The Moon’s a Balloon

by David Niven

  ‘You’ve seen a rodeo, son, and you’ve seen a horse race. I’m gonna combine the two. Races that will last fifteen minutes.’ He leaned forward, conspiratorially—‘INDOORS,’ he hissed.

  ‘Tell me more,’ I said.

  ‘You kidding? I’m on to a goddam goldmine and I’m not giving it away to some jerk in a bar…You come up with some heavy dough and I’ll make you a partner. I’m gonna make me a fortune so if you want ‘in’…scratch around and come up with some rich pals. Here’s my card—I’m at the Astor Hotel.’

  I called Hertz early the next morning and invited him to meet me at ‘21’ for lunch.

  ‘You outta your skull?’ he said, ‘eating in joints like that? Boy, have you gotta lot to learn.’

  He suggested I meet him in the lobby of the Astor and he would then show me the way to eat less expensively. I found him and we started walking. I told him about Lefty Flynn and Hertz immediately sparkled to the idea that Lefty with his connections was the ideal man to enlist in the project. Then he initiated me into his cheap eating plan. It was beautiful in its simplicity. He chose a big busy restaurant around 48th Street. I entered alone and sat at a table for two. Then I ordered a cup of coffee and a doughnut and opened my daily paper. After a suitable interval, Hertz came in and joined me. Not a flicker of recognition passed between us.

  Hertz then commanded a huge meal of soup, steak, potatoes, pie and coffee. I continued reading my paper, drank a second cup of coffee, and nibbled at my doughnut.

  When Hertz had finished eating, he summoned the waitress and called for his check. This was my cue.

  ‘Would you give me mine too, please?’

  The waitress slapped the two checks on the table. When she had moved away and was busy elsewhere, Hertz picked up my check for the doughnut and two cups of coffee, marched briskly over to the cashier, paid and went out into the street.

  I took my time, finished my reading, then picked up Hertz’s very sizeable account.

  ‘Oh! waitress…look, there’s a mistake here! I haven’t had all this steak and pie and stuff…I’ve just had a doughnut and a couple of cups of coffee.’

  Consternation and consultations followed but there was nothing for them to do but write out a second bill for two cups of coffee and a doughnut. I paid and joined Hertz at a prearranged street corner far away. A second busy restaurant was selected and there, following the same routine, Hertz got the doughnuts and coffee and I tucked in to a sizeable repast. Lefty Flynn was always becoming involved in schemes to make his fortune overnight, so it was only natural that when I told him about Doug Hertz, he insisted on meeting him the very next day.

  They made an extraordinary couple walking side by side down Fifth Avenue. Lefty towered over Doug by a good twelve inches in spite of Doug’s high-heeled boots and high crowned hat.

  Doug was obviously impressed by Lefty and could see that he agreed with me that this great ex-athlete with his mass of friends could be more than useful in finding backing for his dream. Horse races lasting fifteen minutes! Over coffee he explained it to us in detail.

  ‘Simple,’ said Doug, ‘you have four jockeys in each race and each jockey rides fifteen horses for one minute.’

  Lefty’s arithmetic was no stronger than mine and his fingers were working like a Turkish bazaar dealer’s on an abacus.

  ‘Why, that’s sixty horses for each race,’ he said finally.

  ‘You said it…so we’ll need about 150 horses all told for a card of six races—each horse running several times. Mind you this is the time to buy…polo ponies! That’s what we want for this set up. Who needs polo ponies in the winter? Nobody wants to feed the sons of bitches…Polo ponies: that’s what we have to get.’

  ‘That’s right,’ echoed Lefty, slapping the lunch counter. ‘We need polo ponies!’

  I looked at him out of the corner of my eye…there was no question…he was hooked.

  ‘It’s just like a relay!’ said Lefty, eyes gleaming.

  ‘Just like a relay,’ repeated Hertz, ‘except the jockeys will have to ride a different way, for each minute, one bareback, another facing the pony’s ass, another changing saddle, another changing mounts without touching the ground and so on.’

  ‘Gee whiz,’ said Lefty.

  ‘And get this,’ said Hertz, ‘we’ll be having betting concessions, peanut concessions, liquor, hot-dogs—kids, we’re gonna clean up’, said Hertz. Later that day we formed our company—The American Pony Express Racing Association—and pencilled in its officers. President Maurice B. Flynn, Secretary and Treasurer, D. Niven. The experienced D. Hertz prudently kept his name off the books.

