The Moon’s a Balloon

by David Niven

  Fortunately, film and tape gradually eliminated the live monster, leaving it to cope most efficiently with the news, ‘talk-shows’, and sports, but while it was in its final throes, masochist me could not resist one more exposure to its well-known dangers, so off I flew to New York.

  It was an important show but the material was the usual gibberish: I was a spy or a doctor or a Congressman, I forget which—it would not have made the slightest difference. The strange thing was, I didn’t really need the money that badly…it was an irresistible urge to be frightened…like skiing, but this time I was determined to be calm. After all, I was the star of the show and the major part of the burden was mine. My idea of being calm was this: I left my hat, coat and briefcase (my spy, doctor or Congressman equipment) in my little dressing room just off the sound stage and with only five minutes to ‘air time’, I wandered nonchalantly about in shirt sleeves.

  An hysterical assistant rushed up, ‘David!…for Christ’s sake!…’

  ‘Calm yourself, please,’ I said, trying not to throw up, ‘we have five, lovely, long cool minutes before we have to act this very bad play in front of several millions of people but, in the meanwhile, let us all relax…’

  ‘David! for Chriss…’

  ‘Please, I said, ‘don’t raise your voice, all I need is two minutes during which I will go to my room, put on my coat and hat and pick up my briefcase.’

  The man nearly disintegrated as I sauntered about, perhaps for the first time what Americans have always hoped a true Britisher might be—an ice-cold Gibraltar.

  ‘David!’ the assistant pleaded. ‘Please—you’ve just got two minutes!’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘no sweat’, and followed by a forest of admiring eyes and with the slow measured tread of a London Bobby, I stalked to my little dressing room.

  I had locked myself out.

  Immediately, I was transformed into a shrieking, babbling, banshee.

  ‘HELP! HELP!’

  A quivering announcer started to extol the sponsor’s wares against a background accompaniment of studio firemen hacking down my door and eventually, I made my entrance with my hat on back to front, my coat wrongly buttoned and covered in wood chips. I couldn’t remember a word. Orson Welles once said to me, ‘We have now acted in theatres, on radio, in films and on live television—they can’t think of anything else, can they? Oh! God! I hope not. I stayed on in New York to make a film.

  In this journal, I have, by now, firmly established myself as a name-dropper so I can, with equanimity, record that apart from re-establishing contact with McClain, the New York Giants and many other old friends, the only occurrence of note during the time I was filming in New York was my good fortune in getting to know Senator J.F.K. of Massachusetts and his beautiful wife, Jackie.

  One night with a small party, we visited El Morocco and were seated at J.F.K.’s request in the Champagne Room at the back. I was dancing with Jackie in the main room and remarked on the fact that her husband remained out of sight all evening.

  ‘Why’s that? Doesn’t he like to dance?’

  ‘He wants to be President,’ she replied.

  The picture finished, I returned to the Pink House just in time for the boys’ summer holidays. I had many offers. Four Star was mushrooming, the mortgage was paid off and the Oscar was gleaming on the mantelshelf. I should have known from experience that I was headed for trouble. The astute reader will have noticed fewer references to Hjordis in the pages covering the last few months. Unfortunately and almost imperceptibly, this had become the pattern of our lives at that time.

  I had fallen into the well-known trap of becoming so wrapped up in my career, myself and, lately, my success, that I had been taking the most important thing in my 4ife for granted.

  Hjbrdis told me that she was leaving me.

  ∨ The Moon’s a Balloon ∧

  SEVENTEEN

  With complete honesty, Hjordis explained that she had to find out if she was still an individual, a human being in her own right, or just the trappings of someone else. It was very painful. Once Hjordis makes up her mind—that’s it! She rented a small house nearby and moved into it to live alone and find out if she still ‘existed’. The boys were nonplussed and refused to believe it had happened. Irreverently, they named her new residence ‘The Summer Pink House’ and visited it daily on their bicycles.

