The Moon's a Balloon [antikvár]

Introduction When he died at his home in Switzerland on 30 July 1983 at the age of seventy-three after a painful four-year struggle with motor neurone disease, David Niven had become that curious phenomenon, a national treasure. This honorific epithet differs from 'celebrity', which doesn't necessarily involve either respect or the acknowledgement of significant accomplishment. But on the other hand it exists somewhat apart from the recognition of a person's achievement as a writer or a performer. Only a select number of artists are recognised as national treasures, and they have not always reached the very summit of their professions. What they must do is embody certain native qualities that make the public embrace them with a particular warmth and sense of identification, and this involves the acceptance of flaws and a knowledge of the subject's experience of pain as much as it includes virtues and a kind of idealisation. David Niven more than any other actor of his generation, perhaps of the twentieth century, became a national treasure at home and a much loved personality the world over as the embodiment of an exemplary form of Britishness, or more specifically Englishness. He was handsome and debonair, with a high forehead, dark and gently wavy hair, and sporting a thin, neatly trimmed moustache that hugged the full length of his upper lip. He came of age when moustaches were common among movie stars (Clark Gable, Basil Rathbone, Ronald Colman, Errol Flynn et al), politicians (Ramsay MacDonald, Neville Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, Oswald Mosley, Clement Attlee) and the Bridsh army (Generals Montgomery, Alexander and Wavell). I remember being told by a moustachioed captain in the Loyal Regiment at the War Office Selection Board I attended in 1952 that at one dme moustaches had been obligatory in the Bridsh army undl the order had been rescinded by King George V during the Great War, and that thereafter they had remained de rigueur and semi-official in the infantry. This may or may not have been true, though virtually all the senior officers in the units I served with grew them. The only significant film in which Niven appears with a shaven upper lip is Bontiie Prince Charlie, by general agreement and in the actor's own view the worst film he ever made and his most embarrassing performance. introduction In the roles Niven played and in his public persona he was humorously self-deprecating, socially at ease, unselfconsciously patriotic. He was a natural leader, yet with no trace of arrogance, aristocratic yet not affected in the manner of the effete, world-weary English milord. How appropriate it was that in 1985, two years after his death, he should have been one of the five film-makers (the others were Vivien Leigh, Peter Sellers, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock) chosen to appear on postage stamps to celebrate British Film Year. Both Chaplin and Hitchcock were knighted, and Sellers received the CBE, but surprisingly Niven never received any honour from the British crown, though his close friend Douglas Fairbanks Jr was awarded an honorary KBE. It is said, though there is no written evidence for this, that when admirers sought a knighthood for him. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher turned down the suggestion, saying it would be reconsidered were he to return home and pay his taxes. After quitting the army in 1933 Niven spent the whole of his life abroad apart from the war years, first in the States, then dividing his time between homes in Switzerland and the Côte d'Azur. David Niven was the creation of a number of forces, principally the British middle class, the public school system, the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, the Great Depression, Hollywood, World War Two, extensive expatriation and his own romantic imagination. He was a self-made man, not in the old-fashioned sense of pulling himself up by his own bootstraps but through shaping his own image and embellishing the facts in his biography. One is reminded of a celebrated exchange between the American writer S. N. Behrman and that other expatriate, the exquisite comic author Max Beerbohm. Behrman asked if Frank Harris, the Victorian author of the notorious and long-suppressed My Life and Loves, had ever told the truth. 'Sometimes, don't you know,' Max replied, 'when his invention flagged.' Like Harris, Niven was also a compulsive womaniser, and from his teens a heavy drinker. Niven was born in 1910 in London (though he usually told people he was born in 1909 in Kirriemuir, Scotland), his father of Scottish extraction, his mother half French. After the death of his father in the Dardanelles campaign in 1915, his mother married a rich businessman and leading figure in the Tory Party, Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt, whom Niven loathed and recreated as a Dickensian stepfather. It may be, however, as Niven's assiduous authorised biographer