David Niven (6 page)

Afterwards David said, ‘No, I'm not really that good, but I was taught by a staff sergeant at Sandhurst how to fence dirty.' He'd used all the dirty tricks he knew with a sword, and after that demonstration of his skills fencing was no longer compulsory and we used our drinking time wisely.

I was two years older than David and I had a private income whereas he was struggling to manage on the nine shillings a day the Army paid him. So I took care of all bills – drink, food and girls, that sort of thing.

I knew the best whores on the island. David was bursting for some hanky panky and said he hadn't had any since he left England. So I took him to a very good brothel called Auntie's.

I also knew a very nice Maltese girl who was not a regular prostitute but would often give me a good time for payment. I asked her if she had
a friend for David, and she did, but the friend wanted paying also. So I arranged for us to meet them in a little hotel, and he took a liking to my usual girl, and I said, ‘Sorry, old boy, but
that
one's for me.'

He said, ‘That's utter rubbish and you know it. No one has exclusive rights when you pay for it.'

I said, ‘Well
I
do when
I'm
paying,' and he said, ‘Oh, right, yes, of course. Yes, the other girl is most pretty.'

So the next time I said to him, ‘Right old man, you can have my girl,' and he said, ‘Thanks all the same but I like the one I've got.'

So I said, ‘But you said you fancied mine,' and he said, ‘I know, but my girl knows some really good tricks.'

I said, ‘Are
you
paying for her?'

He said, ‘Ah…no!'

‘Very well,' I said, ‘then yours is mine and mine is yours, and I don't think you'll be disappointed.'

Afterwards, I said to him, ‘How was it?'

He said, ‘Oh marvellous. Your girl was very good. Funny thing, though. She said it made a nice change not to have a rash all over her face and tits.'

I said, ‘What is she talking about?'

‘That moustache of yours, old boy,' he said. ‘Gives her a terrible rash.'

‘Why didn't she mention it before?' I said, and Niv replied, ‘Because
you're
the one who pays.'

After that I thought we should try the non-professional girls of which there were many on the island. They were daughters of officers, even wives of officers, and the lonely wives of sailors who were always off to sea, leaving their poor wives behind with no one to take care of their needs. So David and I volunteered. Often.

There was never any shortage of women. I said to him that we should try the older women – the officers' wives. He said, ‘I'm not into old ladies.' But then he realised that a lot of the wives were only in their early 30s and still very nice looking, so he said, ‘I always fancied trying an older woman,' and he got very involved with a captain's wife.

The captain found out and called Niv into his office and said, ‘Look here, Niven, are you very much in love with my wife?'

Niv said, ‘No, sir. Not at all, sir.'

So the captain said, ‘Then will you
please
stop telling her you are. It upsets her.'

So Niv found he had the captain's blessing. That put him off. ‘What's the fun in poking a man's wife if he knows it and doesn't care?' he asked. So he moved on to somebody else's wife.

Apart from keeping other men's wives happy, David's other great talent was telling anecdotes that captured the interest of everyone around him. Trubshawe said, ‘He told the best stories, or rather he was the best at telling stories. I remember him at a dinner party given by the Commander-in-Chief on board ship where there were two dozen guests, and Niv was able to manipulate the conversation until he was the centre of attention, telling stories that had them all in hysterics. He had a single pip on his shoulder yet even the most senior officers were his captive audience. It was just astonishing the way he could tell an anecdote. He was a raconteur even at that young age.'

In the summer of 1931 David returned to England for two months' leave and was shocked by two discoveries. The first was that Nessie had gone. The second was that his mother, holidaying at Bembridge on the Isle of Wight, had cancer of the colon. But she didn't complain. She was just happy to be surrounded by her family because Max was briefly home from the South Pacific where he managed a banana plantation, and Grizel was home too, having just given up on an acting career. She had studied at RADA but decided she would do better to study sculpting at the Chelsea Polytechnic. She had also discovered that she was a lesbian, and David lovingly referred to her as ‘my sister the dyke'.

