Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (38 page)

Lo Scoglietto – Italian for ‘Little Rock’ – was built on a small peninsula that juts into the Mediterranean between Beaulieu and St Jean-Cap Ferrat, and had its own little green-water harbour, a big garden with fig trees, cedars, cypress, pines and two 2000-year-old olive trees that had been planted by the Romans, and a sweeping view of Beaulieu, its green and white cliffs and the sparkling blue bay towards Cap d’Ail. It had six bedrooms, three bathrooms, marble floors, a library, two salons, an office, a kitchen, a laundry, and three rooms for servants. Not everyone loved the South of France, even then. As Sam Goldwyn put it in one of his classic Goldwynisms, ‘Nobody goes to the South of France no more: it’s too crowded,’ and Noël Coward wrote in his diary the previous summer that ‘the whole of the Côte d’Azur has become one vast honky-tonk. Millions of cars, millions of people, thousands of “motels” and camping sites. The coast, viewed from the sea, is still romantic and beautiful, but once ashore it is hell …. The whole place was filled with ghastly tourists augmented by hordes of gormless American sailors with vast Adam’s apples and rimless glasses … the South of France, as far as I am concerned, has had it.’ But out of season, even today, the Côte d’Azur is delightful and Niv loved its warmth, sunshine, swimming, sailing, fishing, the wonderful food and wine, the laid-back southern-French lifestyle. The Rainiers lived a few miles along the coast in Monaco and his neighbours included Somerset Maugham. Véronique and Gregory Peck had recently bought a villa nearby on the Cap, though Niv and Peck soon found themselves in trouble with the
police when they sailed a boat to Italy, called their wives at home by walkie-talkie radio, and joked, ‘We’ll be back with the loot at eight. Keep the harbour open.’ Their conversation was intercepted by
les flics
and five armed men turned up at Lo Scoglietto with a search warrant.

In June Niv and Hjördis at last adopted the little Swedish girl he had promised her, a blonde, blue-eyed infant just a couple of weeks old. She had been born in Geneva on 4 June, the illegitimate daughter of a Swedish woman in her early twenties who lived there, Mona Gunnarson, who named the child Eva Charlotte before the Nivens changed it to Kristina. Before the adoption they had to get the formal permission of eighteen-year-old David Jr, who was soon to start his first term at the London School of Economics, and Jamie, who was now fifteen. Jamie said, ‘Under Swiss law if one of the parents is over the age of fifty and has two children by an original marriage, and that child is over the age of fourteen, that child can say no. I didn’t say no because he asked me not to. He said, “I know that you want to say no because she’s been a terrible mother to you, but you mustn’t do that to me. Please don’t.” Well, that was it, but had I been eighteen or nineteen I would probably have said, “You’ve got to be out of your mind. This woman is a horrible person. This is a dreadful soul. You can’t have another child brought up by this person.” But she was fine with the girls and he was terrific and loved them very much.’

Kristina, who was still living in Switzerland in 2002, told me she was convinced that she was not just adopted but was actually Niv’s real daughter, the result of an affair he had with Mona Gunnarson. ‘I think she was a model,’ she said. ‘I found out that he really was my father after he died, when I had to get a birth certificate to become Swiss, and I think my real mother went to the school right next to the chalet in Château d’Oex, the Clos des Abeilles, and I believe she had a son too. There must have been a lot of subterfuge for me to be passed off as adopted rather than my father’s daughter. I think
Hjördis knew this and that’s what created a lot of the disagreements between her and my father. Everybody used to say how alike my father and I were and that we had the same look in our eyes. I always had a little suspicion about it because we were very much alike, with a great sense of humour and always laughing. Maybe it was finding out about me that made Hjördis drink, but she wasn’t particularly faithful herself. I think David and Jamie knew and it’s bothered them since I was born. It must have been heavy for my father to keep the secret for so long. My real mother came to his funeral and was so covered up that she had a veil over her face, because apparently the resemblance between her and me is so great that it would have stuck out like a sore thumb. She married an Egyptian but is now widowed or divorced. She’d be about sixty-five or sixty-six now, and was in London at the Connaught Hotel a couple of months ago, and I sent her some flowers but she’s never been in touch with me.’

