David Niven (24 page)

‘I did that on purpose.'

‘Like hell you did, honey.'

‘But it worked. You danced with me.'

‘Oh yeah, and all the time you were grabbing my ass.'

‘I was trying not to tread on your feet.'

That sent Ava into more shrieks of laughter. David told me that he took Ava through a near-perfect tango and was sure he couldn't have been as sloshed as Ava said he was.

‘Sloshed or not,' said Ava, ‘you kept saying, “How about a little kiss? Just one! On the cheek! I'll even close my eyes.”'

‘Don't believe a word of it,' David said to me.

‘You got a better version of events?' Ava asked him.

‘Give me time and I'll think of one. The point is, my darling, is that your face was the most beautiful in Hollywood and any man would want to kiss it.'

‘You wanted a little more than that, David.'

‘I'm embarrassed to say that the worst thing about all this is that I can't remember what happened next.'

So Ava explained that not only did he not get a kiss from her but he didn't get anything else either.

I didn't say a word through all this, mesmerised, captivated and thoroughly entertained by an amazing double act. Here was a rare moment when David was actually unable to recall many details. But as Ava pointed out to me a few days later, David was drinking hard after Primmie's death, as well as trying to seduce every girl he came across. ‘It
would be a miracle if he could remember half of what he did during that period of his life,' she said.

She told me that he continued to pursue her but she resisted ‘because I knew he was really grieving and not really interested in anything other than a screw to help him through a lousy time'. I asked her if she would have otherwise been interested, and she said, ‘Oh, Christ, yes. It was hard to resist him. Not many girls did. He was so funny and so charming.'

David, then, did not have any kind of affair with Ava Gardner – at least, not at that time – and the funny thing was, David couldn't remember whether he'd been successful or not, as was clear in that West London restaurant in 1979, because he asked Ava, ‘Tell me truthfully, my darling, did you resist me?'

‘Oh God, yes,' she laughed.

‘Oh well,' he said, gently stroking his moustache and giving me a knowing look, ‘you can't win ‘em all.'

‘You did okay,' Ava reminded him, ‘you got the most beautiful gal in Hollywood – Rita.'

‘No, no, Ava,' David protested.
‘You
were the most beautiful girl in Hollywood. I settled for the second most beautiful girl in Hollywood which was Rita.'

That just made Ava laugh more and she hit his shoulder and said, ‘You can stop the sweet talk now.'

A few weeks after that memorable dinner with David and Ava, I reminded him what he had said about Ava being the most beautiful girl in Hollywood and Rita being the second, and he said, ‘I meant it, old bean. Ava was
the
most beautiful girl in Hollywood. And Rita was a close second.'

David always carried a torch for Ava, which didn't surprise me. Even in middle age, when I first knew her, she was still radiantly stunning and at times even breathtaking. When they worked together on a movie in 1962, she and David would share intimate moments. But, as David told me, ‘Ava would never have been an ideal wife. No actress would.'

And that went for Rita Hayworth too. David was exceptionally fond of her but, he said, he didn't love her. ‘I thought I did, but I didn't know for sure what I was feeling. Often I just felt as though I had no emotion left inside me.'

David was never able to explain exactly why he went on a sexual feast after Primmie died except to say he thinks he was actually ill. I wondered why he found Rita to be a relatively stabilising force because once he began his affair with her, his sexual rampage came to an end. He told me, ‘I think I felt that I could have really fallen in love with her, and for a while I wanted to give it a chance. But the problem with Hollywood is that there
was a perpetual rumour mill – still is – and suddenly the newspaper columnists were announcing I was going to marry Rita. I was furious. I demanded the newspapers retract their stories. Rita denied it publicly, I denied it publicly, and it wrecked what we had. I don't believe we would have ever married. I didn't want another wife. I had made it clear in the Press that there would never be a Primmie mark 2.'

He thought he could become happy again. But he said he was miserable. ‘I was unhappy with everything – so miserable I did what I had never intended to do. I got married.'

