Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (20 page)

In April 1942 David began to help plan the biggest commando operation of the war, a raid on the German-occupied French port of Dieppe. Inspired by Montgomery and the Chief of Combined Operations, the future Admiral Lord Mountbatten, whom Niv came to know well, it envisaged an attack across the English Channel by 6000 Canadian and British soldiers who would capture Dieppe, hold the town for twelve hours, take prisoners and secret documents, and retreat across the Channel again. As one of Montgomery’s 5th Corps officers, Niv had to assign men from Phantom for this dangerous mission, knowing that many would never return. ‘He told me about one particularly hard decision that he had to make,’ the British actor John Hurt, who became a friend many years later recalls Niven telling him: ‘ “I had two radio operators who were excellent but the better one, the best in the regiment, was married with three children.” He chose his best man, and he didn’t come back, and Niv always felt that he should have chosen the other feller who didn’t have a family, but he said “those were the sort of decisions you had to make all the time. They prey on you and never leave your dreams.” He intimated that there were many other
examples of hard decisions that he had to make, and he had to write all the letters to families when people died.’

The Dieppe Raid was a disaster. It was launched at dawn on 19 August and for more than eight hours on that hot summer day the invaders were massacred as they tried desperately to land on the pebbly beach. Niv’s radio operator was one of 1027 commandos, mostly Canadians, who were killed that day. Hundreds more were wounded and 2340 captured, so that fewer than a third returned home, which explained why Niv hated to talk about the war after it was over. ‘There are too many dead men looking over my shoulder,’ he said.

But in the midst of death there was also life, and in north London on 15 December 1942 Primmie gave birth to their first son at the Royal Northern Hospital in Upper Holloway a few days before it was hit by a bomb that killed twelve children. They called him David – an unwise decision that Niv came to regret because it cast a long shadow of comparison over the boy in later life. They named him in full David William Graham, and minutes after the birth Niv sent a telegram to Roxburgh that arrived at Stowe within the hour and read: ‘
SON BORN 9.30 THIS MORNING PLEASE PUT HIM DOWN FOR GRAFTON BOTH DOING WELL FATHER DOING EVEN BETTER
.’ Hoppy allowed him to spend each night with Primmie in hospital and every evening he borrowed a motorbike, donned a steel helmet and rode from Richmond across London in the blackout, with bombs exploding on all sides and ack-ack guns pounding away at the German aircraft, to sleep on the floor at her side until she and the baby returned home to Dorney.

By now Niv had become almost an official public relations man for Britain and the army, was sent north to Glasgow on a recruiting drive to shake hands and make speeches, and on 14 January 1943 he was seconded to the army’s director of PR to come up with ideas for another morale-boosting film, this time to extol the glories of the army rather than the RAF. This did not prevent him having to join the 2nd Motor
Training Battalion for more dreary manoeuvres on Dartmoor, where he kept ‘A’ Squadron on its toes by making the men live for three days off the land without any food or water. There was a brief flurry of excitement when the navy sought help to deal with some German E-boats, and he and the squadron spent several nights at sea with their anti-tank rifles but found nothing, though the cook lost his teeth overboard.

Niv still had plenty of time for a home life with Primmie and baby David, and at weekends, when they were not hobnobbing at Ditchley Park with the Trees, Churchill and Eden they were enjoying parties at Dorney and in the villages nearby. Many of his friends lived in the vicinity so as to be close to Denham Studios – Noël Coward, the Millses, Olivier and Vivien Leigh – and they gathered regularly in each other’s houses, bringing their own food and drink because of rationing. ‘I remember that once there was a ring at the doorbell,’ Sir John Mills told me, ‘and there was a soldier in full battle-dress and a gas mask, a bayonet on the rifle, and it was Niven. He kept doing that sort of thing. He was a great chum and we never stopped laughing. And we all adored Primmie. She was a lovely person and they were a very happy couple. Whenever he told a story she’d roar with laughter even though she must have heard it lots of times already.’

That spring Niv went off on another PR trip, this time to the Midlands for a week to make cheerful speeches in tank and armament factories, and in April the army released him yet again, this time for nine months, to make another morale-boosting propaganda film,
The Way Ahead
. Major J. E. Dulley took over ‘A’ Squadron and Niv was never to return to Phantom.
The Way Ahead
was to be directed by Captain Carol Reed and written by Major Niven, Major Eric Ambler, and a twenty-one-year-old playwright, Private Peter Ustinov, who had just had his first success in the theatre with a play called
House of Regrets
– ‘Best Play of the War’ said the
Daily Mail
– and was now attached to the Army Kinematograph Service. Under army regulations the only way that a private could
work closely with officers was for him to be a servant, or ‘batman’, to one of them, and Ustinov was duly appointed David’s batman. At first Goldwyn was reluctant to let Niv make another film without a percentage and some control over it. ‘
FACT THAT YOU HAVE BEEN IN ONLY ONE PICTURE IN FOUR YEARS MAKES IT MOST IMPORTANT THAT YOU BE PRESENTED PROPERLY IN ANY PICTURE
,’ he cabled. ‘
AM VERY FOND OF YOU DAVID AND WANT TO HELP BUT CAN LET YOU GO INTO PICTURE ONLY ON TERMS OF MY OFFER STOP WARMEST REGARDS SAM GOLDWYN
.’

