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Bob & Dolores Hope: Manufactured Fidelity

January 24th, 2008 by Scott Marks

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I promise you, this will be that last Bob Hope column I write…for at least 20 minutes.

About.com would not allow me to leave a comment or surely I would have. Sheri and Bob Stritof wrote a Celebrity Marriage column about Bob and “Delores” Hope and the spelling of Mrs. Hope’s name in the article’s title isn’t the only thing they got wrong.

“If you are looking for a positive example of a celebrity marriage, you don’t have to look any further than the life long union of Bob Hope and Dolores Reade.”

Oh, what a load of crap.

Bob Hope was a philandering serial-shtupper who set up a stabbin’ cabin not far from his Toluca Lake version of Xanadu so that he and Marilyn Maxwell didn’t have to try and conceal their identities from hotel desk clerks. And how many of those USO show chippies did Bob plow through?

Sheri and Bob continue: “We remember hearing Bob and Dolores share many, many years ago on a television interview that they had some rough times in their marriage journey. They revealed that what kept them together was not only their love and respect for each other, but their firm belief in the vows they made to one another when they married. Unlike many celebrity marriages, there was no hint of scandal about the Hope household.”

If Bob broke 75 at Apache Wells as many times as he shattered his marriage vows he would have made Tiger Woods look like Harold Russell. And that “hint of scandal” talk is pure bunk. Back then, reporters lived by a more gentlemanly code and held back when a story threatened to ruin a performer’s career. This was particularly true when it came to celebrity philandering where the male cheater was frequently looked upon as a cool stud.

That’s not to say our current media fixation on camcorder documentation of celebrity minutiae is the best way to go about reporting on their lives, but if the truth be told, I like it when Hollywood is put under a microscope. For almost 30 years nary a week has passed without my dose of The National Enquirer and the same hold true with my decade-old obsession with The Globe. (I used to read The Star, but quit after it became too much like People and US Weakly.)

Movie stars are nothing more than high-paid civilians that eat, sleep and s–t just like the rest of us. If you choose to live your life in the glare of the public spotlight, don’t whine when some of the darker corners of existence become illuminated. If anything, these piggish paparazzi have a knack for humanizing the stars. I’d love to see pictures of Mealy Cyrus hiding a smoke or Tom Cruise exiting a limo without his panties. The flashing photogs capture flaws that in a strange way manage to make celebs seem more human.

There is a difference between lying and not telling the truth. I’m all for not printing dirt, just don’t perpetuate the whitewashing lies invented to cover it up.

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