Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (30 page)

Years later Niv claimed that
Round the Rugged Rocks
sold 28,000 copies in total in Britain and America, very many fewer than a ‘celebrity’ author would sell today, which would mean the book earned him little more than £12,000 in modern terms and would have made him realise that it was a great deal easier to make a living as an actor.

Despite his battles with the British taxman and his decision never to live in England again, he remained intensely patriotic and royalist, annoyed some Americans by refusing to take out US citizenship, and always stood to attention when
he heard the British national anthem, ‘God Save the King’. ‘He would always stand even if he was watching a football match on television,’ his daughter Kristina told me, so he was deeply affected when King George VI died at Sandringham on 6 February 1952, aged only fifty-six, and he wrote letters of condolence to the dead king’s mother, Queen Mary, as well as to Princess Marina and Princess Margaret.

Back in LA and the Pink House, Niv and Hjördis slipped again into their sunny, laid-back Californian routine. Despite his worries about work and money they continued to live extremely well and to give plenty of parties, and Hjördis joined a giggly group of women who regularly played and gambled on canasta. One new friend was a twenty-two-year-old actor who was to become one of Niv’s closest chums for the rest of his life: Robert Wagner, ‘R. J.’ to his friends, who had recently made his fourth film. ‘We all loved the water and I met him on Bogart’s boat, the
Santana
,’ R. J. told me at his home in Mandaville Canyon, not far from the Pink House. ‘God, the Pink House was so beautiful then. It overlooked the ocean and was really sensational and we had a lot of good times there.’

To save money Niv brought the boys back to California, cancelled his plan to send them to Stowe or Eton, and sent them to a local Roman Catholic day school. To protect them from the taunts of other children who might jeer that he was a very bad actor, he taught David and Jamie to say that their dad knew he was a terrible actor but just loved making movies, and if people were silly enough to pay him lots and fly him all over the world, why should he say no? ‘He was a good, caring father and loved us a lot,’ David Jr told me at his home in Beverly Hills, ‘but he didn’t spoil us or lavish presents on us. He was very strict. He wouldn’t tolerate lying and you had to be polite, punctual and tidy. One of his punishments was to make you stand with books on your head facing the corner for maybe an hour. I was beaten once when I was about ten, in 1952, because I changed my school report card and said I hadn’t, but unfortunately I’d used black
ink and the report card was in dark blue ink. I was beaten because I’d lied about it so many times. I had to go and choose my own stick in the garden and I got six of the best. But he hated that sort of punishment.’

Niv loathed lies and dishonesty, he told Margaret Hinxman in 1979. Honesty, he said, ‘is really the same as honour, isn’t it? I don’t lie, mostly because it’s always so difficult remembering the lies you’ve told. The only time I ever took a birch to one of my sons was when he altered his school marks … And it hurt me a hell of a lot more than it did him … Dishonesty must be the worst crime. Oh, you embroider a good story to make it sound funnier. But that’s different. You’re not harming anyone.’ Jamie was never beaten but ‘he’d let you know he was displeased’, he told me. ‘He’d go quiet and sort of cut you out. I don’t doubt that he loved me, but I didn’t like it if he was distant or rejected me; and I told him so. He was more aloof as a parent than I would have liked. He did the best he could, but I’m not sure he had the best tools, because of the way he’d been brought up himself.’ Niv could also sometimes have ‘a vicious temper’, said David Jr, ‘but we discovered that it was actually incited by gin, and Jamie and I pointed out to him that he was really
horrid
when he was on gin and he never drank it again. I never saw him drunk but he drank a huge amount. He had hollow legs and drank all day.’ When he was home he often played with the boys. ‘He’d stand at the top of the lawn and hit baseballs at me like crazy,’ said Jamie, ‘and that’s why I became quite a good baseball player, and he encouraged me to play basketball, football, tennis, skiing, ice-hockey.’ R. J. Wagner told me that Niv was a good father, constantly talking about the boys and concerned for their welfare, but Doreen Hawkins was not so sure. ‘He loved the boys very much,’ she said, ‘but
no
actor’s a good father. It’s just impossible. They don’t see their children enough.’ As for Hjördis, ‘she didn’t do very well as a mother to the boys: we never saw much of them and there was always a nanny.’

