Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (44 page)

David turned out to be one of the most difficult authors Hamish Hamilton ever published. He complained constantly about suggested cuts, jacket designs and publicity, and was at first unwilling to help to sell the book. When Jamie Hamilton asked him to attend an important lunch in London for his sales reps he replied airily, ‘I am afraid there is no hope as we are going yachting in early July … so sorry.’ He said he was ‘
delighted
’ about the projected green book jacket, which
showed a horse race – ‘it could be really great’ – but later changed his mind and said he hated it. When he corrected the proofs and then flew off to Hollywood to sing ‘Hello, Dolly’ with Pearl Bailey at a 5200-seat charity gala in June no one in London could understand his corrections, and when Hamilton sent him a series of urgent cables because the book was overdue at the printer he ignored them all. By now Jamie Hamilton was angry and wrote:

Niv hit the roof and replied with grim typed formality: ‘Dear Hamilton, When I first read your letter of June 18th I very nearly blew a fuse. Then I reflected that I have in my time been insulted by champions including Samuel Goldwyn and Field Marshal Montgomery, so I decided that you must have suffered a crise de foi. Even so, I must ask you never again to
give me the Dr. Allington to Scroggs Minor treatment, or the explosion will be heard by the Russians in their space lab!… Of course I have every intention of doing everything I can do to help but we are to be realistic about this: I am not just sitting on my ass waiting for publication day, I am working on at least half a dozen movie projects … So eat a lot of veg soups and yoghurts and don’t write any more “Dr. Allington’s”.’ Before sending the letter he changed ‘Dear Hamilton’ to ‘Dear Jamie’ by pen, made corrections to eight garbled words, added ‘Bloody drunken French secretary’ and ‘love David’, and promised to attend the reps’ lunch in London after all.

Hamilton cabled him to say ‘
GOOD BOY SEE YOU MONDAY IN MY STUDY ALLINGTON
’ but the lunch was not a total success because Niv was by now so touchy about the book that he thought he overheard one of the reps say ‘I hate it’ and the unfortunate fellow was forced to write to the paranoid author to say that he loved the book and the jacket. Niv, however, decided now that he hated the jacket himself and demanded another. Even when he had his photograph taken for the jacket he objected to the photographer, Beverly Lebarrow. ‘Coming to London to pose for Mr. Lebarrow was one of the most horrible experiences of my professional career,’ he wrote to Jamie Hamilton. ‘It’s quite possible that I do look like an elderly baker but I should have thought any professional photographer worth his salt would have taken special pains to disguise the fact and do something better for the author.’ When the final hurried jacket was produced it did indeed look a dreadful mess and showed an emaciated, unhandsome Niv holding four coloured balloons, each stencilled with one fashionably uncapitalised word that together read
the moon’s a balloon
.

Jamie Hamilton begged Niv to do a signing session at London’s most fashionable bookshop, Hatchards, when the book was published in October, and to agree to be the guest of honour at the influential Foyle’s literary lunch. He refused
both and eventually agreed only reluctantly to make a BBC TV programme about his old movies, a half-hour
Aquarius
programme, and to spend two nights in London to give some Press, TV and radio interviews. More trouble was to come when he was finally sent a finished copy of the book: he still hated the jacket, and then discovered to his fury that the index called Primmie Primrose, not Primula, that the caption to a photo of their wedding was dated 1941 instead of 1940, and that another caption said wrongly that Jamie’s wedding was in 1969. Hamilton wrote to apologise but added insensitively that ‘they are, after all, comparatively small errors and unlikely to upset anyone except yourself’. Niv hit the roof again: ‘Nobody sent me either the photographs or the index to check and I find it very humiliating to be a man who knows neither the year of his own wedding or his son’s wedding, or even the name of his first wife.’

He became a grandfather when Jamie’s first daughter, Fernanda Jr, was born on 24 June, and towards the end of September he flew to Munich and then to Nice to film
King, Queen, Knave
with Gina Lollobrigida, whom he came to dislike intensely, but he was back in London early in October for the publication of
The Moon’s a Balloon
. Jamie Hamilton gave a launch party for literary editors, columnists and booksellers where Niv cannily homed in on the booksellers, realising that they were the people to charm and impress if the book was to become a bestseller. ‘For the next twenty minutes and more, there were roars of laughter coming from that corner as he poured out jokes and anecdotes and flattery,’ wrote Greenfield in his autobiography. ‘You could see them swelling with pride. Roger Machell told me the following week that the buyers present at the party had more than doubled their orders in the next few days.’ Another huge boost to sales came when Niv was interviewed on TV on the
Michael Parkinson Show
. ‘He was a nice man,’ Parkinson told me,

The Moon’s a Balloon
was published at last on 11 October 1971 at £2.50 and Niv was still so unsure about it that he gave Roddy Mann, his press agent Theo Cowan, and several other friends £100 each to go round key bookshops and buy forty copies each. ‘He was really quite nervous about it,’ Mann told me, but there was no need to be. The reviewers raved about it and when I praised it in my weekly books column in the
Sunday Express
, saying that it was ‘the funniest volume of reminiscences for ages … forthright, bawdy and often hilarious’, he wrote an astonishingly humble and modest letter that very day to thank me:

Few famous authors would take the trouble to thank an unknown young critic for a good review.

