Reading all the remarks about Bob Hope in the "draft dodger" thread reminded me of an article which I had read quite awhile ago, about Bob Hope, that I thought you'd find interesting. It is copied below. It is rather lengthy, and the author's purpose in writing it was to point out some lessons (he is an investment advisor), which might benefit us as well, in addition to the great information about Bob Hope.
Chester
Gary North's REALITY CHECK
Issue 233 April 22, 2003
BOB HOPE, MARCH FIELD, AND YOUR CAREER
On Sunday evening, several million people and I watched yet another NBC Bob Hope special, "100 Years of Hope & Humor." Bob Hope will turn 100 on May 29. NBC decided to run the special on Easter, competing with the ABC's annual re-run of "The Ten Commandments."
Why did I watch? It was not because I ever found Bob Hope very funny, at least not after "Son of Paleface," which I saw about five times at age 10. His ad-libs were sometimes very funny, but his stand-up routines weren't. He was surely not a great actor. But I liked the man. Three generations of Americans liked the man. My father, who turns 86 today, liked the man. He was not impressed by most of the celebrities who came to entertain the troops during World War II (he served in the Military Police in Egypt), but he always had a good word for Hope.
Hope was a giant. There is no question about it. He entertained 11 Presidents at the White House. Think about that. He played golf with a lot of them, from Eisenhower to Clinton. He even played golf with Jack Nicklaus, who says Hope shot a 73 that day. (I got a 73 once, but I was bowling.) He is among the richest actors in Hollywood. He began investing in southern California real estate in the 1930's, as did Bing Crosby, but he has outlived Crosby by a quarter of a century. In 1984, FORBES estimated the value of his southern California real estate holdings at $115 million. The property is presumably worth a lot more today.
[The richest movie stars have probably been Bob Hope, Gene Autry, Bing Crosby, and Clint Eastwood. What did they have in common? As far as I can determine, this: they were all mediocre actors. But 'Go ahead: make my day' was a great line. And I have always appreciated Autry's four-word interruption of the other actor's line: 'All work and no play make Jack. . . . ' 'And plenty of it!']
When Hope dies, I think the government will fly flags at half-mast. As far as I'm concerned, it should.
His career is a model for me. It has been ever since I recognized the importance of the March Field incident. I'll share my thoughts on this. But first . . . .
STAGES OF GROWTH
Hope started out in Vaudeville. That was a tough training ground. Most of the performers didn't make it big -- as in every field. Among those few who did, only a small percentage went on to bigger things after vaudeville died: Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, Jack Benny, Crosby, Burns & Allen, Phil Silvers ("Sergeant Bilko").
For decades, vaudeville was a major medium, especially before talking pictures and commercial radio killed it in the 1930's. It was partly apprenticeship, partially an end in itself. For most successful people, there must be a screening system. Today, we send our children to college to provide this, but college is bureaucratic, not entrepreneurial. Getting A's on term papers is not the same as getting applause from an audience or profits from a small-scale venture. Writing term papers doesn't prepare most people for a career. (I'm an exception, but I don't recommend following my example.)
Hope made the transition to radio. He mastered radio, 1931-1952. Radio led to success in the movies, and from there to success in TV. While the NBC Easter special did not mention it, it was Hope's absence on TV in between specials that made him a permanent fixture. A weekly stand-up comedy TV show eats up too much material. It creates shooting stars. Then the public loses interest. Milton Berle is the classic example, but all of them succumbed except Hope. What was possible in radio, 1930-1950 -- years of personal popularity -- for some reason does not work in the age of television. (Sitcoms are an exception.) Hope made a crucial decision in 1950: no weekly TV show.
That decision made possible the longest contract in entertainment history: 69 years with NBC. According to host Jane Pauley, this is in the Guinness Book of Records.
He hosted the Oscars for 15 years, 1960-75. That did more to make the Oscars into a major annual event than anything ever has.
He has received over 2,000 awards for his humanitarian and professional efforts -- another Guinness record. He has received 54 honorary doctorates -- an award handed out by universities mainly to persuade famous people to show up on graduation day without charging a fee. Instead of a large check they get a small piece of recently printed paper.
