It would be surprising if voter anger were not rising. This is an easy shorthand & proof of deteriorating economic fundamentals.
Deficits compounding at an absurd pace makes it a flat-out, undeniable truth for observers that things are quickly getting much worse. All of which explains Obozzo's attempts to capitalize on the semiotics of it by suddenly painting himself a fiscal conquistadore.
-----------------------
Voter Anger Is Building Over Deficits
(he generic poll shows a 16-point swing to the GOP over last year)
by Karl Rove
After engineering an unprecedented spending surge for nearly a year, President Barack Obama now wants to signal that he takes deficits seriously. So this week the White House announced that it is considering creating a commission to figure how to fix the budget mess.
Eureka!
Well, almost. What seems to concern the president is not the problem runaway spending poses for taxpayers and the economy. Rather, what bothers him is the political problem it poses for Democrats.
Last year, Mr. Obama made fiscal restraint a constant theme of his presidential campaign. "Washington will have to tighten its belt and put off spending," he said back then, while pledging to "go through the federal budget, line by line, ending programs that we don't need." Voters found this fiscal conservatism reassuring.
However, since taking office Mr. Obama pushed through a $787 billion stimulus, a $33 billion expansion of the child health program known as S-chip, a $410 billion omnibus appropriations spending bill, and an $80 billion car company bailout. He also pushed a $821 billion cap-and-trade bill through the House and is now urging Congress to pass a nearly $1 trillion health-care bill.
An honest appraisal of the nation's finances would recommend dropping both of these last two priorities. But the administration has long planned to run up the federal credit card. In February, Mr. Obama's budget plan for the next decade projected that revenues would equal about 18% of GDP while spending would jump to 24% of GDP, up from its post World War II average of 21%. Annual deficits of about 6% of GDP were projected for years to come.
When Mr. Obama was sworn into office the federal deficit for this year stood at $422billion. At the end of October, it stood at $1.42 trillion. The total national debt also soared to $7.5 trillion at the end of last month, up from $6.3 trillion shortly after Inauguration Day.
This spending has been matched by a decline in the president's poll numbers. This week, Gallup found that his job approval rating slipped below 50%. Last March, Americans approved of Mr. Obama's handling of the deficit by a 52% to 43% margin in the ABC News/Washington Post poll. By October, his standing had flipped in the same poll, with 45% approving and 51% disapproving.
Anger over deficits was picked up in a late October NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, which asked voters if they'd rather boost "the economy even though it may mean larger budget deficits" or keep the "budget deficit down, even though it may mean it will take longer for the economy to recover." Only 31% chose boosting the economy; 62% wanted to keep the deficit down.
These numbers suggest trouble for Democrats. In 1994, a wave of budget concerns (among other factors) handed Republicans control of Congress. Just before Election Day that year, 33% of voters approved and 59% disapproved of President Bill Clinton's handling of the deficit.
Today the latest Quinnipiac Poll tells us that only 19% of voters believe that Mr. Obama's health-care reform won't add to the deficit. The rest of us have reason to be skeptical. The bill includes all sorts of budget gimmicks, two of which illustrate that there is no fiscal restraint in it. One calls for steep cuts in Medicare and the other imposes a 40% excise tax on private, gold-plated health plans. It's just not plausible that this Congress will actually cut Medicare or tax health plans the unions have spent decades creating.
The administration says it is now instructing agencies to either freeze spending or propose 5% cuts in their budgets for next year. This won't add up to much unless agencies use the budgets they had before the stimulus inflated their spending as their baseline in calculating their cuts.
For example, if the Education Department uses its current stimulus-inflated budget of $141 billion instead of the $60 billion budget it had before Mr. Obama moved into the White House, freezing its budget will do nothing to fix the fiscal mess the president has created.
Ominously for Democrats, concerns over spending have recently helped to flip the Gallup generic ballot to now favor Republicans by four points (48% to 44%). Last year, Democrats held a 12-point generic ballot advantage. The change has been driven by independents, who now favor Republicans by 22 points. By comparison, in the run-up to the 1994 congressional elections, Republicans first eclipsed Democrats in March of that year, when they gained a one-point advantage, before falling behind Democrats until the fall.
Mr. Obama's spending choices are dragging congressional Democrats into ugly electoral territory where many are likely to meet a brutal fate next fall.
---
Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of the forthcoming book "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions).
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Stephen J Carter | SF Novelist
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Gold market's three waves ...
A report from Merrill Lynch on the unfolding gold bull market, and the 3 waves it will likely have. This via Jim Sinclair's JSMineset, here.
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The three stages of gold price appreciation to $1500/oz
As we first discussed in our October 13 2008 Metals Strategist, three variables alone can explain the fluctuations in the price of gold: risk, currency and commodity prices. Departing from this analytic framework, we argued back then that gold would move to $1500/oz in three steps over three years. The outburst of the credit crisis in August 2007 marked the start of the first stage, with gold rising from about $650/oz to about $950/oz. The second stage of gold price appreciation is primarily about USD weakness and lack of confidence in fiat currencies, and should drive gold above $1200/oz. The third and final stage will be driven, in our view, by a strong cyclical recovery in energy and commodity prices.
The 2nd stage of higher gold prices is about USD weakness
Decomposing gold spot returns into factors, we find that USD depreciation and currency risk have been the key contributors to higher gold prices in the last eight months. Our analysis also suggests that gold prices have also been leading indicators of 5Y breakeven inflation rates and the USD yield curve slope (10Y-2Y) since April. Moreover, we find that the correlation of gold returns to EURUSD is a lot higher on the upside than on the downside. In our opinion, the explanation for this is that the supply of money in all currency areas is increasing a lot faster than the supply gold. So the weak dollar is pushing gold prices higher in USD, and the increase in global money supply is driving gold prices up in every currency.
A 100t increase in gold demand = a $45/oz move in prices
Broad money in a number of key currencies expanded 7 to 10 times faster than gold supply in 2008. This trend is poised continue over the next 18 months. If EM CBs come to the conclusion that gold at the current prices is better value and offers lower political risk than government bonds denominated in EUR or USD, reserve diversification into gold will continue. We estimate that any given increase physical gold demand of 100t ($3.6bn) could push prices up by $45/oz. With EM FX reserves at nearly $6trn, it will not take much to send gold prices higher.
The point of fiat currencies is to debase them as needed
While some investors remain concerned that lax monetary policy could end up resulting in inflation sometime down the road, we would argue instead that the whole point of having a fiat currency is to be able to debase it when the economic conditions require it. Of course, as the combination of monetary and fiscal policy measures help create an upswing in economic activity over the next two years, cyclical pressures will come back into the system. Because we expect gold to maintain its long-run relationship with other commodities, we see a third stage of gold price appreciation in the next 18 months where prices push above $1500/oz on the back of higher oil and commodity price.
