Underfoot in Show Business

I'm thrilled that one of my favorite books, Underfoot in Show Business, is back in print, bringing Helene Hanff's scrappy memoir to a new audience. Before she wrote 84, Charing Cross Road, Hanff was a struggling playwright in mid-twentieth-century New York City. "Each year, hundreds of stagestruck kids arrive in New York determined to crash the theatre," she writes in the introduction to Underfoot in Show Business. "One in a thousand turns out to be Noel Coward. This book is about life among the other 999. By one of them." Hanff depicts the trials of pursuing a creative career with wit and humor—patching together odd jobs (such as adding 30,000 last-minute exclamation points to the press releases for Oklahoma!), sneaking into Broadway shows after intermission (the secret is not wearing a coat), and finding ways to stretch a few dollars until the next paycheck. In her hands, the absurdity of life becomes something utterly charming.