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| The Story of 84 Charing Cross Road | |||
| By James Roose-Evans August 13th 1981 |
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Dear JR-E, Just got the mail from friends in London. Two marvellous reviews, The Times and The Telegraph, of your production of 84 Charing Cross Road, from which I gather you bring off a miracle. God (and I) bless you for it! PLEASE let me know if it ever gets to London, well in advance, so I can save up the fare…… Helene Hanff. |
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| I had adapted and directed for the stage Helene’s books of letters to Marks and Co, the antiquarian bookshop, and it had opened at the Salisbury Playhouse, with Rosemary Leach as Helene, and David Swift as Frank Doel, before transferring to the Ambassadors Theatre in London. Little did Helene Hanff realise when she sat down to write the story of her friendship with the bookshop that the resulting slim volume would become not only an instant success but also a cult book, celebrating the friendship between the two countries. Letters poured in by the hundreds; invitations and gifts arrived by each mail; cheeses from Wisconsin, a bust of Shakespeare from Stratford, pecan nuts from Georgia, even a proposal of marriage from a fifteen year old boy with terminal acne. |  |
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“I was totally unprepared for this,” wrote Helene, “and I didn’t know how to handle it.” Yet it was this book, followed by the stage production and then the movie with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins which was given a command performance in the presence of HRH The Queen Mother, which changed Helene’s life. |
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Helene never ceased to express her gratitude to me. “What fortune teller would ever have the nerve to predict that the best years of my life would turn out to be my old age? As long as I live – and however many times I say it – I will never be able to tell you what you have done for me, but not the least of it is the financial security that keeps rolling in – this time from Australia – to give me, for the third year, a worry-free old age I never expected to have. It’s just indescribable. God bless you a thousand times, as the Irish say, for dramatising it.” | ||
| It was one afternoon, during the previews at the Ambassadors Theatre, that we all crowded into Rosemary Leach’s dressing room to listen to Helene giving her Letter From New York for the BBC’s Woman’s Hour programme before flying to England for the West End opening. She described how all her life she had had two ambitions: one was to come to England, which she finally achieved when Andre Deutsch published her book, and the other was to be a playwright. She had written scores of plays, none of which had ever been performed, “and now someone I have never met, James Roose-Evans, has turned the book into a play, and they are presenting it in the West End, and I have been invited to the First Night, and when do you think they have fixed that for? THANKSGIVING DAY!! I nearly refused to go!” | |||
| As the final curtain fell and the waves of applause began, I hurried Helene down flights of steps and through the pass-door on to the stage, and then darted into the stalls to watch the curtain calls. One by one, the company came on, then David Swift and, finally, Rosemary Leach. It was at this point that Helene was supposed to come through the shop door, but there was no sign of her! Backstage she was, as I learned later, saying “Where’s James? I’m not going on without James!” Finally the company manager pushed her on and, as she entered, the audience roared, and Helene and rosemary fell into each other’s arms. |  |
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The reviews the next day were ecstatic. In The Daily Telegraph, John Barber wrote, “I found my
throat lumpy and my eyes in tears. It does not often happen.” Similarly in The Times, Irving
Wardle, not easily given to being moved, wrote, “The sight of Helene Hanff on the set of the
bookshop she made famous, and blinking under the applause of the town she could never afford to
visit, made last night’s opening into the end of a fairy tale, obscure affection finally crowned
with public acclaim.”
Later Helene was to write of that evening, “One of the critics described my walk through the bookshop door to join the cast on stage at the curtain call, and ‘the audience rose to her’. I hadn’t seen that in the darkness beyond the footlights. I stared at the line till I couldn’t see it for tears. Somehow, with that image, the dream week I’d lived through in London was suddenly, overwhelmingly, real. The suite in the hotel, the flowers and messages were real, the Opening Night was real, even the wildly improbably plaque I had to unveil, which read ’84 Charing Cross Road, the Booksellers Marks and Co were on this site which became world renowned through the book by Helene Hanff’ – even that was real. What fortune teller would ever have had the nerve to predict that the best years of my life would turn out to be my old age?’ |
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The play received four nominations from the Society of West End Managers: Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Play, and won for Rosemary Leach the Best Actress of the Year Award. The following year I flew to New York to direct Ellen Burstyn and Jo Maher for the Broadway production presented by Alexander C Cohen where it won awards for Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Director and Best Play. | ||
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Helene herself was diminutive, given to wearing neat trouser suits, white silk blouses and a cravat; her short cropped hair framing the lined monkey-like face. Speaking in sharp shooting phrases she was like a small boy who, dressed as a cowboy, fires off toy pistols with glee. She was, at such moments, like a show-biz kid performing to entertain the adults. “One doesn’t really change as one grows older,” she observed in a TV interview. “You remain a twelve year old still, with all the same feelings – like I’m still scared of making a fool of myself.” It soon became clear, however, that Helene’s wise-cracking was simply her way of getting by. Underneath one sensed her vulnerability. In the tough world of Manhattan she was a survivor. Since its first production, the play has been presented in many parts of the world, including Japan, and its story continues to move and delight audiences wherever it is done.
James Roose-Evans
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