by Helene Hanff
“We’re all set. I phoned the box office and they’re not sold out; they have a few seats downstairs.”
We climbed on stools and ordered coffee and Maxine explained the Just Go method of seeing every show in town. We made our coffee last twenty minutes, during which we took turns running to the front door, at two-minute intervals, to glance up the street at the theatre where the Odets was playing. At nine-ten, it was my turn to be lookout and I saw the theatre doors open and the crowd begin to stream out onto the sidewalk for intermission.
We left the drugstore and hurried up the street to the theatre, to light cigarettes and mingle with the crowd of smokers on the sidewalk. After a few minutes, we drifted into the lobby and mingled with the smokers there. And when the bell rang, we mingled into the theatre along with the paying customers who went down the aisle to their seats. We stood at the back while Maxine, under pretext of wanting a last puff on her cigarette, cased the house for empty seats. These were easy to spot because they had no coats or programs on them. Maxine saw a pair down front on the side and said: “Come on.”
She sailed down the aisle, her burnished head arrogantly high above her best black cocktail dress, her mother’s marten scarf dangling negligently over one shoulder, and me pattering nervously behind her. She said, “Excuse me” graciously to a man sitting in the aisle seat and we climbed past him and sat down in the two empty seats. Maxine shook out her fur, draped it over the back of her chair and turned to survey the house.
“There are two better seats back there in the center,” she said, and stood up. “Come on.”
“You go if you want to,” I said. I was pale with terror.
“Is this really your first time?” she asked sympathetically. I nodded and she sat back down.
“All right,” she said. “We forgot to get programs. After the second act, remind me.”
The house lights dimmed and I sat frozen in the certainty that at any second an usher’s hand would drop to my shoulder and a waiting cop would haul Maxine and me off to night court. But no usher materialized: we saw the second act of the Odets, which was excellent; and after the second intermission we picked up a pair of programs and moved to the better seats on the center aisle.
From then on, we went to theatre several nights a week. We never saw a first act, but in a three-act play nothing ever happened in the first act. Of course, it wasn’t always smooth sailing. Occasionally the house proved to be more crowded than the box office had indicated when we phoned; and as the houselights dimmed, we’d find ourselves still standing at the back or, worse still, wandering up and down the aisle looking for empty seats—at which moment an usher was likely to loom up and helpfully ask to see our stubs.
“I’m afraid we’ve lost them,” Maxine would explain in her best stage diction. “We must have dropped them in the lobby during intermission.” And we’d flee out to the lobby and across the street, and wait around to mingle with the intermission crowd at the musical there. (Musicals were in two acts instead of three and had a single later intermission.)
Since the biggest hits somehow always opened in the winter months, we caught a lot of colds. You can’t mingle into a theatre with an intermission crowd in your winter coat. The ushers would spot you at once as a gate-crasher, since no matter what the weather theatregoers always leave their coats behind on their seats when they go out for a smoke. So on cold nights, Maxine caught sore throats walking to her subway and I got coughs standing on windy corners waiting for my bus. But if you go to theatre regularly, it ought to cost you something. Especially if the show was a rare and wonderful one like Lady in the Dark.
Lady in the Dark was the only musical ever to win the hearts of us two serious students of the drama. It had Gertie Lawrence, who had been our idol in half a dozen Broadway comedies, and it had an astonishing new comedian named Danny Kaye. We must have mingled into it half a dozen times and I remember the night when we made a momentous decision and spent our own money to see the first act. And still, when the show finally closed, our appetite for it was unappeased.
Soon after it closed, it went on the road and opened in Philadelphia. Philadelphia being my home town, I considered it squarely up to me to get us there. My father knew the box-office men, so getting in to see the show free would be no problem. The problem was the fare to Philly. Neither of us had it.
On the Monday Lady in the Dark was to open in Philly, I brooded over the problem during breakfast at the cafeteria. Then I opened The Times and turned to the theatre section. In the middle of one page, an ad announced that tomorrow evening, the Philadelphia Orchestra would give its regular Tuesday concert at Carnegie Hall. Right there, the problem was solved.
