by Helene Hanff
So you’ll understand that when, after eighteen homeless months, I finally found a “converted apartment” available, I was past caring that the rent was twice what I could afford.
The building was a five-story greystone on East Ninety-fifth Street and had formerly been a private home. Its larger rooms had been “converted” to apartments by installing ancient kitchen and bathroom equipment in adjoining smaller rooms. The ground-floor apartment I looked at was a large, dark room-in-the-back, its one window looking out on a courtyard below and a stone wall opposite. Beyond it, the kitchen with its ancient stove and leaky refrigerator was all mine, and the adjoining bare room with its iron tub and a chain toilet in a former closet was the first private bathroom of my life. And no mansion could have seemed more beautiful to me than that three-room hovel when I was told it might be mine.
It wasn’t mine for certain. The tenant who was moving out told me his lease had only a month to run and he couldn’t guarantee the rental agency would give me a new lease. I wanted to go directly to the building’s owner but of course that wasn’t possible. When I went down to see the rental agent, he explained that the owner owned several similar buildings and had nothing to do with the running of any of them. Everything was handled by the agency. But the rental agent was kind and said that if my references were satisfactory he saw no reason why I shouldn’t count on a lease. I had to be content with that.
I moved in forthwith and plunged into the job of furnishing and decorating. I furnished the room in what New Yorkers called Early Orange Crate. The super helped me make a bookcase out of wooden planks he found in the cellar, and a dressing table for the bathroom out of an orange crate. One of my brothers donated a dresser his little girls had outgrown, and I bought a secondhand drop-leaf table and chairs and a secondhand studio bed. Add white enamel paint to cover everything, my old white rug, and yards of red burlap which Maxine draped across the top of the window and down over the rusty living-room pipes in an opulent swag—and in our objective opinion the room was simply stunning.
Two thorny problems remained. The kitchen and bathroom floors were covered with stained, faded and cracked linoleum, which clearly had to be replaced. I bought two bright rolls of linoleum at Woolworth’s, brought them home—and wondered what to do with them. What did I know about cutting linoleum and running it around the kitchen pipes and bathroom pipes and under the elderly stove and bathtub? I phoned Maxine.
“How much would it cost me,” I asked, “to hire a man to cut and lay new linoleum for me?”
“A fortune,” said Maxine positively.
“Well, I don’t know what to do!” I said. “I bought all this linoleum and I bought a knife and a ruler they said I’d need, and I’m paralyzed. I don’t know where to start!”
There was a thoughtful pause at the other end.
“What night,” asked Maxine, “is Tom coming for your lesson?”
Oh.
So when Tom came for my Latin lesson he spent four exhausting hours stretched out on the kitchen and bathroom floors—neither long enough to accommodate all of him, but the rooms fortunately having no door between. Armed with ruler, knife, hammer, a box of tacks and the disposition of a saint, he measured, cut and tacked my new kitchen and bathroom linoleum while I read him the Gospel According to St. Matthew out of a Latin Bible borrowed from him.
The bathroom floor looked so bright and new it called attention to the dirty, faded wallpaper. So a week later, when Tom arrived for my lesson, he found the bathtub full of water and two rolls of do-it-yourself wallpaper waiting for him, and he put in another active recreational evening wallpapering the bathroom while I read to him out of my Catullus.
The last remaining problem concerned kitchen equipment; and it was in her solution to this one that Maxine pulled off her greatest financial coup.
Never having owned a kitchen before, I made the appalling discovery that except for a coffee pot and a few plates left over from the seventh-floor garret, I had nothing whatsoever to put in it. I mean I didn’t own a strainer, a kitchen fork or spoon, a pot holder, a can opener, a pot or a pan. Nothing. I sat down and made a list of bare kitchen essentials and when I totted up the approximate cost the total came to roughly fifty dollars.
If I have to add this, I didn’t have fifty dollars.
