Actor Bob Colonna, shown in the living room of his Providence home, has written a book, “Greetings, Gate!” The Story of Professor Jerry Colonna, about his late father, the comic Jerry Colonna. Bob Colonna rejects the notion that he has surpassed his father — but says he has no complaints. Below, a family photo showing Jerry Colonna with Bob Hope. The caption on the back reads "Shot in real bunker on Pacific Tour."

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

One of Bob Colonna’s earliest memories is of being on the back patio of the first house he ever knew, in Studio City, Calif., talking with his dad, Jerry. It was during the war, 1943 or ’44.

“Professor” Jerry Colonna was hot stuff then. Bob Hope’s sidekick and constant companion on his tours to entertain the troops, he had already been in one of the famous “Road” movies (The Road to Singapore, 1940) with Hope and Bing Crosby, and was approaching the height of a 30-year career in radio, TV and film. He possessed one of the most familiar voices on radio, and probably the most recognized moustache anywhere, after Adolf Hitler’s.

But to Bob he was just Dad. And he was about to do something very cool, as Bob recalled the other day, 60-odd years later:

“I had this little metal airplane that I could pedal around in — like a World War II fighter plane. And one day when I was about 3, I was in the plane and talking to Dad out on the patio, and I said, ‘Where did I come from?’ ”

The rest of the conversation, as Colonna recalls it, went like this:

“You came in that airplane. Your mother and I were out here on the patio, just sitting here one day, and we looked up in the sky and saw an airplane and the airplane came down, and there you were.”

“I could fly???”

“Oh, yeah.”

“How come I can’t fly now?”

“I don’t know. You used to.”

Sitting in his cramped walk-up off North Main Street, in Providence, its faux-stained-glass windows rattling from the brisk wind outside, mementos of two show biz lives, his and Jerry’s, on the walls, Colonna explains:

“I thought about this much later, and I thought, ‘That was so cool!’ It was a great setup for eventually when I would be able to understand the notion of adoption.”

Adopted? It might come as a surprise to those of us who have followed Colonna’s long career hereabouts as Trinity actor, director of The Rhode Island Shakespeare Theatre (TRIST) and onetime real-life Falstaff, known more recently for some of the most unforgettable performances ever on any Rhode Island stage.

What about the family resemblance? The bulging eyes, the expressive mouth, the wide grin?

All a happy accident or an illusion, just one of many serendipities that have marked both their careers, as Colonna reveals in his new book about his dad, “Greetings, Gate!” The Story of Professor Jerry Colonna (Bear Manor Media, 239 pages, $24.95).

It was never an issue with Jerry’s adopted son, who can’t remember a time when he didn’t know. He played with Bob Hope’s kids, who were also adopted, so it seemed natural anyway. He didn’t even look for his birth parents until about his 50th birthday. He found out his mother’s name, Clara Jeffries, and that his father was dead, probably by his own hand. That’s as far as he got.

No matter. When he was young, his adoptive parents, Jerry and Flo, were the world.

“I grew up an only child, very vulnerable,” he said, as the windows rattled. “Dad was away a lot. I adored him. I was scared of my mother; she was tough. She was scared most of the time, just about how to handle the house.” (He grew to understand Flo better while researching the book, he said, learning more about some of the genuinely terrifying experiences she had faced.)

“They really didn’t want me to go into show business, because they knew how scary it was. Mother wanted me to be a priest, that was her big thing. And when that wasn’t going to happen, she said, ‘Well, you argue enough to be a Philadelphia lawyer,’ so I should be a lawyer. Or something other than show business. But that’s all I wanted to do.”

No wonder. The father he adored was in show biz, and beloved around the world.

Jerry Colonna, Bob says, was never an actor. “He was a character — a character he developed on his own when he was young. One thing led to another and then the Hope writers developed a character for him, The Professor.”

The Professor’s shtick always included a telephone call between him and Hope at the top of the show. Colonna listened to some of the old recordings again, to write the book. One of his favorites is a bit in which Jerry is calling from Panama. His son slips into voice-over mode as he repeats the lines from memory:

(Hope) “What are you doing in Panama?”

(Colonna) “A very important project, Hope. We’re draining the Panama Canal.”

(Hope) “How are you doing that?”

(Colonna) “Five thousand men, each with a straw.”

(Hope) “Colonna, that’s impossible!”

(Colonna) “It is?” Colonna pauses for precisely the right number of nanoseconds….

“All right, men, spit it out!”

Bob Colonna attended “an inordinate number” of those shows starring Bob Hope and his dad, “and I equated, I guess, acceptance with applause. And laughter. By the time I was in the third or fourth grade, I was a complete ham. And it has taken most of my career to learn how to actually act, you know?”

He had a good teacher in college, he says — before he flunked out of Marquette University, in Wisconsin. He had begun binge drinking and eating there, two habits that blighted his career for years. And then Adrian Hall was an influence — the now-legendary Trinity Rep director who brought Colonna here from Milwaukee after seeing him act there. Hall taught him more about directing than anything else, Colonna says. Later on, Ed Shea was another big influence.

“And Richard Jenkins taught me how to relax. He was an incredible influence, a hell of an actor, and then running Trinity he would stop rehearsals all the time and give actors hints that would stay with them for the rest of their lives. What he said to me, and it scared the hell out of me, was, ‘What would happen if Bob said that line, instead of whoever he’s trying to be?’ That was a real awakening.”

His education had begun at an early age. At 10, he saw Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam, and Jean Arthur and Boris Karloff in Peter Pan in New York. By age 15, he was working onstage with his dad in British vaudeville. He remembers getting some straightforward advice from Jerry: “Know when to get off, and never turn your back on the audience: your ass is too big.”

