Bob Hope carried the story with him for decades, and when he finally told it, the emotion was still raw. Before Fred MacMurray became one of Hollywood’s most dependable leading men, he was just another struggling performer who needed a favor—and that favor came from Bob Hope. Their paths first crossed on Broadway in 1933 during the Jerome Kern musical Roberta. Hope played Huckleberry Haynes, while MacMurray performed with the California Collegians and served as an understudy.
Neither man knew that both would soon end up at Paramount, but MacMurray would get there first. During the run of Roberta, Paramount arranged a screen test for MacMurray. He was told to show up in a tuxedo with a top hat and walking stick. He had the tuxedo but not the accessories, so he turned to Hope, who loaned him his own hat and cane.
Hope had already endured his own disastrous 1930 screen test, which had gone so badly that he later joked his nose appeared on screen ten minutes before the rest of his face. Hollywood had shown little interest. So when MacMurray came back to borrow Hope’s accessories a second time for additional footage, Hope found it amusing rather than threatening. Then came the shock.
MacMurray received a standard seven-year Paramount contract and headed west. Hope joked about being irritated that Hollywood had rejected him while welcoming his friend. About five months later, walking down Broadway, Hope looked up at the Paramount marquee and saw something that stopped him cold: The Gilded Lily starring Claudette Colbert, with Fred MacMurray prominently featured. Hope later admitted he rushed to see the movie, almost hoping MacMurray would be terrible.
Instead, he discovered the opposite. “He was great,” Hope remembered. MacMurray followed it with Hands Across the Table opposite Carole Lombard, and Hope thought he was fabulous. When Hope finally arrived in Hollywood in 1937, he admitted one question was on his mind: What had success done to Fred?
The concern was reasonable. MacMurray was now a genuine star, working steadily at one of Hollywood’s dominant studios. In just five years, he had appeared in 23 films, including The Bride Comes Home opposite Colbert and Alice Adams with Katharine Hepburn. Hope, meanwhile, was the newcomer.
His first Hollywood attempt had failed, and he had returned east to conquer vaudeville, Broadway, and radio. The major breakthrough MacMurray had achieved so quickly remained out of reach. Then Hope encountered MacMurray on a set one day. Four years had passed since their Broadway days.
Hope was the one waiting for his big break this time. MacMurray was established. Fred recognized him. “Hey,” MacMurray called out, according to Hope, and threw open his arms and hugged him.
Decades later, that tiny moment was still powerful enough to make Hope emotional. “You want to cry,” he recalled, because this was a man who had been a star for years, yet he greeted Hope exactly the way the old Fred would have. Hope saw it as proof of something important. Success, he observed, could change people in strange ways.
It had not changed MacMurray. “And he’s always been that way,” Hope said, his affection unmistakable. “He’s a beautiful, beautiful man. ”
Coming from Hope, those words carried particular weight.
There could easily have been jealousy between them. MacMurray had literally borrowed Hope’s hat and cane, taken a screen test, and reached Hollywood before the man who lent them to him. Hope even admitted he once watched MacMurray on screen partly hoping to see him fail—only to discover Fred was great. Whatever competitive feelings existed disappeared beneath respect.
MacMurray had not yet reached his peak. By 1943, he was reportedly Hollywood’s highest-paid actor, earning $420,000 that year. Yet the following year, he took one of the greatest risks of his career. Billy Wilder asked America’s dependable nice guy to play an adulterer and murderer in Double Indemnity.
MacMurray initially resisted, understanding exactly what audiences expected from him. Other actors had already turned down the role. MacMurray worried that becoming Walter Neff could destroy a career he had spent nearly a decade building. Wilder kept pushing, and eventually MacMurray took the risk.
When Double Indemnity arrived in 1944, the gamble paid off. Instead of destroying his image, the film revealed how deceptive that image could be. MacMurray didn’t transform himself physically into a conventional villain. Walter still looked and sounded like a respectable American professional, which made his descent into murder even more disturbing.
