Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (27 page)

In Hollywood Hjördis was nervous of meeting Niv’s famous friends and never felt that the Pink House – where Bob Coote was still living in the guest cottage – was really hers even
though Primmie had never actually lived there. ‘I don’t think I could have gone there if she had ever lived in it,’ she said, and she banished all Primmie’s initialled towels and linen to the guest house and was never completely happy there. She and David soon had their first row, over the position of a chair that she wanted to move, and she shouted at him. He left the room quietly and later she found him in the cellar ‘sadly sorting out some old books’. For the first month of their marriage, she told the
Daily Mail
in 1960, ‘I was terribly sulky and irritable because the excitement of it all had been such a strain that I needed to let off steam and have a really good quarrel. He couldn’t understand this and got more and more frightened by my sulks until in the end he went and sat in the cellar, reading’ – haunted, maybe, by the memory of Primmie and another cellar. Hjördis, with her dark Scandinavian moods, could not have been less like Primmie and he realised it only too soon. As an ex-military man he was also extremely tidy and was soon irritated by her laziness, sleeping late, demanding breakfast in bed, and her habit of leaving her clothes strewn around and the cap off the toothpaste tube. Even so, ‘he always loved Hjördis and treated her wonderfully,’ said Doreen Hawkins.

Eventually she began to relax a little and enjoy the shops, the warmth, and the laid-back barefoot lifestyle. Bob Coote gave her the teasing nickname that Niv was to call her for the rest of his life:
Nej
, pronounced Nay, the Swedish for ‘no’, because she said it all the time. The Astaires befriended her and so did several local Swedes including Greta Garbo and Anita Ekberg. So did Pat Medina, who told me: ‘Hjördis was very nice and fun in the early days and we were good friends.’ The Nivens took tea with Noël Coward and Deborah Kerr, and became close to forty-eight-year-old Humphrey Bogart and his second wife, twenty-three-year-old Lauren Bacall, whose real name was Betty. Bogey had already made
The Maltese Falcon
and
Casablanca
and in 1945 had married Bacall, who had appeared with him in
To Have and Have Not, The Big
Sleep
and
Dark Passage
. ‘The four of us hit it off immediately,’ Betty Bacall told me, ‘and Niv became one of the best friends I’ve ever had and one of the most fun. Their marriage was very happy for the first several years and we always had a great time together. He was marvellous, an irresistible man with an irresistible personality. He, Bogey and I were on the same wavelength, and he was crazy about Bogey. They both loved to laugh and sail – Bogey loved sailing more than anything except me – and there’s been nobody even close to the kind of man Niv was, and the
fun
that he was, and the
funniness
that he was. He was hysterically funny and a flirt and you just wanted to be in his company.’

One piece of fun that Niv concocted with Tyrone Power was a wicked practical joke on Rex Harrison, whose reputation as a randy seducer was possibly greater even than his own. Harrison was married to Lilli Palmer but having an affair with Carole Landis and still constantly on the prowl for other women, so Niv and Power hired two actresses from Central Casting to play a mother and daughter and planted them at a Hollywood party where they knew Harrison had been invited. ‘Sexy Rexy’ was duly mesmerised by the ‘daughter’ and invited to afternoon tea by the ‘mother’, but when he arrived the ‘mother’ had been ‘called away’ and the ‘daughter’ was on her own and seemed keen to know him better – but just as they got down to ‘afternoon tea’ in the living room the ‘mother’ suddenly returned, caught him with his pants down and threatened angrily to ruin his career and his marriage by telling his wife as well as the prim gossip columnists. As Harrison pleaded with her and hopped about trying to pull his trousers on he saw at the window Niven, Power and several other men roaring with laughter. Years later Niv told the actor John Hurt that ‘Harrison had a cock like a chicken’s neck – long, thin and red!’

As soon as Hjördis reached Hollywood her film star looks earned a full-page photograph in London’s
Sketch
magazine that made her look much more glamorous than Niv himself,
and three months later her pensive portrait filled the cover of
Life
magazine to illustrate an article that chose her as one of the ten most beautiful women in Hollywood along with Greta Garbo, Ava Gardner, Jean Simmons and Elizabeth Taylor. Several producers, including David Selznick and Billy Wilder, took one look at her and offered her screen tests. ‘All those guys were saying “you look fabulous, you should be in movies”,’ Betty Bacall told Guy Evans, ‘and she had herself sculpted, and I knew that being a wife was not her! She wanted to have a career and be noticed more.’ Hjördis was sorely tempted by the offers but Niv dissuaded her because ‘one actor in the family is more than enough’, he told her, forgetting that the wives of nearly all his friends were actresses. In later years she resented increasingly his objection to her having her own career and the fact that she always took second place to him, and by marrying him she had undoubtedly lost something of her independent identity. But maybe he knew already that she was a terrible actress and was trying to save her from embarrassment and failure.

