Bob Hope: The Tiger Woods Of His Time
Hell Toupee
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article855671.ece
Bob Hope: the road to bed
The trademark leer of America's top comedian was the public clue to an
insatiable appetite for women. Bob Hope was one of show business's
most incorrigible philanderers, reveals his biographer Arthur Marx
In Bob Hope's seven decades of superstardom there was hardly a breath
of scandal connected to his name. Yet his womanising made Gary Hart,
John Kennedy and Bill Clinton look like amateurs in the philandering
derby. His character and his attitudes, his Midas-like greed and his
callous dismissal of long-time, loyal associates would not have played
well in the headlines either.
In his inner circle it was widely known that there was a lot more to
the sexy innuendos and lecherous laughter-evoking leers directed at
the beautiful women on his shows than the average fan suspected or
would have dared to imagine.
According to Robert Slatzer, a former Paramount publicist: "It was
pretty generally known around the studio that whenever Bob had to go
off on one of his tours or play to the army camps, he'd have girls he
wanted to boff sent ahead for him. But his favourites were beauty
contest winners. He was always trying to get them on his show � not
only to rev up the GIs in the audience, but because he wanted them
himself."
While Hope and Bing Crosby were still close friends and at the height
of their popularity as a team, they used to trade girlfriends. Not
girls they were serious about, but the bimbo, one-night-stand types
that were so common on studio lots or around broadcasting stations.
If, for example, Crosby found a girl he thought was particularly good
in bed, he'd introduce her to Hope, and vice versa.
In the late 1940s, while Crosby was recuperating in hospital from an
appendectomy, he had a nurse who gave him what he described to Hope as
"the greatest blowjob of my life. You ought to try her, Bob".
The next day Hope had his personal physician, Tom Hearn, check him
into St John's hospital on the pretence that his nerves were shattered
and that he needed a rest. He insisted on having the same room and the
same nurse. He got anything but rest.
By the time of his divorce from his first wife in 1934, Hope was
living with Dolores Reade, a singer who remained loyally at his side
for nearly 70 years. Though there was certainly a wedding ceremony,
there is no record of their marriage certificate. They adopted four
children, but Hope's long absences were thin pretexts for escaping the
shackles of domesticity and indulging his extramarital passions.
In many cases the sole criterion for choosing an actress to take along
with him on tour would be whether she was willing to have sex with
him. One such was a Minnesota-born movie starlet named Barbara Payton.
She was 25, 5ft 4in with blonde hair and a saucy personality.
Moreover, she was willing to bed down with just about any man who
asked her, provided he could supply the required incentives � money or
a shot at a film role.
Hope had just done a whirlwind tour of 21 American cities with his
radio cast. In Dallas, he checked into the Baker hotel where, as fate
would have it, Payton was staying. She was Hope's type and, of course,
he appealed to her. Not only was he America's number one motion
picture star, but he was attractive, fun to be with, and able to keep
pace with her in the drinking department.
There was immediate chemistry between them. "As a result," Payton
recalled, "we only knew each other a few hours before we knew each
other as well as a boy and girl ever can." Their affair lasted about
six months.
Having a romance with Hope and keeping it out of the papers was not an
easy thing to accomplish. Not only did Hope have to maintain the
pretence of being faithful to his wife Dolores when he was in
Hollywood, but he was on the move so much that Payton spent a great
deal of their romance packing and unpacking.
After warning her about these absences, her studio,
Universal-International, dropped her contract. Why she gave up a
promising career to be with someone as unreliable as Hope was a puzzle
to her friends.
Certainly, she did not stick with Bob Hope because of his prowess as a
lover. "Bob was the greatest that first night in Dallas, but once it
became old hat to him he was no longer such a tiger," she said later.
Nor was it Hope's generosity. The only gift that he gave her, other
than a king-sized bed, was three jars of jam. However, he was always
good for "a lot of laughs", she confessed.
Just before he started on the film Fancy Pants, Hope set up Payton in
a furnished apartment in Hollywood. Barbara's new love nest was easily
accessible from the Paramount lot, which made it easier for him to
drop in for a matinee.
It was inevitable that the pair would break up sooner or later,
because Hope was not only incapable of being true to his wife, but
consistently cheated on his mistress as well. After a failed marriage,
feeling desperate and unwanted, she died in 1967 at the age of 39.
Waiting in the wings to replace Payton was a blonde actress named
Marilyn Maxwell. Hope is reported to have had affairs with a long list
of actresses, but the one he was truly crazy about was Maxwell. Signed
to a term contract by MGM, she had had an affair with Frank Sinatra,
who must have continued to have a yen for her because he became
extremely jealous when she became Hope's lover. Though the singer
denied it, it was known that he harboured a grudge against Hope ever
after.
