A WORD FROM...

On this page, I am planning on including tributes to Helene from people who knew her personally, played her on film or on stage, met her, etc.... and will hopefully be updated on a regular basis with more offerings.

The first entry is from the 25th Anniversary edition of '84 Charing Cross Road' - in which Anne Bancroft (who played Helene in the 1986 film of '84') wrote an introduction to the book:

INTRODUCTION

I'm not a writer, but this book and its author mean enough to me that I'm glad to venture a few words in celebration of its new edition.

Like the people who win our hearts, the books we come to love can introduce themselves in the strangest ways. Let me tell you about how I met 84, Charing Cross Road. Some years ago, as I was sitting on the beach on Fire Island, a man strolling by approached me. I didn't know the fellow, so his exclamation - "I've just read something that would be perfect for you!" - took me by surprise.

The next day, as I sat in the same spot, he came my way again, this time with book in hand. His enthusiasm seemed so sincere I couldn't help but be intrigued. So, soon as he was gone, I opened the small volume he had delivered and started to read. That's how my romance with 84, Charing Cross Road began.

As many of you already know - and many more, I hope, are about to find out - it's difficult, if not impossible, to start this book without finishing it. The trail of Helene Hanff's correspondence with Frank Doel and his colleagues at Marks & Co. leads us, captivated, down one woman's idiosyncratic path through English Literature; along the way, our enjoyment in sharing her literary education is deepened by the human narrative her letters weave. This is a book which seems at first to be about other books, which of course it is, but as we get to know Helene, and, through her, Frank and Nora Doel, and Cecily Farr and Megan Wells and the rest at 84 Charing Cross, we recognise that the books desired, located, sent and received are the happy vehicles for much else: conversation, friendship, affection, generosity, wit - in other words, for all the best things life can share with us.

Which brings me to just what it is about this slim book that means so much to me. The more I listened to Helene's distinctive, wry, and winning voice, the more I heard echoes in it of another voice, that of a friend I'd been close to for many years, since, in fact, we'd been students together. Much like Helene, this friend was enchanted by books in a way that animated his every word; what resonated between Helene's voice on the page before me, and my friend's in my memory, was the respect, need, and love for books that characterised their mutual passion. Sadly, at the time the wandering reader of Fire Island delivered 84, Charing Cross Road into my hands, I was mourning the death of this very friend. So all the while Helene was writing to Frank Doel about Pepys and Hazlitt and Stevenson and "Q", her words were really talking to me about this dear friend of mine, giving them a poignancy that only enriched the extraordinary charms they already possessed.

Soon after, knowing of my attachment to this book, my husband did a wonderful thing, pursuing and acquiring the film rights to it and presenting them to me as an anniversary gift. That's how I got to play Helene on the screen, and to meet her in person. If I were a better writer, I'd describe the occasion on which we all met the Queen Mother at a command performance of the movie; the image of Helene democratically offering her hand to royalty remains an indelible memory.

Now, I certainly didn't mean to pass myself off as a reader of the stature of Helene Hanff, nor even the beachcomber who dropped her book into my lap, but it seems to me that my experience with this lovely volume reveals an awful lot about what books provide: a way of reaching out across time and space to friends and strangers, and to the absent presences that play such a large part in all our lives. In the pages that follow you'll recognise Helene reaching out to her beloved English authors and to the many friends in and about 84, Charing Cross that these long-dead writers introduced to her. What you won't recognise is the beachcomber speaking to me, or myself communing with my late friend; but, believe me, there we are, right between the lines.

ANNE BANCROFT

In an article in the Guardian, on April 11th 1997, Mark Shivas (who produced the BBC Play for Today of '84 Charing Cross Road') wrote:

I played up to Helene's rosy view of a London, England and the BBC when we started making 84 Charing Cross Road. On our first meeting, instead of sending a car to take her to rehearsals, I presented myself at her Bloomsbury hotel driving my Morgan, with a bunch of roses from the garden. Sure enough, I turned up in a later book as the epitome of Englishness.

Anne Jackson was cast as Helene without ever having met the real person, as much on Helene's dark brown, gin-and-cigarettes telephone voice as anything. Helene was tickled. "She's so much more glamorous than I am," she growled. And indeed she was. Helene more resembled Nancy Walker. It was hard for Anne to play the part with Helene watching from the control box, but it was difficult for Helene to watch us recreate her life. She ended the recording in floods of tears and said it was as though she had died and gone to heaven.

The production team loved her. Anne Jackson, the director Mark Cunningham, and I all became her long-term friends and I soon visited the New York apartment that we had built in the studio from photographs, an eerie experience. She was so delighted that we'd all recreated her life for her. 84 then became a stage show in London and New York and later a movie. I'm sure there's room for a musical. Probably we could figure out an ice show.

