Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (12 page)

The big break that led to Sam Goldwyn’s and Niv’s first Hollywood contract was preceded by a meeting with another Hollywood mogul, Darryl Zanuck, the boss of Twentieth Century-Fox, after Doug Fairbanks Sr introduced them at a Turkish steam bath and told Zanuck that David had played polo in Malta. Zanuck invited Niv to join him for a few chukkas that Sunday afternoon and David’s account of that day is one of the funniest set pieces in
The Moon’s a Balloon
, in which he described how he was made to ride a vicious white Arab stallion called St George that sank its teeth into Zanuck’s buttocks, causing Niv to plant the end of his polo stick up Zanuck’s pony’s rectum. The story is wonderfully funny but identical to the one he was to tell in
Flight Deck
magazine in 1945, when he claimed that exactly the same thing had happened to him in Malta, where his bitten opponent had been an admiral. Even the horse had had the same name. So did it happen to Zanuck or the admiral? Did it happen at all? Or was it another of Niv’s glorious fantasies?

It was Edmund Goulding who finally gave David’s career the boost he needed. He suggested to Thalberg that he should give David a part in
Mutiny on the Bounty
, which was about to go into production, and a rumour spread that Thalberg was about to give David a long-term contract – a rumour that may well have been started by David himself. But Goulding had second thoughts and decided that Niv would be better off with Sam Goldwyn. He dug out David’s only decent screen test, drove with it to Sam and Frances Goldwyn’s house, and persuaded them that if David was good enough for Thalberg it would make sense for Goldwyn to beat him to it by signing him up first himself. It helped Niv’s prospects hugely that
British actors and accents had suddenly become fashionable in Hollywood movies, that Colman was about to leave Goldwyn’s stable, and that David, with his little moustache and impeccable English accent, resembled Colman.

In his office on the Monday morning Goldwyn sent for Niv. ‘He sat behind a huge desk in a tastefully furnished office,’ he wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon
.

The contract allowed Goldwyn to cancel it whenever he liked, but David did not notice that and could not believe his luck. The meeting had lasted no more than a couple of minutes and now, dazed, he was giving his personal details to Goldwyn’s head of publicity, Jock Lawrence, who decided that for PR purposes Niv had been born in Kirriemuir, his father had been a general, he had indeed been a lumberjack in Canada, and had actually led the rebels into battle in Cuba.

In
The Moon’s a Balloon
Niv said that Goldwyn paid him at first $100 a week with twelve weeks unpaid lay-off every year, but the original contract, dated 25 February 1935, shows that he was actually paid $125 a week. In the second year, if Goldwyn kept him on, his salary would increase to $150 a week, in the third to $200, the fourth to $300, the fifth to $400, the sixth to $500, and the seventh to $600. Niv was overjoyed. A Hollywood contract just six weeks after getting a work permit! $125 a week! In modern terms that was the
equivalent of £35,000 a year, and he was only just about to turn twenty-five. He went out and bought himself a lavish birthday present, a $500 car, and took Goulding for a celebratory lunch. But when he returned after lunch the head of Goldwyn’s casting department, Bob McIntyre, suggested that he had better take the convertible back to the showroom because Goldwyn had just put him on immediate suspension for twelve weeks and he would not be starting work or earning his first $125 until 15 May. After less than a day as a Goldwyn employee he was already unemployed. It was a portent of things to come. Niv had just clamped his wrists into golden handcuffs.

Goldwyn was to become his third surrogate father and as soon as he signed the contract Niv wrote eagerly to J. F. Roxburgh, almost as though he needed his approval. ‘I am an actor now, God rest my soul!’ he wrote. ‘And I find it much more fun, more interesting and definitely more lucrative than being a rather inefficient soldier.’ But whereas Roxburgh had been cool, classy and cultured, and Alec Telfer-Smollett had been bluff, military and sporty – and both had been very English – Goldwyn was tempestuous and larger than life.