---------------------
------------------
The three stages of gold price appreciation to $1500/oz
As we first discussed in our October 13 2008 Metals Strategist, three variables alone can explain the fluctuations in the price of gold: risk, currency and commodity prices. Departing from this analytic framework, we argued back then that gold would move to $1500/oz in three steps over three years. The outburst of the credit crisis in August 2007 marked the start of the first stage, with gold rising from about $650/oz to about $950/oz. The second stage of gold price appreciation is primarily about USD weakness and lack of confidence in fiat currencies, and should drive gold above $1200/oz. The third and final stage will be driven, in our view, by a strong cyclical recovery in energy and commodity prices.
The 2nd stage of higher gold prices is about USD weakness
Decomposing gold spot returns into factors, we find that USD depreciation and currency risk have been the key contributors to higher gold prices in the last eight months. Our analysis also suggests that gold prices have also been leading indicators of 5Y breakeven inflation rates and the USD yield curve slope (10Y-2Y) since April. Moreover, we find that the correlation of gold returns to EURUSD is a lot higher on the upside than on the downside. In our opinion, the explanation for this is that the supply of money in all currency areas is increasing a lot faster than the supply gold. So the weak dollar is pushing gold prices higher in USD, and the increase in global money supply is driving gold prices up in every currency.
A 100t increase in gold demand = a $45/oz move in prices
Broad money in a number of key currencies expanded 7 to 10 times faster than gold supply in 2008. This trend is poised continue over the next 18 months. If EM CBs come to the conclusion that gold at the current prices is better value and offers lower political risk than government bonds denominated in EUR or USD, reserve diversification into gold will continue. We estimate that any given increase physical gold demand of 100t ($3.6bn) could push prices up by $45/oz. With EM FX reserves at nearly $6trn, it will not take much to send gold prices higher.
The point of fiat currencies is to debase them as needed
While some investors remain concerned that lax monetary policy could end up resulting in inflation sometime down the road, we would argue instead that the whole point of having a fiat currency is to be able to debase it when the economic conditions require it. Of course, as the combination of monetary and fiscal policy measures help create an upswing in economic activity over the next two years, cyclical pressures will come back into the system. Because we expect gold to maintain its long-run relationship with other commodities, we see a third stage of gold price appreciation in the next 18 months where prices push above $1500/oz on the back of higher oil and commodity price.
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Thursday, September 24, 2009
Arthur B. Laffer: Taxes, Depression, and Our Current Troubles
The left is determined to repeat the mistakes of the Great Depression. Other states don't have to follow the US on its socialist deathspiral. The laughable irrationality and obstinacy of the American left today, dictated by a decades-old ideological rigidity, precludes a return to reason anytime soon. The only solution for Americans is to move to a nation where democratic capitalism is not considered a venal sin.
Laffer's brief history of the Depression is a fascinating analysis.
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Taxes, Depression, and Our Current Troubles
by Arthur B. Laffer
(Tariffs, rising state and federal taxes, and currency devaluation ruined the 1930s, and they could do the same today.)
The 1930s has become the sole object lesson for today's monetary policy. Over the past 12 months, the Federal Reserve has increased the monetary base (bank reserves plus currency in circulation) by well over 100%. While currency in circulation has grown slightly, there's been an impressive 17-fold increase in bank reserves. The federal-funds target rate now stands at an all-time low range of zero to 25 basis points, with the 91-day Treasury bill yield equally low. All this has been done to avoid a liquidity crisis and a repeat of the mistakes that led to the Great Depression.
Even with this huge increase in the monetary base, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has reiterated his goal not to repeat the mistakes made back in the 1930s by tightening credit too soon, which he says would send the economy back into recession. The strong correlation between soaring unemployment and falling consumer prices in the early 1930s leads Mr. Bernanke to conclude that tight money caused both. To prevent a double dip, super easy monetary policy is the key.
While Fed policy was undoubtedly important, it was not the primary cause of the Great Depression or the economy's relapse in 1937. The Smoot-Hawley tariff of June 1930 was the catalyst that got the whole process going. It was the largest single increase in taxes on trade during peacetime and precipitated massive retaliation by foreign governments on U.S. products. Huge federal and state tax increases in 1932 followed the initial decline in the economy thus doubling down on the impact of Smoot-Hawley. There were additional large tax increases in 1936 and 1937 that were the proximate cause of the economy's relapse in 1937.
In 1930-31, during the Hoover administration and in the midst of an economic collapse, there was a very slight increase in tax rates on personal income at both the lowest and highest brackets. The corporate tax rate was also slightly increased to 12% from 11%. But beginning in 1932 the lowest personal income tax rate was raised to 4% from less than one-half of 1% while the highest rate was raised to 63% from 25%. (That's not a misprint!) The corporate rate was raised to 13.75% from 12%. All sorts of Federal excise taxes too numerous to list were raised as well. The highest inheritance tax rate was also raised in 1932 to 45% from 20% and the gift tax was reinstituted with the highest rate set at 33.5%.
But the tax hikes didn't stop there. In 1934, during the Roosevelt administration, the highest estate tax rate was raised to 60% from 45% and raised again to 70% in 1935. The highest gift tax rate was raised to 45% in 1934 from 33.5% in 1933 and raised again to 52.5% in 1935. The highest corporate tax rate was raised to 15% in 1936 with a surtax on undistributed profits up to 27%. In 1936 the highest personal income tax rate was raised yet again to 79% from 63%—a stifling 216% increase in four years. Finally, in 1937 a 1% employer and a 1% employee tax was placed on all wages up to $3,000.
Because of the number of states and their diversity I'm going to aggregate all state and local taxes and express them as a percentage of GDP. This measure of state tax policy truly understates the state and local tax contribution to the tragedy we call the Great Depression, but I'm sure the reader will get the picture. In 1929, state and local taxes were 7.2% of GDP and then rose to 8.5%, 9.7% and 12.3% for the years 1930, '31 and '32 respectively.
The damage caused by high taxation during the Great Depression is the real lesson we should learn. A government simply cannot tax a country into prosperity. If there were one warning I'd give to all who will listen, it is that U.S. federal and state tax policies are on an economic crash trajectory today just as they were in the 1930s. Net legislated state-tax increases as a percentage of previous year tax receipts are at 3.1%, their highest level since 1991; the Bush tax cuts are set to expire in 2011; and additional taxes to pay for health-care and the proposed cap-and-trade scheme are on the horizon.
In addition to all of these tax issues, the U.S. in the early 1930s was on a gold standard where paper currency was legally convertible into gold. Both circulated in the economy as money. At the outset of the Great Depression people distrusted banks but trusted paper currency and gold. They withdrew deposits from banks, which because of a fractional reserve system caused a drop in the money supply in spite of a rising monetary base. The Fed really had little power to control either bank reserves or interest rates.
The increase in the demand for paper currency and gold not only had a quantity effect on the money supply but it also put upward pressure on the price of gold, which meant that dollar prices of all goods and services had to fall for the relative price of gold to rise. The deflation of the early 1930s was not caused by tight money. It was the result of panic purchases of fixed-dollar priced gold. From the end of 1929 until early 1933 the Consumer Price Index fell by 27%.