Maxine and I were going to theatre that night and we met at a nearby drugstore for our watch-and-wait cup of coffee.
“Do we have a problem!” I said as we ordered the coffee. I gave her my kitchen list, with the total cost at the bottom ringed round with exclamation points.
Our coffee came and Maxine sipped hers absently as she studied the list.
“What you need,” she said finally, “is a kitchen shower.”
‘I’m not getting married, I said.
“You’re marrying New York,” said Maxine. “You’ll have to write a cute invitation. We’ll have the shower at my house. A luncheon. A Saturday luncheon.”
“I couldn’t!” I said. “I can’t send out invitations asking people to furnish my kitchen!”
“You’re not sending the invitations. I’m sending them. You don’t know anything about the luncheon,” said Maxine. “It’s a surprise. Showers are always surprises. You’re just coming to my house for lunch. When you get there, be surprised.”
We drew up the invitation in the theatre lobby during intermission. We drew up a list of guests, including my two out-of-town sisters-in-law who, said Maxine, wouldn’t come but wouldn’t-have-the-nerve-not-to-send-something. And to avoid duplication, Maxine had me draw up an alphabetical list of essential items, a copy of which she enclosed with each invitation, together with a request that the recipient check off the item she was bringing.
And so on the appointed Saturday I wandered into Maxine’s parents’ apartment for lunch—and there was my sister-in-law come all the way in from Garden City and a simple host of friends. And sitting in the middle of the floor in a large wicker basket, each item brightly wrapped and tied with flossy ribbon, were frying pans and double boilers and mixing bowls and kitchen knives and pot holders and dish towels and a roasting pan and a Revere Ware teakettle that sang.
By the end of the month I had as warm and bright and well-equipped a home as any penniless writer ever had. And none of it securely mine until I signed a lease.
On the day the old lease ran out, I went down to the rental office ready to do battle but inwardly terrified, with the eighteen-month nightmare fresh in my memory.
To my relief, the agent smiled warmly at me when I walked into his office. He told me that my references had been approved and that my lease was ready for signing. I sat down, suddenly weak. The agent pushed the lease toward me and handed me a pen. I didn’t even read the lease, I’d have signed anything that guaranteed a roof over my head. I went straight to the bottom of the page, where the two lines for signatures were: the bottom line marked OWNER, the top line marked TENANT. I signed my name along the line marked TENANT.
Then the pen slipped out of my hand and rolled to the floor and I stared at the lease, dumbfounded. Because on the line marked OWNER, a signature had been written just below my own. In a thin spidery hand, it read:
“Maude E. Bird.”
9. OUTSIDE HOLLYWOOD
TO BE YOUNG and trying to crash the theatre in the forties was to resign yourself to the chronic problem of how to earn enough money to keep alive till you became famous on Broadway. You learned to avoid nine-to-five jobs and look instead for part-time work which, though it paid a meager wage, would leave you free most of the day to pursue what you liked to think of as your real profession.
The jobs actors took in those days ran a gamut considerably longer than this book. An actor, for instance, might work as a bellhop, bartender, bus driver, barker on a sightseeing bus, bonded messenger, bouncer, or butcher’s delivery boy, and that’s only the B’s.
Actresses were more limited, as Maxine discovered, even though when she filled out an Employment Agency Questionnaire and
came to the question: “Kind of Position Wanted:__________” she wrote simply: “I’ll do anything.” In addition to taking street-corner and door-to-door surveys, Maxine drove a school bus, was a saleslady at Lord & Taylor during the pre-Christmas rush, and taught elocution in a convent.
Maxine’s trouble was that when she was out of work she got impetuous and she’d seize any job that came along without a careful enough consideration of the hours involved. There was the winter she drove the school bus, for instance. Like most actresses, she was used to going to bed very late and sleeping half the morning. Even when she wasn’t in a play, she was generally up half the night working on some big project like drying her hair.
