Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (28 page)

Despite Niv’s complaints about London property prices he could still afford to rent a hugely expensive house in Westminster for two months at 23 Chester Street, which had a drawing room big enough for a hundred guests and was lavishly furnished with Chippendale, Sheraton and Queen Anne furniture, Van Dyck paintings, and Hjördis’s bedroom had a gilt bed and an old carved mantelpiece topped with pink marble. In London he caught up with many old friends, among them the Duke of Edinburgh, whom he met for dinner on 27 November 1948, two weeks after the birth of his first child, Prince Charles, when they joined twenty-two fellow members of the Thursday Club, a regular dining club. ‘Niv and Doug Fairbanks were among the “Beards” who helped to cover up Prince Philip’s dalliances,’ Betty Bacall told me. ‘Prince Philip always had women and they covered for him and pretended that his women were their women.’ When I asked Prince Philip if he would talk to me about Niv, his private secretary, Brigadier Miles Hunt-Davis, said ‘no’ because according to him the prince met Niv only ‘on one or two formal occasions and would not be able to tell you anything of interest’. This was puzzling since Prince Philip later wrote Niv a letter that began ‘Dear David’ and was signed ‘Philip’, which he would hardly do unless Niv were a friend.

By now the Nivens were such a golden celebrity couple that they might as well have been royal themselves, and when they returned to California at the end of February the
Sketch
reported their departure with a glamorous, full-page cover photograph of Hjördis. Their arrival in Hollywood was very different: Goldwyn refused to see Niv and issued a brusque order that he was to be loaned out again to appear with the child star Shirley Temple, now twenty, in a film
that Niv described as ‘a disastrous teenage pot-boiler’. David realised that he had behaved badly over the past few months and wrote to Goldwyn asking to be forgiven:

Goldwyn ignored it. He had finally had enough of this arrogant, selfish, ungrateful actor whom he had treated like a favourite son and who had just finished making one of the worst movies he had ever seen. Niv in turn reacted once more with anger and more arrogance.
OK. Fine, if that’s the way he wants it. Why bother with Goldwyn anyway? Who needs him?
Friends in Hollywood, even other producers, told him he was a big enough star now to go it alone as a freelance. Why tie himself to a studio? And what had Goldwyn really done for him? Sure, he had given him his start, and helped him in the early days, and taken him back after the war, but otherwise he had made a huge profit out of renting him out to make crappy films for other producers. For this dreadful Shirley Temple film Goldwyn was being paid $18,700 a week for four weeks for David’s services but was paying him only a fifth of that, and he had neglected to guide his career properly, so why should Niv feel guilty? The man had let him down. The time had come to leave, not just Goldwyn but maybe Hollywood altogether. As early as April 1949 he was thinking of going to live in Switzerland.

His attitude towards Goldwyn was partly justified. ‘David’s misfortune was to have found the wrong employer in Hollywood,’ the British critic Alexander Walker told me. ‘If he had gone with Irving Thalberg rather than Goldwyn he would have become an MGM contract artist, and MGM would have kept him in business for many, many years so long as he continued to be a star and make money for the corporation. With Goldwyn he was a loan-out for pictures whether they were appropriate for him or not, so there’s a sense of his career being dispersed, not building in the way that Cary Grant’s was built.’

Simmering with indignation, Niv made the Shirley Temple film,
A Kiss for Corliss
, in which he played a womaniser who is used by the teenage bobby-soxer Shirley to make her boyfriend jealous. His part was tiny and he could not be bothered to take it seriously. ‘Because he had joined the company late and desired to finish early, his scenes were compressed into a rushed, lumpy mass, without continuity,’ wrote Shirley Temple in her autobiography forty years later. ‘ “Today we do scene 425,” the director Richard Wallace would announce. “Oh, God!” Niven would reply. “I didn’t prepare
that
one!” Everything would grind to a halt except the coffee machine. Niven would retreat somewhere to learn the appropriate lines, invariably reappearing with the triumphant clarion call, “I’ve got it!” Usually he hadn’t. The more he fluffed, the more impatient I became. Working over his shoulder and off-camera, I took to smiling superciliously at the crew as he blew over and over again. As he was an experienced actor with brains and wit, Niven’s problem was not incompetence. What I neglected to acknowledge with my snide glances was that he detested this job [
and
] may have seen this loan-out as … punishment.’ Many years later Niv said that acting with Shirley Temple was ‘an experience that should really happen to dogs rather than actors’. The critics were sympathetic. ‘Poor David Niven!’ said the
Sunday Chronicle
and Caroline Lejeune wrote in the
Observer:

Niv finally persuaded Goldwyn to see him in his office on 22 July. ‘It was not my finest hour,’ he wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon
. ‘He sat expressionless behind his desk. I said, “Look, Sam, we don’t see eye to eye any more. I have two years left of my contract – how about releasing me?” He never took his eyes off me as he flicked his intercom lever. “Give Niven his release as from today … he’s through.” ’

After fourteen years under Goldwyn’s wing he was on his own.

