The Moon’s a Balloon

by David Niven

  Any actor who voluntarily supports two residences should have a psychiatrist permanently installed in both of them.

  However, the Regency furniture was sent for and the house was officially declared open by the more-beautifulthan-ever Grace from next door in Monaco who sat on a packing case with her enchanting husband and ate sardines by candlelight.

  During the next few years, we returned a few times to Hollywood including once to make a picture about two crooks with Marlon Brando and once to shoot the pilot of Four Star’s most ambitious television series, The Rogues. The eye must really have been ‘in’ on the day when producer, Collier Young, and I did the casting because we chose as my leading lady, a complete unknown—Sally Kellerman.

  Brando, contrary to what I had heard, was easy, sympathetic and generous to work with and a great help on a tricky political occasion.

  Hjordis and I had received a message from the White House. Jackie was giving a very small surprise party for the President.

  The producer of the picture, a staunch Republican, saw no particular reason to arrange the schedule to get me off a few hours early on Friday evening. Brando, a super Democrat, viewed it quite differently and the matter was quickly arranged. We flew to Washington; on arrival, we were smuggled by Fifi Fell into a small hotel where we changed and then boarded the Presidential yacht at a heavily guarded dock.

  Apart from Fifi, ourselves and a senator from Florida, it was entirely a family affair—the R.F.K.s the E.F.K.s, the Shrivers, the Smiths and so forth. Jackie had provided a small orchestra. When it struck up ‘Happy Birthday to you’ as the President boarded for what he thought was a quiet dinner alone with his wife, his face, luckily, lit up with pleasure. We cruised up and down the river, followed by a secret service launch…a gay, happy family evening. We gave presents and in the early hours of the morning, played some fairly strenuous Kennedy games.

  During one of these physical encounters, the entire left leg of Senator E.K.’s trousers was ripped off at the crotch. At four AM we came alongside for landing and it was evident that several marines, secret service men and others, were standing there to receive us.

  ‘Please take my pants,’ I said, ‘it’ll cause no stir if an actor comes ashore half-dressed, but it might look odd if you do.’

  ‘The hell with it,’ laughed Teddy Kennedy, ‘it happened didn’t it?’ and with white underpants on the port side flashing bravely, he stepped jauntily ashore.

  The next day, J.F.K. was in his office at eight sharp before attending a Decoration Day Service with his small son. At eleven, we had a rendezvous in his oval office.

  ‘See how it feels,’ he smiled and I sat for a moment at the Presidential desk.

  With Jackie and the two children, we were whisked away in the Presidential helicopter to spend the rest of the weekend swimming, walking and skeet shooting at Camp David.

  On the way up there, with a secret service helicopter in attendance, I noticed, at the President’s elbow, a brightly coloured telephone. He saw me staring at it and started to laugh.

  ‘Is that the one?’ I asked. He nodded.

  ‘The one you pick up if you want to blow up the world?’

  ‘That’s it,’ he said, then he looked down at the glorious, green countryside passing below us, glanced at the attendant chopper flying beside us and laughed again.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘a guy could get to like this!’

  Countless volumes have been written about this extraordinary human being and the earthshaking moments he lived through and often controlled. I shall never forget him for his simplicity, his humour, his kindness, his interest in other people and, above all, his love of life. The end of the journal is now in sight so I will attempt to reward the reader’s patience and loyalty by bringing it swiftly to a close without making it sound like my obituary. Since the war, Trubshawe, long since married to the glamorous Mrs. Tower, had tried his hand at many things, including becoming a publican. He had been the landlord of several hostelries including a small inn—The Lamb, at Hooe in Sussex. The honest burghers of Brighton, taking their Sunday drives over the Downs, were astonished to see a newly erected billboard that stated simply—

  TRUBSHAWE HAS A LITTLE LAMB

  12 miles.

