At age 100, Bob Hope has left this world. Presumably he is entertaining all comers on a new, and higher, stage. He made it there despite the moral strictures that my mother, along with some other like her, leveled against his moral standards.
My mother was not one of Bob Hope’s fans. In fact, she would not allow me to see his movies. To her, they were too sexy, though she would never have used this word to convey her objections. However, she gave no explanation of her reasons for trying to keep me away from the comedian’s films.
But I knew why. The way Hope joked about women and girls as alluring to males was enough. Add to that, the sight of Dorothy Lamour wearing a sarong, as often happened in the famous Road films, was too titillating for me to be exposed to.
Sex was in Hope’s face, especially his eyes. He would look at women with a comic leer that indicated a lustful appreciation of them. When not explicit, he was suggestive, a word that the Legion of Decency, the Catholic film review agency, used in finding a film objectionable.
The Pilot, the weekly newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston, went further. As Boston Globe writer Martin Nolan recently recalled, in 1943 the Pilot criticized Hope for endangering the very salvation of the GIs to whom he had told filthy jokes. It would prompt them to go into battle and perhaps die with impure thoughts in their minds, thus exposing themselves as unprepared for God’s judgment.
As noted, I largely escaped contagion by humor coming from America’s most famous funny man. Of course, I did not miss Hope altogether – no one could in the 1930s and 1940s when I was growing up. But when I did see him in a movie or hear him on the radio, he was someone whose taste my mother had made me feel wary of.
My mother’s hard line about Hope and some other entertainers came from her belief in the teachings of the Catholic Church. She took seriously its doctrines on sexuality, the way fewer and fewer Catholics seem to today. It wasn’t only the church that laid down her attitudes. Growing up in the backwash of the Victorian era, she inherited rigid attitudes from her family about anything to do with sex.
Her church taught then, as it still does now, that the least indulgence in sexual thoughts or actions on the part of an unmarried person is, in itself, seriously sinful. Yes, there could be mitigating circumstances, and less than full consent to venereal pleasure diminished the sin, but sexual activity of any sort was forbidden to anyone not married. And even if you were, there were strict limits as to what you could do, especially if you enjoyed it.
It could not have made my mother happy to serve as an ever vigilant sexual traffic cop, always ready to intervene for my protection and that of my brothers and sisters. She would seem also to have invested much energy into fending off “suggestive” incursions on her own psyche, from Bob Hope as well as others who failed her standards.
How my father felt about Bob Hope I never discovered. Since he did not take the role of prime moral arbiter in our household, his views about sexuality did not matter. Judging from the one time he spoke to me about the subject, very briefly at that, I assume that he shared many of my mother’s inhibitions.
Long since, I have felt free to laugh at Bob Hope’s jokes, even those formerly considered off-color. One of the many benefits of growing old is perspective. So many of the taboos of the past now seem trivial, not worth the effort that went into supporting them.
I now appreciate the man who, as cultural critic Roger Rosenblatt has said, “could turn an ordinary line into a howler.” Extending his praise, Rosenblatt adds: “He could do everything, like a con man should.”
Count me now among those who give “thanks for the memory” of this joke teller, singer, dancer and entertainer extraordinaire. When grown up, I had only one quarrel with him-his apparently uncritical backing of the Vietnam War. Though I can appreciate his sacrifices and courage in traveling far to entertain American troops, I saw him as supportive of our government’s determination to pursue a misbegotten war.
Even there, however, I appreciate some of the jokes he told: “I was on the way to my hotel,” he informed the soldiers, “and I passed a hotel going in the opposite direction.”
This fabulous man, a native of England, reportedly has 56 American streets named after him. His mark on the American experience of the twentieth century, though not profound, will endure in history. Even my mother, were she still in this world, might now forgive him for having posed a danger to my youthful morals.
Richard Griffin