by Helene Hanff
The first of the two calls came early in the afternoon as I was trying to get a whole cigarette out of my brother.
My oldest brother was married by then but the middle one was still living at home. I wouldn’t say he was exactly working at the time, but he was earning money, which I wasn’t. (He later became a big wheel in industry so I’m not allowed to say that his earnings came from playing pool and duplicate bridge in local contests. He was so expert at both games that rich men backed him, won heavily on him and gave him a percentage of their winnings.)
Since my parents were feeding and housing me, I didn’t need cash for anything but cigarettes and these my father generally remembered to buy for me. It was when he forgot that I was forced to appeal to my brother’s better nature—such as it was. I’d ask him for a cigarette and he’d ponder the request.
“I’d be glad to give you one,” he’d say earnestly, “but one cigarette won’t help you. You’ll smoke it—and in half an hour you’ll be out of cigarettes again. Now what I’d like to do is find a way to give you enough cigarettes to last you awhile.”
He’d take six or seven cigarettes out of his pack, hold them half-out to me and ponder them. And the minute I reached for one, he’d yank them back and say:
“I know how to do it!”
And he’d take a penknife out of his pocket, cut all six or seven cigarettes in half, and hand me the butts thus accumulated. This was before king-size cigarettes had come on the market, so you know how long half a cigarette was. You couldn’t light it without burning your upper lip and the tip of your nose.
I did not stand idly by while he mutilated six cigarettes. But it’s very difficult for a girl to get cigarettes by force from a brother who’s bigger and taller than she is and has an open penknife in one hand. So as I said, I was trying to appeal to his better nature when the phone rang.
“Miss Hanff?” said a woman’s voice at the other end. “Just a moment, please. Oscar Serlin calling from New York.”
All the blood left my head. Oscar Serlin had produced Life With Father, then in its fourth or fifth year on Broadway and with road companies across the country, including one in Philadelphia that was breaking records there in its second year. Of all Broadway hits, this had been the biggest.
“Miss Hanff?” said Oscar Serlin in a deep baritone voice. “I’ve read your play. I’m very impressed. When can you come to New York to see me?”
We settled on Friday afternoon and when I hung up I was shaking. I managed to tell my brother the news and he was so impressed he gave me a whole cigarette. I’d only just finished it when the second call came. This one was from a producer we’ll call Charlie. He also had a play running on Broadway. It had got mixed reviews but it had been running since early October and was by no means a flop. Said Charlie, without reservation or preamble:
“I think you’ve written a marvelous play. I want to produce it.”
He went on for half an hour about the characters and the dialogue, which he said were both marvelous, and about the theme of the play which was also marvelous.
“I have some friends who are interested in it and we all want to meet you,” he said. “When can I give a small dinner party for you?”
I said I was coming to New York on Friday and Charlie said Friday evening would be ideal for the dinner party. He gave me his address and told me again how marvelous the play was and we hung up. I phoned my agent, who congratulated me and ordered me not to set foot in either producer’s lair until I’d seen her first.
On Friday, wearing my good spring suit and carrying a new silk blouse (charged to my mother on my prospects) to change into for the dinner party, I set out for New York, with the fare donated by my father, and a nearly full pack of cigarettes and fifty cents for buses donated by my brother.
Hoarding the fifty cents for emergencies, I walked from Penn Station to my agent’s office. She welcomed me warmly and gave me instructions. Oscar Serlin, she said, was one of Broadway’s most discriminating producers and I was to let him have the play. However, I was to be very, very nice to Charlie because, while she didn’t think too highly of his current production, one simply never knew what next year might bring.
I phoned Maxine from my agent’s office and told her the news. She was in rehearsal for one of the bombs she was periodically cast in and we shrieked congratulations at each other over the phone.
“Listen, I’ll be home all evening,” she said. “Call me and tell me what happened!”
“I’ll phone you before I leave town,” I promised. And wouldn’t I just.