  Hollywood is an impossible place to work out family problems. There, several hundred resident correspondents peer through their microscopes at an ever-changing handful of goldfish who are news. Rumours flew; so we put out the traditional nauseating statement about a ‘trial separation’ and voiced our pious hope that ‘friends would understand while we attempted to reconcile our differences’.

  Looking sadly at an empty chair was no way of spending the summer holidays so I took the boys to Honolulu to try our luck on the surf boards. Forty-eight hours later, the Los Angeles papers were full of pictures of me being helped from the sea with blood streaming down my face—the result of a head-on collision with a rock.

  Urgent enquiries from Hjordis—a good sign.

  After six weeks, I returned to the Pink House and diplomatic relations were re-opened between the two establishments, mostly in the form of S.O.S. messages, relayed by the boys.

  ‘The boiler’s burst—she wants to know what to do.’

  ‘Somebody’s stolen the mowing machine and the landlord is suing her—who does she call?’

  I went to work at M.G.M. with Doris Day making Please Don’t Eat the Daisies and, three months to the day from the start of our trial separation, I took my lunch box at midday and paid my first visit to the Summer Pink House. Hjordis was sunbathing in the garden when I walked in demanding beer to wash down my sandwiches. By the time I went back to the studio, the war was blessedly over.

  It was a horrible experiment but by anyone as completely honest as Hjordis it could never have been undertaken except as a last resort. Most importantly, it worked and a whole new lease of life was given to our happiness entirely thanks to her having had the courage of her convictions. As soon as I was through with the picture, we took off on a second honeymoon.

  We had been invited to Brazil as guests of the Government. I was to be presented with the key of the city of Rio de Janeiro by President Kubitschek. We went via New York and while Hjordis busied herself finding clothes for the visit, I misguidedly enrolled myself at the Arthur Murray School of Dancing for a crash course in the tango.

  For hours, closeted in a tiny cubicle, I nestled between the bosoms of a large, dark lady and swooped and dipped like a madman.

  If anybody was still dancing the tango in Brazil they certainly were not doing so during our visit. I never had a chance to display my virtuosity. North American hospitality is justly famous: the South American variety is exuberantly overpowering. It was a fascinating experience. Very few Hollywood faces had, thus far, been seen in that land of ardent moviegoers and we were feted, cheered and mobbed wherever we went.

  When the President, at the palace, presented me with a colossal key, Hjordis said, as a joke, ‘What about me? Can’t I have a little one too?’ With great gallantry, he ordered a small, golden replica to be made specially for her and delivered the same afternoon.

  A fascinating man with a most attractive family, his pride and joy the controversial city of Brasilia, which was then only half built. On the spur of the moment he said, ‘We’ll go up there together tomorrow.’

  We flew up in the presidential plane accompanied by his wife, daughters and the architect of Brasilia—Oscar Neymever, who sat white-faced and miserable throughout the trip—he is frankly terrified of flying. When we arrived in Brasilia, the President put us in his helicopter and pointed delightedly as we flew between the half-built skyscrapers of his new capital, landing finally on the lawn of the only finished structure in the city, his own ‘Palace of the Dawn’, there to spend the weekend. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘you and I will officially declare the lake to be filled with wa
ter.’

  In a dinghy with an outboard motor, dodging in and out of the half-submerged tree trunks, we made the grand opening tour of the huge half-filled man-made waterway.

  After another week of being royally entertained in Sao Paulo, we spent a few days by ourselves in Bahia. Soon after we got back to the Pink House, my birthday loomed up and Hjordis said, ‘Let’s go down to some little place on the beach and have lunch together.’

  It was a Sunday and the weather was glorious, and dreading the bumper-to-bumper traffic, I advanced every excuse, but she was adamant. So I took my place resignedly behind the wheel and we headed out towards Malibu.

  She pointed excitedly, ‘Let’s go in there…it looks sweet.’