By mid-1932 there were public fears of a change in the gold-dollar relationship. In their classic text, "A Monetary History of the United States," economists Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz wrote, "Fears of devaluation were widespread and the public's preference for gold was unmistakable." Panic ensued and there was a rush to buy gold.
In early 1933, the federal government (not the Federal Reserve) declared a bank holiday prohibiting banks from paying out gold or dealing in foreign exchange. An executive order made it illegal for anyone to "hoard" gold and forced everyone to turn in their gold and gold certificates to the government at an exchange value of $20.67 per ounce of gold in return for paper currency and bank deposits. All gold clauses in contracts private and public were declared null and void and by the end of January 1934 the price of gold, most of which had been confiscated by the government, was raised to $35 per ounce. In other words, in less than one year the government confiscated as much gold as it could at $20.67 an ounce and then devalued the dollar in terms of gold by almost 60%. That's one helluva tax.
The 1933-34 devaluation of the dollar caused the money supply to grow by over 60% from April 1933 to March 1937, and over that same period the monetary base grew by over 35% and adjusted reserves grew by about 100%. Monetary policy was about as easy as it could get. The consumer price index from early 1933 through mid-1937 rose by about 15% in spite of double-digit unemployment. And that's the story.
The lessons here are pretty straightforward. Inflation can and did occur during a depression, and that inflation was strictly a monetary phenomenon.
My hope is that the people who are running our economy do look to the Great Depression as an object lesson. My fear is that they will misinterpret the evidence and attribute high unemployment and the initial decline in prices to tight money, while increasing taxes to combat budget deficits.
---
Mr. Laffer is the chairman of Laffer Associates and co-author of "The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy—If We Let It Happen" (Threshold, 2008).
-------------------------
Laffer's brief history of the Depression is a fascinating analysis.
------------------------
Taxes, Depression, and Our Current Troubles
by Arthur B. Laffer
(Tariffs, rising state and federal taxes, and currency devaluation ruined the 1930s, and they could do the same today.)
The 1930s has become the sole object lesson for today's monetary policy. Over the past 12 months, the Federal Reserve has increased the monetary base (bank reserves plus currency in circulation) by well over 100%. While currency in circulation has grown slightly, there's been an impressive 17-fold increase in bank reserves. The federal-funds target rate now stands at an all-time low range of zero to 25 basis points, with the 91-day Treasury bill yield equally low. All this has been done to avoid a liquidity crisis and a repeat of the mistakes that led to the Great Depression.
Even with this huge increase in the monetary base, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has reiterated his goal not to repeat the mistakes made back in the 1930s by tightening credit too soon, which he says would send the economy back into recession. The strong correlation between soaring unemployment and falling consumer prices in the early 1930s leads Mr. Bernanke to conclude that tight money caused both. To prevent a double dip, super easy monetary policy is the key.
While Fed policy was undoubtedly important, it was not the primary cause of the Great Depression or the economy's relapse in 1937. The Smoot-Hawley tariff of June 1930 was the catalyst that got the whole process going. It was the largest single increase in taxes on trade during peacetime and precipitated massive retaliation by foreign governments on U.S. products. Huge federal and state tax increases in 1932 followed the initial decline in the economy thus doubling down on the impact of Smoot-Hawley. There were additional large tax increases in 1936 and 1937 that were the proximate cause of the economy's relapse in 1937.
In 1930-31, during the Hoover administration and in the midst of an economic collapse, there was a very slight increase in tax rates on personal income at both the lowest and highest brackets. The corporate tax rate was also slightly increased to 12% from 11%. But beginning in 1932 the lowest personal income tax rate was raised to 4% from less than one-half of 1% while the highest rate was raised to 63% from 25%. (That's not a misprint!) The corporate rate was raised to 13.75% from 12%. All sorts of Federal excise taxes too numerous to list were raised as well. The highest inheritance tax rate was also raised in 1932 to 45% from 20% and the gift tax was reinstituted with the highest rate set at 33.5%.
But the tax hikes didn't stop there. In 1934, during the Roosevelt administration, the highest estate tax rate was raised to 60% from 45% and raised again to 70% in 1935. The highest gift tax rate was raised to 45% in 1934 from 33.5% in 1933 and raised again to 52.5% in 1935. The highest corporate tax rate was raised to 15% in 1936 with a surtax on undistributed profits up to 27%. In 1936 the highest personal income tax rate was raised yet again to 79% from 63%—a stifling 216% increase in four years. Finally, in 1937 a 1% employer and a 1% employee tax was placed on all wages up to $3,000.
Because of the number of states and their diversity I'm going to aggregate all state and local taxes and express them as a percentage of GDP. This measure of state tax policy truly understates the state and local tax contribution to the tragedy we call the Great Depression, but I'm sure the reader will get the picture. In 1929, state and local taxes were 7.2% of GDP and then rose to 8.5%, 9.7% and 12.3% for the years 1930, '31 and '32 respectively.
The damage caused by high taxation during the Great Depression is the real lesson we should learn. A government simply cannot tax a country into prosperity. If there were one warning I'd give to all who will listen, it is that U.S. federal and state tax policies are on an economic crash trajectory today just as they were in the 1930s. Net legislated state-tax increases as a percentage of previous year tax receipts are at 3.1%, their highest level since 1991; the Bush tax cuts are set to expire in 2011; and additional taxes to pay for health-care and the proposed cap-and-trade scheme are on the horizon.
In addition to all of these tax issues, the U.S. in the early 1930s was on a gold standard where paper currency was legally convertible into gold. Both circulated in the economy as money. At the outset of the Great Depression people distrusted banks but trusted paper currency and gold. They withdrew deposits from banks, which because of a fractional reserve system caused a drop in the money supply in spite of a rising monetary base. The Fed really had little power to control either bank reserves or interest rates.
The increase in the demand for paper currency and gold not only had a quantity effect on the money supply but it also put upward pressure on the price of gold, which meant that dollar prices of all goods and services had to fall for the relative price of gold to rise. The deflation of the early 1930s was not caused by tight money. It was the result of panic purchases of fixed-dollar priced gold. From the end of 1929 until early 1933 the Consumer Price Index fell by 27%.
By mid-1932 there were public fears of a change in the gold-dollar relationship. In their classic text, "A Monetary History of the United States," economists Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz wrote, "Fears of devaluation were widespread and the public's preference for gold was unmistakable." Panic ensued and there was a rush to buy gold.
In early 1933, the federal government (not the Federal Reserve) declared a bank holiday prohibiting banks from paying out gold or dealing in foreign exchange. An executive order made it illegal for anyone to "hoard" gold and forced everyone to turn in their gold and gold certificates to the government at an exchange value of $20.67 per ounce of gold in return for paper currency and bank deposits. All gold clauses in contracts private and public were declared null and void and by the end of January 1934 the price of gold, most of which had been confiscated by the government, was raised to $35 per ounce. In other words, in less than one year the government confiscated as much gold as it could at $20.67 an ounce and then devalued the dollar in terms of gold by almost 60%. That's one helluva tax.