David Jr called Hjördis ‘The Swede’. ‘Daddy and she had a really good time at the beginning,’ he said,

At the Pink House there was always tension between Hjördis and the boys, Jamie told Grace Bradberry of the
Daily Mail’s Weekend
magazine in 2002, ‘and it never went away. It was really kind of tragic. We did go on family trips and she made an effort, but she just didn’t want to deal with the two young boys she’d inherited.’ Pat Medina told me: ‘She told the boys to stop calling her Mummy. She said, “You have to call me Hjördis, you can’t call me Mummy,” and I said, “You cannot
do
that. They’re very fond of you but you keep correcting them and they can’t remember what to call you and they’re totally in confusion.” Jamie was so upset that he locked himself in his bedroom.’

Niv’s attempts to economise were laughable: he reduced the boys’ pocket money and insisted that the housekeeper should stop buying bottled water, but otherwise life continued
as extravagantly as before. He chartered an expensive boat to take a party of friends to Catalina Island and wafted Hjördis off to Barbados for a two-week holiday, though Jamie told Grace Bradberry: ‘It was pretty much wipeout time in 1952, ’53 and ’54. He was around the house. He had nothing to do. But he was blessed with an enormous sense of humour. He used to come and watch me play baseball, and always said, “Well done.” He also came to see me in a school production of
The Haunted Tea Room
that my brother starred in too. I wasn’t much of an actor, but he was nothing but enthusiastic.’ Young David had parts in lots of school plays too. Because he was fair-haired he was always playing a girl. ‘They used to stuff two football socks up my sweater!’ he said. ‘It was all most embarrassing, and it put me off acting for life.’

It was three years before Niv’s luck began to change for the better. He made two live drama appearances on TV in 1952,
The Petrified Forest
and
The Sheffield Story
, and did a couple of guest spots on the Bob Hope and Jack Benny shows, and they were to lead to a crossroads in his career that would save him from bankruptcy and eventually make him rich. The Hollywood moguls saw TV as a dangerous rival and hinted that actors who appeared on it would be blacklisted, but Niv had little to lose now and gambled $20,000 to join Charles Boyer, Ida Lupino and Dick Powell in forming a new company, Four Star Television, to make live half-hour TV films under the title
Four Star Playhouse
. In the first five years they made 1800, from Somerset Maugham and Zane Grey short stories to series such as
The Rifleman, Burke’s Law
and
The Rogues
. Ida Lupino soon dropped out but Niv, Boyer and Powell each travelled to New York once a month to direct or appear for free in a play, one of which started young Steve McQueen on his road to stardom. Niv became one of the first Hollywood stars to appear regularly on television and ‘they made a lot of money’, Roddy Mann told me. ‘I think that was the main source of his fortune. He always felt that he could produce and make a film as well as anybody.’ Betty Bacall
told Morley that she and Bogart started watching the shows ‘and one night Bogie said, “My God, he can act,” and it was true. David’s dramas were always the best acted and the best written of the season, and he remains the only leading actor I have ever known whose career was totally revived and turned around as a result of television. He really did begin to do some very good work there.’

‘Four Star was very productive for him,’ I was told by Jess Morgan, who became Niv’s business manager and friend in Los Angeles in 1952 and was to work for him for thirty years. ‘The early Fifties were not his best economic times but he was just getting going again. We did everything for him: prepared his tax returns, paid the bills, even the household bills, kept records, helped him with buying and selling of houses and cars, got the proper insurance, and invested his money for him. He wasn’t mean but he was careful with money, very respectful of it, very interested in it, and smart about what he did – one of the smartest guys I ever met. He was very canny and understood the business thoroughly – how to function in the entertainment business – and he had a great time doing it. He loved it. He didn’t hire me because he was lazy – he could make a lot more money doing other things – and he wasn’t extravagant. He never earned superstar salary but he earned star salary and lived comfortably but not wildly. All that first-class travel, for instance, was paid for by whichever studio he was working for.’

A second piece of good fortune came his way in 1952 when Otto Preminger, impressed by his performance in
Nina
, persuaded him to appear as an ageing roué and seducer in another stage play,
The Moon Is Blue
, a slightly risqué sex comedy with just three parts, and then to repeat the role in a film version. Niv was reluctant to go on the stage again but what else was there? He opened in the play with Diana Lynn and Scott Brady at the United Nations Theatre in San Francisco on 8 July, played the part for two months and was so good in the film version – with William Holden and Maggie
McNamara – that he won the Foreign Press Association’s Golden Globe for the best comedy performance of the year even though the film’s distributors, United Artists, had tried several times to persuade Preminger not to cast him because he was ‘all washed up’. Some outraged viewers said the film was indecent because it contained words like ‘mistress’, ‘virgin’ and ‘seduce’, and it was banned by the Catholic Church, which ensured that it became a huge success. Bravely Niv had agreed to accept a much smaller fee than usual in exchange for a percentage of the profits, with the result that he said he made more out of that picture than any he had yet been in. ‘The money kept rolling in,’ he said. His luck was turning at last.

