Bob Hope Xmas Show: Osan, Korea, Dec. 1968

He was not really a singer, but he introduced a handful of standards in a pitch-perfect voice. He was not really a dancer, but held his own as a hoofer with Cagney and Baryshnikov.

He was never nominated for his acting, but presided over more Oscar ceremonies than anyone and was among the top box office draws of his day. He never had a regular television series, but his specials were smash ratings hits, and the creators of "M*A*S*H" and "Gilligan's Island" cut their teeth as his radio writers. He lent jokes to Franklin D. Roosevelt, played golf with Bill Clinton and entertained the troops in every American war, from Pearl Harbor to the Persian Gulf.

He was born in London the year that the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk — and on May 29 he will turn 100.

Anyone under 50 may think of him, if at all, as the Vietnam hawk who backed Richard M. Nixon, taunted protesters, twirled a golf club and read from cue cards as he grew gradually more out of touch with the times. His nimble mind is now adrift and his once-restless frame is limited at last to the bedroom of his sprawling estate in Toluca Lake, the Los Angeles neighborhood where he has lived for 65 years.

But Bob Hope ruled the world.

"When you're an innovator, and you get old, people forget that you're an innovator, you know?" Jay Leno says in "100 Years of Hope and History," a two-hour retrospective to be broadcast tonight on NBC, 53 years to the month after Mr. Hope's television debut on Easter Sunday, 1950. "And there's a whole generation of people that just remember Bob Hope as `Didn't he used to do some shows for the soldiers?' And they forget. I mean, he's probably the greatest American entertainer of the 20th century."

Mr. Hope was always best known for what Time magazine called his "vibrant averageness." As early as 1947, Variety criticized his unwillingness to "veer an inch from his time-tested routine," and concluded: "Question simply is: Who's going to outlive the other, Hope or the listening public?"

By lasting so long, by taking sides on one of the most divisive political issues of his day and by performing, in his last active years, more or less on autopilot, he helped obscure his own most brilliant work and lost a new generation of audiences. But his comic heirs were paying attention, and in tonight's special, performers from Conan O'Brien to Drew Carey, Mel Brooks and Steve Martin attest to his inspiration.

"I just see an enormous skill and hilarity to his delivery, and his persona, and the character that he developed over the years, and the superbly flippant style that coped with every situation," said Woody Allen, who began successfully sending gag lines to Mr. Hope as a teenager. "To me, he was a guy who was very, very facile with his dialogue, and never, ever at a loss for a very funny remark to make in any situation, no matter how harrowing, or romantic, or downtrodden or exuberant.

Mr. Hope all but invented the role of wisecracking emcee, first in vaudeville, then on radio, at 17 Oscar ceremonies over 38 years, and in 286 television specials, including the first Western entertainment broadcast from China, featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Big Bird, and innumerable personal appearances featuring the top entertainers, athletes and politicians of the moment. In more than 50 films, often with his friend Bing Crosby on the "Road to Zanzibar" — or Morocco, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bali or Utopia — he perfected the role of braggart-coward who seldom got the girl but never stopped trying.

"When I look at some of my movies, some of the early ones especially, I can just see myself `doing' him unabashedly," Mr. Allen added in a recent interview. "And for people that know me, like Diane Keaton, they can just see it clear as a bell."

With his rapid-fire delivery, inimitable timing and slightly nasal voice, Mr. Hope insisted, always, on a live audience, so he could punch a monologue up or ratchet it down as he read his listeners' reactions. Mr. O'Brien speaks of the "backtracking" style, in which Mr. Hope's film characters' conceits suddenly crumble in perfect deadpans or double takes.

He was the first to sing Ira Gershwin's "I Can't Get Started," Cole Porter's "DeLovely," plus "Two Sleepy People," "Silver Bells," "Buttons and Bows" and "Thanks for the Memory," which won the Oscar as best song in his debut film, "The Big Broadcast of 1938," and promptly became his theme song in 59 unbroken years under contract to NBC.

He pierced an era of prudery with a raciness less popular figures could not have dared. On a 1940's radio broadcast, when Dorothy Lamour said she was just pulling his leg, Mr. Hope replied: "Dottie, you can pull my right leg, and you can pull my left leg, but don't mess with Mr. In-Between!"

Mr. Hope was the first comic to acknowledge that he relied on a stable of writers, and he meticulously cataloged the inventory in 88,000 alphabetized, cross-referenced pages of jokes now in the Library of Congress, along with letters, scrapbooks, medals and an assortment of Hope-iana.

"We wrote jokes about his writers," said Larry Gelbart, who went to work for Mr. Hope in 1948 and whose writing credits include the television version of "M*A*S*H" and the movie "Tootsie." "He knew there was a good joke in having writers. He played off everything. He used every part of his life. His life was his own straight line. Actually, he was wittier and smarter off stage. We sort of wrote to a Hope paradigm. His jokes weren't known for their wit; they were known for their breadth and width and range of subject matter. People loved him because he was so publicly being the fool we all privately are."

