Underfoot in Show Business

by Helene Hanff

  Open to page one of a long novel you don’t want to read, and run your eye down the left-hand side of the page, noting the first sentence in each paragraph. Say a paragraph begins:

  “The house was set well back, in. . .”

  Skip the whole paragraph; it’s going to describe the house and grounds and you’re not reading the book for the architecture. Run your eye on down to the paragraph beginning:

  “Her eyes were a pale watery blue. Her skin, which had once. . .” Skip that paragraph too; she’s getting old and unattractive. You’ve learned this in a sentence-and-a-half, why read twelve?

  Skip the paragraph beginning:

  “He strode toward the moors. In the darkening light, the moors. . .” unless you’re just crazy about moors.

  Keep running your eye down past all such paragraphs until you come to a paragraph in which something happens. Say you come to a murder or a rape on page 250. You can count on the author spending at least thirty pages on this event. The facts will be set forth on pages 250–251, the outcome will be found on pages 279–280. Skip the pages in between; the studio that hired you only wants the facts and you only want to get to bed before dawn.

  When reading plays, skip the parentheses.

  “(Large, well-appointed living room. At left.. .)” It goes on for ten or twenty lines and you’ve read the only one the set designer will pay any attention to.

  “(JANE enters through French windows. SHE is a tall, rather. . .)” She’s tall unless the director happens to cast a short actress for the part.

  After the first scene, the parentheses will include all the emotions the playwright couldn’t manage to convey in the dialogue. It’s easier, for instance, to write “(angrily)” than it is to write an angry line. Skip all those, too; the audience won’t see them and every actor and actress I ever knew found them distracting and blacked them out before learning the part.

  Of course, when we got a new Steinbeck or Hemingway novel, or a Williams or Miller play, we didn’t write a two-page summary, we wrote a ten-to-twenty-page synopsis, including all the minor characters and large hunks of dialogue; but long synopses paid a dollar a page so they were worth the time they took.

  Every afternoon at four o’clock, the outside readers took their completed assignments down to the Broadway theatre district (where most studios had their offices) and up to the Monograph story department, which occupied half a floor in an office building and was just jumping with personnel.

  There was the story editor, in charge of novels; the play editor, in charge of plays; their assistant, who assigned work to the readers; Jean, in charge of cataloguing and returning all material submitted; Lilian, who sent copies of all readers’ reports to Monograph’s Hollywood office; and Evelyn, who got out a news bulletin on what everybody else was doing. Not forgetting two private secretaries, an at-large stenographer and Miriam, the file clerk. And way down at the end of a hall, in a private dungeon of their own, were the inside readers who read all day long. We never saw them; they never came out.

  The outside readers sat in a row on a bench outside the assistant’s office, each of us waiting our turn to go in. All of us were starving writers except Dolly. And my God, how we resented Dolly.

  Dolly was a fashionable young matron who came to Monograph looking and behaving as if she were at a glamorous cocktail party. Her husband was a successful businessman and Dolly didn’t need the reading job. She read for fun—she told us with entire innocence that she thought reading was “a fun job.” And wouldn’t you know Dolly’s specialty was the easiest and best-paid of all reading work? She read the empty little romances in women’s magazines—Ladies’ Home Journal, Woman’s Home Companion, Good Housekeeping—which in those days published only creampuff fiction. Six stories to a magazine, Dolly got $2 per story and only had to write one-paragraph summaries on little file cards.

  Dolly would sit on that bench with a fur stole across her lap and say chattily to all us hungry writers:

  “I didn’t feel like taking any work last night. But yesterday morning I saw a pair of alligator pumps at Saks and I looked at the price tag and it was only two magazines! So when they asked if I wanted any work last night I said to myself: ‘Dolly, you take it! You can get those alligator shoes!’ So I took it.”

