Underfoot in Show Business

by Helene Hanff

  In a category all his own was a singular gentleman who died before this book was written, but who is alive and cherished in my memory and will be as long as I live. He is the Owl in this story; and all I knew about him when I wandered over to Warner’s that day was that his name was Jacob Wilk and that, publicly, he was the eastern story editor for Warner Brothers Pictures. Privately, Jake Wilk was Broadway’s foremost, if not its only, secret producer. This is how he secretly produced plays:

  Some reader would cover a novel that seemed a likely vehicle for one of Warner’s stars and would recommend the novel to Jake. Jake would read it and decide it would make a fine Broadway play. (Movies didn’t interest him.) He’d go over in his mind the names of all Broadway playwrights until he came to the one who was exactly right for this particular book. Then he’d phone the playwright.

  “I want you to read this book,” he’d say. “I’ll send it over to you. I think you ought to adapt it for Broadway.”

  “I’m tied up right now, Mr. Wilk,” the playwright would say with innocent tact, “but as soon as I get time I’ll certainly read it.”

  Jake would send him the book that afternoon and phone the playwright next morning.

  “Have you read it yet?” he’d ask.

  The playwright in some surprise would repeat that he was “tied up.”

  “All right,” Jake would say agreeably, “I’ll be in touch with you.”

  The next day he’d phone again.

  “Have you read it yet?”

  He’d keep this up day after day until finally, to get Jake off his back, the playwright would sit down and read the bloody book. And the next day when Jake phoned, the playwright could say heartily:

  “Jake, I’ve read it and you’re right, it would make a very funny play. But I’m all tied up this season. Why don’t you get somebody else?”

  “That’s all right,” Jake would say. “I’ll wait till you’re free.”

  He’d give the playwright a week and then he’d phone him:

  “Are you free yet?”

  And from then on he’d phone the playwright every day with “Are you free yet?” until finally the playwright would explode at him over the phone:

  “Look, Jake, even if I were free, we don’t have the rights to the damn book, we don’t have the money and we don’t have a producer!” And he’d hang up before Jake could answer.

  For a month or so, the playwright would hear nothing further. And just as he’d forgotten all about Jake and his book, Jake would phone him and say:

  “We’ve got the rights to the book, I have a producer and two thirds of the backing, and I can get the final third from Warner’s on a preproduction deal as soon as they’ve seen your script. Are you free yet?”

  And so the dazed playwright would sit down and write the play and in due time it would open on Broadway. Some of the plays he secretly produced were smash hits; sometimes, as Jake’s daughter put it, there’d be “a string of flops that opened and shut like clams.”

  But whatever the outcome, from the moment one of his plays went into production, Jake would exhort everybody involved not to mention his name in connection with it. He didn’t want Warner’s to know he was messing with another Broadway play (though some of Warner’s most successful films were made from Jake’s Broadway plays).

  “Keep my name out of it,” he’d say. And they’d keep his name out of it. But they couldn’t keep Jake himself out of it. During rehearsals of one of his secret productions he was so incessantly underfoot that the producer and playwright threw him out of the theatre with enough force to break his arm. It didn’t stop him. Nothing stopped him. Because when Jake got a Broadway brain-storm it became an obsession. If you thwarted him the obsession intensified.

  How I know is, the last of Jake Wilk’s obsessions—and the one totally and permanently thwarted by Broadway—was me. You may know what it’s like to have an obsession. You’ve got no idea what it’s like to be one.

  As I said, it began with a phone call.

  “This is Warner Brothers’ story department,” a secretary said. “Can you stop in and see Mr. Jacob Wilk, our story editor, this afternoon?”

  I assumed that Gene Burr, Jake’s assistant, had recommended me as a reader. Gene Burr had bought me a drink a few weeks earlier to tell me how much he liked my new play, and he knew I was struggling to make ends meet on Monograph’s pittance. I went over to Warner’s and up to the story department and was ushered, all unsuspecting, into the office of Mr. Wilk.

