Read Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven Online
Authors: Graham Lord
Niven was a very good actor, and he was so hospitable and enthusiastic, and terribly funny. He could keep you rolling all day. One day on the set he was telling a story and Dan Dailey was laughing so hard that I thought he’d had a stroke. His face had turned purple and his head looked like an egg-plant. I’ve never seen a man in such paroxysms of laughter. His face was blood red! That’s what David could do to you. He was the world’s greatest storyteller, and his stories were insanely funny. ‘Now promise me, old boy, you’ll never repeat this,’ he said, ‘Rita [
Hayworth
] was the very best there ever was, old boy! You could be in bed with Rita and you might take it into your head that you’d like to wrap a mackerel in newspaper and shove it up her ass, and without your saying a word, old boy, she’d get up and go down to the fridge and get a fish!’ When he talked about having girlfriends he said ‘It’s absolutely necessary, old boy, absolutely necessary’ He meant you get bored with your wife and you have to do something to reawaken your libido, and he had the soul of a playboy, though he didn’t chase after the girls on the film. He was an enormously powerfully built man,
huge
muscles in his legs, which he was proud of. He pulled up his pants and showed me his calf. His calf was like a football, an
enormous
calf muscle, and I think he was very muscular all over, though he suffered from back problems after a jeep accident. While we were shooting it was giving him trouble again and there were days when he could hardly move and he just stayed stiff on the set and the director moved people around him he was in such pain.
Randall was surprised to see how frugal Niv was – ‘he brought his lunch in a paper bag every day’ – but that helped to pay off the mortgage on the Pink House after just ten years and to buy a flashy new silver Bentley Continental. But his triumphs were soon to be darkened by tragedy. At the end of November Bogart’s cancer was found to have returned and after five days in hospital he was sent home to die. He was now so weak and wasted that the only way he could come down from his bedroom to greet his friends at six o’clock for his evening drink was by being lowered in a wheelchair in a little service elevator, the ‘dumb waiter’. They would come in turn, just one or two at a time: Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and Sinatra often; Niv all the time. Bogie died in the early hours of 14 January 1957, aged fifty-seven. Betty Bacall telephoned the Nivens before dawn. ‘My darling husband is gone,’ she said. Three days later Niv acted as an usher and bouncer at the memorial service at All Saints’ Episcopal church in Beverly Hills, where one of his jobs was to throw out the Press photographers. ‘He was wonderful all during Bogie’s illness and helped me a lot after Bogie died,’ Betty Bacall told me. ‘He said, “It’s like having a picture on the wall that you’ve had for ten or twenty years and then suddenly one day you are able to move that picture to another wall. You always have the picture, you never forget the person, but you’re able to move it so it’s not always a central focus,” and I thought that was brilliant, and I in turn have said the same thing to friends who have lost someone very close to them.’
Niv’s next movie was a remake with June Allyson of a wacky 1930s comedy,
My Man Godfrey
, in which he played a tramp who is persuaded to become a butler and whose Society-girl employer falls in love with him and discovers that he is in fact an impoverished Austrian count. Niv was brought in to replace an Austrian actor, O. W. Fischer, who had turned out to be so heavily humourless that he would guffaw at the end of every funny line. On Niv’s first day in
the part the director was horrified to see that he was just as bad and guffawing at the end of every line too, until he discovered that Niv was pulling his leg and winding him up. Once again his reviews reported that he was much better than the film itself – and the same thing happened with his next film,
Bonjour Tristesse
, for which he flew to Paris and the South of France with Deborah Kerr and eighteen-year-old Jean Seberg. The picture was based on the bestselling novel by Françoise Sagan and he played a middle-aged Riviera playboy and philanderer with a taste for pretty young jet-set flesh and an almost incestuous relationship with his seventeen-year-old daughter. ‘David is still recognisable as David Niven but there’s an edge to him,’ said Alexander Walker. ‘It was one of his four best films along with
The Way Ahead, Carrington VC
and
Separate Tables
.’
While Niv was filming he hired a villa at St Tropez and fell in love with the warm, hedonistic lifestyle of the Côte d’Azur – so much so that four years later he was to buy a villa along the coast on Cap Ferrat and live there for the rest of his life. He was probably seduced not only by the lotus-eating way of life, the balmy Mediterranean and the proximity of Princess Grace but also by the laissez-faire nonchalance of the French policeman who arrested him late one night, when he had forgotten his key and was trying to break in to the villa, and then showed him how to break and enter like a real burglar by inserting a long spoon inside the shutter.
