The Moon’s a Balloon

by David Niven

  The Queen Mary was sailing in two days’ time and I had to have that sailing permit.

  He was very generous. On condition that I did not come back during that time, he allowed me to pay over the next three years but it still cost me several thousand pounds for the privilege of spending six years in the British Army.

  The Queen Mary carried fifteen thousand troops. We were packed like sardines. It didn’t matter.-We ate in shifts, slept in shifts and lay about in shifts. The teak rails of the upper decks bore the carved initials of countless G. Ls who had made the journey to Europe—how many, I wondered, were left behind for ever.

  On the night I landed in New York, my old employers at ‘21’ gave a large cocktail party for me in the upstairs room of their establishment and I spent the evening with John Huston.

  Next day I shopped for some badly needed clothes and took a sleeper on the transcontinental traits for California. I was feeling very tired and rather odd so the trip would rest me up, I thought. David Selznick was on the train and he brought me up to date on who was who now in Hollywood and what was going on. David was a friend who never minced words, however ominous. ‘It’s going to be tough for you,’ he said. ‘It’s a whole new ball game now—a lot of new stars and new directors have come up while you’ve been away—you’re lucky to have Goldwyn behind you.’

  At Chicago, a telegram was delivered from Eddie Goulding saying that he was giving me a welcome home bachelor party of a hundred at Romanoff’s on the night of my arrival. Another came from Goldwyn saying there was to be a big press luncheon the same day. I looked forward to it all but I also dreaded it…I really was very tired and coughed a lot.

  WELCOME HOME DAVID!!

  A big banner was strung across the main gate of the studio. Stage 8 had been transformed into a restaurant and several hundred studio employees and members of the press listened to speeches of welcome by Goldwyn, Hedda Hopper, the head prop man, Dave Chasen and others. The room was spinning, I was sweating and I had a terrible headache. I wondered how I was going to get through it. I might have been Hollywood’s first recruit but I was being treated as if I had won the war single-handed.

  After luncheon, ‘Willie’ Bruce said, ‘I’m taking you home, putting you to bed and getting you a doctor—you look awful.’

  ‘I can’t let Goulding down,’ I said. ‘He’s asked a hundred people tonight.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Willie, ‘if the doctor says you can go—all right—otherwise, bed.’

  The doctor took my temperature—it was 104°F—and told me I had bronchial pneumonia. Goulding was marvellous when he was told. He came to see me and insisted on going through with the party without me.

  ‘I’ll have a direct line to your room and an amplifier. You’ll be able to hear what’s going on and you can talk to old pals on the phone.’ Among the hundred bachelors, Goulding rounded up most of my actor friends including Clark Gable, Doug Jr., Flynn, Gary Cooper and ‘Ty’ Power. Also, I noticed from the book of photographs he sent me later of the proceedings, an impressive body of the Hollywood super-brass had also dusted off their dinner jackets including Goldwyn, Selznick, Pandro Berman, Eddie Mannix, Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Mervyn Le Roy, Hal Wallis and even Harry Cohn. There was a pipe band. My name was carved in a huge block of ice and the whole place was festooned with American and British flags.

  It was extremely generous of Goulding, highly flattering and completely unwarranted.

  I convalesced in the desert at Palm Springs and, as soon as I was well enough, Goldwyn put me to work. He loaned me to Paramount to do a picture with, of all people, Loretta Young.

  Primmie cabled that she hoped to get passage soon and I went, frantically, house hunting.

  The Fairbanks’s found it for me, right next door to theirs, exactly what she had always said she wanted—old and rambling with a big garden and a view of both the Santa Monica Mountains and the ocean. The basement had about three feet of water in it when the agent showed it so I was able to buy it very cheaply. Vicki Baum, author of Grand Hotel, had built it forty years before.

  ‘The Pink House’, as it was known for obvious reasons, became of tremendous importance to me. It was the first home I had ever owned, and with my adored family, I longed to settle down at last. I seemed to have been running and running all my life.

  I decided to give the place to Primmie as a surprise when she arrived, then let her do it over and, with her wonderful taste, decorate it in her own good time—in the meanwhile, I rented a big Spanish-style monstrosity in Beverly Hills.

