had come to believe that he would defy the normal ravages of time forever.  In what seemed a remarkably short time, he went from someone who had perennially appeared to be fifteen years younger to a certified octogenarian.

There were increasing signs that the mental acuity that had allowed him to maintain almost total control of his life and his career for so longhad begun to fail him. On the telephone, he’d often become confused — he’d repeat himself or interrupt the conversation to ask, “What did I call about?”  

But most alarming, he began to forget lines in the act he’d been performing on stage for decades. Strutting across the footlights in the midst of a joke or a song, his mind would suddenly short circuit. Trying to conceal his confusion from the audience, he’d wander over to Geoff Clarkson, his longtime pianist and music arranger, and whisper, “Where am I? Have I done the joke about the two Aggies in the bar yet?”

No youngster himself, Geoff had been on the road with Hope for years — recruited from the Les Brown Band — and was programmed to listen only for his cue lines. Otherwise, while Hope delivered jokes, the pianist and composer — he wrote the classic, “Home” — had heard countless times, Geoff’s mind was elsewhere. Now he realized that he’d have to start paying attention.

But even with Geoff helping him stay on track, Hope began to deliver abbreviated performances, sometimes leaving his prepared material to take questions from the audience. But this ploy didn’t work, since he couldn’t hear the questions and often tried guessing what had been asked. Promoters who had paid his standard performance fee of $50,000 to $80,000 began demanding refunds. Some even threatened breach-of-contract suits. So it was that before the decade of the nineties had barely begun, Hope’s days of performing live, his favorite part of show business, came to an unpleasant and involuntary end.

Throughout his life, Hope had enjoyed remarkably good health. In 1963, he received laser treatments for corneal blood clots which threatened the sight in his left eye, thanks to a carelessly held prop pistol on a movie set. Following the treatments, he compensated for his weak eye by relying on the good one. Now, almost thirty years later, his overworked right eye became cloudy, giving him the sensation — as he described it to me — “of being in a smoky room.”

Over the years, as the right eye weakened, Barney McNulty his cue card man printed the cue cards in progressively larger type until the lettering was almost a foot tall. An average joke could require four cards that had to be stacked on a heavy-duty easel that Barney had specially made. Ultimately, though, Hope had difficulty making out the cards no matter how large the printing.  With his eyesight and his hearing failing simultaneously, he often seemed disoriented and confused.

No longer able to hear the tracks of songs, musical director Bob Alberti had to kneel just below the camera lens to help him maintain tempo. Hope’s monologues became a nightmare to get on tape as he stumbled over lines, slurred his words or came to a dead stop mid-sentence when the cards suddenly drifted out of focus.

The very act of starring in and personally overseeing every facet of his specials which for so long had been such a pleasure, became a horror, not only for Hope but for those around him who were watching an American icon deteriorate before their eyes. Staffers who had been with him from the beginning began to feel like corner men administering to a once-great fighter who had taken on several bouts too many.

It came as no surprise that, as his declining health prevented him from supervising the details of production, the overall quality of the specials began to decline. In 1990, we were taping a sketch set in Sherwood Forest in which he was cast as the Sheriff of Nottingham opposite Tom Arnold’s Robin Hood and Roseanne Barr’s Maid Marian. The stage was darkened for Hope’s entrance when, within hearing of the audience, he yelled to the producer who was standing nearby, “Why am I carrying this bow?” When reminded of the archery tournament that concluded the sketch, he looked befuddled but joked, “I have to start rehearsing more.”

In 1992, during the taping of a spring special in Columbus, Ohio, guest Barbara Bush offered to read him his lines when he couldn’t see the cue cards after she realized that, unless she helped him, taping her five minute segment would take hours. Later, when he appeared as a guest on Bob Costas’s late-night talk show, he couldn’t hear Bob’s questions even though giant speakers had been placed beside his chair. The resulting interview couldn’t be aired.

The last fully staffed regular season special entitled Bob Hope’s America — Red, White and Beautiful, aired on May 17, 1992, and based on the physical discomfort that he was obviously experiencing, the assumption of those close to him was that it would be his last as host.  In 1993, NBC honored him with a three-hour special entitled Bob Hope, The First Ninety Years hosted by Johnny Carson. Hope played a passive role on the show, mostly applauding the acts that had come to pay him homage — George Burns, Milton Berle, Angela Lansbury, Whoopi Goldberg, Chevy Chase and Walter Cronkite among them. Again, everyone onnected with it hoped that the special would be Hope’s farewell to a remarkable career on television. Sadly, it would not.

During 1993 and 1994, NBC aired several specials, compilations of clips from past shows. No longer able to walk without assistance, Hopecould only be shown sitting or on the arm of a guest, most of whom had to prompt him for his lines.  With Hope now unable to oversee any phase of production, the shows appeared uneven. Between the less-than-Hope-quality production values and the star’s steadily declining health, many of the old-timers who’d been with him in his prime found the specials particularly difficult to watch. The audience at home must have shared their discomfort, as one special managed to finish number 77 in the Neilsen ratings. Another was shelved as unairable.  Referring to one of the shows, David Letterman told an interviewer for Rolling Stone, “. . . it was tough to watch. If it had been a funeral, you would’ve preferred the coffin be closed.”