His next picture,
Enchantment
, gave him some idea himself of what no longer being the main attraction might be like when he played a disregarded old codger: an English general looking sadly back on a great but doomed romance when he had been young. He disliked the part because his hair was bleached and he had 32lbs of lead weights sewn into his sleeves and trousers so that he would move slowly, and he discovered that old, slow people are ignored even if they are only playing a part. But because the role was serious and so different from his usual parts it gave him another rare chance actually to act, and Goldwyn indulged him by letting him name one of the characters Trubshawe, the general Rollo, and the niece Grizel. It was a static, sentimental, melodramatic picture, not one of his best, but it delivered a touching little love story and David himself was surprisingly good as the old man. Next Goldwyn lent him out again to make yet another poor comedy,
A Kiss in the Dark
, in which he played a gentle
concert pianist whose ruthless agent takes advantage of him until he is saved by the love of a good woman. The
Observer
called it ‘one of the silliest and trashiest stories seen on the screen for many a long day’, and the
News of the World
asked, ‘What on earth are they doing with that fellow’s career?’ It was a question that Niv was asking himself increasingly. Why was Goldwyn putting him in so many dreadful movies? How was he to stop his faltering career sliding into a pit of mediocrity?

The crunch came quickly. Early in May he was told that Goldwyn was lending him out again to Korda to make another epic costume drama, this time about the Scarlet Pimpernel, Sir Percy Blakeney, the fictional English hero who had saved French aristocrats from the guillotine during the French Revolution. The film was going to be made in England and France, and he would have to return to Europe for six months.

Niv went spare. He had only just returned to Hollywood, his new wife and sons were beginning to feel settled, David Jr was five and about to start nursery school, and now he would have to disrupt their lives again and take them back to England. He refused to do it. They had a fierce row during which Goldwyn said he had picked Niv out of the gutter and could dump him back in it, and Niv replied by accusing Goldwyn of making a fortune out of him by lending him to other producers at a vast profit. Goldwyn suspended him without pay. Niv tried to sit it out, and failed. His lifestyle was lavish and he needed the money badly.

Eventually he crawled back to Goldwyn, simmering with resentment, ordering his agent, the Music Corporation of America, to approach Goldwyn with a string of arrogant demands. MCA was appalled: did Niven not realise that Goldwyn could ruin him if he became too difficult? Niven did, but still insisted that Goldwyn should meet fourteen lavish conditions before he would agree to make
The Elusive Pimpernel
. He wanted Goldwyn or Korda to pay return fares
for Hjördis, the boys and the new British nanny, Evelyn Walne, to travel to England by sea, not by air, and fares and living expenses for him and Hjördis when they went to France on location for eight weeks. He wanted a clothes allowance for the boys and the nanny. In England he wanted a house within twenty miles of the studio staffed by ‘a housekeeper, servants, gardener, etc.’. In the autumn he wanted two suites or a flat at Claridge’s Hotel and Goldwyn or Korda pay all the tips. He wanted a car, an entertainment allowance, British ration books, a $100 food parcel to be sent every week from America and cases of Scotch and gin to be sent each month. He even demanded to be paid compensation for the American radio fees that he would not earn by being out of the country for six months.

