Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (10 page)

David moved in with Sally, her mother Gladys Belzer, and her three sisters in a house on Sunset Boulevard, and discovered that they were all just as sweet and gorgeous as she was. The youngest sister, Georgiana, was only ten, but the other two were also already successful actresses. The eldest, twenty-five-year-old Polly Ann Young, was the most gorgeous of them all, had appeared in more than a dozen movies and was to go on to make twenty more. But the most successful was Gretchen, who was already a famous star at twenty-one after making more than fifty movies under her screen name Loretta Young, and was to make nearly fifty more and to win the Best Actress Oscar in 1947 for her part in
The Farmer’s Daughter
. Gretchen had been married at seventeen and divorced at eighteen, and David fell for her immediately. ‘She was a big love of his,’ I was told by his son Jamie, and although she was a devout Roman Catholic she was no prude when it came to having affairs. ‘Every time she sins she builds a church,’ quipped Marlene Dietrich. ‘That’s why there are so many Catholic churches in Hollywood.’ But although Gretchen and David became lifelong friends and were to
make several movies together, it seems that they were never lovers, certainly not at first. When they met she was deeply involved with Spencer Tracy and early the following year, while making
The Call of the Wild
, she had an affair with Clark Gable that resulted in an illegitimate daughter, Judy, who she pretended for many years was her adopted daughter.

Gretchen/Loretta was making a film at Twentieth Century-Fox,
The White Parade
, and when Niv confessed that he wanted to become an actor too she smuggled him into the studio under a blanket on the floor of her car. He was enthralled by the fabulous sets, the vast sound stages, the crowds of actors in all kinds of costumes, the bustling atmosphere of make-believe. As he watched her being made up for her next scene his determination to become an actor was so reinforced that he went to try to register with the Central Casting Office, the employment agency that found film work for non-speaking extras but had a big sign that read: ‘DON’T TRY TO BECOME AN ACTOR. FOR EVERY ONE WE EMPLOY WE TURN AWAY A THOUSAND.’ He joined the queue but was turned away by a clerk when she discovered that he did not have a work permit.

Despite being completely unknown, Niv had such charm that soon he became close friends with several actors who were already stars. One was fifty-one-year-old Douglas Fairbanks Sr, with whom he had already played golf in England, the dashing athletic star of swashbuckling adventure films like
The Three Musketeers
and
The Private Life of Don Juan
, whose estranged wife Mary Pickford had decided that he was too much of a Don Juan himself and was about to divorce him. Like Niv, Fairbanks was an overgrown schoolboy who loved golf, tennis and practical jokes, and they hit it off right from the start. Another new chum was forty-three-year-old Ronald Colman, the charming, good-looking English actor with the trim moustache and beautiful voice who had a contract with Sam Goldwyn but was about to leave him to freelance after making more than forty films, among them
Bulldog Drummond, Raffles
and
The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo
. Niv was often considered to be a younger version of Colman and his possible successor, and soon after they met playing tennis they became friends and regularly dined together even though Colman was renowned as a bit of a recluse after his divorce that year from Thelma Raye.

The closest of all Niv’s new Hollywood friendships was with thirty-five-year-old Fred Astaire – the dancing star who had made only four films so far but was about to make one of his best,
Top Hat
– and his tiny lisping wife Phyllis, to whom he would stay happily married until her death twenty years later. Niv had met Astaire’s sister Adèle in London and knocked on the Astaires’ door after a game of tennis nearby. Phyllis opened the door, took one look at him, shut the door again hurriedly and cried out nervously to Fred in the back yard: ‘There’s a
dweadful
man at the fwont door without a shirt on who says he knows your sister.’

‘When I came face-to-face with this individual,’ Astaire wrote in his autobiography, ‘I detected immediately a rather military-looking Britisher of unquestionably fascinating personality. We had a drink or two and heard all about his stint in the Cuban army since getting out of the Scots Guards, his racing mules in Florida and I don’t know what all, and that he was thinking about going in the movies but so far he had had no chance to do anything but think about it. To us he certainly seemed to qualify with that personality. He had us in stitches the entire time … How glad we were that he stopped by that day. We gained one of the closest of lifetime friends.’ Astaire became another surrogate older brother but even so, despite every effort, he failed to teach Niv how to dance well and gave up in despair.

