Underfoot in Show Business

by Helene Hanff

  And so, as I trailed Terry into the Warwick dining room, past a gantlet of chic women who called to her from every table, my green suit with the threads hanging from it was covered evenly from shoulder to hem with grey-white sheepdog hair.

  Terry sailed to a back table where, she said, we could talk in peace. A waiter brought imposing menus, and Terry, after studying her menu for a minute and me for another minute, announced I was too young to drink in the middle of the day and advised me to try the creamed chicken. The ordering thus disposed of, she got down to business.

  “Your plays are terrible,” she told me, beaming. “Just terrible!” And she laughed. “Never mind. You have talent.”

  She told me the Bureau of New Plays was financed by several Hollywood studios and that she herself had nothing to do with the contest, though the Guild “might do something for the winners.”

  “I lent them my secretary as a playreader,” she said, “and when she finds a script she thinks shows talent, she steals it for me.” She grinned at me. “I’ve got all four of your plays, but the judges don’t know it. I’ll put them back when I’m through with them.”

  Lunch arrived and she stared at the creamed chicken and then allowed that Play No. 4 wasn’t as bad as the others and after lunch she’d show me how to rewrite it. Then she asked whether I planned to change my name. I said it hadn’t occurred to me. For the next ten minutes, between bites of her chicken, Terry repeated my name aloud ten or twelve times, with varying inflections. Then she nodded decisively.

  “Keep it,” she said. “If anybody ever gets it straight, they’ll remember it.”

  After coffee, we went back up to her suite where she worked all afternoon with me reconstructing Play No. 4. When I left her at five, she said:

  “Bring me the first-act revisions next Tuesday. If you don’t have the fare, borrow it from your parents and I’ll reimburse you. And bring me a copy of the play for myself so I can put this one back.”

  She told me which Fifth Avenue bus would take me to Penn Station and I floated home to Philadelphia.

  For the next six weeks, from early February to mid-March, I went to see Terry every Tuesday. My two bosses had to close their office and go their separate ways so I was out of work again, but Terry said it was just as well because I needed to study. She had me buy Aristotle’s Poetics and Stanislavski’s My Life in Art and An Actor Prepares and Lawson’s Theory and Technique of Playwriting and quizzed me on certain key passages in each to make sure I understood them.

  The Broadway season was then at its height. Terry was looking in on rehearsals of a new Guild play, she was overseeing the road company production of another play about to tour the Guild’s subscription cities, and she was working with two authors whose plays the Guild had under option. All afternoon every Tuesday as we worked, the phone rang, the desk sent up importunate messages from stars, agents, directors, and Terry’s harassed secretary hurried in and out with reminders of auditions and backers’ conferences and memos on contracts and run-throughs, vainly trying to keep Terry from wasting the whole afternoon on me. And week after week, Terry went on wasting it.

  The Tuesday before March 15—when the contest winners were to be announced—she said to me over lunch:

  “I don’t know what three names the judges have picked, dear, but if you’re not one of the winners don’t worry about it. I can take care of you.”

  And I was so moved I couldn’t even thank her, I just nodded dumbly. At dinner that night, I explained airily to my family that I really didn’t care whether I won a fellowship or not.

  Which was a good thing because March 13 and 14 came and went, with no word from the Bureau of New Plays. Since the winners were to go on the radio to accept their fellowships at a ceremonial dinner on the fifteenth, I thought it unlikely that word would come as late as that morning. And sure enough, nothing came in the mail on the morning of the fifteenth.

  In spite of Terry’s warning, I was disappointed. To console myself, I went downtown and shopped for a spring outfit to wear-to-New-York-on-Tuesdays. I bought a navy suit with a white collar and navy shoes and bag, but it took me all day since the less you have to spend the longer it takes you to find what you want. So it was five o’clock when, lugging my bundles, I turned the corner of our block, started up the street toward our house—and stopped in my tracks.

  Camped on our doorstep were half a dozen reporters and photographers talking to my mother. She saw me and beckoned frantically, and I loped into a run, bundles flapping.

