Underfoot in Show Business

by Helene Hanff

  “I called him and he said a new show was getting ready to try out in Washington, they needed a last-minute replacement for the ingénue, and I should fly down to Washington Monday morning. I flew down and gave my usual superb audition and Bobby, the director, said: ‘Fine, dear. We open Friday, take the script home and study it and come back after lunch and we’ll get to work.’

  “So I got a hotel room and locked myself in with the script and read the first act where I didn’t have much to do, and then I read the second act where I had a big scene, and in the middle of the big scene it said in the script: ‘She drapes herself over the piano and sings.’ Sings? Maxine Stuart sings??

  “So when I went to the theatre I said to Bobby: ‘Lissen, I think you better hear me sing,’ and he said: ‘Sure, baby, I want to, now let’s get to work.’ And we rehearsed the first act. On Tuesday morning we started the second act, and we got to where I was supposed to drape myself over the piano and sing ‘He Ain’t Got Rhythm’ and Bobby called out: ‘We’ll get you the sheet music later. Skip the song for now.’

  “Wednesday they gave me the sheet music which I couldn’t read. On my dinner hour I went around to a music store and played a record of ‘He Ain’t Got Rhythm’ and learned the tune in my fashion. But on Thursday, when dress rehearsal started, I still hadn’t sung for anybody so I went over to Bobby and said: ‘Lissen, I think you better hear me sing,’ and he said: ‘Just speak the words today; save your voice for the opening.’

  “On opening night, Don, who plays the piano in the scene, stopped by my dressing room and said: ‘How did the key sound to you? Can you manage that A all right?’ And I said: ‘Well, I can certainly try!’ I felt so educated, knowing there was an A in it.

  “The first act went by like a breeze, and in the second act I made my entrance in my black-lace-over-pink-net-with-flounce evening gown and on cue, Don started to play and I draped myself over the top of the piano and began to sing ‘He Ain’t Got Rhythm’ in my one note. I sang about four bars—making a great important message out of the words so nobody’d notice there wasn’t much tune—when I heard the piano getting very loud. I pushed my resonance all the way up and gave it my full projection and I still couldn’t top the piano. And I thought: ‘That scene-hog has got to be made to take his foot off the pedal. Nobody can hear me.’ Well, I finished triumphantly—by which I mean the note I finished on was very close to the note the piano finished on—and I said to myself: ‘You see? There’s nothing to it.’

  “After the show, we were all standing around on stage waiting for the management’s criticisms and cuts and so forth, and Bobby came over and put his arm around me and said: ‘Maxine, honey, you’re great in the part, now-lemme-ask-you-something. How are you at pantomime?’ So of course I said I was great at that, too, and Bobby said: ‘Fine, baby, fine, now why don’t we get a record of some blues singer singing “He Ain’t Got Rhythm” and you can just drape over the piano and pantomime the words and you won’t have to bother singing.’

  “The show got appalling notices so it’s closing after Washington, and I’ll be home in two weeks. Trust you’ll be the same. Arty studios in New England are all very well for the summer but it’ll be coming on Fall soon and you should be just panting to get back to the big wide world of unemployment and telephones and trucks clanking down Second Avenue.”

  And just as suddenly as that, I was panting to get back to it.

  12. A ROUND TRIP THROUGH THE ANNEX OR SARAH WANTS TO DO SOMETHING GREEK AND OTHER STORIES

  ON A SPRING DAY in 1952, a worried young dentist named Joey lifted his melting brown eyes from my X rays to me and said sadly:

  “It’s staggering. There’s no room left for any more fillings.” Like George Washington, I had bad teeth.

  I was faced, he said, with a choice: I could have all my teeth capped, for roughly $2,500; or I could have all my teeth out and replaced with false ones, for roughly $2,500.

  Since I was earning $50 a week at Monograph and had $92 in the bank, I went home and suggested to the Lord that this was an ideal moment for a miracle. What I had in mind, of course, was that if He really felt like it, the Lord could get one of my plays produced on Broadway and have it run long enough to make me $2,500. What the Lord had in mind, of course, was Flanagan’s Law.