Is it really possible that Niv could have duped or persuaded Hjördis to adopt his own child by another woman, maybe a pretty girl whom he had spotted at the school in Château d’Oex? It seems preposterous, an example perhaps of the common poignant delusion of many children, especially orphans or those who are adopted, that their real parent is someone rich or famous, but Kristina was adamant. ‘David Niven was my real father,’ she insisted, and showed me two Swiss birth certificates, both relating to her, with the same date of birth and reference numbers, but one names her as Kristina, adopted daughter of Niv and Hjördis, while the other, probably the first, calls her Eva Charlotte and lists her surname already as Niven and her nationality as British even before she was adopted, which Kristina believed is evidence that she was born with the surname Niven and was therefore the real daughter of someone called Niven. It certainly seems strange that Niv and Hjördis kept the adoption secret for more than three years. ‘David and I made a pact,’ she told
Woman
three years later. ‘We wanted Kristina to lead a normal
life without fuss and the inevitable publicity she’d receive if the press were to hear about her. So for three whole years, although she has been with us in London, Paris, Rome and even Hollywood, her secret has been kept. We have landed at airports and walked through groups of waiting pressmen to the customs followed by Kristina and some good friend and no one ever suspected a thing.’ But why bother to hide it? An infant would hardly be upset by photographers and many famous people adopt children without any great fuss from the media.

Sadly the Clos des Abeilles, a finishing school for girls aged sixteen to eighteen, no longer exists and in 2003 its head, Madame Simone Favey, was in an old folks’ home and ‘cannot remember anything’, her son Benoit Favey told me, ‘and I’m afraid that there are no school records that might refer to Miss Gunnarson.’ In 2003 Mona Gunnarson was 67, divorced, living in Dusseldorf, and had another daughter, a son, and two grandchildren. For the sake of her family, who knew nothing about Kristina, she begged that her married name should not be revealed, denied that Niv was Kristina’s father, and said that the man had in fact been a sailor in the US navy.

To pay for their two homes, three children and several servants, Niv started to accept every film that was offered. In the next seven years he made fourteen movies, most of them pretty dreadful, and in the twelve years after that another fifteen, usually just for the money. The first was a Bing Crosby/Bob Hope picture,
The Road to Hong Kong
, in which he made a mercifully brief appearance as a Tibetan monk. Then came a much better movie,
Guns of Darkness
, a thriller in which he played a British planter in a South American republic who rescues the country’s wounded president after he has been overthrown in a coup. It was an unusually serious part for him and the reviewers were impressed. ‘The planter is such a convincing figure,’ said the
Daily Mail
, ‘a man in agony because he sees and asks too much, that you never
think of him as David Niven until the film ends.’ The
Financial Times
agreed: ‘David Niven … seems continually to improve as an actor,’ it said.

His co-star was Leslie Caron, who played his disgruntled wife and was one of the few women who did not like him. ‘He was not my kind of gentleman,’ she told me, but refused to say why. ‘He did not particularly like her either,’ said Jamie, ‘so perhaps they were just not suited to each other or perhaps there is more here than you or I will ever know.’ When I asked Princess Salimah for an opinion, she grinned. ‘Maybe he tried to jump her bones!’ she suggested. ‘Or maybe he
didn’t
!’

The script for
The Guns of Darkness
was written by John Mortimer, who was to become one of Niv’s closest friends. ‘He found Leslie Caron slightly irritating,’ Mortimer told me. ‘It was filmed in Spain and we spent a lot of time together. We went to see things like the Alhambra, which was not really his thing because it was a bigger star than he was! He was very funny. We drank a lot of cheap Fundador brandy, so he called me Fundador. Afterwards we would always meet when he came to England. He’d come to lunch in the country and was very sweet because we used to ask him for one o’clock and people would see him walking about the lanes because he thought it would be rude to arrive early. And he once brought a beauty queen whom he’d picked up at London airport!’