Bonjour Tristesse
was the first of five films that Niv was to make with the elegant, thirty-five-year-old, Scots-born Deborah Kerr, who was married to her first husband, Tony Bartley. They clicked immediately, became close friends for the rest of his life, and seventeen years later he told Don Short of the
People
that she was his favourite co-star, ‘a marvellous person, with such a tremendous sense of humour. That’s what I look for in a woman – femininity and humour.’ It was a jokey relationship – sometimes she would adopt the gorblimey cockney accent of a London charlady and he called her Hilda
or Hil because of it – but also such a close relationship that it was she who saw through the constant merriment and spotted that he could sometimes be sad and melancholy.
‘By now he was very unhappy with Hjördis,’ Doreen Hawkins told me, ‘and he used to look unhappy, with what Deborah called his “mouse face” look, which seemed to say “I can’t stand this any more”. Deborah christened him Mouse Face: it had a dark shadow over it when he was unhappy.’ In 2002 Deborah Kerr was eighty-one and living in Switzerland but sadly unable to give me an interview because ‘she is not well’, I was told by her second husband, Peter Viertel, who married her in 1962. ‘She has Parkinson’s Disease. She wouldn’t be able to answer your questions except to say yes or no, and her voice is very weak. She can’t move either, but she’s somehow bearing up at the moment.’ But before the onset of her illness she told Sheridan Morley:
I loved David very much. Our relationship was one of total fun, because every disaster on the set or off was always met by David as some kind of elaborate joke played on him from above. He never let that mask slip in public, and it was only after years of working with him that I began to see a darker, sadder side to his nature. Most of the time we were like two children in school, crying with laughter over each other’s jokes; but there was a terrible insecurity about him when we got near the end of a picture. If he didn’t know exactly what film he was going into next, he got terribly neurotic about not being in work. He had to keep working, working, working all the time and I never in all the years I knew him found out why. Was he really so worried about money, or was it an escape from the family, or just that he liked the life of a film studio more than any other? He couldn’t bear life if he wasn’t actually working: a lot of actors are like that. David didn’t have any other life until he started to write again: at this time, the films were really everything.
They never became lovers, her husband told me: ‘He did have love affairs but not with Deborah. Not that Deborah didn’t have lovers before we were married, but she said she didn’t see him that way. They were close chums.’ R. J. Wagner told me that he wished Deborah and Niv had married: ‘That would have been perfect, a romance made in heaven. They were the most wonderful couple I ever saw together. They had the same sense of humour and such a joyous time together.’ Another close but platonic woman friend was R. J.’s own wife, the nineteen-year-old Russian-American actress Natasha Nikolaevna Zakharenko, who called herself Natalie Wood. She had already made twenty-eight films and came into Niv’s life when she married twenty-seven-year-old R. J. in December 1957. ‘We had some great times together,’ said Wagner.
At the end of 1957 David’s career was riding high. In London in October
The Little Hut
was playing on one side of Leicester Square,
My Man Godfrey
on the other, and
Around the World in Eighty Days
was on round the corner in Charing Cross Road. At Shepperton Studios he was just finishing the final shots for
Bonjour Tristesse
and about to start filming
Separate Tables
. He was said to be earning £30,000 per film – about £450,000 in modern terms – and since he had made three films that year he must have earned well over £1 million in today’s values yet he was still well aware that without Preminger and Todd his career might never have been resurrected. At the end of October he gave an interview to Roy Nash of the
Star
, who asked what he might have been doing now had he failed to make it in Hollywood. ‘I should be the lonely and inefficient secretary of a nine-hole golf course, or something equally dismal,’ he replied.
As it was, he was about to reach the summit of his career.
Separate Tables
, for which he was to win an Oscar, had been born as two hugely successful one-act stage plays by Terence Rattigan, set in a genteel seaside residential hotel in southern England where most of the residents are old retired people. Burt Lancaster’s film company bought the movie rights for
Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh to play all four leading parts, but when the Oliviers backed out Lancaster himself played the drunken American journalist, Rita Hayworth his beautiful ex-wife, Niv the retired English ‘major’ who lives at the hotel and lies about his past, and Deborah Kerr the timid spinster who is bullied by her old mother, played by Gladys Copper, and hopelessly fond of the major.