I left my agent’s office and went around the corner to Oscar Serlin’s office in Rockefeller Center. Even the receptionist’s room was quietly opulent. I gave the receptionist my name and she smiled and said: “Oh, yes!” and rang Mr. Serlin on the intercom, and then told me to go right in.
I opened the inner-office door and saw, across a vast expanse of carpeting, an imposing desk at the far end of the room from behind which a man rose and held out his hand. Oscar Serlin was over six feet tall and built like a football player. He gave me a warm handclasp, drew up a chair for me, offered me a cigarette from a silver box, lit it for me with a silver lighter, fixed his liquid brown eyes on me and said:
“Tell me about yourself,”
and as far as I was concerned, he was Shakespeare, Sir Galahad and President Roosevelt fused.
I gave him my ten-cent autobiography and he nodded. Then he picked up the blue-bound copy of my play, which was on his desk.
“This is a very bad play,” he said conversationally. “Your construction’s lousy. Your two central characters are very interesting and your dialogue is excellent. But you have to be a carpenter before you can be a cabinet-maker. Let me show you.”
And leaning back in his chair, he reconstructed the entire play for me so easily and brilliantly it left me tongue-tied. When I could speak, I told him I knew I could rewrite it exactly as he’d outlined it and that I thought I could finish it within the standard three-month option period.
It was then that he explained—with some surprise, I thought—that he didn’t want to produce the play. He’d just wanted to meet me.
“I want you to keep in touch with me,” he said, “and I want to see your next play. When are you moving back to New York?”
“I’m trying to find a job in Philly so I can earn enough to come back,” I said, “but I haven’t had any luck so far.”
He nodded and wished me well and walked me to the door; and sadly relinquishing the dream of having my play produced by this god, I left his office and went over to the Taft Hotel to change into my new blouse in their ladies’ room.
The Taft Hotel ladies’ room charged me a nickel for the use of their john, which is the one health service I thought nobody ought to have to pay for, and I left there vowing never to patronize the Taft Hotel again.
Charlie lived way up on Riverside Drive. I caught a Fifth Avenue double-decker bus, climbed to the top and took the front seat so none of the other passengers could watch me counting my remaining funds. I had a return ticket, thirty-five cents and six cigarettes. Deduct a dime for a bus to Penn Station and another for a bus home from North Philadelphia station, and I had fifteen cents left over—exactly the price of a fresh pack of cigarettes for tomorrow—so I decided to make the six cigarettes last me till I got home to Philadelphia.
Charlie turned out to be a pleasant, bustling little man who welcomed me with enthusiasm and presented me proudly to the assembled dinner guests. They included an elderly lady backer who was deaf and had to be shouted at; a German baron who wrote poetry and planned to direct my play for Charlie though he’d never directed a play before; and a pair of homosexual male twins who were dying to act in my play, which had no parts for them. But everybody was enthusiastic about the play, the martinis were excellent—and all over the living room, on every table, were wooden boxes and crystal holders chockfull of free cigarettes.
We drank to the play, we discussed possible
stars for it, we debated whether the Booth Theatre was too small or the Belasco too big, and by the time Charlie led the way into the dining room I was carelessly dismissing Oscar Serlin as short-sighted.
All I remember about that dinner is my traumatic experience with the first course. Did I tell you I’m very near-sighted? Well, in those days, as Dorothy Parker observed, men never made passes at girls who wore glasses. Being young and female, I never wore mine at a dinner party, certainly not at a dinner party given in my honor by a Broadway producer. The first course arrived in the kind of sherbet glasses my mother used for shrimp cocktail, and all I could see of the stuff in the glass in front of me was that it was white. Peering narrowly down at it, I decided it was crab meat, of which I am very fond, and I took a hungry mouthful of it—and discovered, with apoplectic results, that it wasn’t crab meat. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I couldn’t swallow it. So, before the fascinated gaze of the entire dinner party, I spit it out.
