|
|
Hollywood Spin
|
|
Everlasting Hope
Thanks in large part to a complicit press, Bob Hope’s serial womanizing remained a well-kept Hollywood secret until it was finally exposed in the early 1990’s by celebrity biographer Arthur Marx.
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
By Richard Horgan
|
If you want to get a sense of Bob Hope the man rather than simply Bob Hope the entertainer, this week’s obituaries are not the place to look.
Instead, take a trip to the library, the bookstore or Amazon.com to peruse The Secret Life Of Bob Hope, an unauthorized biography written ten years ago by, of all people, Groucho Marx’s son.
The 480-page tell all contains a dizzying number of revelations, especially for those who are only familiar with Hope’s carefully cultivated public image. These include his secret first marriage to a vaudeville dancer, prodigious amounts of cheating on his second wife Dolores and the need in one case to buy off a jealous ex-lover with a chunk of pricey Palm Springs real estate.
In his introduction, Marx recalls a conversation he had with Joyce Haber, the celebrated one-time gossip columnist for the Los Angeles Times, shortly before her death in 1993. Asked how it was possible for Hope to keep his private life so private all these years, Haber replied: “We all knew about Bob and his women, but never wrote about those things when I was on the paper. We never mentioned the Rock Hudson thing either. Now it’s different. You write or talk about anything or anybody as long as it sells papers or gets ratings.”
Many have speculated that Hope was too frail in 1993, at age 90, to be expected to take on the allegations contained in Marx’s book. But this is a gross misread of an entertainer who always went to great lengths to protect his public image. While Hope knew better than anyone that his legendary status late in life protected him from any and all manner of lurid detail, the real reason he was most likely thankful for the memories was because they recast him in the invigorating light that he himself preferred.
“Bob Hope could have sued me and probably won,” suggests Arthur Marx, speaking to Hollywood Spin shortly after the comedian’s death on July 27th from pneumonia. “All the stuff I wrote about him, his girls and his affairs, was true. But he still could have sued me and because he had such big lawyers, I’m sure he could have won. But he didn’t care. I think he was kind of pleased that I wrote about his girls.”
Marx was originally contracted to write a book about Hope in the early 1980s. But to his credit, when he was asked to soft pedal any revelations about the entertainer that the public might object to, Marx said he wasn’t interested in making up another publicity story about the entertainer, as others had done, and held out for a publisher who would allow him to tell the truth.
The Secret Life Of Bob Hope is that rarity of all rarities, a candid memoir of a celebrity’s sexual peccadilloes that was able to make it past the profile subject’s phalanx of attorneys, publicists and handlers. For example, another book written around the same time as Marx’s by Wendy Leigh about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s private life was virtually suppressed from public consumption.
Nevertheless, Marx says he has written most of his books under the fear of being sued and was in fact taken to court by a former son-in-law of Hope who objected to being characterized as having tried to extract money from daughter Linda before they divorced. In the end, Marx’s publisher paid the litigant $10,000 in a case that the author to this day says he isn’t sure why they lost.
Marx had his own rude encounter with the ethics of modern media alluded to by Haber when he traveled to New York after the publication of the Hope book for a promotional appearance on Geraldo.
“In the back of the studio, Geraldo popped up with Hope’s adopted son, Tony,” recalls Marx. “Suddenly I was debating him about the facts in the book. That was a double cross by Geraldo and I’ve never liked him since. He should have either told me Tony was going to be on the show or not, so I could be prepared.”
In addition to reminding us how much Hollywood studios and journalists used to conspire to keep certain things out of the public eye, Marx’s book also has a strange new resonance in light of basketball star Kobe Bryant’s recent transgressions. It may sound strange, but it takes a lot of guts for someone as notorious as Hope to fool around the way he did.
The book also contains other fascinating examples of Hope’s brazen personality. For example, long before Sony’s 2001 fake movie critic David Manning, Hope once made up a flattering quote about a TV special that was panned by the critics, taking out a prominent ad in the Hollywood trades and attributing the fake rave review to the eponymous and entirely fictitious Chicago News.
| Some people have questioned the research behind Arthur Marx’s claims. Although Marx is certainly more of a gut-level biographer, allowing his show business instincts to lead him to bona fide sources, he says Hope’s indiscretions were apparent to him as far back as the mid 1960’s, when Marx and screenwriting partner Bob Fisher were commissioned by the entertainer to write four successive screenplays beginning with A Global Affair.
|
In addition to a number of books about his father, Marx has written biographies of prominent Hollywood figures such as Samuel Goldwyn, Red Skelton, Mickey Rooney and Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis, which formed the basis of a recent TV movie starring Will & Grace’s Sean Hayes as Lewis. Let’s face it, the best arbiters of Marx’s credence as a non-fiction author are the subjects of the books themselves and in this respect the 82-year-old author has done fairly well.
Alright, so maybe Red Skelton did stand outside the window of an Orange County bookstore displaying copies of Marx’s biography, urging people as they walked in not to buy a copy. But that usually means the prose hit the bulls eye. Meanwhile, when asked what he thought about Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin once replied, “Read Marx’s book.” In that biography, Martin is painted as the hero and Lewis as the jerk.
| But leave it to Hope, the original king of all media, to come up with as classy a comeback as any 90-year-old could hope for. After the publication of the Hope biography, Arthur Marx was signing copies of books about Groucho at a screening of his father’s Marx Brothers films near Toluca Lake when a winking Hope finally made his thoughts known.
| |
“I’m sitting there and suddenly someone shoves a copy of my Bob Hope book in front of me,” Marx recalls with a laugh. “I said, ‘What’s this?’ And the gentleman opened it up to the first page and I saw that Bob Hope had autographed my book. Which is pretty funny I thought.”
Prior to Marx’s book, there appear to have been only a few mentions in the press of Hope’s philandering - a 1956 Confidential magazine article detailing his relationship with actress Barbara Payton and a 1991 Globe expose featuring the confessions of a former Hope secretary. Both reports however were largely ignored by the public because they appeared in the tabloids.
| Today, Marx soldiers on with tentative plans to return to the biographical field once more with a second book on Rooney or perhaps another account of a recently deceased and much beloved entertainer, Buddy Hackett. Although Marx is trying to wait a sufficient amount of time before contacting Hackett’s widow, a number of quickie biographers have no doubt already bolted from the gate.
|
[Every Wednesday, Hollywood Spin takes a look at issues relating to the Hollywood publicity machine. To reach the author, please email rhorgan@filmstew.com. Meanwhile, to comment on this week’s topic, please go to our Hollywood Spin Discussion Board.]
|
|
|
|
|
 Email
|
 Print
|
|
|
|
|
|