David Niven (15 page)

Niven and Flynn had a drink and then Flynn said that he had taken to reading the Bible. That's also the story David told in
Bring on the Empty Horses
. It was a sentimental finale to their one time hellraising friendship. But it wasn't what really happened.

In 1979 David told me that in 1958 he came across Flynn in a London restaurant. ‘He looked ghastly. The drugs and the booze had bloated him and he looked like a man who should have died a long time before. I tried to avoid him but he came over and sat down, drunk, of course, and then he said, “You know, sport, when Primmie died I never came to see you, never did a goddamn thing to help. But you know how it is.”

‘My hackles were up and I said very coldly, “Yes, Errol, I daresay I do. You were too busy what with all the lawsuits,” and by that I meant he was probably ravaging some underage girl or getting arrested, and I think he got my meaning. He stood up and yelled, “Well you can go to hell.” I said, “I've been there. When my wife died. Funny that I never saw you there.”

‘And he threw the chair over and staggered out, and I never saw him again. I felt very sorry we couldn't have parted as friends, but he touched a very raw nerve. He was always selfish and I guess he died selfish.'

Dawn Patrol
may have signalled the end of Niven's friendship with Flynn but it also signalled the dawn of Niven's film stardom. It wasn't the kind of stardom that Colman or Cary Grant enjoyed – they were able to have films built around them and their names usually guaranteed an audience; that's the true meaning of ‘star' – but at last Hollywood began taking Niven more seriously.

‘I didn't have to stretch myself too much,' David told me in regards to his performance in
Dawn Patrol
. ‘I had the kind of military training that the character might have had, at least as far as the discipline was concerned. And I knew many men who came back from the Great War who had survived. I knew officers who had found themselves with the responsibility
of sending men to certain death. And it's true to say that the part had a lot of
me
in it. I'd learned a little about acting by then, but I had my own personal traits to fall back on. It didn't require any great leap for me.'

It was only years later, when I saw the film again on TV after David was dead, that what he had told me about his acting was true; it is all there on the screen – the British stiff upper lip, the jovial personality, the authentic military background, and the understanding of what officers of the Great War had gone through. It was, in fact, a lesson in method acting long before the term ‘method acting' had been coined. He had learned one of the most important lessons of acting – that an actor draws on personal experience whenever he can.

What David didn't completely learn was to lean on the smaller experiences of life that many actors draw on. That is why there were so many David Niven performances that lacked depth; he could impersonate a skater without ice to skate on but he couldn't always get under the skater's skin.

That was no great setback for a screen actor; many stars endure with just the basic understanding of acting and a whole lot of charisma. But Niven never really had quite enough charisma to make it as a major star. He was invariably someone the audience could enjoy seeing in a film that was generally crafted around somebody else. That was the rule in Niven's career, and there were very few exceptions to the rule.

The fact that his career lasted as long as it did, when greater stars fell by the wayside much sooner, is a testament to his sheer likeability – the audience has always liked him, but they haven't necessarily wanted to see a film just because he was in it. He was invariably an added bonus, or sometimes he turned out to be the only worthwhile element of a rather bad movie.

Somebody who understood this was William Wyler who wanted to cast Niven as Edgar Linton in his up-coming production for Samuel Goldwyn,
Wuthering Heights
. But David had sworn that he would never work for Wyler again.

—

W
hen I talked to Wyler in 1976, he told me, ‘I had two wonderful stars, Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier, to play Cathy and Heathcliff, but what I needed was someone who could play the hapless Edgar and still make him more than he is in the book or the script. Cathy has to marry Edgar when she could have had Heathcliff, and she and the audience know it is a mistake, but you can't make Edgar into a villain. He is a victim of circumstance. That makes the audience all the more torn, that makes for good drama. Principally I had to choose someone who was under contract to Goldwyn, and of all his contract players, David Niven was the one actor I knew could make Edgar into the kind of character I wanted Edgar to be.'

