84, Charing Cross Road (10 page)

Her career began auspiciously in 1938, when she won a fellowship from the Bureau of New Plays as a result of a nationwide competition. Soon afterward, she moved to Manhattan, where she became a protegee of Theresa Helburn, a co-producer of the Theater Guild. But although Ms. Hanff wrote 20 plays through the 1940’s, none were ever produced. Her repeated attempts to succeed in New York theater are chronicled in her 1961 memoir,
Underfoot in Show Business
.

“I wrote great dialogue, but I couldn’t invent a story to save my neck,” she told The New York Times in 1982. In the 1950’s, Ms. Hanff supported herself by writing screenplays for television programs including
Playhouse 90
,
The Adventures of Ellery Queen
and
Hallmark Hall of Fame
.

A child of the Depression, Ms. Hanff could afford only a year of college, and throughout her life was an impassioned autodidact, educating herself by reading the great books, which she preferred to procure from London rather than dip into “Barnes & Noble’s grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies.” One wall of her studio apartment on East 72d Street in Manhattan was filled from floor to ceiling with her Marks & Co. treasures, with their rich leather bindings and gleaming gold stamping. In front of the bookshelves hung the Marks & Co. sign, stolen for her by a devoted
84
reader from the shop after it closed, not long after Mr. Doel’s death.

When Ms. Hanff decided to publish her correspondence with the shop as a memorial to Mr. Doel, the result brought her undreamed-of attention.
84, Charing Cross Road
was hugely popular in Britain, where it was adapted for the London stage by James Roose-Evans. (The play was less well-received on Broadway, where it ran in 1982 with Ellen Burstyn as Ms. Hanff and Joseph Maher as Mr. Doel.) In 1987 the book was made into a feature film starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins.

The book’s success finally gave Ms. Hanff the wherewithal to travel to England, where she visited the boarded-up bookshop and met Mr. Doel’s widow, Nora, a journey documented in
The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street
(1973). Ms. Hanff’s other books include
Q’s Legacy
(1986),
Apple of My Eye
(1977) and the children’s titles
Movers and Shakers
(1969) and
Terrible Thomas
(1964).

“It’s unreal to me, what the last 10 years have been like,” Ms. Hanff said in 1982. “The fans—people all over the world who regard me as a friend! And in London there is a brass plaque on the wall with my name on it, to mark the spot where the bookshop once stood, because I wrote letters to it. In your own mind you’re still an uneducated writer who doesn’t have much talent, and yet here you are with a plaque on the wall in London! You don’t even dream about things like that.”

But 84,
Charing Cross Road
could not provide its author with the economic stability she sought throughout her life. “The one drawback about being a writer is that you never know in any month where the rent is coming from six months from then,” Ms. Hanff told Publishers Weekly in 1985.

In her last years she was “broke,” by her own account, living on royalties and Social Security and accepting a $5,000 grant from the Authors League Fund to help pay her hospital bills.

No immediate family members survive.

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