Underfoot In Show Business (3 page)

In every one of these offices, there was a sign on the wall saying,
No casting today. Please leave your name;
or, more cheerily,
No casting today but keep in touch!
You could walk into the office of a producer who was casting a new musical, and find a horde of young actors and actresses who’d been summoned to audition overflowing the sofas, chairs and windowsills till late arrivals had to sit cross-legged on the floor, and above them on the wall a large sign stubbornly insisted,
No casting today.
The signs were like pictures; they were never taken down.

So kids making the rounds learned to ignore them. They also devised ingenious methods for forcing the attention of the receptionist in the producer’s outer office, who was usually the only person they were permitted to see. Say you were a young actor or actress making the rounds and you walked into the office of a producer who was casting a new play. You stepped up to the desk and asked politely if you might see the producer.

“No-casting-today,” said the receptionist in a bored tone and without looking up. “If-you-want-to-leave-your-name—” And her pencil moved to a pad, but she still didn’t look up. This was very frustrating because you might have heard you were exactly the physical type the producer was looking for, and how could the receptionist know this if she didn’t look at you? So you invented a trick to force her to focus on you. Bill Flanagan of Flanagan’s Law, for instance, changed his first name to Brazelius and added the initial P. when he made the rounds.

“She asks you to leave your name,” he explained to me, “and if you say ‘Bill Flanagan’ she writes it down without looking up. But if you say ‘Brazelius P. Flanagan’ she looks up. She asks you how to spell it, she stares at you to see if you’re serious—and she remembers the name later.”

He claimed he got a lot of work on the strength of that Brazelius. Of course, when he signed a contract, he reverted to Bill.

Maxine’s trick was not to answer when a receptionist asked her name.

“You-wanta-leave-your-name?” the receptionist would mumble, pencil poised above her writing pad, eyes on her manicure. Maxine would stand silent until the receptionist was finally forced to look up to see if she was still there. Once the receptionist looked up, she saw Maxine’s mop of flaming red hair, which was dramatic enough to be remembered.

Having made the rounds of producers’ and agents’ offices faithfully, Maxine was regularly rewarded by being asked to audition for some new Broadway play. Those auditions not only aged her parents considerably and ruined their digestion and mine; they also conformed to Flanagan’s Law by simply defying expectation.

Take, for example, the afternoon when an agent named Eddie sent for Maxine to tell her she was to audition the next morning for the producer and director of what promised to be the new season’s outstanding production. The playwright was famous, the two stars were internationally known, the director was the most sought-after. The cast was set except for the comedy-ingénue.

“You are so right for the part,” said Eddie, “that after they’ve seen you I don’t think they’ll bother to hear anybody else read for it! Provided”—and he paused solemnly—”pro
vided
—you give the best damn audition you’ve ever given. This is a top-drawer production, dear. I don’t want to send you over there unless you feel you can give a top-drawer reading.”

Now in the best of times and under tranquil conditions, Maxine was by nature highly emotional. (We were both by nature highly emotional.) Under the conditions Eddie had created, she was Joan of Arc and
The Snake Pit
combined.

She phoned me that evening and, with death in her voice, asked me to come to her at once; she couldn’t stand to be alone and she couldn’t stand to be with her parents and she was feeling nauseous and so forth. I hurried up to West End Avenue, arriving just as Maxine’s parents were leaving for the movies (I gathered they couldn’t stand to be with her either), and Maxine’s mother, looking careworn, said:

“She’s in her room, dear. You’d better knock.”

I went down the hall and knocked timidly on Maxine’s bedroom door. When she opened it, I said, “Hiya” hollowly, took off my coat and hat and dropped them on the bed—and Maxine promptly had hysterics. That’s how I found out it was bad luck in the theatre to put hats on beds.

When we both stopped crying I asked her what kind of temperament the role called for.

“I don’t know,” said Maxine coldly. “It’s a secret! I don’t know whether to look ingénue or sexy or sophisticated. First Eddie says I’m exactly right for the part, now he admits he hasn’t seen the script! Nobody’s seen the script!”

She plucked an invisible eyebrow and glared at me in the mirror, her brown eyes snapping with fury.

“...incredible people, they have the bloody play MIMEOgraphed and then they dig a hole under the subway and BURY all five hundred copies, God forbid anybody who’s going to audition for it should
read
it!”