Mort Lachman, a longtime Hope writer and producer, said simply: "I'll tell you what kind of a boss he was: insatiable. There were never enough jokes. We didn't call them jokes. We called them `crumbs for the bear.' "

Mr. Hope's son Tony, at 62 the second oldest of four adopted children and a lawyer in Washington, said: "Part of the American spirit has always been to poke fun at the pompous. That seems to me to be the cornerstone of his humor, to align himself with the view of the common man and pull the pompous down to that level by saying what the common man would've said if he'd had another 15 seconds to phrase it."

Mr. Hope, the son of a hard-drinking stonemason, came to the United States when he was 5 and grew up in Cleveland, saddled with the name Leslie Townes Hope, which became Lester, then Les and finally Bob. He hustled at various jobs and survived two bouts as an amateur boxer, known as Packy East.

He soon wound up in dancing school, then teaching dance, then, in 1920, dancing professionally with his girlfriend, Mildred Rosequist, whose mother told her "he'd never amount to anything." For the next dozen years, in one dance act or another, he toured the country until his big break on Broadway in Jerome Kern's 1933 musical "Roberta."

That same year, he met a sultry nightclub singer from the Bronx named Dolores Reade. When he walked into the Vogue Club on West 57th Street, she was singing "It's Only a Paper Moon," and this February they celebrated their 69th anniversary.

But the Hopes' home life was not perfect and Mrs. Hope, still spry and singing at almost 94, put up with a lot. At his busiest, Mr. Hope was on the road perhaps 250 nights a year and he was famous for having a roving eye, and then some. Graydon Carter, now editor of Vanity Fair, spent the night at Mr. Hope's Palm Springs house when he was writing a magazine piece about him in 1983.

"I'm sound asleep and I see Bob at the door and he's got pajamas on and he starts coming over toward the bed, and he leans down really close to my face and taps me: `Do you want to go into town and pick up some girls?' " Mr. Carter recalled. "He was 80 at the time."

One of his best movies, "The Seven Little Foys" (1955), the true-life tale of an absentee father and feckless husband who took his children on the vaudeville circuit to keep from losing custody of them after their mother's death, has bittersweet autobiographical overtones. In one scene, a little Foy in long johns sarcastically demands of his famous father, "Button me up, Eddie Foy!," an echo of how young Tony Hope once greeted his father in the dining room at the Pebble Beach Country Club: "Good morning, Bob Hope!" he cried.

"Loud," Tony Hope recalls, still chuckling at the memory. "He got mad."

Linda Hope, who has worked off and on as her father's producer, said the absences were hard because the time with him was such fun. "When we were very young, and especially during the war, he was traveling extensively and we were at the Burbank airport, and sometimes we didn't know whether it was to wave hello or goodbye."

Ms. Hope said she had talked often with her father about his long support for the Vietnam War, in which she had friends who died. "He said, `I don't care what you feel about whether we should be there or not; I deal with the fact that they are there, and my feeling is if they are there and they're defending their country, we need to be behind them.' "

In this Mr. Hope anticipated the collective national regret that attended the opening of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall and that animates today's protesters against the war in Iraq, whose slogans amount to "Oppose the war, support the troops."

His Vietnam humor could be mordant. "Technically, we're not at war," he told the troops in his 1966 Christmas special. "So remember that when you get shot: Technically, it doesn't hurt."

To read the files of letters from G.I.'s that Mr. Hope saved over the years is to sense the extraordinary bond they felt with him. One wounded Navy man, after two years in a hospital in World War II, signed his letter simply, "Your shipmate."

As he aged, Mr. Hope collected more honors than any entertainer in history, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, even if he became less entertaining. "I do think that, eventually, he reached the point where he became so identified, and deservedly so, with the establishment that it hurt him," Mr. Allen said.

He never tried to take on an Oscar-caliber character role, though his children once tried to option John Osborne's "The Entertainer," the story of a faded English music hall comic that earned Laurence Olivier an Oscar nomination in 1961.

"Vulnerability was not something that he allowed people to see too much," Linda Hope said. "I can sort of understand that, too, because as an entertainer he couldn't have done what he did with the soldiers and bases and hospitals and all of the horror that he saw firsthand if he allowed himself to be particularly vulnerable and emotional. And I think very early on he developed this way to get through the material, and not touch the areas that, if you're a really great actor, you have to touch."

Mr. Allen said: "He was never as deep a thinker as Chaplin. He never had quite the literary intelligence of Groucho. There was not much suffering in his movies, really, and they will never have the depth, the dimension of some others. But his work is truly wonderful."