MacMurray later summarized his approach: he always began as “Smiley MacMurray,” the decent Rotarian type, until audiences gradually realized the man they trusted was actually a heel. The performance became one of the defining roles of film noir. Yet despite Double Indemnity receiving seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, MacMurray was not nominated for Best Actor. Across a career spanning more than 80 films, he never received a competitive Oscar nomination.
But the film permanently expanded what Hollywood knew he could do. A decade later, he played the self-serving Lieutenant Tom Keefer in The Caine Mutiny. Then in 1960, Wilder used that trustworthy face against audiences again, casting him as the married executive J. D.
Sheldrake in The Apartment. The quality Bob Hope admired in MacMurray—that ordinary, approachable decency—was the foundation of his screen image. It was also what made him dangerous on camera. Hollywood spent decades treating his naturalness as simplicity when it was actually what made him effective.
By the late 1950s, MacMurray’s career appeared to be slowing. Between 1957 and 1959, he made six westerns, often modest productions far removed from his prestigious earlier work. MacMurray disliked the genre and joked about the saddle sores. Then Walt Disney offered him a role that changed his career direction almost overnight.
The Shaggy Dog arrived in 1959 and became an enormous commercial success, finishing among the year’s biggest box office attractions. The man audiences once watched romance Claudette Colbert and Carole Lombard had become a favorite of American families. Disney followed with The Absent-Minded Professor in 1961, in which MacMurray played Professor Ned Brainard, inventor of the gravity-defying substance Flubber. Its success produced Son of Flubber in 1963, followed by other Disney projects including Follow Me, Boys!
in 1966. At almost exactly the same moment, television producer Don Fedderson approached MacMurray about My Three Sons. MacMurray repeatedly resisted because he had no desire to surrender his life to an exhausting weekly television schedule. Fedderson finally offered a remarkable solution.
MacMurray would work only about 65 days per year, with his scenes for the entire season filmed first. The remaining cast would later complete scenes around his pre-recorded material, sometimes performing opposite a stand-in famously nicknamed “Fred McMop. ”
There was another powerful incentive. MacMurray reportedly received a 50 percent ownership interest in the series.
He accepted, and My Three Sons debuted in 1960. Instead of becoming a short-lived retirement job, it ran for 12 seasons and 380 episodes, ending in 1972. The arrangement reveals something important about the man behind Bob Hope’s affectionate memory. MacMurray had grown up watching his mother struggle financially after his parents separated.
As an adult, he became famously careful with money, sometimes arriving on sets with his own brown-bag lunch, and he invested heavily in real estate, including a large Sonoma County ranch. By his later years, the former $75-a-week contract player had become extraordinarily financially secure. Yet the lifestyle he protected was surprisingly ordinary: family, his ranch, golf, fishing, and time away from Hollywood. After My Three Sons ended, MacMurray gradually withdrew from regular work.
His final theatrical appearance came in the 1978 disaster film The Swarm. By then, the man who had worked almost continuously since the 1930s had little left to prove. Retirement brought challenges that professional success could not solve. A lifelong heavy smoker, MacMurray developed throat cancer in the late 1970s.
The disease returned shortly after Thanksgiving in 1987, although treatment again brought it under control. Then, just after Christmas in 1988, MacMurray suffered a stroke that affected his right side and his ability to speak. Months of therapy reportedly restored much of what he had lost, but his strength never completely returned. Those who knew him said his humor remained intact.
Don Grady, who had played Robbie Douglas on My Three Sons, continued calling his television father. Grady remembered that during their final conversation, MacMurray was too weak to come downstairs to the telephone, yet he could still joke. The easygoing personality Bob Hope had encountered more than half a century earlier was apparently still there. In November 1991, MacMurray developed a urinary tract infection that progressed into a serious blood infection.
With his wife June and two of his daughters beside him, he died at 83. Years before that final chapter, Hope had already offered perhaps the simplest explanation for why MacMurray remained so beloved. Success could do strange things to people, but it had not done that to MacMurray. “He’s always been that way,” Hope said.
“He’s a beautiful, beautiful man. ”
When MacMurray turned 80 and was asked how he wanted people to remember him, he did not mention Double Indemnity, Disney, money, or awards. His answer was one word.
Fondly.
