David Niven (19 page)

In April 1943, Niven was again released temporarily from duty so he could work on pre-production on
The Way Ahead
, preparing the film with Carol Reed and working closely on the screenplay with Private Peter Ustinov who, in order to be able to work with officers, had to be seconded to Niven as his ‘batman'.

In the film, Niven played a former Territorial Army officer who is recalled to train recruits. A host of British character actors played the recruits, including Stanley Holloway, James Donald, John Laurie, Jimmy Hanley and William Hartnell. Filming began in August on Salisbury Plain with interiors shot at Denham Studios. David and his family moved into a house close to Denham. Many of their friends would often visit, such as the Oliviers, Jack Hawkins and John and Mary Mills. ‘There was quite a collection of us,' John Mills told me (on a foggy location for the TV series
Quatermass
in 1978), ‘and we would meet in each other's houses.'

Niven recalled such a gathering at the home of Larry Olivier and Vivien; ‘I remember that no one could carve a chicken like Larry Olivier.' Niven told me this while we were lunching at Pinewood Studios where he was filming
Candleshoe
. I'd opted for the chicken and had been given thick, generous slices of tender breast, and this provoked a memory Niven had of the days during World War II when he would be home on leave and he and Primmie would be visited by friends who brought their own food and drink with them. ‘Sometimes there would be a rather large party, and Larry and Vivien would always come over, and if we had a chicken Larry always did the carving. He'd been raised in a low-budget parsonage and could make a chicken do for as many as 10 people.'

During the summer of 1943, Captain Clark Gable, on leave from the American Army Air Force and based in Britain, went to visit David and Primmie and their baby son at their thatched cottage. Gable had joined up after his wife, Carole Lombard, was killed in an aeroplane crash while on a War Bonds tour. He rose from lieutenant to major and flew several bombing missions over Germany. David told me,

Clark arrived unannounced and I was out so Primmie took care of him. I came home to find Clark Gable in his American uniform sitting in
my
deck chair, playing with
my
son, drinking
my
last bottle of whisky being served to him by
my
wife. At first I hadn't realised it was Gable but thought it was some audacious Yank because he had changed so much, but then he said, ‘What's the matter, Nivvy, can't an old friend drop by to take advantage of your wife and whisky?' and I realised it was him, and I was over the moon to see him.

The war had changed his face. The loss of his wife had changed him. He was in complete misery over his loss, and yet even in his deep misery at the loss of Carole, he found it possible to rejoice over the great happiness that had come my way, which was very generous of him and just like him.

We talked a bit about the war and what we'd been through. He admitted that he was always scared stiff during the bombing raids, but the thing that frightened him most was the thought of being captured by the Germans and what Hitler might do to him. He said, ‘That sonofabitch'll put me in a case and charge 10 marks a look all over Germany.'

He came to visit us often after that, and I thought he seemed to be gradually getting over Carole's death, but I could see that there were times when he was overwhelmed by my own family happiness, and one evening he disappeared into the garden. Primmie found him sitting on an upturned wheelbarrow with his head in his hands. He was crying. Primmie sat down beside him and held him.

In November the cast and crew of
The Way Ahead
sailed in a troopship to Algeria and Tunisia to film the battle scenes. ‘That was a worrying voyage,' Peter Ustinov told me in 1978 when he was making
The Thief of Baghdad
at Shepperton Studios. ‘You never knew if you were going to be torpedoed by a U-boat or bombed by the Luftwaffe. My main concern was losing my life but Niven and Reed seemed more concerned over how the end of the film might have to be altered if we were all to be sunk.'

With the final scenes shot, Niven returned to England at the end of November and was promoted to lieutenant-colonel. By this time he had seen enough of the war, as he admitted to me years later. ‘I had enjoyed making
The Way Ahead
, and I was sick of the war. Who wasn't? It may have been selfish of me but I reached the point where I just wanted to go back to Hollywood and making films. Goldwyn wanted me back for a film
[Coming Home]
about men returning home from the war, and I was hoping to get a release from the Army, but it took most of the next year for it to
decide that it couldn't do without me. I'm sure they could have, but they didn't want to set a precedent, they said. My chums like Larry Olivier and John Mills and Rex Harrison all had an early release so they could make films for the war effort, but I was the one they said couldn't do that.'

