by Helene Hanff
Herman and I were both worn out by the beginning of Matinee’s third year. I was working on the adaptation of a disorganized Chinese fantasy called The Carefree Tree, when the phone rang and a secretary said: “Ethel Frank calling.”
“Hon,” said Ethel. “Drop The Carefree Tree, you can go back to it later. Come on down, I have a special assignment for you.”
“No,” I said.
“It’s not a dog, it’s a big assignment!” said Ethel, and added solemnly: “We have a new sponsor. You’re going to do their first show.”
This so thoroughly baffled me I left The Carefree Tree in the typewriter and went down to the Matinee office out of sheer curiosity.
The cost of producing Matinee five days a week, live and in color, meant that the show was shared by four or five sponsors. This multiple sponsorship kept the show, and the writers, beyond the reach of corporation or ad agency interference, since no sponsor could hope to control a show of which he owned only one fifth. Plus which, sponsors were constantly signing on and dropping off the Matinee roster the way you’d hop on or off a bus. I couldn’t imagine any sponsor whose arrival Ethel would announce with such solemnity.
She and Rosemary were in a huddle over a list of names when I walked in.
Ethel looked up.
“We’re going to produce a series of special plays,” she said, “for the United Lutheran Church in America.”
It shook me. It shook all three of us.
“You’re going to write the first script,” said Ethel. “We’re buying that Ozark play you liked, if the Lutherans okay it.”
“Ethel,” I said, “do you think I’m the ideal writer for the United Lutheran Church?”
Ethel looked pious.
“The Lutherans,” she intoned, “are remarkable men. They told me they do not have the slightest interest in the religious denomination of the writer.”
“That may very well be,” I said, “but I doubt if they had Reform Judaism in mind.”
Rosemary laughed.
“All I need on this show is to run around trying to find six Lutheran writers,” said Ethel bitterly.
“Well, we ought to find them a Lutheran story editor, dear!” said Rosemary. Rosemary had a Catholic father and a Methodist mother, the other story editor was Jewish, and neither of them had time to take on additional scripts.
It was several days later that Ethel phoned to say she’d found a story editor for the Lutherans and I went down to the office and met Katherine, a gentle, blonde Episcopalian. (Said Ethel morosely: “In this town they’re lucky I found them a Protestant.”)
In a simple black dress with a white collar and a retiring violet lipstick, Katherine was pronounced very holy-looking, and she trotted off to meet the Lutherans with the Ozark play under her arm. The play was the story of a fifteen-year-old girl in the backwoods of Arkansas, all of whose yearnings were focused on a red dress in a mail-order catalogue. Neglected by ignorant parents and ignored by a preoccupied schoolteacher, the girl allowed a boy to make love to her in return for money to buy the red dress; she became pregnant and was driven to a fatal, self-inflicted abortion. I had read the play a few years earlier for Monograph and had recommended it to Ethel as one we might somehow sanitize for television.
The Lutherans liked the play, and they didn’t want it sanitized. They wanted plays that dealt with the problems confronting all mid-twentieth-century churches, and the teenager’s tragedy was grimly familiar to them. They approved the script and directed that it be produced as their Easter show.
Katherine and I worked hard on the script, and when it was finished copies were sent to the six Lutherans in charge of the project. All six read the script and then invited Katherine and me to a dinner conference to discuss revisions. They were charming hosts and it wasn’t till coffee was served that the six copies of the script were passed to Katherine and me, each with notes in the margins suggesting revisions. All the revisions were minor. But one particular margin note appeared prominently on every script: “WHERE EASTER?” My heritage had caught up with me; I’d gone and left Easter out of the Easter script.
We assured the Lutherans that Easter would be prominently featured in the final version, the conference ended and I went home to do the revisions. A week later, the final revised script was approved by the Lutherans and airmailed to Albert in Hollywood. It went into rehearsal on a Thursday.
On Friday, the NBC censorship office telephoned Albert and ordered him to cancel the show. NBC censorship was sent a copy of every Matinee script as a matter of form, and the only one it ever ordered off the air as too immoral for the television industry was the first script sponsored by the Lutheran Church.
Ethel, Rosemary and Katherine sat in the East Coast Matinee office that afternoon in a kind of paralysis, wondering how to tell the Lutherans they were too sinful for television. But out in Hollywood, Albert McCleery was phoning NBC, beginning with the censorship office and working his way straight up to the top-level executives, repeating the same message to each:
“You go ahead and cancel this show,” he was shouting, “and I’ll see to it that every newspaper from New York to California carries the story of how NBC censored the Lutheran Church off the air!”
Late that afternoon, NBC backed down and rehearsals of the play were allowed to proceed.
My last unsettling experience unsettled me clear out of the Annex.