The 1933-34 devaluation of the dollar caused the money supply to grow by over 60% from April 1933 to March 1937, and over that same period the monetary base grew by over 35% and adjusted reserves grew by about 100%. Monetary policy was about as easy as it could get. The consumer price index from early 1933 through mid-1937 rose by about 15% in spite of double-digit unemployment. And that's the story.
The lessons here are pretty straightforward. Inflation can and did occur during a depression, and that inflation was strictly a monetary phenomenon.
My hope is that the people who are running our economy do look to the Great Depression as an object lesson. My fear is that they will misinterpret the evidence and attribute high unemployment and the initial decline in prices to tight money, while increasing taxes to combat budget deficits.
---
Mr. Laffer is the chairman of Laffer Associates and co-author of "The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy—If We Let It Happen" (Threshold, 2008).
-------------------------
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Timeless Reagan
This is what the 9/12/09 protests are all about ...
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"We warned of things to come, of the danger inherent in unwarranted government involvement in things not its proper province. What we warned against has come to pass. And today more than two-thirds of our citizens are telling us, and each other, that social engineering by the federal government has failed. The Great Society is great only in power, in size and in cost. And so are the problems it set out to solve. Freedom has been diminished and we stand on the brink of economic ruin. Our task now is not to sell a philosophy, but to make the majority of Americans, who already share that philosophy, see that modern conservatism offers them a political home. We are not a cult, we are members of a majority. Let's act and talk like it.
"The job is ours and the job must be done. If not by us, who? If not now, when? Our party must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than ensuring that each one of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society.
"Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, galloping inflation, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite. Our party must be based on the kind of leadership that grows and takes its strength from the people."
--Ronald Reagan
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----------------------
"We warned of things to come, of the danger inherent in unwarranted government involvement in things not its proper province. What we warned against has come to pass. And today more than two-thirds of our citizens are telling us, and each other, that social engineering by the federal government has failed. The Great Society is great only in power, in size and in cost. And so are the problems it set out to solve. Freedom has been diminished and we stand on the brink of economic ruin. Our task now is not to sell a philosophy, but to make the majority of Americans, who already share that philosophy, see that modern conservatism offers them a political home. We are not a cult, we are members of a majority. Let's act and talk like it.
"The job is ours and the job must be done. If not by us, who? If not now, when? Our party must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than ensuring that each one of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society.
"Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, galloping inflation, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite. Our party must be based on the kind of leadership that grows and takes its strength from the people."
--Ronald Reagan
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Wednesday, June 10, 2009
"If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should in terms renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave."
--John Adams, Rights of the Colonists, 1772
"One single object ... [will merit] the endless gratitude of the society: that of restraining the judges from usurping legislation."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Livingston, March 25, 1825
The truth is, that, even with the most secure tenure of office, during good behavior, the danger is not, that the judges will be too firm in resisting public opinion, and in defence of private rights or public liberties; but, that they will be ready to yield themselves to the passions, and politics, and prejudices of the day."
--Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833
"[T]here is not a syllable in the plan under consideration which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution."
--Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 81, 1788
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Mark Steyn: BOB HOPE 1903 - 2003
Mark Steyn's Bob Hope obituary (a bittersweet homage), from May 4, 2003. I've been listening to a few of the old Hope routines on the internet recently, which brought me to mind of reposting this.
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BOB HOPE 1903-2003
(from May 4, 2003, The Sunday Telegraph)
by Mark Steyn
If you only remember one thing about him, it’s this: Bob Hope has made more people laugh than anyone in human history. He’s the only comedian to have been, over the years, the Number One star in radio, in film, and then television, at a time when each of those media was at its highpoint. The Road pictures with Bing Crosby were the highest-grossing series in movie history till James Bond came along, his six decades with NBC hold the record for the longest contract in showbusiness, and his TV specials for the network remain among the most-watched programmes of all time. Plus he’s logged some ten million miles, playing up to 200 live performances a year until into his nineties.
Success on that scale breeds a particular kind of contempt. Younger comics who for 30years have despised Hope as a pro-war establishment suck-up forget that he more or less invented the form they work in: the relaxed guy who strolls on and does topical observational gags about the world we live in. When he started eight decades ago, there were no “stand-ups”; it was an age of clowns – weird-looking guys in goofy costumes taking frenzied pratfalls and telling ethnic gags in stage dialects – German, Irish, Negro. In the 1920s in Cleveland, Hope did as he was told and played in blackface wearing an undersized derby and an oversized red bow tie. But even then he knew enough, unlike most of the fellows he worked with, not to get trapped by the conventions.
How old is Bob Hope? Old enough to have been given his first big break by Fatty Arbuckle, who got him into a small-town tour of Hurley’s Jolly Follies in 1925. Within a year, he and his partner George Byrne had formed the Dancemedians and graduated to hoofing with another British-born stage act, the Hilton Sisters. Daisy and Violet Hilton were Siamese twins joined at the hip and lower back and they specialized in three-legged tap routines. Not the easiest gals to dance with. “They’re too much of a woman for me,” said Hope. Daisy and Violet’s career peaked with an appearance in Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks. In the early Twenties, Fatty Arbuckle was already on the skids and the Hilton Sisters had nowhere to go, and thus Hope’s career began with two cautionary tales: if you get a break, don’t blow it, as Arbuckle did, and don’t get stuck in a self-limiting act, as Daisy and Violet were perforce. Over the decades, vaudeville died, and so did Broadway revue, radio comedy, Hollywood musicals and TV variety, but Hope never died with them. By the time NBC let him go in 1997, the world’s only 94-year old stand-up act could barely see the cue cards and hardly hear his co-stars. But he could hear the laughter.
The centenary he’ll celebrate this month – quietly at home with just the family - is not the one he’d have chosen for himself. His strategy all his life was to get bigger and bigger and richer and richer: he never thought there’d be a peak and then the gentle downward incline of a late, enforced retirement. Mortality offends him not so much personally as in its long-term commercial implications. He was the first comedian to run himself as a business, and he succeeded brilliantly. Time magazine reported in 1967 that he was worth half a billion dollars. Asked about the figure, Hope said, “Anyone can do it. All you have to do is save a million dollars a year for 500 years.”
