Helene Hanff

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young and this is a download from the Desert Island Discs archive. This edition may be slightly different from what was actually broadcast, but it's the only version we have. It comes from the British Library's radio collection. It was archived without the music, so although the Castaways choices are introduced, they're not part of this recording. Full details can be found on the Castaways page on the Desert Island Discs website.

Speaker 10:26

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty one.

Speaker 10:30

And the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Helene Hanff0:33

This week our castaway is the author, Helene Hanff. Now, Miss Hanff, we're not very isolated at the moment, because we're sitting in your London hotel suite. But in the event of real isolation on a desert island, could you endure it, do you think?

Helene Hanff0:47

Uh

Presenter0:47

Oh, I wouldn't last three days.

Helene Hanff0:50

Uh

Presenter0:50

Does music mean a lot in your life? Means so much that I was up all night thinking I couldn't go there with only eight selections.

Helene Hanff0:58

Do you have any musical skill yourself? Do you play an instrument? None whatever, just ears.

Presenter1:00

None whatever.

Presenter1:02

Uh

Helene Hanff1:02

What

Presenter1:03

The first disc you've chosen? The first disc I've chosen is the Bach Demein of Tuccata in an arrangement by Stokovsky. Oh, yes. Who when I was a teenager was the idol of Philadelphia teenagers. He was known as Stokie to us. My father used to years later called him the Rich Man Sinatra. But the trick was that every urchin in Philadelphia who had ten cents could go to Stokovsky's youth concerts. The orchestra played for nothing. He conducted for nothing. The best seats in the house were seventy five cents. And in the Peanut Gallery it was ten cents. This place seated three thousand people. They turned away hundreds.

Presenter1:42

and there were six or seven youth concerts a year. And we got to know music,'cause he'd send us down to the library to play recordings of the things he was going to play at the next concert. After the first year we picked the programs that sent questionnaires around.

Presenter1:58

But we were terribly sophisticated music lovers without knowing it.

Presenter2:02

He took music out of the rich man's concert hall and gave it to the people.

Helene Hanff2:09

Bach Stakarta in D minor, the Leopold Stockovsky transcription, conducted by Stockovsky himself with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and of course Miss Ann Fjor from Philadelphia. A large family.

Presenter2:22

I had two older brothers.

Presenter2:24

My father had run away from college to go on the stage as a song and dance man, and when I decided to go to New York to crash the theater,

Helene Hanff2:28

Uh

Presenter2:34

He was overheard to remark to my mother, I had two sons, and the ham had to come out in her.

Helene Hanff2:40

How long had he lasted as a song and dance master?

Presenter2:42

Two years. He got starved out. He got stranded in Montana.

Presenter2:47

and wired home for the fare.

Presenter2:50

home, which my grandmother sent him, but according to my mother, when he got home he had lice or fleas or something, and she threw him into the bathtub, burned all his clothes, and said that was the end of the theatre.

Helene Hanff3:00

What did he go into afterwards?

Presenter3:01

Well, he became a Willie Lohman. He sold shirts. This was during the Depression, and since box office men had empty theater seats and no shirts, he used to swap shirts for passes. So every Monday night during the Depression our whole family went to theater.

Helene Hanff3:18

Philadelphia is or used to be a good theatre town.

Presenter3:21

Oh, it was a great tryout town. We got everything before Broadway did.

Helene Hanff3:21

Uh

Presenter3:24

As a schoolgirl, what was your ambition?

Presenter3:27

Oh, I wanted to be a writer. I had got stage struck since we went to theater every Monday night. They didn't know from babysitters in those days. They wanted to go out. You went out. Did you go to college? No, I had one year of college and then I had to quit.

Speaker 13:35

Uh

Helene Hanff3:35

They want to go out you and

Speaker 13:36

Yeah.

Presenter3:39

Learn typing and get a job.

Helene Hanff3:41

Cause it's

Presenter3:43

Oh, I worked in a diesel engine basement. Ten dollars a week and all the grease I could carry home on me. I remember that.

Helene Hanff3:49

But you made a pretty good job of educating yourself, at any rate, so far as English literature is concerned.

