Friday, December 12, 2014

Give Me Some Undercurrents

Like I said, this Bob Hope bio really bogs down after World War II. Like, you might get a page or two of Bob grumbling about how much his fax machine cost. But I did find out that on one trip to Vietnam he took along "nearly a ton of thirty-by-forty-inch poster board" for cue cards. So that seemed like a lot of poster board. That was something to think about. And when Tony Coelho got kicked out of seminary for having epilepsy (!) and his parents thought he was possessed by the devil (!!) Bob and family took him in for several months and Bob advised him to go into politics (he became a six-term Democratic state congressman). And Bob sent Tony Coelho to the bank and told him to take as much money out of Bob's account as he needed to start a new life. Also, the playwright John Guare lived with Bob Hope and his family for ten months. These facts briefly struck me as interesting but I think it is wearing off. "It was not a house full of undercurrents," Guare says. "It was a genuinely pleasant house." Zzzzzz.