Most important of all for Niv’s career, he became friendly with the powerful thirty-five-year-old MGM producer Irving Thalberg, who had produced
Grand Hotel
and
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
. Thalberg and his thirty-two-year-old Canadian wife, the leading actress Norma Shearer – who had
made sixty films and won an Oscar in 1930 for
The Divorcée
– became so fond of Niv that they gave him a breathtakingly generous Christmas present at the end of 1934: a brand new Studebaker car that embarrassed him deeply because his own present to them was six handkerchiefs embroidered with the letters I and N. Later he claimed that he was so hard up that he could not afford to buy even one gallon of petrol for the car and sold it ‘to eat and pay the rent’.

David lived for six weeks rent-free with Mrs Belzer and her lovely daughters, and although they made him feel one of the family he realised that he was beginning to outstay his welcome and persuaded a young receptionist at the half-empty Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, Alvin Weingand, to rent him a room for just $65 a month but not expect to be paid until he had got a job. Lonely for company, he telephoned a girl he had met in New York, Lydia Macy, and spent the weekend with her in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, and it was while he was there that he spotted HMS
Norfolk
in the bay, went on board for a party, drank too much and ended up in his crumpled dinner jacket on the
Bounty
. Thirty-year-old Robert Montgomery was on board, drove Niv back to Hollywood and the MGM studio, and introduced him to the stocky, forty-three-year-old London-born director Edmund Goulding, who had directed sixteen films, most notably
Grand Hotel
. He was to be so important for David’s career that Niv was to say later, ‘I owe more to him than to anyone else in the business.’

Goulding asked David to do a screen test for the part of a drunken, dissolute young man in his new film, and he felt so nervous and frozen with fear that when the test director, Harry Bouquet, asked him to tell a funny story on camera the only thing he could think of was a naughty limerick:

Bouquet was appalled, but Goulding told David that the only decent part of the test had been the limerick because he had been so natural while he was telling it, and he recommended him to another director, Al Hall, who was looking for an Englishman to play the part of a young English aristocrat opposite the tiny, forty-one-year-old, platinum-blonde sexpot Mae West in her next film,
Goin’ to Town
. She had become a huge star after making just five movies, notably
She Done Him Wrong
and
I’m No Angel
, and by the following year she was reckoned to be the highest-paid woman in America after earning an incredible $130,000 for
She Done Him Wrong
. She and Hall were impressed by Niv – especially when she asked him to remove his shirt and show his muscles – and many years later she said, ‘Niven has charm where other men have only cologne.’ But just as he stood on the brink of a breakthrough into the movies after only a few weeks in Hollywood an immigration official caught up with him, reminded him that he had arrived in Los Angeles with only a ten-day visitor’s visa and was now an illegal immigrant, and ordered him to leave the country within twenty-four hours or be arrested. David caught a train 200 miles south to Mexico and checked into a flyblown hotel in a one-street border town called Mexicali while he applied to the local US consul for a resident alien visa so that he could work in Hollywood.

It took several weeks for David to get his birth certificate and a police report from England so that he could apply for the visa, and while he waited he earned a small wage working in a bar, washing up in the restaurant and cleaning the guns of American tourists who came to Mexicali on shooting holidays, though typically when he returned to Hollywood he told an English actor, Billy Milton, that he had been in Mexico teaching the local rebels how to use firearms. At last, early in January 1935, he returned to LA with the visa and a
new determination to break into movies. He checked into his cheap room at the Roosevelt Hotel again and returned to the Central Casting Office, presented his visa and work permit, and was taken onto their books at last – to join thousands of other extras scrabbling for jobs – as ‘Anglo-Saxon Type No. 2008’. As an Anglo-Saxon Type the first part he was offered was to play a swarthy Mexican in a Western movie.