Presenter3:54

Well, I

Presenter3:56

was haunted by the fact that I had no education and that I wanted to be a writer.

Presenter4:02

I wanted to write plays, but I

Presenter4:05

didn't seem to realize there was something wrong with not liking to read plays. So I just went down to the library and told the lady I wanted to learn

Presenter4:13

Something about English literature, and God bless her, she steered me to a shelf to where I found Arthur Quillacooch's lectures at Cambridge. So I lugged them home.

Presenter4:24

And

Presenter4:25

He had been teaching Harrow and Eaton students who knew all the English literature and every time he referred to something he knew they knew, I said, wait here and went out and got it. One of them was Paradise Lost and all of Milton's sentences ended in Latin and I said wait here and went out and got a teacher to teach me Latin for free so I could get back to Milton and then I got back to Kew. So it took me thirteen years to get through first year Harrow I think.

Helene Hanff4:54

Yeah.

Presenter4:54

Yeah. Yeah. Let's have your second.

Helene Hanff4:55

Yeah.

Presenter4:56

Andrego

Presenter4:57

I went to New York. I was twenty. I didn't know anybody there.

Presenter5:02

I was terribly broke and I lived in a furnished room.

Presenter5:06

But once a year, if I had to go without food for two or three days, I went to hear Handel's Messiah at Carnegie Hall in those days, and I'd slide into my seat and just as it started I'd think I made it one more year. I remember a year when I was hit by the housing shortage. I had eleven addresses in eighteen months. And there was a night, Christmas week, when I'd paid a doorman to let me sleep on two chairs in the lobby.

Presenter5:32

And the next morning, by accident, I saw the billboard, Carnegie Hall, Messiah, tonight. I hadn't I'd been so desperate looking for a place. I went around and I thought, if they have a ticket for me, that means I'll make it another year.

Presenter5:45

And I had a few singles, slid into the sea, made it another year. So it's it's very nostalgic and very warm music to me. I love it anyway. I love the Messiah.

Helene Hanff6:00

Philip Langridge singing Comfaji from Handel's Messiah. Going back to the chronology, how long did you stay in the diesel engine business?

Presenter6:09

Oh, I was only there a few months and then I got a nice quiet situation. I was secretary jointly to a dance band leader and a saxophone teacher. Oh, at that time you gave yourself a rather impressive title. Oh, well, yes. The dance band leader played debutante, sub-debutant parties. And to do these parties you had to know when the best boys' schools had their vacations because you wanted the sub-deb to have a good stag line. So my job was to write haughtily condescending letters to the headmasters of Hotchkiss and Saint Paul's and Andover and Exeter, and I signed them.

Presenter6:45

Baroness von Hanff. Now I'm a short, dumpy, eighteen-year-old with straight hair and glasses and bad teeth, and I had to lope to the Ritz-Carlton desk where they had a mailbox every morning and announce that I was Baroness von Hanff and asked for my mail. It was so unerving, it was a pleasure to type my third act through a three-hour saxophone lesson.

Helene Hanff7:01

Just

Helene Hanff7:06

Uh

Presenter7:06

Yeah.

Helene Hanff7:06

This playwright

Helene Hanff7:09

This playwriting thing that there was a playwriting contest that you entered.

Presenter7:13

That was the great mistake. I won it.

Helene Hanff7:15

How

Speaker 27:15

I'm a

Helene Hanff7:15

How many players did you submit?

Presenter7:17

To the contest four. Specially written one? Oh, specially written, one every two weeks. Writing a three-act play takes no time at all if you haven't got any idea what you're doing.

Presenter7:27

Who was running this contest?

Presenter7:30

Well, it was a place called the Bureau of New Plays, but it turned out really that the Theatre Guild was behind it, or had at least guaranteed to train the playwrights with

Helene Hanff7:39

Theatre Guild was very important in the New York theatre at that time.

Presenter7:41

Yes, somebody called it Art with the capital A. It was the only theatrical producing company. That was really not out to make money. They were out to discover American dramatists and European dramatists. I believe they produced the first O'Neill. I'm not sure.

Presenter7:57

how much of sure they produced, but they were his favorite producing hub.

Speaker 28:00

Was this the first Theatre Guild playwriting competition?

