Hanff, Helene. Underfoot in Show Business. New York : Little, Brown & Co, 1960. Print.
First Sentences:
We'll begin with the law that governs the life of every one of the 999 from the day he or she first arrives in New York, which was first explained to me by a stage manager named Bill Flanagan. Flanagan's law of the theatre is:
"No matter what happens to you, it's unexpected."
Description:
Helene Hanff, author of Underfoot in Show Business, is probably best known as the author and main character of her book, 84 Charing Cross Road. But prior to this memoir of books and correspondence with a rare book dealer in London post-World War II, Hanff was an aspiring playwright in New York City. Her day-to-day hopes, meetings with producers and agents, struggles to find money to live, and interacting with friends in similarly tenacious circumstances in the theater world now are all wonderfully recollected in this delightful memoir.
Hanff entered a play-writing contest sponsored by the Bureau of New Plays with three submissions. She was later contacted by Terry Helburn of The Theatre Guild, a high-end group that produced new plays. Helburn told Hanff at their first meeting that "Your plays are terrible....Just terrible!....Never mind. You have talent." She had picked Hanff's plays out of the contest submissions (which Hanff did not win) and decided to help Hanff rework those plays so the Guild might produce them.
So Hanff was enrolled in the Guild's seminar for new playwrights, which once included Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. But the four current Guild-produced plays, including one by Lee Strasberg, all flopped, so Hanff's pieces never saw the stage. But she now had an in and was off and running.
Thus begins a world of Hanff where she took any sort of job that left time for writing (waitress, secretary, and play-reader who recommends works for production). These jobs leave time for daily visits to agents who send her scripts to producers. These producers in turn express interest in her new work, then, after weeks of inquiries from Hanff, reveal to her they had promptly forgotten about them. There's even a chapter explaining this process called, "If They Take You to Lunch, They don't Want Your Play."
Meanwhile, Hanff and her struggling actress friend Maxine learn to explore New York with little or no money. She explains how they sneak into every movie or play. For plays, they waited outside in the cold for the intermission, then mixed in and followed the real theater-goers inside, locating vacant seats to enjoy the second half. Sneaking into movies involved attending to the last showing and then walking in after the box office and ticket takers had closed for the night. One time, they even paid full price...with US mail stamps stolen from Hanff's office. Maxine came up with these plans due to her "unflagging imagination and the nerve of Naploeon."
One of Hanff's jobs entailed stuffing envelopes and mailing 10,000 publicity notices for the new American Folk Opera, "Away We Go." The title was changed at the last minute to..."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 tell you your new musical is to be called "New Jersey." Or "Maine."
Then, after folding and stuffing several hundred press releases publicizing this play with its new title, it was decided that "Oklahoma" need an exclamation point. Since the title "Oklahoma" appeared three times in each press release, Hanff had to add 30,000 exclamation points by hand to the new releases.
She loved being an outside reader in 1947 where she read and summarized a play or novel every day and two on the weekend, receiving $6 per each summary. She explains how she can read (i.e., "skim") works to allow time for her own writing. One book, which appeared in three volumes, allowed her to double her usual fee:
What I read during that nightmare weekend--taking notes of all place names, characters' names and events therein--was fifteen hundred stupefying pages of the sticky mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien....and phoning several friends to say good-bye because suicide seemed so obviously preferable to five hundred more pages.
Of course, things eventually improve for Hanff but not in the theater world. Rather, she begins writing scripts for the new medium, television. Maxine got a job as the Blue Cheer detergent girl and convinced Hanff to take a job writing weekly Ellery Queen mystery stories at $200 a show. The difficulty was each show could only have five characters: Ellery Queen and his father, the murdered character, and two suspects, as well as two "five-liners" who could only speak five lines.
As you might guess, I loved immersing myself into the theater world of the 40's and 50s and beyond. Hanff is a exquisite tongue-in-cheek writer who clearly views her life and those around her with a clever, caustic, and very humorous eye. If you enjoy great writing, intimate look into the world of struggling playwrights and theater production, as well as life in New York City for struggling artists, then Underfoot in Show Business is definitely for you.
[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:]
Hanff, Helene. 84 Charing Cross Road
Hanff, a struggling, poor writer, wants to buy classic rare books unavailable in the United States, so contacts a used book dealer in London. Their witty, intelligent, and personal correspondence is delightful to read.
Happy reading.
Fred
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