When you’re that big – when you’re as mass as mass media can get – you don’t have hardcore followers, you’re not a cult or a genius like Buster Keaton or Monty Python. The old Broadway saw – “Nobody likes it but the public” – could be made for Hope. He’ll never be intellectualized or taught in college, which is as it should be: he worked hard at being breezy, and it paid off – when he was on Broadway in his first big musical Roberta (1933), the composer Jerome Kern marveled at his natural ease, painfully acquired after a decade in vaudeville. He was born poor, and had it rough, and took 15 years to slog his way to overnight stardom, but he never bought into the tears-of-a-clown, pain-of-comedy clichés. He started out in Eltham, Kent on May 29th 1903 as Leslie Townes Hope, the second youngest of seven brothers. His only sister died before he was born. “They ate her,” he said. When he was four the family emigrated to America: “My youth was spent in a very tough neighbourhood. If you didn’t get in three fights a day, you weren’t trying.” A sibling followed him into the business as “Bob Hope’s Brother Jim”. “Sure I helped him out,” said Hope. “I helped him out of showbusiness.”
Not all interviewers want to play straight man. The more Hope blithely tossed off cheesy gag writers’ lines about his impoverished childhood, the more some journalists pressed him for psychoanalytical insights into the pain beneath the surface. So, just to get them off his case and back to the jokes, Hope would put on a straight face and tell them that his comedy sprang from his hunger for his mother’s attention and approval as a young child in a large family. One of his writers suggested this line and it seemed to keep the more inquisitive interviewers happy. But with Hope the real depth is in the shallows, the real feeling is in the glib gags; if there is an “authentic” Bob Hope, you glimpse him in those “sure I helped him out” cracks. As a boy in Cleveland, he’d dress as Chaplin and waddle down Euclid Street. But, as soon as he could, he dispensed with the pathos of the little tramp, the sentimentality of the ethnic comics, and embraced instead the dapper assurance of a newer American archetype: the wiseguy, the kind of rat-a-tat quipster you could find in the sports columns and the gossip pages of the Jazz Age but not in its comedy routines, in their way as convention-bound as grand opera.
Much of what we now take for granted as the modern comedy monologue – the delivery, the structure, the subjects – comes from the template developed by Hope. Larry Gelbart, the creator of "M*A*S*H", who wrote for the comedian in the early Fifties, remembers being on tour with him in England and standing in the wings in Blackpool with a local girl he’d picked up. Hope told a joke about motels and the girl fell about. “Do you have motels around here?” Gelbart asked. “No,” she said. “Do you know what a motel is?” he asked. “No,” she said. “So why are you laughing?” “He’s just so funny.” She has a point: by that stage, audiences were so attuned to the self-confident rhythm of his act that they laughed at the right spots without knowing quite what the joke was.
If Hope started out as the first modern comic, he quickly became the first post-modern one. Other comedians had writers, but they didn’t talk about them. Radio gobbled up your material so you needed fellows on hand to provide more. But Hope not only used writers, he made his dependence on them part of the act: “I have an earthquake emergency kit at my house. It’s got food, water and half-a-dozen writers.” In vaudeville, a performer would have a comic persona – he’d be a yokel, say, and he’d tell jokes about rustics and city folk – but Hope’s comic persona was the persona of a comic: he played a guy who told jokes for a living, and the conceit (in every sense) worked; by advertising the fact that he had a team who did all the tedious chores like providing the gags, he underlined his extraordinary preeminence. When he got too busy even to learn the material and the TV sketches were played with a permanent sideways glance off-camera as he and the guests read everything off cue cards, that too became just another running joke. “Bob’s got the cue cards at home now,” said Frank Sinatra. “He comes down in the morning and Dolores is sitting at the breakfast table and a guy behind her holds them up and Hope reads ‘How. Are. You. Darling? Did. You. Sleep. Well?’” I saw him live in Toronto years ago and they had to keep the house lights up so he could read the cards – the local gags, painstakingly filed in his vault according to city, region, country – and the fact that we had to sit in the glare and could see the boys moving the jokes on and off somehow only emphasized the difference in scale between Hope and the rest.
For the movies, his writers cheerfully acknowledge that they built a screen character around his own worst traits: the vain, cowardly, cheapskate skirt chaser. The only difference was that on screen he chased skirt to little effect and played his liveliest bed scenes with animals (a bear in The Road To Utopia, a gorilla in The Road To Bali). Off screen, he was the animal, nailing Marilyn Monroe, Gloria De Haven, and countless others. On the one occasion I met Hope he paid no attention to anything I said, his eyes looking over my shoulder as if we were doing a sketch and he was trying to find the boy with the cards. It turned out there was a well-stacked blonde 60 years his junior padding back and forth behind me. “Ain’t that something?” he mumbled appreciatively as she wiggled past us. He’s a great connoisseur of women. He still calls Doris Day “JB” for “Jut Butt”, because she had “an ass you could play cards on”, though I don’t believe he ever did.
Dolores Reade was a nightclub singer at the Vogue in Manhattan when Hope walked in one night in 1933. They married, adopted four kids, and Dolores figured if she waited long enough Bob would exhaust himself. Seventy years on, Mr and Mrs Hope finally enjoy for real the contented, tranquil domesticity they promoted for years on TV, in that obligatory moment on the Christmas special when, after dancing with Ann-Margret and bantering with Brooke Shields, Bob would bring on Dolores for a duet of “Silver Bells”. About a decade back, I made a TV documentary on a certain showbiz veteran, and asked his wife if she’d like to sing a number on the show. “Ah, the Dolores Hope moment,” she said. “I don’t think so.” As Bob hit 90 and began slowing down, Dolores finally got to make her first album, embarking on the singing career she’d put on hold in 1933. Her husband, who’d looked on the wife and kids as support material for the Hope brand, could hardly complain when his family took the wheel and kept the machine on the road.
He understood the business of show better than anyone. He and Crosby joined a third partner to invest their Road movie profits in a new oil well. Almost immediately it was gushing a hundred barrels a day. Hope put his oil profits in real estate, buying up strategic chunks of Beverly Hills when it was still hills. The way he tells it, even the creative decisions were principally about money. He became the first big movie star to cross over to TV because Paramount wouldn’t match NBC’s offer. When he needed a theme for song for his new radio show in 1938, the plan was to use
“Wintergreen For President” from the Gershwin hit Of Thee I Sing and re-write it to plug his sponsor: “Hope Is Here For Pepsodent”. But the publishers wanted to charge him 250 bucks per show. “Nuts to that,” he said. “I know a song we can get much cheaper”: “Thanks For The Memory”.
He only put his foot wrong once. He was the American everyman and he wanted to be every man’s American, fun for young and old alike. But Vietnam placed huge strains on that notion of a universal popular culture. For the first time in his career, Hope had to choose sides and it wasn’t so much that he chose wrong but the way he chose. “Students are revolting all over the world,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re revolting about, I just know they’re revolting.” The limitations of his technique – of being a frontman for a factory of joke generators – were suddenly exposed. The reliable formulae, the old portable puns sounded sour and small-minded.
Unimaginably, the guy who’d always been one step ahead of the times was behind the times. Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon can complain about the way “speaking out” on Iraq is hurting their careers, but Hope’s a sharper example of how taking sides can change public perception: in a late Sixties poll of American high schools’ favourite entertainers, he came second to the Beatles. By the time the war ended, he’d lost that generation forever.
