David Niven (7 page)

The death of Henrietta was a crossroads in David's life. He felt extreme guilt and grief, and now he was uncertain about his future. What he was sure about was that the Army wasn't a part of it.

David's commanding officer at Aldershot gave him a month's leave, so David cabled Barbara Hutton in New York to ask if he could visit. She cabled him to come immediately, so he sold his car, borrowed money from the bank and from Grizel, and bought the cheapest ticket to sail to New York, arriving on Christmas Eve.

‘I'd not experienced American hospitality before,' David said, ‘but I stepped ashore and was immediately met by Barbara and some of her friends and was made to feel unbelievably welcome. I was whisked off to the Pierre Hotel, a very elegant and exclusive place where Barbara's family lived in several swish suites. I wasn't allowed to pay for a single thing and I lived like a millionaire for a week. I was really overwhelmed by their warmth and generosity. I simply wasn't allowed to pay for anything – not that I could have afforded to.'

He was treated to a night at the Central Park Casino where bootleg liquor was flowing despite Prohibition, and he spent Christmas Day with Barbara's family and was showered with presents. He was introduced to
American football and an assortment of nightclubs. He also had a girlfriend which I only heard about in 1980 when I had lunch with him and Lynne Frederick. He said, ‘I met a very nice girl in New York on my first trip there, called Maureen Brennan, a fitness therapist with a very nice line in acrobatic sex. I was fit but not that fit, and I hurt my back rather badly. From time to time my bad back has returned but I've always told people I damaged it during the war. I was too embarrassed to say I hurt it having intercourse. Not that I was embarrassed to have intercourse. Everybody does. I was embarrassed to say I got
damaged
having intercourse.'

He had, of course, experienced high society life, something reserved for the lucky few. It was only a fantasy that many European immigrants to America dreamed about, thinking the streets were paved with gold. David would become one of the lucky ones because most immigrants wound up living in poverty. David wound up living in Hollywood. But Hollywood was still a long way from Aldershot.

‘I'd realised that there was a way of life in America that was like a dream,' he told me. ‘I couldn't wait to go back and I knew that when I did it would be for good – or at least, for a very long time. Even on the voyage home I benefited from the generosity of an American who was a passenger and who shared with me his daily sweepstake ticket, and I won £160.'

In late February 1933 he sailed back to England, vowing to return to America at the earliest opportunity. Trubshawe had left the regiment to marry Margie Macdougall, and Army life became ever more dull.

Niven was promoted to full lieutenant and bought a sports Bentley with his sweepstake winnings and drove to London whenever he could to be with Ann Todd and Merle Oberon. Ann seemed not to know about Merle, and told me, ‘David was getting very serious about me and I think we might have got married, perhaps. But we were just never alone. He liked to be in a crowd, always wanting to be at the centre of it all. I didn't like crowds. We just weren't suited.'

David didn't let the grass grow under his feet. He had yet another girlfriend, Priscilla Weigall, voted Deb of the Year. She had friends in high society, among them Douglas Fairbanks, the swashbuckling actor from the days of silent movies who was now living in Hertfordshire. Knowing that David wanted to be an actor, Priscilla introduced him to Fairbanks and the two hit it off immediately, but David couldn't find the nerve to ask Fairbanks outright for help in becoming an actor.

Priscilla then introduced him to film producer Bunty Watts who gave him a job as an extra in a film she was making,
All the Winners
. David appeared briefly as one of a crowd at the races, but it wasn't enough to get him noticed so he went back to soldiering.

Things suddenly improved for him when a new commanding officer was appointed in the spring, Colonel Alec Telfer-Smollett. The regiment was revitalised under his command and David found him very approachable. Before long the colonel was inviting him to dine and play golf.

‘He was someone who believed in the ancient concept of a regiment. That it should be a family,' he told me in 1970.

I said to him, ‘You seem to have taken to men in authority who treated the people around them almost like family.'

‘Yes, I suppose I have. I suppose I never really felt I had enjoyed a family life so I took what substitutes came along.'

‘Were these men father figures to you?' I asked.