  ‘We’ll open in Atlantic City,’ said Hertz.

  ‘Where do we get the ponies?’ I asked.

  ‘Sales. Pick ‘em up for peanuts. So long, as they’re sound, doesn’t matter how mean they are.’

  ‘Who’s going to ride them?’

  ‘Cowboys—I’ll find them, a few ads in Montana and Oklahoma and we’ll have all we want…thirty’ll be enough.’

  Lefty and I sat goggle-eyed as Hertz expanded.

  ‘Atlantic City, Municipal Auditorium, then the Boston Garden, then the big one—Madison Square…we need working capital right now for offices and my living expenses so you fellas can get going and raise that dough. Forty people putting up a thousand bucks each’ll do it.’

  Lefty and I were mesmerised by Hertz. We became like two schoolboys who had wandered into a power station and pulled a switch. Everything suddenly started to happen.

  The first person Lefty decided to approach was Damon Runyon.

  Runyon loved the idea, promptly bought a thousand dollars’ worth of stock and gave us a word of warning.

  ‘Skip Atlantic City.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Unless you can make a deal with the guy who runs it.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ’

  ‘Pinkie’, he runs the numbers, the protection and the whores. He even gets a piece of every slot machine on the Steel Pier…nobody gets into Atlantic City without Pinkie…don’t try it.’

  When we reported this conversation to Hertz, he pooh-poohed it. ‘Oh, Pinkie won’t bother us.’

  Armed with our first thousand dollars, and with Damon Runyon’s name as an investor, we soon found that it was not all that difficult to raise some more. Jack and Charlie bought a few shares and stifled sighs of relief when I told them I was leaving. Elsa Maxwell campaigned for us and the sudden arrival of two old friends from England; Dennis SmithBingham and Ian Galloway who both became shareholders and officers of the Board, helped to lay a fairly solid financial foundation.

  Many people however were sceptical of our chances and at 1, William Street, the headquarters of Lehman Brothers, we had to throw in our reserves. I went downstairs and retrieved Hertz. We had left him sitting in full regalia in a waiting room.

  Hertz was subjected to a barrage of technical questions about cash flow, contracts and projected earnings. He fielded them admirably but the day was not won till I remembered the steel plate on the top of his head.

  ‘Oh, Doug…tell Mr. Lehman about the Argonne.’

  Hertz went into his routine about the hair growing like moss but still Lehmann wavered.

  ‘Pull a little out for Mr. Lehman,’ suggested Lefty.

  Hertz was as brave as a lion. Without a murmur he seized a great hank of his forelock and pulled it out by the roots. Victory was ours. The hair never grew in again, of course. We didn’t use this impressive ‘ploy’ too often but even so, by the time we had raised twenty-five thousand dollars, Doug Hertz’s head looked like a diseased moorhen.

  Hertz made a deal with a decaying Polo Club at Poughkeepsie, eighty miles away up the Hudson River. There was a ramshackle hotel on the property and Hertz persuaded the proprietors that they, should give us free stabling for our ponies. In return we would provide a rodeo every Sunday for which they could sell tickets. The advance guard of ponies went to Poughkeepsie followed by a bus load of c
owhands from Carland, Oklahoma, and six Indians whom ‘Colonel’ Zack Miller had persuaded to leave their reservation. I went up to take care of this group while Lefty and Hertz went to Atlantic City. A week later they returned, flushed with success, having landed a contract with the Municipal Auditorium for a Grand Opening in May.

  Smith-Bingham and Galloway, both expert horsemen, moved up and training started with a vengeance…it was needed. The cowboys, mostly old rodeo and circus hands, operated in a haze of bourbon and rye whisky, and the ponies bought at an average price of around a hundred and twenty dollars, though sound in wind and limb were mostly quite mad.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Hertz, ‘we’ll have ‘em running through the orchestra and jumping into the ringside seats.’

  Our spartan life at Poughkeepsie was enlivened by the appearance of Hertz’s blonde, statuesque wife who took an instant shine to Ian Galloway. One night there was an ugly scene when Hertz accused Ian of trying to seduce her in the stables. It ended with everyone getting drunk in the hotel and swearing eternal friendship but in the middle of the celebrations, Dennis Smith-Bingham rushed in. ‘Come on, quick! somebody’s left the door open and about forty ponies have got out…they’re all over the bloody country.’ We dashed out.

