The Moon’s a Balloon

by David Niven

  Friends were always championed to the death. One weekend, Larry, Vivien, Bobby Helpmann and Noel were trying to put Hollywood into its proper perspective for me.

  ‘It’s all very fine for you,’ I argued, ‘you are all theatre people who occasionally make a movie…I have nothing but movies.’

  If I had trodden on a wasps’ nest, I couldn’t have stirred up more action: everyone started shouting at once and when it died down, it was obvious that steps were about to be taken to get me started in the theatre. Within a week, John C. Wilson, the Broadway producer and longtime friend and associate of Noel’s offered me a play—Nina.

  Gloria Swanson, who, the season before, in a spectacular comeback, had been the toast of Broadway in Twentieth Century, had already been signed and the cast of three was to be rounded off by that excellent English character actor, Alan Webb.

  ‘I’m terrified,’ I said to Noel. ‘I’ve only been on the stage once over ten years ago and I was fired for being gassed.’ The Coward finger wagged immediately.

  ‘You will do it,’ he ordered. ‘You will do it well, and above all, you will do it sober.’

  The boys stayed on in the haunted manor with Evelyn Walne, their new governess, poised to join us if the play looked like running and in October, Hjordis and I flew to the United States. First stop was to spend a weekend, pheasant shooting, with friends in New England.

  I had by now seen Hjordis under a variety of conditions and had come to realise that one of the joys of being married to a ‘foreigner’ is being constantly surprised—nothing is automatically predictable.

  I was not thrown off balance, therefore, when she came down to breakfast on the first morning, dressed not for the chase but for spending the day with an apple and a good book.

  ‘I am not coming to watch you shoot,’ she announced, ‘because I don’t want to be shot.’

  The high-powered hunters and their wives tried to persuade her that it was perfectly safe, but she was adamant.

  ‘I know I am going to be shot—so I stay home.’

  Finally, after much badinage about Scandinavian sixth sense, trolls and spooks, she reluctantly consented to join us.

  ‘But I will be shot,’ she said sadly.

  Less than an hour later, two guns turned to fire at a bird that was going back low and Hjordis fell to the ground, hit in the face, neck chest and arms.

  I rushed over and as I cradled her, moaning, in my arms, a terrible thought went through my head—it’s happened again.

  Her beautiful face was a terribly swollen mask of blood; when she asked for a mirror, we pretended nobody had one. Within half an hour she was in the local hospital, where it was discovered that she had over thirty pieces of lead in her, including one which to this day remains embedded in the bone of her eye socket.

  She was given an anaesthetic and they were preparing to remove the pellets when some strange force propelled me, uninvited, into the operating room. ‘Stop, please!’ I said to the astonished white-clad group. ‘I’m sorry, before you cut her—I want another opinion.’

  I don’t know what made me do it—some half-forgotten wartime whisper about shrapnel wounds perhaps; anyway, white gauze masks were lowered and I was asked, icily, if I wanted to accept the full responsibility. My host produced an ex-navy surgeon friend who was paged at the local football game. He came and examined her and gave it as his opinion that if the swollen tissues were operated on at that time, she would be scarred for life.

  ‘Many will work their way out,’ he said, ‘the ones in deep we can get later. She should be X-rayed frequently to see if any move, especially the one near the jugular.

  Thank God for the U.S. Navy. Hjordis is, today, unmarked but now when she hears those little northern voices, I listen with great attention. A battered Hjordis and I moved to the Blackstone Hotel, New York. In a tiny room next to us was lodged a doe-eyed waif, a young actress, also making her debut on Broadway that season—Audrey Hepburn. Together, we shook with fear as our opening nights drew inexorably nearer.

  Nina was a translation from a big French success by Andre Roussin. It was directed by a comic Russian, Gregory Ratoff. In English, it was pretty bad. Gloria looked marvellous and took great pains to remain that way by eating the most loathsome concoctions of yoghurt, yeast, wheat germ and molasses. She also had a fixation that every actor should have another string to his bow—some other profession capable of padding out the lean times.