—

M
aybe Sam Goldwyn thought he was doing Niven a favour when he told him he was going to Britain to make
Bonnie Prince Charlie
for Alexander Korda. A year earlier, Niven had told Korda that he wanted to star in a film about Charles Stuart, and so when Korda told Goldwyn that he wanted to make a film about Bonnie Prince Charlie and he wanted Niven to play the title role, Goldwyn agreed.

Korda agreed to pay Goldwyn $15,000 a week for the loan of David who was in turn paid his usual $3,000 a week by Goldwyn. ‘It was fair enough,' David told me. ‘Those were our terms of agreement, and $3,000 was very good money to be earning.'

But what made Niven so unhappy about the film? ‘We were going to be shooting it in the autumn [of 1947] for at least 10 weeks,' he said, ‘and I was sure it was going to take longer than that. I just knew I was going to be stuck in Britain making the film for three or four months, and then I would be landed with a heavy tax bill which would mean that I'd be working practically for nothing.'

But it wasn't just money that was on David's mind. ‘My family life was just getting settled again. I was living in the Pink House with my boys, and they were settled into a happy Californian life, and the very last thing I wanted was to uproot them. So I refused to go and Goldwyn put me on suspension. Then Goldwyn promised to indemnify me against the extra tax I was going to have to pay, so off I went and made one of the worst films of my life.'

David, the boys and Pinkie sailed to England where Niven rented a
small suite at a country hotel close to Shepperton Studios where
Bonnie Prince Charlie
was to be made over the next five months.

To David's distress, his moustache was shaved off and he was put into a blond wig. ‘Three directors had a go at trying to finish the film, or even get it started,' he recalled. ‘Even Korda directed some of the scenes. I said to him, “This just isn't working, is it?” He said, “Don't worry, we will fix everything.” I said, “What with? A miracle, because that's what it's going to need.” We didn't even have a script. It was being written as we went along. It amazes me that films can actually get into production without a completed script, but it happens all the time. Sometimes you can fix things, sometimes you can't. This couldn't be fixed. It should have been declared moribund after the first week of filming.'

David was always furious about the fiasco that was
Bonnie Prince Charlie
, although there were compensations. ‘I became great friends with Jack Hawkins,' he said. Hawkins was playing Lord George Murray. ‘I asked Jack to tell me honestly if, with my blond wig, I looked like a prick. He said, “Yes, and so do I.” And he did too. We all looked like pricks. But there was no time for any fun. I was in every shot of the film. I worked every day, all day.'

His evenings were free, and he found time to have a fling with the Duchess of Kent. He also became very friendly with Princess Margaret. Just how friendly, Niven never said, but Michael Trubshawe told me, ‘We got together a couple of times when he was making that
Charlie
picture, and he told me he was having a marvellous time with Princess Margaret and then he told me something that she did to him which he enjoyed very much.'

‘Like what?' I asked.

‘I can't tell you. Not while the Princess is alive.'

I never did find out, but David's second wife Hjördis – whom he was about to meet while filming
Bonnie Prince Charlie —
told me in an interview I did with her in 1986, ‘He and Princess Margaret were lovers. But you can't print that.' I think it's okay to print now, after so many years.

At this point, I feel I should say a little something about Hjördis who became the second and last Mrs David Niven.

I have seldom come across any person directly or indirectly connected with Hollywood who has been the victim of such bitter character assassination as Hjördis has. That said, she readily admitted that she behaved unbelievably badly throughout their 35 years of marriage. She became an alcoholic and was beset with mental illness and a terrible secret she harboured from childhood.

Many people who knew the Nivens railed about her as though she was
some kind of evil banshee. Much has been said and written about her since her death in 1997. The sad thing is, she would not have disagreed with some of it.

I got to know her a little. The first time I met her was on the second of the three days I spent with David in 1970 at the Connaught Hotel in London. She turned up – where she had been and where she was headed I had no idea – and sat in for a time on the interview and wasn't slow to pick him up on details he got wrong, or had exaggerated, or even invented. Her point, as she put it to me, was, ‘I've heard all these stories a thousand times, and they bore me to death.' To which he said, ‘Then please go away and die, darling.'

