Underfoot In Show Business (17 page)

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

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.

“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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