  The picture at Paramount finished just in time for me to fly East to meet my family. They had taken eighteen days in terrible gales to cross the Atlantic in an old Liberty ship. They finally docked in Portland, Maine. Primmie looked radiant as she came running down the gangplank. Little David was full of chat and questions. As a typical war baby, he noticed the skeleton of a house being built, ‘Look, Daddy,’ he said, ‘a bomb.’

  Jamie, now five months old, slept all the time in a carrying cot. The handle broke in New York and I dumped him on his head in the middle of Penn Station, which may account for the fact that he became an extremely efficient merchant banker.

  Primmie fell in love with California on sight and was over the moon when she saw the ‘Pink House’.

  ‘The furniture will be perfect in it,’ she cried, her eyes shining like a little girl’s. ‘I’m going to make it so beautiful for you! You’re going to be so proud!’

  It was decided that she would do the house herself without telling me anything and then, one day, when it was all finished she would let mecarry her through the door.

  She had brought ‘Pinkie’ with her—a fresh-faced English girl who had spent the war in an anti-aircraft battery in London. ‘Pinkie’ adored the children and soon made the Spanish dungeon shine like a new pin. Goldwyn loaned me to Universal to make an historical [-] was to portray Aaron Burr—the two most unlikely bits of casting of the century. The script was gibberish, but I was far too happy and the prospect of, at long last, settling down with my family in my own home was too good to be ruined by renewed quarrels with Goldwyn and by suspensions which I could ill afford.

  Larry Olivier had left behind a large black Packard when he had last been in California. I bought it by cable, left Pinkie in charge of the children and with Clark Gable, Rex Harrison, Ida Lupino and Nigel Bruce, we set off in convoy for a week’s golf at Pebble Beach…They were golden days and Primmie showed me a letter she wrote to Bill Rollo saying that she never imagined she could be so happy. We came back on a Sunday because I had to do wardrobe tests the next morning.

  ‘Ty’ Power and Annabella gave a small party for Primmie that evening. John McClain had just arrived from New York and all my closest friends were there. As I looked around at them and at Primmie’s radiant face, I wondered how it was possible for ohe man to have so much.

  Nearly everyone was working the next day which meant being up by five or six o’clock so we had an early barbecue round the pool. ‘Ty’ cooked. Afterwards, we went indoors and played some games. Someone suggested ‘Sardines’—an old children’s game, played in the dark. I was hiding under a bed upstairs when I heard ‘Ty’ calling me.

  ‘Come down, quick, Primmie’s had a fall!’

  I rushed down.

  In the dark she had opened a door thinking it was a coat closet—it was the door to the cellar and she had fallen down a dozen steps. She was lying unconscious on the floor.

  We dabbed her head with water and she started moaning and moving a little. Within twenty minutes the doctor arrived and within another half hour, she was tucked in bed in hospital.

  ‘She’s very concussed,’ the doctor told me after his examination, ‘but it’s nothing to worry about. She’ll have to stay absolutely quiet and in the dark for a few days—she’ll be fine.’

  I went back to Ty’s house and told everyone the good news. Then I went to the Spanish house and Pinkie helped me pack up a few things Primmie might need,
a couple of nighties, a toothbrush, some perfume.

  Back at the hospital, they repeated that she was fine, and said there was no good I could do by staying and to go on home: if I wanted to, to drop by before I went to work in the morning.

  I was back about six the next day. They let me see her. She looked beautiful but very pale. Her eyes were still closed.

  ‘She’s had a good night,’ said the nurse.

  All during the day I called from the studio.

  ‘Nothing to worry about—it’s a bad concussion—all she needs is complete rest and quiet.’

  After work I went back to the hospital. They were most reassuring. I sat with her for a long time holding her hand. She was very still.

  Suddenly, she opened her eyes, looked right at me, smiled a tiny smile and gave my hand a little reassuring squeeze. It was the first time she had recognised me. The matron said, ‘Why don’t you go on home and get some sleep yourself, there’s nothing you can do. We’ll call you at once, of course, if there is any change…go on home and don’t worry.’

