by Helene Hanff
His secretary took my name in. Then she came back. The producer, she said, was about to go into rehearsal with a new play and wouldn’t have time to read mine. But he sent me greetings and wished me lots of luck with the play. (None of us was so sordid as to mention the unpaid option money.)
Producer No. 6 was a very fine actor who wrote me from Hollywood that he wanted to produce the play and star in it as soon as he completed the film he was making. And he very well might have done so if, three weeks after he wrote to me, he hadn’t happened to drop dead on the golf course of a heart attack.
And that was the end of the furor over that particular play.
Since this history was to be repeated, with minor variations, every time I hatched a play (and I had them like rabbits), I learned to understand how producers’ minds worked.
When a producer phones a playwright and says: “You’ve written a wonderful play. When can you come and see me?” it doesn’t mean he wants to produce the play. But whether it means (a) he wants to meet the playwright, or (b) he wants to rewrite the play himself to make it producible, or (c) he’d produce it if he had the money, or (d) he needs a play in reserve, to hold his backers’ interest till he finds one he really likes, his motive stems from the same economic fact. That fact told me why the odds against me would always be so much greater than the odds against Maxine.
If you’re a young actress who has never set foot on a professional stage, a producer can take a small gamble on you by giving you a bit part in his next production. If you do well, he’ll trust you with a larger part next season. Eventually, he may trust you with a leading role.
But if you’re a young playwright, the situation is different. There’s no such thing as a bit play. It’s going to cost a Broadway producer just as much to produce your play as to produce Tennessee Williams’s. He can’t take a small gamble on you; he’s got to gamble all the way.
He reads your play and it’s clearly not worth gambling the fortune required to produce a play on Broadway. But there’s a fine central character and the last scene in the second act is terrific—and what about your next play? So he wants to meet you. And he definitely wants to see your next play.
He gets your next play a year later and it’s not very good but it’s better than the first one. And what about next year? Maybe your great play is just around the corner, maybe you just need to be nursed a little longer. So instead of returning the script to your agent with a flat rejection, the producer phones you.
“I’ve read your play and I’m very impressed,” he says, which is true as far as it goes. “When can you lunch with me?”
And you lunch with him. For the first five years. After that, you don’t bother unless you need the lunch because you know from experience, if they take you to lunch they don’t want your play.
4. IF SHE TAKES YOU TO LUNCH SHE CAN’T SELL IT
A COUPLE OF TIMES in the last chapter I mentioned my agent without telling you who she was. The truth is I couldn’t remember who she was. (I say “she” because in the forties and fifties, as almost all producers were men, almost all agents were women.)
“Agents” in this book, of course, refers exclusively to Broadway play agents—“playbrokers,” they were once called. Those I knew were affectionate, warm-hearted women who belonged body and soul to their clients—unlike many Hollywood agents and New York literary agents who were rumored to be Uncle Toms (ostensibly working for their writers but actually far more zealous in looking after the interests of the Hollywood studio or the New York publishing house). But though I have fond memories of every playbroker who ever handled my plays, I managed to use up seven of them (that I can remember), some of them twice.
Beginning in my fellowship year, when the older playwrights in the seminar were already complaining about their agents, I noted a fact that became increasingly evident as the years went on. Since all (but one) of the unsuccessful playwrights I ever knew were men, I hope they’ll excuse me for stating this fact in the male gender:
The average unsuccessful playwright goes through life with the firm conviction that his agent is persecuting him. She’s giving him ulcers and sinus trouble and he complains about her to his friends and to the psychoanalyst she drives him to.
I couldn’t afford ulcers or an analyst, so on the night when I discovered my agent was giving me a severe postnasal drip, I realized the time had come to figure out how agents’ minds worked. Having run through three of them by then, I made a discovery which from then on was my salvation:
All playbrokers are alike.
Herewith the biography of a play agent, or what you need to know before you set foot in her office with your new play.
She begins her career by renting a small office and installing a phone, on capital saved while she was assistant to an older agent. She has pirated away two or three of the older agent’s youngest clients, and she scouts around and corrals a few more potential playwrights, say eight in all. Her real assets are in herself: she is friendly and sympathetic, she is brilliantly critical, highly intelligent, shrewd and slightly ruthless.
She goes to work to sell her eight plays, sending each play to Broadway producers, and phoning and pestering selected stars and directors until they, too, agree to read her plays. As fast as a play comes back rejected, she sends it out again. And then one day, she sells one of the eight plays. It opens, it’s a hit, and overnight the author is a big name on Broadway.
The agent now has Mr. Big to pay her office rent and phone bill. She has seven unsold plays, which six Broadway producers have read and rejected, and a dozen producers have not yet seen. They never will see those seven plays. Because now that the agent has Mr. Big, eight new clients drift in, wanting her to handle their plays. She’s Mr. Big’s agent: if she’s good enough for him, she’s good enough for them. So the agent gets to work on the eight new plays, and puts the seven old ones on a closet shelf marked Dead.
Well, why doesn’t she try to sell all fifteen? Because she hasn’t time. Why not? It doesn’t take her all day to send out the new plays, does it? No—but she has Mr. Big.
