One in a Hundred Million: The Book That Found Its Own Actor

Tired, he went down to Leicester Square Underground station to catch a train home. Someone had left a book on a bench. It was The Girl from Petrovka.

The Book in Red Pencil

At home, he opened it and saw that someone had written in it. There were corrections throughout, among them changes from British spelling to American: labour became labor. Hopkins had no idea whose they were.

Feifer did. An American journalist who had studied Soviet law at Columbia, he first went to Moscow in 1959 as a guide at the American National Exhibition, the one where Nixon and Khrushchev had their famous “kitchen debate.” Late in 1971, he lent a friend his advance proof copy of the novel, which he had marked up in red pencil for the American edition, and asked him to be careful with it. The friend lost it in the London district of Bayswater, according to the reconstruction by the statistician David Hand. What happened to the book after that, no one knows. Some months later, it somehow ended up on a bench beside the one man in London who needed it.

Feifer later recalled one more detail. Britain was then under IRA bomb threats, and people were being warned not to touch unattended packages. The book Hopkins found, Feifer said, was wrapped. Hopkins picked it up anyway.

Vienna Instead of Belgrade

The film was supposed to be shot in Belgrade. The Yugoslav production company Inex Film had signed with Universal, the sets were built, and shooting was scheduled to begin on September 29, 1973. Two weeks earlier, Inex cancelled the contract without explanation. Director Robert Ellis Miller suspected pressure from Moscow, and a Yugoslav official denied it but admitted that Inex had feared offending Russia. An arbitration later awarded Universal $508,000 in damages.

Production moved to Vienna, where shooting began on November 5, 1973. It was there that Feifer visited the set and met Hopkins. Hopkins told him what had happened at Leicester Square. Feifer told him what he had lost. They compared the notes in the book, and they matched.

Had everything gone to plan, this meeting might have taken place in Belgrade. That is speculation, of course, but no other part of this story has so much of the Balkans in it.

The Mathematics of a Miracle

Feifer himself estimated that Hopkins finding the novel after searching the bookshops was something like a one-in-a-million event, and that its being his own copy made it one in a hundred million. The estimate is informal, but it captures the feeling.

Hand took the story seriously and opened his book, The Improbability Principle, with it. He argues that we calculate such events backward: after the miracle, we see only the one chain of events that led to it, and none of the countless others that might have happened. Every day, millions of people lose and find things, meet strangers, change plans, and run into what they weren’t looking for. Given enough opportunities, some astonishing things have to occur. This is what Hand calls the law of truly large numbers.

There is one inconvenient caveat. The whole story rests on the word of two men and on annotations that, by their account, matched. There is no independent proof, so it should be read as a well-documented anecdote rather than fact.

What Remains

The film came out in 1974 and did not become a turning point for any of its leads. Hopkins would soon move on to the roles the world remembers him for, and Feifer would go on to write about Russia, Okinawa, and Commodore Perry. Their book remained.

There is no need to choose between fate and chance. The book was not looking for Hopkins. But someone looking for the book sat down beside it.