LOS ANGELES, May 29 — For the "Greatest Entertainer of the 20th Century" one expected a little more.

Bob Hope predates the airplane, the mass-produced automobile and the Panama Canal. The nutshell autobiography attributed to him is that he was born Leslie Townes Hope in England, raised in Cleveland, educated in vaudeville and groomed and polished in New York. And now the most famous intersection in Los Angeles carries his name.

Mr. Hope turned 100 today, and to mark the occasion, the junction of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street was christened Bob Hope Square. But the mayor of Los Angeles was not in attendance, nor was the governor of California, and there were no A-list celebrities or comedians expressing their indebtedness to Mr. Hope, now a frail man hidden away in his estate in the San Fernando Valley.

There was Mickey Rooney, an old pal, two city councilmen, an official from the city Department of Transportation and a Marine Corps brass band.

The tribute was not soul-wrenching or introspective or an effort to articulate Mr. Hope's place in the pantheon of American culture. One of the councilmen presented the Hope family with pumpkin bread. The official from the Transportation Department said his children enjoyed the old Bob Hope movies. Mr. Rooney was brief, recalling when Mr. Hope awarded him an Oscar. "He said, `Should I give it to you or to the statue?' " Mr. Rooney remembered. "I wonder what he meant by that."

Instead, for some of the few hundred in attendance today, the ceremony was as much a reminder of how fleeting fame is and how rapidly memories yellow as it was a celebration of a famous man.

"Bob gave and gave and gave and I really honor the man," said Joan Hicks, 78, a recent transplant from New York who is pursuing a second career as a puppeteer. "But the truth of it now is when you grow older, it all fades. People look at the old as old, but I look at it as a gift, honey."

Ms. Hicks remembers her days of youth and romance, the days when Mr. Hope was in his prime and she was turning heads. She organized parties in New York for the men returning from World War II. "I'm not stuck in the 40's," Ms. Hicks said. "People just assume I am."

She told of the young coeds with pierced navels who recently questioned why she dressed so old-fashioned, in a long skirt and filigreed blouse. "I said because it makes me feel beautiful. This is who we are. This is who I am."

Mr. Hope is the embodiment of her generation, Ms. Hicks said. He appeared in more than 50 movies, presided over 17 Oscar ceremonies and did nearly 300 television specials. He was a comedian who worked clean and worked for 70 years.

But humor grew raunchy and Mr. Hope grew old, and his legacy lies less in his movies than in his service to service members, having traveled 10 million miles and performed for 10 million troops in his career. In recognition, the White House today created the "Bob Hope American Patriot Award."

John Guinn, 53, saw Mr. Hope perform in Okinawa during the Vietnam War. "Yeah man, he was a great comedian," Mr. Guinn said. "But, you know, times change. Comedy reflects the world you're living in. America's a melting pot now. But yeah, Bob Hope was a great comedian."

And in that regard, there is a five-acre monument in the works on the San Diego shoreline to commemorate Mr. Hope's dedication to the nation's servicemen and women.

It will be in the shape of a five-pointed star, and on each point of the star will be a bronze statue of Mr. Hope depicting him on a one of his U.S.O. tours, in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the cold war and Operation Desert Shield.

Motion detectors will set off recordings of some of his speeches, perhaps something like this one from Mr. Hope's Web site (http://www.bobhope.com):

"A member of my staff asked me when I'm going to retire. I said when I can no longer hear the laughter. He said: `That never stopped you before.' "

A million dollars has been raised for the monument, called the Military Tribute to Bob Hope, though $4 million more is needed, said John G. Ibe, vice president of the foundation that is supporting the project. Mr. Ibe, 82, when asked why he was creating such a monument, explained it this way:

"During the war, I had a friend named Tom Jones from Independence, Mo., who served with me aboard the U.S.S. St. Lo. It was an aircraft carrier and the first American ship sunk by a kamikaze.

"Fifteen days before the ship sank, we saw Bob Hope in the Admiralty Islands. As we were going back to our ship, Tommy said that was his first live show in his life. He was 18. He says he thought every man who goes off to war should see Bob Hope. He just changed your attitude and helped you understand the reason you were there. That was Tommy's last show. He never lived to see another. That's why I'm involved the way I am."

For Mr. Ibe, Mr. Hope is nothing less than a pillar, a man who appreciated your fighting effort so much that he would fly into hostile territory to tell you so. He gave young men and women a sense of purpose.

But times change and so do sensibilities. Hugo Sanchez, 35, a construction worker on Hollywood Boulevard, said he had never heard of Mr. Hope. Mr. Sanchez's childhood in Guadalajara, Mexico, was filled with Mario Moreno, better known as Cantinflas, Mexico's greatest comic actor, the "Latin Charlie Chaplin" and a contemporary of Mr. Hope.

