Underfoot in Show Business

by Helene Hanff

  And then suddenly a book on the top shelf leaned out and waved to me. “Eureka,” I said, feeling very Greek, and took the book down and kissed it.

  The book was Imaginary Conversations by Walter Savage Landor and the conversation in it I loved best was a lyric dialogue between Aesop and a young slave girl named Rhodope (pronounced Rah-do-pay. I think). The dialogue contained no incident or event I could dramatize, but I decided that Aesop and his fables would make a fine nominee and that Sarah would enjoy playing Landor’s gentle slave girl. And it was a sunny day on which to walk down through Central Park and on to the Forty-second Street main library to do a little research.

  Strolling down through the park, I tried to remember where else I’d read about Rhodope. It seemed to me that somebody else had written about her, but I couldn’t remember who it was. Since it was Aesop I was nominating, I stopped trying to place Rhodope and concentrated instead on Aesop’s fables. By the time I reached the library I knew just which fables I wanted to use and how I wanted to use them, and I ran up to the third floor and hurried over to the card file marked A and made out library slips for all the books on Aesop.

  In an hour I’d read all the library could tell me about Aesop’s life because the fact is that nothing at all is known about him for certain. A few books described him as a humpbacked beggar, a few backed Landor’s theory that he was a slave and an equal number stated that no such person as Aesop ever lived and that the fables were the work of anonymous writers.

  None of the books on Aesop mentioned a slave girl named Rhodope.

  Hallmark scripts were supposed to be factual. I had no facts. I found a library phone booth and called Ethel and gave her a digest of my findings.

  “Based on Landor’s dialogue,” I said, “I could write a story about Aesop with a lovely part for Sarah—but I’d have to make it all up.”

  There was a pause while Ethel studied the problem.

  “Here’s what you do,” she said. “In Sarah’s mistress-of-ceremonies introduction, write a line saying that nobody knows anything about Aesop’s life. And then add, ‘Some say he was a hunchback, some say he never lived—and some say it happened like this. WE say it.’ That way, you’re not lying but you’re not claiming it’s factual and you can make up your own story.”

  “Like a fable!” I cried, carried away.

  I hung up, left the booth, hurried past the card catalogue, down the steps and out of the library. And since I’d learned nothing about Aesop and was writing the script for Sarah anyway, I can’t tell you why it didn’t even cross my mind to stop at the card catalogue marked R and look up Rhodope. All I know is it didn’t. I hurried home to reread Landor’s dialogue and get to work on the script.

  I was positively inspired as I wrote it. I was inspired by Landor’s lovely lines, Aesop’s fables, the evils of slavery, the glory that was Greece and the fact that I could make up what I needed as I went along. I finished it late one afternoon, proofread it after dinner and then took it over to Ethel Frank’s house that evening; she liked working on scripts at home in the evening when it was quiet.

  Ethel’s mother let me in and told me Ethel was in her bedroom talking on the phone to Albert in Hollywood. I went down the hall and walked into her bedroom just in time to hear Ethel tell Albert, in a tone of high tragedy:

  “Helene just quit the show.”

  “Oh, she couldn’t have,” I said. “Her teeth aren’t paid for.”

  Ethel waved at me furiously to be quiet. Her face wore the dignified, persecuted look it always wore when she was bawling out Albert. She had an arresting face, with angular cheekbones and wide eyes. Her hair, which was whatever shade Arden’s was featuring in any given season, was pale brown with gold streaks that spring.

  “I have told you before, Albert, to keep your grubby hands off my writers’ scripts,” she went on with wounded dignity. “The last time Helene walked off the show I talked her into coming back. This time I don’t know whether I can or not.”

  Albert had a habit of tinkering with dialogue to give it a soap-opera touch. Since I never saw the show, I never knew when he’d got his itchy fingers on one of my scripts until Ethel told me about it afterward, and to avoid getting ulcers over it I refused to read his rewrites. I loved writing for Hallmark, but once a script was finished and out of my hands, the show was over and I went on to the next one. It was Ethel who got the ulcers. She was fiercely protective of her writers.

