David Niven (29 page)

David rang me early one morning and said that he had a problem, that Vivien was very sick and there was a fellow called John Buckmaster who was upsetting her, and he needed my help. Buckmaster was Gladys Cooper's son who had mental problems of his own. I went straight to Vivien's house where David was waiting outside, looking like he was about to have a nervous breakdown. He said he'd been trying to get rid of Buckmaster for hours and he was the last thing Vivien needed, but he wouldn't leave and he wouldn't let David near her.

I went in the house and saw Buckmaster with just a towel around him, standing on the landing, saying he had been sent by a ‘higher power' to protect Vivien and we were not going to get past him. I told
him I'd been sent by an even higher power to make sure he got the hell out of there. David thought this was funny and he chuckled nervously, fingering his moustache. He said, ‘What are you going to do, Jim?' and I said, ‘I have no idea.' That made Niven laugh all the more but he had to try and stifle his laughter.

I advanced on Buckmaster and he suddenly changed his mind and said he would get ready to leave. David gave me the studio doctor's phone number and said that while I got rid of Buckmaster he'd look after Vivien. I had the easy job; I only had to get Buckmaster back to his hotel, and he went very quietly, and then call the doctor who said he would meet me at Schwab's which was an all-night drugstore. He gave me four capsules to sedate her, and he said I should call him to come over with a couple of nurses when she'd taken the first one.

I got back and David said that Vivien was behaving very strangely, and sure enough, she was wearing only a towel and sitting in front of the television looking at just the lines because there was nothing being broadcast. It was as though she were hypnotised by it. It was past midnight and I suggested we all had early breakfast and went to the kitchen to make scrambled eggs and broke one of the capsules and mixed it in to the egg and put some in her coffee. She got very suspicious because I hadn't thought to actually make breakfast for David and myself.

David told her, ‘Eat up, Viv, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.' She scooped up a forkful of egg and pointed it at David and said, ‘You have some too, David dear.' He said, ‘No, no, they are for
you.'
She refused to eat any of it so he took a mouthful of the scrambled egg and drank some of her coffee. I shouldn't have laughed but it was funny; poor David had no idea the sedative was in there and he started to yawn and then said he needed to take a nap. He lay on the couch and went fast to sleep. So then I was trying to deal with her on my own. I couldn't wake him up. So I tried to get Vivien to take a sedative. But she managed to gradually empty the bottle of sedatives into the swimming pool. She stayed awake all night watching television – naked! Finally a nurse came, and I had to hold Vivien down on the bed while the nurse injected her with a sedative.

Laurence Olivier, in England, was called for and he came and collected his sick wife and took her home where she underwent extreme forms of treatment which sickened David when he heard about them. In later years, as he watched his own wife become increasingly sick, he promised himself he wouldn't put her through what Vivien went through.

In early 1953, he received bitter news. His brother Max had died from a heart attack at the age of 50 on his farm in South Africa. David was unable to attend the funeral because of his film commitments; he had accepted to make two films, one in England followed by one in Ireland.

He knew that being a star of British films in the 1950s wasn't a step forward. ‘I was a refugee from Hollywood – a has-been – and British studios often hired has-beens to make their modest films look more appealing in America, though God knows why because they didn't seem to like me in America any more,' he said.

In
The Love Lottery
, filmed at Ealing Studios in March and April of 1953, he played a film actor who is the number two star at a studio where the number one star is a dog. It was a good spoof on Hollywood, and Niven came out of it well. ‘The cinema seldom goes far wrong when it decides to laugh at itself,' wrote the
Daily Mail
. ‘The new Ealing picture does this with gusto. David Niven has his best part for a long time and rises splendidly.'

As soon as he finished on
The Love Lottery
he went straight to Ireland to star in
Happy Ever After
as an ex-General who becomes the squire of an estate in Ireland where he proves so unpopular that the locals attempt to murder him. Irish actor Barry Fitzgerald, who played virtually the same part in this as he did in John Ford's
The Quiet Man
, kept teasing Niven, ‘Duke Wayne wouldn't have done it that way,' to which Niven eventually replied, ‘Duke Wayne wouldn't have done this bloody silly film in the first place.'