Meanwhile, life moved on. In the spring of 1993, Dolores decided to throw a party to celebrate Hope’s ninetieth birthday. It would have a carnival theme and would take place at their sprawling estate in Toluca Lake. She would have a gigantic, three-pole circus tent erected in the backyard, beside the pool.  Around the perimeter of the house, carnival booths would beckon guests to “take a chance” on a baseball-throw, a basketball-toss and a dart booth with balloons as targets. Winners would be awarded cupie dolls and stuffed animals with ribbons around their necks that read “I celebrated Bob’s 90th.”

Strolling among the revelers, look-alikes of the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields and Charlie Chaplin would offer themselves up for free souvenir photos while a calliope near the house wheezed carney tunes.

Inside the tent, which featured at one end a fully stocked Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop with stools, four hundred guests would enjoy a sitdown dinner (main course: rack of lamb). Among them would be family members, former co-stars, staff members, friends, colleagues — everyone he liked. The guest list would include his writers, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Gerald and Betty Ford, and over a hundred Secret Service agents.  At the center of the tent was a stage on which the Les Brown Band would back the evening’s slate of entertainers that included Don Rickles, Milton Berle, Phyllis Diller, Jack Carter, Shecky Green (Hope’s favorite comedian), Jane Russell, and a host of others.

During the finale, while the guests sang “Happy Birthday,” hundreds of multicolored balloons were released to float upward until they

reached the overhead klieg lights where they went pop! pop! pop! while Secret Service agents, cocked-Glocks in hand, glanced around frantically to locate the shooter.

As we were saying our goodnights to Dolores, I said, “This whole thing was magnificent. It must have cost a fortune.” She smiled and said, “When I tell Bob how much, you’ll hear him scream at your house.” She knew we lived a mile and a half away.

In the summer of 1998, Hope attended a party celebrating Barney McNulty’s seventy-fifth birthday at a church hall in North Hollywood. Scores of Barney’s friends and colleagues stopped by, including Angela Lansbury, with whom he had worked on Murder, She Wrote. Hundreds of photos that he had taken over the years were tacked on bulletin boards. The event would turn out to be the last time most of us would see Hope. He now had assistance twenty-four-seven and looked all of his ninety-five years. After about an hour and a half, he was helped into a van and waved feebly out the window as it drove off. Barney ran alongside. “Thanks for coming, boss!”

Ironically, his fifty-year reign as NBC’s longest-running radio and television star, which for so long had been such a blessing, now became a curse. The network, fearing negative public reaction were they to do otherwise, allowed him to continue appearing on the screen.  No one in the network’s executive suite dared cancel someone who had been one of their giants — least of all entertainment chief Warren Littlefield, who hadn’t yet been born when Hope signed his first contract with the peacock.

Meanwhile, public relations man Ward Grant worked overtime denying rumors — due in large part to Hope’s appearance on the specials — that his boss was at death’s door, while NBC cheerily announced that there would be no 1995 Christmas special “... in order to allow Mr. Hope to concentrate his efforts on upcoming specials.” On July 30, 1996, the tabloid magazine Star ran a photo of a frail and shockingly aged Hope on its cover with the headline: “Bob Hope Tragedy. He’s Gone Blind, Deaf and Needs Your Prayers.”

In the cover story by Deidre Hall and Beverly Williston, Hope was described during a visit to Milton Berle’s eighty-eighth birthday party as “a virtually helpless invalid [who] has to be led around by the hand.” Within days, NBC dispatched sitcom actor Tony Danza to deny the grim picture that the article had painted. Danza also announced that he would co-host with Hope an election year special that would air in the fall.

Two weeks later, the tabloid magazine Globe followed up the Star’s revelations with yet another disturbing cover story on Hope’s rapidly deteriorating health. Entitled “Bob Hope’s Tragic Last Wish,” the article by Diane Albright quoted unnamed friends describing him as “almost ready for the final curtain,” “feeling that the end is near” and “. . .knocking himself out to attend tributes and birthday parties of his oldest and dearest friends, telling them this could be the last time they’re together.”  Another long-time pal was quoted in the article as saying, “Everyone close to Bob feels he may be running out of time. They fear he may not see next Christmas.” The article, complete with family photos of happier times past, went on to detail “Frail Bob Hope’s last wish: to co-star with his gorgeous dream girl, Sharon Stone.”

Describing his excitement at the prospect, the author quotes him as saying, “I’ve had every hot screen siren in the last sixty years on stage

or overseas with me — everyone but Marilyn Monroe, who tragically died before I could book her — and Sharon Stone. I can’t get Marilyn

back, but I haven’t given up hope of getting Sharon.” The author then concluded that “Friends hope Sharon doesn’t take too long to make up her mind.”

