How does he explain his own popularity? “It’s very simple. I never do anything that makes any guy sitting out there in the audience feel uncomfortable. So when the little woman says, ‘Let’s go to the show,’ the guy says, ‘Let’s see the John Wayne picture,’ because he knows I won’t humiliate him. I think the guys pull the girls in.”
He wanted to get into Russia to make The Conqueror, the first United States picture shot there, but the deal fell through. When a certain TV celebrity received the Kremlin’s permission to film a television show behind the Iron Curtain, Duke asked: “If they let you in, why not me?”
“We’ve never said anything about the Russians.”
Duke Wayne grinned. “That’s the difference. I have.”
Seventeen
Maybe I look like Mother or Grandma Moses to Americans in uniform if they’ve been away from home long enough in far-flung places. That’s the only reason I could ever find for Bob Hope’s wanting to take me along on his Christmas shows overseas. The first time he invited me, I was too delirious to ask why. I haven’t asked him since, and he hasn’t told me. But whenever he calls: “Pack your things, Hedda, we’re off,” I’m always rarin’ to go.
You think you know what Bob’s like, but you don’t until you’ve seen him on one of these safaris. We once had to wait six hours while the fuel was drained out of our plane and replaced. When the pilot had stepped aboard, he’d sniffed and said: “My God, they’ve filled it with jet fuel.” Which would have blown us to hell and gone at a few thousand feet. Have you ever had black coffee and Tootsie Rolls for breakfast at 6 A.M. five days running? No complaints from Hope. When I got home, I’d drunk so much of the stuff I developed coffee poisoning and didn’t recover for a month.
I’ve watched him put on a performance in a base hospital for patients who looked better than he did after he’d been driven half blind with fatigue by army wives who wouldn’t let him rest because he helped their husbands’ chances for another promotion. Bob can’t say no to anybody.
He would rather entertain five hundred GI’s than be handed $50,000. He’s looked after the money he’s earned, too, though he pays as high as $2000 a week apiece to his team of writers. They deserve it. This unpredictable character, high over the Pacific, hours out on our way to the Far East, asked two of the team, John Rapp and Onnie Whizzen: “Have you got that script about a sergeant and a private you wrote six years back but we didn’t use?” So help me, they fished it out of one of their bags and passed it to him.