Hope: Entertainer of the Century by Richard Zoglin

Author:Richard Zoglin [Zoglin, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2014-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

AMBASSADOR

“I’m not having any trouble with the language. Nobody speaks to me.”

On November 14, 1955, Bob Hope applied for a visa to visit the Soviet Union. The request, made at the Soviet embassy in Washington for himself and a TV crew of ten, might have seemed strange coming from a staunchly anticommunist Republican at the height of the Cold War. Hope often cast the rigid and ruthless Soviet dictatorship as a comic villain in his monologues. “I saw a Russian ad for cold cream,” he joked when the Soviets aired their first TV commercials. “It had a picture of a beautiful girl, and underneath it said, ‘She’s lovely, she’s engaged, she’s gonna be shot in the morning.’ ” But for Hope, entertainment always trumped ideology, and he wanted to score another show-business coup by becoming the first entertainer to do an American TV show from behind the Iron Curtain.

He got the idea while he was in London in the fall of 1955, shooting his movie The Iron Petticoat, in which Katharine Hepburn played a Soviet pilot who defects to the West. Hope, quixotically, wanted to shoot the movie’s ending at a Moscow airfield. The US State Department turned down the request, even before the Russians had a chance to say no. Then, intrigued at the idea of bringing Soviet entertainment to American audiences, Hope sent his brother Jack to Brussels to get footage of the Moscow Circus, intending to use clips of the troupe (“the greatest I’ve ever seen,” Hope said) in one of his TV specials. But both NBC and his sponsor, Chevrolet, vetoed the idea, apparently fearful of the political fallout.

Hope’s next idea was to bring a TV crew to the Soviet Union to shoot an entire special there, featuring Soviet artists and entertainers who had never performed in the West. “I’ve seen many a curtain go up in my time,” he said. “My greatest thrill would be to see this one, the Iron Curtain, go up.” At a time when the Cold War was at its frostiest, the idea would take two and a half years to come to fruition. But it was the centerpiece of Hope’s efforts in the 1950s to secure his role as America’s leading show-business emissary to the world.

Hope had not taken an entertainment troupe abroad since his Far East swing during the Korean War in 1950. Then, in late 1954, Secretary of the Air Force Harold Talbott asked Hope if he would make a New Year’s Eve trip to Greenland, where five thousand US troops were manning a Strategic Air Command post at Thule Air Base, part of the nation’s early-warning system against a potential Soviet nuclear strike. The lonely and forbidding outpost was 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, but Hope jumped at the chance.

To join him, he recruited a big Hollywood star, William Holden (winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor that year for Stalag 17); two of his World War II traveling companions, Jerry Colonna and Patty

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