Underfoot in Show Business

by Helene Hanff

  People from the other departments wandered morosely up to our offices that day, to indulge in the usual morning-after castigation of the management. Our attic was ideal for this, since it was the one place in which Terry and Lawrence could be counted on not to set foot, especially in December. All day long, the wage slaves from casting, subscription, auditing, playreading came in to sing the usual litany freely and with feeling. This would not have happened (the litany began)

  —if Terry didn’t sit over at the hairdresser’s letting some floozy pick her plays for her;

  —if Lawrence didn’t lie on the casting conch plucking lofty, expensive ideas out of that goddamn mustache, with a vast unconcern for what the public would pay to see;

  —if, when the lofty ideas flopped, the two of them didn’t embark on monster economy drives which consisted of cutting down the number of towels rented weekly for each office and threatening to take the water cooler out of the casting department because (said Lawrence) too many strangers were drinking our water;

  —and if, year after year, they didn’t insist on selling season tickets in nineteen subscription cities for “six forthcoming Guild productions” when they had only four plays under option and disagreed violently about three of them.

  And so on and so forth. It was an old refrain with lots and lots of verses. But on this December day the tone was particularly bitter. Not just because December was a very cold month in which to be thrown out of work, but because for all their talk nobody who worked there was eager to see the Theatre Guild close down. Most of them had been there for years. They remembered the great days of the Lunts, the Shaw openings and the five-hour O’Neill drama which the stage doorman was said to have referred to innocently throughout its run as “Strange Intercourse.”

  Joe and I finished making up the ads, and then he went down to get Lawrence’s O.K. on them, and I went down to get Terry’s.

  She was in her office in an armchair, having tea. Her fluffy white hair was rinsed a deep, cerulean blue that season; her blunt nose and blunt chin were as cheerfully pugnacious as ever.

  “Well, dear!” she said when I came in. “We seem to be having a run of bad luck!”

  I gave her the ads and she read them carefully, glancing at the reviews to check each quote, then running her eye over all the reviews and murmuring:

  “I don’t know what the boys want!”

  Then she said the ads were fine and handed them back to me, and I started for the door. As I reached it she said, patting her hair casually:

  “I notice Lawrence was first on the program again. That’s twice in a row, isn’t it?”

  If the program for one show read “Produced by Lawrence Langner and Theresa Helburn,” the program for the next show had to read “Produced by Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner.”

  I said I was sure Mr. Langner hadn’t been first twice in a row because Joe was always careful to check the last program before we made up the new one.

  “All right,” she said agreeably. “Just remind Joe: I’m first on the new one.”

  My gloom evaporated. The Russian People hadn’t been the one-flop-too-many after all. We were going to do another one.

  We read about it the next day in one of the gossip columns. Joe came in with the afternoon dailies and said resignedly:

  “Terry scooped her own press department again.”

  She was always scooping us. She never told us anything about a new production for fear we’d tell somebody. (In the theatre, everything is a secret.) Then she’d go and confide in some columnist. It appeared that between acts of The Russian People on opening night, she’d told a columnist—in strictest confidence—that the composer and librettist had finished the new Guild opera and that it was to be called Away We Go.

  Down the hall in his cage, Jack, the auditor, floating on a sea of unpaid bills, shouted at anybody who went past:

  “What do they think they’re producing an opera with? What’re they using for money?”

  and the question was indeed pertinent. During the next few weeks we heard they were holding backers’ auditions, and that they had the promise of a third of the money needed, from Broadway’s biggest single backer, though there were several ifs attached to his promise.

  The New Year set in, The Russian People closed and the management plunged on with Away We Go. By the end of January, Joe and I had all the names connected with it.

  It wasn’t your normal operatic cast. The male lead was to be sung by a young man who’d played the juvenile in Yesterday’s Magic and the singing comedienne was the ingénue from Papa Is All. Both were unknown, of course. The leading comic was very well known in the Yiddish Art Theatre but hadn’t done much in English.

