Hope Course Has Hecklers Yelling Fore

In the days of World War II, a special services officer in a zone where bombs were dropping warned Bob Hope, “You’ll do your show and then run for your life.” Deadpanned Hope: “I’ve never done it any other way.”

Hope was, as usual, jesting. It’s debatable whether a better-loved comedian ever took the stage or screen.

But, it’s a precarious business. Not too many years ago, in the days of a war where nobody hung yellow ribbons out, Hope, of all people, was booed at football games for having the audacity to entertain the troops in a war the boo-ers disapproved of.

Bob Hope knows an audience as few entertainers ever come to know it. He has had a 65-year (requited) love affair with one since he was a kid in Cleveland and found out he wasn’t cut out to be a prizefighter. Bob didn’t want to hit anyone. He went into the ring because it had a spotlight. Bob never missed a chance to take a bow. “I was the only guy they had to carry into the ring as well as out of it,” he confesses.

He got the measure of the best and the beast in an audience the long hard way, in vaudeville, Broadway, Hollywood, benefits, banquets, nightclubs, radio and TV--to say nothing of performances on the pitching decks of aircraft carriers, trenches and jungle bases. You raised a curtain and Hope sprang eternal. Have Tux, Will Travel originated with Hope. He was as American as the wisecrack, as beloved as the Easter Bunny.

Bob got used to hecklers from gin mills in Poughkeepsie to the closing act in the Palace. But he is getting catcalls from a sector of the audience he hadn’t reckoned on. And they haven’t even heard the jokes.

These are the environmentalists, and in the present case they seem about to try to save the planet from bogeys, birdies, divots and the occasional mark of a golf cleat on a weed path.

The circumstances are the least bit complicated. They usually are. But, basically, they are these: Bob Hope throughout his career has collected more real estate than Genghis Khan in his prime. Bob didn’t set out to do it. It just happened. Bob was making the kind of money on his radio and movie shows the old railroad barons only dreamed of. He didn’t pay a lot of attention to what was done with it.

What was done with it was a land grab. One of Hope’s six brothers, Jack, had the soul of a cattle baron. He picked up land by the state. It was cheap by today’s standards, but it was so far out in the country it included places that had only been visited by mule train.

Hope never did anything with the land, except pay taxes on it. It just sat there. Deer ran through it. Later, so did joggers. Hope hardly knew he had it. He was so busy running around the world that he said his wife, Dolores, had bath towels monogrammed “Hers” and “Who’s?” The accumulation of property was of only academic interest to him. It didn’t applaud, laugh, cheer or whistle. Bob wanted laughs, not dirt.

Finally, the comedian decided to sell. That’s basically what you do with property. Or so he thought. He had kept it a wilderness for 40 years in some cases, nearly 50 in others.

The audience wasn’t laughing this time. The hoots began to come in. They didn’t throw tomatoes or walk out, but they closed ranks and jeered in unison.

You would have thought Hope was going to cut the Amazon, net the whales, poison the streams. But the property he has in Agoura isn’t exactly a rain forest. It doesn’t have a single redwood on it.

And they didn’t want to build a prison on it or a nuclear plant or build a pulp mill or grow rice.

They wanted to build a golf course. That’s golf as in greens, and fairways, water hazards and trees. Not exactly your basic 20th-Century eyesore. Yellowstone Park should have it so good. Golfers litter the landscape with slices and hooks, a divot here and there, but not beer cans and potato salad and wax paper and cigarette butts. Golfers don’t like litter. Makes it too hard to putt.

Hope has 2,500 acres in Agoura. He proposes to deal off the top portion, the so-called China Flats area, for a wilderness preserve. The bottom half would be a TPC golf course. It’s a deal he says has with the tacit approval of the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club is to environmentalism what the Vatican is to Catholicism.

As land use, a golf course would seem to be as good as you’re going to get. I mean, it’s not an industrial park. I know some golf courses where the deer still come down to eat the leaves at nightfall. It’s empty at night, which means the muggers can’t use it as a place of business. Golf courses generally will put more trees there than nature would. It’s not a wilderness, but it’s not downtown Pittsburgh, either. It’s the next-best thing to sleeping next to a cemetery.

The environmental objection is the usual. It will promote congestion. The mountain lions won’t like it. If God meant for it to be a golf course, he would have put tees in. Today a golf course, tomorrow a mall, a high rise, a traffic jam and a Holiday Inn. Civilization.

The builders counter that these things will occur anyway--350,000 people move into Los Angeles County each year--and a golf course will delay the despoilment.

It’s the never-ending argument of the 20th Century. The residents want Hope to donate the property for a national park. They got theirs, they want to put a moat up. Hope’s people have offered his Runkle Ranch property, a 5,700-acre hunk, for $10 million to the Santa Monica Mountain Conservancy, an offer that has that state agency drooling, tens of millions below market value.

Some show-business types want a Broadway theater named after them. Others opt for a street, a hospital or even a high school.

Hope wants a golf course. The game has been his second love since he first hoofed out on stage and asked, “Did you hear the one about. . . ?” Hope never made a camp show without a driver in his hand, a putter in his luggage and a quip on his lips.

He’d like to leave the world a tough par five over water to remember him by. Grant can have his Tomb, Washington his Monument, Caesar the Colosseum. They can have Mt. Rushmore. Hope wants 18 holes in Agoura.

Will he get it? Says Ventura County Supervisor Maria VanderKolk, leader of the opposition: “I love Bob Hope. I grew up with Bob Hope. He’s done some wonderful things for our country, our boys. I’m distressed to find myself opposed to him.”

But she wants to leave it to the birds and the bears. Hope wants birds and bogeys. He wants to be able to listen not to the call of the plume crested Pacific wren, but the full-throated migratory California golfer yelling “No! No! Not over there !” He wants to be remembered by something you can make an 11 on.