Bring On The Empty Horses

Description for BRING ON THE EMPTY HORSES by David Niven:

David Niven has done it again. This is the unanimous verdict of everyone who has seen the pre-publication copies of BRING ON THE EMPTY HORSES. after the extraordinary success of THE MOON'S A BALLOON (British sales alone nearly 100,000 hardback and over 1,500,000 paperback), everyone has been waiting with bated breath to see if it could have a worthy successor. The publisher's first reader's report began: "immensely enjoyable, an absolute sure-fire success.'

It isn't another autobiography. It's a look at Hollywood during twenty-five of its most glamorous years, 1935 to 1960. What makes it so different from other books about the world's film capital is that Niven was there himself and tells the whole story as he saw it, from "extra' to wining an Oscar. Those were the great days of Hollywood; it was booming, filled with great personalities and controlled by arrogant moguls - as Niven says himself, a Lotus Land bearing little resemblance to the rest of the world. Great stars would receive 20,000 fan letters a week and newspapers set aside pages every day for the news and gossip pumped out by the Hollywood self-adulation machine.

Two hundred million people paid every week to go to the movies and among the names lights above the theatres were Garbo, Gable, Colman, Cooper, Bogart, Flynn, Constance Bennett and Astaire. All of these dozens of other top-name stars and directors were personal friends of Niven's; he describes them at work and play, with a wealth of wonderful stories.

This is undoubtedly the liveliest book about Hollywood ever written - compulsively readable, often wildly funny and, in the nicest sense of the phrase, straight from the horse's mouth. It's a warm-hearted book and exposes the agony an actress can feel when she starts slipping at the box-office, the heroism of Humphrey Bogart, the rise and sensational fall of Errol Flynn, the tragic story of Marion Davies, mistress of the newspaper millionaire William Randolph Hearst, and the personalities of such giants as Chaplin and Cecil B. de Mille. It's all told with understanding and sympathy; Niven seldom writes about people he doesn't like, but when he does he makes a direct frontal attack and kicks where it hurts.

Finally - the title. Here's Niven at his best. He and Errol Flynn were filming The Charge of the Light Brigade for a director, Michael Curtiz, 'whose hungarian-orientated English was a joy to us all. High on the rostrum he decided the mement had come to order the arrival on the scene of a hundred riderless charges, "Okay," he yelled into a megaphone, "Bring on the empty horses!"'