Presenter8:04

It was the second.

Speaker 28:05

Who who had won the first? Funny you should ask.

Presenter8:08

They had picked two winners the first year and given them fifteen hundred bucks to live on and sent them on their way. It was the second year when the Theatre Guild stepped in. The first year was just the Bureau of New Plays. And the Theatre Guild said to the Bureau of New Plays, you're doing this all wrong.

Presenter8:21

It's a very bad thing to give playwrights money.

Presenter8:23

and no training, and just let them fritter it away.

Presenter8:27

So we were trained to death. I mean, we went to seminars, we went to rehearsals, we went to openings, we were taught by playwrights whose plays invariably flopped, directors whose plays flopped. The Theatre Guild which was teaching us had seventeen straight flops in the next two years. Not one of the twelve of us they trained ever became a playwright.

Presenter8:48

The two young men who had been given fifteen hundred and sent wandering off on their own were Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

Helene Hanff8:53

Mm-hmm. Here we go.

Presenter8:54

It does not pay to educate playwrights.

Helene Hanff8:57

So the pattern for a few years was you writing plays and doing various odd jobs.

Presenter9:00

Empire

Speaker 29:01

Yeah.

Presenter9:01

Dawson

Presenter9:02

Of course.

Helene Hanff9:03

such as

Presenter9:04

Well, the best of the jobs was reading scripts for the New York offices of Hollywood Studios.

Helene Hanff9:10

Uh

Presenter9:10

Uh

Helene Hanff9:11

You had a system for seeing every Broadway production at a minimum of expense.

Presenter9:15

Oh, we had no money. My friend Maxine had a marvellous system for getting everything for nothing.

Presenter9:19

We always waited up the street in a cheap drug store where we were known as the Gruesome Tucson. We sat for an hour over a cup of coffee, running out every five minutes to see when the act broke and people came out.

Speaker 19:24

We sat for

Presenter9:31

A sidewalk to smoke.

Speaker 19:33

I thought you were going to be able to do it.

Presenter9:33

And then we mingled with the smokers, we mingled back into the theater, and Maxine, who had twenty twenty vision, could spot the seats that had no coats on them.

Presenter9:42

And we saw the second and third acts of everything.

Presenter9:45

We found out nothing ever happened in the first act anyway,'cause they know you're coming late. How many plays did you write altogether? Twenty. And did you ever see one a year?

Speaker 29:52

One a year.

Presenter9:53

Oh, no, my word, none ever got as far as a rehearsal. Lots of options. Well, options are handy. An option means that a producer takes it for three months and has you rewrite it completely and drops it. Another producer picks it up and has you rewrite it completely and drops it.

Helene Hanff9:59

An option

Helene Hanff10:04

Would he get you one?

Speaker 210:04

Uh

Presenter10:08

Most of them give you money. Now and then you run into one who forgot to send the check, and after you've rewritten the play he's found somebody else's, and he sends his best regards to you through the secretary.

Helene Hanff10:20

Very hard to get.

Presenter10:20

Very hard to give to the landlady. Record number three. Being a music lover, I grew up.

Presenter10:26

when there really was no American classical music.

Presenter10:31

We hadn't found our way yet.

Presenter10:33

So when the first real American composers turned up, like Aaron Copeland.

Presenter10:37

and Bernstein. They were a big thrill to me.

Presenter10:40

But this was the first American composition I heard that had lovely, lovely words, which were as much Americana as the music. The words are by

Presenter10:53

James A. G.

Presenter10:55

It's called Knoxville, Summer of Nineteen Fifteen, and it's his recollection of being a little boy.

Presenter11:03

in that town at that time.

Presenter11:06

And

Presenter11:08

Samuel Barber, caught.

Presenter11:11

The feeling of small town America at the turn of the century, not long after it.

Presenter11:16

And the words and music together were like a coming of age to me of American music, and I love it.

Helene Hanff11:27

An excerpt from Samuel Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915, The Voice of Leontine Price. Now, Miss Hamphorth, as well as being a writer, you also became a reader, a professional reader.

Helene Hanff11:38

How

Presenter11:39

How does that work?