On my way from the cafeteria to the office, I worked out a story to give my boss about having to go to Philadelphia Wednesday for a funeral. Then I phoned Maxine.
“Meet me at Carnegie Hall at eight-thirty tomorrow night,” I said. “Bring a nightgown. Tell your folks you’ll be back Wednesday night late.”
I had in my adolescence been one of several thousand bobbysox worshippers of Leopold Stokowski, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. With all my friends I had got happily in the orchestra’s hair, I knew all the first-desk men personally and was especially palsy with Marshall Betz, the orchestra librarian.
Therefore when Maxine met me at Carnegie Hall, we went around to the stage door and said hello to Marshall, who passed us in to hear the concert. During intermission we went backstage to say hello to my many friends in the orchestra and put through a call to my father on the Carnegie Hall office phone asking him to meet us at Broad Street Station at approximately one in the morning. We heard the rest of the concert and then rode to Philadelphia on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s private train.
I had one bad moment on the train when Maxine, looking extremely high-fashion in a dark green wool suit and her mother’s fur jacket, turned to me and said simply:
“Stick close to me, will you? I only have a nickel.”
My father drove us home and we slept in the twin beds in my old bedroom. Lady in the Dark was sold out, of course. But we got passed in to hang over the back rail at the matinee performance, dined with my parents, hung over the back rail again for the evening performance and touched my father for the fare back to New York. He also drove us to the station so that when we reached New York, Maxine still had her nickel. It took her home on the subway.
We had an easier time seeing neighborhood movies free. We only had to miss the credits, and the M-G-M lion or J. Arthur Rank’s naked friend banging his gong. Maxine and I were selective moviegoers: we only saw half a dozen films a year, but we saw each of them five or six times. We’d get a crush on James Mason, say, or Humphrey Bogart, and follow his current film from the upper West Side to lower Third Avenue. We saw The Maltese Falcon seven times and I Know Where I’m Going six. With The Seventh Veil, I lost count. This kind of moviegoing was ideally suited to Maxine’s system, which ruled out patronizing any one movie theatre often enough for the box-office girl to get to know our faces.
What we did was, we phoned the box office and asked when the last feature started. If the box office said eleven o’clock, we’d get to the movie house at eleven-ten, and lurk outside a few minutes till the box-office girl closed up and went home. Then we just walked in and sat down. Any usher not in the men’s room changing into his street clothes was asleep in the back row.
Only once did we have to wait outside an extra ten minutes till the manager came out and went home. This was at a movie theatre where, on a previous nerve-racking evening, we had unexpectedly bumped into him coming out as we were going in.
You may have noticed I was careful to specify neighborhood movie houses. Only once did we attempt a first-run Broadway house. The Broadway movie palaces were great, plush Hollywood temples crawling with doormen and uniformed ticket takers and different grades of ushers, and you couldn’t possibly sneak in free, even at midnight. It was this impasse that led Maxine and me to commit our only prison
offense.
I was working late that evening at the press office, folding, inserting, sealing and stamping five hundred press releases which had to be mailed that night to newspapers all over the country on behalf of a second-rate tenor who was going on a cross-country tour. I was dining on a sandwich and a container of coffee and folding the last hundred letters when Maxine wandered in. She’d had a late rehearsal at a theatre across the street and had seen the light in the press office window.
“The new Bogart opened today at the Capitol,” she remarked.
The Capitol being a very overstaffed palace, I told her plainly I only had ninety cents. She only had ten. As tickets were $1.25 per person, I considered the subject closed. I went on folding and Maxine sat down and inserted the letters for me and we sealed and stamped them. As I put away the leftover releases and envelopes and the leftover sheets of stamps, Maxine rose.
“I think I’ll phone the Capitol,” she said.
