Instead, like a lot of other would-be playwrights, she eventually found herself writing scripts for an entertainment upstart called television, then a live medium based in New York. Hanff comments some 40 years later, ''I didn't have a chance.'' ''So, of course, with a great beginning like that,'' Ms. Arriving in town as the winner of a prestigious Theatre Guild fellowship, an honor bestowed on Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller the year before, she had every reason to believe she would fulfill her goal. Hanff has had good reason to believe in Flanagan's Law.
''Its basic premise is that no matter what happens to you in your career, it's unexpected,'' she says.Įver since she first came to New York as a stagestruck 19-year-old from Philadelphia determined to conquer Broadway, Ms. for nearly 20 years.įor Helene Hanff the success of ''84, Charing Cross Road,'' first published in 1970 and still available in both hard cover and paperback (Avon Books, 1979), was, she believes, ''the greatest accident of my life.'' It was one that happened after years of reading scripts for $40 a week, baby sitting, writing ''arty murder plots'' for the early ''Adventures of Ellery Queen'' TV series, and, most time-consuming of all, struggling in vain to get her plays produced on Broadway.Īccident or not, it proved consistent with a theory she encountered in the theater called Flanagan's Law. Hanff's New York apartment and the dusty Dickensian reaches of Marks & Co. Such were the unlikely beginnings of a long and happy friendship-by-mail, a BBC television drama, a Broadway play, and a curiously affecting little book called ''84, Charing Cross Road,'' the collection of letters that made their way between Ms. Addressing it to ''Marks & Co., 84, Charing Cross Road,'' she requested a Latin Bible, a book of Hazlitt's essays, and other volumes on a list of her ''most pressing problems.''
In 1949 Helene Hanff, then an impoverished young writer with a rich taste for out-of-print literature, wrote a letter to a used-book shop in London.
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