  Out of our mouths, you understand, she took it. She was a very pleasant woman, friendly and sociable; but I’d sit on that bench watching one of her two-magazine alligator pumps dangle from a nylon toe—I wore pants to Monograph myself because with pants you could wear thirty-five-cent ankle socks instead of $1.35 nylons—and wish I could hate her.

  But the fact that she didn’t need the job was only (a). (b) Dolly wasn’t a writer. Not being a writer, she used to utter the most loathsome of all amateur literary clichés. She’d leaf through the Ladies’ Home Journal she’d just read and she’d say:

  “I could write better stories than these.”

  If she said it once she said it three times a week.

  Understand, none of us had a high opinion of women’s magazine fiction. But being writers, we knew that any kind of specialized writing demanded technical skill, at the very least. What infuriated us was that Dolly didn’t know how fiendishly difficult it was to write anything, especially anything salable. So every time she said: “I could write better stories than these,” there’d be a highly charged pause and I’d wonder if this was the day one of the male readers was finally going to go berserk and stomp her to death.

  The other readers were the standard types to be found in every studio reading department. If standard is the word.

  There was middle-aged Miss Manheimer, who was large and stout and addicted to garden hats with bunches of fruit on them and lived with her mother. There was Jason, a failed actor who had decided to be a playwright instead. And there was Wide-Margin Wirtz, who was bald and fat and the reading department thief.

  Readers were permitted to do a long synopsis (which paid ten to twenty dollars) whenever they considered a manuscript warranted it. Wide-Margin thought everything he read warranted it. But he didn’t exactly write a ten-page synopsis. What he did was set three-inch margins at both ends of the typewriter so that his synopsis ran like a wide ribbon down the center of the paper, stretching two or three pages of copy to ten. Now and then the editors would complain and Wide-Margin would sulk along on six-dollar summaries until the fuss died down. Then he’d start again. But that’s not what I meant by “thief.”

  I ran out of paper in the middle of a long synopsis one morning and since Wide-Margin lived closer to me than any of the other readers I phoned to ask him if he had any extra “setups”—paper with carbon attached—and he said he had plenty so I went over to his apartment to get them. He was typing when I got there, and he waved toward a closet and said:

  “Help yourself.”

  I opened the closet door and what met my eyes was a writer’s dream of Christmas morning. On shelves from floor to ceiling were reams of Monograph typing paper and setups, boxes of carbon paper, typewriter ribbons, pens, pencils, rubber bands, paper clips and two stapling machines. Monograph eventually caught him raiding the supply room and fired him and he moved on to another studio.

  But our prize character was Winston Atterbury. Winston was Monograph’s disappearing reader.

  Every studio had for its sins one reader to whom it gave the galleys of, say, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. That is, it was always a big book, six or seven hundred pages long, it was always a widely heralded work by an important writer, it was still in printer’s galleys and no other studio had yet seen it. The galleys had been stolen from the publisher’s office by bribing a stenographer or office boy, and rushed to the studio late on a Friday afternoon. The reader was summoned, taken into the story editor’s private office, told about the property and exhorted to read the book over the weekend taking copious notes, do a long synopsis later for double money, but rush the galleys back to Monograph early Monday morning so they could be whipped over to the publ
isher’s office before they were missed. The reader would nod eagerly, hurry home with the galleys and disappear from the face of the earth for two weeks.

  That’s a disappearing reader. And I have to say that during four or five years of reading for a living, almost every reader was tempted to disappear at least once. Including me.

  I’ve never liked novels and there were weeks when I had to read one a night for Monograph. But I was usually spared what I regarded as the ultimate professional-reading horror: the seven-hundred-page, three-generation family saga that always had more subplots than a soap opera and more characters than Dickens, and forced you to make pages and pages of notes. Anything worse was simply beyond my imagination.

  Well, on the blackest Friday I ever want to see, I was summoned to Monograph and handed three outsized paperback volumes of an English book which was about to be published here. I was to read all three volumes over the weekend, and since each volume was double the length of the usual novel I was invited to charge double money for each. I hurried home with the three volumes and after dinner began to read Volume I. And if Monograph’s office had been open at that hour, I’d have phoned and quit my job.

