Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (15 page)

David’s problems with the ‘yellow press’ were often his own fault because he was not always as discreet about his love life as he should have been. Max sent him a novel Christmas present that year, a letter telling him that he was giving him his body back after redeeming it from the hospital to which David had sold it for £6 10s Od in 1933, and now that Niv owned his body again he decided to share it as often as possible with a lovely twenty-six-year-old blonde American actress, Helen Briggs, whose screen name was Virginia Bruce. They began an affair in January, the newspapers were quick to report that they were engaged and he admitted that he
was ‘no longer engaged’ to Merle – so they
had
been engaged – and did not deny that he might now be engaged to Virginia. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he blustered.

But Virginia was just one of many girlfriends in 1937. ‘There were a lot of women whom he nearly married in the 1930s,’ Jack Hawkins’s widow Doreen told me. ‘They were all
crazy
about him, even Norma Shearer,’ who emerged from her mourning later in the year and was seen so often having dinner and dancing with Niv that the newspapers speculated about them too. Niv’s philandering was freer than ever because Flynn’s wife had moved in with him at 601 North Linden Drive and Niv had moved out to live on his own in a bungalow at 8425 De Longpre Avenue, where one of his neighbours was the thirty-eight-year-old movie leading lady Kay Francis, who was resting between her fourth and fifth husbands. One night she telephoned him at midnight, very agitated. ‘Please come quickly!’ she gasped. ‘There’s a man in my living room and I can’t get him out!’ Niv went to her house just up the street and found her standing terrified behind a sofa facing a huge man in a black overcoat who turned out to be the Duke of Sutherland, who had thought that Kay Francis’s house was a brothel owned by
Lee
Francis.

While Niv was sowing his oats in Hollywood, 1937 was not a happy year for Merle in London. She bought a big Georgian house in York Gate, hired four servants and made secret visits to her mother, who was ill with high blood pressure and diabetes and living in a residential hotel. Merle had always looked after her mother financially and paid all her bills, but the old lady was still distraught that she would not let her live with her because of the colour of her skin: ‘Look at my brown hand in your white hand,’ she said one day to her friend Sally Sutherland. ‘That’s the reason I can’t be with my Queenie,’ and the tears slid down her face. Shooting began on
I, Claudius
in February but the film was never finished, partly because Korda, Laughton and Merle all had doubts about it, and partly because in March she had a bad car crash
in London that left her concussed, badly cut over her left eye and ear, and covered with blood. Niv telephoned from Los Angeles, concerned, but she needed four weeks of convalescence, by which time Laughton’s contract had almost expired and the film was abandoned. A couple of weeks later her mother died. Merle buried her in an unmarked grave and had a portrait painted of a white woman with blue eyes who she later told friends was her mother. For her 1937 was horrible, but for Niv it was to be the year that he began seriously to climb the ladder to stardom.

Five

A Circus Going on Inside
1937–1939

K
ing Edward VIII abdicated the British throne on 10 December 1936 and David Selznick decided to remake the silent movie classic
The Prisoner of Zenda
to star Ronald Colman as King Rudolph V in a thinly disguised commentary on the abdication. Colman persuaded Selznick to cast Niv as his aide-de-camp, Captain Fritz von Tarlenheim, though Niv later claimed that he got the part only because Selznick won him from Goldwyn in a game of cards. The film was packed with established stars: Madeleine Carroll, Mary Astor, Raymond Massey, C. Aubrey Smith and a grinning, mischievous, chain-smoking Douglas Fairbanks Jr, who would soon become another close Niven chum. The director, John Cromwell, wanted Niv to play his part straight but when Selznick saw the rushes he decided that David was not good enough and would have to be replaced until Niv suggested that he should play the part for laughs, tried one scene his way, with a jaunty flashing smile and a glint of mischief, and both Selznick and Cromwell decided he was perfect. The result was easily his best performance so far. The film itself drags tediously but in it Niv is handsome, sexy, amused and amusing, and quite as charming and debonair as Colman, and he began at last to enjoy the trappings of stardom and for the first time was allowed to choose his own stand-in.

The movie took four months to film and had its moments of drama, notably when Massey’s huge black stallion tried during the coronation scene to mount Niv’s mare while he
was on her back. This delighted Fairbanks, who was as keen on practical jokes as his father, and he and David spiked the extras’ bowl of fruit punch in the hope of livening them up. The reviewers generally considered that Niv was pretty good in the film and it raised his profile so considerably that Goldwyn was able to rent him to Twentieth Century-Fox to play his first starring part in a main A-movie feature,
Dinner at the Ritz
, with the up-and-coming French actress Suzanna Charpentier, whose screen name was Annabella and who was to marry his friend Tyrone Power two years later. It was a romantic murder story set in Paris, London and the French Riviera in which he played a smooth undercover detective who tracks down a gang of swindlers, and he sailed to England on the
Normandie
in July to shoot it at Denham Studios. It was his first trip home in four years and he persuaded Goldwyn to give him two months’ leave once the film was finished so that he could make the most of that English summer. Trubshawe, who was now the squire of Barton Hall in Norfolk and the father of two little girls, met the ship at Southampton and persuaded him to open his village fête and play cricket for his village team. ‘He wasn’t at all spoilt by the beginnings of his success,’ Trubshawe told Morley. ‘He was tickled pink by it and only terrified that it was all too good to be true and might disappear overnight.’ Niv stayed with friends near Ascot, looked up others, saw Merle for the first time in eight months and visited many of his old haunts. He went to the Fairford carnival, Bembridge, and stalking in Scotland, but his hopes of seeing Stowe and Roxburgh were in vain because the school was closed for the holidays, and he was disconcerted when he walked into one of his London clubs and was greeted by an elderly member who remarked, ‘Good God, Niven, we haven’t seen you for a week or two. Where’ve you been?’

