by Helene Hanff
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Text originally published in 1961 under the same title.
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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.
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UNDERFOOT IN SHOW BUSINESS
BY
HELENE HANFF
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS 4
INTRODUCTION 5
DEDICATION 6
TO THE READER 7
1. FLANAGAN’S LAW 8
Footnote to Chapter 1: It Doesn’t Pay to Educate Playwrights 15
2. “NO CASTING TODAY BUT KEEP IN TOUCH!” 18
3. IF THEY TAKE YOU TO LUNCH THEY DON’T WANT YOUR PLAY 28
4. IF SHE TAKES YOU TO LUNCH SHE CAN’T SELL IT 36
5. THE UNDERFOOT FREE ENTERPRISE SYSTEM 40
6. “SUMER IS ICUMEN IN...” 48
7. “NO LEGS NO JOKES NO CHANCE” 53
8. LARGE FURNISHED REAR WITH KITCHEN PRIVILEGES 60
9. OUTSIDE HOLLYWOOD 72
10. OWL AND PIGLET ON BROADWAY 83
11. “LHUDE SING CUCCU” 93
12. A ROUND TRIP THROUGH THE ANNEX OR SARAH WANTS TO DO SOMETHING GREEK AND OTHER STORIES 99
PLEASE USE NEAREST EXIT 115
ABOUT THE AUTHOR 119
REVIEWS 120
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 121
INTRODUCTION
“Each year, hundreds of stage-struck kids arrive in New York determined to crash the theatre.
...One in a thousand turns out to be Noel Coward. This book is about life among the other 999. By one of them.”—Helene Hanff
In her spirited, witty and vastly entertaining memoir, Helene Hanff recalls her ingenuous attempts to crash Broadway in the early forties as one of “the other 999.”
Naive, near-sighted, frequently penniless but hopelessly stagestruck, she found her life governed by Flanagan’s Law: “No matter what happens to you, it’s unexpected.” Therefore, as a prize-winning Theatre Guild protégée with a brilliant future, Helene naturally found that all the producers who were going to produce her plays didn’t, and all the agents who were going to sell her plays couldn’t.
Together with her best friend Maxine, an aspiring actress consigned to playing the comedy-ingénue in plays that regularly folded after five performances, she cultivated the “delicate, illegal art of getting everything for nothing”—from free seats to every Broadway show and neighborhood movie and borrowed outfits from Saks to voice lessons for Maxine and Greek lessons for Helene. To keep body and soul together until Broadway fame arrived, they devised an economic survival system that embraced such unlikely jobs as taking street-corner.
DEDICATION
“The day I finished the book, I celebrated by phoning Maxine in Hollywood.
‘Do you want to hear the dedication?’ I asked her.
‘Go ahead,’ said Maxine.
So I read it to her.”
To all the stagestruck kids who ever have, or ever will, set out to crash the theatre
“’What do you think of it?’ I asked.
‘It’s MUCH too sentimental,’ said Maxine. ‘Why don’t you just dedicate it to me?’
So what the hell—“
This book is for Maxine
TO THE READER
You may have noticed this book was not written by Noel Coward. It’s a book about show business, where fame is the stock in trade, and it’s written by a name you’ve never heard of and probably can’t pronounce. There is a simple explanation for this.
Each year, hundreds of stagestruck kids arrive in New York determined to crash the theatre, firmly convinced they’re destined to be famous Broadway stars or playwrights. One in a thousand turns out to be Noel Coward.
This book is about life among the other 999. By one of them.
—HELENE HANFF
1. FLANAGAN’S LAW
WE’LL BEGIN WITH THE LAW that governs the life of every one of the 999 from the day he or she first arrives in New York, which was first explained to me by a stage manager named Bill Flanagan. Flanagan’s law of the theatre is:
“No matter what happens to you, it’s unexpected.”
You can even work it backward. Thus if you know I never got anywhere in the theatre you can deduce from Flanagan’s Law that my theatrical career must have got off to a magnificent start. And it did, back home in Philadelphia on the shining day when I got a letter from Theresa Helburn, co-producer of the Theatre Guild.
This was at the tag end of the Depression, and after one year of college I’d had to quit and go to work. I got a job as typist in the basement of a diesel-engine school. Twelve dollars a week and all the grease I could carry home on me. In my spare time I wrote plays. And one evening when I came home from work, my mother told me she’d heard on the radio that an organization called the Bureau of New Plays was sponsoring a playwriting contest. It was open to “young people of college age” and the three winners were to be awarded $1,500 fellowships.
“I sent away for an application blank for you,” she said.
The application blank arrived and informed me I could submit as many plays as I chose. I’d already written three, but reading them over I didn’t like any of them much. It was only October and since the deadline for submissions was January 1, I decided to write some new ones for the contest.
In the next three weeks, during lulls in the diesel-engine basement and at home in the evening, I wrote a new three-act play, since writing a three-act play takes no time at all when you haven’t got any idea what you’re doing. At the end of the three weeks I was fired, leaving me free to write three more plays during November and December. I sent all four off to the contest. And then, since the results weren’t to be announced till March 15, I put the whole thing out of my mind and went job-hunting.
