Still, it was only after Doel’s death in 1969 that it occurred to Hanff to publish the exchanges, and even then she thought it no more than “a nice little short story”. There was also an amusing sub-plot in Doel’s wife, the Irish Nora, née Morrison), who jealously chided him for bringing Hanff’s letters home, although as both correspondents told her, she’d have more reason to worry if he didn’t. The relationship between the sassy, sophisticated Manhattanite (Anne Bancroft in the 1987 film) and the staid, reliable Englishman (Anthony Hopkins) would strike a favourite chord on both sides of the ocean. In an urgent follow-up, she inquired: “ARE THEY KOSHER? I could rush a tongue over. Begun after the war, it was accompanied by occasional presents of food to the ration-starved Londoners, and peppered with her New York wit.Īfter dispatching one gift, a ham, she noticed that the proprietors of Doel’s shop were “Marks” and “Cohen”. All this in a freezing New York office, because (as she said) the company had turned off the heating to compensate for the overspend.īy the time of the memoir, Hanff's transatlantic correspondence with a book dealer called Frank Doel was into its second decade.

As a result, she spent a long night adding 30,000 exclamation marks (“Oklahoma!” was mentioned three times on each release), while the manager went to frantic work on the playbills. Then the producers decided the name still lacked something. She hated the new one, ' Oklahoma' (it was like calling the musical 'New Jersey, or Maine'), but cranked out another 10,000 releases anyway. Once she had to pulp 10,000 mimeographed press releases about a folk opera called A way We Go, because the producers decided on a late title change. In between not getting her plays staged, she had worked as a TV writer and theatrical publicist – learning, as the latter, interesting lessons about the fine lines between triumph and disaster. , when she was already portraying herself as an artistic failure.

Helene hanff