Bob Hope & Bing Crosby Hollywood’s dream team

They were just like any married couple except this pair were so happy together, there was never any chance of a divorce!

Bob Hope and Bing Crosby were the dream team of Hollywood, with the perfect chemistry to get us laughing and just the right balance of shining talent and downright daftness.

Crooner Crosby, of course, always played the smooth ladies’ man, nice guy and more serious. For Hope, well, he was the one who wanted to be a ladies’ man but was too silly for it to work like it did for his sidekick. But together, in their series of Road movies, they ruled the world!

Between 1940 and 1962, they made seven of the films, Road To Singapore, Zanzibar, Morocco, Utopia, Rio, Bali and Hong Kong. All but the final one also starred Dorothy Lamour, with Joan Collins coming in for 1962’s Road To Hong Kong.

Of course, along the way, Crosby and Hope had done lots of other things, and not always together, but it was as a comedy double-act that they really hit the sweet spot.

Born in Eltham, London, in 1903, Bob Hope was seen as a classic American idol by the time he passed away 10 years ago, aged 100. But his true roots were with his stonemason father, from Somerset, and his Welsh opera-singing mum, who’d also been a cleaner. The fifth of seven sons, Bob had clearly grown up in a house where you had to work hard to get much attention, and he never lost that art!

He was also a steady man, unlike many stars, settling into married life with Dolores for 69 years, after a strange first marriage of less than a year. Rumours about extra-marital affairs followed him for much of his life, but he and Dolores would be extremely close. She lived to 102.

If you knew how much of a charmer Bob was, you’d understand how he could get away with the odd bit of cheating. Photos of the most powerful man on Earth, President Nixon, holding an ashtray to the floor in the White House while Bob putts a golf ball into it, show he could charm anyone! People loved his wisecracking ways, and he was fast with his one-liners.

If he was much-loved, Bing Crosby was possibly even more so. A true gentleman, just three weeks younger than Hope, he also had half a dozen siblings and had to shout to be heard. With his smooth baritone voice, that was no problem later in life.

Like James Stewart, Bing Crosby just had one of those faces people took to and trusted, and a gentle way about him that put us at ease. Some of his ancestors had been English, and even crossed to the New World on the Mayflower centuries earlier.

So Bing and Bob had links and parallels, and perhaps it should be no surprise that they hit it off.

The young Harry Crosby, his real name, had loved a spoof feature in a local paper, called The Bingville Bugle, and a pal started calling him Bing. It stuck! Still just a fresh-faced kid, his life changed when he saw Al Jolson onstage, doing joke songs and making up gags as he went along. Young Master Crosby was hooked for life, and there was nothing else he wanted to do.

When war came and Bing performed for the troops, he picked up so much German, he was asked to also do propaganda announcements for Germans. In fact, the ones who sussed him out called him Der Bingle! At the end of the conflict, US troops voted him top for having improved morale, with Hope not far behind.

Crosby would sell plenty of cinema tickets, at the last count 1,077,900,000 behind only Clark Gable and John Wayne.

However, despite never being an official duo like Laurel and Hardy, it was the Road To flicks with Hope that paved the way for him. On the music front, his version of White Christmas has sold 100 million copies, a figure that would have even Lennon and McCartney shaking their heads in wonder.

Dorothy Lamour was the girl who made it all work on screen, but away from film both Bing and Bob adored Rosemary Clooney.

“They treated her like a sister,” recalled her husband Dante DiPaolo. “When they all looked at each other, everyone was always smiling.”

Even when Crosby and Hope weren’t working, they started playing a lot of golf together. There was rarely a serious word spoken! Filming Road To Hong Kong in England, of all places, they made sure they stayed close to a good course.

“One day, they’d filmed a party scene and then went straight to the golf club,” recalled Bob’s son, Tony. “They got into the locker room and took off their shoes, and all this confetti fell out.

“You can imagine the looks on the golf club members’ faces, so Bob and Bing launched straight into one of their spiels! They had an instant repartee.”

Just as they won over the gents at an exclusive golf club, they won over the world with their unique chemistry.