"Cantinflas was funny," Mr. Sanchez said. "But Bob Hope. Him, I no know him."

There was nothing Bob Hope loved more than an audience, and audiences responded in kind, particularly soldiers facing combat who desperately needed a laugh. Some years ago, he chartered a yacht for a cruise in Canadian waters. It was one of the few formal vacations the comedian ever took, and he found he could not stand the serenity. He cut the cruise short and returned to Hollywood with the comment, ``Fish don't applaud.''

Mr. Hope, who made an art and a vast fortune out of the delivery of the one-line gag, thrived on applause. It was the secret of his youthfulness.

It was also an important source of the energy that allowed him to travel millions of miles to entertain American servicemen, far exceeding the effort of any other entertainer. From 1941 to 1948 he performed nearly all his 400 radio programs at military bases. And at an age when most performers curtail their activities, Mr. Hope continued to make his annual tours during the war in Vietnam, playing to the sons of the servicemen he entertained during World War II and the Korean War.

Servicemen, as well as several generations of civilians, delighted in Mr. Hope's style of humor, epitomized by his breezy monologues, which were tightly woven gags that mixed the topical with the fantastic.

He arrived in Saigon on the day that Vietcong agents blew up an American officers' billet. ``I was on the way to my hotel,'' he told an audience several hours later, ``and I passed a hotel going in the opposite direction.''

Mr. Hope excelled at a typically American brand of brash, timely humor. The wit was never very profound or subtle, but it was, at its best, irreverently poignant, carrying him through several immensely successful careers in the theater, radio, films and television.

Unlike most comedians who rose to success in the first decades of the century, Mr. Hope employed no special trick of speech, clothing or pantomime. His character, while essentially clean-cut, was that of a fast-talking wise-guy, a quaking braggart, an appealing heel with a harmless leer and a ready one-liner. One of his legion of writers, Melville Shavelson, who went on to direct Mr. Hope in two of his best films, ``Sorrowful Jones'' and ``The Seven Little Foys,'' once told John Lahr of The New Yorker, ``We took his own characteristics and exaggerated them. The woman chaser. The coward. The cheap guy. We just put them in. He thought he was playing a character. He was playing, really, the real Bob Hope.''

Woody Allen was among those comedians who often credited Mr. Hope as an influence on their own work. ``When my mother took me to see `Road to Morocco' I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life,''Mr. Allen once said.

Mr. Hope served a long apprenticeship in vaudeville and the theater before he appeared on the national scene in 1938. That was the year he began his popular series of Tuesday night radio shows for Pepsodent toothpaste and made his first feature motion picture, ``The Big Broadcast of 1938.'' A bittersweet ballad he sang with Shirley Ross in the film, ``Thanks for the Memory,'' became the theme he used throughout his career.

He had made a half-dozen films of varying popularity when, in 1940, Paramount cast him in ``Road to Singapore'' with his old friend Bing Crosby. Mr. Hope's often futile aggressiveness perfectly complemented Mr. Crosby's nonchalance. The film, a picaresque tale of a couple of con men told with songs, uncomplicated gags and a free use of outrageous camera tricks, was a huge hit at the box office. It set the pattern for other ``Road'' films, all starring Mr. Hope, Mr. Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, who played the exotic native girl over whom the two mock rivals fought.

In all, the trio made seven ``Road'' films, the last of which was ``Road to Hong Kong,'' released in 1962. Perhaps the most memorable was ``Road to Morocco'' in 1942, with Mr. Hope and Mr. Crosby perched on a camel, singing the title song (with its lyric ``like Webster's dict-ion-ary, we're Morocco bound'').

The early ``Road'' pictures also helped to establish Mr. Hope as a major film personality in his own right. His solo starring vehicles, such as ``The Ghost Breakers,'' ``My Favorite Blonde,'' ``Monsieur Beaucaire,'' ``The Lemon Drop Kid'' and ``The Paleface,'' combined with the success of the films he made with Mr. Crosby, earned him a place for 13 years, from 1941 to 1953, as one of the nation's 10 top money-making stars in the annual voting of theater owners. In 1949, Mr. Hope occupied the No. 1 position on the list.

In the mid-50's, as Hollywood began to feel the effects of television competition, Mr. Hope, who had made two and sometimes as many as three pictures a year, slowed his pace slightly to an average of one film a year and devoted more time to his weekly television show.

Although he was competing with himself on the free television medium, Mr. Hope was able to maintain his popularity at the movie-theater box office. His later pictures included ``The Seven Little Foys,'' ( in which he dances memorably with James Cagney) ``The Facts of Life,'' ``Beau James'', ``Call Me Bwana'' and ``I'll Take Sweden,'' all of which provided him a sizable percentage of the profits. ``Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number,'' released in 1967, was his 52d film. On his way to becoming an American institution, Mr. Hope, alone among the great entertainers, was No. 1 in radio, in film, and in television.