  Bob Coote was in the house when I got back, waiting for news. I told him everything was going along well, that no one was worried, and we raided the ice box for a snack.

  About eleven o’clock, the phone rang. It was the doctor.

  ‘I think you’d better come down,’ he said…’there are certain symptoms we don’t like. I’ve alerted the best brain surgeon there is…we may have to operate.’

  Bob came with me. An hour later, they started the operation. Two hours passed before the doctors came down.

  I knew.

  I knew as soon as I saw them come out of the elevator.

  I knew by the way they walked.

  I knew by the way they stood murmuring together without looking at me as I waited across the hall.

  She was only twenty-five.

  ∨ The Moon’s a Balloon ∧

  FOURTEEN

  Somehow the dreadful days dragged by—somehow into weeks and months. Friends tried valiantly to cushion the despair and I was infinitely lucky to have them.

  Ronnie and Benita Colman took me into their home for I never again set foot in the Spanish monstrosity; then Douglas and Mary Lee Fairbanks gave me sanctuary. Joan Crawford took the children, with a stunned Pinkie, till they were settled on the Colmans’ ranch at Montecito. Everyone tried to help, but there comes a time when friends must be allowed to get on with their own lives, so I went back to work at Universal and occupying myself with such a disaster was some sort of relief from the alternative. Even so, after work I walked for hours alone on the darkened beach, hoping, perhaps, that a merciful tidal wave might sweep out of the Pacific. Then I went to bed to toss in torment till dawn when exhaustion took over. A couple of hours of deep sleep would be brutally ended by an alarm clock and smashing down once more came the awful realisation that it had not been a dream. Work on the Pink House continued. Not because I wanted to transform it into a shrine: it held no memories: we had never lived in it…so work went on. After a while, with the rest of the house still gutted, one room, the cook’s, and the kitchen, were finished.

  With a few belongings, I moved in among the cement and sawdust, coils of wire, unattached radiators and toilets, buckets of paint…utter desolation that seemed somehow symbolic.

  The so carefully collected furniture and china arrived from England but somewhere the container had been dropped and most of the contents were smashed beyond repair.

  I had with me, for comfort, in the cook’s room, a little case full of Primmie’s most private things, childhood treasures, some photographs of our wedding and of the children’s christenings, my letters written during the war and her tiny cache of inexpensive jewellery. While I was away at work one day, the case was stolen. That night I nearly gave up.

  The Pink House was finally finished and upstairs, a white carpet was laid. That day, Rex and Lilli Palmer gave me a Boxer puppy to keep me company. Within an hour, ‘Phantom’ had permanently changed the colour of the carpet. On Sundays, the house was full of people from morning till night. Every week Gable arrived accompanied by some gorgeous creature while Lana Turner, Anita Colby, Rita Hayworth, Deborah Kerr, Ava Gardner, Ida Lupino and Patricia Medina set an unassailable standard of beauty and fun. Bob Laycock was stunned when he saw them. In his capacity as Chief of British Combined, Operations, he came to California as the guest of the American Pacific Fleet at San Diego and stayed with me for several days. It cheered me a lot to think that he took back to Bill and Kathleen Rollo good reports of their grandchildren.

  Like the understanding Gable who had been through a similar family tragedy himself, John McClain was a staunch and thoughtful friend. One day he said, ’

  ‘Betty’ Bacall is giving Bogart a surprise party tonight—it’s time you got out of your house.’

  I didn’t really want to go but the alternative was still something I flinched from. Pinkie would relentlessly keep the children up till I came home from work so they could have a half hour’s ‘play’ with their father. It was torture for me and I dreaded seeing their gay, shining, trusting little faces.

  After they had gone off to bed it was worse—a lonely meal and then pacing about the house like a caged lion till bedtime. By now, I was making an important picture for Goldwyn playing the Bishop in The Bishop’s Wife with Loretta as the wife and Cary Grant as the Angel, so I was faced with getting up at six o’clock.

  McClain, however, brushed aside all protests and I found myself with forty others hidden in different parts of Bogart’s house as a surprise for his birthday.

