For some reason, my files contain a lot of photos of great comedians posing together. Here's a shot of Mr. Benny and Mr. Hope, taken to promote an evening where they had "back-to-back" specials on NBC. Somewhere on a long list of regrets I have is that I never took more advantage of an "in" I had to hang around the NBC studios in Burbank when these gents (and Johnny and Dino and a few others) were doing their shows. I always found it fascinating and educational when I did it, but I didn't do it as often as I should have.
Hope always seemed to be taping a special when I was over there, and he had it down to such an exact science — get in, read the cue cards, get out — that it was almost disappointing to watch. You also didn't get to see him do what he did best, which was the opening monologue.
He'd tape the entire special except for the monologue and then, a day or two before its air date, he'd go on with Johnny Carson to plug it. After The Tonight Show finished that evening, they'd fly in a special curtain and Hope would tape his monologue in front of Johnny's audience. (I saw this once. Johnny stood off to one side, yelling how he had worked his way up in show business to being Bob Hope's warm-up guy.) This procedure enabled Hope to do his opening remarks at the last minute, thereby making them more topical.
I never got to see Jack Benny taping but I met him once, when I was about 11. It was at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica Blvd., on the corner where the Creative Artists Agency building has since been erected. Mr. Benny was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, knee socks and what struck me as inappropriately expensive shoes, given the rest of his outfit. We were both waiting for a very long light to change and he turned to me and said, "I don't know why these things take so long to change." I had no idea of what to say in reply and he apparently took that as a sign that I didn't know who he was and said, "You don't recognize me, do you?" (That sounds snotty, I guess, but he said it in a very nice way.)
I finally found my voice and stammered out something like, "You wouldn't have to wait for these lights if you let Rochester pick you up in the Maxwell," and he gave me a look that any Jack Benny fan would recognize. In fact, now that I think back on it, it seems like he was giving the proper Benny/comedy take to an unseen camera.
What struck me most about him was how gentle and unassuming he was. Later, when I met Bob Hope, he was always on, always playing the star. You would never have met him walking all alone through Beverly Hills and, if you did, he wouldn't stop and ask you where you went to school. He spoke only of what he was doing and what he had to do next. That's not a criticism; just an observation. And when I look at the above photo, I think you can almost perceive that difference between the two men. You can also sense — and I think this is genuine — that they really, really liked each other.