Comedy legend Bob Hope was a top star in vaudeville, on Broadway, on radio, in movies, on TV and through decades of USO tours around the world. He also had one of the longest show-business marriages on record — he was wed to singer Dolores Reade Hope for 69 years until his death at age 100 in 2003.
Or was he? “Hope: Entertainer of the Century,’’ a new biography by Richard Zoglin out Nov. 4, not only casts doubt on whether Hope was ever legally married to the former Dolores DeFina (who died in 2011 at age 102) — it chronicles a long list of his rumored sexual dalliances, some of which went on for years.
“No marriage license for Bob and Dolores Hope has ever turned up,’’ Zoglin writes. “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.’’
The author was able to find a divorce decree documenting Hope’s 1933-34 marriage to former vaudeville partner Grace Troxell, which Hope’s publicists denied ever took place when it was revealed in a 1993 biography. Zoglin’s book reveals Hope “quietly sent her money in the years before her death’’ in 1976 at age 65.
Zoglin quotes former Hope writer Sherwood Schwartz on Hope’s womanizing in the late 1930s: “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.’’
Mostly, the book alleges, Hope enjoyed one-night stands with showgirls and beauty queens — avoiding romantic entanglements with his beautiful co-stars in movies, who included such actresses as Lucille Ball, Jane Russell, Madeleine Carroll, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine and Dorothy Lamour.
But some of his affairs were of longer duration, Zoglin writes, and involved higher-profile women, a few of whom he worked with — and who sometimes met unhappy ends:
Doris Day
“Hope claimed to a friend years later that he and Day had a brief romantic fling while they were touring together [raising funds for the March of Dimes, above] in 1949,’’ Zoglin writes. “When they returned home to Burbank, Dolores was at the airport to greet them, giving Bob an ostentatious welcome-home hug. According to Hope, Day saw the gesture as a wife’s symbolic marking of her territory, and she ended the relationship then and there. Day [now 90] never commented on the alleged affair.’’
Barbara Payton
Payton, a blonde femme fatale who starred in such noirs as “Bad Blonde’’ (above) and James Cagney’s “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye,’’ had a relationship with Hope that began in the spring of 1949 and lasted for several months, according to the book. Zoglin quotes her biographer as saying, “She followed Hope around the country, moved into a furnished apartment that he rented for her in Hollywood, and when the affair ended in August, was paid off by Hope to keep quiet about it. If so, it didn’t stop Payton . . . from selling her story to Confidential magazine in 1956, a rare breach in the wall of secrecy that surrounded Hope’s sex life.’’ Turning to drugs and prostitution, Payton drank herself to death, dying at the age of 39 in 1967.
Marilyn Maxwell
Curvy actress-singer Marilyn Maxwell was Hope’s girlfriend from around 1950 to 1954, according to the book, co-starring with him in the movies “The Lemon Drop Kid” (above) and “Off Limits’’ as well as touring with his vaudeville act and USO shows. “Hope’s intimate relationship with Maxwell was well-known to most of the people who worked with him,’’ Zoglin writes. “On the road for a military-camp show, publicist Frank Liberman once saw Hope and Maxwell check in for the night at a cheap motel . . . The two were together so often that people on the Paramount lot began referring to Maxwell as Mrs. Hope.’’ Married three times, she died of a heart attack in 1972, aged 50.
Ursula Halloran
Hope had a “fairly open affair’’ with Halloran, a member of his publicity staff who accompanied him on a trip to Russia in 1958, Zoglin reveals. She was found dead of a drug overdose in 1963.
Rosemarie Frankland
After he crowned the Welsh beauty Miss World of 1961 (above), Hope “took Frankland on his 1961 Christmas trip to the Arctic, supported her when she moved to Los Angeles to pursue a film career and gave her a small part in his 1965 movie ‘I’ll Take Sweden,’ ’’ Zoglin writes. Publicist Liberman told the author the affair went on for “nearly 30 years,” and the comedian called her “the great love of his life.’’ She also died of a drug overdose, in 2000.
Sandy Vinger
Hope’s last girlfriend was a writer on his California Federal Savings commercials (like this one above) whom Zoglin reports “was his frequent companion in the 1980s.’’ Sandy Vinger brought a breach-of-contract suit against Hope in 1994, when he was 91, claiming he agreed to support her for life. It was settled out of court.
Dolores Hope
Zoglin writes that Dolores Hope, a devout Catholic who had adopted four children with Hope [seen together in his native England in 1994, above], was “almost certainly’’ aware of his affairs. Asked by a reporter in 1978 if she thought her husband was “one hundred percent true-blue,’’ she replied, “I doubt it. I think he’s perfectly human and average and all that.’’
Hope’s daughter Linda is quoted in “Hope: Entertainer of the Century’’ as saying, “I’m sure my mother knew what was going on. And she just decided that he was worth going through whatever she had to go through, to have the life and be Mrs. Bob Hope. But I don’t think any of the [other women] had the significance to him that she did and the family did.’’