Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (32 page)

Nor was the next big milestone in his life. In
The Moon’s a Balloon
David said that one Sunday afternoon that summer, when they had a houseful of guests at the Pink House, he took a phone call from forty-six-year-old Mike Todd, a loud, brash, vulgar showman who had helped to invent the new Todd-AO system of wide-angle, big-screen cinema photography. Todd had never made a movie but offered Niv the star part in a film that he was later to declare was his favourite of them all,
Around the World in Eighty Days
, and signed him up there and then. Not so, according to David’s agent Phil Gersh, who told Peter Haining after Niv’s death that Todd had actually wanted Cary Grant for the role, had tried for six months to get him, and when he failed Gersh had to arrange for David to meet Todd three times to beg for the part before Todd agreed reluctantly. It was to be the turning point of his career, to make him richer than ever and to catapult him into a high orbit among the Hollywood stars. After six nervous years of skating on thin ice as a freelance his days in the wilderness were over.

Nine

Around and on Top of the World
1955–1959

M
ike Todd wanted to make a vast, spectacular movie to show off his new Todd-AO wide-screen photography and decided to film Jules Verne’s epic story of a daring Victorian English adventurer, Phileas Fogg, who in 1872 bets his friends £20,000 that he can travel around the world in eighty days and does so with only seconds to spare with his French valet Passepartout – by train, horse carriage, balloon, ostrich and ship. It was a lavish picture that was to be filmed at 140 locations in thirteen countries and nine studios, with nearly 69,000 extras and fifty brief appearances by major stars, from Ronald Colman, Noël Coward and Marlene Dietrich to John Gielgud, George Raft and Frank Sinatra. Even Trubshawe was in it as ‘Man betting at Lloyd’s’, and in the end it cost £2∙5 million to make, about £40 million in modern terms, but on its first release it was to earn twice that and to win five Oscars including the one for the best picture of 1956.

Niv owed his part not only to Phil Gersh but also to his old lover Evelyn Keyes, who was living with Todd and kept telling him how good Niv would be once it was certain that Cary Grant was not available. Gersh negotiated a fee of over $100,000 and the three-hour film, in which David appeared in almost every scene, took six months to shoot, most of it in California but some in France, Spain, Hong Kong, Japan and England, where he found time to play cricket at East Grinstead at the beginning of September for an actors’ side against a team of politicians. Making such a big movie inevitably
involved a huge number of problems, not least the raising of enough finance, and now and then Todd had to stop shooting while he tried to scrape together a few thousand more dollars. When they came to shoot the scenes in the hot-air balloon Niv confessed that he suffered from vertigo and had to be filmed with the balloon suspended less than five feet off the ground, though one scene had to be shot much higher as the balloon dangled from a crane 180 feet up, so Todd made Niv drink a bottle of champagne first and take another up with him.

Later David said that
Around the World in Eighty Days
, directed by Michael Anderson, was easily his favourite of all his films because the ebullient, cigar-chomping, life-enhancing Todd was such exhilarating fun to work with and so many of his friends were also in it. But he was not very kind to a nervous twenty-one-year-old who was appearing in only her third film: the red-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned Shirley MacLaine, who was dreadfully miscast as a poshly-spoken Indian princess whom Niv rescues just as she is about to be burned alive on her late husband’s funeral pyre. ‘He intimidated me,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘He was bitingly sarcastic about my being cast as a Hindu princess [
and
] for quite a few days [
he
] treated me like an unwanted guest at a garden party. I was so new in the business, so eager to please, and feeling so lonely on location … that he really hurt my feelings … I had a terrible time and in many ways blamed his standoffish, detached, droll Englishness for my insecurities. I know he had no respect for me until the picture was over and he saw that perhaps I might make it in the business after all.’

MacLaine was appalled to see how blatantly Hjördis misbehaved with other men, especially when she had had too much to drink, which was increasingly often: ‘ “Why don’t you simply present your entire package, then?” David said to her one evening at dinner when she was embarrassingly flirtatious. He was hurt, and
she
was sarcastic and detached … We went on to do our love scene the next day and David
never missed his marks, was always in his light, was letter-perfect in his lines, but he never looked me in the eye. I could see why Hjördis tried to provoke him.’