  “Miss Helburn’s on the phone,” my mother called as I came within earshot. “She wants to know where you are.”

  I ran up the front steps and into the house, my mother following and the press bringing lip the rear.

  “You won,” my mother said. “You’re the only girl. You’re the youngest. The newspapers got a telegram.”

  I picked up the phone and said hello, but Terry had hung up. Feeling lightheaded, I sat down to be interviewed and photographed. Just as the press was leaving, the phone rang again and I hurried to answer it.

  “Why aren’t you in New York?” Terry demanded. “You go on the air at seven-forty-five!”

  “I just found out about it!” I said. “I wasn’t notified. I didn’t get a letter or a telegram or anything!”

  “Well, you knew you won,” said Terry. “You’ve been seeing me for weeks.”

  It was no time to answer: “But you said—.” I changed into the new blue suit, took the next train to New York and went on the radio with the other two winners to accept the fellowship. Two months later, Terry took me to Westport, Connecticut, to work as an apprentice at the Guild’s summer theatre; and in the fall I moved to New York on my fellowship money, having been enrolled by Terry in a playwriting seminar to be conducted by the Theatre Guild.

  And since nobody had told me about Flanagan’s Law, I didn’t realize that with a start like that, I was positively certain to get nowhere at all in the theatre.

  Footnote to Chapter 1: It Doesn’t Pay to Educate Playwrights

  BEFORE I’D BEEN IN NEW YORK a month, I made the shocked discovery that most people who worked in the theatre made fun of the Theatre Guild. You mentioned the Guild at Sardi’s (shyly and proudly) and everybody died laughing.

  What baffled me about this was that the laughers included the stars and playwrights, directors and designers who were most impressed by the Guild’s artistic standards and most eager to be involved in Guild productions.

  Then what was so funny?

  Consider the saga of the Bureau of New Plays and its fellowship winners, and the playwriting seminar the Guild conducted for them. It was the sort of high-minded fiasco that could have happened only to the Theatre Guild.

  The Bureau of New Plays had been founded one year earlier and had awarded two fellowships that year, giving the winners $1,500 each and sending them on their way. During the second year, when I was one of the winners, the Theatre Guild stepped in.

  “You’re doing this all wrong,” said the Theatre Guild to the Bureau of New Plays. “It’s a great mistake to give young writers money and send them wandering off on their own. Playwrights need training! So this year,” finished the Theatre Guild, “you give them the money and we’ll give them the training.”

  Having hatched this lofty and commendable project, the Guild rounded up twelve promising young playwrights and enrolled us in a seminar. The Guild had its own building and theatre on West Fifty-second Street, and on a mild September afternoon we gathered in the third-floor board room for our first session, to be conducted by Lawrence Langner and Terry, the Guild’s co-producers.

  At first glance, it was a typical board room, large and quiet, with wide windows and a polished mahogany board table long enough to seat all of us. What gave the room its quality, and awed us into silence as we took our places at the table, were the faces that looked down at us from massively framed photographs on the walls.

  There was Shaw, with a pixie smile and a note scrawled ac
ross the beard. There was O’Neill, staring somberly into space, the Lunts in a flamboyant scene from The Taming of the Shrew, Maurice Evans as Falstaff, and Ethel Barrymore and Gertie Lawrence, and George Gershwin with the original cast of Porgy and Bess.

  The hallowed history of the Theatre Guild flowed out from those walls as Lawrence Langner looked into our solemn faces and told us the future of the theatre rested with us. Terry added her own welcome and then Lawrence outlined the seminar.

  We were to meet in the board room three afternoons a week, in classes to be taught by producer Cheryl Crawford, director Lee Strasberg, and Guild playreader John Gassner. Occasionally Terry or Lawrence would lecture on production, and from time to time famous actors, actresses, playwrights and directors would be brought in as guest lecturers.