  He sat behind a cluttered desk, the walls around him covered with framed posters of Broadway hits which I assumed he had purchased for Warner’s. He had, but of course that’s not why they were on the wall. He’d secretly produced all of them.

  He looked up when I entered and glared at me from behind rimless spectacles. He had greying sandy hair and a strong, unremarkable sixty-year-old face.

  “Hello,” he barked. “Sit down!”

  I sat, quaking. I didn’t know then that Jake never spoke, he barked, and he never smiled, he glared, and he never had the slightest idea that that’s what he did.

  On his desk was the familiar blue-bound copy of my play which Gene Burr had liked and had given him to read, and Jake now glared at that.

  “This is a good play,” he snapped. “Who’s seen it?”

  I gave him the names of the four producers who had so far turned it down.

  “Who’s your agent?” he barked. I told him. He reached for the phone and called my agent and demanded to know who else had seen the play.

  “Has Leland seen it?” he rapped into the phone. “Irene?” He listened a moment and said impatiently, “All right. I’ll be in touch with you,” and hung up. Then he looked past me and bawled out of the open office door like a train conductor:

  “Where’s Leland Hayward?”

  Jake had a secretary and two assistants and he never addressed any one of them by name in my hearing. When he wanted something, he just bawled into empty space and whoever was within earshot came running. This time both the secretary and Gene Burr came running.

  “Leland Hayward’s in Rome on his honeymoon,” said Gene.

  “Take a note to him,” barked Jake, and as this was clearly meant for the secretary, Gene withdrew. “Dear Leland. Let me know what you think of this script as soon as possible. Regards. Jake.” He handed the secretary the blue-bound script and said: “Get his address in Rome. Send it airmail.”

  It passed through my mind that Leland Hayward might be less than eager to spend his honeymoon reading my play. Such an extraneous thought never passed through Jake Wilk’s mind. He glared at me and said:

  “Get me some scripts. Irene hasn’t seen it, Guthrie hasn’t seen it, nobody’s seen it!”

  Believe me, everybody was going to.

  During the next few weeks, the play was airmailed to Leland Hayward on his honeymoon and sent by messenger to Irene Selznick, who was in the hospital recovering from surgery. It went to Guthrie McClintic and Gilbert Miller and Kermit Bloomgarden and then on down the line of lesser producers. Within a couple of months, every producer on Broadway had read it and for assorted reasons turned it down. Jake spent an afternoon tabulating the reasons. The next morning my phone rang. When I said hello, a voice at the other end, like a voice barking the final order to a firing squad, rapped:

  “Wilk!”

  I jumped slightly and said how-was-he and Jake said:

  “I’ve found out what’s the matter with this play. You’ll have to rewrite it.”

  “I generally do,” I said.

  “All right, we’d better have lunch,” he snapped. “Sardi’s! One o’clock!”

  I walked into Sardi’s five minutes early but Jake was there ahead of me, sitting at a large round table for five at the back of the room. This was his table. Whether he ate alone or had six guests, that’s where he sat. The two of us lunched with the width of the table between us, most of the width taken up by letters from producers telling Jake what was wron
g with the play. We discussed the play’s faults, and over coffee we mapped out an entirely new plot.

  (The play’s characters and setting appealed to everybody; the play’s plot appealed to nobody. I mention this to keep you from wondering what was the matter with my plays. That’s what was the matter with all of them. I’d never liked fiction and fiction was getting back at me: I never could invent a story worth a damn.)

  The coffee came in a silver pot and as we talked, Jake tapped the pot absently with a finger to see if it was hot—then with two fingers, then three. As soon as he could press four fingers against it without pain, he bawled at any waiter going past:

  “Coffee’s not hot!”

  and the waiter carried off the old pot and brought a fresh one. During our two-hour conference we ran through four pots.

  (What paralyzes me about this finger-tapping procedure is that Jake bequeathed it to me. Sitting over my breakfast or dinner coffee to this day, I tap the pot to see if it’s hot. Thanks to a long association with Jake Wilk, if the coffee’s not scalding I can’t drink it.)

