The Moon’s a Balloon

by David Niven

  In the days that followed, three things became apparent. The first was that with all the ex-bootleggers and gangsters leaping into the legitimate wine and spirits trade, I was in for a rough time in the very rough sector of the city that had been allotted to me.

  Secondly, most private customers, in a sudden wave of self-righteousness, preferred to deal with old-time wine merchants and looked down their noses at the upstarts who had erupted from the gangster-ridden world of speakeasies, though this was an excuse I preferred not to make to Jack and Charlie when my shortcomings as a salesman came up for periodic review. And thirdly, I found it impossible to try and sell to friends and acquaintances. I just could not bring myself to say ‘Thank you so much for having me to dinner—now, how about buying a case of Scotch?’

  The Montclair Hotel was pretty awful and the steam heat in my tiny room was suffocating but it was cheap and right on the edge of my ‘territory’. The front door of the Montclair was on Lexington Avenue, exactly opposite the back door of the Waldorf-Astoria so during that miserable cold winter, I made it a point to come out each morning from the Montclair, carrying my bag of samples, cross Lexington, climb the long stairs at the rear entrance of the Waldorf, wend my way through the vast gilded lobbies of the most luxurious hotel in New York, descend the steps to the front entrance, pass through the revolving doors and issue on to Fifth Avenue to start my day…

  ‘Good morning, Mr. Niven,’ said the doorman, saluting deferentially. ‘Morning, Charles.’

  Very good for morale. Then I turned right at the first corner heading for the sleazy restaurants and bars of my domain and making the most of the warmth from the exhausts of the heating plants coming up through grills in the sidewalks, I started my dreary rounds.

  ‘Stand over there and wait your turn—okay, jerk, let’s see your list—what’s this crap? Never heard of it. Git yer ass outa here.’

  Fourteen degrees below zero outside and stamping into stifling sandwich counters for lunch then off again to try and corner restaurant owners sitting hunched over their meals while ‘waiters’ in filthy aprons wiped off tables and removed the debris of departed customers.

  ‘Wait till I finish eating for Chrissake. Okay, let’s look at the list…Who expects to get these goddam prices anyway? ‘21 Brands’, never heard of ‘em…Take off twenty per cent and maybe I’ll talk to you: now beat it.’

  Back at the end of the day with little success.

  ‘Good evening, Mr. Niven.’

  ‘Evening, Charles.’

  Up the front stairs—through the warm, rich-peoplefragrant lobbies of the Waldorf, down the back stairs, across Lexington, avoiding skidding taxis and clanging street cars and then going to ground like a bedraggled fox in my lair in the Montclair.

  Big cities can be the loneliest places in the world, especially when cash is in short supply, but on New Year’s Eve I decided to splurge so I took in the show at the Radio City Music 1-Tall and stood myself a decent supper in a bar-grill off Broadway. There I met, or rather picked up, a show-girl who said she had been stood up by her date. We had a few drinks and she asked me to take her up to see the marathon dancers. The Depression had produced some desperate people but none could have sunk to greater depths of degradation than those poor creatures, shuffling round twenty-four hours a day for days on end sleeping occasionally in each other’s arms. Zombies with exhausted pinched faces competing for a few hundred dollars in purse money and for the sadistic pleasure of jaded onlookers like my pick–up. She lived in a gaudy apartment on the West Side. A large number of vacuous satin-clad dolls were propped upon her bed. She was attractive in a brassy but curiously vulnerable way. She too seemed lonely.

  The next day, I got a call from Jack Kriendler, he must have got the news with his breakfast, he was very highly strung, ‘Jesus, kid, you gotta watch your step…you outta your mind or something? You wanna get rubbed out?…Lay off that dame you had last night for Chrissake…she’s dynamite!’

  He told me the name of the man who had stood her up. It didn’t mean anything to me, but McClain whistled when he heard it.

  ‘Jack’s right,’ he said, ‘forget it unless you want to wind up at the bottom of the East River in a barrebof cement.’