  In addition, each student would attend morning rehearsals of a new Broadway play. There were several new plays to be produced by the Guild. Cheryl Crawford was also producing one; Lee Strasberg was directing one; and John Gassner had written one. Each of us was to be assigned to rehearsals of one of these productions. We would also be given tickets to Broadway plays.

  Thus began the education of twelve young would-be playwrights, an intensive professional training the luckless winners of the previous year’s fellowships might well have envied. Nothing was overlooked, no time or trouble was spared; and in March, when the seminar ended, everybody agreed it had been a great success.

  There was, to be sure, one small hitch. We had attended rehearsals of our mentors’ productions so that we might study and analyze the best new plays, those which had met the high standards of the Theatre Guild.

  The play produced by Guild protégée Cheryl Crawford flopped.

  The play written by Guild playreader John Gassner flopped.

  The play directed by Lee Strasberg flopped.

  All four plays produced by the Theatre Guild flopped.

  But that’s a detail. The worth of the seminar itself can fairly be judged only by the ultimate achievements of the twelve neophyte playwrights so carefully educated. What became of them?

  One—Danny Taradash—became a screenwriter with an Academy Award to his credit. A second—John Crosby—became a famous TV critic.

  No. 3 became a physician, No. 4 is a short-story writer, No. 5 manages a movie theatre, Nos. 6 and 7 are English professors, Nos. 8 and 9 became TV writers, Nos. 10 and 11 became screen-writers, and No. 12 has a private income and seems not to have done much of anything. (You’ll find out soon enough which of these I was.)

  The Theatre Guild, convinced that fledgling playwrights need training as well as money, exhausted itself training twelve of us-and not one of the twelve ever became a Broadway playwright.

  The two fellowship winners who, the previous year, had been given $1,500 and sent wandering off on their own were Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.

  2. “NO CASTING TODAY BUT KEEP IN TOUCH!”

  WHEN MAXINE AND I MET and became best friends—in the back-stage ladies’ room of the Morosco Theatre—I thought she was the most glamorous creature on earth. Maxine was a bona fide Broadway actress.

  We met during my fellowship winter when I was assigned to rehearsals of a comedy called Yankee Fable, in which Maxine had an impressively large role as the comedy-ingénue—impressive to me because Maxine was my own age. Sitting in the dark, empty theatre during the first two days of rehearsal, I had gawked more at the redheaded comedy-ingénue than at the star. It awed me that someone as young as I was should be so poised and assured and so thoroughly at home on a Broadway stage as Maxine was.

  On the third day, I went into the backstage ladies’ room to wash before lunch, and the redhead was standing at the sink. She was fussing with the straps under the shoulders of her white silk blouse, and when she saw me she turned beet-red. I smiled uncertainly, wondering what she was blushing at.

  “Have you got a safety pin?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t,” I mumbled, tongue-tied in the presence of so much glamour. She turned away and went on fussing with the brassiere straps or whatever they were, and as I washed my hands I goggled at her covertly, never having seen a real actress at such close range. Maxine had the kind of beauty people goggled at anyway. She had thick masses of hair the color of flaming autumn leaves that curled about her face in loose ringlets, a complexion like milk and one of those swan necks you see in 1890s portraits. It was when I had got as far as her neck that I noticed something peculiar below it. Maxine’s left breast appeared to be a couple of inches higher than her right.

  She saw my puzzled stare and her eyes suddenly filled with tears.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “It’s my damn falsies,” she said. “I can’t get them to stay put.”

  “Can’t you take them off?” I asked timidly.

  “How can I go back onstage with no bosoms when I had them all morning?” she demanded. “Everybody would notice!”

  “Oh, I don’t think they would,” I said earnestly. “Listen, I’ve been watching you all morning. Why don’t you take them off and walk up and down, and I’ll tell you if I notice the difference.”

  Maxine removed the falsies, buttoned her white blouse, threw her shoulders back and walked away a few steps to give me a profile view. Then she turned and faced me bravely.

  “Nobody,” I stated positively, “will notice a thing! You don’t need falsies, you have a lovely figure!”

  “I’m playing a sexy part, I wouldn’t have got it if they’d known I was flat-chested,” said Maxine.