Not long after Matinee Theatre went off the air, I won a fellowship from CBS. I was given five thousand dollars on which to work for a year on TV dramatizations of American history. Sitting in the bathtub, the day after I won this contest, I made a momentous decision: henceforth I would stop looking down on television. I would stop writing bad plays and commit myself unreservedly to television scripts. I even toyed with the possibility of buying a TV set.
Fired by this decision, I flung myself into the fellowship year. I researched for months in libraries, I wrote a ninety-minute script, rewrote it under the supervision of one of the Playhouse 90 producers and then plunged into a series of outlines for more ninety-minute scripts to come.
And all this time, behind my back, television, which had waited to do it till I’d made my great bathtub decision, now went completely to pot. First, the quiz-show scandals broke. Then the CBS executives in charge of the fellowship project were forced out of CBS. Then Playhouse 90 went off the air. Then every other dramatic show went off the air, to be replaced by Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, and fifty imitations of each. Most devastating of all, I woke up at the end of my fellowship year to discover that the entire television industry had packed up and moved to Hollywood where it was now permanently resettled.
I was unwilling (to put it mildly) to follow Gunsmoke and Perry Mason to Hollywood; westerns bored me and nothing could induce me to revert to shabby TV whodunits. No need to worry. I told myself. Ethel and Albert were bound to get a new show, produced in Hollywood and written in New York.
And sure enough, one day in the fall of 1960, Ethel phoned with the long-awaited words:
“Albert and I have a new show.”
“Hallelujah,” I said. “What is it?”
“I just want you to realize,” said Ethel, “that we’re almost the only show that’s still written on the East Coast. And East or West, dear, if you want to work in television you’re going to have to write for this kind of show. It’s all they’re doing now.”
“Ethel,” I said, “what’s the show?”
“The Adventures of Ellery Queen,” she said.
PLEASE USE NEAREST EXIT
Dec. 6? 7? ‘60
Now listen, Maxine—
As soon as we hung up the other night I phoned those girls you sublet to and told them about your green deck chair and your good stew pot and they are mailing the stew pot to Hollywood today by Parcel Post but they said to tell you you do not HAVE a green deck chair. They looked in the closet where you said it probably was, and the cellar storeroom where you said it would be if it wasn’t in the closet, and
it isn’t in either place and it also isn’t anywhere else, you probably hocked it.
This is not a real letter because (a) you already owe me two letters and (b) I’m late for the Unemployment Insurance office.
WRITE ME.
love
h.
Dear Heart—
I know I said on my Christmas card I’d write soon and here it is March but I’ve been busy making my movie debut.
First, did you know when you see “(MOS)” in a shooting script it means MidOut Sound? Comes from way back in the days of the early talkies when some German was directing a movie and at one point he shouted: “Ve do zis next take midout sound!” So of course they’ve been writing (MOS) in shooting scripts ever since.
Now about my movie debut. I bumped into Joe Anthony on the street and he told me he was directing Career and he’d try and get me a bit in it. The next day I got a call from Paramount and would I come in and meet Hal Wallis, producer of Career? I went in and met him—I was very charming and commented on the chic of his office, his sweater, his tan and anything else I could see—and he said I could report to the casting director of Career the next day, there was a part in it for me.
So the casting director gave me a script and told me which scene to study. There were two characters in the scene—CHIC WOMAN IN HER MID-THIRTIES and MIDDLE-AGED TV DIRECTOR, both parts maybe five lines long. I started reading the CHIC WOMAN IN HER MID-THIRTIES and he said: “No, you’re the TV director.”
Well, lemme tell you it was a blow to the ego, but I started reading the TV director till I got to a line in the business where it said the chic woman “hands HIM a book.”
So that night I called my agent and said: “Listen, there’s been a mistake; they’ve got me playing a man. And if it costs Paramount Pictures half a million when they find out the mistake and have to retake the whole scene, somebody’s gonna get a poker up. So you better check with Paramount.”
The next day when they got ready to shoot the scene I met both the chic woman who’d been hired to play the chic woman and the middle-aged gent who’d been hired to play the TV director. It seems Mr. Wallis can’t stand to see people out of work so he keeps hiring three or four people for the same bit part, regardless of sex. So they made the TV director a woman and let me play that, and they gave the nice middle-aged gentleman two lines to say someplace else, and that’s how Muzzy got into the movies, kiddies.
I’m homesick. Spring has come to California and it puts me in mind of little goodies like Radio City and Bloomingdale’s but let’s face it, I’m working out here. I’ve done five TV shows in the last two months.
And that’s the story of my life and please write and tell me about yours, your last letter around Christmas was very disquieting. You must have found gainful employment by now, please God?
love
m.
305 E. 72nd St. STILL!
(even though the rent just went up again)
Doll!
I’m getting up a party of hundreds to go see Career and cheer and stomp when you come on.
I have mildly earthshaking news of my own which I’m sitting here celebrating with a rare and beautiful martini—You should see me, running around this opulent, wall-to-wall palace in slacks with patches in the seat and sweaters with holes in the elbow, putting quarters in a piggy-bank till they mount up to a bottle of gin. Hysterical.