Eventually the company making the movie, Two Cities Films, forced Goldwyn to give way by paying him $100,000 and threatening that if he did not release Niv the British army would simply order him to do as he was told. Niv, Ambler and Ustinov were given a room at the Ritz Hotel in London to work every day on the script, and to make life easier for Ustinov Niv gave him a sleeping-out pass that said ‘This man may go anywhere and do anything at his discretion in the course of his duty’, which deeply upset the first military policeman who stopped Ustinov afterwards. ‘I showed him my pass,’ Ustinov told me, ‘and he said, “Lucky bastard! I’ve never seen one of these before.
And
you got his fuckin’ autograph!” ’ The unusual set-up at the Ritz appealed to David’s schoolboy sense of humour and whenever a senior officer approached the room Niv would hiss ‘Cave-ee!’ and Ustinov would swiftly pretend to be doing something batmanlike, such as polishing David’s belt.

Niv and Ambler had much more money than Ustinov and often rang room service to order a round of drinks, paying vast Ritz prices, which embarrassed Ustinov because he was earning only fourteen shillings a week and could not afford to reciprocate. To raise some money to buy his round occasionally he sold the only valuable thing he owned, a Derain nude, to a dealer for £60 (about £1500 today). Years later he saw the painting again, by now extremely valuable, hanging on a wall in Niv’s house in Hollywood. ‘The best bargain of
my life,’ said David breezily. ‘I bought it off a dealer for £65 when we were all working at the Ritz.’

Apart from the script for
The Way Ahead
Niv was also the technical adviser for a War Office instructional film about a gun,
The Seventeen-Pounder
, that was being made in London’s Soho by Publicity Picture Productions, one of whose employees, the son of a London policeman, was a fifteen-year-old, £2-a-week teaboy, gofer and trainee animator, Roger Moore, who was to become many years later one of Niv’s closest friends and to star on TV as the Saint and in the cinema as James Bond. ‘I didn’t want to be an actor then,’ Sir Roger told me in Monaco. ‘I wanted to be an architect or an artist, and I remember the great excitement when he came to visit. I stood around with my mouth open just looking at him on the other side of the office, and the girls were all fainting – and a few of the boys!’

In June 1943 Leslie Howard died when his plane was shot down by two German fighters over the bay of Biscay just as Goldwyn’s Americanised version of
The First of the Few
opened in the USA under the title
Spitfire
, but despite all the time that Goldwyn said he had spent trying to improve the film, he wrote to Niv on 2 August:

Goldwyn’s offer of financial help was typically generous and his letters to Niv throughout the 1930s and 1940s read as though they were written by a very fond uncle to his nephew. The letter ended, ‘I am looking forward to the time when you will be coming back to this country, and we can make some really fine pictures together. Good luck to you, and God bless you. Affectionately, Sam.’

Niv’s part in
The Way Ahead
was indeed an excellent one and some believe that the film was the best he ever made. Filming started in August on Salisbury Plain and at Denham Studios, and he played the part of a kind, gentle, genteel young British officer just after the retreat from Dunkirk whose job was to mould a shambolic group of unlikely recruits into a finely honed team of fighting men. He puts them through a tough training programme and sails with them to North Africa to harry Rommel’s army after the Battle of El Alamein where they prove at last that they have indeed become fine soldiers. The soldiers were played by some excellent actors – William Hartnell, Stanley Holloway, Raymond Huntley, John Laurie – and Ustinov was the splendidly irritable French owner of a flyblown café in Tunisia. It was a deeply patriotic, inspiring and moving film that can still send shivers down a British spine when the soldiers sing evocative wartime songs such as ‘Lily of Laguna’, Tessie O’Shea breaks into ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’, and Niv leads a final resolute bayonet advance into the dust and smoke of battle. Today the film leaves a residue of deep regret that the characters of Britain and the British have changed so drastically since then, and many of the performances in it, including David’s, were excellent.

Niv’s pleasure in making another film at last was marred in September by the news that Hoppy Hopkinson, who had risen to become a major-general and CO of the Glider-Borne Brigade of the 1st Airborne Division, had been killed by a sniper while leading his men into an attack on a German position at Taranto in Italy, but in November Niv, Ustinov
and the rest of the cast sailed for the Mediterranean themselves aboard the troopship
The Monarch of Bermuda
to shoot the location scenes in Algeria and Tunisia. They returned to England via Cairo, where Max was also an army major, had just been visited by Doug Fairbanks, and had ridden with him to the Sphinx and the pyramids on camels. Max was possibly even more mischievous than his brother, and as his camel was led away – ‘rolling this way and that,’ wrote Fairbanks in his war memoir – Max ‘shouted for all to hear, “If this keeps up, I’ll have an
orgasm
!” ’ Afterwards, in true Niven tradition, he took Fairbanks to an Egyptian brothel.

Back in England at the end of November, Niv was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and wrote to Goldwyn’s assistant Bill Hebert in Los Angeles: ‘I really am rather happy about it as this is a
real Colonel
in the Field Army and not a sort of “prop” one like so many people from Hollywood have become. After volunteering in 1939 I have served the whole time with the field forces and have held every rank from Second-Lieutenant up.’ He added over-optimistically,

He concluded by reporting that ‘my small son, David Jr., is a terrifying human being. He is now eleven months and walks, whistles through his five teeth, bites his mother, roars with laughter all day long and looks faintly Japanese. However, we both think he is the greatest thing on earth.’

Niv’s promotion was to give him a suitable rank to sit in on briefings with the American commander-in-chief, General Eisenhower, Monty and other senior officers who were planning the invasion of Europe, and in January he was appointed a high-powered PRO as Assistant to the Director of Broadcasting Services at SHAEF, Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe. There he was to work directly for the American General Ray Barker as a liaison officer to oil the wheels of the great alliance against Hitler and prevent friction and misunderstandings between the British, Americans, Canadians, French and Poles when finally they invaded Europe in June. ‘He was a
very
distinguished colonel,’ I was told by the British actor Patrick Macnee, who was to star in the TV series
The Avengers
. ‘He used to come into the Ivy restaurant in full uniform and women looked at him as if it was God turning up.’