Bob Hope's journey: how a broadly popular performer became a symbol of cultural and political division.

• Author: Kurtz, Steve
• Position: "Hope: Entertainer of the Century" - Book review

Hope: Entertainer of the Century, by Richard Zoglin, Simon & Schuster, 569 pages, $30

Bob Hope lived to be 100. For most of those years he was one of the biggest celebrities in the world. But what mark has he left? Journalist Richard Zoglin tries to answer that question with his biography Hope: Entertainer of the Century. It's the subtitle that intrigues--does Hope deserve the designation, and if so, what will people make of him in this century?

Zoglin's previous book was Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America, so it's interesting to see him take on the man who helped create the world those comedians were reacting against. Long before Richard Pryor or George Carlin were performing, Hope was actually hip: When he was new on the scene, he offered something fresh and different that audiences couldn't get enough of. Zoglin, better than anyone before him, shows us how Hope built up that character to become a huge star, beloved for decades and yet at times surprisingly controversial.

That controversy was probably inevitable. It's not so much that Hope changed--though he did, somewhat--but that the audience did. When the comic was coming up, performers who wanted to hit it big knew they couldn't go wrong waving the flag. But in an era of clashes over civil rights, Vietnam, the counterculture, Watergate, and more, it became hip to paint yourself as outside the mainstream, no matter how successful you actually were. Questioning the most basic aspects of our society signaled to the new audience that you were one of them. Hope, being the most noticeable and unembarrassed representative of an older type of entertainment, indeed an older type of America, was bound to come in for his share of denunciation. But inevitable or not, it would be a mistake to let the controversy get in the way of assessing Hope's work and its influence.

Though he would become almost ostentatiously American, Leslie Towns Hope (he'd change it to Bob for show biz) was born in London, England, in 1903. His family emigrated to Cleveland before he turned five. He and his six brothers were raised in poverty, learning to scramble to make it. Even when he became the richest entertainer in the world, he still retained a certain stinginess--he could be very generous to old friends, but he would fret if he felt he wasn't getting the best deal, even over small things.

After bouncing around from one job to another, including a stint as a boxer, Hope went into...