Underfoot in Show Business

by Helene Hanff

  One of my letters had gone to a man who ran the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia. He had phoned me, interviewed me and engaged me as his secretary for the summer. I was to report at Bucks on June 20.

  On June 20, I arrived in New Hope and hauled my two suitcases into the playhouse office. The producer looked up from his desk and stared at me blankly.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked. I told him he’d hired me as his secretary for the summer. “Oh!” he said. “That was last spring, wasn’t it? I thought my secretary was going to be working for Bela Blau up at the Deertrees Theatre in Maine. I talked her into staying with me.” I must have turned pale because he added: “Maybe they haven’t replaced her yet. Why don’t I phone and see if they can use you at Deertrees?”

  He phoned Deertrees, chatted a minute, hung up and said:

  “They can use you.”

  I was to go back to New York and report to Bela Blau’s office. Two members of the Deertrees staff were driving up that afternoon and Bela would phone his office and tell them to wait for me.

  First I took a bus to Philadelphia, having a filial urge to see my parents and borrow the fare to Maine in case something went wrong in New York. Then I took a train back to New York and lugged my suitcases into Bela Blau’s office and met the Deertrees stage manager, Bill Flanagan of Flanagan’s Law, and the assistant stage manager who drove us to Maine in his elderly cream-colored Ford called the Beige Bee because he’d bought it with money he’d earned on a radio show called The Green Hornet.

  The town of Harrison, Maine, lay between two lakes with mountains rising beyond them and was as beautiful a spot as I’ve ever seen. It was a tiny town—pop. 200—with three streets. We found the theatre just beyond the third street and it was as enchanting as its setting. The handsome log-cabin playhouse stood in the center of a hushed clearing circled by pine woods. As we walked around to the back of the theatre to Bela Blau’s office, the ground under our feet was a thick carpet of pine needles.

  Bela shook hands with me and said, beaming:

  “Your partner will be very glad to see you! She’s a local girl and she almost quit when she thought she was going to be in there by herself. She’s never worked in a box office before.”

  I did not say “In a where?” and I did not tell him I couldn’t add. If Bela Blau wanted me looking after his finances for the summer, that was his problem. Mine was to get myself installed in a summer theatre. After a day of considerable mental anguish I was finally installed in one and I wasn’t leaving.

  Still, as I crawled into bed that night, in an airy bedroom in an old-fashioned frame house that let rooms to “summer people,” I couldn’t help feeling Bela Blau was in for a nerve-racking summer. And boy, was I right.

  I met Reta Shaw, my cell-mate, the next morning. Reta was a stout schoolteacher with a pretty face and the most cheerful, unruffled disposition I’ve ever had the privilege of working alongside. She must have caught Theatremania in that box office because the next year she gave up teaching and went to New York to crash the theatre—and did. She began turning up on Broadway as a comedienne in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Picnic and The Pajama Game and so forth; she was very much in demand for years.

  She couldn’t add either.

  The two of us were on duty in the box office from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M. daily including Sunday. Salary: $17 a week. Eight of it paid the rent on the furnished room with breakfast thrown in, a dollar went for cigarettes (thirteen cents a pack in Maine that summer) and the remaining eight dollars bought seven lunches and seven dinners. The town of Harrison had one restaurant: Ken’s Koffee Kup. If you didn’t feel like eating there you could always starve. I have fond memories of Ken’s place. The cuisine may not have been very haute but you got a lot of food there for eight dollars a week.

  Deertrees ran on the package system. In successive weeks, we had Tallulah Bankhead, Ethel Barrymore, Grace George, each with her touring company and her ancient hit. Grace George, who had been a reigning star when my father was a chorus boy, had long since grown old enough and rich enough to spend her summers sensibly in Europe. Instead, she was touring the summer circuit in Kind Lady.

  She arrived with her company at nine o’clock of a rainy Sunday night, having spent the day on the road from New Jersey where she’d played the week before. She announced that she would run through the play then and there, so that she and her company could accustom themselves to the new stage before the Monday night opening. But as I said, it was raining. Grace George walked into the theatre and realized there was going to be a hitch in her plans.