‘My behaviour during the next few weeks was indicative of an unhinged mind,’ Niv admitted in
The Moon’s a Balloon
. ‘I decided to make life unpleasant for Goldwyn which was tantamount to an eight-year-old with a pea-shooter assaulting Fort Knox.’ By contrast Goldwyn behaved impeccably and agreed to everything that was even remotely reasonable, though he did tell David that he would have to fly to England to start shooting on the scheduled date even if the rest of the family followed by sea. Niv refused. Like some sullen child he seemed to want to goad his father figure beyond endurance so that he would punish him and so prove he loved him. During one row in Goldwyn’s office in July Niv told him he was ruining his career and stormed out. At the end of the month the Nivens went by slow train to New York, slow boat to Liverpool, and slow train to London, where they looked for a furnished flat to rent in Mayfair or Chelsea and Niv told the
Evening News
that he was appalled by the ‘terrific’ prices being asked. ‘For one of them – a very unattractive place – we were asked a rental of £65 a week,’ he complained. ‘I am not a millionaire film star who can pay any fantastic price they care to demand – nor am I a “sucker”. After six years in the Army one hasn’t much left to throw away.’ He complained
to Goldwyn’s representative in London, who cabled Goldwyn: ‘
NIVEN UPSET BY INADEQUATE HOUSING AND REFUSES TO SEE ME UNTIL HIS FAMILY SETTLED
.’ One of Goldwyn’s assistants in Los Angeles sent Niv a placatory cable only to receive an offensive reply threatening legal action and ending: ‘
GOOD LUCK YOU WILL NEED IT
.’ But his masterstroke was yet to come: he cabled Goldwyn to remind him that under his contract he was entitled to six weeks’ holiday a year – and he wanted it now. Goldwyn must have been incandescent, but still he agreed. Niv then became absolutely impossible: he insisted that he wanted to take his holiday in California and that Goldwyn should pay for him and Hjördis to return, once again by boat and train. Korda, in despair, offered to lend him his yacht to go anywhere he chose. Niv refused. This was one of the most impressive, self-destructive sulks of all time.

Astonishingly Goldwyn swallowed his anger and agreed yet again. The Nivens returned slowly to Hollywood at Goldwyn’s expense and Niv then gave him a two-fingered salute by flying thousands of miles back east again the very next day for a long delayed honeymoon in Bermuda, where he rented a tiny two-room cottage on the beach and swam, snorkelled and fished. Goldwyn must have smiled grimly when a vicious hurricane devastated the island a couple of weeks later, but otherwise the honeymoon was idyllic. ‘The more I saw of Hjördis, the more amazed I was at my good fortune,’ Niv wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon
. ‘The luck, the unbelievable luck that one man should meet, fall head-over-heels in love, marry within ten days and be blissfully happy – twice in a lifetime! I revelled in Hjördis’s forthrightness, honesty and laughter and the holiday sped by.’

At the end of six weeks he reported reluctantly back to the studio in Hollywood. Goldwyn refused to see him, understandably, and in later years Niv agreed that he had behaved extremely badly. ‘Conduct such as mine, spoiled brat behaviour of the worst sort, was idiotic, conceited, indefensible and
unforgivable,’ he confessed in
The Moon’s a Balloon
, ‘the sort of thing that helped bring Hollywood to its knees.’ He and Hjördis returned to England at the end of September and went on to France to make some location shots at Mont St Michel on the coast of Brittany for Korda’s long delayed film, which turned out to take even longer to shoot than
Bonnie Prince Charlie
– nearly six months – and to have just as many ridiculous wigs, frills, furbelows and weird stripy costumes. It was also possibly even more absurd than
Bonnie Prince Charlie
. Set in 1792, it was meant to be both funny and exciting but managed to be neither. Niv, as the Pimpernel, was an embarrassingly wooden, unfunny fop, despite all his constant winking and smirking at the camera. Even the usual Niven trademark jokes – a servant called Trubshawe, an aristocrat called the Marquis de Gacher, his mother’s maiden name – no longer seemed amusing. Once again the only consolation was that Jack Hawkins – as a choleric, blustering Prince Regent – and Bob Coote were in it too, right up to the neck. Another member of the cast who would become a good friend later was twenty-six-year-old Patrick Macnee, who was long under the impression that he was Niv’s nephew because his lesbian mother had once had an affair with Max.

The film was not released in Britain until 1949 and the reviewers were scathing. ‘David Niven plays the Scarlet Pimpernel with the sheepish lack of enthusiasm of a tone deaf man called to sing solo in church,’ said David Lewin in the
Daily Express
, and
The Times
warned that ‘film audiences are in danger of forgetting what a really accomplished actor Mr Niven is. Here he makes his first embarrassed entrance like the dame in some nightmare pantomime.’ Goldwyn agreed with the critics. In June 1949 he told Korda: ‘Alex, I think it is the worst picture I have ever seen in my life.’ He demanded huge changes and even more reshooting, and it was not released in the United States, where it was renamed
The Fighting Pimpernel
, until 1955 because Goldwyn refused to stick to his agreement to distribute it since it was so ‘patently
bad’. Korda sued him. Goldwyn sued Korda, and for once Niv agreed with Goldwyn. ‘It was a disastrous flop,’ he said a few years later, but financially it was not a flop at all: the public loved it and it was a huge box-office success.