  ‘I have a clothing business myself,’ she said. ‘The Pilgrim Company…all my clothes for this show will be made by Pilgrim.’

  We opened in Hartford, Connecticut, in front of a heavily partisan audience, most of whom had come up from New York to cheer us on, but among them was the usual sprinkling of carrion crows sniffing for the first scent of possible disaster and ready to fly back to Broadway, the bitchy bearers of grim tidings.

  The show, at this point, went over quite well and Otto Preminger, never a man to mince words, said he liked my efforts very much but by the time we arrived in Boston, a week later several scenes had been re-written and the show was half as good. Two weeks and many re-writes after that, we opened in Philadelphia. The carrion crows had every reason to be delighted—there was no question—we were headed for big trouble.

  Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer answered my S.O.S., and came down from New York to see the show and offer me some advice.

  ‘Well, what do you suggest?’ I asked over supper.

  ‘Get out of it,’ said Rex.

  When we arrived in New York, Hjordis tried her best to appear optimistic and Garson Kanin suggested questionable aid for first-night nerves. ‘Go to the top of the Empire State Building…don’t throw yourself off—just look down at all those millions of lights and remember that only one of them is the Royale Theatre.’

  When the big night came, neither the prdducer nor the director made it to the theatre and the last run through was conducted by Biff Lifli’, the stage manager, who read out the final instructions with all the enthusiasm of an undertaker.

  All the professional first nighters were there and the dreaded critics. Also, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Tallulah Bankhead and Rex and Lilli—gluttons for punishment.

  The house lights dimmed and an expectant buzz faded into a pregnant silence. I stood quaking beside the stage manager who made an abortive effort to bolster my sagging morale as he signalled for the curtain to rise—‘Get out there, Dave—there’s nothing you can do about it now—the horse has left the barn.’

  For a panic-stricken moment, I toyed with the idea of rushing madly out of the theatre and throwing myself beneath the hooves of the mounted police, then I tottered on stage.

  Webb and I played the first explanatory scene together, then the doorbell rang signalling the entrance of Swanson. Webb, the husband, took refuge behind the curtain and I, the lover, moved across stage to admit my mistress. I was ill prepared for what I saw.

  She had, I thought, worn some rather odd garments in Hartford, Boston and Philadelphia but now the Pilgrim Company had really excelled itself. Swanson stood there enveloped in a black taffeta tent. She stepped forward and a gasp of horror mingled with the applause.

  She smiled seductively at her lover and I was supposed to smile back. I tried but I was so nervous and my mouth so dry that my upper lip became stuck above my teeth and I stood there leering at her like a mad rabbit. The Bedouin tent with Swanson’s head sticking out of the top of it rustled across the stage and flung itself into my arms. Swanson is not tall. She is, to put it mildly, petite, so when I clasped her to me, the top of her head nestled just to the right of my breast-bone.

  Unfortunately, in my terror of the whole situation, I squeezed too hard in that initial clinch. There was a loud report. This was followed by a twanging noise and about eight inches of white whalebone shot out of Swanson’s chest, and straight up my nose.

  The audience was delighted—something new at last—they roared with laughter. Swanson half turned to see what was happening,
thereby stirring the whalebone around in my sinus. Tears of pain streamed down my face but in my innocence of things theatrical, I thought maybe it didn’t show and with the whalebone crunching about among the scroll bones, and with my gopher teeth gleaming in the limelight, I carried bravely on with the scene.

  The audience hooted, and the ‘flop sweat’ broke out all over me like dew. Down in the area of my navel, Swanson hissed, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ In the morning, Walter Kerr, the critic for the Herald Tribune, wrote—‘We understood from the programme that Miss Swanson designed her own clothes…like the play, they fell apart in the first act.’

  Nina trailed along for three months but by early spring, we were all mercifully back in the Pink House. The movie business still wanted no part of me.

  Hollywood is like a bird dog. When things are going badly, it tenses and sniffs at you. It scrapes away at the camouflage. It knows.

