In his latest book, KC native gives Bob Hope some overdue credit

Not long after Bob Hope’s death, Richard Zoglin began interviewing comedians. He asked each of them — George Carlin and Robin Williams among them — to name their biggest influences.

“Nobody ever mentioned Bob Hope,” said Zoglin, the Kansas City native and Time magazine theater critic who wrote 2008’s “Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America.”

“It just confirmed for me how off-the-radar he was, and I thought it was unfair. I think he was the inventor of the modern form of stand-up comedy.”

Zoglin, in his new book, “Hope: Entertainer of the Century,” has corrected that oversight.

Hope long had intrigued Zoglin, who grew up near 75th Street and Ward Parkway before his family moved across the state line.

His interest in theater criticism dates at least to his days at Shawnee Mission East High School, where he graduated in 1966 and once angered administrators when he reviewed the spring musical for the school paper and found the orchestra wanting. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in English as well as a graduate journalism degree from the University of California-Berkeley.

He joined Time as a staff writer in 1983 and served as the magazine’s television critic for more than a decade. He returns to Kansas City this week buoyed by strong reviews for “Hope,”described by The Washington Post as “absorbing and authoritative” and The New York Times as “revelatory.” The hardcover book is now in its third printing.

Hope died in 2003 at age 100, after years of poor health. But for much of the 20th century he pleased Americans seeking distraction. When they purchased radios the size of small refrigerators in the 1930s, they discovered a comedian different from Jack Benny, who seemed to be forever articulating his profound sense of thrift with carefully scripted pauses.

Hope offered adrenaline. “He combined the vaudeville gag rhythm — joke joke joke — with material that was much more relevant and topical,” Zoglin said. “The jokes weren’t about his mother-in-law. They were about the news.”

When California got a lot of rain one year, Hope joked about a police officer who had ticketed him for “crossing a street against the tide.” However mild, such material “put comedy in contact with the real world,” Zoglin said,

When Americans went to the movies in the 1940s, they could see Hope in comedies, most notably the “Road” pictures with Bing Crosby. Those films flirted with anarchy, Zoglin writes, with Hope and Crosby sometimes addressing viewers directly. Hope was developing his signature character, the “blustering coward who was always wise-cracking his way through everything.”

Decades later Woody Allen famously confessed to lifting this character in early films like “Sleeper” and “Bananas.”

But during World War II Hope began to rewrite his job description by entertaining American service members overseas.

While many of his contemporaries performed for troops, Hope worked harder, Zoglin said, learning the names of commanding officers or local hangouts, all to better connect with his audiences.

(To judge from clippings in The Star’s library, that was a trick Hope never stopped using. When Hope played Kemper Arena in 1977, a singer told him that the perfume she was wearing was Evening in Paris. Hope then identified his own scent: “Afternoon in Sugar Creek,” a reference to the Jackson County community’s refinery.)

“He was also more intrepid than the others,” Zoglin said.

Hope and his entertainers endured air raids in Palermo and Algiers. Correspondents John Steinbeck and Ernie Pyle praised Hope for his determination to entertain troops near the front.

Hope would endure similar scares 20 years later. In 1964, after trying for two years, he received permission to perform in South Vietnam.

Upon arrival in Saigon, Hope and his musicians, dancers and beauty queens had to shake glass out of their mattresses after a bomb leveled a nearby hotel. Zoglin cites documents, captured years later, that indicated the Viet Cong had been targeting Hope but missed.

Such nerve helped Hope earn the respect of service members, which perhaps gave him license to push the usual boundaries of propriety.

“Don’t get up,” Hope would say upon entering a hospital ward full of grievously injured soldiers or sailors. “Hello, advisers,” he said greeting GIs in South Vietnam in 1964, having gentle fun with the government euphemism for some of the first American troops sent there.

Zoglin writes that Hope was sufficiently smart about his entertainment career — transitioning from vaudeville to Broadway to radio to film and then on to television — that his sheer longevity meant that he became both beloved and polarizing. Hope was a strong supporter of both the Vietnam War and President Richard Nixon.

“Bob really didn’t understand how people could protest the war,” Zoglin said. “He really began on the other side of the generation gap. Almost all the new comedians considered themselves to be some degree rebels or anti-establishment while Bob Hope was the establishment.”

At the University of Michigan, where Hope performed in 1969, demonstrators distributed leaflets that read “Where There’s Death, There’s Hope.” Some colleges even canceled scheduled Hope appearances.

Hope’s 1969 Christmas tour of South Vietnam included an ugly moment when soldiers booed him off the stage. And yet the television special of that same tour, broadcast in January 1970, drew a vast audience, with almost half of the television homes in the country tuned in.

“I grew up watching him, but I felt kind of an ambiguous relationship with him during the Vietnam years,” Zoglin said. “He alienated a whole generation.”

For his biography Zoglin had the support of Linda Hope, the comedian’s daughter, who gave him access to her father’s papers.

Still Zoglin appears to have pulled no punches, including awkward information about the entertainer’s philandering well into his 70s, as well as occasional thoughtlessness. When one longtime employee complained to Hope that she had worked for him for decades and had received no pension, Hope wrote his own checks to her.

Also Zoglin dives deep into Hope’s craft. He writes about the comedian’s spot-on timing and skill with ad-libs but also how, in later years, Hope would grow angry when some younger comedians on his TV specials — Jonathan Winters, for one — would veer off script.

“Stay on the cards, kid,” he once told Winters.

“By the 1960s he was seeming very much older, and his jokes were kind of impersonal, while new guys like Richard Pryor were using stand-up to dig deep into themselves.”

Hope just may not have had that impulse, Zoglin said.

“He wasn’t very introspective or deep,” Zoglin said. “He was an authentically happy guy.”

Zoglin interviewed a wide range of sources, among them entertainer Connie Stevens, a Christmas tour veteran who described the moment in South Vietnam when soldiers booed Hope off the stage in 1969; Dwight Chapin, a former special assistant to president Richard Nixon, who said Nixon cultivated Hope to generate public support for his Vietnam strategies; and Bob Gates.

Gates was the co-pilot of a 1942 night flight over Alaska who delivered Hope and his fellow entertainers to Anchorage after the aircraft had lost one engine as well as its radio.

When the plane landed, Gates told Zoglin, Hope hugged him and said, “OK, let’s go to the barracks and change our drawers.”

This story was originally published June 14, 2015 at 6:10 AM with the headline "In his latest book, KC native gives Bob Hope some overdue credit."