At the height of her affair with Hope, she confessed to her New York
hairdresser: "I'd marry Bob and I believe he'd marry me, but I'd be
such a heavy around Hollywood for stealing him away from Dolores and
breaking up that allegedly happy family that I believe someone would
kill me."
During the spring of 1951 Hope asked Lew Grade, his agent in Britain
and Europe, to book him for a personal appearance tour of England and
Scotland. Maxwell went over with him on the Queen Mary. By then, the
affair had reached such a fever pitch that Maxwell was being referred
to as "Mrs Bob Hope".
It was inevitable that the gossip would get back to Dolores and her
mother Theresa DeFina. "Finally," Theresa recalled, "Dolores phoned
Bob on the Queen Mary and told him that he was publicly humiliating
her and this his adultery had to stop." As usual, her complaint fell
on deaf ears.
However, on one occasion Dolores caught her husband in bed with one of
his ladies. Out of control, she yanked the covers off Hope and his
playmate of the night. Caught red-handed, Hope sat bolt upright in bed
and exclaimed: "It isn't me!" He was less flip when the shoe was on
the other foot. The late Lester White, one of Hope's writers,
recounted the scene when Hope dropped in on Maxwell unannounced and
knocked on her hotel door at midnight. "When she called out nervously
'Who's there?', Bob replied, 'It's me, Great Lover Hope'." When
Maxwell finally opened the door, she wore a negligee but seemed
flustered.
Suspecting another man was present, Bob yanked open the closet door
and there, huddled inside in polka dot undershorts, was Jimmy Durante.
However, Maxwell remained a big part of the comedian's emotional life
until she married the writer Jerry Davies in 1954.
Hope frequently flew to London, ostensibly for business, but actually
for other things that attracted him there. London was notorious for
its beautiful, statuesquely built British showgirls.
Pamela Guard was one of many. Pamela, whose stage name was Yana, was
known primarily for her impressive figure. She told the
producer-writer Digby Wolfe that "whenever Bob came to London she'd
have him over to her flat, work in his act whenever he needed her, and
they tootled all over the Continent together".
In 1953 Hope began the patient seduction of his latest girlfriend,
Jeannie Carmen. A model who had migrated to New York from Arkansas,
Jeannie was a beautiful brunette, about 21, with a body that would
have made Marilyn Monroe envious. Her career as a trick-shot golfer
gave her extra appeal to Hope.
"I didn't even know he was married," she said later. "I was a country
girl. I wasn't from the intelligentsia. In fact, I was pretty stupid.
But what I found fascinating about him was . . . his humour was so
great . . . until I found out it wasn't on-the-spot sense of humour at
all . . . he had writers.
"But he was really nice. Nobody was nicer than Bob. And he was
nice-looking, too, until he got his little tummy and his girdle and
all that. So we started running around together. But we still had not
been intimate. He was always trying to get me up to his room. I don't
even remember the first time we had sex. That's how exciting it was.
As a lover, he wasn't very exciting."
Hope had less luck seducing his new secretary, Jan King, a petite
35-year-old. "Bob, you don't appeal to me," she recalled yelling. "Now
let go and zip your pants up. I want to work for you for a long time,
but not doing this." He finally got the message.
As his "confidential" secretary for 15 years, little escaped King's
notice. "It didn't take long after I joined Bob's Hollywood staff to
find out that the man America loved, the man who promoted himself as
an adoring husband and father, was a lech. He had women stashed away
all over town, and part of my job was to help him conceal his secret
harem from Dolores and the world.
"I also learnt that his lavish dressing-room office at the studio was
a hotbed of intrigue, from which he carried out his secret seductions
and where members of his family spied on him. He finally barred
Dolores from his office.
"His 'talent scouts' brought him a succession of beautiful young
women. They all had stars in their eyes and were looking for their big
break. Some of these women he gave bit parts to in his pictures, and
others he just put on his payroll, so he could use them as tax
deductions."
Only occasionally would Hope's family be welcome at his Palm Springs
hideaway. Once a year he would allow his daughter Linda to invite a
few of her classmates to spend their Easter vacations with her there.
Ann Rapp, one of Linda's friends, recalled: "We were all in our early
teens, and quite innocent, but I can remember that Hope was a very
lecherous man. (He) was actually repulsive around young girls. He had
a dirty mouth and he was kind of perverted.
"By perverted, I mean, like, well, he was an exhibitionist. At the
Palm Springs house sometimes he'd come out without any clothes on, or
if he was dressed, his fly would be open. And then he would pretend it
was a mistake, like he didn�t know we were in the room."