  Deertrees was built entirely of pine logs, by somebody who didn’t realize that the sound of steady rain on pine walls and a pine roof is deafening. During a heavy downpour, the players’ voices were completely drowned out and the show simply stopped. When the rain let up—ten minutes or two hours later—the show resumed. So at nine o’clock that Sunday night, Grace George and her company sat down in the damp playhouse to wait out the storm. The crew and staff drifted in and we all sat around, listening to the racket and batting at the bugs which had hurried in out of the wet. At ten, we began to wonder when Miss George would give up and go to bed.

  At a little before eleven, the rain stopped. And Grace George went up onstage with her company, and instead of walking through the play as the old lady held prisoner by two strangers and their half-witted daughter, gave a harrowing, electrifying performance that froze us to our seats. The performance ended at 1:30 A.M., after which Grace George, seventy if she was a day, sashayed serenely off to bed, looking forward to eight performances in the next six days with another traveling Sunday at the end of the week and that’s what I mean by Theatremania.

  Her opening-night performance was fine, but no finer than the performance she’d given for the staff and crew at midnight the night before, so we toasted her at our regular opening-night gin picnic. Each week, every member of the staff and crew gave Flanagan thirty-five cents and he bought gin and pretzels with it, and after the opening we had a gin picnic on the playhouse lawn. One Monday night we drank two-hundred-proof hospital alcohol instead. One of the boys on the crew had a brother who was an intern at a local hospital and he filched us a bottle of hospital alcohol which we cut with Coca-Cola. You can get higher on that than you can get on Cutty Sark. You can get positively looping till after a while you can’t feel your arms or legs or anything.

  As I said, Maxine was spending the summer at a “try-out” playhouse. A letter from her described the daily Westport routine and at first glance it seemed to be the standard schedule for an acting company at any summer theatre where a new play was tried out every week.

  9:30 A.M.—Breakfast.

  10:00 A.M.—Everybody off to study his-or-her lines in next week’s play.

  11:30-4:30—Rehearsal of next week’s play.

  4:30-6:00—More studying of lines in next week’s play.

  6:00-7:00—A light supper.

  7:15—Arrive in dressing room to mend and press costumes and apply makeup.

  8:30-11:00 P.M.—On stage in this week’s play.

  11:30—Late supper and then home to bed at one in the morning, in order to be up at nine and start the whole thing over again.

  Wednesdays and Saturdays the program changed to include a matinee performance, and Sunday was entirely different: dress parade in the morning, dress rehearsal all afternoon and evening and far into the night.

  Perfectly normal summer schedule. But Maxine’s letter had been written in somebody’s car on the way to Mount Kisco, New York, thus revealing an extra feature of the Westport company’s schedule.

  At Mount Kisco, which was forty miles from Westport, there was a playhouse of the “package” kind; and that summer Westport and Mount Kisco traded plays. Every alternate week, Westport sent its new try-out play to Kisco for a week’s run, and Kisco sent its star “package” to Westport for a week. The “package” company, of course, just moved to Westport for t
he week. But the Westport company had to be in Westport during the day to rehearse next week’s play, so instead of moving to Kisco the company commuted nightly.

  So every second week, the six o’clock supper was sandwiches eaten in the car on the forty-five-minute drive to Kisco, and the eleven-thirty supper was sandwiches eaten in the car on the way back. It made a nice change for everybody.

  By comparison, Reta and I had an easy summer in the box office. We whiled away the long hours between customers by playing word games and paper-and-pencil games: Battleship and Hangman and Associations and Twenty Questions and What Is It? On non-matinee days each of us was allowed to take the box office alone for two afternoon hours while the other went swimming or rowing—or just stood outside and felt the sun and saw the sky, which all by itself was a change.

  Those afternoons gave us the strength to face the trauma of matinee days. The trauma was due to a crisis which arose absolutely incessantly.