‘In America, sir. Making pictures.’

‘Pictures? Watercolours?’

Dinner at the Ritz
was given lukewarm reviews but the
New
York Times
reckoned that David was one of its few virtues and it was the first of many films in which his performance was generally considered to be much better than the film itself. At the end of September he sailed back to New York on the
Queen Mary
, once again denying persistent newspaper reports that he and Merle were going to marry, and his Hollywood friends were delighted to have him back. He spent a weekend at Eddie Goulding’s desert home at Palm Springs and was startled to find in the swimming pool the fabulously mysterious Swedish superstar Greta Garbo standing naked in the shallow end. Garbo seems to have made a habit of surprising men in swimming pools in the nude: in later years Niv told journalists that when the Earl of Warwick borrowed Goulding’s house, he once ran out and dived naked into the pool, surfacing in the middle cosily chest-to-chest with a topless Garbo. Niv stayed with Ronnie Colman at his San Ysidro ranch, played tennis with Fred Astaire, and enjoyed another lavish weekend with Hearst and Marion Davies at San Simeon, though Hearst, now seventy-four, was heading for bankruptcy with debts said to be $126 million.

Goldwyn rented David out again immediately for three months to Paramount to make
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife
, a comedy in which Gary Cooper played a seven-times-married American millionaire, Claudette Colbert an aristocratic French gold-digger, and Niv one of her admirers, a smooth young French bank clerk. His part was tiny but the director, the froglike little Ernst Lubitsch, who was to become one of his favourites, gave him some advice about playing comedy that he treasured for the rest of his life: ‘Nobody should try to play comedy,’ said Lubitsch, ‘unless they have a circus going on inside.’ In
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife
, however, the circus had left town and the film is embarrassingly slow, laboured and unfunny. Cooper was cringingly wooden, Colbert deeply irritating, and Niv did little more than look handsome and pull a few comic faces. Undeterred – or unaware – that he had made a bummer, Lubitsch arranged
an early private screening of it after a Hollywood dinner party where Charlie Chaplin gave Niv some more excellent advice: ‘Don’t be like the majority of actors. Don’t just stand around waiting your turn to speak –
learn to listen
.’

Unfortunately Goldwyn was beginning to think that Niv was becoming just a bit too cocky and big-headed. ‘He was fast becoming a star,’ Claudette Colbert told Morley, ‘and Goldwyn was already getting irritable with him. “The trouble with that young man”, he once said to me, “is that his body has gone to his head,” ’ though she added, ‘I never saw much sign of that. On
Bluebeard
he was divine, very funny and behaved extremely well.’ But Niv was indeed so well known by now even in England that Roxburgh asked him if he could use his name to endorse a new fund to raise money for Stowe. David was delighted and replied, ‘Please use my name for that or any other reason at any time (except anything to do with the School Certificate!).’

He saw in the New Year at the Californian mountain resort of Lake Arrowhead with Ronnie Colman, Bill Powell, George Cukor and Loretta Young, who was persuading Twentieth Century-Fox to cast him opposite her in her next film,
Four Men and a Prayer
. Back in California he enjoyed yet another Hearst weekend at San Simeon and then spent six weeks on the nursery slopes of a new ski resort at Sun Valley in Idaho for his first lessons in skiing, a sport that was to fill his later years when he lived in Switzerland. While he was at Sun Valley, Norma Shearer telephoned and sounded still so lonely more than a year after Thalberg’s death that Niv invited her to join him and introduced her to Marti Arrougé, a ski instructor twelve years younger than she who was to become her second husband.

Back in Hollywood Niv moved out of the house in De Longpre Avenue and into one of Marion Davies’s guest cottages at the huge Hearst ‘beach house’ at 445 Ocean Front Road at Santa Monica, which he rented with the twenty-eight-year-old English actor Robert Coote and a young Australian
fortune hunter, Walter Kerry Davis, who was in California looking for a rich wife. Davis’s hunt for a bride was so unsuccessful that he was often unable to pay his share of the rent, but the three young men got on extremely well and became so renowned for their drunken parties that Carole Lombard christened the house ‘Cirrhosis by the Sea’, a name that they painted on a board and put up outside the house. Flynn stayed with them whenever his marriage went through yet another crisis, Doug Fairbanks Jr moved in as well when his father threw him out of his house further down the beach, the witty writer and actor Robert Benchley was a regular visitor, and Cary Grant lived in the same road, at number 1018, a house that William Hearst Jr said was ‘a bachelor’s paradise [
with
] girls running in and out of there like a subway station’. It was also a house where David embarked on another lifelong friendship when he met Noël Coward there again in March. Fairbanks, Niven and Benchley once played a wicked practical joke on the fifty-year-old English actor Roland Young when he was suffering from overwork and exhaustion after making five films in one year: they persuaded him to have some treatment from a woman osteopath who turned up in a white uniform and carrying a medical kit but was in fact a prostitute. ‘The joke was ruined,’ Fairbanks wrote in his autobiography, ‘when, like so many idiotic schoolboys, we sought to spy on the two of them and Bob Benchley began to choke out loud with laughter, thus giving the game away. We happy few thoroughly enjoyed each other’s companionship for months.’