In the Depression, Herbert Hoover ran for re-election on the slogan “Prosperity’s Just Around The Corner”. On stage, Hope said he’d run into a lady in the lobby. “She said, ‘Young man, could you tell me where I could find the rest room?’ And I said, ‘It’s just around the corner.’ ‘Don’t give me that Hoover talk,’ she said. ‘I gotta go.’” That’s a perfect Hope gag: genially pointed – exactly where he wanted to be. After Vietnam, he never quite recovered his timing. In the 1988 Presidential election, he thought Dukakis “sounded like something you step in”. HIV? “Did you hear the Statue of Liberty has Aids? She’s not sure whether she caught it from the mouth of the Hudson [the river that runs along Manhattan’s west sure] or the Staten Island ferry [pronounced “fairy”].” Hope isn’t “homophobic’ – his closest professional confidante these days is a lesbian daughter – but he couldn’t seem to get his groove back. In transforming himself into a one-man laugh corporation, he’d blunted his own comedic instincts.
So today there are two standard lines on Hope’s transformation into a comedy brand. The first is the official one: he’s a beloved American icon, the GIs’ favourite entertainer for 60 years, Comic Laureate to the Republic. This version is nicely caught in a snatch of lyric from some earlier anniversary tribute: "Thanks For The Memory The places you have gone To cheer our soldiers on The President sent Kissinger But you brought Jill St John..." (Miss St John, for those who can’t keep their Bond girls straight, was Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever, and a fine example of the kind of talent who accompanied Hope on his USO shows.) The counter version, just as stale, is that he’s a bland sell-out, Mister Squaresville, flattering third-rate politicians with golf gags so they’ll show up for his tournament. (“After you play with Gerald Ford, he pardons you.”) When he first sauntered on stage with a club, it underlined his radicalism: the ease, the confidence, the naturalism. To his detractors, it symbolized laziness, conservatism, pandering.
I prefer a third version. On that night in Toronto, the best couple of minutes was when he did a soft-shoe to “Tie A Yellow Ribbon”; he didn’t need the cards for that. Look at him trading steps with Jimmy Cagney in The Seven Little Foys, one of his best pictures. There are a zillion stand-ups today, but they can’t do what Hope did in the late Thirties. He introduced “Thanks For The Memory” in his first feature, The Big Broadcast Of 1938. Everything else about the film – Martha Raye being loud, W C Fields doing routines involving a misplaced hat on the top of his cane – might as well come from the Stone Age: the only real thing in the picture is Hope and Shirley Ross as a married couple now parted. “Thanks For The Memory” is a beautifully grown-up song, sung by the pair sipping cocktails at the bar, their regret expressed through an accumulation of reminiscence, both scenic (“castles on the Rhine”) and intimate (“stockings in a basin when a feller needs a shave”).
The studio thought the line “that weekend at Niagara when we never saw the falls” was too “dirty” in its implication, so they made Leo Robin, the lyricist, change it to “when we hardly saw the falls”. “Which I think is dirtier,” Robin told me with a chuckle. When you see it on screen, there’s no doubt what they’re talking about. Instead of pre-recording the track and lip-synching it, Hope and Ross were told they’d be singing it live, and it’s an extraordinary moment, two people neither with any great reputation in acting communicating everything they’re not quite saying:
"We said goodbye with a highball Then I got as high as a steeple But we were intelligent people No tears, no fuss Hooray for us …" At the end of the take, there were plenty of tears from everyone on set: the tenderness and wistfulness of those three minutes make all the Fieldsian hoke around it look like a heap of junk.
Hope and Ross sang three other great duets on screen: “Two Sleepy People”, “Penthouse Serenade” and “The Lady’s In Love With You”, another laundry list, one that gets in all the sexy playfulness of romance: "If there’s a gleam in her eye Each time she straightens your tie You know The Lady’s In Love With You…"
No one matches that Hope today. Much of Woody Allen’s persona – the cowardly schnook who gets the girl – is an extended hommage to Hope’s own screen identity in The Paleface, Cat And The Canary et al. But Allen can’t do that earlier Hope, the leading man brimming with sexy charm, teasing jokes and rueful romance. Within a few years, Bob himself had put that guy in mothballs in the interests of greater profits. Shirley Ross retired from Hollywood in 1945 and you can measure Hope’s career just from the orchestral transformation of “Thanks For The Memory”, from a bittersweet ballad into a walk-on theme that got swankier and swankier and statelier and statelier until it became the showbiz version of a national anthem, a “Hail To The Chief” for a grand comedic dignitary.
Bob Hope cast his lot and it worked out mighty lucrative, but these days as he pads around his second floor quarters at the fancy spread at Toluca Lake his kids say it’s the old songs that run through his head. And for many Hope fans that’s what we’ll be hearing on May 29th: "And strictly entre nous Darling, how are you? And how are all those funny dreams that never did come true? Awf’lly glad I met you Cheerio and toodle-oo And thank you so much."
-------------
What a towering talent and trailblazer Bob Hope was, dominating each medium he worked in in their early years, and forming many of the cultural entertainment norms we take for granted today. If they ever have university courses on vaudevile and twentieth century popular culture, Hope will be one of the cultural touchstones.
-------------
BOB HOPE 1903-2003
(from May 4, 2003, The Sunday Telegraph)
by Mark Steyn
If you only remember one thing about him, it’s this: Bob Hope has made more people laugh than anyone in human history. He’s the only comedian to have been, over the years, the Number One star in radio, in film, and then television, at a time when each of those media was at its highpoint. The Road pictures with Bing Crosby were the highest-grossing series in movie history till James Bond came along, his six decades with NBC hold the record for the longest contract in showbusiness, and his TV specials for the network remain among the most-watched programmes of all time. Plus he’s logged some ten million miles, playing up to 200 live performances a year until into his nineties.
Success on that scale breeds a particular kind of contempt. Younger comics who for 30years have despised Hope as a pro-war establishment suck-up forget that he more or less invented the form they work in: the relaxed guy who strolls on and does topical observational gags about the world we live in. When he started eight decades ago, there were no “stand-ups”; it was an age of clowns – weird-looking guys in goofy costumes taking frenzied pratfalls and telling ethnic gags in stage dialects – German, Irish, Negro. In the 1920s in Cleveland, Hope did as he was told and played in blackface wearing an undersized derby and an oversized red bow tie. But even then he knew enough, unlike most of the fellows he worked with, not to get trapped by the conventions.