The Nivens returned for Christmas to Château d’Oex, where he was now to spend every winter skiing and enjoying the mountains and the social life of Gstaad, and he started an annual Christmas tradition that he was to keep up for many years: he invited Noël Coward and his companions Graham Payn and Cole Lesley to spend Boxing Day at Château d’Oex. Coward and his chums would arrive at noon on the little mountain train from Les Avants wearing mink coats and carrying three pillowcases full of presents, and the Nivens would meet them at the station with bullshots –
glasses of beef soup heavily laced with vodka – before walking round to the chalet, where they would join other friends such as the Burtons or Blake Edwards and his wife, Julie Andrews. One Boxing Day Niv hired a local oom-pah-pah band in traditional costume to play ‘Rule, Britannia’ as Coward and Co. stepped onto the platform, much to the delight of the Stationmaster and the crowds of skiers, while the white-coated butler presented them with drinks on a silver salver.

Niv rarely went to the Côte d’Azur in winter but he did in January 1962 to clinch his purchase of Lo Scoglietto for a reported £50,000, though he told several friends that he paid much less for it. Today the house is worth at least £12 million and maybe much more, but ‘he bought it so cheaply because he claimed that the sewers of both St Jean and Beaulieu emptied right outside the house’, Leslie Bricusse told me. ‘In fact he made his offer only after he had some frogmen go down to check that it wasn’t true.’

One of the first improvements Niv undertook was to build a swimming pool. ‘He wanted a beautiful figure-eight pool,’ said Bricusse, ‘at least seventy feet long, and they had to blast into the rock to do it. He went away, made a movie, and came back four months later and there was this vast hole in the garden: he had told the guy he wanted it eight feet deep but they had made it eight
metres
deep. You could have put a submarine in there!’

Niv relished Château d’Oex and his winter life in Switzerland but Lo Scoglietto became his favourite home and he was to spend more time there than anywhere, though he told the French tax authorities that it was merely his summer holiday place. He loved America and Americans, but in his heart he was still European, and after twenty-one years in the States he felt that he had come home.

Eleven

Shampoo, Beakers and Fernet Branca
1962–1969

O
n April Fools’ Day 1962 Hjördis was skiing with David Jr, Jamie and her Swedish niece near Gstaad and was so disconcerted by a strange man who kept staring at her and murmured ‘I love you’ that as she sped down the mountain she glanced nervously over her shoulder to see if he was following her and crashed, knocking herself out and breaking her leg in fifteen places. Niv flew her to the Nuffield Orthopaedic Hospital in Oxford and checked her into a private room before flying back to Rome to shoot two more Italian films. Later she claimed she was in hospital for nine months and that he flew back to London to spend every Sunday with her, but her absence still left him with plenty of time to enjoy the pretty girls of the Côte d’Azur that summer.

He was amused to discover that Lo Scoglietto had once been a convent, which gave an extra spice to his infidelities. ‘He was an attractive man and women threw themselves at him, so you can’t blame him,’ I was told by Kathrine Steinberg, who was Jamie’s sixteen-year-old girlfriend and spent that summer with them. ‘He was a little flirty with everybody, even me, and once when he had a girlfriend there with him he gave Jamie some money to take me to the cinema so that they would be on their own.’ His social life was full and he spent a great deal of time with the Rainiers and often with Grace alone. ‘I was staying at Cap Ferrat once when Hjördis was away,’ Roddy Mann told me, ‘and David said, “We’re going out to dinner in Monte Carlo but I want to pick a chum up.” A chum! It was Grace and I fell instantly in love with
her. She was
adorable
, a knockout, and they were huge friends. So we were charging around Monte Carlo in the dark and he gets lost and goes up a one-way street, and Grace says, “David, you’ll get into trouble, it’s a one-way street!” and he said, “How can we get into trouble? You
own
this place!” ’

Another good friend – and a friend of the Rainiers – was the American journalist and novelist Paul Gallico, who lived a few miles along the coast in a lovely medieval house on the ramparts overlooking the sea at Antibes. ‘David was a snob and loved mixing with titled, rich or famous people, but he was such fun to be with,’ I was told by Gallico’s widow, Virginia, who was thirty years younger than her husband, still lives in the same house and has been for many years Rainier’s
Dame d’Honneur
at the palace in Monaco. ‘He lit up a room and was very much on stage even with his friends and rather fancied himself as this dashing chap with the twinkle in his eye, and that rather worried Paul because he felt that David never relaxed in public.’ Sometimes, though, Niv’s attempts to be jolly could backfire. When John Wayne’s wife Pilar gave birth to their son John that year Niv sent them a telegram that read: ‘
CONGRATULATIONS STOP I THOUGHT IT WAS WIND
.’ She had in fact had a very difficult labour and Wayne was furious.