  It was a pitch black night so it took hours to round them up. The only casualty was Hertz who ran very fast straight into a large carthorse which was standing perfectly still in the middle of a field. The impact knocked him cold.

  Training progressed and in a few weeks, we could see that we had a very exciting spectacle on our hands: the only problem was money. We were approaching our Grand Opening in Atlantic City and the cost of moving the whole cavalcade from Poughkeepsie was going to be astronomical. Hertz called an emergency meeting.

  ‘We’re in trouble, boys, we’ve gotta have another ten grand to get us to the opening. From there on in the show'll pay for itself but I’ve gotta have ten big ones this week or we fold.’

  We were silent.

  ‘Get down to New York fellas and beat the bushes—I mean it—or we fold.’ Somehow we raised the money, and set off’ for Atlantic City on the appointed day.

  The advance man had done his job with enthusiasm. Hoardings and walls were plastered with announcements of our coming and promises of what we were going to deliver. ‘CHILLS, SPILLS AND THRILLS’—screamed the posters. Doug Hertz organised a parade from the railway station and tied up traffic all over town—as a result. He rode at its head himself, an oval pouter-pigeon figure rolling slightly in the saddle as his round thighs tried to grip: he didn’t really ride, he ‘conned’ horses into letting him sit on them. The American Pony Express Racing Association was in Atlantic City for a week before the Grand Opening and Lefty and I often broached the subject of Damon Runyon’s warning about the mysterious Pinkie which still nagged us. ‘Nothing to worry about at all,’ said Hertz confidently, ‘I’ve seen the police, nobody’s going to interfere with us.’

  ‘How do we get any betting? It’s illegal in the State of New Jersey.’

  Hertz winked broadly. ‘Everything is just Jim Dandy.’

  On the night of the Grand Opening, it was pouring with rain but the lines were at the box ofce and by the time the parade started, the auditorium was packed—fifteen thousand people. Dorothy Fell and McClain came down with a big party from New York to cheer us on but we were so short of cash that we couldn’t aford an orchestra for our opening night. The best we could provide was an organist. The organ blared out stirring music as the parade trotted round the arena.

  A Master of Ceremonies, wearing full fox hunting regalia, explained over the bud speaker the finer points of the races. The teams of ponies were guaranteed to be evenly matched, he said, so it was a question of picking the jockey with the most prowess.

  I had a feeling of cement in my stomach when the teams came out for the first race, but Hertz waddled about exuding confidence.

  ‘Good luck, kids,’ he said, to the riders, ‘you’re gonna be great.’

  The ponies sensed the tension and acted up like thoroughbreds. One or two which had been tubed whistled loudly through holes in their necks. Suddenly the auditorium went dark except for the bright floodlit track. Crack went the opening gun and away went the first race. The entire audience rose to its feet. Terrible chances were taken at the sharp turns. The cowboys excelled themselves, the courageous Indians staged some hair-raising falls and at the end of the evening we listened almost unbelievably to loud and prolonged applause.

  ‘We’re in business, kids,’ said Hertz, clapping Lefty and me on our backs. ‘Next stop, Boston, then the Garden!’

  The morning after, I was sitting in our little office in the Auditorium smugly reading the reviews of our show in the local press when four extremely hostile characters barged in. They wore fedoras and tight double-breasted suits.

  ‘Where’s Hertz?’ they demanded.

  Almost before I could answer the avocado shape of our leader appeared in the doorway behind them. When Hertz saw his visitors, he went the colour of cat-sick.

  ‘Okay,’ said one of the hostile men to me, ‘we don’t need you—beat it.’ I left with what dignity I could summon.

  For about twenty minutes, I watched the approach to our office from a discreet distance and when I saw the men depart, I hurried back in. Hertz was sitting slumped behind the desk. He looked stricken.

  ‘What did they want?’ I asked.

  Hertz smiled wanly.

  ‘It was a shakedown,’ he said, ‘but nothing’s gonna happen. Like I said, I’m right in there with the cops.’ He didn’t sound too confident and in the event, a number of things did happen. That second night, we had a ‘house’ only slightly less well filled than the previous one. Everything was going according to plan and the audience was enjoying itself hugely. Suddently, in the middle of the second race all the lights in the Auditorium went out. For a while chaos reigned, ponies were crashing into each other, cowboys were swearing and women screaming. The lights stayed out for fifteen minutes and the slow handclaps started. Finally, the lights came on again and we restarted the show. During the fourth rare, the same thing occurred—only this time, when the lights went on again the people were streaming towards the exits and many went to the box office and demanded their money back.