Presenter11:40

Well, there were outside readers and inside readers. The inside readers were down the hall from us in a little dungeon all their own. They read all day. They never came out. We never saw them. Reading what for whom? Reading plays, novels, short stories for the New York story departments of Hollywood Studios, which are always looking for material. Yes. Now an outside reader came in at four o'clock, there were eight or ten of us, picked up a play or a novel, took it home, read it that night, did a synopsis next morning before breakfast, and then you were free to write all day. You brought it in at four and took home another one. You had begun writing for television? Well, no, when I began writing for television, I walked into Paramount and said I quit.

Presenter12:22

I had just got my first hour T V script for more money than they'd pay me in three months, and I said, that's it.

Helene Hanff12:27

Nice about it.

Helene Hanff12:28

That was the LRA Queen show. This was

Presenter12:30

That was Fifty Two: The Adventures Valerie Queen.

Helene Hanff12:33

Live television.

Presenter12:34

Oh, very live.

Helene Hanff12:36

So

Presenter12:36

If an actor had the last line in one scene, you couldn't give him the first line in the next,'cause he needed ten seconds off camera to walk from the living room to the bedroom. How many characters were you allowed? I was allowed five full parts. That was Ellery, his father, the murderer, the corpse, and one suspect.

Helene Hanff12:54

So the world is a very good question.

Presenter12:55

It's very difficult to do a murder mystery unless. Let's have another record. And I don't believe in owning records, so I don't own any.

Presenter13:11

It's Ralph Vaughan Williams's Serenade to Music. It's a setting of a scene from The Merchant of Venice, the two young lovers.

Presenter13:21

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank

Presenter13:24

And

Presenter13:25

It is a combination.

Presenter13:27

of English music

Presenter13:30

and English literature.

Presenter13:32

Which was terribly important to me because being a writer, born speaking English,

Presenter13:39

London was to me what Rome is to a parish priest. It was the one Mecca I wanted to get to before I died. And I was at the time establishing a link with England. I was writing to an antiquarian bookshop, Marks and Company, at 84 Charing Cross Road, buying second-hand English classics that were beautifully bound and

Presenter14:06

had been owned by somebody who lived in England, so that it was a real link for me with English literature, and this music made me think I knew what it was like around the bookshop.

Presenter14:19

And it set Shakespeare

Presenter14:21

It's one of the rare settings of Shakespeare that's worthy of him.

Helene Hanff14:28

An excerpt from Serenade to Music by Vaughan Williams, conducted by Sir Adrian Belt. Wright, you were writing away for television. You also wrote some historical pieces, as well as the Ellery Queen detective stuff.

Presenter14:41

Oh yes, I graduated to a show called the Hallmark Hall of Fame, on which Sarah Churchill was the mistress of ceremonies. Now, there were taboos on the Hallmark Hall of Fame, one of which was that we couldn't write any historical scripts about Revolutionary War figures, those who fought in the American War of Independence, because

Presenter15:04

mister Hall of the Hallmark Greeting Cart Company would not insult Churchill's daughter by suggesting the British had lost it.

Speaker 215:12

Yeah.

Helene Hanff15:12

BAAP

Presenter15:12

It was very important to him not to bring it up.

Helene Hanff15:12

So it's good.

Presenter15:15

Yeah.

Helene Hanff15:15

Yeah.

Presenter15:17

American history after that period, and lots and lots of English and other.

Presenter15:22

Nationalities just to spare Sarah the shame.

Helene Hanff15:25

You could run into a little trouble with the Greeks, I see.

Presenter15:28

Well, yes, I blame that on an Englishman named Walter Savage Landor. You can't blame the Greeks. Walter Savage Landor wrote a lovely, lovely dialogue between Aesop, in the days when he was a slave, and an innocent young slave girl named Rhodope.

Presenter15:46

And I took off on Aesop in Rhoda Pay and wrote a lovely uplift.

Presenter15:51

Script for the Hallmark Hall of Fame. It was to be broadcast at 2 p.m. Hollywood time.