Max needed money so Henrietta loaned him £3,000, a huge amount in 1931, and told him he needn't repay the loan until after her death. The seriousness of her illness still didn't dawn on David, and he concentrated his energies that summer on his favourite subjects – boats, booze and girls.

When he returned to Malta, he and Trubshawe continued their antics ‘because it was so bloody boring there,' said Trubshawe.

We got drunk quite a lot, and when we did, we got up to all sorts of things that seemed like a good idea at the time. One night we decided it would be a bit of a wheeze to dress as women, and the Madame at Auntie's allowed us to mingle with her girls who all helped to dress us and put make-up on us. Of course, I had this moustache! When I asked Niv how I looked, he said, ‘Nobody will want to poke you. You've got a hairy face.'

I said, ‘I don't want anyone to poke me.'

He said, ‘But you want them to
think
they are going to poke you. That moustache will have to go.'

I said, ‘Come one step nearer and I'll drop you where you stand.' Then David had an idea. He got a veil and put it over my face but the moustache is so big that the veil had to be huge and it covered almost all my face. He said, ‘We'll say you're an exotic Turkish whore.'

I said, ‘Nobody will believe that,' but Niv said, ‘Want to bet?'

So we joined the girls and waited for some customers. Niv looked like Clara Bow with little cupid lips. We were the ugliest whores in the brothel. But a couple of Naval officers took a shine to us. ‘Here we go,' he said when he spotted these two officers giving us the eye. I thought they would spot us as fakes in a minute and give us hell. But they were really interested. They knew we were men – that was obvious. We didn't fool them for a minute, which was what the joke was supposed to be. They were willing to pay top price for us. The Madame was haggling. David whispered to me, ‘Get rid of the veil. That'll make them change their minds.'

So I whipped off the veil and one of the officers said, ‘Christ, even
better!'

Then Niv said, ‘Discretion, old man – better part of valour and all that,' and we shot out of there, still in our frocks, and arrived back at barracks like that. We just marched past the guard and saluted, and he stood there with his mouth gaping open as we strode by in our frocks.

Despite these escapades, David was restless in Malta and asked to be transferred to the West Africa Frontier Force, but his request was denied.

‘If it wasn't for Trubshawe,' David said, ‘I would have gone insane. We started running out of ideas how to keep ourselves entertained. We tried joining the Malta Amateur Drama Society but were rejected, so we decided to put on our own show in a canteen at the docks. Not the most glamorous of venues, but we ran for three nights. Our show consisted of funny sketches and highland dancing. We were surprisingly successful and it reminded me how much I enjoyed performing.'

Niven and Trubshawe were relieved to be returned to England in December 1931 and stationed at the Citadel barracks above the town of Dover overlooking the English Channel. Trubshawe bought a car so they could occasionally race off to London, more than 70 miles (112 km) away, to meet girls.

David finally bought his own car, purchased with a small inheritance of £200 left to him by his grandmother who died that spring. In his Morris Cowley he was able to run around, finding girls here and there, while Trubshawe made plans to settle down, having got engaged to a girl, Margie Macdougall, he had met in Malta.

That pretty much brought an end to the Niven-Trubshawe era of schoolboy escapades, and their friendship would never be the same again.

—

N
ow that Trubshawe was no longer single and fancy free, David went to parties on his own, and at several very fashionable social events in London that summer he kept meeting Barbara Hutton, the beautiful 19-year-old American Woolworths heiress. She was engaged to a Georgian prince, Alex Mdivani, but she liked David so much that they became firm friends and when the time came for her to return to the United States she invited him to join her for Christmas in New York.

Around that time he was seeing a beautiful hostess at the Café de Paris called Merle Oberon who was trying to become an actress and had appeared fleetingly and uncredited in a number of British movies. She was half-Indian, half-British – her ethnicity was kept a secret for many years – and possessed stunning exotic looks which captivated David.