  ‘Betty’ Bacall was the perfect mate for Bogie…beautiful, fair, warm, talented and highly intelligent, she gave as good as she got in the strong personality department. Women and men love her with equal devotion.

  Someone had been delegated by Betty to keep Bogie busy at the studio to give us all time to arrive and hide. When Bogie finally appeared, it was apparent how his busy time at the studio had been spent. He was loudly abusive and cries of ‘who needs these bums!’ and ‘get the bastards outta here!’ reverberated from the front door. For a few nervous minutes it was touch and go whether he would throw all forty of us out into the street, but Betty placated him, or rather, answered him loudly in the same vein and the party became a success after all.

  Bogart was quite alarming to meet for the first time with his sardonic humour and his snarl that passed for a smile. It took a little while to realise that he had perfected an elaborate camouflage to cover up one of the kindest and most generous of hearts. Even so, he was no soft touch and before you were allowed to peek beneath the surface and catch a glimpse of the real man, you had to prove yourself. Above all, you had to demonstrate conclusively to his satisfaction that you were no phoney.

  My test came soon. He asked me if I liked to sail.

  ‘Done it all my life,’ I said, blithely, ‘in fact I once represented my country in eight metres.’

  Bogie looked at me reflectively and sucked his teeth.

  ‘Okay, come aboard Santana Sunday.’

  Women were only infrequently made welcome aboard Santana so Betty was not there when I boarded the sixty-five-foot ketch at Balboa.

  Tough and often argumentative ashore, I expected Bogie to be a veritable Captain Bligh afloat. Far from it, he was easy going, perfectly relaxed and highly efficient. I was lulled into a sense of false security and had no idea that this had been earmarked as the day of my entrance exam. We were sailing along in a good stiff breeze; Bogie was at the helm, I was beside him, the solitary crew—a Dane he called Dum Bum—was forward keeping a sharp lookout because the stiff breeze was doing nothing to dispel a thick mist.

  ‘Tuna boats ahead,’ yelled Dum Bum suddenly.

  Sure enough we were running fast towards a dozen big drifters, each with its net trailing out astern. It was a tricky situation that called for immediate action and because of the direction of the wind, there were only three solutions: one was correct, the second risky, and the third woul
d have led to losing the mast.

  Dum Bum was looking apprehensively at Bogie and I was just thinking to myself that he was leaving things dangerously late when he let go of the wheel, gave me a wolfish grin and said—‘Take over, Big Shot—I’m going to the can.’

  He disappeared below.

  Luckily, I knew what I was doing. I yelled a few orders which Dum Bum instantly obeyed, spun the wheel and the danger was past. Christmas alone with the children was something I had dreaded. Although they never ceased asking others when their mother was coming back, some extraordinary radar system prevented them from ever mentioning her to me. I knew one day they would ask me the direct question so until then I resolved not to broach the subject.

  On Christmas Eve, with the lighted tree in the window behind me and a mountain of gaily wrapped presents from kind and even anxious friends beneath it, I was sitting on the patio steps swept suddenly by a wave of despair. A little arm went round my neck: they both stood there hand-in-hand.

  ‘Are you very lonely?’ asked the eldest and when I just nodded, he said, ‘Mummy’s never coming back, is she?’

  ‘No she’s not,’ I said.

  ‘Has she gone up to Heaven?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right…she’s gone to Heaven.’

  The evening star was very bright over the distant ocean. He looked up.

  ‘I can see Mummy’s eye,’ he said. The Bishop’s Wife turned out well. It, too, was chosen for the Royal Command Film in London and Goldwyn, loaning me out all over town, kept me blessedly busy. I made pictures with Barbara Stanwyck and Jane Wyman. I played all sorts of roles, including a world-famous pianist. During my big concert scene an expert played the piano with his arms through my tail coat while I rolled my eyes and looked soulful.

  When a man is deeply unhappy, he brings out the very gentlest instincts in the very nicest women. They want to wrap him up, take him home and look after him. They give all of themselves but he, in turn, can give in only one direction and, inoculated by his unhappiness, rides roughshod far and wide.