  The score had been composed by the leftover halves of two teams: an operetta lyricist whose composer partner had just died, and a musical-comedy composer whose lyricist partner had died. Add a Russian ballerina and an Armenian director from Hollywood, and our American Folk Opera was all set.

  During February, people from other floors drifted into our office with progress reports. This was, they informed us, the damnedest musical anybody’d ever hatched for a sophisticated Broadway audience. It was so pure you could stage it at a church social. It opened with a middle-aged farm woman sitting alone on a bare stage churning butter, and from then on it got cleaner. They did not feel a long sequence of arty dancing was likely to improve matters on the farm.

  The purity complained of was obvious on the day of the dress parade. As the girls walked across the stage in their period farm dresses, not an ankle or an upper arm was visible. I don’t even remember seeing a neck. As I left the theatre, I heard Lawrence suggest to the costumer that the dresses might be cut a little lower here and there without spoiling the authenticity.

  The show was to open in New Haven early in March and Joe went up a few days before the opening to “beat the drum” for it. He was very worried. Not about the show. Joe admitted frankly that there was still some work to be done on it, but he believed that by the time it opened in New York it would be the greatest show since Hamlet. What worried him was that some drama editor, or some columnist’s assistant like Winchell’s Rose, would sneak up to New Haven and see the show before it was Ready. As of now, Joe did not feel it was Ready.

  (It was always a producer’s worry that somebody in a newspaper’s drama department would sneak out of town to a pre-Broadway try-out and write a report that would kill the show before it ever opened. But no drama department editor scared them half as much as Winchell’s Rose. Walter Winchell’s column appeared in cities across the country, including all the Guild’s subscription cities, and was immensely influential. If Winchell’s Rose—she must have had a last name but I never heard her called anything but Winchell’s Rose—snuck out of town to see the try-out, the effect might be devastating.)

  Away We Go opened in New Haven to mild but approving notices. Pleasant, pretty musical, they said; which cheered us. But about mid-afternoon, a newspaper reporter phoned and left word for Joe to call him as soon as he got back from New Haven. He said he had an important item for Joe; he didn’t sound as if it were anything pleasant.

  Joe came back to town, full of enthusiasm. The show, he assured us, was great. It had a few weak spots but they’d all be strengthened in Boston. Some wiseacre from an afternoon daily had snuck up from New York and had said bluntly the show was corn and wouldn’t last a week on Broadway. But, said Joe, Terry and Lawrence were not worried. They knew they had a hit.

  Lois gave him the reporter’s message and Joe returned the call. He listened for a few minutes, thanked the reporter and hung up. Then he told us the news. According to the reporter, Winchell’s Rose had gone to New Haven and seen the show and had wired Winchell her report on it. The wire had read:

  “NO LEGS NO JOKES NO CHANCE.”

  Winchell had shown the wire to the backer who had promised a third of the financing; and as a result, the backer was pulling his money out of the show.

  Joe
called Terry and Lawrence in New Haven. They’d heard about the telegram. Joe didn’t mention the backer and neither did they. How they expected to finance the Broadway opening we didn’t know, but when Joe left for Boston the show was still scheduled to open there the following Monday and in New York two weeks later. The show opened in Boston to fair notices—not nearly as good as those Boston had given some of our other flops and certainly not notices you could get last-minute financing on. So we still didn’t know how the show was to open in New York till Jack tossed us the news casually with our mail the next morning: Terry and Lawrence had sold the Guild Theatre and building to a radio network. Away We Go would open on March 31, as scheduled.

  Joe phoned from Boston with instructions about the opening-night press release to be sent to 10,000 Guild subscribers. He said that the whole second act had been thrown out, and that the company was working round the clock on a new second act. With a new second act, Joe felt, it would really be a great show.

  For the next few days, Lois and I were busy addressing envelopes and grinding out 10,000 copies of the press release on the mimeograph machine to tell the world about the new American Folk Opera, Away We Go. We had about 8,000 mimeographed when Joe came back from Boston and broke the news to us that we’d have to throw them all away and start over. There had been a title change.