“It’s herring,” Charlie told me. “Don’t you like it?”—a question I bitterly resented since it would be rude to say no and having just spit it out I could hardly say yes. So I can’t tell you what else we ate or what we talked about; I spent the rest of the dinner hour patching together the remnants of my aplomb.
After dinner, the other guests departed and Charlie took me to see his current Broadway play. The production was the kind usually described as “shabby”: the sets didn’t quite work, the direction was awkward and the play was embarrassing where it was meant to be moving. After the theatre, we adjourned to Sardi’s—to talk.
At Sardi’s, it turned out that while my play was still marvelous, it wasn’t quite marvelous enough. It would be, however, as soon as Charlie rewrote it. What he had in mind was a contract making him co-author. He would then rewrite the play his way and if his version was approved by his backers, he’d produce it.
Had Oscar Serlin offered me such a contract I’d have jumped at it (though Oscar would have found the suggestion that he rewrite an author’s play simply bizarre). But where Oscar’s revised construction of the play had sounded brilliantly right, Charlie’s sounded terrible. Nor did he bolster my confidence in him by telling me what changes he’d personally made in his current play. The scenes I’d found embarrassing were the scenes Charlie had written.
I explained this to Charlie. (Every year I make a vow to learn tact or keep my mouth shut but so far nothing has come of it.) We argued and we talked and we argued and we arrived at no conclusion. Sardi’s, on the other hand, did: I looked up and noticed that the waiters were putting chairs up on tables and that we were the only customers left in the restaurant. I plucked Charlie’s sleeve as he was finishing a sentence.
“I think Sardi’s wants to close,” I said.
We looked at Charlie’s watch; it was nearly 3 A.M.
With many apologies, Charlie put me in a cab, gave the driver a dollar and said:
“Take the young lady to her hotel.”
The cab drove off and I told the driver to take me to Penn Station. At Penn Station, the lone night clerk informed me that the next train for Philadelphia was due at 6:35. I couldn’t wake up Maxine’s family at three in the morning to ask to sleep there. So I sat down on a Penn Station bench to wait for the 6:35.
It was a raw March night, there wasn’t anybody else in the waiting room, and Penn Station was saving heat. I’d been sitting there for fifteen chilly minutes trying to get up the nerve to ask the night clerk if he had a blanket, when the stationmaster came along. He stopped, looked down at me and asked politely what I was doing there.
“I’m waiting for the six-thirty-five to Philadelphia,” I said.
He clucked.
“A nice young lady,” he said, “doesn’t want to sit all night in a railroad station!”
And I thought: You won’t get any argument out of me, mister, there’s no place I wouldn’t rather sit.
“Wouldn’t it be much better,” he said, “to go across the street to the Governor Clinton Hotel and get a good night’s sleep?”
I don’t know why I couldn’t tell him I only had thirty-five cents, but I couldn’t. And since I was wearing my good suit and silk blouse he couldn’t guess it.
“How will it be,” he suggested jovially, “if I escort you there myself?” And he bowed and offered his arm.
I stood up and he took my arm and we left the station and walked across the street to the Governor Clinton, where the stationmaster explained to the desk clerk that this charming young lady had missed her train and needed a room for the night.
And don’t think he didn’t stand there at my side till the desk clerk gave me a little cellophane bag with a nightgown and toothbrush in it and summoned a bellhop to take me up to my room.
The bellhop took me up and unlocked the door and switched on the lights for me, and I tipped him a quarter—leaving me a total capital of ten cents, minus the cost of the room (and the nightgown and the toothbrush), which I hadn’t had the courage to ask about.
I undressed, decided it was a lovely hotel, crawled into bed at quarter to four and slept like a baby till eleven-fifteen next morning.
At eleven-sixteen I phoned Maxine. It was Saturday and I prayed her rehearsal wasn’t scheduled till noon, which was usual on a Saturday. God heard me and Maxine herself answered the phone.
