David Niven (11 page)

David landed a decent supporting role in Goldwyn's
Splendour
, a romantic drama in which he played a failed crook who attempts to marry a rich girl because his family has fallen on hard times. Joel McCrea, who was the film's leading man, and Merle Oberon persuaded Elliot Nugent, the director of the film, to give David the role.

David liked Joel McCrea but was also a little jealous of him. ‘We both started at Goldwyn the same time,' he said, ‘and I was a little put out that Goldwyn was giving him starring roles while I was billed about sixth and seventh most of the time. Goldwyn was very busy building McCrea's career with the right kind of parts. I began wondering why Goldwyn even took me on when he didn't know what the bloody hell to do with me. But it was good of McCrea to lobby the director and Goldwyn to give me a decent part.'

David recalled the horrors that awaited him on that film.

I was trying to marry a rich girl and had a line which I'll never forget. ‘I'd marry her millions if she had two heads and a club foot.' I said it over and over before we filmed it so it would be stuck in my head. But when we came to shoot it, I was so nervous, I said, ‘I'd marry her club foot and two heads for her millions.'

‘Cut!' The director, Elliot Nugent, was patient at first, and he just said, ‘Take two!'

‘I'd marry her twenty heads and club foot for…!'

‘Cut!'

‘I'm sorry, Elliot, I
do
know it.'

‘Then say the goddam line. Take three!'

‘I'd marry her millions if she had two feet and a club head.'

‘Cut!' It took me nine or ten takes to finally get the line right. Now I can't ever forget that line!

The film earned David his first professional review when the
New York Times
noted, ‘The unpleasant Lorrimores are acted with poisonous
effectiveness by Helen Westley… Katherine Alexander…and David Niven as the useless son.'

David made a fourth film before the year was out,
Rose Marie
, a Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy musical for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. David had little chance to shine in this because, as the
New York Times
noted, ‘Since this is Miss MacDonald's and Mr Eddy's picture there can be no important place for other members of the cast.' Another newcomer, James Stewart, also had trouble getting noticed.

David said in 1978, ‘I had thought that acting in a film would be easy, but I found that when it came down to it I had very little confidence and was extremely nervous. I had trouble saying the few lines I had in each picture.'

Merle suggested to Goldwyn that it might help David if he was to do a stage play. Without mentioning Merle's part in the plan, David told me,

Goldwyn really hadn't a clue what kind of parts to put me in. He'd taken me on as a sort of successor to Ronald Colman but he didn't have the scripts that called for that kind of part. So he thought I needed to learn more about acting and the best way to do that was to put me in a play,
Wedding
, which played at the Pasadena Playhouse. I only had three scenes and didn't speak until the third scene when I had just two lines.

I couldn't resist putting it about that I had the starring role but that backfired because on the opening night I was horrified when I made my first entrance to tremendous applause. All my Hollywood friends, the Colmans, the Fairbankses, the Goldwyns, had decided to surprise me by turning up to see my starring role on the stage. I was terrified, and after my first scene I got back to my dressing room and drank three great slugs of whiskey, staggered back on for the second scene, just about made it back on for the third and made a total mess of my only two lines of the play. So to cover, I told a dirty story and then as I made my exit I walked into the scenery. I didn't do a second night – I was fired.

Goldwyn was furious with me and my punishment was to be laid off for six weeks – unpaid.

It's difficult to know if Goldwyn really did lay him off as punishment. David was hardly in demand by other studios, and Goldwyn didn't produce enough pictures to feature all of his contract players, so it may be that David was simply out of work for a while, and probably not unpaid.

Merle had to return to England to make two films for Alexander Korda. When she returned to America in October, David met with her in New York and they decided to drive the 3,000 miles (4,800 km) back to Los Angeles. David recalled some of this adventure to me without ever mentioning that he was travelling with Merle but did refer to the ‘Great Big Star'.