  ‘The Frigate Bird’ was a well-known whore house with a very unsavoury reputation. I explained this to Hjordis.

  ‘Oh, please,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been in one before. Please, do take me in there…and look…it says Dining Room!’

  Still chastened by our short separation, I gave myself a good mark, for being attentive to my wife though luncheon in a brothel seemed a strange way to demonstrate it, and turned into the driveway.

  As we entered, a parrot in a cage gave a wolf whistle and a sleazy madame greeted me with, ‘Look who’s here! Well, hullo there, Dave!…Long time no see’—a libellous and erroneous statement as it happened but I pretended not to hear and pressed grimly on towards the dining room. There I froze. In the gloom, I saw the well-known back of a close friend. His arm was around a blonde girl’s waist…Laurence Olivier.

  ‘Quick!’ I hissed to Hjordis. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’ Then as my eyes became accustomed to the semi-darkness, I spotted another even more easily recognisable form…Peter Ustinov was pinning a dark girl to the wall. My head spun. My friends had gone mad—what a lunatic risk to take! I grabbed Hjordis by the arm and dragged her down the passage; the parrot whistled again, a peal of well-known laughter followed Patricia Medina!

  Only then did I catch on. My surprise birthday party in surprise surroundings was a complete success. In the spring of 1960, we had an overpowering urge to move. This urge became more and more pronounced and we knew with certainty that this was not something being signalled to our brains by out pathologically itchy feet. We knew that we wanted to make a big and permanent change. When I told my agent and my business manager that we were thinking of moving back to Europe to live, they were dumbfounded and lost no time in pointing out that my career had never been in better shape, and asked what sort of pictures I thought I’d make over there.

  ‘You’ll be sitting on top of some goddamned mountain,’ they said, ‘praying for the phone to ring.’

  They talked ominously about the boys’ schooling, hinted darkly about my obligations to Four Star…they told me quite frankly that they reckoned I had gone mad, but the more they reasoned with me and the more valid their arguments sounded, the more certain I became that we would be going. Hollywood had changed completely. The old camaraderie of pioneers in a one-generation business still controlled by the people who created it, was gone. The mystique had evaporated. Wrong it may have been, but when Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer and Marlene Dietrich had graciously consented to give interviews to the press, it was on the strict understanding that the copy would be submitted and could be altered to their taste before it was published. They created and perpetuated their images and—they became immortal.

  Now, the inevitable reaction had set in and upon us was the era of the vicious, apparently law-suit proof columnist, of Confidential magazine and the telephoto lens. The pipe dream was gone—the lovely joke was over. The asphalt jungle of highways was proliferating everywhere through the once lovely Californian countryside; the famous sunshine was dimmed by automobiles and industry and the scent of fear was attacking the smogfilled lungs of the professional film makers, already resigned to the fact that their audience was brainwashed by television. It was time to go, but even so and with our European roots tugging at us, it was a tough decision to make. Although we had lately received a nasty shock from the tax authorities who had taken all our savings to pay off a hefty reassessment of taxes from four years before, we still needed a clear sign that we should actually start making our reservations.

  The message was delivered nearby in tragic and brutal fashion…On a bright Sunday during the Easter holiday, David and Jamie were on the patio helping me with the barbecue, Hjordis was indoors baking the potatoes. The garden was vivid with blossom and the yellow orioles had come back to nest once more. Around us the hills were misty and the blue jacaranda trees were in full bloom. In the distance Mount Baldy on one side reared its snow-topped head above the industrial haze of the Los Angeles basin, in the opposite direction. Catalina and the Santa Barbara Islands floated in ghostly isolation far out in the Pacific.

  I don’t think we even heard it…if we did we would have dismissed it as the backfire of an automobile. It was a revolver shot. Four youths, ‘junkies’, had come up from Downtown in a taxi. After paying the fare, they had ‘cased’ our street for suitable victims and had settled on a neighbour’s house a few yards away.