Niv was briefly involved in a disastrous film with Merle and Gary Cooper,
The Cowboy and the Lady
, from which every one of his scenes was eventually cut, but he enjoyed making
Four Men and a Prayer
with Loretta Young, not least because it was directed by John Ford, who was to become his favourite director. Ford was also an accomplished fellow practical joker and on Niv’s twenty-eighth birthday Ford gave him the day off and told him to go out, enjoy himself and get really drunk,
and he and Flynn embarked on a monumental pub crawl, boozing in one joint after another until dawn. At 8 a.m. he reported to the studio as usual and was staggered when Ford accused him angrily of being smashed and made a formal complaint to the head of the studio, Darryl Zanuck. Zanuck and a wake of underlings steamed on to the set, looking furious, and ordered Niv to prove he was sober by playing a scene dressed in a doctor’s white coat, from the pocket of which he was told to withdraw a stethoscope. He groped drunkenly in the pocket and was horrified to pull out a large snake, which he flung on the floor. Then he was ordered to open a first aid box that produced a colony of little green turtles which he threw into the air with a yell. ‘Print it!’ bellowed Ford with glee, and he was to show the film at parties for years to come.

In
Four Men and a Prayer
Niv had a straight role for a change as one of the four sons of a murdered British colonel who are determined to prove that he was not guilty of causing the deaths of some of his men. Another of the sons was played by Richard Greene, a twenty-year-old newcomer from England who felt that Niv was jealous of him and resented his being given bigger billing and a better part. ‘I always felt he was watching me rather too closely,’ Greene told Morley, ‘and I remember an ambitious, calculating and very sober man who for some reason wanted to appear to be a cavalier drinker. Behind all that bonhomie and the endless anecdotes and good cheer, there seemed to be a sort of nervousness, as though he was trying to estimate the opposition you might represent to his career. There was always a sting in that tail, and one never really found out what was going on behind the grin.’ Niv really had no need to be jealous because
Variety
said that he was ‘the best in the cast’ and he was signed up immediately by Twentieth Century-Fox for another romantic comedy with Loretta Young,
Three Blind Mice
, about three hard-up sisters who move to Santa Barbara in search of wealthy husbands. David played a penniless playboy pretending
to be rich, and although the film was pretty poor his next,
The Dawn Patrol
, was a triumph that was at last to make him an undoubted star after just four years in Hollywood.

It was a very English remake of a 1930 film about the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, a sad, moving yet stirring anti-war movie, directed by Eddie Goulding, in which Niv co-starred with Flynn, who played the ebullient Captain Courtney to Niv’s boozy, happy-go-lucky Lieutenant Scott. Goulding told Niv excitedly that the role of Scott was ‘the best part ever written for an actor’ and Niv agreed. ‘It was a marvellous part,’ he said, and he played it to perfection as the drunken but brave, jaunty and sensitive fighter pilot who is appalled by the waste of young lives as wave after wave of boyish Englishmen with only a few hours’ flying experience are sent up into battle against German air aces. It was a powerful, provocative film and particularly poignant because when it was made in 1938 another terrible world war was just over a year away. The reviewers were ecstatic and said that he was better than Flynn and Basil Rathbone even though they were excellent too. In England the
New Statesman
raved that ‘David Niven emerges as a deeply sensitive, natural actor as well as a potential star of great magnitude’, and his performance was so good that Warner Brothers signed him to play the lead in
The African Queen
, Charlie Allnut, opposite Bette Davis but she fell out with the producer, the picture was cancelled, and it was not made until twelve years later with Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart. When Bogart won an Oscar for it and Niv told him how he had nearly played the part himself, Bogart said unsympathetically, ‘Kid, you would have stunk up the screen in that part.’

Even now not everyone was impressed by David. Another actor in
The Dawn Patrol
, Peter Willes, who had been with him at Stowe, accused him of ignoring him and told Morley that Niv ‘was an extremely mean and deeply heartless figure. I think perhaps his real tragedy was having less heart than anyone I ever knew … I was always surprised all through his
life by the contrast between the genial public image and the darker private reality … He had a ruthless instinct for survival and self-preservation, and the people he liked best were almost always the ones who could do him a bit of good. There was an odd sort of insecurity always hanging over him, and he often seemed frightened of wasting his charm on the wrong people – as though it was all he had, and it might one day run out.’