Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I had known David Niven almost all of my life. I had met him in Hollywood just after the war when I was a child living with my grandmother, Gladys Cooper, who was to work with him in both The Bishop's Wife and Separate Tables. I had written magazine and Times profiles of him occasionally. #2 The author realized that David had a book to write after hearing David's son say, If you want to know about my father's life, you won't find it in his autobiographies. They're all about other people. #3 The Moon's A Balloon and Bring on the Empty Horses are examples of how David changed his story to fit the needs of his books. His autobiographies were the digest of his after-dinner stories, and his attitude to Hollywood was like that of Richard Gordon to medicine, Henry Cecil to the law, or James Herriot to the veterinary business. #4 The function of the biographer is not to rewrite already existing memoirs in the light of further evidence, but to start out from the very beginning as if those often partial and partisan works did not exist.