  On the third night, it was discovered that at least half the cowboys had packed up and left during the day.

  The next day, the forage for the animals never arrived and during the night a large number of saddles mysteriously disappeared.

  On the fifth night, the lights went out again. More cowboys defected the next day and on the Saturday night, our show was pitiful. It didn’t matter any more, the audiences had eroded to a point where only a handful turned up.

  Hertz, who had certainly never lacked courage, was stoic in defeat, but all chances of selling the show to other Auditoriums in the country had evaporated. We were living on a shoestring. Everything had depended on making a big profit during that first week.

  It was decided to liquidate our assets immediately and salvage what we could from the wreck.

  Lefty could take all the disappointments except the desertion of the cowboys. He had loved them dearly and he couldn’t believe that they had allowed themselves to be induced to sink us. Sadly, he left for Greenwich and I stayed on to help Hertz arrange a sale of the livestock and remaining saddlery—all the assets we had. They didn’t fetch much and by the time we had tied everything up in Atlantic City, I am afraid our gallant band of backers did not see very much of their original investment.

  When I came to think of it, I, too, was in far worse financial shape than when I had first become involved with the American Pony Express Racing Association and in addition, I had given up my job with Jack and Charlie but please don’t feel at the end of this chapter, you are leaving me, like Pearl White, strapped to the financial railroad tracks, because, thank God, succour was ‘already puffing towards me aboard the American Express.

  ∨ The Moon’s a Ba
lloon ∧

  TEN

  Back in New York, I found a letter from Grizel. My mother, it appeared, had left everything to ‘Tommy’ in trust for the four of us, but she had stipulated something very important. Max had once borrowed £300 from her to bail himself out of debt, so if either Joyce or Grizel or I were in desperate need, the small estate must try to provide the same amount for us. Within a week, I had collected my share. It came to a little over eight hundred dollars—I was rich.

  Lefty and Norah had gone to Bermuda where they had rented a small cottage at Devonshire Bay. Lefty met me in Hamilton and I spent several blissful weeks on that spectacular island at a time that must have been its golden era. No cars, no motor cycles—just bicycles or horse-drawn carriages, no muttering groups at street corners, no sullen looks from under pork-pie hats, no cut-off conversations, just smiling happy faces and music everywhere.

  Joe Benevides was our carriage driver, a mixture of negro and Portuguese blood. He had bright blue eyes and the broadest smile I had ever seen. As we clip-clopped along the dazzling white coral road, we passed through orchid farms and dense plantations of palm trees. Bright hued little birds darted to and out of the oleander and giant hibiscus bushes and when we arrived at the cottage, the bay in front of it was aquamarine and the seagulls flying lazily in the blue above had long graceful forked tails. ‘Norah’s got a big surprise for you, Davey,’ said 10ty, ‘somebody very special is coming to supper tonight.’

  In a day spent swimming on a pink sand beach, reminiscing about our ill-fated venture and laughing—oh! how much we laughed—I forgot about my big surprise until Anthony Pleydell-Bouverie walked into the cottage, accompanied by a diminutive Finnish wife called Peanut.

  Anthony was now flag lieutenant to Admiral Sir Ernie Erie Drax, commander-in-chief of a large fleet based on Bermuda. It was a classic reunion.

  A week later, Tommy Phipps arrived. He had lately come back from California and was full of stories of Hollywood. He had also sold his first piece of writing, a short story, to Harper’s Bazaar. The days flew by. We bicycled off in the mornings to various beaches or explored the Islands. We were never out of the water and became burned the colour of mahogany. I fell slightly in love with a dark haired beauty of eighteen from Richmond, Virginia. She wore a camellia in her hair on the night I took her for a romantic drive in the full moon. Joe Benevides, though himself the soul of tact on these occasions, sitting bolt upright in his box and staring straight ahead oblivious to what was going on behind him, had unknowingly sabotaged my very delicate preliminary moves by feeding his horse some wet grass. It is quite impossible to impress a beautiful girl with your sincerity if your carefully worded murmurings into a shell pink ear have to compete with a barrage of farts.