  What I had to read, during that nightmare weekend—taking notes on all place names, characters’ names and events therein—was fifteen hundred stupefying pages of the sticky mythology of J. R. R. Tolkein. (I hope I’m spelling his name wrong.) I remember opening one volume to a first line which read

  “Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday....”

  and phoning several friends to say good-bye because suicide seemed so obviously preferable to five hundred more pages of that.

  I also remember the bill I turned in:

  They paid it. I think they knew how close I’d come to disappearing; and one disappearing reader per season was all any studio could cope with. We had three of them during the years I was at Monograph. Each had his own technique for evading studio attempts to find him during his disappearance. First there was Howie, who hid out in the flophouse movie theatres lining Forty-second Street; then there was Elwood, who got friends in Chicago or Pittsburgh to send bogus telegrams to the studio reading CALLED AWAY BY DEATH IN FAMILY GALLEYS WITH LANDLADY ELWOOD, which Monograph appreciated because they could send somebody up to the Bronx to get the galleys back. Lastly, there was Winston Atterbury.

  Winston had bleached blond curls with bleached blond sideburns and he was a very dapper dresser, he favored pearl-grey ties to match his pearl-grey suede shoes. As long as I knew him he was working on a novel about plantation days in the Old South. We’d assumed he was born Willie Smith or Joe Potts and renamed himself Winston Atterbury, but during his disappearance his mother phoned from Omaha to ask if Monograph knew “where my son is,” and damned if she wasn’t Mrs. Atterbury.

  Winston was a professional pauper. Every day, he borrowed six cents from Miriam, the file clerk. Miriam was a willowy, dark-haired girl with great sympathetic brown eyes and a heart that melted and bled for Monograph’s underpaid outside readers. Her voice shook when she spoke of us because we had no union and no minimum wage and no unemployment insurance and no consideration from Monograph and we were all so nice and so talented and so pathetic.

  So naturally it was Miriam Winston turned to when he first decided to borrow six cents. She listened with brimming eyes as he explained he only had nine cents and if he couldn’t borrow six he’d have to walk to Washington Heights, where his rooming house was; it took a bus and a subway to get there.

  Miriam begged him, she entreated him, to take at least a quarter. But no, six cents was all he would take. After that, Miriam lent him six or eight cents a day—he varied the amount but it never went above nine—and on Friday, payday, he paid her back. Then one Friday I walked into the office in time to hear Miriam tell Winston in a low, passionate voice that she would absolutely not take his thirty-one cents, he was to use it toward a good big lamb chop.

  “Why didn’t you take it?” I asked her when Winston had gone. “He just got paid and we’ve had a good week.”

  Miriam turned on me, trembling with compassionate fury.

  “Would you like to know,” she demanded, quivering, “what that boy did for his dinner last night?”

  “What did he do for his dinner last night?” I asked obligingly.

  “He ate cat food!” said Miriam and burst into tears.

  I couldn’t say so to the mother of us all, but Winston’s poverty stories never inspired much confidence in me. They were too interesting by half.

  He was there quite a while before we discovered Winston was a disappearer. He disappeared with The Wall by John Hersey.

  The Wall was not only the hottest advance property of the year, it was also the longest. It came into the office in three hundred and thirty galleys, each galley nine feet long if it was an inch. Winston was summoned into the inner office late on a Friday afternoon and told to take copious notes on the book over the weekend and do a long synopsis at his leisure, just so he got the galleys back early Monday morning. Winston nodded eagerly, hurried home to Washington Heights and disappeared.

  When he didn’t show Monday morning, Monograph phoned the stationery store on the corner next to his rooming house (the rooming house had no phone) and asked the owner to call Winston to the phone. The owner sent somebody up to Winston’s room but Winston wasn’t there. All morning, the story editor’s secretary kept on phoning without success. In the afternoon she sent Winston a telegram.