The comedian, whose original name was Leslie Townes Hope, was born on May 29, 1903, in Eltham, England, the fifth of seven sons of William Henry (Harry) Hope, a stonemason with a weakness for drink. In reference to his famous profile, dominated by his ski-jump nose, Mr. Hope once commented that after his birth, ``My mother thought the doctor had left the stork and taken the baby.''

In press interviews published nearly 50 years ago, at the time he was enjoying his first major success on Broadway, Mr. Hope was referred to as ``the scion of the aristocratic Hope family,'' who had been lured to Broadway from an ancestral castle, Craig Hall, Kent, England. In later years, such references to Lord Hope of Craig Hall dwindled, and Mr. Hope spoke candidly of his family's straitened circumstances. The Hopes emigrated to Cleveland in 1907, where the comedian briefly attended public schools, briefly studied dancing and briefly devoted himself to amateur boxing under the name of Packy East.

``Some fighters are carried back to their dressing rooms,'' he recalled.``I'm the only one who had to be carried both ways.''

He worked out a dance routine with his girlfriend Mildred Rosequist and they began to appear as a teen-age team in vaudeville. He also was arrested for stealing some sporting goods from a store. He later joked about it: ``Was I going to go out and get a job and earn a living, or was I going to spend the rest of my life stealing? I decided to forget the job and stay with show business.''

Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle, the film star, gave him his first professional engagement when Mr. Hope was doing a dance act with Lloyd Durbin. After appearing for a short time as part of Mr. Arbuckle's vaudeville act, the team began to receive bookings on its own.

When Mr. Durbin died on the road of food poisoning, Mr. Hope teamed with George Byrne. They did a little of everything, including the playing of saxophones, a blackface routine and, for another brief period, being the dancing partners for Daisy and Violet Hilton, the celebrated Siamese twins (``They're too much of a woman for me, ''Mr. Hope joked).

By 1930, Mr. Hope had become ``a single,'' specializing in the kind of brash stand-up humor for which he later became world famous. He played the Palace Theater on Broadway, an engagement that led to parts in Broadway shows. He had an important featured role in the Jerome Kern musical ``Roberta'' in 1932, in which he appeared with Fred MacMurray and George Murphy.

It was Mr. Murphy who introduced him to Dolores Reade, a nightclub singer. Mr. Hope and Miss Reade were married that same year and later adopted four children, Linda, Tony, Nora and Kelly. His wife and children survive him.

Between his legitimate-theater engagements, Mr. Hope continued to tour the vaudeville circuits with his wife as his partner, or ``straight man.'' Along the way he honed his gift for delivering a torrent of snappy gags in such an easygoing manner that audiences liked him immediately.d

Early in 1936, Mr. Hope went into the ``Ziegfeld Follies,'' playing, among other roles, Daddy to Fannie Brice's Baby Snooks. The other members of the cast included Eve Arden and Gertrude Niesen. It was in this show that he sang a song that has become a pop classic, ``I Can't Get Started.'' It was, however, sung for laughs, with Miss Arden making caustic comments on Mr. Hope's passion.

Later in 1936 he gained full Broadway stardom in ``Red Hot and Blue,'' sharing top billing with Jimmy Durante and Ethel Merman. Mr. Hope had another chance to stop another show, this time singing Cole Porter's ``It's De-Lovely'' with Miss Merman. As usual, he constantly ad-libbed while on stage. The audience loved it, but not Miss Merman. She threatened, ``If that so-called comedian ever behaves like that again I'll use my shoe to remodel his ski nose.''

Stardom in radio and Hollywood was just ahead. No one worked for it harder than Bob Hope. ``I used to do four shows a day in vaudeville, then drop into a nightclub,'' he remembered. ``I might do 30 or 40 minutes off the cuff. I thought nothing of working from twelve noon to one o'clock the next morning.'' By 1938 most of the country was listening to his radio show on Tuesday nights, with his fast-talking monologues and his occasional double-entendre exchanges with his guests.

But more than any other single activity in which Mr. Hope engaged, his World War II United Service Organizations, or U.S.O., tours endeared him to the nation. He played his first camp show on May 6, 1941, and in 1966, he estimated that he had traveled more than two million miles and entertained more than 11 million servicemen in the succeeding years. His armed forces shows fueled his comedy, too. ``Valley Forge is a sentimental place with me,'' he once joked. ``One of the toughest Christmas shows I ever played.''

The format for his touring shows was largely an elaboration of that for his radio show, which featured Jerry Colonna, the bug-eyed comedian with the handlebar mustache; Frances Langford, the singer, and a big band, plus ``guest stars,'' with the emphasis on pretty women.