MARK SHIVAS

In the UK newspaper The Independent, 14 April 1997, James Roose-Evans wrote:

Helene Hanff will always be associated with what is, undoubtedly, her most endearing and enduring book, 84 Charing Cross Road (1971); yet this slim volume of correspondence between herself and Marks & Co, an antiquarian bookshop in London, was written at the lowest point in her career.

For years, as she was later to describe in Underfoot in Showbusiness (1961), she had been writing plays that never got produced, while eking out a precarious existence reading scripts for Paramount Pictures, writing articles for encyclopaedias, television scripts, and children's history books; until one evening she sat down to take stock of herself and her future. "I was a failed playwright. I was nowhere. I was nothing."

It was into this void that there came the news of the death of Frank Doel of Marks & Co from whom for over 20 years she had been ordering books she could ill afford, but which had given her a link with England. "Coming when it did the news was devastating. It seemed to me that the last anchor in my life - my bookshop - was taken from me. I began to cry and I cculdn't stop." It was then that she realised that she had to write the story of her relationship with the shop and, in particular, with Frank Doel.

Published in 1971, the book became an overnight success and, even more surprisingly, a cult book. Once, in conversation with me, she referred to it as "my little nothing book; I thought I was writing a New Yorker story when I wrote it. I still think it is a nice little short story."

Soon letters, gifts, and tele phone calls poured in from all over the country. One such call was from a woman in Alaska and when Hanff commented: "This must be costing you a fortune," back came the unexpected reply, "I'm married to an Eskimo and we live 300 miles from the nearest town. I didn't want to wait till spring when the roads clear and we can get into town to the post office." It became one of those books that people passed on, or gave to each other. Hanff told me how the nuns of Stanbrook Abbey near Worcester, an enclosed order of Benedictines, had a single borrowed copy which was placed in a glass case, and a small American nun was elected to turn one page a day so that the whole community could read it together.

Then, in 1980, I acquired the stage rights and adapted the book as a play for the stage, directing it first in the West End and, the following year, on Broadway. Later it was made into a movie starring Ann Bancroft. Since then the play has been performed all over the world. But it was not until the stage version that Helene Hanff began to make any real money, enough to ensure her at least a reasonable comfort in her old age which was much troubled by pneumonia and bronchial infections (exacerbated no doubt by her excessive smoking), as well as diabetes. Until then, in spite of the book's success, she never made a penny because, as she described on the Dick Cavett celebrity television show, every reader of the book wrote her a fan letter which she would then answer, and she had worked out that the cost of the aerogram equalled the amount of the royalties on each copy of the paperback edition.

It was the book's publication in England by Andre Deutsch which brought her to England for the first time, only to find that Marks & Co had closed. This, and subsequent visits, led to her writing a sequel, The Duchess of Bloomsbuiy Street (1976). Soon she was giving regular monthly talks for Woman's Hour on BBC entitled "Letter From New York". Other books followed, including The Apple of My Eye (1978), a quirky look at New York, and Q's Legacy (1985) - about the work of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose essays found in a library first ignited her passionate love of English literature - and still the letters kept arriving from all over the world.

As a writer Helene Hanff is no Jane Austen or George Eliot. Being a lover of what she once described as "I was there" books, she is at her best when writing about her own experiences. And the six books which she published provide an almost ongoing autobiography. Unmarried, she lived alone; but, although there had been romances, as she once confided to the American actress Olympia Dukakis, who is to play Helene Hanff in a revival of the play, she was not prepared to write about the more private side of her life.

Perhaps the central irony of that life is that having always dreamed of being a playwright the only thing of hers that was staged was an adaptation of her book. When she was young she had entered and won a play writing competition sponsored by the prestigious Theater Guild of New York. Summoned to New York, she met the formidable Therese Helburn, co-director of the Guild, who told her: "Your plays are terrible, just terrible. But never mind. You have talent." She was given ajob in the publicity department of the Guild and once a week studied the craft of writing plays with Miss Helburn. But although options were taken on a number of the plays, none was ever produced.

When 84 Charing Cross Road opened in the West End (on Thanksgiving Day, of all days, she complained), the audience rose to its feet as she appeared at the end to embrace the stage Helene Hanff played by Rosemary Leach. The next day, in The Times, Irving Wardle 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 fairytale: obscure affection crowned with public acclaim."

Although the bookshop itself is long gone, on the spot where it once stood, is a brass plaque which states simply to every passerby:

84 Charing Cross Road
The booksellers Marks and Co
Were on this site which became world renowned
Through the book by Helene Hanff.

JAMES ROOSE-EVANS

As I find/receive/obtain tributes to Helene from other people, they will be added to this page.