That was easy. Turning his back on the food, the drink and the women (not the ones he married; the ones who ended his marriages) was harder. But now — after three marriages and divorces, years of binge eating that drove his weight to more than 300 pounds, and enough booze to sink a ship, or a career — he has slimmed down, is on the wagon, and for the last dozen years has been in a relationship with a “wonderful, beautiful, amusing woman” who is so publicity shy, he says, that she wishes to be absent from this article completely.

He may never have found his birth parents, but finally Bob Colonna seems to have found himself, and his career reflects it. He enjoys directing more than acting these days, and he is manifestly good at it. But it’s his performance at Warren’s 2nd Story Theatre a few years ago as Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and before that as Roy Cohn in Angels in America, that remain the stuff of local theater legend.

That story has been told before, though not in his book, which is all about Jerry. Nowhere in the book does Colonna deal with the obvious question, but it arises anyway: Has he gone beyond his dad? And indeed, did the lessons learned as a child hold him back?

“Well, I do more things than Dad did,” Colonna replies. “He was never an actor. He was a trombone player who was funny on the side and then was picked up by Bob Hope. Our careers were almost exactly the same. He never pursued anything. Things came to him. He was very lucky for a long time.”

Jerry’s luck ran out eventually. He was bumped from the wildly popular Pepsodent Show. People stopped calling. He booked some gigs of his own — only to be sued by an agent who thought he should get a cut anyway. It was in the contract. The agent won — a million dollars! It was a huge financial blow, added to his career reverses. Then Jerry suffered a stroke and eventually lost his voice, and it was all over.

Bob joined his Dad on stage in Las Vegas during the early part of the decline. But they were going in opposite directions.

“After a year and a half, I said, ‘I have to get back, I can’t do it anymore. I can’t work for drunks,’ ” Colonna recalled. He thought about that for a moment. “I can’t work for drunks,” he repeated, adopting a drunken accent and laughing, savoring the irony, given his own bout with alcohol at the time.

Mostly, he wanted to get back to acting, back to speaking lines written by Shakespeare and a career that led from acting to directing, writing (children’s books before this one), teaching drama and directing student plays (at Rhode Island College) and, among other kudos, to the prestigious Claiborne Pell Award for Artistic Excellence, which he received just last year.

He rejects the idea that he has surpassed his father, however:

“Try being funny,” he challenges. “Just try it. A really good dramatic actor may be able to be funny. A really good comedian probably can act.

“One of the things I learned when I was directing Shakespeare, I found that the timing in tragedy and comedy is exactly the same: You set ’em up, then you whack ’em with it — straight line, punch line, straight line, punch line, straight line, punch line — and if you’re really good, you can do both at the same time, the way Chaplin did. Basically, it’s sexual — it’s the rhythm of life, which is tension, release, tension release. Everything that actually works in life, and especially in show business, that’s it. Tension, release.”

Colonna’s life and career seem to be in a prolonged release phase at the moment. Gone is the tension, the frenetic pace that he learned at Trinity, and that had his actors at TRIST begging for some time off. And in that sense, maybe Jerry’s career did hold him back. And maybe, as things have turned out, that was a good thing:

“There have been many times in my life when I say, ‘I should be better at this,’ you know? I’m definitely a second-string actor — second or third-string. But the other thing is, I’m entirely devoid of ambition, because I saw the other side of success. You know, Dad, when they bumped him from the Pepsodent Show and his career started to go downhill, and how frightening it was.

“And the worst part of it was, if you’re supposed to be a big deal, a national star. You see it all the time. You say Pepsodent Show to somebody here, somebody of this generation, and they have no idea who you’re talking about. Remember John Lovett? Saturday Night Live? ‘That’s the ticket!’ That guy? Don Adams is another one. As long as [Get Smart] was on, Don Adams was the biggest thing — everybody was quoting those lines: ‘Would you believe….’ You know?

“That’s how fast it goes. If you have to crash on the other side of success, there’s nothing more devastating. It took Dad — there were years when it was just one struggle after another. There was literally a time when my mother was mad at me, when she said, ‘You wait until your father gets home in September!’ I wish I was making that up, but she had to say that.

“So, I know too much, you know? I have absolutely no ambition. I don’t have any teeth for the game; I’m not tough. I’m not remotely tough. I mostly have just kind of gone where the wind blew.

“I have an audition this afternoon in Boston for a part that I’m really excited about. And they called me. I’ve never had an agent. It came about because I know somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody else who knew my work and called me. And that’s been my career. So I have been lucky. Mostly, I have been really, really, really lucky. And I don’t know what that’s about, you know? Right from the beginning. Here I was, kicked out of my birth family, and I land in a pretty cushy spot. But… I don’t know… I have no complaints.

“Right now I have a deficit in my bank balance, I have enough bus fare to go to Boston and back, and tomorrow I’m getting a check in the mail from a friend whom I did some work for over the weekend — and you know what? I don’t care!”

He thought for a moment then. “My landlord may read this and say, ‘Well, I care,’ and I’ll try not to get behind there,” he said. And he laughed a good hearty laugh, loud enough to drown out the windows rattling in the chill wind.

Colonna got the part. He’ll be playing Hector in The History Boys, by Alan Bennett, at SpeakEasy Stage, in Boston, in May. Meanwhile, he’ll tell stories about his dad, the book, and a life in the theater Feb. 7 at 6 p.m. at the Redwood Library, 50 Bellevue Ave., Newport.

driggs@projo.com