  An awful lot happened in 1934 and I had a funny feeling that things might be going to get better when one evening in early January, passing homeward through the Waldorf, I ran into Tommy Phipps, an old friend from England. There were three famous Langhorne sisters from Virginia—all very beautiful. One married Dana Gibson, the artist, and became the prototype of the Gibson Girls, another, Nancy, married Lord Astor and became Britain’s famous female Member of Parliament representing Plymouth from 1919 to 1945 and was presiding at the very time I met Tommy over the much publicised Cliveden Set. The third, Norah, the youngest, and gayest, married an English Army officer, Paul Phipps. Tommy, the result of this union, had been sent to Eton and now, a few years later, had come to America to live with his mother and a newly acquired stepfather.

  Tommy insisted that I leave with him that moment to spend the weekend with his family in Greenwich, Connecticut. While I was flinging a few things into a bag, Tommy filled me in on various details.

  ‘Lefty’ Flynn had been one of the most famous of all Yale athletes. Full-back and all-American, he had also created impossible records in track, winning everything except the high jump and he only failed to win that, according to Tommy, because he was busy winning the mile which took place at the same time.

  He became a leading light in the Yale Glee club and toured with it all over the country. When they were performing in Los Angeles, his monumental physique and good looks caught the eye of William Wellman, the director, and almost overnight Lefty was starring in cowboy pictures.

  His instantaneous success had made him, for a while, unreliable and during his third and last film, he had asked one day to be excused in the middle of shooting to go to the lavatory. Eight days later he had been located by distraught studio executives, in an hotel in Oklahoma City, sitting up in bed playing a guitar and painted bright blue from head to foot. In the room with him was a six-piece Hawaiian orchestra which he had picked up en route to San Francisco.

  Somewhere during his travels he had met Tommy’s mother and the resulting coup de foudre had only lately resolved itself and resulted in a new home for Tommy.

  I fell in love with the whole family immediately and I am forever grateful to them for the home they gave me from that weekend on. Not a frame house home…though that was available to me at any time…something much more important…a home inside myself from which I felt safe to venture forth and do battle.

  Norah and Lefty did not go to parties in New York, preferring the simple life, in Greenwich, but they had a very soft spot for that inveterate international party giver, Elsa Maxwell. One evening they waited for me at the end of my day’s work and took me to tea with this legendary figure in her apartment in the Waldorf Towers.

  Rumours abounded as to how Elsa managed to pay for all the extravaganzas she presided over. Some said she was backed by the nouveaux riches who picked up the tab in exchange for being launched surrounded by Elsa’s formidable list of the socially desired: others, less generous, hinted that she made a good living out of the by-products of these parties and having talked someone into paying for one, she then collected a handsome percentage from the caterers, orchestras and decorators involved. The truth was that she was personally enormously generous and died leaving very little money. I liked her the moment I saw her.

  A small, dumpy figure of sixty-odd in a sacklike garment relieved by not a single bauble, she dispensed tea and dropped names with great expertise. She reminded me somewhat of Lady Weigall so it didn’t surprise me when she said, ‘Selling liquor…that’s no good, no good at all…get you nowhere…you should go to Hollywood…nobody out there knows how to speak English except Ronald Colman.’

  Norah and Lefty made encouraging noises so she went on ‘Next week I’m giving a party for Ernst Lu
bitsch, just a small dinner up here for forty…plenty of people are dropping in after the theatre so you be here about twelve and I’ll introduce you to Ernst and tell him to do something about it.’

  The following week, I showed up at the appointed hour to find about a hundred and fifty people milling around all with the indelible stamp of self-assurance and wealth. ‘If I could only sell each one of them a bottle of Scotch…’ I thought. Instead of trying, I grabbed a glass for myself and looked around for Elsa Maxwell. She was sitting on a sofa at the far end of the room, surrounded by admirers, and didn’t seem to show too much enthusiasm when she caught my eye, just lifted a hand in greeting, so I decided to get on with the job myself.

  Beside me stood a little dark man with a pale face, slicked down black hair and a huge cigar. He was regarding the social scene with evident distaste. ‘Which is Lubitsch?’ I asked.

  ‘I am,’ he said and =moved away.