She found the number and dialed it. I took a last mouthful of coffee and then nearly choked to death on it as I heard Maxine’s most gracious stage voice inquire of the Capitol box office:
“Do you accept stamps?”
There was a brief pause, and then Maxine amplified:
“Postage stamps. In exchange for tickets.”
She listened a minute, said, “Thank you” warmly and hung up.
“They’ll take them,” she said. “Where did you put them?”
“It’s stealing!” I said.
“On what you’re paid?” said Maxine coldly. “You were supposed to leave an hour ago. Are you being paid for overtime?”
So a few minutes later we pushed two dollars and fifty cents’ worth of stamps across the counter at the box office of the Capitol Theatre and went to see Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.
While free entertainment was something we both required, free clothes were needed only by me, since Maxine’s parents were still happy to keep her supplied with Bendel’s best. My clothes problem was chronic but I was blessed with affluent friends who were always generously deciding they never wore that old plaid suit anymore, or With skirts getting longer that raincoat was really much too short. And if a skirt was too large at the waist or a dress, in Maxine’s phrase, “hung like a bag” on me, I’d early resigned myself to the fact that I couldn’t sew and couldn’t afford alterations and I went around unconcernedly pinned together. So whenever Maxine and I were strolling on Fifth Avenue and she wanted to stop in at Bergdorf’s or Bendel’s, she’d pause on the sidewalk in front of the store, run an eye over my conglomerate outfit and say simply:
“You wait out here.”
But of course there were critical producers’ lunches and large romantic evenings for which I had to look the part. On most of these occasions I just borrowed Maxine’s clothes, having had the forethought to get thin enough to wear them. But every now and then, both of us had important engagements for the same day or evening and Maxine would report with distress that she didn’t have two suitably elegant ensembles on hand.
In such emergencies I followed her instructions. I went to Saks, bought a beautiful dress or suit on my charge account, took it home, wore it on my big date, and returned it to Saks the next day. (Except that, being sloppy, I generally got a spot on it, in which case I kept it and paid it off at the rate of five dollars a month for a year or two so that by the time I threw it out it was all paid for.)
Maxine borrowed my clothes only once. She borrowed a ruffled organdy blouse handed down to me by some sadist, my five-year-old black suit and a beanie my mother had knitted, which was my hat wardrobe that season.
“What do you want them for?” I demanded. Maxine looked evasive.
“I’ll take care of them,” she said.
Two weeks later, when she returned them, I found out she’d worn them on location in a rooming house in Brooklyn, where she’d played the lead in a documentary film on gonorrhea.
When it came to vocal lessons for Maxine, and Latin and Greek lessons for me, we hit our first snag. I’d been trying to teach myself Latin and Greek and she’d been trying to teach herself to carry a tune and neither of us was doing too well.
Private instruction being both necessary and expensive, Maxine decided that the solution for both of us was to Sell Something. This led to two exhausting Saturdays, the first spent haggling with the Empire Diamond and Gold Buying Service over the value of my high school graduation ring and a ring my parents had given me with a minute diamond in it, for both of which Empire gave me a stingy fifteen dollars, and since this wouldn’t buy much Greek I bought Shaw and Shakespeare with it instead.
The second Saturday we spent trotting from secondhand clothing store to secondhand clothing store trying to sell Maxine’s mother’s fifteen-year-old Persian lamb coat. That coat gave Maxine nothing but trouble anyway. Her mother had passed it on to her a couple of years before, and for a whole season Maxine had worn it with chic assurance. But during the second season, she made the mistake of wearing it on a picket line she had volunteered for. You turn up on a line of starving strikers wearing a Persian lamb coat and you are liable to be stoned to death. Maxine escaped without injury but she lost her taste for the coat, so one hot Saturday in August we lugged it to the Ritz Thrift Shop ready to trade it in for vocal lessons.
“How much are you asking?” said the man at the Ritz Thrift Shop, running a practiced eye over the coat.
“I thought two hundred,” said Maxine in a tone that managed to be both haughty and friendly.