  Literally ten minutes after I discussed miracles with my Creator, the telephone rang and Gene Burr said Hi, how was I, and I said Fine, where was he? I knew he’d left Jake Wilk’s office at Warner’s but I didn’t know where he’d gone.

  “That’s what I’m calling about,” said Gene. “How would you like to write for television?”

  Television was barely four years old and I knew nothing whatever about it. Before I could say this, Gene added carelessly:

  “It’s only two bills.”

  “Two what?” I asked.

  “Two hundred dollars for a half-hour script.”

  Two hundred dollars would buy two porcelain tooth-jackets. If I wrote a script a month for a year, Joey could live on the television money and I could live on the Monograph money.

  “You’re sent from Heaven,” I told Gene Burr. “What show is it?”

  “The Adventures of Ellery Queen,” he said. “It’s a low-budget show on a little network called DuMont. I’m the story editor. Come on down to my office tomorrow afternoon and we’ll talk.”

  The next afternoon, driven every inch of the way by the simple desire to have teeth, I became a writer of television murders.

  A few weeks later, Maxine dropped in one morning for a cup of coffee. After two seasons of unemployment she was grimly pleased to report that she was working at last. She could be seen nightly, she informed me, on all the better TV channels.

  “What show are you in?” I asked.

  “I am not in a show. I do a solo act,” said Maxine acidly. “I am the Blue Cheer girl.” Blue Cheer, she explained to me, was a detergent. She was selling it on television.

  This is not just how Maxine and I got into television in the fifties, it’s how everybody got into television in the fifties. Unable to get rid of us any other way, the theatre had built an Annex and flogged us into it.

  (Gene Burr, who had wanted to be a Broadway producer and whose Ellery Queen writers were all failed playwrights, put it more brutally but defined it for all of us with deadly precision. “Television,” he said, “is the asshole of the theatre.”)

  The budget for Ellery Queen was so small that the cast of each script was limited to five characters. Since two of them had to be Ellery and his father, it left you only three characters for the murder plot: the character who got murdered (known as the corpse) and two suspects, one innocent and one guilty. But in addition to the five full parts, we were allowed two “five-liners”—actors who, for the pittance they were paid, were permitted by Actors’ Equity to speak five lines and no more. These five-liners were very useful to the writer; you kept them standing around looking silent and villainous.

  I myself brought a unique extra dimension to Ellery’s adventures. Until I came on the scene, the show’s scripts had been evenly divided between low-brow and middle-brow murders. In prizefight and racetrack murders, the suspects and corpses spoke uneducated English and were therefore low-brow, while murders involving politicians or businessmen were middle-brow. What the show lacked was a group of distinctly high-brow murders in which the suspects and corpses were all cultured. That was my contribution. I became Ellery Queen’s special writer of arty murders. I wrote six: murder in the art gallery, murder at the opera, murder in the concert hall, murder at the Shakespeare festival and two murders at the ballet. And we were just getting round to the rare-book business when the show went off the air.

  Nobody outside the industry would have believed the physical restrictions of live television. Ellery Queen was televised in a large rehearsal hall, a bare room blocked off into the three separate stage sets which were all the budget allowed. Well, in “Murder at the Opera,” if Ellery played one scene in an opera star’s dres
sing room and the next scene in his own living room, you couldn’t give him the last few lines in the dressing-room scene or the first few lines in the living-room scene because he needed ten seconds off-camera to walk from the dressing-room set to the living-room set. And if he wore white tie and tails in the opera scene, you put him in his living room in the next scene, so that during his ten-second walk he could slip a long dressing gown over his evening clothes. I mean, you didn’t take him from the opera scene and put him on a beach in the next scene because there was never time for costume changes, there was only time to slip one costume over another.