  They rang the bell. The son of the house, a boy about the same age as mine, opened the door. They shot him.

  While he was dying in agony on the threshold, they held up the distraught parents, took their available cash and then, inexplicably, allowed them to call a doctor.

  They were all arrested within half an hour, and, receiving the sentences reserved for juveniles, have, presumably, long since been once more let loose on society.

  Los Angeles is a violent city so I don’t mean that we stampeded in panic—as a result of this single tragedy, but it certainly tipped the scales, because we had lately decided to adopt and we wanted to bring up a new family somewhere in peace and quiet.

  Finding a good home for the Pink House was our primary consideration. Many unknowns wanted it badly but we sold it much less advantageously to an old friend who loved it and who has lived there happily with his family ever since.

  I resigned from the Board of Four Star, put the Regency furniture in storage and when the boys went back to boarding school, we flew off to find a new home and a new life in Europe.

  First stop—Klosters in Switzerland—to catch the tail end of the skiing and to ask the advice of Deborah Kerr and her husband, Peter Viertel. They were adamant that we should follow their example and make Switzerland our base so when my agent finally trapped me after days of frantic search offering me several months in Greece and England making The Guns of Navarone, I left for the island of Rhodes and Hjordis stayed behind combing the Alps for a suitable chalet. She was brilliant and within a few weeks found exactly what we wanted, a comfortable cuckoo clock in a quiet farming village fifteen minutes from the ski resort of Gstaad.

  The Guns of Navarone was a long and physically very arduous picture culminating with five weeks in England in November simulating a storm at sea by working nine hours a day in a huge tank of filthy water.

  After nine months, Gregory Peck and I were left alone with two weeks of exhausting night work still to do, shooting from dusk to dawn, filming the actual finale of the picture—blowing up the guns. As my character had been built up as ‘a genius with explosives…the only man who can do it’, it will readily be appreciated that without my presence during those crucial last two weeks, the colossal seven-million-dollar epic could never be finished. With only three days to go, I picked up a fearsome infection via a split lip and at two o’clock one morning, was carted away with, what in the grim times before antibiotics, was known as general septicaemia. I lay dangerously ill for days while the experts from Guy’s Hospital struggled to identify, isolate and eliminate the bug that had struck me down. The picture ground to a halt amidst general consternation. The ‘Big Brass’ of the company arrived post-haste from America. They called a meeting with Carl Foreman, the producer, Lee Thompson, the director, the head of the finance department, representatives of the banks and insurance companies and
various assistants.

  One of those present reported the scene to me later.

  Foreman read out the latest ominous bulletin from the doctors: murmurs of sympathy and alarm arose on all sides. After a suitable pause, the Biggest Brass spoke, ‘We gotta problem here, fellers…so David is very, very sick…that’s tough on him…and we all love him…but wadda we do if the sonofabitch dies?’

  ‘The sonofabitch’, pumped full of drugs, went back to work against the doctor’s orders far sooner than was prudent, completed the crucial three days’ work and suffered a relapse that lasted seven weeks.

  The Big Brass never even sent me a grape. While I was recuperating in the Chalet, Hjordis busied herself looking for the baby girl we had both set our hearts on. One day the miracle happened. A little round bundle, a few weeks old, was delivered into her arms. It promptly went purple with rage and tried to scream the house down, but one look at the Madonna-like serenity of Hjordis’s face was all I needed. We were entering a period of pure joy.

  Two years later, another little creature appeared and while Hjordis remained calmly confident, relentless competition for the affection of these two diminutive blonde bombshells set in between myself and my two sons. It continues, unabated, to this day; no holds barred.

  After a while in Europe, the twin calls of sun and sea increased in volume. Hjordis, once again, was brilliant and this time, after combing the whole northern Mediterranean basin till she knew every rock by name, she found an old monstrosity, perched in an olive grove on a little promontory of its own on Cap Ferrat.