They stopped at a hotel, possibly in Chicago, where they booked in under a false name. ‘I was absolutely broke so she was paying the bill. I didn't mind being a kept man at all for the trip.' Actually, Merle was paying for most things; they were living together and she was paying the rent on their house. He really was a kept man.

On route from New York to Los Angeles, Merle had to let Goldwyn know where she was at all times and telephoned him at every stop. ‘The upshot of this,' said David, ‘was that Goldwyn got wind of where I was and started sending me telegrams telling me to get back to Los Angeles immediately, but I figured that since I was on suspension I would just ignore them. Telegrams followed us right across America, each one angrier than the last. When we finally got back to Los Angeles Goldwyn fired me.'

Laurence Olivier later heard about this episode but had a lot more insight into what really happened. He told me in an interview I did with him in at Shepperton Studios when he was making
Dracula
in 1979,

Goldwyn was furious with David for risking the career of Merle because she was under contract to him and he was trying to present her as a sweet, virginal heroine – well, Merle was sweet, but
virginal?
That didn't matter; there were precious few virgins in Hollywood, male or female. As far as Goldwyn was concerned David had risked everything he'd invested in Merle, and worse still, he had broken the strange law they have in America which forbids a man to take a woman across state lines for what they call ‘immoral purposes'. Hollywood stars were doing that all the time, and the women all went very willingly. But it would have caused a terrible scandal if he had been arrested or if someone had leaked the story to the press. The scandal would have been enormous. David just didn't understand all that. He said to me, ‘A little car ride, that's all it was.' I said, ‘Yes, from East to West Coast. That's a very long little car ride.'

When Goldwyn fired him, Merle fixed it. She went to Goldwyn and she was so sweet and charming that he couldn't resist her when she urged him to keep David on.

I really think that without Merle, David would never have had a film
career. He was very nearly a disaster from the start, but she kept coaching him, encouraging him, and she kept him working for Goldwyn who would have fired him and that would have been that.

As much as David loved Merle and she loved him, he was unable to stay faithful to her. He had an insatiable sex drive. He admitted to me, ‘I just couldn't get enough when I was a young man.'

When I asked him if he was faithful to the Great Big Star, he said, ‘Oh, how I wanted to be, old man. But I just couldn't. If a pretty girl came on to me, I couldn't resist. Now, who could?'

On Christmas Day 1935 Merle and David were among the guests at Clifton Webb's house. Sam Goldwyn may have disapproved of David's affair with Merle but the couple were the Goldwyns' guests on New Year's Eve.

Before January was out, David was relieved to be back at work. He told me, ‘I was always sure that each film I made would be my last. I had no track record and I was sure somebody was going to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Sorry, old man, but you really don't cut it so off you go and don't come back.” I was always surprised and delighted when I found myself with another job.'

His first film of 1936 was at Paramount,
Palm Springs Affair
, a musical comedy that cast him as a debonair character that finally suited his own personality which may have encouraged Twentieth Century-Fox then to give him his biggest role so far, as Bertie Wooster in
Thank You, Jeeves
from the writings of P.G. Wodehouse. Arthur Treacher starred as Jeeves.

Although it was a B-picture, it gave David his first leading role, and with his incurable charm, he was able to make the upper-class nitwit Wooster into a character of elegance and wit. Both Niven and Treacher were perfectly cast as Wooster and Jeeves, as the
New York Times
noted: ‘Mr Wodehouse must have been one of the fates in attendance at their births, marking them to play the characters he has been writing about these many years.'

Although the film gave David a taste of being a leading man, few people got to see it. It ran barely an hour and was played only as a second feature in major cities in America. It didn't play at all in the UK because at that time the British government imposed a very strict quota on how many films could be imported. Only A-list films from America were shown in Britain, and
Thank You, Jeeves
was undeniably a B-movie.

His next film put him back into the league of a supporting actor again, but it was worth it because the picture was a Warner Brothers epic,
The Charge of the Light Brigade
, staring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, and
directed by Michael Curtiz who had turned Flynn into a star the previous year in
Captain Blood
. Curtiz and Flynn would repeat their success with a number of other swashbuckling epics, notably
The Adventures of Robin Hood
and
The Sea Hawk
.

