We’re on our way to Saigon, and I hope we do as well as Henry Cabot Lodge,” said Hope. “He got out.”

From Bien Hoa they were supposed to travel to Saigon, twenty miles away, in a convoy of armed personnel carriers, but at the last minute the road was deemed too dangerous, and they were flown instead to Tan Son Nhut Air Base, just north of the city, and driven in from there. But as they inched their way through the clogged streets and neared the Caravelle Hotel, where Hope and the entertainers were to stay,
they found a chaotic scene: billows of smoke, piles of rubble, people running, and sirens wailing. Minutes before, a massive explosion had gone off in the Brinks Hotel, a billet for US officers just a block away from the Caravelle. The blast killed two Americans and wounded another sixty-three people, both Americans and Vietnamese.

The shaken entertainers made their way to the hotel, where glass littered the lobby and the electricity was out. There was talk of canceling the tour. But after MPs searched the entire hotel for explosives and assured Hope they could provide security, he forged on.
“We had no electricity all the time we were there and no water,” recalled Butch Stone, Les Brown’s saxophonist. “We just had candles. And all the glass from the windows had been blown into our beds. So before we could get in bed, we had to turn the beds over to get the glass out.”

Ambassador Maxwell Taylor had invited Hope and the cast to his house for cocktails that night, and the ones who weren’t too shaken
by the bombing showed up with Hope. Afterward Hope, Colonna, and Brown were driven to a Navy hospital to visit servicemen who had been injured in the Brinks blast. To end the trying day (and keep a promise he had made to Dolores), Hope went to midnight mass. For safety reasons, it had been moved from the downtown cathedral to a small hotel nearby, where the service was conducted in a cramped single room and a priest heard confessions in the hallway.

The troupe spent two more days in South Vietnam, doing shows in Vinh Longh, a small base in the Mekong Delta; Pleiku, in the central highlands; Nha Trang, the seaside headquarters of the Green Berets; and the air base at Da Nang. The memory of their near-miss in Saigon dominated the trip. “Just as we got to town, a hotel went the other way,” Hope cracked. “If there are any Cong in the audience, remember: I already got my shots.” They returned to Tan Son Nhut Air Base for a show in front of ten thousand soldiers, their largest audience of the tour, and got an official welcome from General William C. Westmoreland, the new chief of operations in Vietnam.

The living conditions were even rougher than usual for Hope’s traveling crew. In Pleiku, mirrors had to be specially brought in so the women could do their makeup. Janis Paige recalled arriving at her
“tiny room, with one Coke bottle of water—for your teeth, drinking, everything—and a twin bed covered with mosquito netting. When I got in, it was still warm and covered with sand. Somebody had just gotten out of it. Believe it or not, I didn’t care. I got in and went to sleep.” The entertainers were impressed by the beauty of the country—and startled by the extent of the US presence there.
“We supposedly had thirty thousand men there,” said Jill St. John. “But I saw thirty thousand men everywhere we went. It was clear we had been misinformed. It was a much bigger commitment than we had been told.” After they returned home, St. John tried to speak out during a press conference: “I started complaining. Suddenly there was no microphone in front of me. It was just removed.” Still, St. John saw Hope’s mission, at least at that early stage of a war she later opposed, as beyond politics: “He was definitely not a hawk. He was thinking of the servicemen.”

Footage from Hope’s twenty-three-thousand-mile tour was edited
into a ninety-minute NBC special that aired on January 15, 1965. An evocative mix of documentary and variety show, it featured most of the elements that would become fixtures on his Vietnam specials. Hope narrates as the cameras show his entertainers boarding and exiting military planes, being greeted by generals, visiting with wounded men in military hospitals. There are clips of his stage shows, recorded by four cameras—three focused on the stage and a fourth handheld camera roaming the audience. The bug-eyed Colonna turns up in the crowd at each stop, dressed in a different costume or service uniform, for some back-and-forth with Hope. Each female guest star gets a musical number and some comedy shtick with Hope, and they appear onstage together for some banter at the star’s expense:

“How’d he get you to go on this trip?”

“He asked me to go on a walk in the moonlight.”

“He threatened me too.”

Anita Bryant closes the show by singing “Silent Night,” asking the men to join in—a sentimental moment that would be repeated on all of Hope’s Vietnam specials. For his studio shows Hope never wanted reaction shots of the audience; he felt they disrupted the timing of his gags. But in Vietnam the reaction shots are constant—men applauding and laughing wildly, often shirtless, cigarettes dangling from their lips, iconic faces of the GIs Hope felt so close to. He pays tribute to them at the end, offering support for a military mission that was still considered noble and necessary:

Even though they’re putting up a great fight against tremendous odds in this hide-and-seek war, they’re not about to give up, because they know if they walked out of this bamboo obstacle course, it would be like saying to the commies, “Come and get it.” That’s why they’re layin’ their lives on the line every day.

The NBC special chronicling Hope’s first Vietnam tour was seen in 24.5 million TV homes, according to Nielsen—the largest audience
for any Hope show to date, and the fourth-most-watched special of the season. Hope had enough outtakes from the tour to put together a second hour-long special, which aired in late March. He even released a record album,
On the Road to Vietnam
, featuring highlights from the trip—though its sales were disappointing.

A startling footnote to the trip came two years later. In March 1967, US troops captured a cache of secret Viet Cong documents, which revealed that the Brinks Hotel blast had, in fact, been directed at Hope and his group, but had detonated ten minutes too early.
“Shortly after the explosion the cars of the Bob Hope entertainment group arrived,” the document recounted. “If the bomb exploded at the scheduled time, it might have killed an additional number of guests who came to see the entertainment. . . . Basically the results were not satisfactory.”

Looking back at their close call, members of Hope’s troupe recalled that, on the day of the bombing, they were held up for ten minutes at Bien Hua Air Base because of Barney McNulty.
The cue-card stand had collapsed during their first show, and McNulty was hastily trying to put the cards back in the proper order before boarding the plane. McNulty’s ten-minute delay may have saved their lives.