  Hjordis told me not to worry because, she said, it made me put out an aroma of defeat. I must have been particularly smelly because she suggested a few days on a boat to take my mind off things. We chartered a small sloop and set off for Catalina Island with Garbo and a gentleman friend, an ex-navy man, completing the crew. Garbo was cook, Hjordis stewardess, and as befitted his background the G.F. engineer and navigator. I was in charge of the sails.

  When the wind fell away towards evening, I hauled them down and handed over to the G.F.

  For an hour he tinkered with the engine. I hovered nearby with useless advice while the Swedish members of the expedition drank schnapps, and made crude Nordic jokes at our expense.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Hjordis sweetly, ‘if you should give us a bearing because if we miss Catalina, the next stop is Japan.’

  Finally the engine spluttered into life and as we chugged hesitantly west in the gathering darkness, the man pored over charts and poked about with calipers. Then he announced heavily, ‘Something’s screwy here—according to my reckoning, we are eleven miles north of the Grand Canyon.’

  The seafaring Swedes showed no sign of panic. One of them—both claimed the honour—saw a pinprick of light far away to port. We changed course and hours later with faltering engine, dropped anchor in a sandy cove.

  Garbo during the weekend made up for some patchy uninspired cooking by exuding sparkling fun and swimming, unselfconsciously so, every day, Swedish style. Television, in the early fifties, had begun to rear its ugly head. The major film studios, instead of grabbing it and making it their own, decided first to ignore it, then to fight it and wound up, a few years later, being swallowed by it.

  I picked up some sparse but badly needed dollars by doing ‘guest shots’ on the Bob Hope and Jack Benny shows. Many people thought it was nothing short of suicide for a film star to fly in the face of the studio bosses and align himself with the enemy. I had no alternative. I was already dead. One well-known ‘zany’ red-head did a show with me and over a very inexpensive supper at the Brown Derby, confided that she was even more strapped for cash than I was. She turned out to be about as ‘zany’ as General Motors: within four years Lucille Ball had bought both the R.K.O. studios. In the spring, unable to raise another dollar in mortgage on the Pink House, I decided the sad moment had come—the Regency furniture had to go. I mailed carefully authenticated lists to Parke Bernet in New York and to the Shabbie Shoppe in Dallas, Texas, and enclosed a letter to each guaranteeing that their establishment was the only recipient of this golden opportunity. Their replies were sharp.

  My own carelessness had saved me from losing my beloved collection. I had put the letters in the wrong envelopes.

  In October,=I was offered a live TV show of Petrified Forest in New York. Hjordis and I worked it out and after deducting air fares and three weeks’ hotel expenses, we looked like clearing three hundred dollars so we took off in a hurry.

  It was a good show and thirty million people saw it—a record at that time. Robert Sherwood sat in the control room watching us and professed himself delighted with our playing of his famous irk.

  Alex Segal directed it beautifully and Lloyd Gough, Kim Hunter and Art Carney rounded out the cast, but by the end of it I was so exhausted by the tension that we decided to blow the three hundred dollars on a trip to Barbados whence Ronnie and Marietta Tree had bidden us come and visit them for two weeks.

  The day after we returned to the Pink House, Otto Preminger called up and offered me the best part in his forth-coming picture, The Moon is Blue. Something he had seen in my performance in Nina at Hartford had persuaded him that I was the actor he wanted. Hjordis and I were beside ourselves with excitement but Otto had a great deal of opposition from United Artists who were financing the picture.

  ‘Niven is washed up!’ they told him…’get somebody else.’ But Otto is an immensely determined individual and what Otto wants, he usually gets…he got me…bless him!

  Many actors don’t like working with Otto because he shouts even louder than Goldwyn and can be very sarcastic. I love it. Actors have a certain amount of donkey blood in them and need a carrot dangled in front of them from time to time. The directors I dread are the ones who say, ‘You’ve played this sort of thing before—do anything you want’…Otto dangles carrots.