Rosemarie Frankland, a British girl with a peaches-and-cream
complexion and big blue eyes, was crowned Miss World in London in
1961, when Hope was there shooting The Road to Hong Kong. "Bob had
been one of the judges of the Miss World contest and lusted for
Rosemarie immediately upon seeing her," King relates. "He lobbied with
the judges for her to win the title." He rewarded her with a bit part
in his 1964 film, I'll Take Sweden, and kept her in a Los Angeles
apartment.
Dolores was "haunted by Hope's infidelity", says King, and was
consumed by an agonising curiosity about her rivals. She and her
mother would sit for hours listening to reports on Hope's illicit love
life from spies they had hired. Members of the family, including his
two daughters, spied on him.
On one occasion Dolores's mother, while standing on the upstairs
landing of Hope's house, tried to eavesdrop on his phone conversations
behind the locked door to his private bedroom. She became so engrossed
that she lost her balance, fell down the stairs and broke her hip.
By 1969 Hope was 66 and still going strong as a womaniser while posing
as a figure of moral rectitude. "I don't believe in all that sexual
permissiveness you hear about today. Maybe it's because I'm at the age
when my bag is my lunch," he declared. In reality he was at least 15
years away from the time when he would stop his wide and varied
extramarital activity.
As recently as the mid-1980s he still had a mistress living in
Burbank, whom he visited regularly.
okerry
news:4B81CBBF...@invalid.invalid...
> Except that his tomcatting didn't make the news...
>
> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article855671.ece
>
> Bob Hope: the road to bed
> The trademark leer of America's top comedian was the public clue to an
> insatiable appetite for women. Bob Hope was one of show business's
> most incorrigible philanderers, reveals his biographer Arthur Marx
>
> In Bob Hope's seven decades of superstardom there was hardly a breath
> of scandal connected to his name. Yet his womanising made Gary Hart,
> John Kennedy and Bill Clinton look like amateurs in the philandering
> derby. His character and his attitudes, his Midas-like greed and his
> callous dismissal of long-time, loyal associates would not have played
> well in the headlines either.
>
> In his inner circle it was widely known that there was a lot more to
> the sexy innuendos and lecherous laughter-evoking leers directed at
> the beautiful women on his shows than the average fan suspected or
> would have dared to imagine.
>
> According to Robert Slatzer, a former Paramount publicist: "It was
> pretty generally known around the studio that whenever Bob had to go
> off on one of his tours or play to the army camps, he'd have girls he
> wanted to boff sent ahead for him. But his favourites were beauty
I will submit that this is why the Tiger Woods and John Edwards cases are
attracting such intense interest - because a lot of folks are hoping this
kind of behavior among anyone who's married will no longer be okay and
acceptable - that no longer will everybody just look the other way and
protect the cheaters.
Anyone who wants to live like this needs to be *single.* Nobody has the
right to torment a spouse and children with a cheater's lies, neglect,
disease and disrespect. This says Hope had *four* adopted children? How
much time could he possibly have spent with them?
And even being single and being a huge player can be hazardous to your
health. Just ask what's-his-name McNair, a married ex-football player whose
mistress shot and killed him because "she thought she was the only woman
other than his wife" and the mistress couldn't believe he would lie to her.
Either stay true to your spouse and enjoy love and respect and care and sex
from them -
Or be *honest and up front* about the fact that you want to date everybody
in sight and get tons and tons and tons of sex from as many people as
possible. Then go home to an empty house so that you don't hurt anyone
else.
Other human beings, even women, are not pets to be kept for amusement.
It is terribly cruel to all involved - even to the cheater - to be a liar
and a player. If having tons of sex is really the goal, there are ways to
get that without tormenting and destroying somebody else (like a spouse and
kids) in the process.
Okay, you may all return to your regularly scheduled AGC now.
okerry
Jim Sumner
>
> read more »
If this doesn't prove that women will have sex with ANYONE famous
then nothing does, Bob Hope had a terrible voice and he was one ugly
dude.
mikey
okerry
news:863f9016-a6dc-43b8...@t34g2000prm.googlegroups.com...
> Thanks for the mammaries.
This has completely blown my image of Bob Hope. I thought he was a stand-up
guy - well, I guess he really was just a stand-up guy. And here I thought
he had a good head on his shoulders.
cuh...@webtv.net
http://www.114thaviationcompany.com that night Bob Hope was doing his
U.S.O.Show.About half an hour before Bob's show was over, a guy came to
relieve me so I could see Bob's show.
LOOK, there is Absolutely NO Way Tiger Woods can Ever match up to Bob
Hope, NO WAY!
cuhulin
Travoltron
was always clear to me why they were there.
Same with Letterman's talentless interns that he would give screentime to.
Gracenote
>
> read more »
Thank you for posting this, I love this type of genuine gossip.
Nowadays we get so little of it.