  A few days later, Elsa called me at the Montclair and said, ‘I talked to Ernst about you but he says this is not a good moment to start in pictures so I’ve thought of something else for you—you should marry a rich wife.’

  ‘How do I do that?’

  ‘Become the most popular man in New York, of course.’

  ‘On forty dollars a week?’ I said but Elsa started issuing instructions like a demented Field Marshal.

  ‘I’m giving the party of the year for the Milk Fund. It will be at the Casino de Paris. I shall have all the most eligible bachelors in New York as professional dancing partners at a hundred dollars a dance for the Fund, and afterwards there will be a big auction and people will vote with dollars for the most popular man in New York. I want you to be one of the contestants. You will all wear green carnations…goodbye,’ and she hung up.

  The Casino de Paris was filled with the brightest, the most beautiful and richest in New York. I had dusted off my ageing dinner jacket and reported for duty as ordered. Elsa gave me my badge of office—the green carnation and stood me in line with about twenty other fellows. I was probably the youngest. I was certainly the worst dancer.

  A number of people bought dances from me and I was able to hand over a considerable sum to the Lady Treasurer but I was ill prepared for the shame of the auction.

  After a midnight show featuring that classic mime, Jimmy Savo, a huge imitation section of the Big Board on the New York Stock Exchange was wheeled on to the stage.

  There were twenty names on it. I remember only five of them, Jock Whitney, Sonny Whitney, Lytel Hull, William Rhinelander Stewart and Clifton Webb, the current rage of Broadway. My name, spelt David Nevins, was at the bottom of the list. As I watched the auction progressing a cold sweat of embarrassment broke out all over me. Blocks of shares worth thousands of dollars were bought and the amount registered in lights beside the name after each sale. For a while I had hopes that people would think I was the maker of the machine or something and in fact NEVINS might have gone unnoticed if Fifi and Dorothy Fell had not felt sorry for me and bought a hundred dollars’ worth of stock between them. My value and my shame remained at that level for all to see. The winner, Jock Whitney, notched up a colossal sum for the Fund. Everyone, with one exception, was highly delighted with the evening.

  I couldn’t take the Montclair any longer—as a matter of fact it was mutual because on the coldest night of the year I managed to loosen enough layers of cracked and grimy paint round the window to open it about four inches at the bottom.

  When I woke up my radiator was frozen solid and the heating system for an entire floor had ceased to function.

  I found a basement room on Second Avenue. My view was of feet hurrying by and up beyond them, silhouetted against the yellow sky, the rattling, banging Elevated Railway.

  The freezing winter seemed endless. Lefty took me skating, something I had never tried before. On a pond near Greenwich I got out of control and charged a girl who was figure skating round an orange. I cut the orange in half and knocked the girl over. Not the best way to start a romance but this was no ordinary girl as I noticed while she was helping me to my feet. She was small, almost tiny, with a wonderfully alive and pretty face, huge brown eyes, and a cloud of auburn hair pushed out from beneath a woolly skating bonnet. We had hot chocolate together and I asked where she lived. ‘May I call you when I come back to New York?’

  ‘Sure, if you want to, my name is Hudson and you can find it in the book. My father’s a doctor and we live at 750 Park…Donald Hudson.’ A few days later I called her, ‘May I speak to Miss Hudson, please?’

  ‘This is she.’

  ‘Oh, well, this is David Niven—you said I might call you.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘David Niven.’

  ‘I’m sorry…I don’t know your name:

  ‘Don’t you remember me…cutting your orange in half?’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘Last weekend…skating at Greenwich…don’t you remember? I knocked you over?’

  ‘You must be mistaken…I’ve never been to Greenwich in my life and I never go skating!’

  ‘You are Miss Hudson?’

  ‘MRS. Hudson.’

  ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry. You see the Miss Hudson I thought I was calling said that her father was a doctor—Donald Hudson—living at 750 Park…I looked him up and…’

  She interrupted, ‘Well, you found my husband’s number and he’s a lawyer. Dennis Hudson, and his address is 250 Park.’ She had a most attractive voice; and safe at the end of the telephone I decided to press on. ‘How is he anyway?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your husband, Dennis! ‘Very well, thank you.’