The Hope caravans traveled from Hollywood to North Africa, the South Pacific, Europe, Australia and Greenland. It was so cold at Thule, the comedian told the soldiers, that one G.I. fell out of bed and broke his pajamas. Kay Kyser, the bandleader, once accused Mr. Hope of having prolonged World War II because there were six Army camps he had not yet played.

In peacetime, when most performers had given up their U.S.O. tours, Mr. Hope continued to tour the outposts. At the same time, he was an indefatigable master of ceremonies for charity functions as well as the most popular of the hosts for the annual Academy Awards program. Mr. Hope first appeared as an Oscar host on radio in 1940. Over the years he appeared 13 times, most recently in 1978. Along the way he made his hopeless yearning for an Oscar into the longest-running gag in the history of the Academy Awards.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1960 voted him a special Oscar, the Jean Hersholt Award, for his ``humanitarian services.'' It was one of five ''special'' Oscars he received and one of his favorites among the countless awards and citations he received during his lifetime, including 54 honorary degrees and the keys to 500 cities.

Mr. Hope received the Medal of Merit from President Eisenhower. In 1963, John F. Kennedy presented him with the Presidential Gold Medal in recognition of the star's ``services to his country and to the cause of world peace.'' ``I feel very humble,'' he said to President Kennedy, ``but I think I have the strength of character to fight it.'' In 1998, when a false report of his death was circulated, he could even hear himself eulogized by members of Congress.

In 1972 in Saigon, Mr. Hope gave the last of the series of annual Christmas shows for servicemen abroad that he had begun in Berlin in 1948. A project to take him into talks with the North Vietnamese on behalf of American prisoners of war fell through. This was probably the closest the comedian came actually to working with the Government, although he was friend and golfing companion to a succession of Presidents, among them Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, as well as former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. (``I love playing golf with Jerry Ford,'' he joked. ``If you beat him, he pardons you.'')

Although Mr. Hope was among the first to make fun of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his crusades against communists, he was careful that his political jabs did not cause genuine pain to either Democrats or Republicans. Only during the Vietnam war did he let his guard down a bit and permit his audiences to see his deep conservatism.

During the 1970's, he still traveled at a pace that would have exhausted ordinary mortals. He made appearances in Central Park in New York and in lesser-known places throughout the country, on behalf of charities and on his own business of comedy.

In 1978, President Carter lent his presence to two days of tributes to Mr. Hope in Washington on the occasion of the comedian's 75th birthday. The celebration, on behalf of the U.S.O., included a series of laudatory speeches about him in the House of Representatives.

The recognition of his film career, which had eluded him when it came to Oscars, was lavishly bestowed in 1979, when he was the performer honored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. That same year, NBC televised six hours culled from the material he had made during his overseas entertainment of the troops over the years.

His trip to the Saudi Arabia to entertain American troops in 1990 was the last of those journeys and one in which he ran afoul of Pentagon censorship. The Defense Department said it had ``restricted media coverage'' of Mr. Hope's visit for security reasons and because of the likelihood that the show would be ``exploited by the Iraqis for propaganda purposes.'' Mr. Hope said he had been forced to censor his material heavily in consultation with the Pentagon and to remove a number of jokes, including those that deal with ``the clothing the women wear around here.'' He was also forced to leave a number of women out of his show, although an exception was made for his wife, Dolores, who was allowed to appear on Christmas Eve to sing ``White Christmas'' to the troops.

Mr. Hope was among those artists and performers awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton in a White House ceremony in 1995. He has also been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Distinguished Service Medal from each branch of the armed forces.

On his 94th birthday in May 1997, the House of Representatives adopted a resolution making him an honorary veteran of the armed forces, noting that Mr. Hope ``has given unselfishly of his time for over a half-century to be with United States service members on foreign shores, working tirelessly to bring a spirit of humor and cheer to millions of service members during their loneliest moments and thereby extending for the American people a touch of home away from home.''

In 1998, just before his 95th birthday, Mr. Hope received the honorary title Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in a ceremony at the British Embassy in Washington. During the presentation, the British Ambassador, Sir Christopher Meyer, resurrected one of Mr. Hope's tried-and-true gags, noting that Mr. Hope said ''he left England at the age of 3 when he found out he couldn't become King.''

Mr. Hope was the author of seven books of humor, ``I Never Left Home,'' ``They Got Me Covered,'' ``So This Is Peace,'' ``Have Tux, Will Travel,'' ``I Owe Russia $1,200,'' ``The Road to Hollywood,'' with Bob Thomas, ``Don't Shoot, It's Only Me,'' with Melville Shavelson, and most recently ``Dear Prez, I Wanna Tell Ya!''