  Now he has given up that line of business and become an actor—a very good one too. He swiftly made a name for himself in television and one of his earliest screen appearances was in The Guns of Navarone—a lovely bonus for me.

  Bill Rollo died. He died exactly as he would have planned it, except that he had every intention of living for ever. He worked hard all his life and put all he could afford into his delightful small farm in Rutland. Fox-hunting was his joy and his extravagance. He spent all the time he could spare with Dinie, his second wife, at Barleythorpe. At the age of seventy, mounted on his favourite hunter, on a glorious autumn morning, with the scent breast high and the Quorn hounds in full cry, he put his horse at a big thorn fence. It fell. Bill’s neck was broken.

  I was filming in Spain. Hjordis was visiting her family in Sweden, David was at the University of Florence and Jamie at school in Switzerland. We converged on London and the next day drove north for the funeral. In London, it had been a happy family reunion, but as the miles sped by and Barleythorpe came nearer, the terrible sadness of the reason for our coming together swept over us. We had all adored him. He had been indestructible. The little village church was packed with his old hunting and shooting friends sitting silently and stoically in their grief. In the family pew, the Niven contingent wept unashamedly. After the service, we walked miserably out into the pale sunshine. The Duke of Beaufort, a close friend of Bill’s, approached.

  ‘I take it you will be spending the night with Dinie??

  ‘I can’t, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘I have to go back to Spain—I’m shooting in the morning.’

  ‘Ah’ he said, ‘they’ve got a nice lot of birds down there this year, I hear.’

  I didn’t try to explain. The boys completed their education in Switzerland, France, England and Italy. Jamie returned to the U.S. and after leaving Harvard, married a very special girl from Philadelphia. He now works in New York, David in London. Lately, Betty Bacall arrived to spend some time at Cap Ferrat with us. She brought with her the score of Applause and for ten days sat at the end of our promontory, belting out her numbers. The fishermen deserted the rocks below, the sea gulls departed and certain species of fish are no longer to be found in our waters, but when she opened on Broadway, she scored the greatest triumph that has come to any actress in the last ten years. Well, that about rounds it off…

  What else is there? Oh! yes!…the Movies! I almost forgot about them. Well…in the ten years since I left Hollywood, my itchy feet have spurred me, usually accompanied by Hjordis and the girls, to make films in Greece, Spain, England, France, Israel, Ireland, United States, Monaco, Switzerland, Austria, Mexico, Italy and the Lebanon—and more than one film in many of these countries.

  During that time I have been directed by the highly intelligent such as John Huston, John Frankenheimer, J. Lee Thompson and Peter Ustinov and by other professionals, also by the heavy-handed, the hysterical and the half-wits. I have worked with drunkards and those who preferred ‘pot’, ‘speed’ or ‘horse’.

  As a result of these travels and all these exposures nothing really fatal happened but there was one extremely painful near miss.

  We were shooting The Pink Panther in the Italian Alps; the following day I was required to do something very simple on skis and the producer, not knowing that I would rather ski than eat, told me to take the afternoon off and practise with a ski teacher. So anxious was I to profit from his rash instruction before he realised I might break a leg, that I bustled off up the mountain in my thin movie ski outfit, halfwittedly ignoring the fact that on the top it was 38°F below zero…so cold in fact that no one else was skiing. Halfway down and travelling fast behind the instructor, I suddenly got a feeling of absolutely nothing in precisely the spot
where I should have been the warmest…something was badly amiss amidships. A neon-sign flashed on in my brain FROSTBITE and cupping my hands over the danger area, I inadvertently put myself into the racing position and flashed past the astonished instructor. At the bottom three morose and mauve-coloured guides were warming themselves over a fire of fir branches. ‘Catso gelato!’ I yelled in my shaky Italian.

  The men were galvanised into instant action. This was a fate worse than death.

  ‘Put it in the snow,’ they shouted, plucking feverishly at my zipper. ‘You put yours in the snow,’ I gibbered, ‘mine’s cold enough.’