Now that his play is a hit, she’s busy negotiating a screen sale, she’s attending rehearsals of the road company and sitting in on auditions for the London company—because having a big-name client means that the agent’s not just an agent any more: she’s Mr. Big’s business manager, press representative, legal adviser, play doctor, confidante and best friend. She’s his buffer in every argument he has with his producer, his director or his star, no matter how many arguments there are or how far into the night they run. If he has a second play trying out in Boston, she has to fly up for the opening: he needs her. If his New York hit opens in London, she has to fly over. Her time is not her own, her soul is not her own, they both belong to Mr. Big. And why not? He’s paying the rent, the phone bill, the secretary’s salary.
She therefore puts the old plays on the Dead shelf and goes to work to sell the new. She sells one. It opens and flops, but she unloads it on Hollywood for a small fortune. The author of this one isn’t a big name, but he’s made her some money, she has faith in his future and he needs help on his new play, the second act’s giving him trouble. Meanwhile, of course, several of his friends bring her their plays because she’s his agent: she got him all that Hollywood money and if she’s good enough for him she’s good enough for them.
So the agent puts the second batch of unsold plays on the Dead shelf and goes to work to sell the third. By which time, of course, the original seven unsold plays are so far down on the Dead shelf she’s forgotten about them.
The authors of them, unfortunately, haven’t.
The author of one of them, not having heard from his agent in several months, phones her one day to find out what’s happening with his script.
“Just-a-minute-I’ll-see-if-she’s-free,” says the secretary who answers his call. This is followed by a three-minute pause, during which the agent debates whether to duck the playwright or take the bull by the horns.
She decides to take it by the horns. She gets on the phone.
“HelLO!” she says in a warmly personal voice. “When can we lunch?”
They lunch. Over the Bloody Mary’s, the agent tells the author what the last producer who saw his play said about it—not realizing she told him this three months ago and is exposing the fact that she hasn’t sent it anywhere since. Over the entree she tells him the latest theatre gossip (“He was drunk last night when he made his third-act entrance, it’s not his fault, poor soul, the man is Sick, he is So Sick!”). Over coffee, she asks the playwright when he’s going to write a new play, he’s too talented to be so lazy!
Now any idiot should know by this time that the agent has given up on his play. Our hero, however, refuses to believe it without further proof. In search of which, he strides briskly into her office one day between 1 and 3 P.M., when he knows she’s out to lunch. (Agents transact much of their business over lunch so lunch invariably takes two hours.)
“I’d like to pick up a copy of my play,” he says. “Olivier wants to read it.”
He tells the secretary the title of his play and she looks puzzled: she’s only worked here four months and she’s never heard of that play.
“I’ll see if I can find it,” she says, and moves innocently, unerringly, toward the closet shelf marked Dead. The playwright, hard on her heels, stares over her shoulder and sees, in shocked outrage, all six copies of his play, all very dusty. The truth is there and he faces it squarely: this friendly, sympathetic, brilliantly critical, highly intelligent, shrewd and slightly ruthless woman hasn’t been sending his play around.
Six Broadway producers have seen it. Twelve or fifteen producers haven’t, and as things now stand, won’t. What can he do about it?
Well, he can go home and call up his friends and tell them all what a slob his agent is, and wind up with ulcers, a psychoanalyst and a persecution complex. But will that get his play read by all the Broadway producers who haven’t seen it? No, it won’t. Then what’s the solution? How is he to get his script into the hands of all the producers who haven’t yet read it? The answer lies in that basic fact about agents: All playbrokers are alike.
This being so, when you find all six copies of your script on your agent’s Dead shelf, this is what you do:
You wander into her office, unannounced, late one afternoon when you know she’s finished work for the day and has time to talk. She welcomes you warmly (they always do), if defensively (ditto), and tells you to come on into her private office and talk to her.
You tell her honestly that you’re sorry your play wasn’t good enough for her to sell. And you love her dearly but would she be terribly hurt if you took it to some less important agent, who might be willing to send it to off-off-Broadway and little-theatre groups, which you realize she herself hasn’t time to do.
Up to now, the agent’s been feeling guilty about you, since along with her other virtues and contrary to general opinion she also has a conscience. And here you are, offering to take one guilt source off her mind. She’s so grateful she smiles at you almost with tears in her eyes.
If she couldn’t sell your play, she says, she hopes you know it wasn’t for lack of trying, or lack of faith in you or affection for you. And what’s more, she means it; and what’s still more, realistically speaking it’s true. So you tell her, with tears in your eyes, that you never doubted that. You and she part company with mutual affection and esteem. But—if by some chance you don’t know their names by heart—before you leave, you ask her to give you a list of the six producers who rejected the play.
Armed with your list, and your six scripts, you proceed to the office of another agent and ask if she’ll read your play. She has a Mr. Big too, of course, but he’s in Hollywood at the moment so she has a little free time. She reads your play, she thinks it’s salable and she offers to send it around. In her stable, you’re a brand-new dark horse. She sends the play to the six best producers who haven’t seen it. (Two of the six want to meet you, one takes you to lunch, and the other three reject it without all the ceremony.) Three months go by and you phone the agent to ask what’s doing with the play. And she says:
“HelLO! When can we lunch?”