Yet his 50+ movies are long forgotten. They were forgotten within weeks of their original departure from the theaters. His jokes are also long forgotten, and deservedly so. So are his TV specials.
Then why do we remember him? Why do organizations honor him? Because of his tours for the troops. They are why there was an audience of millions on Easter evening.
It all began with March Field.
MARCH FIELD
The special had a clip of an old interview by Hope regarding March Field. I had heard this story before. As he narrated it, in 1941, someone on his staff said he ought to give a performance at March Field. "What's March Field?" he asked. It was an Army Air Corps base in Riverside, California, located about 90 pre-freeway miles east of Los Angeles. Hope decided to take the assignment. He appeared on May 6, which ran on the radio: "The Pepsodent Hour." (It is worth noting that Hope's market share has outlasted Pepsodent's market share.)
The response from the crowd was tremendous. The soldiers laughed at every joke. They cheered. Hope could hardly believe it. He loved it. He had never had an audience like that one. He decided that he would continue to play military bases. That decision was well-timed. World War II began in December. He now had a huge market. He took advantage of it. He worked with the newly created USO to put on a tour in Alaska and the Aleutians in 1942. He went to the European war zone in 1943. He went into the South Pacific. Over the next 48 years, he performed on at least 60 tours, the final being the 1990 Gulf War.
His Christmas shows began in 1948, where he performed for GI's in Berlin during the Berlin airlift. (On the stage was "Irving Jones." "Jones" explained that anything named "Berlin" was cut into four sections and then occupied.) He did these for 34 years.
He received given a Congressional Gold Medal from Kennedy, the Medal of Freedom from Johnson, the Medal of Arts from Clinton, and Honorary Commander of the Order of British Empire from the Queen because of his services to British troops in World War II. (Hope was born a Brit.)
Today, there is an entire class of Navy ships named after him. They are strategic sea-lift ships. In 1997, the USO successfully lobbied Congress to designate him as the first Honorary Veteran of the United States. I would have voted for it.
There is something else: the man has no critics. He is not envied.
The estimate is that he performed in front of ten million troops. No other entertainer in history has ever performed in person in front of ten million people. (I am not counting athletes as entertainers, although maybe I should.)
Think about the March Field incident. If Hope had turned down the offer, his fame would be considerably less. When the troops came home, they listened to his radio shows. They went to his movies. They watched his TV specials, up to and including the one last Sunday night. He had a grateful audience of American GI's, and he kept that loyalty. Year after year, he added to his audience through his Christmas tours. Each audience was young. He was able to do what no other comedian of his generation did: replenish the supply of fans to replace the ones who were dying off. His humor was based on wise-cracks, and he kept the material current. Johnny Carson did this, too, but the talk show was a late invention: Steve Allen's gift to American culture in the mid-1950's. Hope never abandoned Vaudeville's format. It was merely re-named "variety show." He and Ed Sullivan -- not a comedian, surely, except inadvertently -- kept the tradition alive.
Hope did something extra for the troops at March Field, back when there were very few troops and nobody paid much attention to them. He didn't need the money in 1941. He was a major star. He didn't have any understanding of the potential that these troops offered to his career. The war was seven months away. There was no tradition of movie stars entertaining the troops. The USO was not created until later that year. He did not know that troops would respond to his style of humor. Someone simply asked him to come, and he went. He did his weekly radio show in front of the troops, and it changed everything in his life. It made him a living legend. With only two exceptions (or nine, says another source), all 144 episodes of his radio show broadcast during World War II were performed in front of troops. His radio audience never grew tired of the military-related quips and the cheering of the troops, who represented their sons, brothers, and husbands.
By the standards of any profession, Bob Hope had made it by 1941. At age 38 in a truly depressed economy, he was rich, famous, and happily married -- unique in Hollywood in any era. He was doing what he loved to do. Anyone in early 1941 would have said that Hope was at the top of the heap. He had it all in an era when most people were hurting. Yet he had not yet begun his ascent to a pinnacle of success -- success in the broadest sense -- that is truly legendary. To have missed it, all he had to do was turn down an odd request: to do his weekly radio show at March Field. No one would have been surprised if he had turned down the offer. But something persuaded him to accept it.
