A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

THE MEMORIES:  Dolores Hope, feted last year on this site as being among the most surprisingly still-alive people in the world, isn't anymore. She was 102. John Lahr's 1998 profile of Bob and Dolores Hope captures a marriage which might seem peculiar to us in 2011:

For sixty-four years, Dolores has had to do a lot of adjusting. “He’s a rover by nature,” Dolores told an interviewer in 1953. “The first year we were married, I saw so little of Bob that I wasn’t sure we’d make a go of it. Now, of course, I’ve gotten accustomed to his being away, and I couldn’t imagine life being any different.” Her Catholicism and her family helped Dolores fill Hope’s long absences. “There were times I wanted to pack it in,” Dolores told the gossip columnist Cindy Adams; and times, too, when Hope did. “Marilyn Maxwell was really serious,” Elliott Kozak says of the buxom blonde, who was known on the Paramount lot as Mrs. Hope in the early fifties. “Bob told me at one point he almost left Dolores for her.”

But Bob and Dolores were a good partnership; they shared not only a sense of humor but an almost Presidential faith in keeping up appearances. “There was a big social element to being successful as a standup comedian,” Tony Hope says. “You had to have the right wife and the right kids. . . . You had to have the total image. And she created that for him.” About her husband’s notorious womanizing, Dolores told me, “It never bothered me, because I thought I was better-looking than anybody else.”


Still, it was hard on her. “She longed for romance from this man, and he was cold as ice to her,” says Kozak, who calls Hope “the most self-centered person” he has ever known. “We were in London one time,” he recalls. “Bob, Dolores, and I were walking at night. All of a sudden, out of the clear blue sky, she pushed him up against the wall and said, ‘Kiss me, Bob. Tell me you love me.’ I was so embarrassed I didn’t know what to say. I turned my back on it. . . . I never saw him go to her and give her a peck on the cheek. I was with him for twenty-five years.” Hope was full of feeling for his public but undemonstrative in private. “merry christmas. trip great. feel fine. love bob,” he wired Dolores in 1965 from Vietnam.

Dolores and the children were extras in Hope’s epic.