Now fifty-two, he had been born Schmuel Gelbfisz in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, the son of a poor second-hand furniture dealer. At twelve or thirteen he had run away from home, travelled to England and sailed to America. The US immigration official who let him in could not pronounce Schmuel Gelbfisz and told the boy that henceforth he would be known as Samuel Goldfish. He found a job as a glove cutter and became a successful glove salesman before moving to California to make movies in a rented barn in the middle of an orange grove in Hollywood with his vaudeville-producer brother-in-law Jesse Lasky and a Canadian actor, Cecil B. DeMille. Goldfish went on to form a film company with a New York theatrical producer, Edgar Selwyn, combining their names to call it the Goldwyn Picture Corporation, and he liked the name Goldwyn so much that he adopted it legally
as his own. In 1925 GPC merged with the Metro and Louis B. Mayer studios to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, MGM, but because Goldwyn was so headstrong, argumentative and bossy he was sacked, became an independent producer, founded Samuel Goldwyn Inc. and was soon the most successful independent producer in Hollywood. By the time that he signed Niv up in 1935 he had made nearly a hundred films in twenty-two years.

He was loud, aggressive, egotistical, stubborn, rude, ruthless and often impossible – a frenzied, dictatorial control freak who was always having rows and feuds, yelling at his cowed employees and pounding his desk, and was once described as ‘the only man who can run amok sitting down’. He cheated outrageously at cards, backgammon, tennis, golf and croquet because he could not bear to lose, and Chico Marx once said of him, ‘Sam is the only man in the world who can throw a 7 with one die.’ Goldwyn even coached his son Sammy to upset the backgammon board ‘accidentally’ if he was losing. During one game between Goldwyn and Marx, Sammy knocked the board over three times. Marx took the boy out of the room, returned five minutes later, and the game proceeded without interruption.

‘How did you do it?’ asked Goldwyn, impressed.

‘I taught him to masturbate,’ said Marx.

During outdoor parties at Goldwyn’s beautiful home in Laurel Way up in the hills he had been known to stalk back into the house after a row with one of his guests, locking them all out in the garden and insisting that his butler should bring all the drinks inside too. But he could be dignified and considerate, and was highly admired and respected for his film-making genius, even by his nervous staff. He was at heart a kind man, usually a perfect and generous host who was always dressed immaculately, adored his wife Frances, and was described by Niv in his book about Hollywood,
Bring on the Empty Horses
, as ‘like crème brûlée – rock hard on the outside and surprisingly soft underneath’. As Alva Johnston
wrote in 1937 in a boldly independent book about him,
The Great Goldwyn
, describing his sudden switches of mood: ‘A split second separates Ivan the Terrible from Mr Pickwick.’

Above all, Goldwyn was obsessed by movies, utterly devoted to making quality films, and renowned for his dedication and his magical ‘Goldwyn Touch’, which ensured that every film he made was in the best of taste and made to the highest standards so that he could be proud of them. He would pay a fortune to acquire the movie rights in the right book and to hire the best writers and directors, and he would throw a fortune away to reshoot a film that was not turning out the way he wanted. The previous year he had been so unhappy with the first version of his film
Nana
that he scrapped it and started all over again, losing $411,000.

Goldwyn was so engrossed in every tiny detail of film-making that he talked to himself, failed to listen to others and could be very forgetful. ‘He once forgot his birthday,’ Niv told Michael Parkinson in 1981, ‘but when he got home his wife Frances met him at the door, told him it was his birthday, blindfolded him, led him into the dining room and left him there while she went to speak to the cook in the kitchen. While he was in the dining room he was full of wind, let it go, and took his coat off and flapped it about. Frances came back, took off his blindfold, and thirty-two people were sitting down for dinner!’

Goldwyn also had trouble remembering people’s names and kept calling his unfortunate European PR man, Euan Lloyd, ‘Urine Lloyd’. Because he was so powerful and overbearing people took their revenge by joking about him, particularly about his colourful use of the English language. When he resigned from one organisation he told them: ‘Gentlemen, include me out.’ He once reacted to a proposal by replying, ‘In two words: im-possible.’ His Goldwynisms became legendary: ‘a verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on’; ‘anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined’; ‘what we need now is some new,
fresh clichés’; ‘we’ve all passed a lot of water since those days’; ‘these directors are always biting the hand that lays the golden egg’; ‘you’re always taking the bull between the teeth’. When one of Goldwyn’s directors said that a script was too caustic he replied, ‘To hell with the cost. If it’s a good picture, we’ll make it.’ And Edward G. Robinson swore that when he asked Goldwyn if he should accept the part of Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice
Goldwyn exploded: ‘Screw ’em! Tell ’em you’ll only play the Merchant!’

This was the man who was to become Niv’s Svengali and his third and final father figure. He came to love him and then to rebel like a sulky son. As he wrote of Goldwyn in
Bring on the Empty Horses
, ‘for half a century he towered like a Colossus above his contemporaries,’ but Ronald Colman, who had just left Goldwyn, was horrified to hear that he had hired David. ‘He’s the best producer by far,’ said Colman, ‘but watch it, he can be a real bastard!’ By joining Goldwyn David had found not only another father figure but also a family to replace those of Stowe, Sandhurst and the army that had kept him protected for the last ten years. ‘Hollywood was a kind of giant public school,’ said Tom Hutchinson. ‘It had a hierarchy and a class structure with its own headmasters, matrons, head boys, monitors and bullies.’

Niv moved out of the Roosevelt Hotel and into a cheap, one-room apartment above a brothel in North Vista Street, and because it was now common knowledge that Goldwyn had signed him up he was welcomed everywhere. He joined the Hollywood Cricket Club, which played every Sunday, and was introduced to its English stalwarts, among them the actors C. Aubrey Smith, Cedric Hardwicke and Nigel Bruce, who played Dr Watson in
Sherlock Holmes
and became a particularly close chum along with his wife Bunnie. Niv met Charlie Chaplin, Basil Rathbone, Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, Boris Karloff and Jimmy Stewart. He played golf with Jean Harlow and William Powell, and joined the West Side Tennis Club because the girls there were much prettier than those at
the Beverly Hills Club. In the evenings he would go with Loretta Young, Sally Blane and other girls to nightspots and celebrity haunts such as the Clover Club, with its glass dance floor and orchestra, and the King’s Club, the Cocoanut Grove, the Russian Eagle and the Vendôme, and he cut a swathe through the gorgeous starlets and wannabes who twinkled in every corner of LA, Hollywood and Beverly Hills. ‘He had an enormous number of relationships,’ his son Jamie told me, ‘but he never really talked about them because he was so incredibly discreet about his life.’

Many years later Niv’s publisher, Jamie Hamilton, wrote in a memo to his editors that it was ‘common knowledge that he had practically every star in Hollywood’, and Roddy Mann told me: ‘He had scores of girlfriends in the Thirties. He was notorious as a swordsman. To be Niven in this town then was extraordinary. Here was this charming, attractive, witty guy who didn’t take anything seriously. He used to say that when he started here in Hollywood it was gentlemen trying to be actors, and then it became actors trying to be gentlemen – and now it’s neither trying to be both!’ He was himself the perfect gentleman and did not tattle about his girlfriends afterwards, though it is said that when Claudette Colbert asked him at a party who was the best lover he had ever had he replied ‘your black maid’.

Some of his girlfriends, on the other hand, were quite happy to talk about him, like the blonde, sexy, very young actress Evelyn Keyes, who was to play Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sister Suellen in 1939 in
Gone With the Wind
, to marry four times and to become Mike Todd’s mistress. She lived with Niv for a while in the late 1930s, even though she was still a teenager, and told Morley that Niv had ‘a marvellous sense of humour’ and was ‘a delightful storyteller, delicious as French pastry, single then and ripe for plucking’. An added bonus for the girls, the British actor Patrick Macnee said, was that ‘the width of his member was something to behold. And it’s the width that matters, you know.’ Macnee
once spotted the naked Niven organ when they were filming together, and ‘on a very mild, dear, fragrantly light-hearted man a penis of that immensity absolutely staggers you’, said Macnee.

‘How immense was it?’ I asked.

‘Well, three times as big as mine.’

‘I’ve never seen yours,’ I said. ‘Was it also very long?’

‘Not very. But that’s not important. It’s the
width
that matters.’

‘So not very long.’

‘No.’

‘How long?’

Macnee hesitated. ‘About a foot?’ he said.

Niv’s first really serious love affair, with the gorgeous twenty-four-year-old actress Merle Oberon, began in 1935 and was to last for more than a year. Her real name was Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson, and although she combined her two middle names to inspire her stage name, her family and friends called her Queenie or ‘Obie’. What was not known then or for many years afterwards, and had to be kept strictly secret in the racial climate of the 1930s and 1940s, was that she was of mixed race. Her father was English, her mother Indian, and she had been born in Bombay and raised in comparative poverty in India. Her skin was light enough to pass as white, she spoke English beautifully with an upper-class accent, and she looked almost Chinese rather than Indian, but the fact that she was a half-caste would have destroyed her career and position as one of the queens of Hollywood had it been known, so she pretended even to her closest friends that she had been born in Tasmania the daughter of an Australian army officer, and that her dark-skinned little fifty-three-year-old Indian mother in London, Charlotte Thompson, was in fact her maid.