  “You’re wonderful in the part!” I said. “They hired you for your talent, not your bust!”

  “I nearly died when I felt them slip during the last scene,” she said, wrapping the falsies carefully in Kleenex and putting them in her handbag. “I’m nervous enough in this company. They’re all such pros.”

  “Well, you’re a pro!” I said.

  Maxine giggled.

  “I only graduated from the American Academy last June,” she said. “The Guild took me out of the senior class and gave me my first job and when the show closed I went back and graduated. This is only my second show.”

  “You must be terrific, if you made the American Academy of Dramatic Art and then got taken out of the senior class by the Theatre Guild!” I said. And I added, trying to sound offhand about it: “You know, it’s funny: I’m a Theatre Guild protégée, too.”

  “I know,” said Maxine. “I asked somebody who you were because nobody else in the company is my age, and they said you were a playwright sent over by the Guild. That’s why I never had the nerve to talk to you.”

  She saw the uncomprehending look on my face and explained:

  “People with brains intimidate me.” And she added simply, “I don’t have any brains.”

  I laughed. I think I knew that people who really have no brains don’t know it. And having read my Stanislavski, I knew that acting demanded a high degree of intelligence. But I understood what she meant: we both grew up equating brains with college degrees.

  “I don’t have any brains either! I only went to college for one year,” I assured her. “I don’t even know anything about the theatre and you’re a professional Broadway actress!”

  “My name’s Maxine Stuart,” she said. “Have you got a lunch date?”

  So we went to lunch together at Ralph’s, an Eighth Avenue restaurant patronized exclusively by the 999 theatre hopefuls who couldn’t afford Sardi’s.

  After that, we exchanged daily confidences in the backstage ladies’ room under a large daisy-sprinkled wall poster that assured us “Syphilis CAN Be Cured!” By the end of Yankee Fable’s three weeks of rehearsal, I was firmly convinced Maxine was a finer comedienne than the show’s star and she had read my latest play and pronounced it far superior to Yankee Fable. Damon and Pythias had met.

  Yankee Fable went to Washington, D.C., for the usual two-week out-of-town try-out. It opened in Washington, closed in Washington and died in Washington. In two wee
ks, therefore, Maxine was back home living the normal everyday life of a glamorous young actress.

  A young actress engages in three kinds of activity. First, there’s physical training. An actress has to train everything from her vocal cords to her toe muscles, so that her body—known to Stanislavski disciples as her Instrument—will be in perfect condition for her life onstage. Second, there’s “making the rounds”: paying daily or twice-weekly visits to the offices of producers rumored to be casting new shows, interspersed—not often enough—with auditions for producers and casting directors. Third, and rarest, there’s the glorious achievement: rehearsing and appearing in a Broadway play.

  I first learned about Maxine’s method of training her Instrument on the Sunday after Yankee Fable died in Washington when Maxine invited me to her house for lunch.

  Maxine lived with her parents in a big, comfortable apartment on West End Avenue, and in no time at all that apartment became my second home. Maxine’s parents were a short, plump, benign middle-class couple comfortingly like my own parents. They knew I lived in a furnished room and ate my meals in the nearest cafeteria, and being warm-hearted people they got themselves rapidly trapped into feeding me oftener than the cafeteria did.

  Maxine’s mother opened the door to me at noon that Sunday. Beyond her I could see Maxine’s father stretched out on the sofa with the Sunday Times. As I opened my mouth to say hello to both of them, there was a piercing scream from the bathroom down the hall.

  “Oh, NO!” screamed Maxine, the “NO” turning into a long, blood-curdling wail that raised the hair on my scalp.

  “Did you have any breakfast, dear?” Maxine’s mother asked, unperturbed by her screaming daughter. “Would you like some orange juice?”

  As I said no-thank-you, Maxine shrieked again, and Maxine’s father said:

  “If you want the theatre section it’s in Maxine’s room.” So as I went down the hall to Maxine’s room I concluded she was rehearsing for an audition for some melodrama.