THE LESSON
There are probably a list of lessons in his career. But the March Field incident was the turning point. So, let's think about it.
First, a man of success is in demand. There are others who want to cling to him, benefit from him, and generally ride on his coattails. He is hard-pressed to meet every demand, let alone request. So, when should he say no?
Second, the March Field request came from what appeared to be people who could not help him. They were not trying to put their hooks into him, only benefit from his skill, which is a skill performed in public. Hope did something for others who could not reciprocate with anything except applause. But applause was his currency. He was asked, many decades later, why he didn't retire and go fishing. "Fish don't applaud," he shot back.
Hope went out of his way to do something for others. He got back a hundred-fold what he put into that event. It changed his career. It changed his life. And it surely changed his reputation: from a comedian to "America's number-one soldier in greasepaint." He was known as the clown hero of the G.I.'s.
But to reap his reward, he had to go on the road, just like his most famous movies' titles said. He did take risks. He did perform in places and conditions that did not appeal to most entertainers. He made that one decision, instantly understood what it meant --easy laughs -- and then had World War II drop into his lap. He was perfectly positioned, and he did not let the opportunity escape him. He paid the price in trips to miserable places, but he reaped a huge reward.
He had the raw talent. He improved on it for two decades. He got breaks, as most highly successful people do. But breaks usually do come to people who have talent and who are self-disciplined enough to use it. The toughest part of anyone's career is to decide when the big break just will not come, or when one's talent isn't quite good enough to take advantage of the big break. Sometimes, a very talented person guesses wrong. Herman Melville quit writing when MOBY DICK and his other books didn't sell well. He was long dead before he became a posthumous literary giant. "Call me Ishmael" summarized his entire literary career during his lifetime.
The world of entertainment lets us trace more easily than other industries the careers of talented might-have-beens. It's not just "where are they now?" It's "who were they ever?" Call it the Peter Best phenomenon. (Best was replaced by Ringo Starr.) Bob Gibson called Joan Baez out of the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival to let her sing a duet with him. Bob Who? But Baez was more talented than Gibson, and Ringo was a better drummer than Best -- and he had that great nose. Think instead of Robin Macy, a terrific guitarist and folk singer. She quit the original Dixie Chicks because they were abandoning their traditional roots. Today she plays in pizza parlors. (I walked in one night. Spotting my distinctive black eyeglasses frames, she turned to her co-guitarist, I learned later, and said: "Look: it's Barry Goldwater!" Pretty hip chick.)
I cannot prove, but I believe, that people who use their talents to the maximum to serve others, including consumers, will eventually begin to prosper. They may even get rich. But, in every life, there will be a March Field opportunity. We may not recognize it until after we have passed over it. But we do recognize it retroactively after we have taken both it and the opportunity it offers.
Sometimes, it's forced on us. The U.S. government in 1911 forced Standard Oil of New Jersey to divest itself of big chunks of its operations. In 1911, the Rockefeller empire was based mainly on kerosene. In response to the break-up, Rockefeller switched Standard Oil's operations to gasoline -- just in time for Henry Ford to drive in and say: "Fill 'er up!" That was when the money really started to roll in!
Bob Hope did a favor to a bunch of GI's in the desert city of Riverside, a city without a river. I know. I lived there for nine years as a student. The remnants of March Field supplied dilapidated housing for married graduate students, which was a good reason not to get married, I believed at the time. Hope did that favor, and an enormous opportunity opened up for him. He took it.
CONCLUSION
Keep your eyes open for your March Field opportunity. Be alert for service, even when there doesn't seem to be any money in it. If the service uniquely requires someone with your talent, and there is nobody else out there who will provide it, give it a shot. Don't commit long-term, but be ready to supply it if it doesn't cost you an arm and a leg.
It was long but interesting <_<
