The night Stokowski left the Peanut shattered

The following is a reproduction of an article written by Helene Hanff for the UK newspaper, The Times, issue dated 21 May 1983.

Helene Hanff, author of '84 Charing Cross Road', recalls a girlhood hero

The Saturday before Heartbreak Thursday was a perfectly ordinary concert-season Saturday. I mean we saw the orchestra men that day, we saw Marshall - and not one of them said anything. They didn't know, any more than we did, that our world was going to end on Thursday. If they had, they would have warned us.

It rained that Saturday. It was April but very cold, so when I left the house after lunch I was wearing my old Girl Scout moccasins and my lumberjacket, and along with the brown paper bag with my dinner sandwiches in it I was carrying my family's automobile robe. We were going to be sitting on line for Peanut Gallery tickets from two in the afternoon till quarter to eight that night, and it wasn't going to get warmer as the hours went by.

I took the subway down to Broad and Walnut and walked the block to Broad and Locust where the Academy of Music was. The front entrance was on Broad Street, but running from the corner for half a block along Locust Street clear to the stage door and the Peanut Gallery entrance, there was this long step under a second-storey ledge. If you got on line early, you could sit on the step and wrap yourself in your old camp blanket or your family's automobile robe, and you were out of the wet because of the ledge. Whereas if you got on line late - say around four o'clock, the line would be clear down to the corner. And around the corner you had to stand bolt upright and freeze to death on Broad Street, which was the coldest, widest street in the entire city of Philadelphia.

Looking up Locust Street from the corner, I could see Fay and Natalie, by themselves, way up at the head of the step next to the stage door. Nobody else was there yet. Fay and Nat were best friends and they were always first on line and I loved sitting next to them because they knew Stoki better than the rest of us did. I walked towards them, past the big wall posters above the step with "The Philadelphia Orchestra. Leopold Stokowski, Conductor", and the week's programme with a streamer reading "Final Concerts of the Season" plastered across the bottom. I reached Fay and Nat and said hello and Fay said: "His box is full tonight".

The biggest speculative advantage of being first on line was, you might get to sit in Stoki's box.

His cab drove up to the stage door at 7.30, 15 minutes before the Peanut Gallery doors opened. He would get out it and stride toward the stage door and the line would scream Hello - (nobody on line was over 21) - and Stoki would wave back. But about every fourth Saturday, he would glance at the first people on line and hold up, say, three fingers. That meant there were three empty seats in his box for the concert. So the first three people would get out of the line and go around to the front entrance and inform the usher with great dignity that they had been invited to sit in Mr Stokowski's box. Then they would carry their paper bags and coats and blankets up the grand staircase to the parquet circle and deposit themselves in the front seat of Stoki's centre box.

At 8.30 his other guests would arrive, all got up in evening clothes. One night it was Helen Hayes and her family. One night, it was an ambassador home on a visit. Whoever it was just climbed over our coats, blankets and handbags piled on the floor and took the back seats we left for them. We never moved for anybody.

By six, it began to rain really hard, and the second big advantage to being first on line paid off. Marshall came out. Marshell Betz was the orchestra librarian, but along with looking after the scores, he was a sort of backstage factotum. He was red-faced and beefy and half-bald, and he glared ferociously before waving the group of us inside the stage door with a stubby, brawny arm.

"Now you go sit in the greenroom till the house opens", he bawled at us. "And behave yourselves!"

We went into the greenroom and left our handbags and dinner bags there, and Fay, who always knew where everything was, borrowed a backstage flashlight. Carrying our blankets and coats, we followed her flashlight up five pitch-black flights of stairs to the pitch-black Peanut Gallery, and then we more or less felt our way down to the front row and spread our blankets and coats across the entire front row of seats, to save them for friends who had had to go to the dentist or shopping with their mothers, and would get on line late and wind up way up at the back under the roof otherwise.

When we got back to the green room we made ourselves comfortable and had dinner. We were still sitting there at eight, when the orchestra man began drifting in. Some of the first-deck men - like Charlie Gusikoff, the first trombone, and Willie Kincaid, the flautist - really liked us and they said Hello-how-are-you. The rest of the men just looked at us and swore, in a discouraged fashion. About ten past eight, some second-violinist turned to us and said snappishly: "Do you mind if I put on my other pants?" and we left for the Peanut. For 20 minutes we stood scanning the back of the house and shouting to friends to come on down, we had seats saved. Then Stoki walked out to the podium and the houselights went down, and there was nothing alive on earth but him and the music.

After the concert, we went across to the drub-store to get milkshakes, to give Stoki time to shower and change and go home. Then we went around to his house to serenade him. He lived at 1716 Rittenhouse Street, in a three-storey brownstone next to a corner parking lot. We would stand in the parking lot, around at the side under his living-room window, and sing. After a minute, a living-room window would go up and Stoki would lean out.

