Read Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven Online
Authors: Graham Lord
Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (11 page)
At Sandhurst in 1929, Niv – now a tough, nineteen-year-old bruiser
(front row, far right)
– played rugby for the Royal Military College’s 1st XV.
Nearly twenty and just commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Highland Light Infantry in 1930.
Second Lieutenant Niven with his best friend Michael Trubshawe on manoeuvres with the Highland Light Infantry in Malta in 1931, where their senior officers all had little wooden signs outside their tents saying ‘C.O.’ or ‘2nd I/C’.
When Niv arrived in Hollywood in 1934 he stayed with four beautiful women: Gladys Belzer
(centre, sitting)
and three of her four daughters
(left to right)
, Polly Ann, Elizabeth and Gretchen. Elizabeth and Gretchen were already stars under their screen names Sally Blane and Loretta Young.
Twenty-five-year-old Niven in Hollywood in 1935 with his first serious love: the twenty-four-year-old Anglo-Indian actress Merle Oberon, who was already a star and wanted to marry him.
Niv’s Hollywood mentor Sam Goldwyn, the larger-than-life movie mogul who gave him his big break in films and treated him like a son until their dramatic row.
The cast of
The Charge of the Light Brigade
– not in Russia but in California and the mountains of the Sierra Nevada. Niven is on the far left, Flynn sitting on the right.
Niv with his hell-raising friend Errol Flynn
(second from left)
, director Michael Curtiz (pointing) and assistant director Jack Sullivan during filming of
The Charge of the Light Brigade
in 1936.
At the Trocadero in 1937 with one of his many Hollywood girlfriends, Helen Briggs, better known by her screen name Virginia Bruce.
Niv with Fred Astaire, one of his earliest Hollywood friends, at the Santa Anita racecourse in 1937. They were to remain close chums for the rest of his life.
With Joel McCrea and Loretta Young in the 1938 film
Three Blind Mice
.
That first job as a professional actor paid him $2.50 a day, for which he had to leave the hotel at 3 a.m., clock in miles away at Universal Studios by 5 a.m., dress in a baggy white suit, sombrero, sandals and a blanket, be sprayed a brown Mexican colour, stick on a false moustache, be driven by bus for an hour to the ranch where the film was being shot, take instructions as to what to do in the various crowd scenes, take a half-hour break at one o’clock for a meagre lunch, continue shooting until the early evening, return by bus to the studio, wash all the make-up off, collect his $2.50, scrounge a lift back to Hollywood with an extra who had a car, sit down to a cheap meal at 10 p.m. and crash into bed for no more than four hours before having to go through the whole routine again if he was lucky, though an extra often worked for no more than one day on any one film. And if shooting were cancelled because of rain the extras were paid nothing at all.
Niv reckoned later that he played in twenty-seven long forgotten Westerns as an extra, probably because he had learned at Sandhurst to ride a horse well, but it seems unlikely to have been so many because it was only six weeks later that he landed an exclusive contract with the Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn, who had been one of the founders of MGM but was now an independent producer. Niv also claimed that during those weeks he played a half-naked slave being whipped in the Cecil B. DeMille epic
Cleopatra
, starring Claudette Colbert, but that too is unlikely because the film was made in 1934, before he had his visa and work permit. To supplement his meagre income during those six weeks he
also worked once or twice a week as a deckhand on a charter fishing boat, the
König
, that was based in Balboa. It was a hard, dirty, dangerous, ten-hours-a-day job spearing, hauling, gutting and swabbing, but it paid $6 a day plus tips and one of his earliest clients was a huge star, Clark Gable, who was soon to become another friend.