Reviews were mixed: ‘Mr Niven who has his limitations outside light comedy, seems most unhappy in this part,' said the London
Evening News
. While the
Daily Mirror
said, ‘David Niven has an unusual role – the bad boy. He carries if off surprisingly well.'

It was while he was making
The Love Lottery
and renting Laurence Olivier's house in Chelsea – Olivier was filming in Italy and Vivien Leigh was in hospital – that he heard he had won the Golden Globe for
The Moon is Blue
. It gave him hope that his Hollywood movie career might be revived. But when he returned to America after finishing
Happy Ever After
, there were no film offers waiting for him.

Four Star Playhouse
provided him with plenty of work and he appeared in seven episodes in 1953–
Man on a Train, No Identity, Night Ride, Finale, A Matter of Advice, For Arti's Sake
and
A Man of the World
. Hollywood became increasingly hostile towards him.

There was a film offer from Britain,
Carrington V.C
., and he returned to England in September to make the film at Shepperton Studios. He played a British war hero court-martialled for fraud. The film was a hit with British critics and the public. ‘Not only has it a great and moving quality but it sends you away feeling proud of Britain's film-makers and actors,'
wrote the
News of the World
.

‘Mr David Niven is very good in this part, having just the spontaneous decency of reaction and the temperamental mixture of lightness and dash of which heroes are made,' said the
Financial Times
.

It is an excellent film, especially for lovers of courtroom drama, intelligently written and directed, and with a superior performance from Niven. Unfortunately it ran into censorship trouble in America – where it was shown as
Court Martial
– because Niven's character has an adulterous affair with a WRAC officer, played by Margaret Leighton. Nevertheless, America's film trade publication
Variety
, happily conceded, ‘David Niven gives one of his best performances in recent years.'

Despite this acclaim and his Golden Globe Award for
The Moon is Blue
, Hollywood was unwilling to forgive and forget, and the best Hollywood had to offer him in early 1954 was the role of a villain in a third-rate MGM swashbuckler,
The King's Thief
. He was ill suited to the part and, embarrassingly, he was billed third below Ann Blyth and Edmund Purdom who played the dashing hero with very little dash.

The only pleasure Niven got from making the film was forming a friendship with a young British actor trying for success in Hollywood, Roger Moore. They remained friends to the very end, and in 1980, when I interviewed Roger Moore when he was promoting
The Sea Wolves
, one of Niven's final films, Moore told me, ‘I was in a terrible film called
The King's Thief
but the blessing of making that film was to become friends with David Niven. I thought it was simply a privilege to share the screen with him.'

From what Moore observed, David and Hjördis were happy, although Roger didn't know then the troubles that were simmering in their marriage. ‘She was a really glamorous woman,' Moore recalled, ‘and people's jaws dropped when they saw her. She'd come to the set and everyone stood there with their mouths open. Personally, I thought she wore too much make-up. But David loved her and they were always hand-in-hand.'

Fortunately for David, he could still do good work in television, and in 1954 he starred in eight Four Star productions, one of which,
The Answer
, earned him an Emmy nomination. But that didn't help him to get good movie parts, and he was offered only a major supporting role in
The Birds and the Bees
, greyed-up to play a crook and former colonel using his daughter, played by Mitzi Gaynor – oh, how the mighty had fallen, to play the
father
of Mitzi Gaynor – to fleece the son of a tycoon.

‘I had come to realise that I was not an A-movie star after all,' he told me in 1978, ‘but a minus-B-picture star. I had started in B-pictures and I was still making B-pictures, and that's all I was ever going to be.'

Even if, by 1978, he was acutely aware that his star had not so much
fallen but had barely failed to rise, in 1970 he had painted a different picture, saying that he ‘had a stroke of bad luck. I was making really rotten pictures and I thought it only had to be a matter of time before someone realised how wonderful I really was and give me a wonderful picture.'

In March 1955 he and Hjördis holidayed in Jamaica at Noël Coward's winter home where David suddenly went down with chicken pox and had to be quarantined. Hjördis admitted, ‘I was never a good nurse and hopeless at taking care of David when he was sick so Noël made sure he was looked after.'