Hope’s final television special, Laughing With the Presidents, was billed as his “farewell to NBC.” The network took out full-page ads in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and The Los Angeles Times to promote the show which aired on November 23, 1996. Washington Post television critic Tom Shales wrote of it:

“It has to rank as one of the strangest TV specials in years. The star of it barely moves, barely speaks, and seems at best semi-conscious. . . The special is more than mortifying and the fact that Bill and Hillary Clinton, George and Barbara Bush and Gerald and Betty Ford were dragged into it seems unfortunate. . . Of course, despite America’s fixation with youth, living to a ripe old age is anything but a disgrace. But the comedian’s abilities as a performer have dimmed now almost to the point of invisibility. The few lines he does have on the special are recited mechanically. Hope is mortal and therefore cannot spring eternal. . . For some time Hope’s specials have been tributes to Hope mounted by Hope’s own production company. . . When the inevitable strains of ‘Thanks for the Memory’ sneak in near the end of the show, one can’t help thinking that, perhaps, after all these years, Hope has now been thanked enough.”

Meanwhile, the honors continued to pour in. The Navy christened a ship the USNS Bob Hope and the Air Force named one of their new C-17 bombers “The Spirit of Bob Hope.” In October, 1997, President Bill Clinton signed a bill naming him an honorary veteran, the first in the nation’s history.

Ironically, Hope may have had a premonition that crippling old age would not present him in his finest hour. Back in 1981, he had flown to Washington to present a Lifetime Achievement Medal to World War II’s five-star General Omar Bradley who was then eighty-eight and in frail health. The old warrior, totally incapacitated by a stroke, could barely manage a smile as Hope pinned the medal on his dress blue uniform.

The presentation at the Kennedy Center received extensive coverage by all three networks, and after Hope returned from the capital, I told himhow stirring it had appeared on television. “Maybe,” he replied, “but they didn’t warn me that he’d be in a wheelchair — paralyzed and completely helpless. He looked pathetic.” Even so, I assured him, it had been a touching and heartwarming presentation. “Yeah,” he said, “I just hope that never happens to me.”

Bob Hope died on July 27, 2003. A memorial High Mass was celebrated at St. Charles Borromeo, the church a few blocks from his house that he had helped build. (“Every time I drive up, they try to auction off my car.”) NBC News covered the services, sending Ashleigh Banfield, who stood near the steps of the church, to file a live report.

Following the mass attended by about thirty princes of the Catholic Church, bishops and cardinals that included the embattled Roger Mahoney, close friends and family were invited to the Lakeside Country Club where Hope had been a member and played countless rounds ofgolf. It was a sunny day and guests mingled among the tables set up outside the clubhouse. Later in the day, a memorial tribute was staged at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in North Hollywood.

Produced by Gary Smith who, with his partner Dwight Hemion had produced Hope specials, it was filled with remembrances from Hope’s friends and professional colleagues including Larry King, Angela Lansbury, Johnny Grant, Katherine Crosby, Michael Feinstein, Sid Caesar, Red Buttons, Tom Selleck, Phyllis Diller, Jack Jones, Jim Lipton, Ward Grant, Lee Iococca, Brooke Shields, Mort Lachman, Jane Russell, Connie Stevens, Tony Orlando, Loni Anderson, Rick Ludwin, Barbara Eden, Rhonda Fleming, Carole Lawrence, Ed McMahon, Janice Page, Mickey Rooney and Linda Hope. The memorial lasted over three hours.

Bob Hope was buried at the Mission San Fernando Cemetery, Mission Hills, California.

Hope’s birth at the turn of the last century couldn’t have been more fortuitously timed. It allowed him to take advantage of a “perfect storm” of American popular entertainment that’s unlikely to recur. When vaudeville died, he was ready to move on to radio. When radio died, he conquered television — all the while making successful movies.

His unprecedented, decades-long tenure as the elder member of TV’s royal family may have ended sadly, but nothing could detract from the real joy of his truly remarkable career captured in the lyrics of a song he sang at the conclusion of a 1978 tribute to vaudeville’s Palace Theater.

Sitting on a stool backstage, he dedicated the song — written by Sol Weinstein — to the memory of the performer he credited with inspiring him to become an entertainer — Charlie Chaplin — who had died several

weeks earlier. As the footlights slowly dimmed, he sang:

Off comes the makeup, Off comes the clown’s disguise

The curtain’s falling, The music softly dies

To play the Palace When vaudeville reigned supreme

Made up for bad times, Brought glad times

’Twas every trouper’s dream

We’ve shared a memory And as the evening ends I’ve got a feeling

We’re parting now as friends

To a performer There’s nothing warmer

Than taking his curtain calls

If I had this to do again And the Palace were new again

I would play it for you again But now the curtain falls

Your cheers and laughter Will linger after

They’ve torn down these dusty walls

People say I was made for this, Nothing else would I trade for this

And to think I get paid for this...

The world will not soon see the likes of Bob Hope again.

[Excerpted from THE LAUGH MAKERS: A Behind-the-Scenes Tribute to Bob Hope's Incredible Gag Writersby Robert L. Mills with a Foreword by Gary Owens.  Published by Bear Manor Media. Copyright (c) 2009.  Available at: http://www.amazon.com

Or to download the e-version on Kindle for $2.99:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0041D9EPO

Photos from the book can be viewed at:   http://bobhopeshowbackstage.weebly.com

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