Niv was back in California for New Year’s Eve 1955, which he and Hjördis spent with the rest of the Rat Pack at Sinatra’s house at Palm Springs, where Bogart pushed the tiny, bald agent ‘Swifty’ Lazar into the pool and Lazar in turn pushed Bogie in, ruining his Cartier watch. ‘How are we going to get this dry?’ complained Bogart. ‘Like this,’ said Lazar, tossing the watch into a blazing fire. It was a rare moment of revenge for Lazar, who was often the butt of Rat Pack jokes and a regular victim of Sinatra, who once hired a builder to brick up a cupboard in Lazar’s apartment so that he would be unable to get at his clothes. Bogart was on form that New Year’s Eve and told the homosexual Noël Coward: ‘I think you are wonderful and charming and if I should ever change from liking girls better, you would be my first thought.’ Sadly Bogie was now so ill that he was no longer up to loving even girls and was deeply hurt by his young wife’s affair with Sinatra, which had become by then common knowledge. Two months later the cancer of the oesophagus that was going to kill him was finally diagnosed and although he underwent a nine-hour operation and radiation treatment it was too late. He had just ten months to live, months during which Niv visited him constantly as he lost a great deal of weight and grew weaker and weaker. Even during Bogart’s final weeks his wife spent her thirty-first birthday with Sinatra, the Nivens and the Rat Pack in Las Vegas while Bogart spent the day on his boat with his son at Catalina Island.

Early in 1956 Hjördis was also in hospital, for six weeks, after suffering a miscarriage and subsequent complications, but in the spring she and David returned briefly to England for him to shoot
A Silken Affair
at Elstree and to appear on the TV panel game
What’s My Line?
, though when he heard that the TV interviewer Eamonn Andrews was planning to ambush him with his life story for
This Is Your Life
he refused
to appear and the programme had to be cancelled. Later that month they flew to Monaco for the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier in St Nicholas’s cathedral on 19 April, two of the very few from Hollywood on a guest list of 600 people, most of them titled or the mega-rich such as the Aga Khan, ex-King Farouk of Egypt and Aristotle Onassis. Rainier had concocted for himself a chocolate Ruritanian uniform clanking with French and Italian medals, stiff with golden epaulettes and fluffy with ostrich feathers, and was attended by a fanfare of trumpets and Monegasque soldiers, who had never seen a war, with bayonets at the ready, but it was a beautiful Riviera morning and the cathedral was gloriously decorated with cascades of flowers, candles, chandeliers, and television cameramen hanging from the rafters. The sight of Grace as a bride must have stirred Niv’s heart and loins because she looked breathtakingly lovely and virginal in a Juliet cap and a long-sleeved ivory gown of silk, lace, taffeta, net and pearls. After the ceremony and lunch in the palace courtyard the guests bizarrely were all whisked off to watch a football match in the national stadium before Grace and Rainier left on their honeymoon cruise of the Mediterranean. It was a puffed-up Toytown wedding but the snob in David, who was always impressed by royalty and titles, relished the make-believe pomp and circumstance. Many people found Rainier vulgar, coarse and dull, but Niv made a point of cultivating his friendship so as to keep alive his relationship with Grace and membership of the small royal circle at the palace of Monte Carlo.

Back in England, he finished
The Silken Affair
, a silly little comedy about a boring, bowler-hatted English accountant who breaks out briefly by cooking the books of a couple of stocking manufacturers, but although the critics damned the film they praised him. It was ‘an impeccable and at times brilliant performance’, said the
Sunday Express
. ‘He has no equal in his own field of precise, polished comedy,’ said the
Daily Mail
. He was ‘one of the most accomplished light
comedians in the business’, said the
Financial Times
. Once again he had shown that he was often the only decent ingredient in many of the poor films in which he appeared.

Shirley Anne Field, a beautiful seventeen-year-old, had a tiny part in the film and David duly tried to pick her up and take her to dinner. At first he offered her a lift in his studio Rolls-Royce, but she declined, afraid that people might talk. He grinned. ‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ he said, ‘wouldn’t dream of besmirching your reputation.’ Later in the week he offered again – ‘How do you feel about besmirching your reputation tonight, my dear?’ – and she laughed and said ‘yes’, and accepted a lift on most days after that. Then he sent her a beautiful lace blouse with a card that read ‘I hope this won’t ruin your reputation any further’, and when she thanked him he invited her to have ‘a well-behaved dinner’ with him. She agreed, and he took her to a very expensive London club, Les Ambassadeurs, where his seduction technique was cruelly interrupted by the drunken arrival of a puffy, blotchy, red-faced Errol Flynn, who tried to flirt with her himself. Niv saw him off and took her home with her virtue intact. Not many seventeen-year-olds can have spurned Errol Flynn and David Niven on the same night.