But Niven was having none of it – to start with. He told me,

I had two objections to that picture. Samuel Goldwyn told me I was going to play Edgar, which was a part I hated and didn't want to do. Who can even
like
that idiot? The second objection I had was working for Wyler again, and I didn't want to work for Wyler again…ever. So Wyler called me and said, ‘David, why don't you want to play Edgar?'

I said, ‘Because it is such an awful part.'

He said, ‘It's not, you know,' and then he hit the ego button with ‘and you're one of the few people who can make it better than it is.'

So I said, ‘But Willie, I was so bloody miserable working for you on
Dodsworth
, and I just couldn't go through it again. You're a son of a bitch to work with.'

That just made him laugh, and he said, ‘I've changed. I'm not a son of a bitch any more.'

Niven was convinced. There were other reasons he did the film. One was that if he didn't, Goldwyn was going to put him on suspension. The other reason was Merle Oberon. She, naively, felt that it would help their relationship if they worked together again, and she was the one who had suggested to Goldwyn that David should play Edgar. That, it turned out, was a mistake because Niven, always happy to be helped along in previous years by his famous friends, now resented being handed a part he simply hated. It was compounded by his dislike of Wyler.

Merle took the same view that Wyler had, which was that Niven was one of the few actors who could make something of the role, and she also pushed David's ego button. In the end, Niven had no good argument to turn the part down, and he went to work on
Wuthering Heights
in December 1938. He recalled,

The first day of shooting, I had to drive up in a two-horse buggy with Merle at my side. We had a line of dialogue each. She would say, ‘Come in, Edgar, and have some tea.' And I would say, ‘As soon as I've put the horses away.' Not difficult stuff.

We did the first take and Wyler said, ‘Cut! Just play it straight, David, this isn't a comedy.'

I had no idea I'd played it for laughs, so we did the second take, and he said, ‘Cut! What's so funny, David? This is not a Marx Brothers picture. Do it again.'

And we did it 40-something times, and finally Wyler said, ‘Well, if that's the best you can do, we'd better print the first take I suppose.'

I said, ‘Willie, you really are a son of a bitch, aren't you?' and he said, ‘Yes, and I'm going to be one for the next 14 weeks.' And he was.

David said that it was an unhappy experience all round, not just because of Wyler but because Olivier and Oberon didn't care too much for each other, probably because Olivier had wanted the love of his own life, Vivien Leigh, to play Cathy. If Merle thought that David would come to her rescue when Olivier called her an ‘amateur little bitch', and just ‘a little pick-up by Korda', she was wrong. Displaying a less than gallant stance, Niven kept his distance, partly because his ardour for her had considerably cooled, and also because the friendship between him and Olivier was strengthening.

Niven recalled, ‘Larry and I had been friends for some time and our
friendship was further grounded when we both started
Wuthering Heights
sharing a deep hatred for Willie Wyler.'

Olivier actually came to like and respect Wyler a great deal, even if it was tough going, and he learned from Wyler much about the film medium which stood him in good stead later, not just as an actor but also as a very fine director. But Niven simply hated Wyler even though Wyler proved to be right about casting him – Niven
was
good as Edgar. Olivier thought so too. He told me, ‘He carried off the part of Edgar wonderfully. In fact, I'd say he was better than Merle in her role. He had an impossible part and he hated it, but he was perfect in it. I would watch him on set and think, “He isn't even trying to act and here I am working my bloody guts out, and he is going to look bad on screen.” But he wasn't bad at all.'

Olivier even admitted that he learned from Niven. ‘David and I are very different kinds of actors and I think that is why we got on so well. He was, with all respect and love for the man, a lightweight actor and he couldn't have performed in a stage classic ever in his life, but he could easily breathe into any part his own great charm and humour and also sincerity, which was all very much his own. And also, when it was needed, he had tremendous pathos. I learned a lot about screen acting from him, although I thought when we first started working on the picture that I knew more about acting than he did. And I did, when it comes to acting on stage, but he had a natural gift for screen acting which I had to work at. So when I call him a lightweight, it is not a criticism.'