  As regularly as Wednesday matinee time arrived, either (a) some camp descended on us, 200 campers and 15 counselors strong, demanding the tickets they’d sent us a check for—only we’d thought they were coming Saturday so we’d saved 215 Saturday seats and sold today’s seats to 215 other customers, and since the theatre only seated 300, there was no place to put the camp; or (b) we had 215 seats saved for the camp and the camp never showed up, having meant their check to cover 215 seats for next Wednesday.

  This crisis took a lot out of us every time, not to mention what it took out of Bela Blau. He was a very kind and good-humored man and he never once lost his temper with us, but after the first three or four matinee days he began to acquire a hunted look. By the end of July all the fight went out of him, and for the rest of the summer the three of us simply resigned ourselves to a succession of traumatic Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.

  Saturday was frantic altogether. Ticket sale in the morning, then the matinee crisis, then the evening ticket-sale rush, and at nine o’clock, when we closed the box office to the public, we had the entire week’s receipts to tot up and balance. Including subtracting the tax on each ticket. I suppose if you had any talent for math you could have totted up our week’s gross in half an hour, but it took Reta Shaw and me from nine till midnight, even with Bela helping. And when we were all through we were usually a dollar short.

  At midnight on Saturday, we went into the theatre for our voluntary job of keeping the backstage crew awake and on their toes all night as they struck last week’s set and mounted next week’s. Reta and I made coffee and played records for them till four or five in the morning while they hauled scenery under Flanagan’s supervision.

  I’ll tell you how he happened to explain Flanagan’s Law to me. It was on a horrendous night when the male star of the show arrived in his dressing room fifteen minutes before curtain time, roaring drunk. Flanagan came charging out to the box office to tell us the news and describe the uproar backstage. Since the play was a comedy, I said:

  “He may get through it, drunk as he is. The audience may think he’s just playing the part very broadly. Otherwise it’ll be a fiasco and we’ll have to return their money.”

  “Neither will happen,” said Flanagan, “because you predicted them. If you can predict it, it doesn’t happen. In the theatre, no matter what happens to you, it’s unexpected.”

  So of course I bet him one or the other would happen.

  Bela Blau held the curtain till nine, but the star was still too drunk to walk straight or talk distinctly, and it was impossible to keep the audience waiting longer. At nine, Reta and I closed the box office and hurried into the theatre and hung over the back rail and watched in suspense as the curtain rose and the two minor characters who opened the play began their ten-minute scene, at the end of which the star was to make his entrance.

  Five minutes after the play began, there was a reverberating clap of thunder followed by a torrent of rain on the pine roof and walls and the play came to an abrupt halt. The curtain fell, the houselights went up and the audience settled good-naturedly to wait out the storm.

  At a little after ten, the rain stopped—by which time the star had been dragged out into the rain and forced to swallow a vat of black coffee, and when the curtain rose again he was thoroughly sober.

  The play proceeded without a hitch and I’ve believed in Flanagan’s Law ever since.

  7. “NO LEGS NO JOKES NO CHANCE”

  IT BEGAN IN DECEMBER of 1942, the morning after the opening of a Guild flop called The Russian People. Despite the fact that we’d waited up till 4 A.M. for the notices, Joe and I were at work at 10 A.M. as usual, composing ads that would fool the public into thinking the show was a hit. Joe was the Theatre Guild press agent. I was his assistant.

  We’d only had four hours’ sleep but we were both wide awake. You couldn’t possibly get drowsy in the Theatre Guild press department, not in December. Our top-floor offices got whatever heat was left over from the casting department on the floor below, the executive offices on the floor below that, and the theatre itself, which was on the ground floor.

  The Russian People was a ponderous bore about the Nazis and the Russian front. But Joe, like the good press agent he was, had persuaded himself by opening night that it was the greatest thing since Hamlet and he took the notices hard. So we weren’t talking much that morning. We just glumly pulled quotes for the ads.

  Pulling quotes worked like this. If Brooks Atkinson, the Times drama critic, wrote: “For the fourth time this season, the Theatre Guild has wasted a superb production on a dull and empty play,” you pulled out the two good words and printed at the top of your ad:

  This sort of thing takes practice, but by the time The Russian People opened, we’d had a lot of practice. Not to beat about the bush, The Russian People was the Guild’s sixteenth straight flop. It was only the eighth for me; I’d only worked there a year and a half.