He recovered and, while Hjördis returned to Hollywood, Niven went to New York to appear in a Four Star production and there had an affair with Grace Kelly. Dawn Addams told me, ‘Infidelity seems to be an occupational hazard with many actors. With David it was almost a second career.'

Hjördis believed that his womanising wasn't helped by the friends he kept. From 1941 he had been good pals with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall around whom a whole circle of friends had sprung up whose main aim was to enjoy a good time. Bacall told me in 1974 on the set of
Murder on the Orient Express
, ‘To be a part of that circle one had to be addicted to nonconformity, staying up late, drinking, laughing, and not caring what anyone thought or said about us.'

In 1955 Bogart and their friends turned up in Las Vegas to give support to Noël Coward who, after a slump in his career, was attempting a comeback performance at the Desert Inn. David recalled the event for me,

Noël Coward was appearing in Las Vegas at the Desert Inn. Frank Sinatra invited a few friends to go with him to Las Vegas for the opening. The group consisted of Betty and Bogie, Mike and Gloria Romanoff, Ernie Kovaks and his wife, Swifty Lazar, Sid Luft and Judy Garland, Angie Dickinson, Hjördis and myself.

When Sinatra organises anything, the arrangements are made with legendary efficacy, not to mention generosity. We all boarded a bus outside Bogie's front door. There was caviar and champagne to sustain us during the drive to Union Station, where, with a cry from our leader [Sinatra] of ‘Yellow armbands, follow me', we marched on to the train and into a private coach for the overnight trip.

Sinatra provided individual apartments for everyone at the Sands Hotel, as well as a large communal suite with hot and cold running food and drink 24 hours a day. A big bag of silver dollars was presented to each girl in the group.

We watched Noël's triumphant first night and then on the other evenings we visited all the other shows in Las Vegas. We all gambled
endlessly, and it all began to get very tiring. After three days of this, Judy Garland slipped me something that she said would keep me going. It was the size of a horse-pill, inside of which were dozens of little energy nuggets which were timed to go off at 40-minute intervals.

After four days and nights of complete self-indulgence, the only one of us who seemed physically untouched by it all was Frank Sinatra, while the rest of us were wrecks. It was then that Betty Bacall surveyed the bedraggled group and said, ‘You lot look like a goddam Rat Pack!'

A week later, we returned to Los Angeles and some semblance of normality. The Rat Pack threw a testimonial dinner to Frank in a private room at Romanoff's where we were welcomed with a surprise package, tied with pink ribbons and flown down especially by Jack Entratta who was the entrepreneur of the Sands Hotel. We opened our packages and we each found a while rat. During the unpacking, several escaped and, running throughout the restaurant, created instant alarm among the chic clientele, among who were some eagle-eyed columnists who made a point of finding out what was going on – and this was heralded as the existence of Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack.

David became a very close friend of Sinatra who, Niven wrote in
The Moon's a Balloon
, had once helped him out of a ‘very bad spot'. He wrote that ‘help was provided instantly and in full measure without a question being asked'. In 1979, over dinner with David and Ava, I asked him if he would elucidate, but he replied, ‘I couldn't possibly, dear boy. When Frank helps a friend, it's a precious gift not to take for granted.'

Ava shoved me lightly and said, ‘Go on, Mike, tell him.'

‘Tell him what?' I asked.

‘You know goddamn well what.'

That got David's interest, so we made a pact. I said I'd tell David my secret Sinatra story if he told me his. Ava already knew what mine was. I gave David my story – which doesn't need to be told here – and so he then told me that he had got into a ‘difficult situation' regarding a so-called ‘agent' who had strong-armed him into signing a contract which would have resulted in Niven having to pay the Mafia half of everything he earned from Four Star. Knowing that Sinatra had friends in the Mob, David asked him for help and Sinatra obliged and succeeded in freeing Niven from the contract. Just how Sinatra did this, Niven never explained. ‘Nobody but Frank could have got me out of that spot – except maybe Al Capone,' he said.