Presenter15:59

On a Sunday afternoon

Presenter16:01

And at ten o'clock in the morning I opened the Times book review section and there was a full page review of a book called A House is Not a Home by a madam named Polly Adler and in the middle of the page was the sculptured head of a Greek girl and under it in italics it said Rhodope, the most famous prostitute in Greece. This was back in the fifties.

Presenter16:25

mister Hall was so pure you couldn't say darn on his show.

Presenter16:30

Now he lived in Kansas City, Missouri, and Ethel Frank, my story editor who nothing fazed, said, Don't panic, don't panic. She called Kansas City, she got the ad agency executive out of bed, and he drove out to the suburbs and took the book review section out of the New York Times on mister Hall's porch.

Presenter16:49

Uh

Helene Hanff16:49

Save the show.

Presenter16:49

Save the show.

Helene Hanff16:52

And then you moved into matinee theatre. You were awarded a television fellowship. What was that and what did it

Presenter16:58

I was awarded a $5,000 fellowship by CBS to work on documentaries about American history. And I no sooner got the check than they fired everybody at CBS who'd had anything to do with it. And I slaved all year on documentaries nobody left at CBS was going to read.

Presenter17:19

much less produce because I was the ancient regime.

Presenter17:24

They were gone.

Helene Hanff17:25

Now all the time you were slaving away in in in your apartment writing for television, you were conducting this correspondence with Marx and Co.

Presenter17:33

With Frank Dole

Helene Hanff17:34

Marks and the menu.

Presenter17:36

He was the man who tracked down all the books I wanted, and I wrote him outraged letters when he sent the wrong one, and I needled him by calling him Frankie. He was still writing Dear Miss Hanf. And in those

Helene Hanff17:47

And in those years, just after the war, for some reason Britain refused to take martial aid and we were on very short commons indeed.

Presenter17:53

Oh, is that what it was? I've never known why the shortages were so dreadful.

Helene Hanff17:57

That was it, as far as I remember. Very generously used to send food puffs. Oh, I was a best friend.

Presenter17:59

Very generous.

Presenter18:01

Oh, I was a poor dog. I mean you were living on one egg a week and one orange a month, and I couldn't bear it. And I knew an Englishman in New York. I called him a Britisher in the book because he had a mother in New Zealand and a sister in Canada, and I didn't know where he came from, but he was English.

Presenter18:17

And he had a catalogue.

Presenter18:20

put out by a British owned company.

Presenter18:23

Which

Presenter18:24

flew fresh eggs from Denmark to his mother in England before she went out to New Zealand. And he gave me the catalogue and I used to go crazy because the packages were really food parcels for one family. And I was sending them to a bookshop where every one of six people was going home to a separate family. And I used to go crazy with the

Presenter18:45

One dozen eggs and one parcel of sweet biscuits, or two dozen eggs and no sweet biscuits.

Presenter18:53

One dozen eggs meant everybody had two eggs to take home to a family of six. It drove me crazy.

Helene Hanff18:57

But nevertheless it was a very beautiful gesture. And it was a correspondence that went on for twenty years. So you made these friends whom you never met. Right. You hadn't visited Britain.

Presenter19:01

And it was

Presenter19:03

You made these friends.

Speaker 219:04

Yeah.

Presenter19:05

Yeah.

Helene Hanff19:08

What did you want to see most in Britain? You had this resolve to see your literary heritage.

Presenter19:14

Oh, London. I wanted to see the corner where the Globe Theatre stood, and St. Paul's, where John Donne preached, and the Tower where Elizabeth sat on the step in front of Traitor's Gate and refused to go in because she wasn't a traitor. You know, all the literature made real.

Helene Hanff19:31

Well, you would have seen it, but you had to wait, so before we talk about it, let us wait while you play another record. What next? Now we have.

Presenter19:34

Indeed.

Presenter19:40

The one most nostalgic record of that time for me.

Presenter19:44

Is

Presenter19:46

Sir Arland Bax's Coronation fifty three. It was written for Elizabeth's coronation, but it was also the theme song on the Hallmark Hall of Fame. And it was the height of my correspondence with Frank, when the food shortages were just about to end but weren't over.

Presenter20:01

And it brings back so much

Presenter20:05

All of Marks and Company, all the people that worked there, all the people I knew in television in the heyday.

