Apparently on a slow news day, the N.Y. Post does. It's almost quaint that in this era of Miley Cyrus and Kim Kardashian, viral leaks of dirty movie star photos and the sordid world of reality shows...there's this headline:
"Bob Hope, sex machine, 'often cheated' during his 69-year marriage."
This is news? We're 14 years into the 21st Century, most people barely know the man who died in 2003, and his better films are from the 30's and 40's, which are in black and white and therefore unwatched by anyone under 50.
The Post breathlessly offers a quote in the book from Sherwood Schwartz (yes, the "Gilligan's Island" producer) saying of Hope, "We'd go to a hotel, I swear to you, outside his room were three, four, five young, beautiful girls waiting to be picked by him to come in...He was a star enjoying his stardom."
Let me now quote from page 170 of "The Secret Life of Bob Hope," written by Arthur Marx and published in 1993:
"'I remember,' says Sherwood Schwartz, 'there were always five or six pretty young girls hanging around in the corridors outside Hope's room - sort of like today's groupies. Since I was a virgin, I was pretty envious of all the action he seemed to be getting.'"
Yes, over 20 years ago, a book was published detailing Hope's well-known wolfish behavior. In Marx's book, Hope was not only open about all this, but comical, too. That same page, 170, has an anecdote from Gene Lester, a photographer. Gene was covering a celebrity junket and "While we were playing Dallas, Hope had two girls flown in from Houston...these two good-looking young chicks arrived." Hope dead-panned: "These are my cousins from Houston."
In 1993, Bob Hope was not welcome as a TV talk show guest. Johnny Carson had already retired. The best Hope could do was get some tribute or other for his movie work, with Woody Allen telling the world how good those films were. It was the small, maverick Barricade book publisher (run by the legendary Lyle Stuart) that offered Marx's bio of Hope. One of the vague selling points, beside the usual list of Hope conquests, and a very strong helping of Bob's ad-libs and comedy, was that Arthur dug up the marriage license for Bob and his vaudeville partner Grace Troxell. In case anyone cared. Yeah, Bob married someone, briefly, before Dolores.
The application for the marriage license is printed, in full, in the photo section that begins after page 160. The NY Post in reviewing this new tome:
"...Hope's 1933-34 marriage to former vaudeville partner Grace Troxell, which Hope's publicists denied ever took place...was revealed in a 1993 biography." Yes, by Arthur Marx. Which you can buy on Ebay or Amazon for a fraction of what the Richard Zoglin book is selling for.
Another "blockbuster" bit of news in this new book? "No marriage license for Bob and Dolores Hope has ever turned up.The lack of any record of the Hopes' marriage (not even a wedding photo) led some Hope family members to speculate over the years that a wedding may never have taken place."
Oooh. How exciting. We're supposed to be shocked or excited by something that happened about 80 years ago? And that was already mentioned in the Arthur Marx biography:
"There no record of the Hopes getting married." Marx did add that "there's no denying that Hope and Dolores are actually married. And if they're not they've been getting away with murder on their joint tax returns for years."
I recall speaking with Marc Eliot, who knew Phil Ochs and was able gather enough of Phil's "small circle of friends" to write a very vivid bio of him. He then parlayed this into some kind of career as a celebrity biographer. I asked him why, after there had been so many bios already, he had just knocked off a new one on Cary Grant. The answer was pretty much...it was something to do. The older ones were out of print.
So it is, that there have been film buffs, fan boys and publish-or-perish college professors, who scan a list of celebrities and biographies and see if they can come up with a match. As in: oh, it's been a while since a W.C. Fields book came out, or Groucho, or...Bob Hope? Unfortunately in most cases, these new bios don't have exceptional new information to offer, and there are no "juicy" anecdotes because everybody who knew the dead star is either also dead or quite senile. Who, in Bob Hope's inner circle, is still alive and was hanging around the bedroom door when he had an affair with Barbara Payton? A paragraph about this is supposed to interest people who aren't even re-playing the Tommy Lee and Pam Anderson video?
Next up from Richard Zoglin? Maybe an expose of how nasty Arthur Godfrey was? No...a little too obscure. How about how nasty Bing Crosby was? Some people might've forgotten about Gary Crosby's book, or Zog can convince a publisher that old people go to bookstores beause they don't know how to buy a used copy of a better bio on Amazon. But I wanna tell ya...
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