Rakish Progress

By Brad Darrach

THE MOON'S A BALLOON

by DAVID NIVEN

380 pages. Putnam. $7.95.

David Niven is the great joke Englishman of his generation. Dependable, diffident and apparently dim, he wanders on to the screen like a mildly rattled rabbit, occasionally splutters, "I say, jolly good, what?" and hardly ever gets the girl. Niven has played this P.O. Wodehouse stereotype with such consistent charm that audiences usually assume that Niven is like that too. Not at all. In The Moon's a Balloon, his racy autobiography, Niven offers himself as a tough, ambitious international playboy--a well-preserved specimen of that almost extinct species, the gilded barfly.

The Niven patina was somewhat rudely applied by a clutter of British public schools. At Heatherdown, where he was sent in 1916 when the family finances collapsed, he made a dubious reputation as a practical joker and was expelled for mailing a sick friend some dog droppings. Then came a Dickensian reform school for "difficult boys," followed by a cramming academy under the direction of a terrible-tempered grandson of Robert Browning. Even at stately Stowe, a school he really liked, "Old Stoic" Niven couldn't resist cheating in an exam. He barely made it into Sandhurst, Britain's West Point.

As he tells it, Niven's military career, which he began as a subalterr in 1929, reads like a script for Carry On, Sergeant. Its high point was a regimental costume ball for which Niver and a brother officer dressed as goats Feeling that his talents as a comedian were wasted in the army, Niven resigned his commission after only four years' service in Malta and the British Isles. In 1933 he appeared in New York City, and parlayed a London connection with Barbara Hutton into a job selling liquor for Jack Kriendler of "21."

Connections were Niven's genius. They led him to Hollywood in 1934, found him room and board with Loretta Young's mother, they got him a seven-year contract with Sam Goldwyn--as well as a chance to play polo with Darryl Zanuck even before he had a speaking part.

Niven's description of that polo match is one of the better "Zanuck-dotes." At one point, the story goes, Niven was racing Zanuck for the ball. Suddenly his horse stretched ahead, sank his teeth into the seat of Zanuck's breeches and held on. Niven made a wild swing at the ball but missed. Next thing he knew his stick was clamped beneath the tail of Zanuck's pony. Attached tooth and tail, the "horrible triangle" galloped past the stands. "I was not," Niven reports soberly, "invited to play polo with Zanuck again."

Niven appears to be a totally social animal. In company he is the most amiable of men--quick with his tongue, handy with a glass, a devil with the ladies. During World War II he was also a brave soldier, but you'll never hear about that from Niven. All he reports of his experiences as a commando major during the Normandy landing is that he could hardly hear the guns for the nightingales.

What can you say about a man who spends half a chapter talking about Elsa Maxwell, but copes with D-day in a throwaway line? You can say, as the author says frankly of himself, that he lives in "a welter of false values." You can also say, as the best pages in this book and the best scenes in his comedies suggest, that the Old Stoic has Style.

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