‘Yes, they were, because I lost my father when I was five.' This, of course, was what David said in 1970 when he was still referring to Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt as ‘Uncle Tommy'. He said that in the spring of 1933, he was invited to lunch by Uncle Tommy at the Carlton Club. ‘Apart from seeing him at my mother's funeral, I hadn't seen him for many years. As I approached him at his table, he rose from his chair and I extended my hand to him, and he said, “The solicitors tell me that you've paid nothing towards the grave.” I felt that was unkind and I realised that I never wanted to see “dear old Uncle Tommy” ever again.'

That didn't turn out to be the case. They would meet again, cordially, within weeks.

David's spirits sunk when half his platoon went to India but he was among those sent to Salisbury Plain to learn all about machine-gunnery. He decided he'd finally had enough and resigned his commission so he could head for Canada to stay with an old friend and former soldier Victor Gordon-Lennox who had married a Canadian girl. Her family was in oil, but David's intention was to head for Hollywood.

He said, ‘Sir Thomas was really rather kind to me after my mother died. He
was
upset that I'd neglected to contribute to the grave, that's true. But he was not unkind, and when he heard I was intending to become an actor in Hollywood he was very worried that I might starve in the process of trying. So I told him I was going to work in the oil business, which I think impressed him. He understood I no longer wanted to remain in the Army and he gave me his blessing.

‘I only wish I had appreciated him more at the time. I think, you know, that it must have hurt him not to be able to acknowledge me or Grizel.'

Of his proposed trip, David said, ‘I really believed I could make it in America. When I said goodbye to the Army I wasn't at all afraid. I suddenly felt like the world was finally my oyster. That's the audacity of youth, and you have to take advantage of it before you grow out of it. The trouble was,
I didn't have enough money to get to Canada so I sold my body to science.' It sounds like an extraordinary claim, which he made to me in 1970 and also in
The Moon's a Balloon
, but he insisted he really had sold his body – or at least, the rights to use it after his death for medical research. ‘I got six pounds and ten shillings for it. And I had to sign a pledge that I would never smoke.'

He bought a return fare to Canada just in case things didn't go well and sailed on 6 September 1933. He was 23 and had no real idea how he was going to achieve his dream of becoming a film star. ‘That's the only way to do what you really want to do. You take a chance. The biggest chances can reap the biggest rewards. They can also bury you. I got lucky.'

He stayed with his former Army friend Victor Gordon-Lennox and his wife Diana whose parents were Admiral Charles and Lady Kingsmill. David stayed for a few weeks, fishing and exploring the countryside, and then headed for New York. He paid for his fair by cashing in his return ticket. He claimed that in Ottawa he came down with severe tonsillitis and had to have his tonsils removed. A few days later his throat bled so profusely that he had to be hospitalised again and given blood transfusions to save his life.

It was around the middle of October when he finally arrived by train in New York, virtually broke and barely able to afford to rent a small room in a cheap hotel. This was the era of the Great Depression and millions of Americans were unemployed but David landed a $40 a week job selling liquor for 21 Brands, a wholesale company that was part of the 21 Club where he had once been a regular guest with Barbara Hutton. It's probable that she helped to land him the job, and his first sale was made to Barbara's rich cousin, Woolworth Donahue.

‘I wasn't a very good salesman,' he said, ‘because I was always hanging around the 21 Club with Barbara and her many rich friends, and I just couldn't bring myself to sell liquor to people who were buying me drinks and meals.'

He didn't want his rich friends to know that he was staying in a cheap hotel so he told them he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria. Every morning he entered the hotel through the back door and left through the front, and each evening before returning to his cheap lodgings, he walked through the front doors of the Waldorf and left by the back. In the Waldorf lobby he bumped into Tommy Phipps, an old friend from England and the brother of actress Joyce Grenfell. Phipps introduced David to his father-in-law ‘Lefty' Flynn who had once been an actor in Hollywood. Flynn in turn introduced David to Elsa Maxwell, a New York social fixer. She immediately took a liking to David and decided that he would do well in Hollywood because he spoke like Ronald Colman.