The two Italian films that David made in Rome that year were
Il Giorno Più Corto
with Stewart Granger, Marcello Mastroianni and Walter Pidgeon, a spoof of the wartime epic
The Longest Day
, which was released in English as
The Shortest Day
; and
La Città Prigioniera
, which was retitled
The Captive City
in Britain and
The Conquered City
in the United States, and told another Second World War story, this time about a British major who is trapped by Greek partisans in an Athens hotel. The critics were sniffy about both and it was becoming increasingly obvious that with two houses, a non-working wife, three children and staff to support Niv was taking on too many movies just for the money. Fortunately his next, 55
Days at Peking
, was much better: a slow but colourful,
spectacular two-and-a-half-hour epic about the anti-European Boxer rebellion in Peking in 1900, in which he played the British ambassador to China with Charlton Heston as an American marine, his old squeeze Ava Gardner as an improbable Russian baroness, and Flora Robson as the Chinese dowager empress. The movie took six months to make, was shot in Spain, and ‘David was a lovely actor, terribly engaging and very funny’, Heston told me in Hollywood. ‘The Brits tend to be better than Americans at acting and he was one of the good ones. There’s a scene where he and I are trying to blow up an ammunition dump, we were a hundred yards away from it, crouching down, and he said, “I’m getting a bit long in the tooth for this, so don’t run too fast and leave me behind,” but then he ran very fast like a fucking rabbit.’ One of the film’s main problems was Ava Gardner. ‘She was still extraordinarily beautiful,’ said Heston, ‘but the problem was liquor. After three in the afternoon it was not easy to get anything out of her.’ To make matters worse, she was afraid of Flora Robson, frightened of the thousands of Chinese extras, and often locked herself in her dressing room to drink, so that many of her scenes had to be shot over the shoulder of her stand-in. Not surprisingly the director, Nicholas Ray, had a heart attack halfway through the film.

While Niv was filming in Spain he was saddened to learn that R. J. Wagner and Natalie Wood were divorcing after four years of marriage, and in the autumn that Primmie’s father, Bill Rollo, had died in England when he fell from his horse and broke his neck while out fox-hunting. He was seventy. Niv had always been very fond of him and returned for the funeral in Rutland, where the Duke of Beaufort asked him what he was doing the next day. ‘I have to go back to Spain,’ said Niv. ‘I’m shooting in the morning.’

‘Ah!’ said the Duke. ‘I hear they’ve got a nice lot of birds down there this year.’

Rollo was buried in the churchyard at Huish beside Primmie
and her mother, who had died two years earlier, and another old friend of Niv’s died in January of cancer: Dick Powell, one of his Four Star partners, who had spent much more time running the company than either Niv or Boyer. Death had become a neighbour and was fingering his friends, and as he told Roddy Mann two years later: ‘Never resent growing older. Millions are denied the privilege.’ But the good news was that R. J. moved to Europe to get over his divorce and joined David in his next movie, Blake Edwards’s farce
The Pink Panther
, in which Niv played the aristocratic jewel thief Sir Charles Lytton, ‘The Phantom’, a Sixties Raffles who preys on rich women. R. J. was his nephew, Capucine his mistress, Claudia Cardinale the princess who owns the Pink Panther diamond, Peter Sellers was making his debut as the bumbling French police inspector Jacques Clouseau, and Trubshawe appeared briefly as a novelist. Unfortunately the film was dreadfully unfunny except for a couple of scenes, Niv’s performance was stilted and unconvincing, and his love scene with Cardinale was excruciatingly embarrassing. Even so, Miss Cardinale told me, ‘we had such fun during the shooting of that film in London and at Cinecittà in Italy. Peter Sellers was so funny when he was shooting but off the set he was totally different, a very sad person, very serious, very unhappy, a lonely man. He never relaxed. But David had so much energy and sense of humour and he was very sexy and elegant. I knew he had an unhappy marriage and I could understand women having affairs with him, but not me: I’ve never been an easy woman and he never pursued me because he knew it was impossible. But I’m surprised Leslie Caron didn’t like him. Perhaps they had a history of some sort.’