  My instructor arrived. ‘Alcohol!’ he commanded. ‘We put it in alcohol!’ We all clambered into his ancient car and I was driven through the main street of Cortina d’Ampezzo, one of the choicest resorts in the Alps, lying in the back with four horny-handed mountaineers, trying to keep the circulation going in my stricken friend.

  In the bar of the Hotel de la Poste, smartly dressed clients finishing late lunch, gaped in amazement as we clumped to the bar and yelled at the barman to fill a brandy glass to the brim with whisky ‘prontissimo!’

  In the lavatory, while the Italians formed a solicitous clucking semi-circle, I faced the agony of the thaw and prised out of my ski pants a pale blue acorn. Into the whisky it went and the pain was excruciating. This moment was chosen by a smart Milanese nobleman whom I happened to know to enter with a view to relieving himself. He took in the tableau at a glance.

  ‘David,’ he asked in a horrified voice, ‘what are you doing?’

  ‘I am pissing in a brandy glass,’ I muttered between clenched teeth, ‘I always do.’

  Apart from that, nothing much happened on my wanderings.

  I have been knifed (by mistake) in a Spanish production and nearly shot dead by a bedouin in Israel when the World War II rifle he was handling still had one up the spout. The bullet passed between our heads as I was talking to Duncan Macrae.

  I have been knocked senseless by falling scenery in an English studio and overturned in a canoe into the loathsomely infested waters of a Mexican jungle…all in all, about par for the course.

  The results, too, have been average. Some pictures the critics loved and the audience hated; some despised by the experts were greatly appreciated by the paying customers. One effort became one of the great money-takers of all time; another broke the record at the Radio City Music Hall and a third was so bad that it never got shown anywhere—even on the airlines.

  The whole movie industry, at the moment of writing, is in disarray—some say it will never recover.

  When it was booming, nothing was put into research. With people, today, cavorting about on the moon, it is incredible to think that films are still made and distributed in much the same way as they were in the days of D.W. Griffith, Chaplin and Buster Keaton. If the film companies had been making motor cars or false teeth, they would have been bankrupt forty years ago. When the business men took over from the old-time movie makers and started chasing ‘trends’, disaster followed as the night the day and now there is little money left with which to make new pictures. Fingers of blame have been pointed freely in every direction including at the people who pulled in the customers.

  Sitting in their yacht in Monte Carlo harbour, I was discussing the situation with the Burtons.

  ‘What about the people who got a million dollars a picture?’ I asked.

  Elizabeth’s reply was as down to earth as usual.

  ‘If someone was stupid enough to offer me a million dollars to make a picture—I was certainly not dumb enough to turn it down.’

  The movie business has often proved its resilience and it will do so once more. In these days of super communications, it makes no sense to think that the greatest form of mass entertainment ever invented will just fade away. Actors have a problem—often we don’t know how to get ‘off’.

  ‘How do I finish this story?’ I asked a writer friend.

  ‘Quite simple,’ he replied, ‘just bring it up to date, then stop writing.’ After he had departed I was left in my London hotel staring at a blank sheet of paper digesting his brilliance and wondering how to avoid being sentimental while at the same time underlining my wonder at the ease with which two baby girls had altered my priorities and changed the whole process and meaning of my life when the phone rang.

  ‘Uncle David!’ said a sweet voice, ‘this is your goddaughter!’

  Noel Coward has twenty-seven godchildren—five more than I (eighteen of mine are girls).

  Noel would never have floundered as I did…his record for patience and helpfulness is legendary…example—

  ‘Uncle Noel! Look at those two little doggies! What are they doing?’

  ‘The little doggie in front,’ said Godfather Noel, ‘has just gone blind, and his friend is pushing him all the way to St. Dunstan’s.’

  ♦

  ‘I have a friend with me,’ said my unidentified goddaughter. ‘He’s dying to meet you…can we come up?’

