Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (31 page)

Rumours that Niv was really good in
The Moon Is Blue
persuaded two British studios to offer him starring parts in two films to be made in England and Ireland in 1953, but in the middle of March, a fortnight before he and Hjördis were due to sail to Southampton on the
Queen Elizabeth
, he heard that Vivien Leigh, who was in Hollywood making a movie called
Elephant Walk
and at the end of an affair with the actor Peter Finch, was having a nervous breakdown and possibly going mad. It was 2 a.m. and her husband Laurence Olivier was thousands of miles away on holiday in Ischia with
William Walton and his wife. Niv telephoned Stewart Granger and they went to her house, where they found her gazing white-faced at a blank TV screen and one of her ex-boyfriends, Gladys Cooper’s schizophrenic son John Buckmaster, who had himself recently been held in a mental hospital, naked except for a towel. They persuaded Buckmaster to leave and tried to sedate Vivien with scrambled eggs and coffee heavily laced with sedatives. She insisted that Niv should taste both first, he fell asleep on the sofa, and she stripped naked and sat by the swimming pool. Granger called for medical help and when a doctor and two huge nurses arrived he helped to pin her down on her bed while she was injected with a strong sedative. Olivier arrived from Italy, flew her back to England, and checked her into a psychiatric hospital where she was given electro-convulsive therapy and slowly recovered.

Niv described this tragic episode, changing the names, in
Bring on the Empty Horses
in a chapter entitled ‘ “Our Little Girl” (Part 2)’, but the story is heavily fictionalised, he made no mention of Granger or falling asleep on the sofa, claimed that she had flaunted her body, offered him sex, snarled at him like a caged animal, and that he had dealt with her on his own.

Four days after she was flown back to England, David and Hjördis sailed for Southampton on the
Queen Elizabeth
to film
The Love Lottery
, but while they were at sea they heard the shocking news that the irrepressibly boyish Max had died of a heart attack in South Africa on his farm at Currie’s Post in Natal at the age of fifty. In London the Nivens borrowed the Oliviers’ house in Chelsea while Sir Laurence was in Italy and Vivien Leigh in hospital, and Niv began to shoot
The Love Lottery
at Ealing Studios, a spoof in which he played the No. 2 star at a Hollywood studio where the No. 1 star is Fang The Wonder Dog, and to raise his profile he agrees to marry the winner of a ‘love lottery’ for which his women fans buy tickets, only for the winner to find that he is nothing like his
image but really rather ordinary and boring. So, sadly, was the film, a dreadfully corny, ludicrous farce, one of the worst that he made.

His next picture,
Happy Ever After
, was much better, but first the Bogarts were in town for the new Queen’s coronation on 2 June and the four of them watched the procession together. Then it was off to Ireland to shoot
Happy Ever After
, which was renamed
Tonight’s the Night
in America, in which Niv played a part quite different from any previously. This time for a change he was an insufferable villain: Jasper O’Leary, a bounder with a smarmy smile who has inherited an entire feudal village in Ireland from its squire, his great-uncle, and vows to ‘squeeze the lemon dry’ by refusing to perform his feudal obligations, calling in all debts, cancelling his great-uncle’s numerous little bequests, and sacking the drunken butler, village policeman and publican. The men of the village decide to kill him, but this is Ireland and things go wrong – all of which made for a jolly, frothy, harmless little tale, though some of the critics were surprisingly rude.

In October Niv was one of the judges for the Miss World beauty contest – an inspired choice – and he and Hjördis returned to Hollywood and the wonderful news in March that he had won the Golden Globe Award for
The Moon Is Blue
and the tragic news that Fred Astaire’s wife Phyllis had lung cancer. Over that Easter weekend she underwent two operations at the hospital in Santa Monica where Primmie had died while Fred and David sat and waited nervously outside. She recovered from surgery so quickly that three months later she seemed as fit as ever, but she had only three more months to live. There was more sadness in May: J. F. Roxburgh died in England of a stroke at the age of sixty-seven. ‘We felt just as upset as if our own father had died, or a member of our family,’ Dudley Steynor told Guy Evans. ‘We were heartbroken. We loved that man.’

In June Niv sailed back to England on the
Queen Elizabeth
to make a film at Shepperton Studios that would earn him
great reviews and boost his reputation immensely. In
Carrington VC
he played yet another British major: a noble, selfless, war hero who has won the VC and DSO but is court-martialled for fraud after borrowing £125 from the regimental fund of which he is in charge, even though he borrowed the money quite openly, and only because the army has taken months to pay him £200 that it owes him, and only after telling his commanding officer he was doing so. The film consists mainly of a long, tedious court case during which he defends himself but is betrayed by his cold, neurotic wife (played by Margaret Leighton) because he has understandably had a one-night stand with a pretty woman captain. It is a dull, static and stagey picture but the critics were lavish with their praise in Britain and America, where it was renamed
Court Martial
, and the reviewers for both the
Spectator
and
Variety
judged it one of the best performances of his career.