How old is Bob Hope? Old enough to have been given his first big break by Fatty Arbuckle, who got him into a small-town tour of Hurley’s Jolly Follies in 1925. Within a year, he and his partner George Byrne had formed the Dancemedians and graduated to hoofing with another British-born stage act, the Hilton Sisters. Daisy and Violet Hilton were Siamese twins joined at the hip and lower back and they specialized in three-legged tap routines. Not the easiest gals to dance with. “They’re too much of a woman for me,” said Hope. Daisy and Violet’s career peaked with an appearance in Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks. In the early Twenties, Fatty Arbuckle was already on the skids and the Hilton Sisters had nowhere to go, and thus Hope’s career began with two cautionary tales: if you get a break, don’t blow it, as Arbuckle did, and don’t get stuck in a self-limiting act, as Daisy and Violet were perforce. Over the decades, vaudeville died, and so did Broadway revue, radio comedy, Hollywood musicals and TV variety, but Hope never died with them. By the time NBC let him go in 1997, the world’s only 94-year old stand-up act could barely see the cue cards and hardly hear his co-stars. But he could hear the laughter.
The centenary he’ll celebrate this month – quietly at home with just the family - is not the one he’d have chosen for himself. His strategy all his life was to get bigger and bigger and richer and richer: he never thought there’d be a peak and then the gentle downward incline of a late, enforced retirement. Mortality offends him not so much personally as in its long-term commercial implications. He was the first comedian to run himself as a business, and he succeeded brilliantly. Time magazine reported in 1967 that he was worth half a billion dollars. Asked about the figure, Hope said, “Anyone can do it. All you have to do is save a million dollars a year for 500 years.”
When you’re that big – when you’re as mass as mass media can get – you don’t have hardcore followers, you’re not a cult or a genius like Buster Keaton or Monty Python. The old Broadway saw – “Nobody likes it but the public” – could be made for Hope. He’ll never be intellectualized or taught in college, which is as it should be: he worked hard at being breezy, and it paid off – when he was on Broadway in his first big musical Roberta (1933), the composer Jerome Kern marveled at his natural ease, painfully acquired after a decade in vaudeville. He was born poor, and had it rough, and took 15 years to slog his way to overnight stardom, but he never bought into the tears-of-a-clown, pain-of-comedy clichés. He started out in Eltham, Kent on May 29th 1903 as Leslie Townes Hope, the second youngest of seven brothers. His only sister died before he was born. “They ate her,” he said. When he was four the family emigrated to America: “My youth was spent in a very tough neighbourhood. If you didn’t get in three fights a day, you weren’t trying.” A sibling followed him into the business as “Bob Hope’s Brother Jim”. “Sure I helped him out,” said Hope. “I helped him out of showbusiness.”
Not all interviewers want to play straight man. The more Hope blithely tossed off cheesy gag writers’ lines about his impoverished childhood, the more some journalists pressed him for psychoanalytical insights into the pain beneath the surface. So, just to get them off his case and back to the jokes, Hope would put on a straight face and tell them that his comedy sprang from his hunger for his mother’s attention and approval as a young child in a large family. One of his writers suggested this line and it seemed to keep the more inquisitive interviewers happy. But with Hope the real depth is in the shallows, the real feeling is in the glib gags; if there is an “authentic” Bob Hope, you glimpse him in those “sure I helped him out” cracks. As a boy in Cleveland, he’d dress as Chaplin and waddle down Euclid Street. But, as soon as he could, he dispensed with the pathos of the little tramp, the sentimentality of the ethnic comics, and embraced instead the dapper assurance of a newer American archetype: the wiseguy, the kind of rat-a-tat quipster you could find in the sports columns and the gossip pages of the Jazz Age but not in its comedy routines, in their way as convention-bound as grand opera.
Much of what we now take for granted as the modern comedy monologue – the delivery, the structure, the subjects – comes from the template developed by Hope. Larry Gelbart, the creator of "M*A*S*H", who wrote for the comedian in the early Fifties, remembers being on tour with him in England and standing in the wings in Blackpool with a local girl he’d picked up. Hope told a joke about motels and the girl fell about. “Do you have motels around here?” Gelbart asked. “No,” she said. “Do you know what a motel is?” he asked. “No,” she said. “So why are you laughing?” “He’s just so funny.” She has a point: by that stage, audiences were so attuned to the self-confident rhythm of his act that they laughed at the right spots without knowing quite what the joke was.
If Hope started out as the first modern comic, he quickly became the first post-modern one. Other comedians had writers, but they didn’t talk about them. Radio gobbled up your material so you needed fellows on hand to provide more. But Hope not only used writers, he made his dependence on them part of the act: “I have an earthquake emergency kit at my house. It’s got food, water and half-a-dozen writers.” In vaudeville, a performer would have a comic persona – he’d be a yokel, say, and he’d tell jokes about rustics and city folk – but Hope’s comic persona was the persona of a comic: he played a guy who told jokes for a living, and the conceit (in every sense) worked; by advertising the fact that he had a team who did all the tedious chores like providing the gags, he underlined his extraordinary preeminence. When he got too busy even to learn the material and the TV sketches were played with a permanent sideways glance off-camera as he and the guests read everything off cue cards, that too became just another running joke. “Bob’s got the cue cards at home now,” said Frank Sinatra. “He comes down in the morning and Dolores is sitting at the breakfast table and a guy behind her holds them up and Hope reads ‘How. Are. You. Darling? Did. You. Sleep. Well?’” I saw him live in Toronto years ago and they had to keep the house lights up so he could read the cards – the local gags, painstakingly filed in his vault according to city, region, country – and the fact that we had to sit in the glare and could see the boys moving the jokes on and off somehow only emphasized the difference in scale between Hope and the rest.
For the movies, his writers cheerfully acknowledge that they built a screen character around his own worst traits: the vain, cowardly, cheapskate skirt chaser. The only difference was that on screen he chased skirt to little effect and played his liveliest bed scenes with animals (a bear in The Road To Utopia, a gorilla in The Road To Bali). Off screen, he was the animal, nailing Marilyn Monroe, Gloria De Haven, and countless others. On the one occasion I met Hope he paid no attention to anything I said, his eyes looking over my shoulder as if we were doing a sketch and he was trying to find the boy with the cards. It turned out there was a well-stacked blonde 60 years his junior padding back and forth behind me. “Ain’t that something?” he mumbled appreciatively as she wiggled past us. He’s a great connoisseur of women. He still calls Doris Day “JB” for “Jut Butt”, because she had “an ass you could play cards on”, though I don’t believe he ever did.
Dolores Reade was a nightclub singer at the Vogue in Manhattan when Hope walked in one night in 1933. They married, adopted four kids, and Dolores figured if she waited long enough Bob would exhaust himself. Seventy years on, Mr and Mrs Hope finally enjoy for real the contented, tranquil domesticity they promoted for years on TV, in that obligatory moment on the Christmas special when, after dancing with Ann-Margret and bantering with Brooke Shields, Bob would bring on Dolores for a duet of “Silver Bells”. About a decade back, I made a TV documentary on a certain showbiz veteran, and asked his wife if she’d like to sing a number on the show. “Ah, the Dolores Hope moment,” she said. “I don’t think so.” As Bob hit 90 and began slowing down, Dolores finally got to make her first album, embarking on the singing career she’d put on hold in 1933. Her husband, who’d looked on the wife and kids as support material for the Hope brand, could hardly complain when his family took the wheel and kept the machine on the road.