“What else has Eddie sent you out for?” I asked. “What type does he think you are?”

The tweezer froze in Maxine’s hand. She stood a moment in the attitude of one listening to the distant roll of the tumbrel. And she whispered in horror:

“I’m coming down with a cold.”

In Maxine’s life this was the overriding catastrophe. A cold ruined you, it ruined your looks, your resonance, your projection, everything.

“It’s not a cold, it’s just nerves,” I said.

“There’s a prickle in the back of my throat, I’m getting a cold!” She went out to the kitchen and heated a kettle of water and draped a towel over her head and spent the rest of the evening steaming her sinuses while we discussed what she should wear to the audition, what material she should use if they asked her to do her own material, and whether she should tell the blonde star that redheads look very well under pink lights so the star wouldn’t veto her as interfering with blonde lighting.

At midnight, when I left her, she was icily calm. She stood in the doorway in her blue bathrobe and bare feet, her fiery hair stuck up in curlers, her nose slathered with freckle cream and her face beet-red from the long steaming, and said in a remote voice:

“I may not call you tomorrow. I know definitely now I’m going to give a ghastly audition.”

“You’re going to give a wonderful audition,” I said.

We were both wrong. You were always wrong. You persisted in assuming there were two possibilities and there were always three: the two you thought of and the one that happened.

Maxine arrived at the producer’s office and the secretary ushered her into an inner office where four men were waiting for her: producer, director, author, casting director. One sat behind the desk, one was in an armchair, the other two were on the sofa. Having announced Maxine’s name, the secretary withdrew, leaving Maxine standing alone in the middle of the room.

The four men stared at her. Nobody spoke. Nobody asked her to sit down, nobody introduced himself, nobody asked her to read. The silence lasted for several minutes during which they went on staring at her. Finally, one of the men spoke.

“I don’t see it,” he said.

“I told Eddie what we wanted!” (That was the casting director.)

“I don’t see this at all,” the third man agreed. The fourth man said nothing. He had a hangnail and he was working on it. The first man pressed a buzzer and the secretary appeared. Looking past Maxine as if she didn’t exist, the first man said to the secretary:

“Who else is out there?” The secretary named another young actress, and the producer said: “All right, send her in.”

The secretary ushered Maxine out. The audition was over. Maxine met me for lunch afterward at the Astor Drugstore, which was a theatre kids’ hangout, and she had even the countermen clutching the walls for support as she acted out the audition for everybody.

There were auditions where she walked out on stage to read and was stopped before she opened her mouth because she was too tall, or too short, for her scene with the leading man. There were auditions where they decided they didn’t want a redhead or had thought she was British.

And there was the winter when she was in Florida with a stock company and got a telegram from an agent saying CAN YOU FLY UP SUNDAY IMPORTANT AUDITION MONDAY MORNING and she flew up and phoned the agent and discovered she was to audition for the New Opera Company.

Nothing daunted, she went out on the New Opera Company stage and did her best comedy material, after which the fat little director came hurtling down the aisle crying:

“Magnificent, Liebchen, absolutely perfect for ze part! Now let’s hear you zing zomezing.”

Boom. Don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you.

Never mind. Once a year came the audition when she actually got the part; and on that day, my friend Maxine owned the earth. She sailed down Fifth Avenue or floated up Broadway in a radiant glow that caused people to stare after her, bemused. Or, as one of her beaux observed to me with a wistful sigh (he wasn’t in the theatre):

“Maxine with a job is like any other woman in love.”

Of course, after the successful audition came the first five days of rehearsal during which Maxine and her parents and I all lived in a permanent state of acid indigestion because during the first five days of rehearsal, an actress could be fired. Not till the sixth day was she given a contract. I spent the five probationary evenings cueing Maxine in her lines (while she steamed her sinuses) and saying hello and good-bye to her parents who went off nightly to the movies looking more and more careworn.

From the day she signed the contract, there was nothing more to worry about till the night before the opening when pre-opening night nerves set in. At 11 P.M. on the night before one opening, she threw the New York telephone directory at me (I can’t lift it myself without using both hands), whereupon I stalked off and went huffily home to bed, to be awakened at 1 A.M. by the telephone conveying weeping apologies from West End Avenue. (Such evenings consoled me for what I put Maxine through when I was out of work and no producer would buy my play, which was most of the time.)