I think David underestimated his contribution to the war. Harrison, Mills and Olivier were not ever actually in the thick of it, and ultimately, despite their own intentions of doing their duty, they were undoubtedly able to serve their country better as actors and, in Olivier's case, as a director of the film
Henry V
. But Niven was a real soldier with a Sandhurst background, and he was an excellent officer.

‘His men under his command had tremendous respect for him,' said Ustinov in 1984. ‘He wasn't a mere prop – a Hollywood film star in uniform. He was a real soldier. An excellent officer. The Army needed him.'

The Way Ahead
was released in 1944 to great acclaim and even greater success than
The First of the Few
. The British Press were enthusiastic.
Picturegoer
said, ‘The dialogue is completely natural as is the humour and there is nothing forced or phoney in a single foot of a wholly enjoyable and inspiring film.'

The
Sunday Times
praised Reed and the writers who had ‘admirably captured the qualities of mingled suspicions, irony and readiness to get on with the job which characterises many recruits to the British Army', and it noted ‘the excellent playing of the whole cast', although it did feel that ‘it was not until the second half and embarkations for overseas that
The Way Ahead
seemed to show its real quality'.

The film also found favour with some American critics. ‘In one scene, wherein [David Niven] dresses down the trainees, he accomplishes a truly heart-disturbing soldier's monologue,' wrote Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times
.

During the spring of 1944, David was ordered to report to General Sir Frederick Morgan in Sunningdale, and he duly arrived at the carefully camouflaged HQ in the middle of a wood where Morgan, as Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, had been working on preliminary plans for Operation ‘Overlord', the codename for the invasion of Occupied Europe.

David recalled,

The first and most important decision Morgan and his staff had to make was exactly where to land on the French coast. Information was supplied to him that had come from the French Resistance about the German defences, and he had hundreds of photographs taken by the RAF. He ruled out landing in Norway, the Netherlands and the Bay
of Biscay, and he had to choose between France and Belgium. The Germans knew that the most obvious landing on the French coast would be at Calais, crossing from Dover, so Morgan knew he had to plan further down the coast and [in June 1943] had arrived at the conclusion that Normandy would be the point of invasion.

The date had originally been set for some day in June 1944, and it was shortly before then that I was summoned to Sir Frederick's headquarters. He told me that because I had spent a great deal of time in America and I liked Americans, he was taking me out of Phantom and promoting me to lieutenant-colonel and assigned me to an American general called Barker with whom he'd worked on the initial invasion plans. I found General Barker's Nissen hut where he told me he had been given the task by Eisenhower of making sure there were no weak links between the various Allied forces.

Barker said, ‘From now on you take orders only from me, and when the invasion comes you will be working only with me. We will be liaising between the British and American forces. You're going to be in the thick of it.'

Through his work with General Ray Barker and General Morgan, Niven came into personal contact with General Sir Bernard Montgomery who was to command the Allied landing force in Normandy. The invasion was originally set for 5 June 1944, but the weather was so appalling that Eisenhower and Montgomery postponed it. On 5 June the Allied Command decided the following day would be D-Day.

‘The night before the invasion,' Niven recalled, ‘Primmie and I clung together miserably. I told her I wouldn't leave until after we'd had breakfast together. It was a kind lie, I'm afraid. She finally fell asleep just before dawn, and I quietly dressed, took one last look at my wife and my baby son who lay in the cot beside the bed, and left.'

Niven and General Barker boarded the
Empire Battleaxe
at Southampton. The first landings had already taken place, and casualties were being ferried back to England. ‘Hundreds of wounded GIs were being helped off a tank-landing craft,' David recalled. ‘Their eyes wide with shock. Boys who had grown old in just a couple of hours. A GI who was watching from the deck of our ship saw these wounded men and said, “That's a helluva encouraging send-off for us.”'