I landed a nice quiet situation as secretary to two musicians—a band leader and a saxophone player-teacher—who shared an office. The dance band played mostly subdebutante parties. In order to sell his band to the subdebs’ mothers Van, the band leader, had to know well in advance when the approved boys’ schools had their Christmas and Easter vacations, since no mother scheduled a party without assuring her daughter a good long “stag line.” So part of my job was to write haughtily condescending letters to the headmasters of Andover, Exeter, Hotchkiss, Lawrenceville and so forth, requesting the dates of their holidays “in order to facilitate the planning of the coming social season.” I signed the letters Baroness Helena von Hanff, Social Secretary.
My two bosses played in a luncheon-music ensemble in the Ritz-Carlton dining room so they were entitled to a Ritz mailbox and enough Ritz stationery for me to write the letters on. After I mailed the letters, I’d stop in at the Ritz every few days on my lunch hour to collect the answers.
Now it’s one thing to sound like a haughty noblewoman on paper, and quite another to l
ook it. I didn’t look it. I had a dumpy little figure and the clothes I bought off the sale racks in Wanamaker’s basement didn’t improve it. I had straight mouse-colored hair which I couldn’t afford to have cut or set very often, I wore glasses, and I had as much poise as any young girl who’s never been anywhere or done anything and most of the time isn’t exactly sure who she is.
Thus equipped, I had to lope up to the Ritz-Carlton desk, tell the clerk I was Baroness von Hanff and ask for my mail. This so unnerved me it was a positive pleasure to get back to the office and work on my current second act through a two-hour saxophone lesson.
That’s where I was working when, on a Friday early in February, the letter came. My father and my two older brothers all got home from work that evening before I did. I walked into the living room and found the whole family gathered in awed silence around a white envelope that lay on our wobbly marble-topped coffee table. My mother handed me the letter. On the back of the envelope was the printed legend, HOTEL DORSET, NEW YORK CITY. Above this was written in ink, “Theresa Helburn.”
I stared at it and my knees went weak. I sat down abruptly on the worn blue sofa and stared round at my parents and my brothers, and still nobody spoke. Nothing so momentous had ever happened in our family.
Both my parents were passionate theatregoers. My father in his youth had run away from college to go on the stage as a song-and-dance man. His show-business career lasted only two years. He got stranded in Montana and wired home for money, and my grandmother sent him a train ticket instead.
“When he came home,” my mother told me, “he had lice or something, and your grandmother threw him into the bathtub, burned all his clothes, and told him he was through with the theatre.”
So he became a shirt salesman, married my mother and settled down. But Philadelphia was a favorite try-out city for Broadway plays, and my father spent the rest of his life swapping shirts for passes with all the box-office men in Philadelphia. This was an ideal arrangement in the thirties because box-office men had too many empty theatre seats and not enough shirts. So throughout the Depression, though the taxes on our house weren’t paid or the installments on the old secondhand car, and though the prescription for my mother’s new glasses went unfilled, every Monday night our whole family went to theatre.
We always brought a program home, to be pasted in the Theatre Book, a large album in which my parents kept the program of every show they saw, each program marked with a pencilled letter in the upper right-hand comer: E, G, F, or R. E for Excellent, G for Good, F for Fair, R for Rotten. On rainy evenings, my brothers pored over the book, scanning the cast lists of 1920s plays for the names of bit players who had since become Hollywood stars: Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck. But in our house such names never carried the weight of genuine theatre name—Shaw and the Lunts, Noel Coward and O’Neill.
To my parents, the theatre was a large, many-mansioned religion. The sanctum sanctorum of this religion was the Theatre Guild, then presided over by its co-producers, Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner. The Theatre Guild was the most prestigious of producing organizations, celebrated for its lofty dedication to the theatre as Art. Even my brothers, though agnostic as they grew older, had been firmly reared in this faith and, like my parents, regarded the Guild with awe. Now here they all were, contemplating a letter from the High Priestess herself—addressed to Sis. I come of a noisy family, and never before or after were they so quiet as when they watched me open that letter.
“Dear Miss Hanff,” it read. “I am interested in your work. Can you come to New York to lunch with me on Tuesday? I enclose the fare.”
Enclosed was a check for five dollars.
During dinner we all shouted happily at each other that the Bureau of New Plays must be the Theatre Guild in disguise and Terry Helburn must be the contest judge and wouldn’t she be pleased to learn my family never missed a Theatre Guild production.
I went through the weekend in a fog. On Monday, I showed the letter to my two bosses, who said I could have Tuesday off. All day Monday I worried about what to wear, and wished I had the money to have my hair done.
On Monday night, my father triumphantly brought home for me a new green rayon suit which he had got wholesale from a friend. The suit was a brighter green than I would have chosen, and not precisely my size, but my mother took it in at the waist and let it out at the hips and cut off the row of threads that hung from the hem, and we decided it looked great.