He returned to Hollywood to face a great sadness: Phyllis Astaire died on 13 September aged only forty-six and leaving Fred with their eighteen-year-old son Fred Jr and twelve-year-old daughter Ava. Fred was devastated. They had had a wonderfully happy marriage and David knew exactly how he was feeling and was himself very upset because he loved both of them dearly. Knowing from experience that work can help to ease grief, he persuaded Fred to return to work on the film he was making,
Daddy Long Legs
, two days after the funeral, and urged him later to start writing his autobiography so as to give him some moments’ rest from his unhappiness.

Astaire’s grief must have reminded Niv how lucky he was still to have a beautiful young wife, whatever her faults, because when he started that autumn to make his next film in Hollywood,
The King’s Thief
, for MGM, one member of the cast, a twenty-six-year-old newcomer, Roger Moore, told me: ‘They were always hand-in-hand then. Hjördis was very glamorous and people stood with their mouths open when she walked on the set, though I always thought she wore too
much make-up. In fact Tony Curtis once told her so, which pissed her off.’

It is good to know that someone got some fun out of
The King’s Thief
because by general consent it is possibly the worst film that Niv ever made – a sword-fighting costume swashbuckler set in the England of Charles II (played by a smirking George Sanders) in which Niv was the king’s villainous adviser, the Duke of Brampton, whose evil plan is to persuade the king to execute all his closest friends and allies for ‘treason’ so that Brampton can steal their estates and money. The plot was absurd, the script dire, and Niv looked so ludicrous in his feathered hat, frilly collars and cuffs, and tiny beard that it is difficult not to cheer when he is hanged at the end. Roger Moore played a highwayman and told me ‘I was a long-haired ponce’ and no one would argue with that. Yet in the right part Niv could be astonishingly good and at the end of 1954 he was nominated for an Emmy award for the best actor in a single TV performance for his part in
The Answer
, a one-hour episode of
Four Star Playhouse
, in which he had played a Bowery bar-room bum who persuades his fellow drunks that he has discovered the meaning of life. But then it was back to banality for his next film,
The Birds and the Bees
with Mitzi Gaynor, in which he played a smooth cardsharper scheming to rip off the gormless son of a rich tycoon. If it was any consolation, many reviewers said he was the film’s only salvation and the
Manchester Guardian
reported that he could be very funny.

In March 1955 David and Hjördis flew to Jamaica for a week’s holiday with Noël Coward at his winter home, Blue Harbour, where Niv immediately went down with chicken-pox, vicious red spots, a temperature of 104 and a fortnight in quarantine so that they had to stay for two weeks instead of one. ‘Hjördis has many wonderful qualities,’ wrote Coward’s boyfriend Cole Lesley in his biography of Coward, ‘but those of Florence Nightingale-cum-
hausfrau
I think she will admit are not among them, though she did her best.
Pathetic-looking trays of food and changes of bed-linen were left halfway on the long flight of steps leading to the guesthouse, while Hjördis had to wash up the crockery and glass – too infectious to be sent to the kitchen – in their hand-basin.’ Niv also managed to pick up a colony of grass ticks that were now breeding energetically in his crotch, but he used his extra week of idleness to paint
Sunday in Jamaica
, a picture that was sold at a charity auction in London three months later for ten guineas – about £170 today.

Back in New York that spring to make yet another
Four Star Playhouse
production, and with Hjördis nearly 3000 miles away in Hollywood, David may well have had a brief affair with the delicious, notoriously promiscuous twenty-five-year-old movie icon Grace Kelly, who had an apartment on East 66th Street, had just made
Dial M for Murder
and
Rear Window
, and was about to make
High Society
. Some of Niv’s friends doubt that he and she had a fling. ‘I think she was too busy with other men!’ chuckled Roger Moore, and Roddy Mann told me: ‘she liked men very much and she was
adorable
, a knockout, and they were huge friends. But it was a brother and sister relationship and I don’t think they were lovers.’ A biographer, James Spada, however, reported that they did have ‘a brief and very discreet affair’ in the spring of 1955, and several of Niv’s friends – Leslie Bricusse, Bryan Forbes, John Mortimer – told me they thought so too, and Tom Hutchinson told me that Niv had once said to him that Grace was ‘a very ardent lover, which made me assume that he’d been to bed with her’. Taki Theodoracopulos, the multi-millionaire Greek socialite and journalist, who knew David well in the 1960s, told me he was sure that they had had an affair, and in 1994 the Superior Auction Galleries in Los Angeles sold a collection of letters that she had written to her friend and secretary Prudy Wise that were said in newspaper reports of the time to refer to several of her affairs, including one with Niv. There was also the story that he told friends in later years about the evening that Grace’s husband, Prince
Rainier of Monaco, whom she was to marry the following year, asked him after a few drinks late one night, ‘Tell me, David, of all the beautiful women you had in Hollywood, who gave you the best blow-job?’