What was billed as his final television special was broadcast by NBC in November 1996, ending a run of 284 NBC specials that began in 1950. The show included clips of the comedian entertaining Presidents from Roosevelt to Bill Clinton.

Mr. Hope was an avid golfer almost to the end of his life and called the game ``My beauty secret.'' He was for many years the sponsor of a major tournament, the Bob Hope Desert Classic in Palm Springs, Calif. He was also known as an extremely shrewd businessman. In 1983 Forbes magazine put his worth at more than $200 million. In addition to owning a large percentage of his own motion-picture and television enterprises, he had extensive real-estate holdings, especially in Malibu, Palm Springs and the San Fernando Valley . He also owned an interest in two television stations and in the Cleveland Indians baseball team of the American League.

He and his wife lived in the same house in the San Fernando Valley for more than 60 years. ``The house cost $35,000,'' he said in an interview, ``The first fix 20 years later cost $450,000.'' A feature of the house was a fireproof vault containing filing cabinets filled with jokes on every topic imaginable. Mr. Hope and his wife recently donated his archive of personal papers, recordings of his radio broadcasts, prints of movies and videos of television shows, scripts for films and radio programs, photographs, clippings and hundreds of thousands of jokes to the Library of Congress.

In his later years, Mr. Hope funneled much of his wealth into charities through the Bob and Dolores Hope Foundation. He was a major contributor to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and gave $825,000 to Southern Methodist University in Dallas for the construction of the Bob Hope Theater, part of S.M.U.'s Owen Fine Arts Center.

In an interview in 1989, the 86-year-old Mr. Hope was asked what he still looked forward to, after a lifetime spent accruing fame, praise and a huge fortune. ``More fun,'' he replied.

After nearly seven decades in show business, Bob Hope has a joke for every occasion. In the new fireproof vault in the gatehouse of his six-acre estate, there are 16 filing cabinet drawers filled with folders labeled by categories: golf miscellaneous, golf American Presidents, gambling, gay liberation, dieting, pollution, religion, weather, dude ranches.

After nearly seven decades in show business, Bob Hope has a joke for every occasion. In the new fireproof vault in the gatehouse of his six-acre estate, there are 16 filing cabinet drawers filled with folders labeled by categories: golf miscellaneous, golf American Presidents, gambling, gay liberation, dieting, pollution, religion, weather, dude ranches. In the old vault down the hall, there are 15 steel drawers of jokes he has rejected.

Two or three times a week, he will call down and ask to see a joke he thinks he used in June 1961 or December 1939. He is never off by more than a month.

At the age of 86, he has a standard answer for the people who suggest he retire and go fishing. "Fish don't applaud," he says. On Sunday, Mr. Hope will perform with the 93-year-old George Burns at Madison Square Garden, the first time the two men have done their comedy acts together onstage. The Garden describes the one-night event as 179 years of comedy. In actuality, Mr. Hope has been a comedian for the last 66 years, while Mr. Burns has been in show business for only 86 years. Being Funny, You See, Is Fun

Mr. Hope sits in one of the numerous sun-drenched garden rooms of a San Fernando Valley house in which he has lived for 51 years. "The house cost $35,000; the first fix 20 years later cost $450,000," he says. His jokes rise effortlessly, like water from a subterranean spring. There is no sense of calculation. The private Hope, like the public one, really enjoys making jokes and listening to jokes.

"I feel better when I come off the stage than I do when I go on," he says. "When you're out there an hour and 15 minutes with people laughing, it helps your whole body."

He has been around so long that his earlier successes have almost been forgotten. Between 1941 and 1953, he was one of the Top 10 box-office movie stars every year, hitting the top of the list in 1949. Before that, he was a star of radio, vaudeville and such Broadway shows as "Roberta" and "Red, Hot and Blue." In seven "Road" pictures with Bing Crosby, starting with the "Road to Singapore" in 1940, he was the hippest of the hip, the premier Saturday Night Live comedian of 50 years ago, spewing out razor-sharp topical quips with the rapid-fire delivery of an auctioneer.

At 86, he is a little stiffer, pudgier and more reflective than he used to be. If the years have made him seem a bit old-fashioned, it is not because of content but because there are newer styles in comedy than the monologue that has served him so well for so long. Perusing the Papers

"I search the front pages and the sports pages every day," he says. "I won't let one thing get out of my way. If the paper says Gorbachev wants to meet the Pope, it's obviously so he can learn how to run Thursday night Bingo. If the Japanese are buying everything in America, I pay the mortgage on my house to my gardener."

He thinks audiences haven't changed much, except to become more sophisticated. "There is no more hick town," he says. "Every place is New York today. We all see the same television shows and read the same news." Recently, he even used two condom jokes in one of his monologues, but his wife of 56 years, Dolores, made him take them out.