  Nobody, it seemed, liked the title Away We Go. The composer had wanted to change it to Yessirree, but Joe was thankful to report he’d been talked out of it. The title finally agreed upon—thanks largely to Armina Marshall, Lawrence’s wife, who came from out that way—was Oklahoma.

  It sounds fine to you; you’re used to it. But do me a favor and imagine you’re working in a theatre and somebody tells you your new musical is to be called “New Jersey.” Or “Maine.” To us, “Oklahoma” remained the name of a state, even after we’d mimeographed 10,000 new releases and despite the fact that “Oklahoma” appeared three times on each one.

  We had folded several hundred of them when the call came from Boston. Joe picked up the phone and we heard him say, “Yes, Terry,” and “All right, dear,” and then he hung up. And then he looked at us, in the dazed way people who worked at the Guild frequently looked at each other.

  “They want,” he said in a faraway voice, “an exclamation point after ‘Oklahoma.’”

  Which is how it happened that, far into the night, Lois and I, bundled in our winter coats, sat in the outer office putting 30,000 exclamation points on 10,000 press releases, while Joe, in the inner office, bundled in his overcoat, phoned all over town hunting down and waking up various printing firms and sign painters. We were bundled in our coats because the heat had been turned off by an economy-minded management now happily engaged in spending several thousand dollars to alter houseboards, playbills, ads, three-sheet posters and souvenir booklets, to put an exclamation point after “Oklahoma.”

  We were not sold out for the opening, New York subscribers having dwindled to a handful after sixteen flops. Nor did we get any help from the weather. When I woke on the morning of March 31, with a cold, it was snowing.

  By six that evening, the snow had turned to sleet and my cold included a cough. As I left the office to go home and climb into a drafty evening dress, Joe took pity on me.

  “I don’t need you there, dear,” he said. “Don’t come unless you feel like it.”

  I felt guilty about not going as I ate a quick dinner in a cafeteria. But by the time I’d fought my way home through the sleet guilt had given way to self-preservation. I undressed and crawled thankfully into bed. In bed, I reached for the wet newspaper I’d brought home and opened it to the theatre page. Our big opening-night ad leaped out at me: “Oklahoma!”

  Slowly, surely, with that foggy bewilderment you were bound to feel sooner or later if you worked at the Theatre Guild long enough, I saw that Terry and Lawrence were right. About the exclamation point.

  I did not allow myself to speculate on the insane possibility that they might also be right about such brainwaves as a clean, corn-fed musical with no legs and no jokes and with a score by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who’d never collaborated before; a full-blown ballet by an unknown young choreographer named Agnes de Mille; and a cast of unknowns, including Celeste Holm, the ingénue from Papa Is All.

  I switched off the lamp, thinking how typical it was of both this epic and the Guild that the notices would appear on the morning of April Fool’s Day. I coughed, pulled up the blankets and, as I drifted off to sleep, said a silent Good Luck to Alfred Drake, the juvenile from Yesterday’s Magic, who was at that moment strolling out onto the stage of the St. James Theatre, singing:

  “Oh, what a beautiful morning!”

  8. LARGE FURNISHED REAR WITH KITCHEN PRIVILEGES

  WHEN A YOUNG WRITER SETS OUT for New York to crash the theatre, she is prepared to starve in a garret for a while. She has read the solemn pronouncement of a turn-of-the-century writer named Richard Harding Davis, that “a man who can afford a hall bedroom in New York City is better off than he would be if he owned 160 acres of prairie.” She has seen La Bohéme and wept as Rodolfo gallantly tossed his poems into the fire to warm his garret on Christmas Eve. And she has seen Stage Door—both Broadway and film versions—describing life at the Rehearsal Club, a female “residence club” where young actresses bolster each other’s morale in charming dormitory rooms. She has gathered from all of these testimonials that starving in a garret is a rich, purifying experience, and she wants it. And she gets it.