  I sat down on the bed, pushing aside a litter of TV scripts, to wait out the fight, which was the last, and always the longest, of her three daily fights with Albert. The fights had begun a year earlier when the Hallmark show had moved to Hollywood. Albert, of course, had ordered Ethel to move out there with it. Ethel had declined; she didn’t like Hollywood.

  “I can’t produce a show in California with my story editor in New York!” Albert had shouted.

  “Fire me,” Ethel had advised him sympathetically. But they’d worked together a long time, and since Ethel was the best story editor in the business Albert hadn’t been able to bring himself to fire her. So the show was produced in Hollywood with scripts written in New York, necessitating an open telephone line coast-to-coast, on which Ethel conducted her three daily fights. The first took place at 1 P.M. our time and 10 A.M. Albert’s time and got him out of bed. (He rehearsed at night and slept late.) The second took place at 4 P.M. our time and 1 P.M. Albert’s and took him away from his lunch. And the third began at 10 P.M. our time and disposed of Albert’s dinner hour.

  “That Albert,” Ethel remarked conversationally when she finally hung up. “He’s ruining my entire nervous system.” She took a tranquilizer—she took one after most evening fights with Albert—and then pointed eagerly to the script in my lap.

  “How’d it come out?” she asked.

  “Great,” I said modestly. Ethel read the script aloud with a stopwatch, and agreed that it was the best little television script in the whole wide world, and we mailed it to Hollywood. A few days later Sarah phoned from Hollywood to tell me how much she liked it, and Albert got on the phone to congratulate me and everybody was happy.

  The Hallmark Hall of Fame went on the air at 5 P.M. New York time (2 P.M. Hollywood time) on Sunday afternoons. On the Sunday on which “Aesop and Rhodope” was to be broadcast I was up early and dawdled over breakfast with the Sunday Times. As always, I read the theatre section and the front page over breakfast; and with my second cup of coffee I turned to the Book Review section. I scanned the review on the front page and then opened the section to pages 2 and 3.

  The entire upper half of page 3 was occupied by a review of a book entitled A House Is Not a Home by Polly Adler. A headline indicated that Polly Adler was a madam and that her book concerned houses of prostitution. Under the headline was a photograph of the sculptured head of a young girl. Under the photograph, the caption read simply, in neat black italics:

  “Rhodope, the most famous prostitute in Greece.”

  Well, there we were. Or rather, since I couldn’t wake up Ethel at nine-thirty on a Sunday morning, there I was.

  Sitting there spilling coffee all over myself, I remembered (now I remembered) where I’d read about Rhodope. I’d come upon her in sketchy accounts of the life of Sappho and in the two or three lines of Sappho’s Greek I’d ever been able to read. But in Greek, the spelling of a noun changes with every case, so Rhodope was Rhodope when you talked to her and Rhodopis when you talked about her. Sappho had talked about her. Not flatteringly.

  To while away the time till I could break the news to Ethel, I got down a couple of books to see exactly what it was Sappho had said about her. According to the only accounts I had in the house, Rhodope had been a slave until she was thirteen years old, at which age she was set up in business as a prostitute by her owner. Sappho’s brother met her, fell in love with her, bought her freedom and took her to live with him. And Rhodope (according to Sappho) took Sappho’s brother for every drachma he had and then left him for richer men.r />
  Where Landor got his version of Rhodope as a gentle, innocent maiden I didn’t know and still don’t.

  At ten o’clock it occurred to me that Mr. Joyce C. Hall out in Kansas City, Missouri, subscribed to the Sunday Times (he was a TV sponsor and all TV sponsors subscribed to it for the theatre section, which contained TV news, reviews and commentary), and I woke up Ethel.

  “What’s the matter?” she demanded sleepily on the phone.

  “It says on page three of the Times Book Review section,” I said, “that Rhodope was the most famous prostitute in Greece.”

  “The most famous what?” said Ethel, wide awake.

  “Prostitute,” I said. “Her picture’s in the paper. They wait two thousand five hundred years and then pick today to put her picture in the paper, surrounded by a review of a book on whorehouses.”

  Ethel enjoyed crises; they stimulated her.

  “Now don’t panic,” she said briskly. “Let me get the Book Review section.”