  ‘Is he a good lawyer?’

  There was a tiny intake of breath but I sensed that she had missed the logical point to put down the receiver.

  ‘Very good, thank you.’

  ‘Where does he work?’

  ‘Downtown.’

  ‘Well, then, how about meeting me for lunch somewhere uptown?’

  She still didn’t cut me off.

  ‘Certainly not, I don’t have lunch with total strangers.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with all you middle-aged American women—no sense of adventure…’

  ‘I’m not middle-aged. I’m twenty-two.’

  I settled smugly on my dungeon bed.

  ‘Then that’s really awful. I suppose you go off to one of those terrible hen parties, nibbling on a salad and gossiping?’

  ‘Would you please not bother me any more. I’m not going to have lunch with you.’

  I said nothing…just waited.

  ‘I mean…how do I know that you’re not a murderer or a kidnapper or something?’

  ‘I tell you what I’ll do,’ I said. ‘I’ll wear a blue and white spotted scarf and a red carnation and I’ll stand on any street corner you name at one o’clock. Then you can walk or drive by and you’ll know me but I won’t know you. You can take a good look and if what you see seems all right and not like a murderer or a kidnapper then we’ll have lunch uptown…how about that?’

  A long, long pause. Finally she said, ‘Madison and 61st Street, one o’clock,’ and hung up.

  I was well pleased with myself so I bought a dozen roses for Mrs. Hudson and a few minutes before 10’clock took up my position, round my neck my blue and white scarf, in my buttonhole, my red carnation.

  Keep moving in sub-zero weather whatever happens.

  Don’t stand on windy street corners. By one-thirty, I was shivering and blue. By a quarter to two, I couldn’t feel the end of my nose and the roses were turning black. I was beginning to feel pretty stupid.

  Just before two o’clock, a girl walked by and smiled sweetly, ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Niven.’ Off came the hat…she kept going. Next three came by, arm in arm. ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Niven’, they chorused.

  Two went by on bicycles and four more in a taxi—she must have been awfully busy rounding up her friends but her masterstroke was the singing group from Western Union.<
br />
  ‘Mr. Niven??

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We have a message for you sir. One! two! three! Happy lunchtime to you…happy lunchtime to you…happy lunchtime, dear David…happy lunchtime to you.’ I wish I could report a romantic aftermath to that episode but there was none.

  In March I dropped in at a bar on 58th Street hoping to pull off a big sale. I didn’t and was soon sipping a consoling drink and staring at the back-view of the first cowboy I had even seen. He sported a black ten-gallon hat, black shirt with white buttons, a white kerchief at his throat and black levis tucked inside heavily worked high-heeled boots. He also wore a large pair of spurs. From the back he didn’t look much like the traditional, tall, lean, leathery man of the saddle. There was a white pudginess about his neck and a very definite bulge at his waistline. He stood no more than five feet four inches.

  He finally got his drink and turned away from the bar, a bad move because his spurs became locked together, his drink went flying and he fell into my arms.

  Doug Hertz, for as such he introduced himself, had a round, white face, small black eyes and a little black pencil moustache. It seemed doubtful that he could ever have been west of Brooklyn. The stories he told later of his childhood were conflicting, but I am sure I detected in his accent a mixture of the Mersey and Whitechapel somewhere under the other layers.

  ‘Sorry, pardner,’ he said, ‘some dude gave me the elbow.’

  Doug Hertz was a promoter of extravaganzas and sporting events. As the evening wore on it appeared that he had gone down with the Lusitania, bobbed up again and had the top of his head blown of in the Argonne.

  ‘Under this,’ he said, rapping two knuckles on a thick black thatch of curly hair, ‘you’ll find a steel plate…hair grows like moss…pull it out tonight and it’s back in the morning.’

  He had also it seemed worked as ranch hand, circus roustabout, oil rigger, bouncer and strike beater. Looking at his small soft hands, I was doubtful. ‘You got any dough, son?’

  ‘None, I earn forty bucks a week.’

  ‘That’s tough, find me forty grand and I’ll make you a, trillion.’ The scheme he uncorked was wondrous.