Since Maxine’s hair was shoulder-length and as thick as a mop, just washing it took most of the evening. And for reasons known to nobody, she decided that the way to dry it was to turn on the oven, sit on the kitchen floor and spread her hair out on an oven rack to dry. She put the oven on at the lowest possible heat so as not to set her hair on fire, and as a result it took her half the night to dry it. She washed it once a week, sat with her hair in the oven till two or three in the morning and as a result slept through the alarm clock five hours later.
So during the season when she drove the school bus, she overslept regularly one morning a week, thereby leaving twenty-five children standing around under twenty-five apartment-house canopies waiting for the school bus. And at least one afternoon a week she was summoned to a two o’clock audition which invariably started an hour late and ran longer than anticipated, causing her to leave twenty-five children standing on the school steps for a couple of hours waiting for the bus to take them home. So Maxine and the school parted company by mutual consent after three months, freeing her in time for the Christmas rush at Lord & Taylor.
Ideally, of course, she found what might be called grey-area acting jobs, like appearing in that U.S. government-sponsored documentary on gonorrhea which enabled her to be seen by thousands of American GIs during World War II.
But the best part-time job for an actress was a running part in a radio soap opera, which was acting of a sort and the easiest imaginable (you didn’t have to memorize lines, you just read them), and which paid handsomely. Maxine hit this jackpot only once. For a halcyon thirteen weeks she was Caroline, the female menace in The Romance of Helen Trent. Unfortunately, by the end of thirteen weeks Maxine had had radio, and radio, she was frank to admit, had had her.
“I’m standing there in front of the mike,” she reported to me over coffee at the Astor drugstore after her first broadcast, “I’m enunciating beautifully and giving a magnificently bitchy performance, as called for—when I notice that the idiot director is staring at me and making little-bitty circles with his thumbs, both thumbs going round and round and round. I tried to ignore him but he went on staring at me, making more and more little-bitty circles in the air with his thumbs. And I said to myself: ‘That man is getting on my nerves.’
“So as soon as I had a ten-second pause, I turned to him and mouthed silently: ‘Stop doing that.’ And I shook the script at him for emphasis, only the script accidentally hit the microphone causing a needle to fly up to the top which meant that on millions of radios across the country, The Romance of Helen Trent was instantly drowned out by static.”
After the broadcast she learned that the little circles were radio sign language for “Speed it up.” It was some weeks before she learned the sign for “Slow down.”
“Can they write ‘Slow down’ on a piece of paper and hand it to you?” she demanded of me as we sat on stools in Sardi’s bar, where she was putting her radio profits to good use by being Seen. “No! When they want you to slow down, the director stares at you with his fists close together against his chest and then slowly pulls his fists away from each other—like a Stanislavski improvisation of a taffy-pull. This means s-t-r-e-t-c-h in radio, but nobody tells you this, you have to guess it! I’m standing there trying to give a performance and I see him step in front of me and start pulling his fists apart and I think: ‘In the middle of a radio broadcast, he has to start playing The Game!’” (The Game is what theatre people call Charades.)
So what with one thing and another, Maxine wasn’t greatly surprised one day, just before the expiration of her thirteen-week contract, to read in the script that Caroline’s headaches had definitely been diagnosed as an obscure form of Rocky Mountain fever which she could cure only by moving to Switzerland for several years. Her contract was not renewed, the party was over and a week later she was back at her old post in front of Radio City Music Hall, taking surveys on the average woman’s opinion of hormone creams and what a man looks for in a razor blade.
Playwrights, of course, hunted for writing jobs. For a while I thought I had the best of these, writing publicity in the Theatre Guild press department. But the Guild job took the whole day and occasional evenings, leaving me no time to write in. So eventually I left the Guild and began looking for part-time jobs in-stead. Fortunately, back in the forties, there was one part-time job for which would-be playwrights and novelists were in demand.