It was a harmonious movie to make except that Sellers and Edwards disagreed so often that at one time they communicated only in writing, and R. J. told me: ‘Niv gave me so much when I went to Europe. He took me to his tailor and shirtmaker and he was a warm mentor for me in many ways because I loved the way he styled his life. I loved the way
he left Hollywood and moved to Europe. That was a very courageous thing to do at that time.’

Niv did suffer one terrifying crisis when they had to shoot some skiing scenes in the Italian Alps and they went out on the slopes to practise on a day that was so cold he quickly realised that his ski suit was much too thin. Halfway down the mountain he became aware that his penis was freezing. He and R. J. rushed to the nearest hotel, yelling for a glass of brandy, and scuttled into the lavatory where Niv plunged his penis – by now ‘a pale blue acorn’, he said – into the alcohol to thaw it out and save it from agonising frostbite. ‘He put his unit into the brandy,’ R. J. told me, ‘and this guy came out of one of the cubicles and said, “My God, what are you doing?” and Niv said, “I always give it a drink now and then.” I laughed so hard I wet my pants. I’ve had such great times with Niven. Roddy Mann and I got so pissed with him one night it was unbelievable. We drank bottles and bottles of
vino
, continually laughing, and stayed up until the early hours.’

Another famous penis that was exposed in March was that of Douglas Fairbanks Jr, whose cock was the major focus of a scandalous divorce case in Edinburgh when the Duke of Argyll accused his wife Margaret of having had at least eighty-eight lovers during their marriage, including three royals, two Cabinet ministers and several film stars. Among the evidence was a cache of Polaroid photographs of the duchess, wearing only a three-strand pearl necklace, fellating a naked ‘Headless Man’ in the bathroom of her Mayfair flat. The photos showed him only from the neck down, but in some circles it was common knowledge that he was Fairbanks – and another of the duchess’s eighty-eight lovers, given her taste for film star flesh, may well have been Niv since he had seduced her when she was fifteen and still plain Margaret Whigham, and he was seventeen. As a girl she had often spent the Easter holidays at Bembridge and confessed in her autobiography that she had had a schoolgirl crush on him. He was not, however, the second unknown man who appeared
in some of the photographs: he was later identified as the Secretary of State for Defence, Duncan Sandys. The photos were so explicit that Sandys was thereafter nicknamed Sunken Glands.

At the end of April Niv and Hjördis flew to Hollywood for him to make another awful farce, this time with Marlon Brando in his first comedy,
Bedtime Story
, in which they played two rival playboys conning rich women in the South of France. David was relieved to discover that Brando was not nearly as moody and difficult as people said, and Brando said later that ‘working with David Niven was the only time I ever looked forward to filming. I just couldn’t wait to wake up each morning and go to work so he could make me laugh.’ He was intrigued by Niv’s constant good humour and kept looking in vain for cracks in his bonhomie. ‘Why are you always laughing?’ he asked. ‘I wanna see the
real
Niven.’ The film itself was much less amusing and when Noël Coward saw it he wrote in his diary that it was ‘a common, vulgar movie’ in which David was ‘dull throughout’.

