Bob Hope Reflects on the Road Not Taken
“I don’t think I’d do anything if it were a sacrifice.”
— Bob Hope
It should have been an antic sight gag in a Ben Turpin silent comedy. But eighteen-year-old Les Hope was a far cry from Mack Sennett’s Hollywood “fun factory” as he clung near the top of a teetering pine in the woods of Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley. Spending the summer of 1921 working with his brother Jim, 27, a foreman at the Ohio and Southern Ohio Power Company, Hope had been tying a towrope to the tall pine when it became apparent that more of its base had been sawed away than was customary. As the lofty tree began its final tilt, Hope had the reckless good sense to swing around to the upper side of the trunk. That frantic move probably saved his life, but when the tree slammed to the ground, the fury of the impact crushed the handsome young man’s face.
“I woke up in the hospital [Cleveland’s Polyclinic] and they wouldn’t give me a mirror for three weeks,” Bob a.k.a. Leslie Townes Hope now recounts tensely. “I was worried, but I felt lucky to be alive. My family was relieved when they found out there were no brain injuries, but the doctors had to rearrange my nose and face. I also had two big facial scars afterward that they’ve since fixed up.”
But the promising young vaudeville hoofer (he had dropped out of high school in his junior year to dance at the local Bandbox Theater) would never look quite the same again. The surgical reconstruction didn’t alter his former visage so much as sharpen it. The cheekbones became more pronounced; the chin acquired a strong, jutting quality, and the nose, previously somewhat snubby, took on the unmistakable appearance of…a ski jump.
Now pushing seventy-seven, the controversial comedian does not like to talk about that incident from his youth. During his six decades in entertainment, there has been virtually no mention of it in his numberless interviews and biographies; and when the man is asked, point blank, about that frightful twist of fate, he squirms, sputters, nervously scratches his famous nose and then mutters, barely loud enough to be heard, “Er, I guess the accident might have helped me in the long run, right?”
The afternoon sunlight spilling into the dining nook freezes Hope’s profile into a forbidding silhouette. But when he abruptly turns his balding head to direct his Mexican maid to serve the pork chops, the darkness falls away, and the pale, severe countenance comes into crisp focus. The years have drawn the skin tight around some of his features and draped it loosely upon others, giving the Hope head the appearance of a chiseled bust covered with a taut pink pillowcase. But eyeholes have been cut out of the fleshy fabric, and the old gaze burns through, hard brown and implacable.
We are seated opposite each other in a glassed-in bay that overlooks the putting green on Hope’s six-acre Toluca Lake compound, which includes this fifteen-room home and a rambling ranch house addition where his personal offices are located. Just over the hill from Hollywood, this has been Hope’s favorite hideaway for some forty years, his official headquarters and a comfy adjunct to his “guest house” outside Columbus, Ohio, and three residences in Palm Springs, one of which is the size of an average metropolitan airline terminal.
Dressed in a baggy white tennis shirt, green plaid slacks and scuffed brown suede moccasins, Hope has been chatting with me about his sentimental attachment to the Toluca Lake household when he rises suddenly, pressing his flowered cotton napkin to his throat in a curious, repetitive gesture. He motions for me to follow him across the room to a highly polished chest containing the genealogy compiled for him last year by Research International.
Hope begins turning the quasi-parchment pages with boyish enthusiasm, pointing out the sepia photos of his birthplace (a humble brick flat at 44 Craighton Road in Eltham, Kent, England), his father (William Henry Hope, a husky, jocund stonemason with a handlebar mustache, shown clowning in a series of funny hats) and his beloved mother (the former Avis Townes, a shy, delicate woman with a beguiling smile).
“My grandfather was a builder and my father followed in his footsteps,” Hope offers softly. “My father left England in 1907 and went to Cleveland. He built the Presbyterian Church on Euclid Avenue — but he wasn’t religious. It was just a job. We followed him later on a ship [Hope was four years old].
“My dad was sort of an amateur comedian, and he would go ’round and play a few pubs in England and have a few drinks with the boys. My mother was a concert singer in Wales before she got married. There were seven boys, and our house was like a frat house. [It is a little-known fact that Hope also had a sister, Avis Emily, who died in infancy.
“Disappeared,” as Bob tersely puts it.] My dear mother worked so hard supporting us, dressing us, keeping us fed. She used to bake lemon pies, which everyone loved. We were average financially; we had to fight it out, and everybody had to work.”
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