  She was gone from the phone for a couple of minutes. Then she came back and said:

  “Hang up, let me call Ed in Kansas City, I’ll call you back.” Ed was the Hallmark account executive. I gathered she had to wake him up, too—it was an hour earlier in Kansas City—because it was some time before she phoned me back.

  “Okay,” she said. “Ed’s driving out to Hall’s place, he thinks the Times will still be on Hall’s front porch and he’ll take the Book Review section out of it. If they’ve already taken the Times in, he’ll ring the bell and ask to borrow the Book Review section for his kid.”

  “What about Albert and Sarah?” I asked.

  “They haven’t time to read anything on a Sunday, are you kidding?” said Ethel. “They’ll be rehearsing clear to air time and then they go out and eat.”

  “Well, just tell Ed to keep an eye out for the mail,” I said. “We’re going to be getting letters from college professors–”

  “Nobody in this country ever heard of Rhodope but you and Polly Adler,” said Ethel. “And even if they have, it’s one thing to see the name in print and another thing to hear it pronounced. Who knows how Sarah’ll pronounce it? We won’t get letters from anybody.”

  We got two. From two prep-school English teachers who wrote to request copies of the script for their classes and to express the hope that Hallmark would continue to do interesting educational shows of this kind.

  By the time Hallmark went off the air, my teeth were capped and paid for and I had two thousand dollars in the bank, making me richer than I’d ever been in my life. But I was also unemployed. And when, one early summer day, notice arrived that Maudiebird’s building was to be renovated and we were all to be evicted, I had no way of knowing what rent I could afford on my next hovel. I had three months to find a place and I was room-hunting in a half-hearted fashion when, one morning, Rosemary phoned. Rosemary was a friend of Ethel’s and a former Hollywood writer.

  “Ethel and Albert have a new show,” she announced.

  “I knew they could do it,” I said. “What is it?”

  “Well,” said Rosemary, “are you sitting down? It’s to be called Matinee Theatre and it’s going to be an hour dramatic show, produced live and in color from Hollywood, every day.”

  “You mean every week,” I said.

  “Every week day,” said Rosemary. “Five a week. Albert’s the executive producer, Ethel’s the associate producer, I’m the chief story editor and you’re the chief writer.”

  “Are you sure, Rosemary?” I asked.

  “I’m sure,” said Rosemary.

  “Hang up,” I said. “I have to think.”

  The chief writer of such a show would be writing a script a month—more, if she could write them faster than that. Paychecks floated before my eyes in heady profusion. The time had come which I’d begun to believe would never come: I was finally through with garrets. I was going to get myself a home.

  One week later I signed a three-year lease on an apartment in a brand-new luxury building. It had a large living room, a small alcove big enough for bookshelves, a desk and my typewriter, a flossy new kitchen and a shiny new tile bath. I blew my entire savings on furniture and drapes and wall-to-wall carpet, and on a day in October I moved in. A big, good-natured guy named Herbie arrived early in the morning to lay the carpet, and when he finished that afternoon, he insisted on uncrating the new furniture for me and distributing it around at my direction. And as long as I live I will never forget the moment when he shoved the last end table and lamp into place, and I stood in the middle of my own home and looked around and said:

  “It’s beautiful.”

  And I didn’t even know I was crying till Herbie said:

  “Well, it’s nothin’ to bawl about, honey!”

  Two days later, Rosemary moved into a flat on the floor above mine, and you have no idea what having her overhead meant to me in the three wild and woolly years of Matinee Theatre. All the other Matinee writers had to run down to Radio City to Ethel’s office all the time. I never had to leave the house. Rosemary would come home at six, bringing me a book or play to adapt. I’d write the first draft and when it was finished leave it in her mailbox. She’d read it the next day, leave the office an hour early and come to my apartment for cocktails and a story conference. I’d write the revisions and then run up the back stairs to her apartment with the final version, and she’d take it to the office the next morning and bring home a new assignment for me that evening.

  I say “that evening” because nobody connected with the show ever got a day off. Matinee Theatre was the most frenzied operation in the history of television.