On Tuesday morning, wearing my old blue winter coat with the grey fur collar over the new green suit, I boarded the train for New York armed with a round-trip ticket and enough money for a cab to the Hotel Dorset.
It was an ostentatiously quiet residential hotel with an elegantly uniformed doorman. But if you had a personal appointment with Theresa Helburn you were not to be intimidated by a doorman. Reeking with poise, I sailed grandly past him into the plush lobby and up to the desk and informed the lady behind it that I wished to see Miss Theresa Helburn.
“She’s expecting me,” I added graciously.
The desk clerk looked surprised.
“I don’t think she’s here,” she said. “I think she moved out.”
My sangfroid evaporated.
“She must be here!” I said in a high-pitched bleat. “She wrote to me on your stationery!”
I showed the lady my envelope with HOTEL DORSET and “Theresa Helburn” on the back. She nodded pleasantly but without conviction.
“Just a minute, I’ll see,” she said, and disappeared into a small office beyond the desk. Then she came back.
“Miss Helburn moved out,” she said. “Try the Warwick.” And she turned away to greet a pair of mink-clad arrivals.
I left the lobby and went out to the sidewalk and stood there in a panic. I didn’t know where the Warwick was; I didn’t have money for another cab so I’d have to find it by bus or on foot, with no guarantee Theresa Helburn would be there when I found it.
The Dorset doorman must have sensed the commotion in me because he bowed in courtly fashion and asked if he might be of assistance.
“I’m looking for Miss Theresa Helburn,” I quavered. “She wrote and told me to meet her here, and now they say she’s moved out, and I know if she moved she’d have let me know!”
Once more I produced my envelope. The doorman raised an arm and pointed a forefinger at a residential hotel directly across the street.
“She moved back to the Warwick,” he said. Then he leaned down and whispered conspiratorially: “Flop!”
“Pardon?” I said.
“Miss Helburn lives at the Warwick,” he explained. “But when the Guild has too many flops in a row she decides the Warwick is bringing her bad luck and she moves over here to us.”
“Doesn’t she have flops here?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Then she moves back to the Warwick.” He gave me a prodigious wink. “You go on over there; you’ll find her.”
So I went across the street to the Warwick and through another elegant lobby to the desk and asked the desk clerk tensely whether Miss Helburn was registered. And when he said he’d ring her suite, relief flooded through me.
While he rang, I watched the parade of glamorous people through the lobby. It was almost one o’clock, and sleekly beautiful women buried in furs were on their way to the dining room, where they were met by full-chested, middle-aged men. I became conscious of my old blue coat and took it off and draped it over my arm to let my new suit show.
The desk clerk gave me a suite number and told me to go right up. I was the only passenger in the elevator, and now that I was actually going to come face to face with Theresa Helburn my heart pounded so loudly I was afraid the elevator operator would hear it. He let me out at the tenth floor and I went down the long carpeted hall to a door at the end and pressed the bell. Chimes rang mellowly inside, and I hoped it would be a maid instead of a butler who opened the door, but I straightened to my full five-feet-three and prepared to de
al with either.
Terry herself opened the door, and I gawked at her: she was barely five feet tall, making me feel suddenly large. She had short, fluffy white hair, bright blue eyes, a blunt square nose and a blunt square chin—and awed though I was, she reminded me then and ever after of a shrewd, friendly toy bulldog.
“Hello, dear,” she said. “Come in. Give me your coat.”
I stepped into the spacious, impersonal hotel living room, and Terry took my coat and waved around at a sofa and a couple of armchairs and said:
“Sit down, dear.”
Being awkward as well as near-sighted, I lunged at the nearest armchair and tripped over what appeared to be a grey-and-white fur coat lying on the floor beside it—whereat the grey-and-white fur coat rose to its four feet with a mildly indignant bass bark.
“Go away, Blunder, and sit down somewhere,” Terry advised the fur coat. Blunder was one of those mammoth, improbable Old English sheepdogs with a face so immersed in shaggy fur you had to guess where his eyes were. I sat down in the armchair and Blunder walked off to the middle of the rug and sat down facing me.
“When I bought him,” said Terry, “everybody called him ‘Terry’s blunder’ so that’s what I named him. I’ll put some lipstick on and we’ll go down to the dining room.”
She went off to the bedroom and I got up and stole a look in the mirror over the sofa. My hair needed combing, my skirt had acquired a thousand small, knifelike creases, and a whole new crop of threads had sprouted from the hem. I didn’t have a comb, I didn’t have scissors and I didn’t have nerve enough to ask for either. I sat back down, very low in my mind, and the sight of my unhappy face obviously moved Blunder because he got up, walked over to me, put his massive front paws on my shoulders and gave me a broad, wet kiss.
Terry meanwhile was calling questions about my education, job and taste in plays. While I answered, Blunder got as much of himself onto my lap as would fit, kissing me in a transport of enthusiasm which removed the last vestiges of powder and lipstick.