And a week after that, you have a frank heart-to-heart talk, you part with mutual affection and esteem, and you are off, with your list of producers who have rejected the play, to agent No. 3. By the time the third agent is through with it, every producer on Broadway has read it and rejected it and you can forget it. But you’ve probably written a new play by then.
Now it’s true, as Maxine once observed, that if you follow my system for five or six years you’ll have “run through every agent on Broadway like a dose of salts.” But by the time this happens, three former assistants to three of your former agents have set up shop for themselves and are looking for their first batch of clients. So you go to each in turn.
And then? Why then, you just go back to the beginning and start over. You carry your new play into the office of good old agent No. 1.
She’s delighted to see you again. You parted with mutual affection and esteem; your old play showed promise; for all she knows, your new one may be the hit of the season. And if she can’t sell it, you won’t make her feel guilty; you didn’t last time. So she welcomes you with the enthusiasm reserved for new clients and sends your script to the six best producers who haven’t yet seen it.
Only the second time round, when you telephone to ask what’s doing, and she says:
“HelLO! When can we lunch?” you say:
“Oh, honey, can I have a raincheck? I’m working like a dog on a new first act—” because by this time, you know damn well if she takes you to lunch she can’t sell it.
5. THE UNDERFOOT FREE ENTERPRISE SYSTEM
SINCE KIDS TRYING TO CRASH the theatre require expensive instruction (which includes seeing the best plays and films) as well as expensive clothes in which to be Seen on occasion, and since they never have any money, they have to master the delicate, illegal art of getting everything for nothing. In the cultivation of this art, my friend Maxine had no equal.
Maxine and I saw every Broadway show and neighborhood movie free. I went to producers’ lunches attired in Saks’s best, Maxine took vocal lessons and I was tutored privately in Latin and Greek, and none of it cost us a dime. All I can remember us paying for were the ballet lessons we took from the Greek gentleman. Thanks to Maxine’s negotiations, we paid him a dollar a week in a class where everybody else was paying two dollars.
What specially equipped Maxine for this art, besides an unflagging imagination and the nerve of Napoleon, was her unique ignorance of finance. I couldn’t add or subtract too well, but Maxine’s innocence in money matters was so total it amounted to a whole new theory of economics. I’ll give you an example:
The autumn when I finally got back to New York after a six-month exile in Philadelphia I had difficulty finding a job. My capital finally dwindling to $15, I told Maxine I couldn’t meet the $10 weekly rent on my hotel room the next week unless I cut down to one meal a day. We were riding on the upper deck of a double-decker Fifth Avenue bus at the time, on our way up to Maxine’s house for dinner, and Maxine stared thoughtfully out the window and down at the street as she worked on the problem.
“All right,” she said finally. “The ten dollars a week for rent you can manage by putting a little away every day. Put fifty cents away every day; that way you won’t miss it. And I can get the money for food for you. As long as I’m working part-time, you can collect my unemployment insurance; it’s just sitting there!”
Given a mind like that, it’s easy to evolve your own economic theory. Maxine’s was simply stated:
“Nothing should cost anything.”
It went into operation that fall, when I finally got a job as assistant to a press agent. Salary: $25 a week. Ten dollars paid for the hotel room, three dollars went toward paying off a large dental bill, and the remaining twelve dollars were flung away carelessly o
n food, cigarettes, toothpaste, typing paper, typewriter ribbons, nylons, shoe repairs, carfare, semi-annual haircuts and taxes. So by the time Friday—payday—came around, I was wiped out.
Since Maxine was living at home, her room, board and essential clothes were supplied. She was also working part-time taking street-comer surveys at one dollar per surveying hour. Surveys of corporation vice-presidents paid two dollars, but you didn’t get this work often, and when you did, half the vice-presidents coldly refused to be surveyed; and since you got paid per vice-president instead of per hour, even that didn’t pay too well. Her average weekly gross for four or five afternoons was twelve to fifteen dollars, which was distributed among hairdressers, theatrical makeup, street makeup, professional photos, Equity dues, audition accessories, nylons, cigarettes, carfare, agents’ commissions, taxes and a monthly lunch at Sardi’s. (If-you’re-an-actress-you-have-to-be-Seen.) So as a rule, she had even less cash than I did.
I was therefore mildly startled when, shortly after I got the job, Maxine phoned me at the office on a Wednesday morning and inquired casually:
“Do you feel like seeing the new Odets tonight?”
I said I had $1.85 to last me till Friday if that answered her question.
“I don’t mean buy tickets!” said Maxine impatiently. “Where would I get the money to buy tickets? I mean Just Go.”
I had no idea what Just Go meant but I said I’d love to.
“Meet me at the drugstore on the corner of Forty-fifth Street at quarter to nine,” she said. “Don’t wear a coat.”
It was a chilly November evening and the curtain time for Clifford Odets’s play was eight-thirty, but I did as I was told. Maxine met me at the door of the drugstore and said briskly:
