Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (16 page)

Equally unimpressed by Niv was the powerful head of Columbia Studios, Harry Cohn, whose cabin cruiser, the
Jobella
, broke down in rough seas outside Balboa one Sunday evening and was rescued and towed back into harbour by Flynn and Niven as they returned from their usual weekend trip to Catalina Island. Mischievous as ever, Niv persuaded a lawyer friend to send Cohn a letter claiming salvage rights and one half of the
Jobella
for rescuing him at sea. Cohn was not amused and had Niv blacklisted and barred from the Columbia lot for life – a disaster for a young actor since there were only six major studios in Hollywood. Eventually he went to see Cohn and apologised for the joke, but every time Cohn saw him after that he would draw his hand across his throat like a knife, and Niv never worked again at Columbia until Cohn died twenty years later.

Goldwyn rewarded David for his superb performance in
The Dawn Patrol
by giving him a three-month break in April so that he could return to England for another nostalgic summer holiday. First he went to W. R. Hearst’s last and most lavish fancy dress party before he went bust, this time for three hundred ‘celebrities’ for his seventy-fifth birthday at the Santa Monica beach house – where Niv and Flynn turned up as elephant trainers, wearing peaked caps and carrying shovels and buckets marked ‘SHIT’ – and then he sailed for England, where he visited Stowe and Roxburgh at last as well as Fairford and Bembridge again and joined the smart London club Boodle’s in St James’s before returning to Hollywood at the end of June.

His success in
The Dawn Patrol
and his burgeoning fame inspired a rumour that Niv had been running Goldwyn down and saying that Selznick had done much more for him than Goldwyn. David quickly wrote to Goldwyn at the end of July to deny it. ‘I would like to repeat once more how truly grateful I am to you,’ he wrote, ‘and to inform you that I have never missed an opportunity of broadcasting my gratitude.’ Luckily Goldwyn believed him, and when he gave him more time off to go to New York for several days in October, Niv sent him a telegram that almost trembled with relief. Goldwyn was in fact so confident of his loyalty and talent that he gave him third billing in his next major production,
Wuthering Heights
, after Merle as tormented, demented Cathy Earnshaw and the comparatively unknown thirty-one-year-old Laurence Olivier as her brooding, bitter gipsy stable lad lover, Heathcliff. The film was to be directed by the dreaded William Wyler, who had given Niv such a hard time in
Dodsworth
two years earlier, and he begged Goldwyn not to force him to make the film. Not only did he find Wyler impossible to work with, he also considered that his part, as Cathy’s weak husband Edgar Linton, was an actor’s nightmare because he was so colourless and wimpish. But Merle and Wyler persuaded him to take the part and shooting began in December 1938, when the location scenes were filmed in a part of the San Fernando Valley that resembled the Yorkshire moors of Emily Brontë’s novel once Goldwyn had shipped in and planted a thousand English heather plants.

Wyler turned out to be as tyrannical and sadistic as ever, making Merle and other women in the cast cry and unsettling even Olivier, whose performance was hilariously stagey. ‘Look, Willie,’ said Olivier in despair after shooting and reshooting one scene over and over again. ‘I’ve done it thirty times. I’ve done it
differently
thirty times. Just
tell
me, that’s all:
What do you want me to do
?’

Wyler gazed at him. ‘Just be
better
,’ he said.

It was a tense, unhappy film to make. Merle and Olivier
disliked and mistrusted each other, which made their passionate love scenes deeply unconvincing, and each walked off the set at times vowing not to return. Olivier had just embarked on a hot affair with the beautiful twenty-five-year-old English actress Vivien Leigh, who was about to land the plum part of Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone With the Wind
, and he sneered that Merle was just ‘a little pick-up by Korda’ and jeered at some pockmarks that she had on her face after she had contracted a mild case of smallpox as a child in India. She in turn complained several times in front of the crew that he kept spitting in her face during their love scenes. Eventually he shouted at her, ‘Why, you amateur little bitch! What’s a spit for Christsake between actors, you bloody little idiot? How dare you speak to me like that?’ and she burst into tears. She tried to renew her affair with David and was upset when he was not keen. As for Goldwyn, he kept interfering and ranted and raved so much that at one point he shrieked that Olivier was the ugliest actor he had ever seen. ‘He’s a mess,’ he howled, ‘dirty, unkempt, stagey, hammy and awful,’ and he was furious when Wyler took a fortnight longer to finish shooting and spent $100,000 more than Goldwyn had planned.

David did have one little bit of fun when he called one of Edgar’s ferocious dogs ‘Trubshawe’ – a jest that he was to repeat in one form or another in almost every film he made over the next few years – though Wyler cut the line before it reached the screen. And he took a small revenge on Wyler in the film’s final scene, when Cathy was dead, surrounded by mourners, and Niv had to sob at the end of her bed. It was such a ludicrous scene that everyone except Wyler was hysterical with suppressed mirth, and try as he did, Niv could not sob, so Wyler ordered the prop man to puff menthol into his eyes and suddenly a stream of green slime slid out of David’s nose. ‘Oooh! How
horrid
!’ cried Merle, jumping out of her deathbed and bolting towards her dressing room. More than twenty years later, when Niv met the English writer and
director Bryan Forbes and told him the story, Forbes found it so funny that from then on Niv signed his letters to him ‘Slimey’. ‘Niv always called the film
Withering Tights
,’ Forbes told me, ‘and thought his performance in it was an abysmal embarrassment.’

One happy result of
Wuthering Heights
was that Niv and Olivier became friends. ‘He was a great joy to be with on that film,’ Olivier told Morley, ‘because we both started it with a deep hatred of Willie Wyler.’ Less affectionately he added, ‘David was always a lightweight, but I think that was probably why we got on so well, because I was no threat to him and he was no threat to me. He couldn’t have done a stage classic to save his life, but he had enormous charm and he was very sincere and very good as Edgar, which is a terrible part.’ Today the film seems absurdly raucous, melodramatic and overacted, especially by Olivier, but at the time it was generally considered to be a classic – except by the caustic Graham Greene – and David was widely praised for managing against all the odds to make Edgar seem warm, human and not nearly as wet as he was in the novel, though his upper lip did look decidedly trembly without a moustache.

The film raised his profile and self-confidence to such an extent that he started making freelance radio programmes for the Lux Radio Theatre without Goldwyn’s permission. By his own later admission he began to get big-headed and to resent the fact that Goldwyn was renting him out to make films for other studios for much more than he was paying him and was making a big profit out of him. He heard that Warner Brothers had paid Goldwyn $175,000 to rent him for
The Dawn Patrol
at a time when Goldwyn was paying him $500 a week, and he consulted the leading Hollywood agent Leland Hayward, who agreed that Goldwyn was making a fortune out of him and promised to make him pay much more. Goldwyn was furious that Niv had consulted an agent behind his back and planted a story in Louella Parsons’s daily gossip column in the
Los Angeles Examiner
that reported that
success had gone to Niv’s head so badly that he was now cutting old friends dead and impossible to work with, and just before Christmas Goldwyn sent Niv a long telegram that was tinged with the regret of a father who was deeply hurt and disappointed by the greed and disloyalty of a favourite son. ‘
IF YOU ARE UNHAPPY AND DISSATISFIED BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT GETTING ENOUGH MONEY I AM ALWAYS AVAILABLE TO SEE ANYONE WHO HAS CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATIONS WITH ME
,’ said the cable. ‘
YOU DID NOT THINK YOU WERE NOT A GOOD ENOUGH BUSINESS MAN TO TALK TO ME WHEN YOU MADE YOUR FIRST CONTRACT NOR DID YOU THINK THAT I WAS A BETTER BUSINESS MAN WHEN I CHANGED MY CONTRACT AND GAVE YOU MORE MONEY … DAVID, GET ON TO YOURSELF AND REMEMBER THAT I HAVE DONE MORE FOR YOU THAN MR HAYWARD
.’

Goldwyn banned Hayward from the studio and demanded half of all Niv’s radio earnings, even though he was entitled to it all under their contract, but Niv was so peeved that when the next radio sponsor gave him one of its hampers filled with cheese, spreads and sardines, childishly he cut everything in half, even the hamper, and sent half to Goldwyn. Goldwyn suspended him for several weeks for his cheek but in February gave him a generous new seven-year contract that increased his salary immediately from $650 to $750 a week, with further regular increases every year that would bring him up to $2250 a week in 1945. He also agreed to give Niv star billing in every film from now on, four weeks’ paid holiday a year, and a huge suite on the lot that he said David could have redecorated just as he wished. Niv had finally made it big. After just four years in Hollywood he had become a major star. ‘
DAVID NIVEN COMES INTO HIS OWN
’ said the headline in
Picturegoer
magazine in March over a glowing two-page article in which Max Breen wrote: ‘It has seemed to me, from the moment I first saw him on the screen … that he had all it takes, and more [
with
] a great deal of charm, and an acting skill beyond the ordinary …
Dawn Patrol
has given him his long-delayed start. Now watch him fly!’

Goldwyn immediately gave him the male lead in
Bachelor Mother
, the first of his films where his name appeared above the title. His pretty female co-star was twenty-six-year-old Ginger Rogers, who was taking a break from her musical dancing partnership with Fred Astaire to make a straight comedy for a change, and David was so excited about his new exalted status that he drove all around Los Angeles photographing the huge billboard posters of himself looking harassed and nursing a baby. The film told an amusing story about how David – playing a charming playboy – and Ginger, playing a shop assistant, are wrongly assumed to be the unmarried parents of a child that she has found outside an orphanage and end up getting married because of it. It is a delightfully jolly and sweet movie – warm, witty and light-hearted – and was widely applauded as being the best comedy of the year, and when eventually it opened in America at the end of June and in England at the beginning of September, just days before the start of the Second World War, it was hailed as a wonderfully cheerful tonic at a dark moment in history when there was very little to smile about. Trubshawe undoubtedly smiled when he saw it, for in it Niv makes Ginger pretend that she is Swedish and speaks no English, tells her to say ‘thank you’ in Swedish, and she says ‘Trubshawe’. The
New York Times
said that the film was ‘hilarious’ and Niv was ‘perfect’, the
New York Post
reckoned that this was the best performance of his career, and in London the
Observer
reported that ‘he is growing, film by film, into one of the best romantic comedians in the cinema. He has that light touch, combined with a bewildering courtesy and a faintly dog-like look of sadness, that endears young actors to audiences.’

‘My head expanded so much it practically became top heavy,’ Niv told Clive Hirschhorn of the
Sunday Express
years later. ‘I was so damn conceited … at last I was a big star and I positively revelled in it … I honestly came to believe the publicity handouts they were writing about me.’ He co-starred
again with Loretta Young in his next film,
Eternally Yours
, but it was a silly little comedy in which he was cast weirdly as ‘The Great Arturo’, a hypnotist who says at one stage ‘take a cigarette and give it to Miss Trubshawe’.

By now Goldwyn was planning to remake a 1930 Ronald Colman film about a stylish English gentleman thief and first-class cricketer, A. J. Raffles, and Niv was desperate to play the part, but Goldwyn punished his cockiness by keeping him on tenterhooks and cast him instead with Gary Cooper in an adventure story,
The Real Glory
, and ordered his latest signing, the up-and-coming thirty-year-old Dana Andrews, who had yet to make his first film, to follow David around while he was making it, accompanied by Goldwyn’s official photographer and wearing a white tie and tails, just like Raffles, to remind Niv that even he was expendable if he got too big-headed. Niv kept his nerve and produced an acclaimed performance in
The Real Glory
, in which he played an Irish lieutenant who leads the defence of a fort against an attack by terrorists during a savage revolt against the American army in the Philippines in 1906 but dies heroically at the end. He was ‘charming’ said the
New Statesman
, ‘waggish’ according to the
New York Times
, and even Graham Greene agreed in the
Spectator
that he was ‘sparkling’.

Perhaps Niv’s new star status finally persuaded Merle Oberon to give him up as a lost cause, for she sailed to England in March, went to the French Riviera with Alexander Korda for a preview of his latest film,
The Four Feathers
, and married him in June in Antibes, even though at forty-five he was eighteen years older than she.

Goldwyn finally relented and gave David the part of Raffles, a part that was absolutely made for him, and in July Niv wrote a revealing eight-page letter to Roxburgh that was bursting with pride, humility, flattery and exclamation marks. ‘I am at a rather tricky time in my strange career,’ he wrote.