What I'm Reading: David Niven, "The Moon's A Balloon"

“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there,” Harold Pinter once wrote, and Niven’s memoir is a very glossy ethnography of the Golden Age of Hollywood. My cousin (incidentally also named Olly) in in TV; since I’m starting out on my own acting career he got me this - the autobiography of one of Britain’s most famous movie stars, back in the age when movie stars were all the paradoxical things that they were.

Niven certainly led a fascinating life. He rubbed shoulders with so many famous people - actors, directors, business tycoons, Presidents, aristocrats, royals - that it’s a wonder he had any shoulders left by the end. Although his entrance into acting was by routes that are impossible now, the Industry has changed so much, it was still a relief to read that he had many of the same problems and anxieties I have about the whole thing!

Undeniably, Niven had class - in both the flattering and problematic senses of the word. I would say his pose has poise; particularly as the narrative moves towards the latter years it becomes more factual, less sentimental, more a series of anecdotes than a consistent whole. This may be in part because (no surprise in an autobiography) things have been edited to paint a rosier picture. No mention is made of his second wife’s abusive alcoholism, or Niven’s attempts to quit the British Army at the height of WWII to return to Hollywood, or his liaison with Margaret Whigham, which today would be called statutory rape.

Moreover - “The past is a foreign country” - some things jar nowadays in a way that they didn’t at the time, or in 1971 when the book was published. For Niven, the British Empire was a natural fact of life, as was his own part in occupying Malta, and he engages uncritically with Churchill, a figure whose halo these days is rightly (starting to be) questioned. My eyes bulged slightly when he detailed his friendship with ‘Felix,’ an Austrian businessman and, Niven tells us, devout Nazi. 

But the main draw of the book is of course the Hollywood anecdotes and the feeling of being behind the scenes with the stars, gaining some secret insight into their lives. There are plenty of revealing stories, though equally as many versions of, “I was at a party. X, Y, and Z were there. They are all lovely and have no character flaws or behaviours that would lead to their being upset at my having written them into this memoir.” Contrast this book with Laurence Olivier’s autobiography, Confessions of An Actor. Olivier was one of Niven’s contemporaries and colleagues, he appears multiple times throughout this book, and his own autobiography was unafraid to get gritty. It also made a point of not just listing the events of his life and the famous people he encountered, but how they made him feel and what he learned from the experience. Niven’s nostalgic memoirs are like his films: a larger-than-life, faintly glowing, heavily touched-up window into another time.