This book is something of a Rube Goldberg machine. Its author, Time theater critic Richard Zoglin, makes enormous claims about the cultural importance of his subject: He calls Bob Hope “the entertainer of the century,” the first person to be a star in every medium, the man seen by more people in person than anyone else in history, even the inventor of stand-up comedy. But the book that contains these claims is so turgid it belies them. No one who was supposedly so central to the life and times of the 20th century could have been this uninteresting, on stage and off.
Zoglin must have thought he had hit biographer’s gold when he took on the job of serving as Hope’s first serious posthumous chronicler; but after years of prospecting, he’s dug up very little that’s shiny from a very deep mine. On the surface, Hope lived an extraordinarily long and fantastically colorful life: He was born poor in England and struggled in America, spending years wandering around the back alleys of the Middle West on the vaudeville circuit before breaking big on Broadway, and then becoming a star on radio, in movies, and on television.
He risked his life to entertain troops over the course of five wars and four decades, and he came to know just about everybody there was to know on the planet during his lifetime. But Hope had nothing interesting to say to them—or, later, about them. He was a wonderfully smooth singer and dancer, but not especially notable at doing either. He was a movie star who made a dozen major hits that all melted into air the second the audience was finished watching them. He rattled off literally tens of thousands of one-liners as perfectly as they could be delivered. And not one of those jokes survived his death at the age of 100 in 2003.
What surrounded Hope was the birth, adolescence, and maturation of popular culture in multiple media. He did surpassingly well in all, but did nothing groundbreaking in any. Zoglin describes Hope’s skits on stage and over the air, all his movies, his television shows, his monologues, his Oscar-hosting, his guest bits, and various side jobs, in granular detail. But so few of them come across as especially amusing that one finishes reading Hope: Entertainer of the Century baffled rather than enlightened about his durable fame. Surely someone who cast such a large shadow ought to have been memorable, somehow. Zoglin’s book spends so much time on how well this movie did and how well that TV special rated that one suspects he’s trying to convince himself Hope is worth the grind.
Bob Hope was a star for 40 years and a legend for 30 more, and through it all, he skated on the surface as no one has done before or since. He was all technique, no substance—as a performer, perhaps the most superficial star who ever lived. The same seems to have been true about his private life. He had few close friends; even he and Bing Crosby, with whom he formed the original buddy-comedy team, kept each other at arm’s length. He was a pretty good boss, but not a great one, and he would complain about reimbursing taxi fare. He was married for 70 years to the same woman, with whom he adopted four children. He was a distant father and a decent brother, neither particularly loving nor notably unloving, and a relatively prudent husband.
Though he had many affairs, he did everything he could to spare Dolores (and himself) the indignity of public exposure and was the subject of only two scandal-sheet exposés about his wanderings over the course of his career. The most horrifying detail in this book is one that Zoglin, who is anything but a sensationalist, simply tosses off: Three of Hope’s long-term mistresses eventually committed suicide. Surely this speaks to a darker quality in Hope’s character, an attraction toward the self-destructive or a tendency to enable self-destruction. But if so, trying to make sense of it is beyond Zoglin’s capacities as a biographer.
So is taking proper account of the formidable grey matter Hope clearly possessed. Zoglin mentions in passing that Hope had a photographic memory and that, until his faculties began to fade, he knew every joke he had ever told, and where he had told it. He also had an ability to recall names and faces over the space of decades, a talent any politician would envy.
“His ordinariness was inimitable,” Zoglin writes in a passage attempting to capture “the machinelike impersonality of Hope’s comedy” and draw a parallel to the impersonality of Hope’s private life. But a man who sits at home at his own dinner table and says nothing (as Hope did) when he cannot help but entertain everybody else on earth is a person who genuinely needs to lose himself in his own depths. And that contrast is what would make him a genuinely interesting biographical subject. It’s admirable that Zoglin only wishes to stick to the facts he has garnered, but his inability to get inside Hope makes this book just as surface-bound as Hope’s own career.
Hope’s special brief was to entertain troops, which he began doing in earnest just before World War II and continued to do until he was nearly 90, for the Americans deployed to the Middle East in the first Gulf war. It was his most admirable role, and in performing it for so long, and under genuinely punishing conditions, he showed true bravery and self-sacrifice. But he also knew, or must have known, that he was creating a halo effect that elevated him almost beyond criticism, until the national split over Vietnam forced him to become—however briefly and almost entirely unwillingly—a figure of ludicrous controversy.
Long before this point, Zoglin writes, Hope had “transcended comedy; he was the nation’s designated mood-lifter.” It’s not nothing to lift a nation’s mood—far from it—and Bob Hope earned every dollar he made. But by definition, mood is a fleeting thing. Bob Hope was not the entertainer of the century. He was, at best, its master of ceremonies.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