Anyhow, here I was with my unemployment insurance running out and the bells ringing in a New Year and suddenly for the first time I faced the fact that I was NOT between assignments, I was NOT temporarily out of work, I was permanently out of a profession. And I thought: “What are you DOING, sitting here waiting for television to move back East and turn respectable or somebody to buy one of your old plays? Television is not coming back East and nobody’s going to buy your plays, they’re all terrible. If you want to eat for the rest of your life you’d better try writing something else.”
So I got down the old play about Oklahoma! and decided if I deleted the junky plot and just told the straight facts it might make a magazine article. Slaved over it for three weeks and sent it to Harper’s and damned if Harper’s didn’t buy it. Sent me a letter of acceptance and $200. Before-taxes-and-agent’s-commission but think of the presTIGE, Harper’s kept telling me.
Carried away by this success, I got down the old play about Stokowski and turned it into what I hoped was a New Yorker story and sent it off to The New Yorker and a week later one of their editors phoned to say he liked it and The New Yorker was buying it.
Well, I like to fall clown dead with joy. Every day for the next week I hurried down for the mail, looking for the check and the letter-of-acceptance or whatever they called their contract. It didn’t come. So I wrote to the gent who’d phoned, saying would he please send me a contract; and I added: “You didn’t say on the phone how much The New Yorker is paying me. Is it a secret?”
It was a secret. He didn’t answer my letter. And he didn’t send a contract.
Two weeks later the galleys arrived—which is how I knew they’d “bought” the story. A week after that, the story appeared in print. On the day the issue of The New Yorker with my story in it turned up on the newsstands, a check came in the mail from The New Yorker for $400.
I tore up the street to the bank with it, and standing at the teller’s window I turned the check over, to endorse it.
On the back of the check, rubber-stamped and bleeding off the edge of the paper, was the contract.
When I endorsed the check, I automatically signed the contract—which then went back to The New Yorker as a canceled check.
So cancel your New Yorker subscription and rush RIGHT out and subscribe to the Reader’s Digest. They don’t believe in contracts either—but they picked up the Harper’s story for reprint and paid me more for it than Harper’s and The New Yorker put together. The check just came this morning—along with a letter from an editor at Harper & Row, Book Publishers, saying she liked the Oklahoma! story in Harper’s and Do I have a book in mind? No, I do not have a book in mind but the letter made my day, who else ever asked me such a high-brow question?
I think my potroast is burning.
love
h.
MISS MAXINE STUART
1105 MERILLON AVENUE
LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA
HARPERS WANTS ME TO WRITE MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY HOW TO GET NOWHERE IN THE THEATRE YOU’RE COSTARRING SEND REMINISCENCES IT TURNS OUT I SPENT ALL THOSE YEARS TRYING TO WRITE PLAYS JUST SO I COULD WRITE A BOOK ABOUT IT AFTERWARDS IS THAT THE LIVING END LOVE
HELENE
MISS HELENE HANFF
305 EAST 72ND STREET
NEW YORK CITY
DARLING AM HYSTERICAL WITH EXCITEMENT ITS NOT THE LIVING END ITS FLANAGANS LAW LOVE AND CHEERS
MAXINE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Helene Hanff’s autobiographical Underfoot in Show Business was her first book and was written soon after she completed the exhausting adventures related therein.
Her books since then have included 84, Charing Cross Road, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, and Apple of My Eye. All three books are still in print in hardcover and or paperback both in England and in the United States. surveys, driving a school bus, and reading novels and plays for the New York story departments of Hollywood studios.
From the joys of summer theatre and furnished rooms to being Seen at Sardi’s and weathering one more Theatre Guild flop, Miss Hanff recalls the rigors of crashing Broadway with warmth and generous humor. Her exuberant account of a misspent youth will hearten theatre hopefuls and entertain the large, devoted readership she has acquired through her subsequent works.
Underfoot in Show Business, originally published in 1962, has been revised for this new edition.
In addition to writing television scripts and books for children, Helene Hanff is the author of 84, Charing Cross Road, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, and Apple of My Eye. Her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and
Reader’s Digest. Miss Hanff lives in New York City.
REVIEWS
“Miss Hanff, having a good memory and a lively sense of humor, has composed a theater sketch that is realistic as well as hilarious....One of the most amusing recent theater books about the Broadway theater.”—Brooks Atkinson
“A delightful book by an irrepressible author....What really lifts the book to a high level of entertainment is the sparkling humor. To describe the incidents wouldn’t do justice to the book’s charm which comes from the style of writing and Miss Hanff’s boundless optimism.”—Library Journal
“A gay and entertaining book which also has substance.”—Boston Herald
“Hilarious and highly successful. If you need cheering up, this is it. Here’s hoping Miss Hanff finds more failures to write books about.”—Columbus Dispatch
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