On opening nights, Maxine’s parents were lucky: they weren’t allowed to go; they might make her nervous. They went on the second night when the crisis was past.

I was allowed to go to the opening. I sat through each one with my stomach churning and all my fingers crossed. Maxine never gave a bad opening-night performance, but most of the plays she appeared in were the kind of total flops we referred to as “dawgs.” I’d sit through the three acts gamely and, as soon as the final curtain fell, hurry backstage to Maxine’s dressing room and say the wrong thing.

An actor I knew did a very funny act at parties in which he mimicked the well-meaning friends who always came backstage after an opening to offer foot-in-mouth congratulations. The funniest bit in his act mortified me because it was what I invariably said to Maxine after every one of her openings. I’d hurry backstage, knowing the play was a dawg that wouldn’t last a week, walk into Maxine’s dressing room and say earnestly:

“
I
LIKED it! I really did!”

If you can’t do better than that, just leave a note with the stage doorman telling your friend she was sensational and go on home.

Maxine appeared in eleven Broadway plays, most of which opened on a Tuesday night. On Wednesday came the flop notices, on Thursday an empty house, on Friday the closing notice went up, on Saturday the show closed and on Sunday Maxine slept it off.

And so, on Monday, she was once more to be found in her parents’ apartment on West End Avenue ready to resume the normal daily life of a glamorous young actress by screaming “Oh, NO!” in the bathroom.

WHEN A YOUNG PLAYWRIGHT—temporarily starved out of New York and back in the bosom of her family in Philadelphia—receives two phone calls from two Broadway producers in the same afternoon, and each producer says: “You’ve written a wonderful play. When can you come to New York to see me?” the playwright naturally assumes that both producers want to produce her play.

Not until she has hurried off to New York and seen both producers and been left stranded at Penn Station at three in the morning with thirty-five cents and her play unsold does it occur to her that there must have been a flaw in her thinking. Somehow or other, she has failed to understand how producers’ minds work.

The phone calls came on a Tuesday in March, a month after I’d gone home for a second wind. I’d hung on in New York for a couple of years after my fellowship year ended, keeping alive on dreary office jobs, from which I was regularly fired for typing my plays on company time. That February, I’d lost the one job too many and when my capital had shrunk to the price of a one-way ticket to Philadelphia, I’d packed my bags, left a new play at my agent’s office, said a tearful good-bye to Maxine and crept mournfully home.

The first of the two calls came early in the afternoon as I was trying to get a whole cigarette out of my brother.

My oldest brother was married by then but the middle one was still living at home. I wouldn’t say he was exactly working at the time, but he was earning money, which I wasn’t. (He later became a big wheel in industry so I’m not allowed to say that his earnings came from playing pool and duplicate bridge in local contests. He was so expert at both games that rich men backed him, won heavily on him and gave him a percentage of their winnings.)

Since my parents were feeding and housing me, I didn’t need cash for anything but cigarettes and these my father generally remembered to buy for me. It was when he forgot that I was forced to appeal to my brother’s better nature—such as it was. I’d ask him for a cigarette and he’d ponder the request.

“I’d be glad to give you one,” he’d say earnestly, “but one cigarette won’t help you. You’ll smoke it—and in half an hour you’ll be out of cigarettes again. Now what I’d like to do is find a way to give you enough cigarettes to last you awhile.”

He’d take six or seven cigarettes out of his pack, hold them half-out to me and ponder them. And the minute I reached for one, he’d yank them back and say:

“I know how to do it!”

And he’d take a penknife out of his pocket, cut all six or seven cigarettes in half, and hand me the butts thus accumulated. This was before king-size cigarettes had come on the market, so you know how long half a cigarette was. You couldn’t light it without burning your upper lip and the tip of your nose.

I did not stand idly by while he mutilated six cigarettes. But it’s very difficult for a girl to get cigarettes by force from a brother who’s bigger and taller than she is and has an open penknife in one hand. So as I said, I was trying to appeal to his better nature when the phone rang.

“Miss Hanff?” said a woman’s voice at the other end. “Just a moment, please. Oscar Serlin calling from New York.”

All the blood left my head. Oscar Serlin had produced
Life With Father,
then in its fourth or fifth year on Broadway and with road companies across the country, including one in Philadelphia that was breaking records there in its second year. Of all Broadway hits, this had been the biggest.