  And of course, after she gets it, it dawns on her that when Richard Harding Davis wrote that a New York hall bedroom was better than 160 acres of prairie he was no longer living in a New York hall bedroom, having grown rich enough to afford a town house and nostalgia; she types her play huddled in blankets and sourly informs Rodolfo he should be damn glad he’s got a fireplace to throw his poems into; and she thinks that somebody in Stage Door might have mentioned that the Rehearsal Club has a special New York electrical system known as DC—direct current—which means that the day she moves in she’s going to blow her radio, her iron, and all the building’s fuses, and that while the fuses can be fixed, her radio and iron can’t, which in turn means that till next Christmas she’s going to have to do without a radio, press her skirts under the mattress, and iron her scarves, blouses and handkerchiefs by pasting them soaking wet to a mirror.

  My first garret—not counting the Rehearsal Club, which took me in temporarily as a favor to Terry and kept me just long enough to ruin my appliances—was one of those hall bedrooms Richard Harding Davis was so crazy about. This was way back in my fellowship year. I rented a hall bedroom on the fifth floor of a brownstone walk-up rooming house on West Sixty-ninth Street. The upper West Side was lined with four-and five-story brownstone houses built in the 1880s as homes for the well-to-do. Fifty or sixty years later the houses were moldering, vermin-ridden rooming houses. Ours had a cavernous entrance hall and a great, gloomy, unlit staircase, the steps adorned with dirty shreds of ancient carpeting and creaking eerily all the way up—and if you passed a dead rat on the stairs you were just very thankful he was dead.

  I used to creak my way up four flights each night, grope down the musty hall to the third room on the left, unlock the door, feel for the string attached to the twenty-five-watt bulb overhead and ask myself why I’d left Philadelphia.

  My room looked out on a stone wall and I couldn’t see to comb my hair, let alone type my play, so I went out and bought a seventy-five-watt bulb and climbed on a chair and several of my best books to install it. But when I came home that night, the seventy-five-watter was gone and the twenty-five-watter was back. Forced to take the landlady’s hint about saving electricity, I told myself Shakespeare probably never used more than twenty-five candles at a time either.

  The room had a chair, a dresser and a bed. Some of the rooms had closets, but mine, being a seven-dollar-a-week room, had nails driven into the wall for clothes.

  I stood this hole for
six weeks and moved out as a result of two stimulating experiences during the sixth week. The first happened on an unusually warm October night. There was no air in the room and I was lying awake, listening to the tubercular coughing of a man across the courtyard, when there was a knock on my door. Since I knew nobody in New York but the ten men and one woman in the seminar with me, none of whom was likely to knock on my door at 1 A.M., I decided it must be a telegram. I climbed out of bed, put on my bathrobe and opened the door. A large, beefy middle-aged man stood staring at me. He gazed from the curlers in my hair down past my blue-and-white-striped pajama-and-bathrobe set, to my bare feet.

  “You Dolly?” he inquired.

  “I’m afraid you have the wrong room number,” I said. He looked me over carefully again.

  “You open for business?” he asked.

  It took me a few seconds to understand him. Then I slammed the door, locked it, pushed the overstuffed chair in front of it, armed myself with a scissors and stood shaking, waiting for him to batter the door down. I knew the difference between rape and prostitution, but at one in the morning in that rooming-house room I wasn’t sure he did.

  In a minute or two I heard his footsteps down the hall and a knock on another door. I heard the door open; then it closed and there was silence. I climbed back into bed and lay staring watchfully at the barricaded door till I fell asleep.

  Next morning I woke up with hives. The hives got worse all week. On Saturday night I woke about 3 A.M. to find a wild thunderstorm in progress and the wind blowing the rain in on my bed. I got up, switched on the light and began to strip the wet top sheet off the bed. As I did so, two shiny round black objects scurried across the bottom sheet and they weren’t hives.