Presenter20:11

brings back everything.

Helene Hanff20:17

Sir Arnold Bax's Coronation March, which he wrote in 1953 for the Coronation, and it's played by the London Symphony Orchestra.

Helene Hanff20:28

Now, there was a change in your career as a writer. Um American television left New York for a new headquarters in the United States.

Presenter20:34

Picked up and moved to Hollywood where I didn't want to live. Right. And left me.

Presenter20:40

Without a profession.

Presenter20:42

I mean, I'd never written anything in my life but dialogue, bad plays and mediocre television scripts, and I had just got settled in a fancy new apartment without any idea how I was to pay the rent.

Presenter20:53

And since I was self employed I wasn't entitled to unemployment insurance or anything else. And I suppose I finally faced the fact that I wasn't going to be Eugene O'Neill.

Presenter21:04

Twenty years later I said to myself

Presenter21:07

You're gonna have to write something else. I mean, people do write prose.

Presenter21:11

So I got down one of my old plays and turned it into a magazine article.

Presenter21:17

and sent it off to the New Yorker, which promptly sent it back.

Presenter21:21

And then I sent it to Harper's and they bought it.

Presenter21:24

And then did I have anything else they wanted to know? So I said, Wait there and I wrote another one and sent it to them, which they sent back, and I sent to the New Yorker, and the New Yorker bought it.

Presenter21:34

Of course I then wrote Thirteen Nobody Bought, but never mind I had got off the

Presenter21:39

The theatre finally has to be.

Helene Hanff21:41

Who was it suggested that you should write an autobiographical book about the trials and tribulations of being a polar?

Presenter21:46

Oh yes. Uh well, the article that I wrote for Harpers was a little spoof, a story of the production of Oklahoma, how it came to be. And it was read by an editor at Harper's Publishers, naturally.

Helene Hanff21:59

This was a theatre guild production when you were working for them.

Presenter22:02

Right, that was my reminiscences about those days. And the Harper's editor wrote me, Dear Miss Hamp, do you have a book in mind? And I wrote back, No, I don't have a book in mind, but I'm thrilled it's a very high class question. And she wrote back and said, Let's have lunch anyway.

Presenter22:17

So I met her for lunch and as soon as she saw me she said, I've got a great idea for your book

Presenter22:21

Why don't you write a funny book about everything that's happened to you since you came to New York?

Presenter22:26

And something told me not to tell her it wasn't funny.

Presenter22:30

Because whatever they paid you to write a book I need it.

Speaker 122:30

Uh

Presenter22:34

So I went home and I wrote a book without any idea what I was doing, and that was Underfoot and Show Business, a story of my misspent youth.

Helene Hanff22:39

A very funny moment.

Presenter22:42

How to get nowhere in the theatre

Helene Hanff22:44

Then you had a a quite brilliant idea of making a book out of your correspondence with Marx and Coe, the antiquarian booksellers. Do you ordinar?

Presenter22:53

I don't keep anything, no. I live in a one-room flat. I don't even keep my old bad books that nobody bought, or my God knows, my old plays went down the incinerator twenty years ago. I kept Frank's letters because they were a record of the books I'd bought, which my accountant wanted when he did my income tax. He thought the prices were hilarious, they were all so cheap. But he said you're building uh a professional writer's library, and we take periodic deductions for depreciation and so forth.

Presenter23:24

So I kept them quite by accident. But when I got the letter telling me he was dead, I

Presenter23:30

I had to write something about it. And I wasn't sure I still had the letters. I went hunting. When I finally found them, I started to cry. I was so relieved. And part of my mom was saying, What's the matter with you? What's the matter?

Speaker 123:33

And I was thinking

Presenter23:42

'Cause I thought the most I'll get out of it is a New Yorker story.

Helene Hanff23:45

And that became Eighty Four Charing Cross Road, a very short book and somehow a very unlikely book to be an international success.

Presenter23:53

It couldn't seem unlikelier to me.

Helene Hanff23:56

And it brought you at long last to London. And sadly you visited the empty premises of Marks and Co., who are now out of business.

Presenter23:56

And if Roger

Presenter23:58

You can do it.