“Miss Hanff?” said Oscar Serlin in a deep baritone voice. “I’ve read your play. I’m very impressed. When can you come to New York to see me?”

We settled on Friday afternoon and when I hung up I was shaking. I managed to tell my brother the news and he was so impressed he gave me a whole cigarette. I’d only just finished it when the second call came. This one was from a producer we’ll call Charlie. He also had a play running on Broadway. It had got mixed reviews but it had been running since early October and was by no means a flop. Said Charlie, without reservation or preamble:

“I think you’ve written a marvelous play. I want to produce it.”

He went on for half an hour about the characters and the dialogue, which he said were both marvelous, and about the theme of the play which was also marvelous.

“I have some friends who are interested in it and we all want to meet you,” he said. “When can I give a small dinner party for you?”

I said I was coming to New York on Friday and Charlie said Friday evening would be ideal for the dinner party. He gave me his address and told me again how marvelous the play was and we hung up. I phoned my agent, who congratulated me and ordered me not to set foot in either producer’s lair until I’d seen her first.

On Friday, wearing my good spring suit and carrying a new silk blouse (charged to my mother on my prospects) to change into for the dinner party, I set out for New York, with the fare donated by my father, and a nearly full pack of cigarettes and fifty cents for buses donated by my brother.

Hoarding the fifty cents for emergencies, I walked from Penn Station to my agent’s office. She welcomed me warmly and gave me instructions. Oscar Serlin, she said, was one of Broadway’s most discriminating producers and I was to let him have the play. However, I was to be very, very nice to Charlie because, while she didn’t think too highly of his current production, one simply never knew what next year might bring.

I phoned Maxine from my agent’s office and told her the news. She was in rehearsal for one of the bombs she was periodically cast in and we shrieked congratulations at each other over the phone.

“Listen, I’ll be home all evening,” she said. “Call me and tell me what happened!”

“I’ll phone you before I leave town,” I promised. And wouldn’t I just.

I left my agent’s office and went around the corner to Oscar Serlin’s office in Rockefeller Center. Even the receptionist’s room was quietly opulent. I gave the receptionist my name and she smiled and said: “Oh, yes!” and rang Mr. Serlin on the intercom, and then told me to go right in.

I opened the inner-office door and saw, across a vast expanse of carpeting, an imposing desk at the far end of the room from behind which a man rose and held out his hand. Oscar Serlin was over six feet tall and built like a football player. He gave me a warm handclasp, drew up a chair for me, offered me a cigarette from a silver box, lit it for me with a silver lighter, fixed his liquid brown eyes on me and said:

“Tell me about yourself,”

and as far as I was concerned, he was Shakespeare, Sir Galahad and President Roosevelt fused.

I gave him my ten-cent autobiography and he nodded. Then he picked up the blue-bound copy of my play, which was on his desk.

“This is a very bad play,” he said conversationally. “Your construction’s lousy. Your two central characters are very interesting and your dialogue is excellent. But you have to be a carpenter before you can be a cabinet-maker. Let me show you.”

And leaning back in his chair, he reconstructed the entire play for me so easily and brilliantly it left me tongue-tied. When I could speak, I told him I knew I could rewrite it exactly as he’d outlined it and that I thought I could finish it within the standard three-month option period.

It was then that he explained—with some surprise, I thought—that he didn’t want to produce the play. He’d just wanted to meet me.

“I want you to keep in touch with me,” he said, “and I want to see your next play. When are you moving back to New York?”

“I’m trying to find a job in Philly so I can earn enough to come back,” I said, “but I haven’t had any luck so far.”

He nodded and wished me well and walked me to the door; and sadly relinquishing the dream of having my play produced by this god, I left his office and went over to the Taft Hotel to change into my new blouse in their ladies’ room.

The Taft Hotel ladies’ room charged me a nickel for the use of their john, which is the one health service I thought nobody ought to have to pay for, and I left there vowing never to patronize the Taft Hotel again.

Charlie lived way up on Riverside Drive. I caught a Fifth Avenue double-decker bus, climbed to the top and took the front seat so none of the other passengers could watch me counting my remaining funds. I had a return ticket, thirty-five cents and six cigarettes. Deduct a dime for a bus to Penn Station and another for a bus home from North Philadelphia station, and I had fifteen cents left over—exactly the price of a fresh pack of cigarettes for tomorrow—so I decided to make the six cigarettes last me till I got home to Philadelphia.