Although a box office success, the film was not received well critically at the time of its release in 1939, although Niven got good personal notices. The
New York Times
noted that, ‘the Lintons, so pallid, so namby-pamby in the novel, have been more charitably reflected in the picture. David Niven's Edgar (and) Geraldine Fitzgerald's Isabella are dignified and poignant characterisations of young people whose tragedy was not in being weak themselves but in being weaker than the abnormal pair whose destinies involved their destruction.'

A casualty of the film was the Niven/Oberon love affair – by the time filming was over, so was their affair. Merle married Alexander Korda and David began seeing actress Evelyn Keyes who moved in with him. He could cope with cohabiting with an actress but not marrying one.

The success of
Wuthering Heights
did a great deal for Niven, but it also inflated his ego further, as he admitted to me later. ‘I thought that to be able to play that awful Edgar and still get noticed when playing against two such excellent people as Merle and Larry meant that I was a star of great magnitude, especially coming after
The Dawn Patrol
. I began doing Lux Radio Theatre programmes on the wireless and decided that I wouldn't
even get Goldwyn's permission because I was too big a star to have to ask him for his permission. A great mistake! I was under contract to him and
all
freelance work had to be passed by him. He wanted half of everything I earned, so when I was awarded with a glorious food hamper by one of the radio producers, I cut it in half and sent it to him.'

Actually, Goldwyn was contractually owed
everything
David earned freelance and Niven was supposed to settle for his weekly wage of $500 from Goldwyn, so in a sense Goldwyn was being generous by insisting on only half of David's earnings from radio work.

Niven discovered that Warners had paid Goldwyn $175,000 to rent him for
The Dawn Patrol
so he decided to consult a leading agent, Leland Hayward, who took a look at his contract with Goldwyn and told David that Goldwyn had been making a fortune from loaning him to other studios.

When Goldwyn heard that David had been secretly meeting with Leland, he got revenge by planting a story in the
Los Angeles Examiner
that success had gone to Niven's head and he was becoming impossible to work with. Goldwyn banned Hayward from his studio and put Niven on suspension for several weeks.

Goldwyn, however, recognised that Niven was becoming a better actor, and I think he really was fond of David. In February 1939 David's weekly salary had been due to rise to $650 a week but Goldwyn raised it to $750 and amended his contract so that the annual increases would result in $2,250 a week in 1945. He also allowed David the use of a large suite on the studio lot and promised to give him star billing in all Goldwyn productions in which he appeared.

His first film under the new terms was
Bachelor Mother
with Ginger Rogers. For the first time, David's name appeared above the title.

Forty years later Niven was still unimpressed by what Goldwyn intended as a show of generosity. ‘It's true that Goldwyn gave me a career in films,' he told me. ‘But who's to say I wouldn't have made it without him? He earned a fortune by loaning me to other studios, and by [1939] I felt I was actually worth a lot more than I was getting. I should have been earning $2,000 a week
then
, not having to wait another five or six years for that amount.

‘My head grew enormously. My ego was inflated like a giant balloon. I was so full of myself because I was at last a big star and I revelled in it and became very conceited. I even believed all the publicity that was being written about me.'

With
Bachelor Mother
Goldwyn came up with a part that perfectly suited Niven's talents. He played a charming playboy whose father owns a major store where Ginger Rogers, working in the toy department, finds an
abandoned baby. She and David are wrongly assumed to be the parents but they nevertheless marry, and it all ends happily.

The film opened on 1 September 1939 just 18 days before the outbreak of World War II, and it delighted critics and audiences alike. The
New York Times
reported, ‘The spectacle of Miss Rogers and David Niven struggling forlornly to prove their innocence of parenthood and winning co credence at al is made triply hilarious by the sobriety of their performances. That is the way farce should be handled, with just enough conviction to season its extravagances.'