Famously, the title of Niven's second book of Hollywood memoirs were inspired by Curtiz's bad English: ‘Curtiz had a rather bad command of the English language,' David told me in 1975, ‘which was fair enough as he was, after all, a Hungarian. He wanted to film a stampede of horses, and the order he barked was, “Bring on the empty horses!”'

Niven had a major supporting role, that of an English cavalry captain whose main function in the film was to be charming and dashing and die a decent death halfway through the film. During the filming, he and Flynn became good friends.

‘Flynn was an Australian,' David said, ‘but he spoke with a clear English accent and so he was perfect casting as Captain Blood and Robin Hood. He called everyone “Sport”, and he was a sex maniac! So he reminded me a lot of me and we got on famously.

‘I had met him a couple of times before we worked together, and at first I found him to be very arrogant and didn't like him at all. But when we worked together I suppose something clicked between us and since we both had a fondness for women and booze and getting into trouble we realised we actually had enough in common to be friends.'

Much of the filming took place near the town of Bishop, some 200 miles (320 km) from Los Angeles. ‘The town had only one hotel,' David recalled, ‘but it burned down a week after we started filming and we had to freeze our arses off, sleeping in tents. Flynn and I tried to keep ourselves warm by drinking alcohol and sleeping with as many girls as we could find. It is quite surprising how many willing young ladies there were in the small town of Bishop who wanted to sleep with movie stars in tents on cold desert nights.'

Although the film featured the famous charge which occurred during the Crimean War, most of the film was set on the North Western Frontier. In 1978 Niven gave me what he thought was the reason for this meddling with history. ‘Hollywood simply didn't feel that the Crimean War, in which the British aided the French against the Russians, was glamorous enough. The North West Frontier had elements of the Bengal Lancers and
Gunga Din
which was popular with Hollywood studios, so the film became an Indian epic.

‘All my scenes were set in India. Flynn and I found ourselves sitting in a basket on top of an elephant for a scene in which we were hunting tigers, and the damn thing suddenly went berserk and began running about and
turning round and round and crashing into things in an effort to get us and the basket off its back.'

Interior scenes were shot back at the Warner Brothers studio and allowed Flynn and Niven to drink and carouse in the evenings and often well into the night despite having to rise early each morning to begin filming. ‘Flynn had a greater capacity for booze than I did,' David said. ‘Most men as drunk as him wouldn't be able to
get it up
, but Flynn had no problem. One morning he appeared bright and breezy and I asked him how he had fared the night before after I'd left him with two girls –
he
had the two girls, not me! He said, “I needed a few more drinks, old sport.” I said, “You needed
more?”
He said, “Hadn't had enough to get the old cock hard enough for two girls.” I said to him, “But surely more alcohol would have made it harder – that is,
difficult
to keep it up.” He said, “Not with my metabolism, sport.” He pointed at his crotch and said, “He needs plenty of alcohol coursing through his veins.”'

The Charge of the Light Brigade
was a tremendous success and, despite being killed off midway through the story, Niven acquitted himself admirably.

At this time, he proved to be a valuable and faithful friend to Douglas Fairbanks who had been through a tough time when he and his wife Mary Pickford divorced. Fairbanks was in love with Lady Sylvia Ashley but she was unpopular with many of Doug's Hollywood friends.

‘Sylvia was a lovely lady and so good for Doug at the time,' David said. ‘She was kind to me and so hospitable when I first got to Hollywood. But a lot of Doug's older friends who were also friends of Mary Pickford didn't like the fact that Sylvia and Doug were getting married. I heard people call her a gold digger. That was nonsense. She made Doug very happy.'

Fairbanks and Lady Ashley married on 7 March 1936 in Paris. Niven was unable to attend, but to show his friendship and gratitude to the couple that much of Hollywood looked down on, he and Merle threw a party for them when they got back to Los Angeles.