He can joke about his money, along with religion, politics, and the Kennedys. “Since it was reported that I’m worth around $30,000,000,” he told me recently, “busloads of relatives have arrived at the house. We have ’em standing in corners instead of floor lamps.”
He’s irreverent, but never a dirty word does he utter, nor does he take the Lord’s name in vain. I’ve been with him days on end, and I’ve yet to hear a cuss word out of him. Came the night that Hollywood and America honored him at a banquet as the number-one citizen of our industry, and Jack Benny stood up to make a speech. “I hadn’t seen Bob for ten months until I ran into him on the golf course,” said Jack, who’d arrived an hour late for the celebration after dining at home. “He stood there and said: ‘I’ve had the god-damndest time with this ball today....’” We sat there in silence, not believing it.
Bob can’t stay home, can’t sit still any more than Jack can. And at parties Jack’s the champion floor pacer, stanchly refusing to dance. “I don’t have to,” he says. “I don’t have to prove myself. I did that in my youth.”
Dolores Hope—they were married twenty-eight years ago—and their four adopted children haven’t seen Bob at home for the past eight Christmases. If there’s any loneliness in her life, which I doubt, religion fills it—she’s a devout Catholic, who used to preach to me. We spent an hour and a half together driving from Beverly Hills to Santa Ana during the war. My mind was on my son, Bill, who was away in the Pacific, so when she started on religion, Dolores did all the talking by default.
At the end of the ride, she apologized: “I guess I talked too long about the faith.”
“Only about ninety minutes too long,” said I. Now she leaves the attempts at conversion to another good friend of mine, Father Edward Murphy, but we’ll come to him farther along.
I spent wonderful Christmases with Bob and his troupe. There was Thule Air Base, where our servicemen hadn’t seen a woman in two years except five homely nurses. Anita Ekberg was one of our party. For stark horror, you couldn’t beat the looks on those GI faces when she was told to cover up in a fur coat because her gown had a low-and-behold neckline.
Not a dry eye in the house when we sang “Auld Lang Syne.” A colonel got carried away and said to me: “Do you mind if I kiss you? You remind me of my mother.” He couldn’t have been a day over fifty-five.
The following year it was Alaska, with Hopper wrapped up against the cold like an Eskimo. “If you want anything, just ask,” they told Ginger Rogers and me, so we had breakfast in bed in rooms as hot as hell’s boilerhouse. Outdoors, even cameras froze if you lingered longer than fifteen minutes.
One year we discovered that the rain in Spain fell mainly on us; that day Gina Lollobrigida and the John Lodges joined us. Another Christmas Day we spent at a missile base in Vicenze, Italy; put on a show on the deck of the aircraft carrier, U.S.S. Forrestal. There was a bronze bust of James Forrestal aboard. I stood and wept for our country’s injustice to this fine man. One of our group asked: “Who was he?”