The literary editor of the
Daily Telegraph
, David Holloway, queried the truth of many of the stories in
The Moon’s a Balloon
and Roddy Mann told me that he actually challenged Niv about a lot of the stories in his book ‘and he said, “Of
course
they’re true”, and although I think all the anecdotes were fictionalised I couldn’t say to a friend, “I don’t believe you”. He exaggerated only to be more amusing. “That’s my greatest joy,” he said, “making people laugh.” ’ Peter Ustinov, a wonderful raconteur himself, told me that all great storytelling needs a degree of fictional embellishment – ‘you’re not really telling a lie, you’re just concentrating something into a nugget’ – and David Jr told me: ‘Daddy was known to exaggerate and then suddenly he’d start believing his own stories. Every year each story got a bit better, so I can no longer remember what is the really
true
true story, or whether it happened to him or a friend of his, or whether it was just a good story that he’d heard. One of his stories had actually happened to
me
but he said it had happened to
him
. I was in a rage. I thought, “How can you
do
that sort of thing?
I
told you that story.” ’ Rex Harrison claimed after reading
The Moon’s a Balloon
that ‘they’re all
my
stories!’ but Jamie Niven said, ‘It was the wonderful imaginative additions to the stories that made them great. I remember sitting on a beautiful
terrazzo in the South of France with Alec Guinness, my father and Jack Hawkins –
that
was a late night! – and it got funnier and funnier and Hawkins and I were laughing so hard because these two giants were going
at
it with stories neither of them had heard. Hawkins said to me, “Don’t you
ever
forget this night.” ’

In a way
The Moon’s a Balloon
was almost a novel, albeit a much better one than
Round the Rugged Rocks
, though a book that purports to be a factual autobiography should not be flawed by quite so many inaccuracies about dates, names and places. Niv even managed to get wrong Primmie’s age when she died. Loving her as much as he did, how could he possibly get it wrong? Was his memory really that bad? Was he just too lazy to check? Or did he say that she was twenty-five rather than twenty-eight simply to make her death even more poignant? The chronology of
The Moon’s a Balloon
is also wildly inaccurate: some things are said to have happened years before or after they did, and there are some odd omissions. He makes no mention at all of
Round the Rugged Rocks
, for instance, and the end is so rushed that while he devoted 259 pages to his first thirty-nine years, i.e. six and a half pages per year, he gave only forty-five pages to the next twenty-one years, just two pages per year, and very disjointed they are too. His compulsive fibbing had become such a habit that he even claimed in an interview with William Hall of the
Evening News
that the book had taken him only four months to write ‘and I swear to you that everything in that book happened to me. It would be unforgivable – and very foolish – to steal anything. Someone would catch you out.’ He told Hall that the disapproving secretary to whom he had initially tried to dictate the book ‘was a tight-lipped Swiss lady’, but a year later wrote in
Smith’s Trade News
that she had been ‘a sour-faced lady from Nice’. One wonders whether she existed at all.

Within a week the book shot to the top of the bestseller lists, where it stayed at number one for weeks, and had to be
reprinted again and again. Most of his friends loved the book and Laurence Olivier wrote ecstatically: ‘Dearest beloved Niv, … Darling Boy Oh how I do congratulate you and rejoice for your glorious and so completely deserved success. I don’t think I ever enjoyed a book so much –
funny
,
fascinating
,
always
interesting and yet possessing a not unwelcome seam of intense sadness, and at times dreadfully moving. Dearest Boy its really first rate and
lovely
. My God your life makes mine seem like a well protected piece of boring organ music. All my love dear heart to you and yours Always your own L.’

Not everyone approved of the book. For some reason it did not appeal at all to the Teutonic mind and nearly twenty German publishers turned it down, and even in Britain there were voices of dissent. ‘You’d think from reading
The Moon’s a Balloon
that here is the most superficial bounder in the whole history of civilisation,’ wrote Bart Mills in the
Guardian
three years later. ‘All those anecdotes and so little substance. Never a nasty word about anyone.’ Soon after publication Niv received a package that contained a jacket of the book wrapped around more than 200 blank sheets of paper with a note that said, ‘I have removed all the filth,’ and when he read the book on BBC radio four years later Mrs Mary Whitehouse, the leader of the British National Viewers and Listeners Association, attacked the book’s ‘foul language and indecency’. Little did the puritans realise that Niv had in fact left out all his filthiest and most scurrilous stories, like the one about the Hollywood actor who loved to sit naked on a large cake and masturbate: as Niv said wisely, ‘You can’t have your cake and have it too!’ Another reader who might well have been angry – or even have sued for libel – was the RAF group captain who had rejected him when he had tried to join the RAF in 1939, a Group Captain Fletcher, whose name had been removed from the text to avoid a libel writ but unfortunately not from the index. ‘
OUT
,’ wrote Niv urgently and it was hurriedly removed.