The Moon's a Balloon by David Niven

Author:David Niven [Niven, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141937342
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Goldwyn signs unknown! – that was the headline of super-powerful columnist, Louella Parsons, the next morning. The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety, the twin bibles of the industry, similarly alerted their readers to this earth-shaking occurrence.

In my new Ford, I drove out to bask in the congratulations of the Belzer-Young family.

Within a week I had evacuated from Al Weingand’s haven and found myself a tiny, brown cuckoo-clock of a chalet at the top of North Vista Street, with a view looking over the whole of the Los Angeles Basin. I shared the chalet with several scorpions and black-widow spiders and a garage with the Madam of a well-known whore house situated immediately below me.

I joined the Hollywood Cricket Club.

There were twenty-two cricket clubs in California at that time. The Hollywood Cricket Club was deservedly the most famous and crashes were frequent on Sunset Boulevard on Sunday afternoons when amazed local drivers became distracted by the sight of white flannel trousers and blazers on the football ground of U.C.L.A.

Hollywood was going through a ‘British period’ and the studios were indulging themselves with such epics as Mutiny on the Bounty, David Copperfield, National Velvet, Bengal Lancers, Edwin Drood, Disraeli, Lloyds of London and Sherlock Holmes … it was a bonanza for the British character actors. The captain of the Hollywood Cricket Club was the redoubtable, craggy C. Aubrey Smith. A famous county cricketer, he had a penchant for suddenly nipping out from behind the umpire and firing down his fast ball.… He had been nicknamed ‘Round the Corner Smith’. His house on Mulholland Drive was called The Round Corner’; on his roof were three cricket stumps and a bat and ball serving as a weather vane.

Ernest Torrance and his wife Elsie were other leaders of the British colony. Henry Stephenson, E. E. Clive, Eric Blore and H. B. Warner were members. Later arrivals, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, were fiercely independent of the label ‘British colony’ and Herbert Marshall spent all his time with Gloria Swanson and Reggie Gardiner with Hedy Lamarr while, aloof from it all, living the life of a hermit in his house at the end of Mound Street, was Ronnie Colman. There he entertained only his intimate circle – William Powell, Richard Bartlemess and Noll Gurney. He had just overcome an unhappy marriage and was trying not to fall in love with Benita Hume.

The hard core British colony took tea on Sundays at the Torrances or the Aubrey Smiths … the atmosphere was very like the Marsa Polo Club in Malta.

Nigel and Bunnie Bruce became, for me, the Norah and Lefty of the West Coast.

‘Willie’ Bruce, immortal as Doctor Watson in Sherlock Holmes, was fat and jovial and generous. Bunnie was thin and gay and generous. They both adored their two little girls, Pauline and Jennifer. They kept open house in an old Spanish-style mansion on Alpine Drive and happily spent every penny that Willie earned.

It was Willie who made me join the Hollywood Cricket Club. He

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