  On Tuesday, two secretaries were assigned the job of locating Winston. Every hour they phoned the stationery store and got somebody to run up and knock on Winston’s door and all day long he wasn’t home. On Wednesday, Jason, one of the other readers, offered to go up to Washington Heights and ask the landlady to let him into Winston’s room so he could get The Wall out of it. Off Jason went to Washington Heights and the landlady let him into Winston’s room. The Wall wasn’t there. Wherever he’d gone, Winston had taken the longest galleys of the decade with him.

  Which is probably what caused the secretary who knew him best to start phoning the bars in Winston’s neighborhood. He’d once told her that “like writers in Paris,” he enjoyed reading and writing “in the local cafés.” She phoned the bar on the opposite corner from the stationery store, which Winston had said was his favorite. When the proprietor of the bar said he’d never heard of Winston Atterbury, the two secretaries got the phone book and looked up all the Washington Heights bars and began phoning each in turn. No Winston. Finally, late on Thursday afternoon, one of them phoned the bar on the corner again.

  “I told you before, lady, I never heard of the guy!” said the bartender.

  “Now don’t tell me that!” snapped the secretary, whose nerves were pretty frayed by then. “He lives on your block and we’re told he’s in your bar regularly.”

  “I don’t know him by name,” said the bartender. “If you want to tell me what he looks like, maybe I seen him.”

  “He’s tall, with blond hair and sideburns,” said the secretary, “and he dresses—”

  “Oh, you mean Douglas!” said the bartender. “Just a second. Hey, Douglas! Lady on the phone for you!”

  So Winston-alias-Douglas got on the phone and said, Hello, there! How were we all?...The what?...Oh, The Wall! Sure, he had it. Had it right there with him. Hadn’t got too far into it yet, he’d been busy with his own writing, but it looked to be a pretty fair book, he thought. . .

  That was the last we saw of Winston. He moved on to another studio before Monograph had a chance to fire him.

  In a business which depended on the Winston Atterburys and Wide-Margin Wirtzes, the turnover was fairly heavy. Along with whose who were fired, there was the occasional reader who blossomed into a successful writer (Ayn Rand was once an outside reader) and there was the occasional Dolly who didn’t need the job and quit when she got bored with it.

  We missed Dolly after she left. As I said, she
was a sociable, friendly soul and much as we resented her, we all liked her. Jason, who inherited her specialty, mentioned her affectionately one afternoon as he came out of the story editor’s office with the new Ladies’ Home Journal.

  “Poor old Dolly,” he said, “I wonder if she misses—” And then he stopped cold.

  There on the cover of the Ladies’ Home Journal, streaming across the bottom like a banner, was Dolly’s name and the announcement that a story by this gifted new Journal writer would be found within.

  Dolly’d not only thought she could write better stories than those: she’d gone home and done it.

  And I mean to tell you the Monograph Studio outside reading department was fit to be TIED.

  10. OWL AND PIGLET ON BROADWAY

  ALL I DID was answer a call from Warner Brothers’ story department and wander over to Warner’s prepared to bootleg a little extra reading—and the sky fell on me.

  The state of mind known as “stagestruck” has never been confined to the hopeful young who think they have a creative or performing talent. There are hundreds of men and women who lay no claim to such talents, but who have wangled permanent niches for themselves in the theatre purely because they’re incurably stagestruck.

  First are the theatrical agents, whose skill at selling and negotiating might have made them richer—and would certainly have given them more security—in any of a dozen mundane industries.

  Then there are the backers. They range from the pants manufacturer—whose few thousand dollars invested in a half-million-dollar production gives him the illusion of being In The Theatre—to Howard Cullman, former chairman of the New York Port Authority, who throughout an impressive business career has invested most of his money in Broadway plays.

  Third are the theatrical lawyers who take only theatre people as clients, invest their legal fees in their clients’ productions and attend preproduction conferences and auditions as assiduously as the producers they wish they were and sometimes become.