The Cutup

This served Hope well until the ’60s, when politics was suddenly no longer something one could avoid talking about in polite company. The times shone a light on Hope the cipher and exposed hidden deposits of nastiness and reaction. Shouting down hecklers among his later Vietnam audiences; gluing himself to Westmoreland, Nixon, Kissinger and even Spiro Agnew (to whom Hope often loaned his joke writers — should we perhaps be thanking him for “the nattering nabobs of negativity”?); making tasteless jokes when the 1968 Oscars were delayed by the King assassination; getting booed offstage at the 1970 Miss World Pageant by flour-flinging feminists; making homophobic cracks during the 1970s: Hope was attuned, in all the worst ways, to the tenor of his times. Instead of being an upstart child, as his persona demanded, he was one of the country-club parents screaming, “Go live in Russia!” The mask, with its upturned, leering lip, became a rictus that froze in a sneer. Bob hadn’t changed, but the landscape around him had, leaving him a polarizing figure, high and dry on an island of rich right-wingers from the post-Goldwater Sun Belt ascendancy. Which is exactly where he always felt he belonged.

And now, in his crepuscular Reaganesque sequestration, we finally see him reflected in or refracted through the people and ideas he associated with, and hardly at all as himself. His ski-jump nose dovetails somewhere in the national folk-memory with Richard Nixon’s, much as Chaplin’s mustache did with Hitler’s. As an emblematic English immigrant emerging from transatlantic steerage and subterranean vaudeville, he’s the anti–Cary Grant, defiantly not smooth or emollient or conventionally sexy. He’s the secular Billy Graham, dispensing bromides and insta-quips — instead of sententious sermons — to presidents. He is “our troops,” a curdled symbol of the Good War who lasted into the age of very Bad Wars. He is a symbol of suburban, postwar, pre-Tiger golf, with all its associations of privilege, exclusion, environmental despoliation and land grabbing. For good or ill, he’s still all over the place — you had only to scan the papers this week — yet our perceptions of him are imprecise, kaleidoscopic, made up of far-flung fragments of identity cast all over the postwar epoch. He’s the Cutup Man, and he may never be reassembled in a way that will make sense to all of us all the time.