The Moon's a Balloon

Title: The Moon’s A Balloon

Author: David Niven

Number of pages: 336

Started: 26 April 2012

Finished: 9 May 2012

Opening words:

Nessie, when I first saw her, was seventeen years old, honey-blonde, pretty rather than beautiful, the owner of a voluptuous but somehow innocent body and a pair of legs that went on forever. She was a Piccadilly whore.  I was a fourteen-year-old heterosexual schoolboy and I met her thanks to my stepfather.

Plot summary:

Takes readers back to David Niven's childhood days, his humiliating expulsion from school and to his army years and wartime service. After the war, he returned to America and there came his Hollywood success in films such as "Wuthering Heights" and "Around the World in 80 Days".

What I thought:

I saw some interviews with David Niven on TV recently and that prompted me to read the first instalment of his autobiography.  It was a very readable book, although I was not entirely sure if I found it 100% credible – not that I thought there were untruths in it, but that maybe memory had amplified things a bit at times.

I have to say that I had not realised quite what a well-known film star he was (being a bit before my time) and I certainly hadn’t realised he mixed in such high circles – chats with his friends Winston Churchill and JFK no less.  It also has to be said that there were a lot of people who died in his life.  Some of that was because of World War 2, but nonetheless I think he had more than his fair share of death the deal with.  His life was a mix of a film star and lots of people dying.  Is that the perfect combination for an autobiography?  I shall leave you to decide.