‘Grace,’ said Niv jovially, and then saw Rainier’s horrified expression. ‘Ah – Gracie
Fields
!’

Noël Coward’s career had faltered briefly but in June he made a triumphant comeback on the first night of a cabaret performance at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas that was raucously applauded by a gang of seventeen friends, including the Nivens, who had been flown in by Frank Sinatra on a chartered plane – among them the Bogarts, Judy Garland, ‘Swifty’ Lazar, and Gloria and Mike Romanoff. Sinatra paid for them all to have private suites at the Sands Hotel, and after Coward’s night of glory they spent three days and nights gambling, seeing other shows, drinking heroically and staying up until dawn, until one morning they all looked so bedraggled and exhausted that Betty Bacall suddenly exclaimed, ‘You look like a goddam rat pack!’ The name stuck. When they returned to Los Angeles they thanked Sinatra by giving him a dinner at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills and Sinatra’s legendary Rat Pack was born. ‘In order to qualify,’ wrote Betty Bacall in her autobiography,
By Myself
, ‘one had to be addicted to nonconformity, staying up late, drinking, laughing, and not caring what anyone thought or said about us.’ At the dinner she was jokingly elected den mother, the notoriously rude Bogart became the PR director, and Niv complained that he had not been given a title at all because they were anti-English. A ratty coat of arms was designed and an insignia consisting of ‘a large group of rats of all shapes and sizes in all positions’, said Bacall. ‘What fun we had with it all! We were an odd assortment, but we liked each other so much, and every one of us had a wild sense of the ridiculous.’ After that the Rat Pack would meet regularly in each other’s houses to sit around talking, drinking, singing, arguing and sometimes fighting. ‘We admire ourselves and don’t care for
anyone else,’ Bogart told the
New York Herald Tribune
columnist Joe Hyams, and it was only later that the Rat Pack name was applied to a completely different group of Sinatra’s friends that included Sammy Davis Jr, Peter Lawford and Dean Martin.

Sinatra was to become one of Niv’s best friends, despite his murky reputation for ruthlessness and his Mafia connections, and David wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon
: ‘He is one of the few people in the world I would instinctively think of if I needed help of any sort. I thought of him once when I was in a very bad spot: help was provided instantly and in full measure without a question being asked. It was not, incidentally, money.’ Whatever this mysterious episode was, Niv never mentioned it to his sons or friends. Roddy Mann told me he thought that maybe Sinatra had lent David ‘some of his strong-arm cronies or recommended some legal muscle to get David out of a contract’, and Roger Moore said, ‘He could have needed an alibi.’

Some of the Rat Pack came together again on 4 July 1955 to celebrate Independence Day on Bogart’s boat, the
Santana
, which was joined by Sinatra in a chartered motor cruiser that had a piano on board. After dinner Sinatra began to sing, fuelled by a bottle of Jack Daniels whisky, and Niv said in
The Moon’s a Balloon
that dozens of people from other boats slowly gathered in dinghies and rubber tenders to listen bewitched as ‘he sang till the dew came down … He sang till the moon and stars paled in the pre-dawn sky – only then did he stop and only then did the awed and grateful audience paddle silently away.’ Richard Burton, who was also on Bogie’s boat that apparently magical evening, remembered it quite differently. In fact everyone got very drunk, reported Burton in his diary, Sinatra ‘got really pissed off’ with Bogart because Bogie and Burton ignored him and went off lobster-potting, and Niv kept trying to set fire to the
Santana
to create a diversion because he was so fed up with Sinatra’s endless warbling. ‘Bogie and Frankie nearly came to blows next day
about the singing the night before,’ wrote Burton, ‘and I drove Betty home because she was so angry with Bogie’s cracks about Frankie’s singing.’ It was a situation that was not helped by the fact that Bacall had started an affair with Sinatra, and Bogie, a heavy smoker who by now had cancer of the oesophagus and was becoming increasingly thin and frail, may well have known about it and was devastated. When Burton read Niv’s description of that evening in
The Moon’s a Balloon
sixteen years later he was astonished and wrote that it was ‘not at all like Niv’s description’.