  But the technical restrictions were easy to learn. What made writing this nonsense the hardest work I’d ever done was the appalling economy imposed by the clock and the small budget. Out of five characters and two five-liners, you had to create the illusion of an entire opera company or a full symphony orchestra. And the economy of background was nothing .compared with the economy of words demanded by the clock, which ordered you to tell a complete story in twenty-six minutes. You were constantly forced to compress eight or ten rambling lines of dialogue into one succinct one—to say nothing of having to create a believable character in five lines.

  The result was that in a year of grinding out shabby murder stories of which I was ashamed, I learned more about dramatic writing than Aristotle, Stanislavski and Terry Helburn had ever been able to teach me. This didn’t infuriate me at the time because I didn’t know it. All I knew was that to avoid being toothless, I had sunk to the depths of literary depravity.

  This view oppressed me less when I graduated from Ellery Queen to more respectable dramatic shows. But then as now, American television was controlled by the large corporations who “sponsored”—paid for—every show, and not only interrupted each play several times to sell soap or cars or underarm deodorants, but also dictated what the writer might, and might not, say in a script. Because of this—and in spite of the fact that I enjoyed writing TV scripts—I never overcame my conviction that writing for commercial television was a kind of prostitution.

  How I know this is that between 1952 and 1959 I must have written at least fifty television scripts, but through those years I steadily refused to buy a TV set, and I never saw a single show I wrote.

  Maxine insisted that the Annex had no such traumatic effect on her, but I maintain that anyone who could send the Blue Cheer ad agency executive the Christmas present Maxine sent was expressing an obvious death wish. Maxine insisted she wasn’t jeopardizing her job because her career as the Blue Cheer girl was doomed anyway.

  Blue Cheer detergent came in fine powdery crystals in a blue box. The way the commercial was written, Maxine was supposed to hold out her cupped hands while some unseen spirit poured Blue Cheer into them from a mammoth box overhead. Then the camera moved in for a close-up of Maxine’s cupped hands full of Blue Cheer while she rattled away about the fine quality of the granules. But Maxine turned out to have peculiar fingers. No matter how tightly she cupped her hands, there was a narrow space between all of her fingers. So while she was enthusiastically describing the fine granules, the said granules were sifting through her fingers in a messy cloud which spilled all over the floor and loused up the whole commercial.

  Well, the hell with it, the Blue Cheer people must have said to themselves, because they rewrote the script so that all Maxine had to do was hold a big box of Blue Cheer in both hands while she talked about the product. She did this so well that after the filming, five Blue Cheer ad agency and company executives con-verged on her with congratulations.

  “Wonderful!” one of them exclaimed. “You held the box absolutely straight!”

  Carried away by this praise, Maxine informed me one day that she was shopping for a Christmas gift for the account executive.

  “It’s done,” she assured me blandly. “I’ve asked around and I’m told you always give the account executive a Christmas present.”

  It took her two weeks to find the right gift and she phoned to tell me about it.

  “I sent him a red-and-white Blab-Off,” she said. “They come in all colors. I sent him the prettiest.”

  “What,” I inquired, “is a Blab-Off?”

  “It’s a little gadget you hook onto your TV set,” said Maxine. “It has a sign on it that says STOP THOSE ANNOYING TV COMMERCIALS. As soon as a commercial comes on, you push the button on your Blab-Off and the set goes dead for two minutes.”

  Like me, Maxine later graduated to dramatic shows and, like me, she got over the Shame of it. She has since spent most of her life acting on television and enjoying it thoroughly. And as I said, I had a very good time myself in the Annex, despite a few incidents that might be described as unsettling. The first of these happened on The Hallmark Hall of Fame.

  This was in 1953, after the demise of Ellery Queen I was having lunch with another Monograph reader when I happened to see Ethel Frank, an old acquaintance, having lunch at a nearby table. When she learned I’d been writing for television, she said:

  “I’m story editor on The Hallmark Hall of Fame. You ought to write for us. It’s a historical show and you like history. Call me tonight and I’ll tell you what kind of outline to submit.”

  I called her for instructions and then submitted an outline on the love story of John Donne. Ethel bought the outline, Albert McCleery, the Hallmark producer, liked the finished script and from then on I was one of seven or eight writers who wrote steadily for the show.