Charlie turned out to be a pleasant, bustling little man who welcomed me with enthusiasm and presented me proudly to the assembled dinner guests. They included an elderly lady backer who was deaf and had to be shouted at; a German baron who wrote poetry and planned to direct my play for Charlie though he’d never directed a play before; and a pair of homosexual male twins who were dying to act in my play, which had no parts for them. But everybody was enthusiastic about the play, the martinis were excellent—and all over the living room, on every table, were wooden boxes and crystal holders chockfull of free cigarettes.

We drank to the play, we discussed possible stars for it, we debated whether the Booth Theatre was too small or the Belasco too big, and by the time Charlie led the way into the dining room I was carelessly dismissing Oscar Serlin as short-sighted.

All I remember about that dinner is my traumatic experience with the first course. Did I tell you I’m very near-sighted? Well, in those days, as Dorothy Parker observed, men never made passes at girls who wore glasses. Being young and female, I never wore mine at a dinner party, certainly not at a dinner party given in my honor by a Broadway producer. The first course arrived in the kind of sherbet glasses my mother used for shrimp cocktail, and all I could see of the stuff in the glass in front of me was that it was white. Peering narrowly down at it, I decided it was crab meat, of which I am very fond, and I took a hungry mouthful of it—and discovered, with apoplectic results, that it wasn’t crab meat. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I couldn’t swallow it. So, before the fascinated gaze of the entire dinner party, I spit it out.

“It’s herring,” Charlie told me. “Don’t you like it?”—a question I bitterly resented since it would be rude to say no and having just spit it out I could hardly say yes. So I can’t tell you what else we ate or what we talked about; I spent the rest of the dinner hour patching together the remnants of my aplomb.

After dinner, the other guests departed and Charlie took me to see his current Broadway play. The production was the kind usually described as “shabby”: the sets didn’t quite work, the direction was awkward and the play was embarrassing where it was meant to be moving. After the theatre, we adjourned to Sardi’s—to talk.

At Sardi’s, it turned out that while my play was still marvelous, it wasn’t quite marvelous enough. It would be, however, as soon as Charlie rewrote it. What he had in mind was a contract making him co-author. He would then rewrite the play his way and if his version was approved by his backers, he’d produce it.

Had Oscar Serlin offered me such a contract I’d have jumped at it (though Oscar would have found the suggestion that he rewrite an author’s play simply bizarre). But where Oscar’s revised construction of the play had sounded brilliantly right, Charlie’s sounded terrible. Nor did he bolster my confidence in him by telling me what changes he’d personally made in his current play. The scenes I’d found embarrassing were the scenes Charlie had written.

I explained this to Charlie. (Every year I make a vow to learn tact or keep my mouth shut but so far nothing has come of it.) We argued and we talked and we argued and we arrived at no conclusion. Sardi’s, on the other hand, did: I looked up and noticed that the waiters were putting chairs up on tables and that we were the only customers left in the restaurant. I plucked Charlie’s sleeve as he was finishing a sentence.

“I think Sardi’s wants to close,” I said.

We looked at Charlie’s watch; it was nearly 3 A.M.

With many apologies, Charlie put me in a cab, gave the driver a dollar and said:

“Take the young lady to her hotel.”

The cab drove off and I told the driver to take me to Penn Station. At Penn Station, the lone night clerk informed me that the next train for Philadelphia was due at 6:35. I couldn’t wake up Maxine’s family at three in the morning to ask to sleep there. So I sat down on a Penn Station bench to wait for the 6:35.

It was a raw March night, there wasn’t anybody else in the waiting room, and Penn Station was saving heat. I’d been sitting there for fifteen chilly minutes trying to get up the nerve to ask the night clerk if he had a blanket, when the stationmaster came along. He stopped, looked down at me and asked politely what I was doing there.

“I’m waiting for the six-thirty-five to Philadelphia,” I said.

He clucked.

“A nice young lady,” he said, “doesn’t want to sit all night in a railroad station!”

And I thought: You won’t get any argument out of me, mister, there’s no place I wouldn’t rather sit.

“Wouldn’t it be much better,” he said, “to go across the street to the Governor Clinton Hotel and get a good night’s sleep?”

I don’t know why I couldn’t tell him I only had thirty-five cents, but I couldn’t. And since I was wearing my good suit and silk blouse he couldn’t guess it.