Hope: Entertainer of the Century Read Online Free Page B

receive (and receive and receive). They do not know we exist as individuals; they see us only as the components of the mass, the audience.” Bob Hope was different. When he went to do shows in a new town or college or military base, he would send advance men to scout the local scene—gathering information about the popular hangouts, names of local celebrities, and bits of local gossip. When he mentioned these in his monologue, the audience felt an instant bond. As an entertainer, he was the greatest grassroots politician of all time.
    Hope got more fan mail than any other star of his day—thirty-eight thousand letters a week in 1944 by one estimate. That record may well have been broken in the age of rock idols and reality TV. But it’s hard to imagine any other entertainment personality—Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley or Justin Bieber—getting the volume of personal, heartfelt letters that Hope did. Servicemen thanking him for bringing a touch of home to a remote outpost during wartime. Parents of soldiers killed in action writing to thank Hope for providing a last glimpse of their son in the crowd at one of his Christmas shows. People who once met him or saw him onstage in vaudeville asking if he would stop by the house for dinner when he came through St. Louis. Old friends pouring out tales of woe and asking for loans or help in finding a job. Birthday greetings and get-well cards by the truckload. When he had eye problems that threatened his vision, dozens of people wrote to offer one of their own eyes so that Bob Hope could see.“I believe this operation can take place without newspapers or anyone finding out,” wrote one man, who said he had only months to live. “This will be my last gift to my fellow man.”
    To read through Hope’s fan mail is to experience the sad drama of everyday human misfortune—illness, family problems, money troubles, disappointed dreams—and realize the beacon of inspiration,hope, and maybe even salvation that celebrities can represent. Hope must have understood this. He replied to an amazingly high proportion of his fan letters—with the help of a battery of assistants, to be sure, but with the kind of care and personal detail that only he could have supplied. Every letter from a serviceman who had seen him in World War II drew an attentive, individualized response—with a few jokes thrown in for good measure, something the letter writer could keep and cherish. A fan who sent a gift to Hope’s hotel room in Oklahoma City before a concert in 1974 got this charming response:
    This is just to thank you for the lemon pie you sent to the hotel and to let you know I really enjoyed it. It gave me energy to fight off the cold I had and to go ahead and do the Stars and Stripes show. There are several ways to make a lemon pie and you have the proper format because it was just tart enough to be good, almost like my Mother used to bake, which is high praise.
    For any other star the first sentence would have been enough, a pro forma thank-you that an assistant could easily have handled. But Hope himself had to add the details—his cold, the tartness—that doubtless earned him a fan for life, one of millions.
    In 1967 Hope got this letter from the friend of a seven-year-old Wisconsin girl, whom he had met a year earlier when she was a poster child for cystic fibrosis. Now, the letter writer told him, the girl was dying:
    She is in the hospital fighting for her life. The doctors give her about four months to live. She learned a few years ago that she was going to die, but the word “die” had no meaning to her. She recently began to understand what was going to happen. She is taking it hard, Mr. Hope, very hard. She falls apart at the word “die.” . . . It will help very much if you were to write a letter or note comforting her. I realize you are a very busy man and you don’t have time to answer every letter you get. But please, Mr. Hope. It might help so much.
    Hope wrote this to