Shooting began in November and David was delighted to be portraying what he considered to be one of Rattigan’s best characters and with such a distinguished cast of English actors, among them Wendy Hiller, Gladys Cooper, Felix Aylmer and Cathleen Nesbitt. ‘It was a dream company to work with,’ he wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon
although several of the cast would have disagreed. Lancaster and his business partner James Hill, who was to marry Rita Hayworth two months later, kept taunting Wendy Hiller with crude remarks, sniggering jokes, filthy language and suggestive innuendos, possibly because she had rejected a sexual advance. Rita Hayworth was nervous, insecure, overawed by all the celebrated English actors, and drinking too much, and she spoke so softly that there was talk of replacing her. Niv, too, was apprehensive of the other actors, especially when he had to shoot a scene at the end of the film when his ‘major’ has been exposed as a liar and convicted molester of women in darkened cinemas, and has to walk into the restaurant knowing that the other guests have heard about his disgrace. It took four days to shoot the scene, with long close-ups of David’s expressions of embarrassment, fear, guilt and shame, and while he was doing them he trembled with nervous tension. ‘There was this whole line-up of the British stage … all staring at him,’ the film’s director, Delbert Mann, told Morley, ‘and when he’d finished they all applauded. I think that was maybe the best moment of his whole acting career.’
Priscilla Morgan – who was twenty-three and later married Clive Dunn, one of the stars of the TV series
Dad’s Army
– played the hotel’s cheeky waitress and told me: ‘David was
very nice and made it happy for everybody. He always made sure that nobody was left out. We English were over in Hollywood for four months and quite lonely, and he was so kind, always asking us over for the weekend. His sons weren’t that much younger than me and I used to go there and have Sunday lunch and play croquet with the boys.’ Some people claimed that Niv’s performance was a shameless copy of Eric Portman’s in the stage play but Priscilla Morgan, who was in that production too, said, ‘He didn’t
pinch
Portman’s performance but he’d do bits that went awfully well on the stage the same way in the film. That’s fair enough. He admired Portman very much.’ Roddy Mann had seen Portman on stage too and denied that Niv had plagiarised his performance: ‘They were totally different. Portman’s was a much
heavier
portrayal, Niven was rather sad and crumpled. He bloody well deserved the Oscar.’
Niv did not try to seduce Cilla Morgan. ‘Everyone said that he would,’ she said, sounding almost disappointed,
but I thought he was an old gent and I already had a liaison in England. When I met David years later at a party he said, ‘Oh, Christ, I didn’t half fancy you!’ and I said, ‘Well, you should have said something. I hadn’t the faintest idea.’ He didn’t approach anyone else either – they were all nine hundred years old! – but it’s a shame he never married Rita Hayworth. It would have been so good for her because she had such horrible husbands, and David and she got on marvellously well. She was a very quiet person, as shy as anything, and he would bring her out and insist on her sitting with us so she wouldn’t be left out. He was absolutely lovely. But I wasn’t too keen on Burt Lancaster: he was very rude to Rita and she was so sweet and defenceless against men being rude to her, which I think they always had been.
Another of David’s fans was Cathleen Nesbitt, who recalled in her memoirs that ‘he made us laugh so much we none of
us wanted to go home … Not only did he tell extremely funny stories, mostly against himself, but he told them so well. And he never was one to hog the scene. He could draw tales from [
another
] actor, eighty-year-old May Hallatt, about her childhood, or from Felix Aylmer about his terrifying attempts to find an exit from the freeways.’
Niv played the ‘major’ as though he had known him personally – with his blazer, cravat, Trubshawe-length moustache and bogus heroic anecdotes of having been at Wellington, Sandhurst and in the Desert Rats, whereas he had in fact been a humble Supply Corps lieutenant who had spent the whole war nice and safe in the West Indies. It was a comparatively small part yet it trembled with authenticity. ‘He kept saying, “God, this is the real stuff, isn’t it?,” ’ Deborah Kerr told Morley, ‘and I think he caught that major because in so many ways he understood him … as a character and as a person David felt that he was on familiar ground – that he too in his own life had always been acting and pretending, “dressing up for the grown-ups”, as he used to say.’