Underfoot In Show Business by Helene Hanff

Author:Helene Hanff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2015-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

9. OUTSIDE HOLLYWOOD

TO BE YOUNG and trying to crash the theatre in the forties was to resign yourself to the chronic problem of how to earn enough money to keep alive till you became famous on Broadway. You learned to avoid nine-to-five jobs and look instead for part-time work which, though it paid a meager wage, would leave you free most of the day to pursue what you liked to think of as your real profession.

The jobs actors took in those days ran a gamut considerably longer than this book. An actor, for instance, might work as a bellhop, bartender, bus driver, barker on a sightseeing bus, bonded messenger, bouncer, or butcher’s delivery boy, and that’s only the B’s.

Actresses were more limited, as Maxine discovered, even though when she filled out an Employment Agency Questionnaire and came to the question: “Kind of Position Wanted:__________” she wrote simply: “I’ll do anything.” In addition to taking street-corner and door-to-door surveys, Maxine drove a school bus, was a saleslady at Lord & Taylor during the pre-Christmas rush, and taught elocution in a convent.

Maxine’s trouble was that when she was out of work she got impetuous and she’d seize any job that came along without a careful enough consideration of the hours involved. There was the winter she drove the school bus, for instance. Like most actresses, she was used to going to bed very late and sleeping half the morning. Even when she wasn’t in a play, she was generally up half the night working on some big project like drying her hair.

Since Maxine’s hair was shoulder-length and as thick as a mop, just washing it took most of the evening. And for reasons known to nobody, she decided that the way to dry it was to turn on the oven, sit on the kitchen floor and spread her hair out on an oven rack to dry. She put the oven on at the lowest possible heat so as not to set her hair on fire, and as a result it took her half the night to dry it. She washed it once a week, sat with her hair in the oven till two or three in the morning and as a result slept through the alarm clock five hours later.

So during the season when she drove the school bus, she overslept regularly one morning a week, thereby leaving twenty-five children standing around under twenty-five apartment-house canopies waiting for the school bus. And at least one afternoon a week she was summoned to a two o’clock audition which invariably started an hour late and ran longer than anticipated, causing her to leave twenty-five children standing on the school steps for a couple of hours waiting for the bus to take them home. So Maxine and the school parted company by mutual consent after three months, freeing her in time for the Christmas rush at Lord & Taylor.

Ideally, of course, she found what might be called grey-area acting jobs, like appearing in that U.S.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.