In May the Nivens flew back to Hollywood for a five-week holiday before returning to London at the end of June to make a film for MGM with two of their contracted stars, Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger,
The Little Hut
, which showed the three of them shipwrecked on a tropical island and indulging in a bit of wife-swapping, which Gardner later called ‘a fiasco’ and Granger said was ‘a bloody stupid comedy’, even though it had been a huge success on the stage. Gardner complained that she hated every minute of it and Granger agreed. ‘Imagine playing a straight man to David Niven with that bloody moustache,’ he complained to his wife, Jean Simmons. ‘He’s always playing with it or twitching it on everybody else’s lines. You can’t win against Niven’s moustache.’ Some of the film was shot in Jamaica but most of it at
the Cinecittà Studios in Rome over more than two stifling months of Italian summer when temperatures reached 140 degrees indoors. Niv’s and Granger’s tempers were not improved when Ava Gardner kept delaying shooting by taking long lunches with her Italian lover, Walter Chiari, and they agreed to complain to the director, Mark Robson. They approached Robson together but as Granger started to speak he realised that Niv had suddenly disappeared. ‘That was typical of Niven,’ he told Morley. ‘He never liked making trouble if he could get somebody else to make it for him, and you never really quite knew where you were with him. He’d vanish, leaving behind that grin just like a Cheshire Cat.’ There were no grins from the critics, who savaged the film, though once again papers such as the
Manchester Guardian
and the
Daily Sketch
singled Niv out as its only redeeming feature.

In England David touched base again with Trubshawe, who was in danger of becoming a bit of a star himself. He had by now had small parts in fifteen films and had just been offered a year’s contract with the Associated Rediffusion TV channel to become a ‘Personality’ and appear in plays and panel games like
What’s It All About?
. With his 6ft 6ins height, splendid moustache and silly-ass persona, Trubshawe was to go on to appear in twenty-five more films over the next fourteen years, among them
Doctor at Large, A Hard Day’s Night, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders, A Dandy in Aspic
and
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer
– not to mention two episodes of
The Avengers
TV series, in which he played a colonel and a general.

In September the Nivens flew to Sweden for a brief holiday, to Las Vegas to join the Rat Pack at Sinatra’s party for Betty Bacall’s birthday, and in October to New York for the triumphant Broadway première of
Around the World in Eighty Days
. Todd put them up in the most expensive suite at the St Regis Hotel and stuffed it with champagne, caviar and flowers, and a thousand ‘celebrities’ in evening dress attended the
first night at the Rivoli Theatre in Times Square, and then a midnight champagne supper at the Astor Hotel. The critics were ecstatic. The lively Mexican actor Cantinflas, playing the randy Passepartout, was very funny and stole the film, deservedly winning the Golden Globe award for best actor that year, but Niv’s reviews were also raves. ‘David Niven is simply perfect,’ said the
New York Journal-American
, which called the film ‘a fabulous entertainment’. Niv was ‘excellent’ (
New York Times
), ‘superb’ (
Financial Times
), ‘perfection’ (
Observer
), and ‘dominates even this gigantic screen with as fine a performance as he has given us for many a long year’, said Bernard Levin (
Manchester Guardian
). The
New York Post
said that the film was ‘a bubble of delight’, the
Daily News
that it was ‘sensational’ and the
World Telegram and Sun
that the only proper reaction to it was ‘wheee-eee-eee!’. The next day Niv sent Todd a cable that read: ‘
OH WELL STOP BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME
.’

Nearly fifty years later the picture seems much less impressive and at times it is actually dull. It is spectacular, of course, with wonderful landscapes, costumes and striking set-piece scenes – a Spanish bullfight, a
suttee
ceremony, a circus in Yokohama, a Red Indian attack, an American election – but as Alexander Walker remarked, ‘It is not a film, it is a collection of stars inserted into a travelogue.’ Each episode seems disjointed and Niv manages to be little more than blandly smooth, but the movie re-established his name and fortunes, and he was never to look back. From then on he was not only around the world, he was on top of it. And there was more to come: in December he was nominated again for an Emmy award, this time for the best actor in a dramatic TV series for his many appearances in
Four Star Playhouse
that year. And his next film, which he made with Ginger Rogers,
Oh Men! Oh Women!
, a comedy in which he played a psychiatrist whose fiancée seems to be having several affairs with other men, earned him more glowing reviews. There were raves too for thirty-six-year-old Tony Randall, a Broadway actor who
was making his film debut and wrote in his autobiography: ‘David Niven was the living proof that you don’t have to start on the stage and be a stage actor and work hard in repertory and all that in order to become a good actor. He taught himself to be a good actor – and he did know how to act.’ Randall told me in New York: