Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (13 page)

After Queenie had left India for England in 1928, at the age of seventeen, she had worked as a hostess in a London nightclub; had had affairs with the debonair young black
West Indian pianist and singer Leslie Hutchinson, who performed as ‘Hutch’ in fashionable nightclubs in Paris and London, and with the American movie mogul Joe Schenck, the president of United Artists; and had been given small film parts by the Hungarian producer Sándor Kellner, who now lived in England, called himself Alexander Korda and was soon to become a naturalised British subject. By 1935 she had made seventeen movies and her mark playing Anne Boleyn opposite Charles Laughton in
The Private Life of Henry VIII
, the dancer Antonita with Douglas Fairbanks Sr in
The Private Life of Don Juan
and Lady Marguerite Blakeney opposite Leslie Howard in
The Scarlet Pimpernel
, after which Goldwyn had bought a share of her contract from Korda and she had left her embarrassing mother hidden in an hotel in London and had come to Hollywood to star appropriately in
The Dark Angel
, for which she was to be nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. So when she and David became lovers she was already a big star earning thousands of dollars a week, whereas he had yet to make his first film as anything other than a humble extra.

This did not bother Merle at all. She had just emerged from a stressful affair with her sensitive, complicated, intellectual co-star Leslie Howard, and now she basked in the warmth of David’s charm and amusing anecdotes, his simple love of life and uncomplicated manly sense of fun, and his pleasure in parties and dinners as well as the outdoors and sport. He had matured hugely since she had first known him briefly in London a couple of years earlier, when Laurence Olivier remembered seeing them together. ‘She had this young man with her,’ Olivier told Morley, ‘who kept putting on silly voices and seemed terribly ill at ease with people who were already making their names as actors, but she was very sweet with him.’ He was certainly completely at ease with actors now and smitten by Merle’s unusual beauty – her immaculate figure, golden skin, greeny-brown almond-shaped eyes, high forehead, smouldering smile and glorious laughter – and he
revelled in her apparently aristocratic elegance, free spirit, and empathy with everything natural, romantic and mystical. Best of all, they both adored sex, especially with each other, and Merle very soon wanted to marry him.

There were those who sneered that Niv was using her because she was a star who could persuade directors to give him parts in movies. Some people called him ‘Mr Oberon’, Olivier said he was ‘Merle’s gigolo’ and she certainly helped him with his acting, but equally David introduced her to his powerful and amusing contacts in Hollywood, and she soon became Norma Shearer’s best friend because of him. Niv and Merle ignored the snide remarks, she bought a house on the beach at Malibu, and they walked the sands together and went swimming, sailing, fishing and riding. They played golf and tennis at the Riviera Country Club. They went dancing at the Trocadero and made the most of the sizzling nightlife of Hollywood. They joined weekday dinner parties, weekend house parties and, as he said in
Bring on the Empty Horses
, Hollywood ‘was hardly a nursery for intellectuals, it was a hotbed of false values, it harboured an unattractive percentage of small-time crooks and con artists and the chances of being successful there were minimal but it was fascinating and IF YOU WERE LUCKY – it was fun: and anyway – it was better than working’. Now and then they would spend several days together at the San Ysidro ranch near Santa Barbara that Ronald Colman and Al Weingand had turned into a discreet hotel resort for illicit lovers. ‘I thought that would end up in a marriage,’ said Weingand. ‘It was a serious affair, not just a shack-up deal – and we hotel men get to know the difference.’ And Weingand told Morley: ‘It was a very outdoor life and I think David made Merle very happy, taught her not to take anything too seriously.’ They became one of Hollywood’s golden young couples and were welcome at any party or aboard any yacht, and the affair was so hot that it was soon strongly rumoured that they were engaged.

In the meantime Niv began to appear in movies at last, five
in that maiden year of his career. In the first, a murder story entitled
Without Regret
, Goldwyn lent him out to Paramount and he spoke his first line on screen: ‘Goodbye, my dear,’ he said, and that was all. In the second,
Barbary Coast
, the story of a prostitute during the San Francisco gold rush of 1850, he had just one line again, as a cockney sailor who says during a noisy riot ‘orl rite, I’ll go’, but is thrown out of a brothel window into the mud. In his third,
A Feather in Her Hat
, he was farmed out to Columbia and although it was a very small part he had one scene which focused entirely on him as a young life-and-soul-of-the-party poet. He was so nervous that the director, Alfred Santell, quietly asked the rest of the cast and crew to encourage him by breaking into applause after his first take, no matter how bad he was. They did and he glowed with new self-confidence, but he was terrified again when he made his fourth film,
Splendor
. ‘He was terribly nervous and kept coming over to me and reading out his lines and saying, “Do you think that’s all right, old boy?” ’ Morley was told by the film’s male lead, Joel McCrea, who was then thirty, just four years older than Niv, though he had already made more than thirty movies, ‘He kept repeating his most difficult line, which was … “I’d marry her twenty millions if she had two heads and a club foot.” But by the time we got around to shooting that scene, he’d say it so often and was so nervous of the camera that it came out, “I’d marry her club foot.” [
He had
] absolutely no confidence in himself as an actor at all.’ Even so, his performance earned him his first review in a major newspaper, the
New York Times
, which reported that he had acted ‘with poisonous effectiveness’. Finally that year he had a tiny part in MGM’s Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy musical
Rose Marie
, in which he had a whole scene with Jeanette MacDonald as a rich, drunken playboy in vain pursuit of the heroine, and although he was extremely nervous again and completely overshadowed by another newcomer, James Stewart, he had made a start.

To give him some stage experience Goldwyn found a small part for him in a play at the nearby Pasadena Playhouse,
Wedding
, in which he appeared briefly in only three scenes and spoke just two lines in the third, but unfortunately he started boasting about the part and hinting that he had a starring role, and on the opening night he came on stage to a roar of applause and was appalled to see in the front few rows Goldwyn and a horde of his friends, including Gloria Swanson and Charles Laughton. Nervous and terrified, he scuttled back to his dressing room before his next scene, gulped a couple of slugs of whisky, made a mess of his only two lines, was sacked after just one night, and vowed never to appear on the stage again. Goldwyn gave him a rocket and laid him off for his second spell of six unpaid weeks on 22 October – a stern punishment with Christmas just around the corner, though Merle was earning quite enough for the two of them and in due course they celebrated the festive season in style.

At the end of October she had returned from London to New York after two months away from Hollywood during which she had been mobbed by fans at the New York première of
The Dark Angel
and had sailed to England to make two films for Korda that came to nothing. David used his suspension to meet her in New York, where she suggested that instead of taking the train to Los Angeles they should buy a car and drive all the way, 3000 miles. She was by now so famous that when they stopped for the night at an hotel in Chicago she wore dark glasses and a black wig and they called themselves Mr and Mrs Thompson – strangely using her real surname, not his, maybe because she was paying the bill. She had, however, promised to let Goldwyn’s office know where she was each evening in case she were needed urgently, and the desk clerk handed Niv the first of a series of telegrams ordering him to call Los Angeles, but he was having far too much fun and in any case wasn’t he meant to be suspended? He ignored it. More cables arrived, increasingly urgent and angry, as they
crossed the continent, but Niv did not call until they reached California after driving for ten days.

Goldwyn was incandescent. Niv had risked a huge scandal by flaunting his affair with one of Goldwyn’s major stars, a woman whose virginal image Goldwyn had spent a fortune trying to promote. He had broken the usual Hollywood morals clause in his contract which specified that he should do nothing to bring himself, Goldwyn or the studio into disrepute. He had risked jail under the law that made it an imprisonable offence to take a woman from one state to another ‘for immoral purposes’. What if one of Hollywood’s two most famous gossip columnists, Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons, had picked up the story? In a fury Goldwyn fired him but when he calmed down Merle persuaded him to change his mind.

Despite his passion for her, Niv was never the faithful type and while she had been away he had had a couple of flings with other women. He had even had Marlene Dietrich – ‘the most feminine creature I ever knew’ – more than once in his bedroom above the brothel, but only because he was ill and she brought him medicine, cooked his dinner, cleaned his room and changed his bedclothes.

Towards the end of 1935 he was having dinner at the Cocoanut Grove with Loretta Young and Sally Blane when an old sailing friend from Bembridge, Anthony Jenkinson, by now Sir Anthony, came in. ‘He told me, with justifiable pride, that he had acquired a house in Hollywood,’ wrote Jenkinson the following year in his book
America Came My Way
. ‘He had been struggling hard to live down the reputation given it by its last inhabitant, a discharged Russian General, who had apparently caused no little comment by maintaining a harem of Oriental proportions.’ On the next day Jenkinson went to the house – ‘built on a precipitous crag in the heart of the Hollywood hills’ – and found its living room decorated with a photograph of the Stowe 1st XI, a Bembridge Sailing Club burgee, an old copy of
The Tatler
and a squash
racquet. Niv repeated his false biographical details as though they were true: that he had worked in a Canadian lumber camp and had been a captain in the Cuban Rebel Light Infantry, ‘but when hostilities commenced David found, to his chagrin, that his soldiery deserted him on the field of battle, leaving him to face the enemy alone. This he thought it scarcely worth while to do, and accordingly made a hurried departure into the mountains.’ Niv even told Jenkinson that he had met Goldwyn in New York, Goldwyn had urged him to go to Hollywood for a screen test and had given him a part in a film opposite ‘a famous leading lady’. It was all quite untrue.

Merle and Niv spent Christmas Day at a party at Clifton Webb’s house, where Cole Porter played the piano and sang, and New Year’s Eve at the Goldwyns’, and three weeks later they were sparkling again at Carole Lombard’s star-spangled White Mayfair Ball in Beverly Hills. Then it was back to work and he made two quick films: another romantic musical,
Palm Springs Affair
, in which he played a debonair millionaire; and then came his first starring role, albeit in a B-movie to be shown before the main feature, as P. G. Wodehouse’s brainless upper-class English prat Bertie Wooster, in the comedy
Thank You, Jeeves
, which gave him his first real chance to show that he could handle a major part and how good he could be at light comedy. He was ideal for the part and his performance was highly praised by the
New York Times
. Goldwyn then sent him off to Warner Brothers to work with another comparative newcomer, the twenty-six-year-old Australian Errol Flynn, who had become a swashbuckling star the previous year with his seventh film,
Captain Blood
.

The new film was
The Charge of the Light Brigade
, another derring-do adventure story that was very loosely based on the suicidal charge ‘into the valley of death’ by 600 British cavalrymen against the Russian guns at Balaclava in 1854 during the Crimean War. Its director was the aggressive, tyrannical Hungarian Manó Kertész Kaminer, who had
anglicised his name as Michael Curtiz and liked to appear on set wearing riding breeches, boots and carrying a fly whisk. Curtiz, who was forty-nine, was later to direct and win an Oscar for
Casablanca
, but he was deeply disliked by his actors and crews, and renowned for his belligerence as well as his difficulties with the English language. On one occasion he yelled at an assistant, ‘The next time I want an idiot to do this I’ll do it myself!’ But he was impressed when he discovered that Niv had been at Sandhurst and they got on surprisingly well. Best of all, he was to give David the title for his third book nearly forty years later.
The Charge of the Light Brigade
script called for a stampede of riderless horses and when Curtiz yelled ‘Okay! Bring on the empty horses!’ that was it:
Bring on the Empty Horses
.

Niv had met the tall, good-looking, rebellious and randy Errol Flynn briefly at a couple of parties and had disliked him for his aggression and arrogance, but they soon discovered that they shared a delight in booze, women and mischief, and became good friends. They delighted especially in taunting Curtiz, particularly when he mangled the English language, until eventually he bellowed at them, ‘You lousy bums! You think I know fuck nothing! Well, let me tell you: I know fuck
all
!’

They made
The Charge of the Light Brigade
over eleven weeks in the Californian desert and Sierra Nevada mountains around the town of Bishop, 200 miles north of Los Angeles, and years later Flynn told Niv that physically it was the toughest film he had ever made. A week after shooting started the only hotel in town burned down and they spent the rest of the time on location trying to sleep, freezing, in tents. One scene showed a tiger hunt, for which Flynn and Niven had to sit in a basket on top of an elephant, which suddenly ran amok and rushed around trying to dislodge the basket and them by scraping it against trees and walls.