  When we left Sardi’s, he asked how long I thought the revisions would take and I said I hoped to do them in six weeks.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll be in touch with you.”

  I started work on the revisions at nine o’clock the next morning. At ten o’clock the phone rang.

  “Wilk!” barked the firing squad. “How’s it coming?”

  I thought How-the-hell-do-you-think-it’s-coming-I-only-started-an-hour-ago. I said it was coming fine.

  “Good,” said Jake. “I’ll be in touch with you.”

  Next morning at ten he phoned again. He phoned the morning after that and the morning following. He phoned every day for a month, as regularly as he brushed his teeth, and the conversation never varied.

  “Wilk! How’s it coming?”

  “Fine.”

  “Good. I’ll be in touch with you.”

  At the beginning of the sixth week, the password changed. When the phone rang at ten and I said hello, he didn’t ask how it was coming, he didn’t even rap “Wilk!” He just barked:

  “Well, where is it?”

  And for the rest of the week it was Where is it? which drove me on Friday to promise him I’d finish it over the weekend. That Saturday, in the dirty apartment I normally cleaned on Saturday, I typed from 9 A.M. to midnight, breaking my back to meet Jake Wilk’s mythical deadline. I crawled beaten into bed at 1 A.M., slept late on Sunday and was nearly halfway through breakfast before he called and said Where was it?

  “I still have the last scene to type, and then I have to separate the carbons and bind the copies,” I said. “I’ll drop it at your office tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be home tonight,” he said. “Drop it off here with the doorman. I’ll read it before I go to bed.”

  I worked all day Sunday. I finished binding one copy of the script at six o’clock, and without stopping to wash my face I tore out of the house (Maudiebird’s little hovel on Ninety-fifth Street) and down to Sixty-eighth Street to the plush Fifth Avenue apartment house where Jake lived, and left the script with the doorman. Then I went home and collapsed. Lying on the studio couch staring up at the ceiling, I lectured myself bitterly.

  “Why,” I asked myself, “are you ruining your health for this madman? He could have waited till tomorrow. He could have waited till Adelaide’s wedding day in Guys and Dolls, which if I remember was the Twelfth of Never!”

  Joy came in the morning: no phone call. It was the producers’ turn for a while.

  None of the producers who read the new version wanted any part of it. (If you can’t invent plots you can’t invent plots.) But, as I said, Jake Wilk’s obsession was not that particular play, it was me. During the weeks I had worked on the revisions, he had read his readers’ reports on several of my old plays and he now wanted to read the plays for himself. I’d thrown away most of them but there were two I’d kept and I sent them to him. He liked both of them. And having failed to get my Play No. 14 produced, he now went to work on Nos. 9 and 11.

  For a solid winter, he tried to sell them. Not until he had exhausted—and I mean exhausted—the last producer and backer on Broadway did he admit defeat.

  He sat in his office with me at twilight of a March afternoon, holding in his hands the last script which had just come back from the last possible producer. He put the script down and stared at it. Then his eyes moved to No. 14, which was his favorite and which it seemed to me was always on his desk. He picked it up in both hands and hefted it gently.

  “Just can’t crack the ice,” he muttered. It was the first time I ever heard him sound tired. “So much talent, it’s all here. . .” And he barked fiercely again: “We just have to crack the ice!”

  I wanted to speak and I couldn’t. He was an eminently successful man with a massive list of achievements, both public and sub rosa, and there he sat, glaring at No. 14 and mumbling tiredly again: “...just can’t crack the ice. . .” I wanted to comfort him for my failure to write a good play. But of course, to Jake it wasn’t my failure at all, it was Broadway’s failure. Broadway was blind, and with all his driving force he couldn’t make Broadway see.

  It took him a month to bounce back. It was actually a pleasure, when the phone rang one April morning, to hear “Wilk!” barked at me from the other end.

  “Have you got an idea for a new play yet?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I wish I had.”

  “What do you do all day besides read for Monograph?” he demanded. I could have said, “I’m trying to memorize my Greek middle voice endings” but I didn’t.

  “Nothing much,” I said.