Eight

Skating on Thin Ice
1949–1955

N
iv’s elation at being free of Goldwyn did not last long. Goldwyn’s PR people put it about that he had been fired because he had become impossibly big-headed and unreliable, and suddenly the producers who had urged him to go freelance were not returning his calls. He had always lived extravagantly and without the weekly cheque from Goldwyn his savings began to dwindle alarmingly. ‘Don’t ever do this, Jack,’ he warned Hawkins. ‘Money! It melts away like butter on a hot stove.’ He soon realised that he had been too cocky and overplayed his hand, and later admitted that he was ‘terribly frightened’ during the ‘dreadful, dreadful’ days of the early 1950s when he came to fear that he faced the possibility of real poverty, might never work in films again and might lose everything he had. ‘To me Goldwyn then was a ruthless tyrant in a tight little empire,’ he wrote in his
Sunday Express
series in 1958, but ‘he could not have been anything else, I guess. Film-making was not a pattycake kind of game, and the competition was savage. On the other hand – and for this I am eternally grateful – Goldwyn transformed me from a hopeless amateur into a pro,’ and he admitted, ‘I made an absolute bally fool of myself. I owe old Sam Goldwyn everything.’

Times had changed and although he was only thirty-nine producers were no longer looking for the old-fashioned English-gent actor that was his speciality and were more excited by the new wave of young Method actors, so he grabbed the first film offer that came along: an MGM musical,
The Toast of New Orleans
, that was being made to launch the film career of the latest ‘discovery’, the twenty-eight-year-old singer Mario Lanza, in which Lanza played a warbling New Orleans fisherman and Niv an opera diva’s manager. It was a very small part but it paid a few bills and kept the bailiffs away for a while. Niv and Lanza got on extremely well, and they and another member of the cast, J. Carrol Naish, started drinking seriously at lunchtime. ‘The three male leads drank Scotch each day,’ the film’s physiotherapist Terry Robinson told Charles Francisco for his book
David Niven: Endearing Rascal
. ‘It started out pretty moderately … but the three of them began having such a good time it started to drive the director nuts. J. Carrol Naish would just curl up and sleep his drinking off. It would finally get to Mario around four and he’d fall asleep, too. On the other hand, David Niven never fell asleep and he looked good all day and evening, as if he’d never had a drop! He outdrank Lanza and Naish – two good drinkers – and his blue eyes continued to sparkle.’

After that months went by without any more work and Niv became worried and depressed. In desperation he sat down every morning in a little rotunda in the garden of the Pink House and started to write a startlingly autobiographical novel,
Round the Rugged Rocks
, in which a randy young English soldier, John Hamilton, leaves the army at the end of the Second World War, becomes a liquor salesman in New York, is involved in indoor horse racing at ‘Sea City’ and frightened off by the Mafia, goes to Bermuda and then to Hollywood, where he finds a job as a deckhand on a fishing boat and eventually becomes a hugely successful film star. Trubshawe appears in the book as a lanky, 6ft 6ins, boozy, hugely moustached, eccentric joker of a soldier called Oglethorpe who becomes Hamilton’s best friend, and together they appear at a fancy dress ball dressed as goats and appal the other guests by scattering black olives on the floor behind them. The book is packed with Niv’s favourite anecdotes, including a scene when Hamilton’s polo stick gets stuck up a horse’s backside,
and he manages to include a sneer at a cowardly English actor, Ralph Ridgway, ‘idol of millions’, who evaded his duty to his country during the war by becoming an American citizen and then pretending to be homosexual so as to escape the army. There is even a Pink House, and plenty of rather coy sex:

Like Niv, Hamilton has several affairs but ‘never had liked possessive women; they gave him claustrophobia’, and there is one scene which seems to have been inspired by David’s brief encounter with the sultry sexpot Mae West in 1934 when she had interviewed him as a possible co-star for her next film and admired his muscles. In the novel she is called Marie Davenport:

As a film star Hamilton becomes impossibly arrogant and selfish, and Oglethorpe has to chide him for his cocky behaviour; ‘Hello, old man. I hear you have been making a four-star, first-class, ocean-going drip of yourself.’

Wonderful raconteur though he was, Niv was not a novelist and did not have the necessary creative skills, so
Round the Rugged Rocks
is thin, laboured, amateurish stuff that later he admitted was ‘pretty juvenile’. Long after it was published he was so embarrassed by it that when
The Moon’s a Balloon
was published twenty-two years afterwards he tried to suppress every copy of
Round the Rugged Rocks
that he could find, and even now there is none even in the British Library, which by law should have a copy of every book published in Britain. Its catalogue has
Round the Rugged Rocks
listed as ‘missing’ and it is difficult not to suspect that Niv slipped in there in 1970 and pinched it himself. But when he wrote the book it helped to keep his mind off the crisis in his acting career, and in due course, because he was famous, it was published both in Britain and the United States at the end of 1951. And it did include one excellent joke: in the United States Hamilton is much impressed by American advertising slogans, especially one for a deodorant that read ‘
IT MAY BE DECEMBER BUT IT’S AUGUST UNDER YOUR ARM
’.