David had made no mention to any of his new friends that he wanted to be a Hollywood actor. ‘I thought that if I failed, I'd simply make a bloody fool of myself and look bloody ridiculous,' he told me. ‘But I did get excited when Elsa invited me to a party that was in honour of Ernst Lubitsch [the film director]. Unfortunately, he ignored me.'

David lost his job selling liquor because of his poor sales figures, and he had to move out of his cheap hotel and into even cheaper lodgings, a basement room on Second Avenue. He wasn't prepared to admit defeat just yet, and in March 1934, in a bar on 58th Street, he met a cowboy, Doug Hertz, who persuaded him to join him in an indoor novelty horse race venture. Lefty Flynn and Elsa Maxwell helped out, getting friends to invest in ponies and hiring cowboys to ride them. Writer Damon Runyon also got in on the act, buying $1,000 worth of shares in what became the American Pony Express Racing Association.

The grand opening was in May at the municipal auditorium of Atlantic City where 15,000 people came to bet on the ponies. Its success quickly came to the attention of the local Mafia who demanded a large share of the profits. Doug Hertz refused to pay up, and the mobsters closed the business down within days.

Broke again, David was saved by Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt who sent him a cheque for what might have been as much as $3,000. It was enough to send a happy David off on a holiday with Lefty and his wife Norah to Bermuda where David had a fling with an 18-year-old girl from Virginia.

In Bermuda, David listened in fascination as Lefty Flynn reminisced about his days in Hollywood. David's dreams of movie stardom were further fuelled when he got a letter from an English friend, Dennis Smith-Bingham, who was now living in Los Angeles and urging David to join him out there. At the end of July, David set sail for Cuba and waited in Havana for a ship to take him through the Panama Canal and on to Los Angeles.

He claimed that while in Havana he met an Irishman in Sloppy Joe's Bar who tried to persuade him to join a troop of mercenaries who planned to overthrow the Cuban government. In 1970 he said, ‘I became a Cuban rebel and because of my Army training I was able to train the rebels in the use of machine guns.'

Just five years later, unable to recall which version of events he had given me, he told a different story. ‘I used to drink every night in a bar called Sloppy Joe's where I met a mad Irishman who was looking for mercenaries. I told him I wasn't interested in getting myself killed. It turned out he was being watched, and then I discovered
I
was being watched also. I was warned by the British Embassy in Havana that the
local police were watching me and it would be best if I got out of town. I couldn't go anywhere because I had passage booked on a liner called the
President Piece
and there were still two days to go. So I steered clear of Sloppy Joe's and was very relieved to get on board and sail on through the Panama Canal and on to Los Angeles.'

He told me that the story of him becoming a Cuban mercenary was made up by a publicist at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios and he liked the story so much he occasionally related it among his many other highly exaggerated tales. But I doubt either version was true. He just couldn't resist adding colour to an already colourful life.

—

U
pon his arrival in Los Angeles he was met by Dennis Smith-Bingham and a 24-year-old actress, Sally Blane, whose mother allowed David to stay in her guest house on Sunset Boulevard for a while. He was immediately struck by the sights of Los Angeles and the film star mansions of Beverly Hills, and he knew this was where he wanted to live and work.

Sally, whose real name was Elizabeth Young, had three sisters – 10-year-old Georgina, 21-year-old Gretchen, and 25-year-old Polly Ann Young who under her own name was a successful actress and had appeared in a number of films. The middle sister, Gretchen, was also a successful actress with the screen name of Loretta Young.

I became acquainted with Loretta through a series of transatlantic telephone conversations which began in 1974 (thanks to John Wayne who gave me her number when I worked on the film
Brannigan
– Loretta was Michael Wayne's godmother). We hit it off and became friends – over the years, I took an interest in her many charities – which made it easy for me to talk to David about his relationship with her. On the set of
Candleshoe
at Pinewood Studios in England in 1976, he said,

I fell instantly in love with her. By the time she was 18, she'd already been married and divorced. There was a lot of competition for her and I didn't stand a chance. She was seeing Spencer Tracy. Now Spence was a man of charm and wit and a good friend if he liked you, but when he was drunk he could be a dangerous enemy.