  A highly organised man, he made a German version of his picture simultaneously with the American one. The German cast arrived, the two companies rehearsed for a month and the entire film was completed in two languages in eighteen days. It was also far ahead of its day in its attitude towards sex, was promptly banned by the Catholic Church in the United States and helped enormously by the ensuing publicity.

  The Moon is Blue became a very big success all over the world and I, personally, was highly delighted to win the Golden Globe Award from the foreign press—for the best comedy performance of the year.

  William Holden and Maggie MacNamara played the lovers in the film but before we started shooting, Otto asked me to play The Moon is Blue for three months on the stage in San Francisco with Scott Brady and Diana Lynn. While we were doing so, Charles Boyer was performing in an adjacent San Francisco theatre. The two of us were having supper together one night when Boyer told me that he and Dick Powell were thinking of forming a company to make films for television.

  In view of the film studios’ attitude towards the upstart television, I was surprised that two such big names were prepared to risk so much, but I myself had little to lose and the net result of that after-theatre snack was the formation of Four-Star Television Inc., which to date has made between two and three thousand films for home consumption.

  The idea of Four Star Playhouse was to have four well-known movie stars each appearing once a month in an anthology series. Since, however, we were unable to persuade a fourth star to join us, most people still being too frightened of the studio bosses who uttered the direst threats against ‘black-legs’, a few staunch friends helped us out during the first season by doing ‘guest’ shows—Ronald Colman, Joan Fontaine, Merle Oberon and Ida Lupino among them.

  The three of us took nothing in salaries and with the proceeds at the end of the first year, we bought the rights to Somerset Maugham’s short stores and started a second series with Henry Fonda as host: he even had the guts to blow froth in the beer commercials. The third year, we purchased the Zane Grey stories and launched a third series, ‘Zane Grey Theatre’. This in turn spawned ‘The Rifleman’ which spun off another new series, ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’, into which we put an instantly successful unknown, Steve MacQueen.

  So it went on but it was not all smooth sailing by a long shot. Frequently, we overspent, or under-planned; often sponsors were weeks behind with their payments. Once on a Friday, I pulled all my savings out of the Bank of America to meet the studio payroll. The day before we were to start shooting a new series with Anita Ekberg as a female Tarzan, we received a very clear message from Howard Hughes’s right-hand man informing us that the luscious Miss Ekberg had left town indefinitely for an undisclosed destination and would not be available in
the foreseeable future. We took the high-powered hint and hastily re-cast another beautiful body in the leopard skin.

  Several owners of today’s biggest names started their careers with us as actors or directors and Jack Lemmon, Barbara Stanwyck, Steve MacQueen, David Janssen, Chuck Connors, Robert Ryan, Robert Taylor, June Allyson, Gig Young, Ida Lupino and many, many others made series for us. One year we were turning out fourteen different series at the same time…as big an output of film as any of the major studios had made in their hey day. We had become big business; nerve-wracking big business.

  My film career after The Moon is Blue also climbed back on to a most satisfactory plateau of important pictures.

  The boys were growing fast and had settled down well in California though I always felt a tiny bit out of place with my polite hand-clapping Hollywood Cricket Club background when I found myself at Chavez Ravine, wedged between two cap-wearing, gum-chewing, mitt-thumping, raspberry-blowing little Dodger fans.

  The days were full of promise and the friends with whom I could savour them were nearby.

  Fred Astaire is a pixie—timid, always warm-hearted, a sentimentalist with a Lefty-Flynn-type penchant for schoolboy jokes. He is also a racehorse aficionado who owned a winner of the Hollywood Gold Cup.

  Early one Sunday he called me.

  ‘I’ve done a terrible thing—I don’t know what possessed me, but at four o’clock this morning, I got out of bed and drove all over Beverly Hills, painting the city mail boxes with my racing colours.’

  Freud might have had an explanation for Fred’s behaviour—well-to-do ladies often abduct sausages from supermarkets—so when one day a voice on the telephone said, ‘Good morning—I am the Bishop of Los Angeles.’ I replied knowingly, ‘And I am the Mother Superior—how’s your cock?’