He already has Ed Koch and Leona Helmsley jokes prepared for Madison Square Garden. And football. "A lot of people like football," he says.

"This is Bob Football Hope telling you always to use Pepsodent because it's better to set out for a nice run than to run out for a nice set," he began his radio program on Oct. 8, 1940.

The vaults contain each of his radio and television scripts, in chronological order. They also contain all the jokes that never made it onto the air. "It's depressing," says Mel Shavelson, who was a radio writer for Mr. Hope between 1938 and 1943 and later directed his movies "Beau James" and "The Seven Little Foys." "I've found jokes I wrote 50 years ago that Bob hasn't used yet." Life on the Road

He may still use those jokes. Each day brings 19 or 20 requests to join a committee, attend a gala, ride in a parade, write the foreword to a book, or raise funds for retired veterans or some medical center, state fair or old-age home. This year he will sleep 190 nights away from home in hotel and motel rooms, an agenda that might cripple someone half his age.

"I have to have a hotel where the windows open, a hard bed, soft pillows and cranberry juice," he says.

Mr. Hope learned how to live on the road in 1924 when his first partner ate a bad piece of pie in Virginia, got ptomaine poisoning and died.

"That set me for life," he says. "Whenever I played a new city, I would ask the stagehands for a good tearoom. 'I have to have dainty food,' I would say, and they would look at me suspiciously."

Now he flies in his own jet with one of his four dogs at his side - "Your dog loves you when no one else does," reads a sign in his bedroom - and he always has a massage after the show. He knows the telephone number of masseurs in nearly every large and middle-sized city in the United States.

On Tuesday, he will salute women in sports in Manhattan. On Oct. 5, he will raise money for the widows of Air Force enlisted men in Florida. Two days later he will perform at Jacksonville State University in Alabama. On Oct. 11, he will dedicate a laboratory to fight Parkinson's disease in Los Angeles. On Oct. 13, he will play a hospital in Massachusetts. Between Oct. 18 and Oct. 28, he will perform in Taiwan, Tokyo and Hong Kong. The Keys to 2,000 Cities

Mr. Hope has been well paid for his altruism. The effusively inscribed photographs on his walls feature Presidents, generals and heads of state. The glass cases in his trophy room are filled with the keys to 2,000 cities. There are medals and Lucite boxes, silver shovels and letter openers inscribed "To Bob Hope in Greatful Appreciation . . .," "To Bob Hope in Recognition of . . ." The badges pronounce him an honorary fire chief of San Antonio, a deputy sheriff of Polk County, Iowa. The vellum scrolls conferring honorary degrees are stacked in a corner.

He is paid up to $100,000 an appearance; his face and his jokes routinely raise a quarter of a million dollars for this school or that hospital. Once or twice, he has simply endorsed his check and handed it back.

Such humanitarianism is always an object of suspicion. Yet when he is asked how much money he raises for charity each year, his answer seems totally genuine: "Not enough. You never raise enough."

Although he lives on the wrong side of the Santa Monica Mountains - on a street of modest homes a dozen miles away from Beverly Hills - Mr. Hope is one of the richest men in show business. In 1949, he and Bing Crosby each made a $3.8 million profit in oil. Mr. Hope took the advice of his stockbroker and bought real estate with the money. In a Life magazine article published 19 years ago, he squashed rumors that he was worth $400 million by saying, "My estate now is worth $40 million, $35 million of it in property." Southern California real estate is worth 10 times what it was 19 years ago, and at one time Mr. Hope was the largest landowner in the San Fernando Valley. 'The Things I Want to Do'

Recently, he has been selling land. "For the things I have to do and the things I want to do, I need money," he says. He supports the Hope House in Cincinatti for delinquent adolescents and a high school in Texas for crippled children. And he wants to build an entertainment center and a museum of Bob Hope artifacts on 150 acres he owns in central Florida.

If you have all the money and all the fame and all the praise you will ever need, along with a one-hole golf course in your back yard, what is there left to desire?

Mr. Hope does a soft-shoe dance on his slate floor.

"More fun," he says.


Osan Air Force Base, December, 1968. Bob Hope brings his show to Korea	The troops wait for the show to begin	Bob brought the show to Korea after entertaining the troops in Vietnam

Bring on the show!	Bob Hope in 1968. In 2003 he celebrated his 100th birthday	The old soft shoe with Ann Margaret

	The beautiful Ann Margaret	Bob and Penelope Plummer, Miss Australia and Miss World 1968

Nice		Bob and Ann Margaret

Oh my!		The great Bob Hope entertains the troops in Korea

White go-go boots.

Bob Hope Xmas Show: Osan, Korea, 19 December 1968

Photos by Neil Mishalov

Listen to Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour sing:

Thanks for the Memories

Recorded in 1938