Several years previously the Nivens had met Jack and Jackie Kennedy, and now that Kennedy had been President of the United States for more than two years they were invited to dinner at the White House in March and got on so well with them that Jackie asked them to join a much smaller, mainly family party two months later to celebrate JFK’s forty-sixth birthday on the evening of 29 May. It was held in Washington aboard the Presidential yacht, the
Sequoia
, on the Potomac river, and a three-piece band played all evening while the yacht cruised up the river and the guests feasted and played the boisterous games that the Kennedys loved, during one of which a leg of Senator Teddy Kennedy’s trousers was torn off. The President’s trousers also came off that evening. He was renowned for grabbing any woman he fancied, dragging her into a corner, yanking her skirts up and having his way with her, and that night he bundled Hjördis below decks and ravished her. Senator George Smathers of Florida, who witnessed
the genesis of this speedy courtship, told Kitty Kelley for her biography of Jackie Kennedy, who was five months pregnant, that Kennedy asked him to keep a lookout while he was with Hjördis and returned about ten minutes later: ‘It was like a rooster getting on top of a chicken real fast and then the poor little hen ruffles her feathers and wonders what the hell happened to her … No one was off-limits to Jack – not your wife, your mother, your sister. If he wanted a woman, he’d take her.’ The story has been repeated by at least two other Kennedy biographers, but more serious than a cheerful romp was the fact that for many years Kennedy had suffered from a chronic venereal disease, chlamydia or non-specific urethritis, and might well have infected Hjördis – and if a woman is infected by chlamydia she may produce fewer hormones than normal, which can make her deeply depressed, so that quick romp with President Kennedy may have caused or worsened the dreadful depression that Hjördis was to display increasingly through the 1960s and 1970s, and that was to make Niv’s life so miserable. Nor was that evening necessarily the only time that Kennedy and Hjördis coupled, for the Nivens spent that weekend with the Kennedys at Camp David, where maybe they fornicated again. Niv probably had no idea that his host had cuckolded him, for he wrote glowingly about him and that weekend in
The Moon’s a Balloon
, but he would have found out eventually when Kitty Kelley’s biography was published in 1979.

Back in Hollywood Niv found a letter from Ian Fleming, who told him that his next James Bond novel,
You Only Live Twice
, included a cormorant called David Niven because its owner, a beautiful Japanese girl, Kissy Suzuki, says that ‘you were the only person who was nice to her in Hollywood!’. The heavy-smoking, hard-drinking, rich-eating Fleming was to die of heart failure just over a year later, aged fifty-six – another of Niv’s friends to die young.

That summer of 1963 was the first that Niv and Hjördis spent together at Lo Scoglietto. Peter Ustinov told me that he
didn’t like the house at all ‘because it looked impermanent, like a Hollywood set’, but Niv revelled in it and kept extremely fit by exercising for thirty minutes every morning, swimming every day in his pool or the sea, waterskiing, walking for miles every day, and playing golf. He bought a catamaran and speedboat which he kept in his little private harbour and used for fishing. He loved eating in little bistros and cafés, like the African Queen in Beaulieu, as well as smart restaurants like the Colombe d’Or in the medieval hill village of St Paul de Vence, where the walls were lined with pictures that Picasso and Matisse had painted to pay for their meals. ‘He loved wine,’ Jamie told me, ‘but stopped drinking hard liquor in the Fifties and ate flat food – food close to the plate, like grilled fillet of sole and spinach rather than steak and
frites
.’ Most of all Niv enjoyed visiting and entertaining friends: the Rainiers over at Monaco, the Gallicos in Antibes, the Pecks on the Cap, Greta Garbo, and visitors such as the Roger Moores, Dickie Attenboroughs, Bryan Forbeses, Ustinovs. Lunch at Lo Scoglietto was always served by a man wearing white gloves and when Grace came to dinner once she was startled to find the Nivens’ eccentric butler wearing his white, ankle-length milkman’s coat and thought he must be a doctor. ‘Niv loved that house,’ said R. J. Wagner, who often stayed at Lo Scoglietto and tried to forget his beloved ex-wife Natalie by marrying an old girlfriend, Marion Marshall. ‘He loved the garden and flowers, and he’d help the bees and wasps out of the pool to stop them drowning. And he loved his little sailboat,
Foxy
.’ Niv regularly went fishing for sea bass and snorkelling for sea urchins, which he ate by the bucketful, and early every evening, his younger daughter Fiona told me, he relished a glass or two of wine before dinner: ‘Evening Beakers, he called them. EBs.’ Such was to be the summer pattern of his life for more than twenty years, and to enjoy his Côte d’Azur lifestyle he refused to agree to make any movie unless it fitted in with his hedonistic leisure timetable. One that he turned down that year was
My Fair Lady
, a film
that like
Lolita
eventually went to one of his
bêtes noires
, this time to Rex Harrison.