Presenter24:05

But it was it was wonderful just to be there. It was empty and dusty and the shelves were on the floor, but at least I was in London. My feet were there. I remember thinking, walking down the staircase, How about this Frankie? I finally made it And I felt that way.

Helene Hanff24:20

Well done.

Helene Hanff24:21

Let's have record numbers.

Presenter24:22

Yes. Six, I think we go to, isn't it? We go to a little night music because.

Presenter24:28

I think what prevents me from being

Presenter24:32

persecuted by the fact that I never got in anywhere in the theatre.

Presenter24:37

is being confronted with the man I believe to be the greatest genius the American theater has ever turned out, and that's Stephen Sunnheim.

Presenter24:47

When he started I thought his lyrics were unbelievably good.

Presenter24:52

I had no idea of the

Presenter24:56

depth of his composing skill till little night music came out. I think

Presenter25:02

It is on a par with The Merry Widow as an enduring light opera that ought to be in every light opera company's repertoire. I think it's marvelous. Which number are we going to hear? We are going to hear I Shall Marry the Miller's Son because I think it's Sunheim at his best. It's a combination of old European country song and that acerbic American something that stamps him unique and I think he is unique.

Helene Hanff25:35

The Miller's Sun, sung by D. Jamin Bartlett, as she sang it in the New York production of A Little Night Music.

Helene Hanff25:44

Your first visit to London, and that was another book for you to write, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. Yes.

Presenter25:48

Yes, I I came over in uh nineteen seventy one for the first time and I had dinner with some very nice

Presenter25:55

people, including an actress named Patricia Colling. And the last thing she said to me as I left her that night was, Keep a diary while you're in London, because you won't remember it all.

Presenter26:08

And it'll be a great comfort to you to be able to read how it was like a few years later. So somebody gave me an empty notebook.

Presenter26:18

And I kept a diary.

Presenter26:20

And when I got back to New York I turned it into a book.

Presenter26:24

called the Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.

Presenter26:27

And Andrei Deutsch brought that out in London and it got me back again.

Helene Hanff26:31

Well, you're quite a regular visitor to London.

Presenter26:33

Oh, now I bumped that.

Helene Hanff26:34

And even when you're not here we hear you on woman's hug.

Presenter26:37

Oh, God bless them. Yes, I came over in seventy

Presenter26:42

Gee, I guess it was seventy eight.

Presenter26:45

and met a darling girl named Chris Longley at the BBC, who suggested that I might be a poor man's female Alastair Cook. And wouldn't I like to go on Woman's Hour and talk about everyday life in New York, just what it was like to

Helene Hanff27:00

This way.

Presenter27:02

Live in an apartment and cook Christmas dinner when you had to park your turkey in four F North because their box was bigger.

Presenter27:11

And I started and I've had a marvellous time for three years.

Helene Hanff27:14

And at long last you have your name on the billboard outside a theatre, and it's a London

Presenter27:20

Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. It's all due to James Roos Evans, who wrote me that he wanted to dramatize Eighty four Charing Cross Road for a summer theatre in Salisbury.

Presenter27:34

and sent me the script, which looked fine.

Presenter27:37

And it got marvellous reviews. London critics went down to see it and loved it.

Presenter27:42

And the next thing I knew, he said it was opening in London, and I came over.

Presenter27:48

For the opening.

Presenter27:49

But I have to tell you I was thrilled to meet a young lady named Susan Kruger from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who told me she was the one that sent the book Eighty four Charing Cross Road to James Roose Evans in the first place.

Helene Hanff28:04

Let's see.

Presenter28:04

So I figure it's a real hands across the sea.

Helene Hanff28:07

Well, the play's now in the West End and it's a great success. And while you're back in New York, it'll still be going on every night. Unbelievable. What's your next project? What are you writing or what are you planning to write?

Presenter28:17

Oh, dear. If I knew, I wouldn't say because I'm very superstitious. Every time I've told somebody what I'm writing, it's a bust.

Presenter28:24

Just keep your fingers crossed. I hope I'm writing something when I get back. Let's have record number seven.

Presenter28:29

If you had asked me, if you had told me, I could only take one

Presenter28:34

piece of music to a desert island with me. It would have been the box at Matthew Passion because I think it is beyond all odds the greatest music in the Western world.

