Underfoot in Show Business

By: Helene Hanff

Narrated by: Karen Commins

In her spirited, witty, and vastly entertaining first memoir, Helene Hanff recalls her ingenuous attempts to crash Broadway in the early forties as one of “the other 999.” Helene warmly tells stories about her life before she wrote the beloved and bestselling book 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD.

Naive, nearsighted, frequently penniless but hopelessly stagestruck, she found her life governed by Flanagan’s Law: “No matter what happens to you, it’s unexpected.”

Therefore, as a prize-winning Theatre Guild protégée with a brilliant future, Helene naturally found that all the producers who were going to produce her plays didn’t, and all the agents who were going to sell her plays couldn’t. Together with her best friend Maxine, an aspiring actress consigned to playing the comedy-ingénue in plays that regularly folded after five performances, she cultivated the “delicate, illegal art of getting everything for nothing”—from free seats to every Broadway show and neighborhood movie and borrowed outfits from Saks to voice lessons for Maxine and Greek lessons for Helene. To keep body and soul together until Broadway fame arrived, they devised an economic survival system that embraced such unlikely jobs as taking street-corner. 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

©1961 Public Domain (P)2024 Jewel Audiobooks

Delightful Book

I read this book a few months ago. Being a theatre person myself, the type no one outside my city has seen or heard about, the memoir of one of the legion of hopefuls who hung around Broadway without ever hitting the big time is a story that's near and dear to me.

That said, the performance of the book doesn't capture Helene Hanff's wit and charm, nor her East Coast accent. Her personality isn't in this reading. It sounds like a marvelous book read by a high school English teacher. The performance doesn't ruin the book, not by a longshot, but it certainly doesn't elevate it, either.