  “You don’t get ideas sitting around waiting for them,” he said. “I’ll find you some work to do. Then you’ll get an idea. All right, I’ll be in touch with you.”

  A few days later he phoned back.

  “I have a very talented boy here,” he announced. “He’s a songwriter. He has a musical he wants the studios to buy but the book’s not very good. He doesn’t want to submit the book, he needs a good presentation. You want to write him a presentation? He’ll pay you for it.”

  I said I’d love to.

  “Sardi’s!” snapped Jake. “One o’clock!”

  He was there ahead of me again. When I threaded my way to his back table he was already sitting at it.

  Sitting next to him, talking nonstop in a joyous bellow, was the “very talented boy,” a round, beaming Mr. Five-by-Five who had written the lyrics to No, No, Nanette thirty years earlier.

  “This is Irving Caesar,” rapped Jake. “He’s a very talented boy.”

  “How do you do,” I said.

  “Hello, dolling!” Irving bellowed, beaming.

  They were insane opposites. Where Jake was lean and unsmiling, Irving was completely round and had a beaming smile which never left his face for an instant. Where Jake said little and barked it, Irving talked continuously and hollered it. But who wants to sit at the quietest table in Sardi’s?

  A “presentation” was a long synopsis written as a press agent or the show’s producer might write it, the object being to persuade the studio that the script was sensational. If you had to redesign the plot, misrepresent some characters and add or delete a few, nobody minded—least of all the studio, which, if it bought the script, would turn it over to five or six new writers anyway.

  But the musical comedy Irving wanted a presentation of was called My Dear Public. It had been a flop on Broadway, and a bore to me when I’d read it for Monograph. I thought it only fair to tell Irving this.

  “What the hell, dolling, you’ll make it look sensational!” he beamed, and I was hired.

  I did an outline of the presentation and mailed it to Irving for his approval. He phoned me as soon as he read it.

  “Dolling, you’re a genius, I don’t know how you do it!” he said. “I’ll buy you a steak at Gallagher’s to celebrate. Nine o’clock, can you wait to eat till nine o’clock? I c
an’t stand to eat early, the waiters got no time to pay attention. Nine o’clock, all right, dolling?”

  So we met for dinner at Gallagher’s Steak House at nine o’clock.

  “Bring her a thick one!” Irving bellowed, beaming at the waiter. “She’s my genius, she lives in a tenement!” He hadn’t seen my apartment but he’d seen the address on the envelope I mailed him. Tenement.

  While we waited for the steaks, Irving told me about himself. In addition to No, No, Nanette he’d written the lyrics to “Swanee” way back when, he wrote musical scores for the Ringling Brothers’ Circus and he’d written a couple of hundred Safety Songs and Friendship Songs for schoolchildren across the country. The Friendship Songs, he told me, had been translated into ten languages. He was a member of the board of ASCAP and an occasional Broadway producer. He was currently at work on songs for a new musical to be called Kisses and Knishes, and he would sing me the score as soon as it was finished.

  “I’m a bachelor,” he told me as the steaks came, beaming benevolently at mine when he saw it was thick enough, and benevolently at the sliced cucumbers and tomatoes when he saw they were thick enough because usually they were too thin. “Marriage is all right, I got nothing against it, but why should I restrict myself to one woman? But so all right, so that’s how I am, so I got this suite at the Park Central—Lissen, whaddaya think it costs me every morning to get The New York Times? A dollar ninety-five. Because how can you phone down every morning and say, ‘Send me up a New York Times’? You can’t, you gotta phone down and order breakfast, I don’t eat breakfast but every day I phone down and order breakfast and then I say casually”—he tossed his head and waved a fat arm airily to show me how casually he did it—” ‘Oh, by the way, send me up a New York Times. ‘ The breakfast is a dollar fifty-five, you gotta tip the kid and pay him for The Times so The New York Times costs me a dollar ninety-five every day. I should write and tell them that. Should I?”

  At which moment, the headwaiter came over to our table.

  “Irving, how’s the steak?” he asked.