Helene Hanff28:50

In Tears of Grief, the final chorus from Bach's Saint Matthew Passion, the Bach Choir with the Thames Chamber Orchestra conducted by Sir David Wilcox.

Helene Hanff29:00

Helene Hampf, are you a practical lady? Could you look after yourself on a desert?

Presenter29:04

Oh, not for two days. Could you build a shelter? No way. I'd smother under it the first night. It would blow down.

Presenter29:10

Plus which I get very badly sunburned. There's no way I could survive sitting on the sand. Could you forage for food? No, the fish would have to jump up onto the shore. I might be able to step on the head. Are you a good cook? I'm a very good cook, but you have to get the food home. I mean I could build a fire when I was a Girl Scout. I went to Girl Scout camp. You a Girl Scout? You have.

Helene Hanff29:25

Yes indeed.

Helene Hanff29:29

Oh yes I have to go.

Presenter29:31

Oh, yes, I'd have been a Grand Scout, certainly. I would have been a golden iglet if I hadn't developed ear trouble. I couldn't get my diving badge.

Helene Hanff29:38

Would you try to get away? Did you get any badges for building boats or anything of that sort?

Presenter29:43

Oh, heavens, no

Presenter29:45

No, I I'm a pessimist by nature. I'd know perfectly well I was going to die there, or unless God sent somebody to rescue me.

Helene Hanff29:51

There you are then, very sadly playing your last record. Watch that.

Presenter29:53

There I am.

Presenter29:56

This is my

Presenter29:58

Most portentious music. The night before I left home, when I was a kid in Philadelphia, we my best friend was also a music lover, of course, and she and I were sitting on the sofa and she turned to me and she said, Whatever happens I was just going off to the Theater Guild's Summer Theater in Westport. She said, Whatever happens

Presenter30:18

You are off on a great adventure.

Presenter30:23

And they were playing this. It's the finale to the firebird.

Presenter30:28

Every time I hear it, I know everything's going to be all right, you know. Course my life was all right. I mean, I've had very bad patches. But if they play The End of the Firebird, I would like to hear this when I die. I would like to know that I was dying and asked somebody to play it for me.

Presenter30:47

So I've had the fourth thought.

Presenter30:50

to make my

Presenter30:52

the friend of my bosom who's not particularly music lover.

Presenter30:56

Such a convert to the firebird that she'll know

Presenter31:02

You know, that's the goodbye music I want to hear when I go.

Helene Hanff31:09

The closing passage to Stravinsky's The Firebird, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Carlo Maria Giolini.

Helene Hanff31:16

Now you've told us that the one disc you'd choose if you were only allowed one would be Bach St. Matthew Passion. What about your one luxury, any one thing that would give you pleasure to have but doesn't help?

Presenter31:26

A scrabble set. A Scrabble set. You can play endless Scrabble Solitaire.

Presenter31:32

And you're not playing against yourself, you're playing against chance, against luck. And being on a desert island, you're totally at the mercy of chance and luck. And it would appeal to me, and it uses up endless hours and it calms you down. And I love words. I make anagrams out of every bus sign, every ad, because it's my way of keeping my mind off my troubles. Right, a Scrabble. I can just sit there playing Scrabble forever.

Helene Hanff31:55

And I can just

Presenter31:58

I'm cheating if I wanted to, but I wouldn't want to, because that would make the game go too quickly.

Helene Hanff31:58

I'm changing

Helene Hanff32:03

And one book, you've already got the Bible and Shakespeare.

Presenter32:06

One book would be the Memoirs of Louis de Saint Simon.

Presenter32:10

of the Court of Louis the Fourteenth. It goes on for six volumes, and all the parts I now find long winded I would read with great pleasure.

Presenter32:19

And I would have the comfort of knowing I've got five more volumes and by the time I got through the sixth I'd have forgotten the first completely, so I could start over.

Helene Hanff32:27

All right. The memoirs of Saint-Simon. And thank you, Helene Ham, for letting us hear your desert islands.

Presenter32:34

I've had a marvellous time.

Helene Hanff32:35

Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.