That November, in 1932, David received word from Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt that Henrietta was dying in a nursing home in South Kensington in London. He rushed from Aldershot, where he was on a training course, to be with her. She had undergone an operation but peritonitis had set in and she was unconscious.

In 1982 David said to me, ‘I was too selfish at such a young age when we holidayed at Bembridge to realise I should have spent more time with my mother. It was only in those last years that I really came to understand that she had loved me very much. I had grown up thinking I was unwanted and unloved. I suppose that was my naturally selfish attitude. But by the time she died it was too late.

‘I saw her before she passed away but she couldn't recognise me. I felt
crushed and ashamed, and I didn't want to lose my mother now that I had realised what a wonderful mother she was. I took her for granted and didn't make the effort to make her more happy. I didn't spend enough time with her.'

David had also been seeing Ann Todd regularly; she had become a rising star having made five films in two years. She told me, ‘His mother hoped that I'd marry him. She told me that if I ever had children I should not feel hurt if they spent their school holidays off with friends or going to parties instead of staying home. She never resented David enjoying his life while she was ill. I went with him to see her in hospital when she was dying. He suddenly seemed quite lost.'

It was a time when David was trying to come to terms with issues he had. He had neglected to realise how much his mother loved him, and he was also dealing with the truth about Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt being his father. ‘It took me a long time to realise that the man who was my real father had made her happy,' he said in 1982. ‘I think I always resented that he seemed to have her more than I did, and I never wanted to acknowledge that he was my father, and it rankled that he never publicly acknowledged that I was his son.

‘One day when we were on holiday at Bembridge, she said to me, “David, please try and understand the position he is in. He's an important public figure and it would cause a scandal if it were known that he had illegitimate children.” I took that to mean that neither of them cared for me enough. I understand perfectly now.

‘I think I understood it when my mother was dying and I wanted her to know how happy I was to be her son. But it was too late. She never regained consciousness.'

Henrietta died at the age of 52 on 12 November with Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt at her side. She left an estate worth more than £14,000 which was a lot more than she had inherited from William Niven. It turned out she had left most of her money untouched all those years so it grew with interest while Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt paid for David's and Grizel's educations and all their living expenses.

Most of Henrietta's estate was left in the care of trustees for use by Sir Thomas who would receive the entire income from the estate until he died, after which it would pass to her four children. David received half the family silver with the Niven crest and a grand butterfly brooch. Max received the other half of the silver along with some jewellery, and to Grizel and Joyce went diamonds, sapphires, brooches, earrings and pearl and platinum rings.

As well as intense grief, David also suffered from confusion and
uncertainty. He knew he had made a grave error in choosing the Army over the Navy, and he began to wonder what he would do with the rest of his life. He certainly didn't foresee a future as a solider. One day, Ann Todd introduced him to Laurence Olivier, another rising star of the theatre, and David thinks that was the moment he began to wonder if he could make a career for himself as an actor.

Olivier told me that initially he saw no potential in David as an actor. ‘I thought he was really rather silly when I first saw him. He obviously loved mixing with actors and seemed to want to impress them all, so he would put on very silly voices and make funny faces, and Merle clearly thought a lot of him and she was very sweet to him. He was seeing both Merle and Ann, you know, and hoped they could help him. I think he was trying hard to be an actor, but he really was just someone who created funny characters.'

Ann Todd wasn't convinced that David could ever be an actor. She said, ‘Around the time his mother died he told me he was thinking of becoming an actor. He wanted to know what I thought about him leaving the Army and going into the Theatre. He always enjoyed seeing plays and I knew he enjoyed performing. I'd seen some of his sketches he did at Army concerts and he was very funny, but it was always him impersonating somebody or pretending to skate without any ice; that kind of thing. It wasn't acting. So I said to him, “David, you are
not
an actor. If you said
‘I love you,'
nobody would believe you.” I'm afraid that rather crushed him.'