In 1952, however, the money was not rolling in yet. It would be a couple more years before it did because Four Star needed two or three years to show a profit and
The Moon Is Blue
was not released until 1953. In the meantime David continued to skate on thin ice yet live like a millionaire. In November he and Hjördis crossed the continent to spend a weekend pheasant-shooting with friends in Rhode Island, where Hjördis came down to breakfast on the first morning and announced that she would not be going out with them because she had dreamed that someone would shoot her. Niv and the others laughed at her – ‘I
know
I am going to be shot,’ she insisted – and finally persuaded her to tag along with some warm clothes and a book. She did – and was hit by lead pellets in the face, neck and chest when two guns turned to fire at a low bird. In
The Moon’s a Balloon
Niv claimed that she was peppered by thirty pellets, her beautiful face was dreadfully swollen and suffused with blood, and that for several terrible moments he feared that a second wife had been killed in a stupid accident, but he was probably exaggerating again because she was left completely unscarred and the
Daily Mail
reported the next day that she had been wounded by only three pellets. Even so, she always claimed to have premonitions of disaster and Niv told Roddy Mann
in 1964 that ‘she can actually smell bad health. If I’m going to be ill, she knows it, way in advance.’ In fact so little damage was done that he soon asked her to appear in a
Four Star Playhouse
production, despite his reluctance to let her become an actress, because he needed a woman to play a foreign spy and she still had a thick Swedish accent and would be cheap. She was delighted and appeared under the stage name Tania Borg. ‘I thought I was absolutely divine in the film,’ she told the
Daily Mail
in 1960. ‘I loved myself, and on the strength of it I was offered a film with Robert Taylor,’ but Niv refused to let her do it. ‘I married you as a wife,’ he told her, ‘not as a part-time mistress. I’ve seen too many marriages break up when both parties film in different parts of the world.’ Once again he might simply have been trying to save her from herself because ‘she was disastrous as an actress’, Betty Bacall told me. ‘That she could think she could ever become a star! It was ridiculous!’

But his relentless opposition to her having a career of her own rankled. ‘She began to change gradually and became bitter,’ Bacall told Guy Evans. ‘She was frustrated, and I don’t think she knew what she wanted, and she became a serious drinker, which was really bad and very hard on David.’ Hjördis also began to carry on with other men. ‘She was always flirting with guys, always,’ Betty Bacall told me, ‘and it was nothing to do with David’s philandering because he didn’t philander that much when he was with her.’ Alastair Forbes, a wartime friend of Niv’s, went further. ‘Once Hjördis saw that David wouldn’t get her any acting jobs,’ he told me, ‘she started to carry on with other men,’ and she told one of her women friends that as a lover Niv was boring and uninventive. ‘The problem with David,’ she said, ‘is that he doesn’t like his sex on a bearskin rug on the floor, he likes it very conventionally.’ Perhaps she should have invested in a tin of caviar. Hjördis was ‘a dreadful, open flirt’, said Pat Medina, who had recently divorced Richard Greene and often spent weekends with the Nivens until she married Joseph
Cotten eight years later. ‘Niv and I never had an affair – we were like brother and sister and had the same sense of humour – but Hjördis was very vain and when he once told her that she was flirting with somebody she said, “David says I said it with my eyes. Well, I can’t help my eyes.” She thought that if she left him everyone in Hollywood would be after her, which wasn’t the case because part of her attraction was the fact that she was Mrs David Niven. But I think she had a go with an American doctor in Pasadena, a plastic surgeon who was removing a scar. She told me she liked him very much and wanted to meet him, and she met him at
my
place. He was a nice looking man with a nice voice, but I thought “Oh God, what has she got me into?” and she saw him again often. People said Niv called her Nej because she was always saying “no” to him: well, if so he was the only one she
did
say it to!’ Betty Bacall remembered the plastic surgeon too. ‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘some terrible doctor.’ Resentment, alcohol and infidelity on both sides began to infect the marriage, and one of Hjördis’s weapons was to feign illness. ‘She was a bit of a hypochondriac,’ said Pat Medina. ‘If anything didn’t go to her liking she gave a great performance of being ill and getting better, and I knew they were not always happy. There was a little summer house there and I’d say to Nej, “Where’s Niv?” and she’d say, “He’s sitting in the summer house,” and I’m sure he was sitting there thinking about Primmie.’