“You have to come down and get me out of here,” I said. “I’m at the Governor Clinton in a room I can’t pay for. I don’t even know how much it costs.”
“Hang up, the operator may be listening in,” said Maxine. “I’ll be right down.”
And she came down and paid the hotel bill. Since her play had been in rehearsal for three weeks and was due to open the following Tuesday (and close the following Saturday), Maxine was in funds and bought me a lavish breakfast before we had another weepy farewell and I went back to Philadelphia.
My mother brushed aside the bad news about the play.
“You’ve got a job!” she said. “In the press department of Life With Father. It’s on the second floor of the Walnut Street Theatre, you start Monday. A man just called an hour ago.”
Oscar Serlin had given the press agent’s assistant a paid vacation for the remaining six weeks of the play’s run in Philadelphia—just to make room for me, so I could earn my way back to New York.
Oscar and Charlie were only the beginning. During my two months in the Life With Father press office, through the two summer months when I worked as prop girl at a summer theatre in Philadelphia and on through September when I finally moved back to New York, I was positively besieged by producers. If producers Nos. 1 and 2 had conformed to Flanagan’s Law, the rest of them positively shouted it.
Producer No. 3 was elderly and semiretired but he’d had a legendary career in his day.
“Yours is the first play he’s been interested in in five years,” said my agent, impressed. “He wants to take you to lunch.”
I met the legendary producer for lunch at the Algonquin, where for two hours he talked of his producing days, the great stars and playwrights he’d discovered and the contrasting sorry state of the contemporary theatre. When we parted, he wished me every success and certainly hoped one of these younger fellows would have the sense to produce my play. (Agent’s translation: “I guess he’s broke.”)
Producer No. 4 telephoned me at midnight. I’d never heard of him but what did that matter?
“I’ve just read your play and I’m so excited I can’t sleep!” he said. “Can you lunch with me tomorrow?”
We lunched. He was an attractive young man and I gathered he had a private income. I asked what plays he’d produced.
“None yet,” he said. “I’ve been looking for the right play for five years. Thanks to you, I’ve finally found it!”
He took a three-month option on the play. He wanted revisions, and during the next three months while I was rewriting, we met weekly to discuss the revisions over long and expensive lunches. At the end of three months, he read an
other playwright’s play and realized that that was the one he’d spent five years looking for, and he dropped his option on mine and took an option on the new one. Three months later still, he dropped the second play, having found a third to take an option on and have long, expensive lunches over.
This man was what might be called a pretend-producer. There were quite a few of these. There was one man who sat in the same office for sixteen years reading plays. He never produced one. If you dropped in at his office, at your agent’s suggestion, he told you he just hadn’t been able to find the exactly right play. But he was still looking—and as a matter of fact, he had one play in mind, a French play, and if the author was willing to rewrite—and if the American rights were available—and if he could find the right adapter for it, which was going to be tough because it was a very special script, but as he’d told your agent, as soon as he got a decent translation he wanted you to read it because you just might be the right adapter for it, he wasn’t sure....
Producer No. 5 sent for me and when I walked into his office he said: “How-d’ya-do” impatiently, and then before I even found a chair: “The whole thing goes haywire in the second act, you’re going to have to do the whole play over. Sit down, I’ll show you what I want you to do.” This one meant business.
He told me how he wanted the play rewritten. He was going to Hollywood for two months and he wanted the revised play ready for production when he came back. He asked whether I’d be willing to quit my job and live on the option money, which he would mail to my agent, so that I could work on the play full time. I said yes.
I was working as secretary to a press agent and I quit the job and went to work on the revisions. The producer sent me a long, encouraging letter from Hollywood but he forgot to send my agent the option money. The night before he was due back in New York, I sat up till 4 A.M. to finish typing the revised draft and put it between covers. At noon the next day I went to his office with the finished play.