“Oh, we can’t even talk!” said the man. When pressed, he allowed the coat might be worth forty dollars to him. Outraged, we stalked out of there and lugged the coat in and out of all the secondhand stores on Sixth Avenue and Eighth Avenue and then we went across town and lugged it down Second Avenue and up Third, and at five o’clock we gave up and lugged it back to the Ritz Thrift Shop and Maxine took the forty dollars, which paid for eight vocal lessons.
The problem of my Greek and Latin lessons remained unsolved. I wrote dignified letters to all the free city colleges, none of which, it turned out, gave free night courses in Latin and Greek. I took my one remaining piece of jewelry—a lapel watch—down to the Empire Diamond and Gold Buying Service and they wouldn’t even make me an offer. Just as I was getting completely discouraged, Maxine, as usual, came through with the solution.
“Why don’t you run an ad in the Personals column of the Saturday Review?’ she suggested.
“The problem isn’t finding a tutor,” I said. “It’s finding the money to pay him!”
“That’s all right,” said Maxine reasonably. “Just mention in the ad that you can’t pay anything.”
And if you think I got no response to an ad that read:
“Wish to study Latin and Greek.
Can’t pay anything.”
you underestimate the readers of the Saturday Review. I got five offers, one from a German refugee who said he would teach me the Latin and the Greek if I would teach him the English, two from retired professors, and one from a Lebanese rug merchant who didn’t know Latin but offered to teach me modern Greek and Arabic instead.
The fifth letter came from a young man who wrote that he’d graduated from the Roxbury Latin School and Harvard; and after careful consideration, Maxine advised me to award the coveted post to him.
“In the first place, he’s young and he might be cute,” she pointed out. “And in the second place, you can’t do better than Harvard.”
So Tom Goethals, who turned out to be six-feet-four, lean and shy-looking, and whose grandfather had built the Goethals Bridge, put his Roxbury Latin School and Harvard education to use by teaching me to read Catullus and trying to teach me Greek grammar.
Maxine phoned me after the first lesson.
“How was he?” she asked.
“Oh, he’s great!” I said.
“I told you to stick to Harvard,” she said. “Taking somebody second-rate would be like sneaking into theatre and sitting in the balcon
y, or borrowing clothes from Gimbel’s instead of Saks. If you’re getting things for nothing, it’s just as easy to get the best.”
We always got the best.
6. “SUMER IS ICUMEN IN...”
“I HAVE TO STAY HOME tonight,” I told Maxine on the phone one April evening when she wanted to go to theatre. “I have to write my summer-theatre letters.”
“I’m set, thank God,” said Maxine. She’d been hired for the summer as a member of the resident company trying out new plays at the Theatre Guild’s summer playhouse in Westport, Connecticut.
The summer-theatre furor always began in April when the new Summer Theatre Directory appeared on the Times Square newsstand. The day it came out, you tore down to Times Square along with every other brat in show business, bought your copy and took it home, and spent the evening making a list of first-, second-, and third-choice barns to spend the summer in, as a member of the acting company, the backstage crew or the producer’s staff.
Somehow, anyhow, you got yourself set for the summer, and in June you quit your winter job and set out for the Adirondacks or the coast of Maine where you had an absolutely wonderful two months on a schedule that would have put a normal person in a sanitarium and at a salary Charles Dickens would have refused to believe.
There were two kinds of summer theatres: the pre-Broadway try-out house, like the Guild’s playhouse in Westport, and the “package” theatre, where each week a star arrived with an acting company (the “package”) with which he or she was touring the summer circuit in some old war-horse like Candida or Charley’s Aunt.
I didn’t care which kind of theatre I worked in, and that night I wrote to a dozen summer-theatre producers offering myself as prop girl, scene painter, assistant stage manager or typist willing to double as usher. (The only category I omitted was box-office ticket seller. I can’t add.) A few weeks later I landed a job and had myself a superb summer but it got off to a demoralizing start.