Hope: Entertainer of the Century Read Online Free
Author: Richard Zoglin
fancy Mercedes, but one of the middle-class Chryslers or Buicks given to him by his TV sponsors. Despite a busier travel schedule than practically any other star in Hollywood, he didn’t have a private plane until late in life, when his friend and San Diego Chargers owner Alex Spanos loaned him one. After seeing how much it cost to maintain, Hope gave it back.
To many he seemed hopelessly shallow: a gleaming perpetual-motion machine with a missing piece at the center.“Deep down inside, there is no Bob Hope,” writer Martin Ragaway once said. “He’s been playing Bob Hope for so long that everything else has been burned out of him. The man has become his image.” But what seemed shallowness was merely a sign of how effectively Hope was able to guard his private life, and the almost superhuman intensity of focus on his public one. His manager, Elliott Kozak, liked to say thatevery morning Bob Hope would get up, look in the mirror, and say to himself, “What can I do today to further my career?” That relentless dedication to his own stardom allowed Hope to virtually redefine the notion of stardomin the twentieth century. Indeed, there is hardly an element of our modern celebrity culture that Bob Hope did not invent, pioneer, or help to popularize. He was largely responsible, in the age of celebrity, for setting the parameters of what it means to be a celebrity :
THE STAR AS BUSINESSMAN. Like nearly every movie star of the 1930s and 1940s, Hope was initially a salaried employee, signing regular contracts with his studio, Paramount Pictures, for a specified number of films per year at a fixed fee. But in the mid-1940s, when he was churning out box-office hits like clockwork, Hope set up his own production company, so that he could have an ownership stake in his movies and keep more of the profits. A few years later he made a similar deal with NBC, becoming the producer of his own TV specials and charging the network a license fee for them—enabling him to own his shows in perpetuity. Hope wasn’t the first Hollywood star to become an entrepreneur of his own career; he patterned his Paramount deal after one that his friend Bing Crosby had made with the same studio a few years earlier. But his business arrangements were the most successful and highly publicized of his day, and a model for the production companies and packaging deals that have become routine for nearly every major star in Hollywood.
Hope’s business acumen became part of his legend. By the late 1940s he was making more than $1 million a year, when that was real money. He invested it shrewdly, first in oil and then in California real estate, buying up huge parcels of land in the San Fernando Valley and elsewhere; at one time he was reputed to be the largest private landowner in the state of California. Fortune magazine in 1968 estimated his net worth at over $150 million—making him the richest person in Hollywood, wealthier even than studio moguls. He was forever complaining that such estimates were too high, and he may have been right. After Forbes magazine put him on its list of America’s four hundred richest people in 1982, he challenged the magazine to prove it and got his net worth downgraded from over $200 million to a measly $115 million. Still, Hope was rich, a canny businessman, and a keyfigure in the gradual shift of power in Hollywood away from the studio and network moguls and toward the stars who kept them in business, and who began taking control of their own financial destiny.
THE STAR AS BRAND. Hope was voracious in seeking out new audiences, marketing his fame across what would today be called multiple platforms. He had been a movie and a radio star for only three years when he published his first book—a jokey, illustrated memoir (penned largely by his gag writers) called They Got Me Covered . It was a surprise bestseller, and Hope went on to author or coauthor eleven more books, including another, more substantial autobiography,
To many he seemed hopelessly shallow: a gleaming perpetual-motion machine with a missing piece at the center.“Deep down inside, there is no Bob Hope,” writer Martin Ragaway once said. “He’s been playing Bob Hope for so long that everything else has been burned out of him. The man has become his image.” But what seemed shallowness was merely a sign of how effectively Hope was able to guard his private life, and the almost superhuman intensity of focus on his public one. His manager, Elliott Kozak, liked to say thatevery morning Bob Hope would get up, look in the mirror, and say to himself, “What can I do today to further my career?” That relentless dedication to his own stardom allowed Hope to virtually redefine the notion of stardomin the twentieth century. Indeed, there is hardly an element of our modern celebrity culture that Bob Hope did not invent, pioneer, or help to popularize. He was largely responsible, in the age of celebrity, for setting the parameters of what it means to be a celebrity :
THE STAR AS BUSINESSMAN. Like nearly every movie star of the 1930s and 1940s, Hope was initially a salaried employee, signing regular contracts with his studio, Paramount Pictures, for a specified number of films per year at a fixed fee. But in the mid-1940s, when he was churning out box-office hits like clockwork, Hope set up his own production company, so that he could have an ownership stake in his movies and keep more of the profits. A few years later he made a similar deal with NBC, becoming the producer of his own TV specials and charging the network a license fee for them—enabling him to own his shows in perpetuity. Hope wasn’t the first Hollywood star to become an entrepreneur of his own career; he patterned his Paramount deal after one that his friend Bing Crosby had made with the same studio a few years earlier. But his business arrangements were the most successful and highly publicized of his day, and a model for the production companies and packaging deals that have become routine for nearly every major star in Hollywood.
Hope’s business acumen became part of his legend. By the late 1940s he was making more than $1 million a year, when that was real money. He invested it shrewdly, first in oil and then in California real estate, buying up huge parcels of land in the San Fernando Valley and elsewhere; at one time he was reputed to be the largest private landowner in the state of California. Fortune magazine in 1968 estimated his net worth at over $150 million—making him the richest person in Hollywood, wealthier even than studio moguls. He was forever complaining that such estimates were too high, and he may have been right. After Forbes magazine put him on its list of America’s four hundred richest people in 1982, he challenged the magazine to prove it and got his net worth downgraded from over $200 million to a measly $115 million. Still, Hope was rich, a canny businessman, and a keyfigure in the gradual shift of power in Hollywood away from the studio and network moguls and toward the stars who kept them in business, and who began taking control of their own financial destiny.
THE STAR AS BRAND. Hope was voracious in seeking out new audiences, marketing his fame across what would today be called multiple platforms. He had been a movie and a radio star for only three years when he published his first book—a jokey, illustrated memoir (penned largely by his gag writers) called They Got Me Covered . It was a surprise bestseller, and Hope went on to author or coauthor eleven more books, including another, more substantial autobiography,
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