"How many of you are there?" he would call down. If there were six or less, he invited us up. If there were more than six, he would come down and sit on the front step and talk to us. That Saturday night there were 10 or 12 of us huddled in the parking lot when he opened the window. "How many of you are there?" he asked. "Six", said Fay.

So of course Stoki said "Go round to the front and I'll press the buzzer". We went around to the front door, and we clambered up the narrow, rickety steps while Stoki stood on the landing -his thick white hair straight up like a beacon above the navy shirt and slacks he had changed into - and counted as with his fingers and his lips. When we got to the top, he said "Which is the sixth?" and we giggled.

"Mind the wires", he said. (He always had tangles of wires on the landing, he was always experimenting with sound equipment.) He led us into the living-room and threw cushions on the floor in a circle for us to sit on. then he sat, in a floppy velvet armchair facing us, and asked how we'd liked the Shostakovich, and we started to talk. He didn't talk, he listened. Lounging in the chair with his long legs stretched out, he questioned every one of us about our reactions to the Shostakovich, his electric blue eyes fastened on each speaker in turn.

Youth concerts were held every fourth or fifth week; there were six of them during the concert season. You had to be aged between 13 and 25 to buy a ticket, and the Academy held 3,000 people - and even so, there were always a couple of hundred kids turned away. None of us could afford regular concert prices - $3 downstairs, Ł2.50 in the parquet circle and so on - except for the 50 cent seats in the Peanut. Well, Stoki wanted every kid in town to be able to afford youth concert tickets, so he conducted for nothing and the orchestra played for nothing, and we acted as ushers and wrote the programme ourselves and sold ads in it to pay for the printing. So youth concert tickets cost 75 cents downstairs, 50 cents in the parquet circle, 35 cents in the balcony, 25 cents in the family circle and 10 cents in the Peanut, and a lot of high-school teachers would slip dimes to poor kids so everybody could go.

No seats were reserved on any floor. When the doors opened, you just tore up the stairs to your floor and knocked down everybody and got to the best seats you could. Then you scanned the programme to guess who the soloist was. (There was a rich lady who paid for the soloist.)

There would be a breathless pause as we waited. Then Flagstadt or Heifetz would walk out on stage, and after a split second of stunned gratification pandemonium would break loose, as 3,000 young people lost their lungs entirely. But - as Heifetz and Flagstadt told the press afterward every year - once the music started, we were the most rapt and utterly silent audience either of them every performed before.

The ovations afterwards used to make al the chandeliers shake. Every soloist played encore after encore because the audience refused to go home. Finally, around midnight, Stoki would get rid of us by having the orchestra play a Sousa march, during which he walked off the stage and had the houselights turned off, floor by floor.

Between youth concerts, he kept us busy. He helped us found a youth orchestra, a youth chorus, a youth dance group and a travelling youth record library.

It rained again on Thursday. I got home late from business school because the trolley-car was caught in traffic, and I rushed upstairs to dress for the youth concert with a bare hello to my mother. When I came downstairs for dinner, the whole family was in the living room and they stopped talking when they saw me. Then my father, with a very strange look on his face, handed me the Evening Bulletin.

Stokis' picture was on the front page, next to another man's picture. Under Stoki's picture, the caption read "Outgoing Conductor", under the other man's, it said "Incoming Conductor". The story underneath said that Stoki had resigned. He was going to California and he wasn't coming back. Ever. Just like that, it was all over.

I don't remember dinner and I don't remember the subway ride. But when I came up out of the subway at Broad and Walnut, I didn't hear anything and my heart stopped; I knew my watch must be wrong and the concert must have started. When 3,000 people between the ages of 13 and 25 are congregated on one corner, you can hear them a block away without any trouble. I started to run and I ran all the way to Locust Street. Then I saw them.

The concert hadn't started. The doors hadn't even opened yet. They were all there, 3,000 young people jammed on the steps and the sidewalk in front of the Academy of Music and lined up along Locust Street to the Peanut entrance. They were standing there in the misty rain and they were absolutely silent. Here and there a girl was crying. I even saw a boy crying. But nobody was saying anything. What was there to say?

It's strange, but I don't remember that last youth concert at all, I only remember that a crowd of us - maybe a hundred of us - waited for him at the stage door after the concert. We wanted an explanation. We waited an hour in the rain before he finally came out. We asked him why he was leaving us, why he was going to Hollywood, of all places.

"We want to take music out of the concert hall", he said, "and give it to everybody. We have started to do this by making phonograph records and giving concerts on the radio. But there are countries where people don't have electricity in their homes. They have no record-players and no radio. What is astonishing Is that everywhere in the world - everywhere! - there are movie theatres. The orchestra and I are going to Hollywood to make movies - and pygmies in Africa and coolies in China will come to our movies, and hear Bach for the first time."

How could we say we didn't want him to give to people in Africa and China what he had given to us? None of us had ever heard any music - not real music - till our first youth concert. Music had transformed our lives since then. Stokowski had transformed our lives.

Two pictures are included in the article:

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