He understood the business of show better than anyone. He and Crosby joined a third partner to invest their Road movie profits in a new oil well. Almost immediately it was gushing a hundred barrels a day. Hope put his oil profits in real estate, buying up strategic chunks of Beverly Hills when it was still hills. The way he tells it, even the creative decisions were principally about money. He became the first big movie star to cross over to TV because Paramount wouldn’t match NBC’s offer. When he needed a theme for song for his new radio show in 1938, the plan was to use
“Wintergreen For President” from the Gershwin hit Of Thee I Sing and re-write it to plug his sponsor: “Hope Is Here For Pepsodent”. But the publishers wanted to charge him 250 bucks per show. “Nuts to that,” he said. “I know a song we can get much cheaper”: “Thanks For The Memory”.
He only put his foot wrong once. He was the American everyman and he wanted to be every man’s American, fun for young and old alike. But Vietnam placed huge strains on that notion of a universal popular culture. For the first time in his career, Hope had to choose sides and it wasn’t so much that he chose wrong but the way he chose. “Students are revolting all over the world,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re revolting about, I just know they’re revolting.” The limitations of his technique – of being a frontman for a factory of joke generators – were suddenly exposed. The reliable formulae, the old portable puns sounded sour and small-minded.
Unimaginably, the guy who’d always been one step ahead of the times was behind the times. Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon can complain about the way “speaking out” on Iraq is hurting their careers, but Hope’s a sharper example of how taking sides can change public perception: in a late Sixties poll of American high schools’ favourite entertainers, he came second to the Beatles. By the time the war ended, he’d lost that generation forever.
In the Depression, Herbert Hoover ran for re-election on the slogan “Prosperity’s Just Around The Corner”. On stage, Hope said he’d run into a lady in the lobby. “She said, ‘Young man, could you tell me where I could find the rest room?’ And I said, ‘It’s just around the corner.’ ‘Don’t give me that Hoover talk,’ she said. ‘I gotta go.’” That’s a perfect Hope gag: genially pointed – exactly where he wanted to be. After Vietnam, he never quite recovered his timing. In the 1988 Presidential election, he thought Dukakis “sounded like something you step in”. HIV? “Did you hear the Statue of Liberty has Aids? She’s not sure whether she caught it from the mouth of the Hudson [the river that runs along Manhattan’s west sure] or the Staten Island ferry [pronounced “fairy”].” Hope isn’t “homophobic’ – his closest professional confidante these days is a lesbian daughter – but he couldn’t seem to get his groove back. In transforming himself into a one-man laugh corporation, he’d blunted his own comedic instincts.
So today there are two standard lines on Hope’s transformation into a comedy brand. The first is the official one: he’s a beloved American icon, the GIs’ favourite entertainer for 60 years, Comic Laureate to the Republic. This version is nicely caught in a snatch of lyric from some earlier anniversary tribute: "Thanks For The Memory The places you have gone To cheer our soldiers on The President sent Kissinger But you brought Jill St John..." (Miss St John, for those who can’t keep their Bond girls straight, was Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever, and a fine example of the kind of talent who accompanied Hope on his USO shows.) The counter version, just as stale, is that he’s a bland sell-out, Mister Squaresville, flattering third-rate politicians with golf gags so they’ll show up for his tournament. (“After you play with Gerald Ford, he pardons you.”) When he first sauntered on stage with a club, it underlined his radicalism: the ease, the confidence, the naturalism. To his detractors, it symbolized laziness, conservatism, pandering.
I prefer a third version. On that night in Toronto, the best couple of minutes was when he did a soft-shoe to “Tie A Yellow Ribbon”; he didn’t need the cards for that. Look at him trading steps with Jimmy Cagney in The Seven Little Foys, one of his best pictures. There are a zillion stand-ups today, but they can’t do what Hope did in the late Thirties. He introduced “Thanks For The Memory” in his first feature, The Big Broadcast Of 1938. Everything else about the film – Martha Raye being loud, W C Fields doing routines involving a misplaced hat on the top of his cane – might as well come from the Stone Age: the only real thing in the picture is Hope and Shirley Ross as a married couple now parted. “Thanks For The Memory” is a beautifully grown-up song, sung by the pair sipping cocktails at the bar, their regret expressed through an accumulation of reminiscence, both scenic (“castles on the Rhine”) and intimate (“stockings in a basin when a feller needs a shave”).
The studio thought the line “that weekend at Niagara when we never saw the falls” was too “dirty” in its implication, so they made Leo Robin, the lyricist, change it to “when we hardly saw the falls”. “Which I think is dirtier,” Robin told me with a chuckle. When you see it on screen, there’s no doubt what they’re talking about. Instead of pre-recording the track and lip-synching it, Hope and Ross were told they’d be singing it live, and it’s an extraordinary moment, two people neither with any great reputation in acting communicating everything they’re not quite saying:
"We said goodbye with a highball Then I got as high as a steeple But we were intelligent people No tears, no fuss Hooray for us …" At the end of the take, there were plenty of tears from everyone on set: the tenderness and wistfulness of those three minutes make all the Fieldsian hoke around it look like a heap of junk.
Hope and Ross sang three other great duets on screen: “Two Sleepy People”, “Penthouse Serenade” and “The Lady’s In Love With You”, another laundry list, one that gets in all the sexy playfulness of romance: "If there’s a gleam in her eye Each time she straightens your tie You know The Lady’s In Love With You…"
No one matches that Hope today. Much of Woody Allen’s persona – the cowardly schnook who gets the girl – is an extended hommage to Hope’s own screen identity in The Paleface, Cat And The Canary et al. But Allen can’t do that earlier Hope, the leading man brimming with sexy charm, teasing jokes and rueful romance. Within a few years, Bob himself had put that guy in mothballs in the interests of greater profits. Shirley Ross retired from Hollywood in 1945 and you can measure Hope’s career just from the orchestral transformation of “Thanks For The Memory”, from a bittersweet ballad into a walk-on theme that got swankier and swankier and statelier and statelier until it became the showbiz version of a national anthem, a “Hail To The Chief” for a grand comedic dignitary.
Bob Hope cast his lot and it worked out mighty lucrative, but these days as he pads around his second floor quarters at the fancy spread at Toluca Lake his kids say it’s the old songs that run through his head. And for many Hope fans that’s what we’ll be hearing on May 29th: "And strictly entre nous Darling, how are you? And how are all those funny dreams that never did come true? Awf’lly glad I met you Cheerio and toodle-oo And thank you so much."
-------------
What a towering talent and trailblazer Bob Hope was, dominating each medium he worked in in their early years, and forming many of the cultural entertainment norms we take for granted today. If they ever have university courses on vaudevile and twentieth century popular culture, Hope will be one of the cultural touchstones.
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