It was several months after leaving Goldwyn before he was offered another starring role at last, in an English film,
Happy
Go Lovely
. He rented the Pink House out for a year and sailed with the family to Southampton on the
Queen Mary
early in March 1950. Despite his constant worries about money he continued to live like a prince, taking Hjördis on holiday to Sweden, moving into Claridge’s Hotel, sending David Jr off to boarding school and looking for a house to buy in the country. He threw himself into the club and social life of London, touched base with old friends and at one dinner party sat next to a gorgeous eighteen-year-old, Fiona Campbell-Walter, who had just begun a fabulous career as a top model, was to marry Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza and to become internationally famous as Fiona Thyssen. ‘It was my first proper grand dinner party,’ she told me, ‘and to my absolute
amazement
I was sat on David’s left, and there was initial panic, but this wonderful, kind, avuncular man completely put me at my ease and we were lifelong friends from that moment on. Obviously I was pretty scrumptious and very beautiful at that age and he was just wonderful, cosy and adorable, which is how I’ve always known him. No, he didn’t make a pass at me, though he liked young girls and certainly fancied my girlfriend Caroline. We were friends until he died but we never had an affair and he never tried. We were buddies.’

Among the friends he saw in London was Trubshawe, who had just landed a part in his own first film,
Dance Hall
, which told of the ballroom romances of four factory girls – Petula Clark, Diana Dors, Kay Kendall and Dandy Nichols – and in which he played a colonel, and he was about to appear in another,
They Were Not Divided
, in which he was a major. Trubshawe was about to embark on a surprisingly long film career during which he appeared in forty films in the twenty years from 1950 to 1970, often like Niv playing military men and often along with many of the leading comic actors of the time. The following year, 1951, he was in the hilarious Ealing comedy
The Lavender Hill Mob
as the British ambassador – with Alec Guinness, Stanley Holloway, Sid James,
Alfie Bass and Audrey Hepburn – and
The Magic Box
, with Robert Donat and Richard Attenborough. In 1952 he was to make no fewer than six films and during the 1950s was to make twenty-one – exactly the same number as Niv himself, though his roles were of course much smaller. He was even to turn up later in four of Niv’s own films:
Around the World in Eighty Days, The Guns of Navarone, The Best of Enemies
and
The Pink Panther
.

Another chum in London was the Scottish publisher Hamish (‘Jamie’) Hamilton who paid Hjördis three guineas, about £67 in 2003, to read a Swedish novel and tell him if it was any good. Three guineas was hardly going to go far at a time when David was still spending money with astonishing extravagance. In June he not only rented a house at 12 Catherine Place, a few yards from Buckingham Palace, he also bought a vast, rambling Jacobean mansion and seventy-four-acre estate in Wiltshire, Wilcot Manor, just a few miles from Primmie’s childhood home and grave at Huish. The house had been a small monastery during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and had three floors, eight bedrooms, a hall, library, numerous other small rooms, and acres of wood panelling. Outside, as well as trees, a lake, lawns and a sweeping circular gravel drive, Wilcot Manor had a round brick-and-flint thatched dovecote and a paddock. It also had a ghost: the spectre of an angry monk who is said today still to haunt the central bedroom on the top floor, because he is still furious with King Henry VIII for turning him out of the house during his purge of the monasteries.

Dark, depressing and cold, Wilcot Manor was a folly which Niv very soon came to hate. At first he intended to live like an English country gent, with a private pew in the village church, a gun in the local pheasant-shooting syndicate, and a rod on the trout-stuffed River Kennet, but ‘I don’t think he stayed there more than a few nights,’ said Andrew Rollo, and Roddy Mann said, ‘He didn’t know that the local hunt used to meet on the front lawn, and he woke up one morning and
there were all these dreadful people in red coats.’ Doreen Hawkins told me that

To help pay for it all Niv made
Happy Go Lovely
opposite the Hollywood dancer, Vera-Ellen. In the American-style musical set in Scotland but filmed in England he played a Scots millionaire who rescues an American show that is due to be put on at the Edinburgh Festival, and although the picture did not earn wonderful reviews Niv’s were the best he had had for a long time. ‘Mr Niven, back on top of his form after a series of disappointing pictures, is an excellent light comedian,’ said the
Daily Mail
. ‘A delightful portrayal,’ agreed the
Daily Mirror
, while the
Spectator
reported that his charm ‘helps enormously to blind one to the picture’s defects’. Much of the film was shot at Elstree Studios, where Euan Lloyd, who was now publicity manager for Associated British Picture Corporation, often bumped into him. After more than two years of his second marriage Niv’s eye was roaming again.
‘He had this unique ability to chat up a woman,’ chuckled Lloyd,