The Moon’s a Balloon by David Niven

Author:David Niven [Niven, D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: [2010.01.06]
Publisher: [Côte d’Azur]
Published: 1970-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

She got the cable two weeks later when she returned from a trip to Spain. She did not distinguish herself by her reply—

WHOSE BIRTH CERTIFICATE?

I really had to sweat it out—there was little transatlantic air mail in those days. The mail service in Mexicali via Mexico City must have gone by donkey. My little pile of money was dwindling alarmingly but many Americans came to Mexicali to hunt quail and other game in the surrounding brown hills. I became the ‘gun man’ in the only moderately clean bar in the town and in exchange for chili or tortillas, I cleaned and polished the guns while their owners drank and boasted. Sometimes I was given a tip. I never refused.

It was just after New Year’s Day 1935 when I triumphantly presented myself at the U.S. Border at Calexico, in my hand was my Resident Alien Visa—my permit to work.

I jumped trucks back to Los Angeles. A1 Weingand let me have my old room back and manfully swallowed the difficulties of payment.

I telephoned Goulding, but he had finished his picture and gone to New York. Mae West, I learned, was halfway through her picture with an unknown English actor called Paul Cavanagh playing opposite her.

I visited Central Casting and after an agonising wait of several days, was finally accepted and enrolled as ‘AngloSaxon Type N° 2008’.

Such was the efficiency of Central Casting that the first call I got to work as a professional actor, was as a Mexican.

Los Angeles is one of the largest cities in area in the world. The film studios are mostly strategically placed in far away suburbs miles from its centre. Universal Studios is in the San Fernando Valley. I was told to be there at 5 AM The Auburn broke down the night before so .1 started a zig-zag journey across the city by street car at 3 o’clock.

Once at the studios, I was handed a chit through a small window and instructed to report to wardrobe. There, I waited in line, showed my chit which was stamped, and was issued with a baggy white suit, a large sombrero, some sandals and a blanket.

I changed in a huge barn-like dressing room. Other ‘Mexicans’ were putting on their outfits. ‘Indians’ were also preparing themselves and honest townsfolk were getting into tailcoats, top hats and bowlers. The women ‘extras’ were dressing in an adjacent barn.

I followed my fellow ‘Mexicans’ to the make-up department and once more stood in line. While those, including myself, who had fair skins were sprayed with a brown mixture from a spray gun, on some of us they glued moustaches. The ‘Indians’ lined up opposite were being similarly treated all over their bodies with a reddish colour. Somewhere the Chinese were getting it in yellow.

There was not much happy chatter, I noticed.

At six-thirty, we were all marshalled by an assistant director and loaded into buses for a one hour drive to a remote movie ranch where the permanent Western town had been erected, there we were positioned by other assistants and told when to move slowly, when to scatter in alarm, etc.

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