When the
Battleaxe
arrived off the Normandy coast, Niven was ordered into a landing craft and put ashore. ‘The beach was marked with white tape to show the paths around the minefields. The dead rolled in the surf and littered the beaches. I try not to remember it now. What I remember
is lying in a trench that first night, hearing the nightingales over the gunfire.'

A small bridge at Carentan was the one vital link between US forces who had pushed up from Utah Beach and the British further east. David, in maintaining personal contact between the Americans and the British, used this bridge which came under constant shellfire, as he recalled to me almost 35 years later.

I had to make the crossing quite frequently, and I was trapped by the shelling on one crossing. There were fox holes either side of the bridge which I had to dive into and cower as the rain just poured down, filling my fox hole until I thought if I wasn't blown to bits I'd probably drown. The rain stopped and I dared a peek over the top. A few yards away in another fox hole I saw a head and to my delight and surprise it was an old friend of mine, John McClaine, who had been a reporter in New York and was a lieutenant in the Navy attached to the OSS.

He pinned an Iron Cross on my chest which he'd acquired when a delivery of the medals had been parachuted to the German soldiers in Cherbourg but had fallen into McClaine's hands instead. Then he gave me a ride in his command car to a small inn in a backwater that was untouched by the war. We became the first Allied combatants the three ladies who ran the inn had ever seen. They gave us a bloody good meal washed down with bottles of Bordeaux. Then we headed back for Carentan and the war.

Shortly after the town of Caen fell to the Allies on 10 July, Niven came across ‘B' Squadron of the secret Phantom force, hidden in a wood near Orme River. Among them was the Welsh actor Hugh Williams who had been among the cast of
Wuthering Heights
. ‘Hugh told me that the second-in-command of ‘A' Squadron, Hugh Kindersley, had been badly wounded by mortar fire. Hugh told me the terrible injuries Kindersley had sustained, and Hugh and I agreed that if we had known about the German Nebelwerfer, which was a six-barrelled mortar, neither of us would have joined the Army. It had to be one of the most devastating instruments of destruction the Germans had thought of. I have never been able to fathom the depths of cruelty and sadism that mankind has sunk to.'

For various strategic and political reasons, it was forbidden for British forces to enter Paris immediately after its liberation on 25 August 1944. The Free French alone had been allowed the privilege of entering the French capital. David claimed he was the first British soldier to enter Paris a few days after it was liberated. It might even be a true story.

Montgomery and Patton just couldn't agree on how to bring the war to its conclusion, and distorted versions of their differences filtered down to the fighting troops. Montgomery wanted to strike at the Ruhr, insisting that that would destroy the enemy's fighting capability. This upset Patton because Montgomery needed reinforcements from the US 1st Army which would have halted Patton's advance on Metz. So General Barker had his work cut out trying to defuse the rumours while General Eisenhower tried to sort out his prima donnas. The problem was not only one of strategy but also egos.

Barker told me to get to Paris with important documents which I had to deliver to an American colonel in the bar of the Hôtel Crillon. I was given a jeep and a driver – an American corporal. We got to Neuilly and got lost, but I had some friends in Neuilly and, finding their apartment, I told the corporal to wait with the jeep. He was busy anyway as the citizens of Neuilly descended on the corporal with kisses and bottles of wine.

I went inside and my old friends fed and watered me and let me bathe, and when I came back out the corporal had disappeared with the jeep, apparently borne off on the crest of hysterical citizenry.

Fortunately I had the documents on my person so, borrowing a woman's bicycle and fixing two Union Jacks to it, I cycled along the Champs Elysées as the people waved and cheered at seeing what was probably the first British soldier they had seen in five years. I arrived at the Hôtel Crillon, went to the bar and there found the colonel and my corporal. I promptly delivered the secret documents and had a drink to celebrate my single-handed British occupation of Paris.