  Out in Hollywood, under Albert McCleery, were two assistant producers, ten directors, two story editors and twenty writers. In New York, under Ethel, were three readers, two story editors and fifty to sixty writers. There were five plays in rehearsal in Hollywood at all times. On a given Sunday, Monday’s show would be in its sixth and last day of rehearsal, Tuesday’s in its fifth day, Wednesday’s in its fourth—and so on, with Albert overseeing (presumably by bicycle) all five. In New York, all Ethel Frank had to do was find twenty properties a month, clear the literary rights, assign the scripts, read and approve the final edited versions and mail them to Hollywood at a rate which ensured a backlog of a month’s scripts.

  With so many scripts to assign, Ethel was frequently forced to gamble on new and untried writers, and every few months one of them turned in an unusable script. Since there was no money in the budget for a new script, the crisis might have been acute. Thanks to me–Miss Big-Mouth–Matinee Theatre found a simple solution to the problem.

  The first day an unproducible script was turned in, Rosemary read it and left it on Ethel’s desk with a note:

  “Ethel: This is a dog. What do we do now?”

  It happened that on that day I finished a script just before lunch. I took advantage of the rare, free afternoon to stroll down through the park and on to Rockefeller Center to pay a social call on my friends in the Matinee Theatre office. I wandered into Ethel’s private office and found her sunk in gloom. She showed me Rosemary’s note and then invited me to read the first page of the “dog.” The script was not just unproducible, it was illiterate.

  “What do you do when this happens?” I asked.

  “What can I do?” Ethel demanded. “We’ve got a hundred dollars left in the budget! I can’t get a script written on that!”

  Ethel was my friend, wasn’t she? Thanks to her, I was making piles of money and living in a breathtaking one-and-a-half-room palace, wasn’t I?

  “I’ll do it over for you, Ethel,” I said.

  “We could only pay you a hundred bucks for it!” cried Ethel. (An hour script paid a thousand.)

  “That’s all right, Ethel,” I said.

  “You’d have to write a whole new script!” cried Ethel.

  “That’s all right, Ethel,” I said.

  “We need it in a week!” cried Ethel. (An hour script normally took f
our weeks or five.)

  “That’s all right, Ethel,” I said.

  I hurried home with the crisis assignment, I slaved for seven days and seven evenings and managed to turn in the script on time. Ethel and Rosemary read it and liked it and showered me with praise and gratitude and admiration, and what the two of them did to me from then on I have trouble believing, even now. As Rosemary had the nerve to reconstruct one of their typical crisis conversations for me, it went like this:

  I’d be hard at work trying to reduce Pride and Prejudice to eight characters and fifty minutes, while down at the Matinee office Rosemary was hurrying into Ethel’s office with an illiterate script and the dread pronouncement: “It’s a dog!”

  “It can’t be!” Ethel would snarl. “Albert’s hired a star for it! It goes into rehearsal next Monday!”

  “Well, you’re going to have to get a new script written in three days, then!” Rosemary would say. And she and Ethel would eye each other.

  “How,” Ethel would inquire delicately, “is she feeling?”

  “I could ask her,” Rosemary would offer nervously.

  “I’ll do it,” Ethel would say. “She can hold up on Pride and Prejudice till the weekend and still finish on time; she’s fast.”

  A minute later my phone would ring and Ethel would ask brightly:

  “How do you feel, hon? Do you feel strong?”

  Occasionally it was Rosemary who phoned and, in a voice dripping with catastrophe, said:

  “Dear, we’re in a terrible jam, I know how tired you are, but—”

  I resurrected so many dead dogs for Matinee that after a while, when the phone rang, a sixth sense told me Ethel or Rosemary was at the other end with another dog, and I’d pick up the phone and say briskly:

  “City Pound.”

  I couldn’t sign my name to those scripts, of course. The only person who could legally rewrite unusable scripts without being paid for it was the story editor. So each time, I was put on the show’s payroll as a story editor. But since story editors were not entitled to screen credit for the rewriting they did, it was necessary for me to have a pseudonym. If you ever run across a television script by Herman Knight, I wrote it. Herman wasn’t great but he was dirt-cheap and fast as the wind.