This was the era when Hollywood was in its heyday, and the best of all part-time writing jobs was to be had in the New York offices of Hollywood studios. Warner’s, 20th Century-Fox, M-G-M, Columbia, Paramount, Selznick, Universal, all had New York story departments which became a positive Mecca for unemployed, undiscovered writers.
I got to Mecca through a letter from the story editor at one of the studios. He wrote to say he’d read my play and had recommended me to the West Coast office as a writer the studio might want at some future date. I wrote back and said How about a part-time job with the East Coast office now instead? Two days later I was an outside reader for a studio we’ll call Monograph.
There were inside readers and outside readers and I’ll explain the whole thing to you in a minute, but first I would like you to appreciate what people with that job title had to contend with. Some tax expert or friend of your family would ask:
“What do you do for a living?”
and you’d say:
“I’m an outside reader for a film studio”
and the questioner would give you the blankest look ever seen on a human face and say:
“You’re a what?”
and you knew it would take you twenty minutes to explain it, and there was no way you could avoid explaining it, and in four or five years you got so tired explaining it.
Most Hollywood movies were adapted from novels, plays and short stories which the studios bought by the ton. To find this material, every studio hired inside readers, who worked nine-to-five in the studio offices; and outside readers, who worked part-time and at home. We didn’t go out and look for the material, you understand; we read what was submitted to the studio by producers and publishers, play-brokers and literary agents, magazines and newspapers. The submissions included plays, novels, short stories, science fiction, and westerns and whodunits by the gross. Every reader had a specialty—mine was plays—but when your specialty wasn’t available you read whatever was. Sooner or later, you read everything imaginable and a lot that wasn’t.
The studios were supposed to accept manuscripts only from professional sources but it never worked out that way. If the story editor’s mother’s janitor wrote a play, Monograph covered it. If your landlady or your Aunt Clara thought her life would make a book and wrote the book in six hundred pages, as long as the pages were typed she could submit it and Monograph would cover it. It didn’t have to be literate, it didn’t have to be sane, it just had to be typed.
We went to Monograph at four each afternoon, got a play or novel, took it home and read it, wrote a two-page Summary and a Comment and brought the work in at four the next afternoon. I can’t print a two-page Summary here but a friend of mine still at Monograph dug a couple of my old Comments out of the files as samples for you, to indicate the extent of what Monograph covered. Comments were readers’ opinions of the work covered and looked like this:
“TITLE: Hope Is Eternal
AUTHOR: John Malan
FORM: Playscript
COMMENT: Crackpot illiterate fantasy about an unsuccessful playwright who throws himself under a subway train, wakes up in Heaven and finds himself posthumously famous on Broadway. (I’ve tried everything else; next year I may try this.)”
“TITLE: Cappy Meets the Test
AUTHOR: Frances Eager Dawes
FORM: Juvenile (8-12 age group)
COMMENT: If Cappy doesn’t straighten out and pass his algebra test, Hilldale High is going to lose the championship football game. Listen, this is my second Eager Dawes this week, next week it’s somebody else’s turn, O.K.?”
For reading and summarizing a play or novel you got $6 (in 1947 when I started reading). The next year they raised it to $8 and by the early fifties (when I quit) it had got up to $10. You read one a day and two or three over a weekend. You weren’t supposed to read for two studios at once—it was like working for both Macy’s and Gimbel’s—but when the bills piled up you bootlegged a little reading from a second studio. And you went babysitting, evenings, and read Monograph’s scripts on the baby’s family’s electric bill, and they also had to give you dinner half the time, and one way or another if you didn’t exactly make a living you somehow made out.
Once you learned the technique of professional reading, you had the whole day free to write in. I could read a long novel in an evening, write the summary of it after breakfast and at nine-thirty be free to write until four, when I took the work in to Monograph. I keep hearing about these expensive courses that will teach you how to read faster. Don’t take them; I’ll give you the whole course right here, free. The technique is never to be applied to books you want to read, you understand; it’s only for books you don’t want to read but have to.