  The Hallmark Hall of Fame dramatized incidents in the lives of great men and women. We could select our subjects from any country, any century, any area of greatness, ranging theoretically from Cleopatra to Dickens, from Boadicea to Gershwin. We were restricted only by the taboos imposed on us by the peculiar morality of television in the fifties.

  I say “peculiar” because you’ll have gathered from Ellery Queen that murder was never considered immoral by American television. Murder was pure entertainment as long as the murderer went to prison or died in the end. The only immorality—the only Sin—was Sex. Every sponsor kept a hawk eye out for any suggestion of this sin in his writers’ scripts. And on the outside chance that something sinful might slip past the sponsor’s eye, every network maintained its own censorship office to which a copy of every television script had to be submitted.

  Well, Hallmark was a biographical show—and you just wouldn’t believe how many of the world’s great heroes and heroines failed to live up to the moral standards of American television. Boadicea might have got by, but you couldn’t possibly write a script about Cleopatra, Dickens or Gershwin without cleaning up their sex lives first.

  Plus which, Mr. Joyce C. Hall, owner of the Hallmark Greeting Card Company, sponsor of The Hallmark Hall of Fame, imposed two fascinating taboos of his own. Mr. Hall, whose home and headquarters were in Kansas City, Missouri, was a gentleman of the Old South. Which meant that while we could dramatize the love story of Jefferson Davis, we were forbidden to write scripts about Abraham Lincoln. Or Harriet Beecher Stowe or General Grant or Walt Whitman-who-was-immoral-anyway.

  Mr. Hall’s second taboo was in deference to the star of The Hallmark Hall of Fame. I’ve often wondered if she knew about it; I have a feeling it amused her vastly if she did. The mistress of ceremonies on The Hallmark Hall of Fame, and the star of one weekly show in every four, was Sarah Churchill. And Mr. Hall forbade all scripts dealing with heroes of the American Revolution because he wouldn’t insult the British Prime Minister’s daughter by suggesting the British had lost it.

  We submitted our Hallmark outlines on special paper with a printed legend across the top:

  “We nominate..………………………………………for

  The Hallmark Hall of Fame because:

  ………………………………………………………………..

  ………………………………………………………………..”

  After “nominate” you filled in the name of the great man or woman; after “because”
you stated his-or-her chief claim to fame. On the rest of the page you outlined the particular incident or event in the nominee’s life which you wanted to dramatize.

  But in actual practice, “We nominate...because” was likely to mean a phone call from Ethel Frank:

  “Listen, we need something for the Jewish holidays, you want to do Joseph and his coat-of-many-colors or some damn thing?”

  Or:

  “Hon, dig up somebody for Sarah for Valentine’s Day and call me back on it, will you?”

  Since Sarah starred in one show a month we were constantly beating the bushes for heroines she could play. So it was a help when Sarah herself came up with a suggestion, which one day she did.

  Though all the scripts were written in New York, the Hallmark show was produced in Hollywood and there were daily transcontinental phone calls between Ethel in New York and Albert McCleery in Hollywood. It was after one such phone call that Ethel phoned me.

  “Sarah,” she announced, “wants to do something Greek.”

  Greek?

  “Ethel,” I said, “except for an occasional queen who murdered her family, Greek women did not go out and get famous. Of course,” I added tentatively, “there’s Sappho.”

  “Sappho’s out,” said Ethel. “Mr. Hall knows she was a lesbian.” “Well, I don’t know what Sarah wants from me,” I said. “I’m not Euripides.”

  “You’ll find somebody,” said Ethel briskly. “Call me back.” And she hung up.

  I went over to my bookshelves. My books provided me with most of my Hallmark nominees but this time, as I studied them, my mind kept cracking jokes:

  “We nominate Persephone for The Hallmark Hall of Fame because: she was the first woman to go to hell and back for her man.”

  “We nominate Jocasta for The Hallmark Hall of Fame because: she was Oedipus’ mother and Freud’s inspiration.”