Now this might sound like it was bitter feuding, but it wasn't. It was good natured banter. But that good nature was to fade completely away after David wrote
The Moon's a Balloon
and he went on to make a career out of telling his stories over and over.
Then
Hjördis did grow very tired of hearing them, and when she often commented on how she was bored with them, his friends, always loyal to him and hardly ever to her, came to hate her.

I next saw her in 1979, when I flew to Switzerland to stay with Peter Sellers and his wife Lynne Frederick, an old girlfriend of mine, and I found myself at a dinner party thrown in a restaurant where I saw Hjördis very drunk and very alone. She was, by then, a hopeless alcoholic.

I met up with Hjördis again, in 1986, by which time she had accepted she was an alcoholic and was on the wagon. She seemed to be well on the road to recovering from a long and debilitating mental illness. She was completely sober in mind and body, and full of remorse for the way she had often behaved. I did a formal interview with her, as well as spending some informal time with her, and I think I got to know a very different woman to the one most of David's friends knew because, by then, she was a radically changed person. Perhaps she was more like the woman he knew when he first met her.

She was born Hjördis (pronounced Yerdiss) Paulina Genburg in Sweden and raised at Kiruna, within the Arctic Circle. ‘I am a typical Swedish iceberg,' she told me in 1986. She knew she appeared to be cold and distant to many of the Americans she would come to know, but she really did have a wonderful sense of humour which, alas, was lost on David's Hollywood friends.

She was 28 when she met David early in 1948. She had just come out of an 18-month marriage to a rich Swedish businessman, Carl Tersmeden, but remained friends with him. She said, ‘We got married after the war, but it was a mistake and we divorced [after 18 months]. But we were still good friends. We weren't enemies, like some divorced people become.'

She was, and remained for a long time, a stunning, very beautiful woman. She was a fashion model and designer in Sweden where she graced many magazine covers. She was the Swedish supermodel of her day, but completely unknown outside of her native country.

She recalled for me how she met David when he was making
Bonnie Prince Charlie
.

I was on holiday in England with a few friends, and they knew the director of a film David was making. I knew that David Niven was in the film but I'd never seen any of his films. I wasn't all that interested in cinema.

I found his chair on the set and sat in it, and when David came along and saw this strange woman sitting in his chair, he was furious. I just smiled at him, and he smiled back. I laughed because he had a blond wig on, and he looked so silly in it. I said ‘Oh, I thought you were dark haired,' and he said, ‘Yes, I know, horrible, isn't it?'

We talked, and he made me feel like I was the most beautiful woman in the world. He made
every
woman feel like that. He was very, very charming.

He asked me to go for a drink with him, and he took me to a pub by the river and he said, ‘Do you play darts?' I said, ‘No,' and he said, ‘Let me show you.' He threw a few darts and said, ‘You have to get the balance right. Don't try to aim the dart like you would a gun, just look at the target and…
throw!'
I said, ‘I wouldn't know how to aim a gun.' He said, ‘Just watch,' and he hit the dart board and smiled and said, ‘See how easy it is?' I said, ‘I'm not sure it is so easy,' so he stood behind me, very close, and he held my hand with the dart and he took ages to line it up. He just wanted to huddle close to me, which I thought was charming. I said, ‘I can't throw if you hold my hand,' and he said, ‘Yes, of course, but do you mind if I stay right here?' He made me laugh, and I threw the dart and hit the board. He said, ‘There you go!' It didn't hit the bull's eye but it did hit the board.

He made me laugh so much. I didn't care that he was an actor. I cared nothing about actors. I only liked him because he was charming and he made me laugh and he made me feel special.

The day after he taught me to play darts, he took me for lunch and he was so very charming all the time. It was very easy to fall in love with him. I could see why Hollywood actresses fell in love with him.