  When she walked in and embraced me I remembered her. Eighteen years old, long, blonde hair, Indian head-band, willowy wasp-waist figure, suede jacket, fringed skirt, green eyes and a gorgeous smile.

  Her companion was considerably less prepossessing.

  ‘This is Big Top,’ said my goddaughter offhandedly, as she indicated a morose, bearded creature lurking behind her. He sported an Afro hair-do, a grave error for a red-haired Caucasian. He, too, was festooned with love beads and his heliotrope bell-bottoms were kept up by a broad leather belt, the buckle of which was fashioned in the shape of a penis. Dirty, horned toenails jabbed out belligerently from between the thongs of his questionable sandals.

  ‘You wanna blow some grass, man?’ he demanded, his flat Lancashire voice winning easily over a phoney American accent. He ignited a joint and passed it to my goddaughter.

  ‘You dig today’s pictures?’ he asked me. ‘How come you only work for these creepy has-beens, man! I’ve got something that’ll really blow your mind, very groovy.’

  ‘What’s it about, Big Top?’ I asked, groaning inwardly.

  ‘Just be cool,’ he said. ‘Be cool…if you wanna be in something really far out, really specific, something really against your bag…I have this story about this old guy, rich and weirdo: his daughter has freaked out; see, and shacked up with a spade who drops acid, who’s a big wheel in some corny new African state…’ He droned out the rest of the well-known rubbish and then delivered a homily. It was cats like me, it seemed, who had ruined the movie business with our bad taste and lack of imagination. The only way we could atone for our sins, was by coming up with some ‘heavy bread’ for his production company. He finally withdrew, leaving my room smelling like a haystack. I opened the windows.

  ‘Isn’t he awful?’giggled my goddaughter. ‘I won’t do that to you again…I got trapped.’ She looked at me speculatively and took a long draught of champagne.

  ‘Want to take me to a party? It’s just around the corner.’

  In the lobby many heads turned in her direction as she clung to my arm. The party was located in a studio above an antique shop. A glassy-eyed transvestite admitted us and pointed limply into the gloom of a sickly-sweet haze…’There’s wine over there.’

  The place was illuminated by carriage lamps; on the walls were garish posters, large, coloured numbers and blown-up photographs of Che and Mao. Through an open bedroom door to the right, I could see two young lesbians making slow, unhurried love. Our host offered us some pills from a Georgian snuff box.

  ‘We have it all, man,’ he said. ‘…California Sunshine even.’

  Out of the gloom a tall girl rose, kissed me on the lips, said ‘Peace’, and sat down again.

  Round the walls couples sat and smoked and stared at nothing in particular. From a record player, a female voice, Joan Baez, I think was singing a sad ballad about children.

  Not much happened for an hour, then a 16mm. film was thrown on a portable screen. It was about homosexu
ality in Algerian prisons. The warders played prominent parts and the close-ups were quite repulsive. As the film unfolded, my blonde-green-eyed Godddaughter became aware of my increasing restlessness.

  ‘This isn’t your scene is it?’ she giggled. ‘Do you want to split?’ She was giggling a lot by now and in the reflected light of the screen, I saw that her eyes were brightly out of focus. Gratefully, I grabbed the offer and ducking under the beam from the projector I went quickly down the stairs. In the street, like a man who has just run a four-minute mile in thick mud, I leaned against the railings, gulping down great draughts of clean, windy spring evening. After a while, I looked up at the scudding clouds above and suddenly and unexpectedly, up there above the chimney pots, I beheld an old childhood friend, sailing calmly and confidently through a clear patch of sky…who knows if the moon’s a balloon, coming out of a keen city in the sky—filled with pretty people? (and if you and I should get into it, if they should take me and take you into their balloon, why then we’d go up higher with all the pretty people than houses and steeples and clouds: go sailing away and away sailing into a keen city which nobody’s ever visited, where always it’s Spring) and everyone’s in love and flowers pick themselves.

  EOF