  I’d got the job when I came back from Deertrees. My agent phoned me one day and said Miss Helburn had read my new play and wanted to see me and the next afternoon I went to Terry’s office.

  “Dear,” she said, “I don’t like this play much. But I wanted to find out how you’re getting on.”

  I told her I was out of work and starving to death and Terry asked what jobs I’d had. When I mentioned Oscar Serlin’s press department and the press agent I’d worked for the season before she nodded.

  “Joe Heidt, our press agent, needs an assistant,” she said. “He’s on the fourth floor. Run up and tell him I said you need the job and you’re very bright.”

  So I took the elevator up to the fourth-floor attic and went down the hall past the auditor’s office to the press department. Lois, Joe’s secretary, was sitting in the outer office, surrounded by the usual press-department litter of newspapers, posters, glossy photos of stars and albums of press clippings. I asked if I might see Mr. Heidt and she told me to go on into the inner office.

  Joe was sitting with his feet up on the desk reading a newspaper. He had a round Irish face which peered at me above the newspaper inquiringly.

  “Miss Helburn sent me up,” I said. “She said you need an assistant.”

  I stopped, being too shy to sell myself, and waited for him to ask where I’d worked before and whether I knew how to interview stars and write publicity stories for newspapers. I didn’t realize the weight of the simple “Miss Helburn sent me up.”

  “Well, all right,” said Joe resignedly. “You want to put your typewriter over there?”

  And he peered into the outer office and pointed to a spot near Lois’s desk. Lois and I got the former assistant’s typewriter from the floor of a closet and put it over there, and I was assistant to the Theatre Guild press agent.

  Part of my job was to go to all Guild openings to help Joe with the Critics’ Seating List. And at my first Theatre Guild opening it was heaven to be standing between Joe and Johnny, the casting director, all of us leaning our elbows on the broad, plush-covered railing behind the last row of seats
as the last glittering couples in evening gowns and dinner jackets followed an usher down the center aisle.

  Our eyes swept the packed rows of first-night celebrities, a sea of carefully groomed heads that rolled away to the stage. Then the houselights dimmed and went out and in the black theatre the footlights gleamed like a golden ribbon along the edge of the dark stage and as the curtain slowly rose I think I stopped breathing.

  This heady excitement returned with each of the next three openings. Then it wore off. You couldn’t possibly assist at the string of disasters the Guild produced that season and the next, and retain your starry-eyed enthusiasm for opening nights.

  The first show I worked on was Hope for a Harvest, which flopped so badly that the stars, Fredric March and his wife, Florence Eldridge, took an ad in the newspapers the next day with a cartoon of a trapeze artist missing connections with his partner in mid-air and a caption reading, “Oops! Sorry!”

  Subsequent accidents included Papa Is All, which was Pennsylvania Dutch; Mr. Sycamore, in which Stuart Erwin became a tree in the second act (that is not a misprint and you did not misread it); and Yesterday’s Magic, in which Paul Muni, as an alcoholic actor, threw himself out the window in the last scene. Add a couple of ill-fated revivals of classics, a limp comedy called Without Love, which not even Katharine Hepburn had been able to prop up for long, and finally, on this morning in December, The Russian People.

  Looming up ahead, according to the brochure we’d sent to Guild subscribers in nineteen subscription cities, was a new American Folk Opera. Like Porgy and Bess, we assured everybody. It was to be based on an old Guild flop, and in true operatic tradition it was to have a murder committed onstage and a bona fide operatic ballet.

  Considering our track record on even the most standard fare, this projected opera had given everybody the jimjams. But it was to be the Guild’s most expensive venture in years, and the rumor that reached us that morning put an end to our worries about the Folk Opera. The rumor was that after sixteen flops, the Guild was bankrupt. Word spread from floor to floor that Terry and Lawrence were planning to sell the Guild Theatre and the Guild building to pay their debts. When the sale was complete, the Theatre Guild would cease to exist.