Read Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven Online
Authors: Graham Lord
Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (37 page)
That summer Niv, Hjördis and the boys went off for an extended holiday in a villa in the South of France on the exclusive, expensive little Côte d’Azur peninsula of Cap
Ferrat, near Nice, that Niv rented from a French ex-Member of Parliament, Jacques Bounin. The house was called Lo Scoglietto and although it was a dilapidated mess inside and the garden a jungle of overgrown trees and dark, soggy grass, they loved it so much that he bought it six months later, renovated it, painted it the same colour as the Pink House and was to spend most of each year there for the rest of his life.
(From left)
Shirley MacLaine, George Raft, Marlene Dietrich and David Niven (as the Victorian adventurer Phileas Fogg) in the sumptuously extravagant film that rescued his faltering career in 1956,
Around the World in Eighty Days
.
… and Niv in the same movie with his randy French valet Passepartout, played by the lively Mexican actor Cantinflas, who went on to win the Golden Globe award for best actor that year.
David’s old lover Merle Oberon, now Lady Korda, with her film producer husband Sir Alexander Korda at the Stork Club in New York.
Niv with another old lover, Ava Gardner, in the 1956 film
The Little Hut
, in which they and Stewart Granger were shipwrecked on a tropical island. The film was ‘a fiasco’, she said, and Granger called it ‘a bloody stupid comedy’ and complained to his wife, Jean Simmons: ‘Imagine playing a straight man to David Niven with that bloody moustache. He’s always playing with it or twitching it on everybody else’s lines. You can’t win against Niven’s moustache.’
Niv disguised as a cinema usher with two of his best friends, Lauren Bacall and her husband Humphrey Bogart at a charity show.
David with one of his closest but platonic friends, Deborah Kerr, in the role that won him the Oscar for Best Actor in 1959, as the bogus ‘Major’ Pollock in
Separate Tables
.
The only time in his life that Niv ever smoked a cigarette, for a scene for
The Guns of Navarone
, the 1961 wartime adventure in which he played an explosives expert, Sergeant Miller.
Niv and the winner of the Best Actress award, Susan Hayward, with their Oscars at the Academy Awards ceremony at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood on 6 April 1959.
With Sophia Loren in
Lady L
, a 1965 comedy directed by his old friend (and army batman) Peter Ustinov.
In the summer of 1959 Hjördis left him for another man, and to make her jealous Niv took his sons David
(left, aged sixteen)
and thirteen-year-old Jamie for a holiday in Hawaii, where, according to David Jr, ‘he went through the girls of Honolulu like a machete through a pineapple!’
When David’s autobiography
The Moon’s a Balloon
was published in 1971 this picture appeared over the caption ‘With Hjördis in Spain, near Malaga.’ In later editions he changed it to read ‘Hjördis in Malaga resting outside hotel with encouraging name’ – a sad alteration because their marriage had become a sham and she was locking him out of her bedroom.
Another misleading family photograph that belied the truth of the Nivens’ unhappy marriage: Niv and Hjördis at their home in the South of France in the late 1960s with his sons Jamie
(left)
and David and adopted daughters Fiona
(left)
and Kristina.