Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (39 page)

Kenneth More had a holiday home on the Villefranche side of Cap Ferrat, and his first wife Billie was still living there in 2002. ‘David was a dreadful snob, very shallow and conceited, but he was also very witty and attractive,’ she told me. ‘He was always charming and sweet to me, but he was false and I never knew whether he was going to cut me or not when I saw him. I used to see him a lot around Beaulieu and on some days he wouldn’t even recognise you, but on other days he would greet you and you’d think you were the only woman in the world. Once I went to buy a paper and noticed a strange man who nobody liked hanging about, and suddenly I was goosed. I thought, “He’s just lost his head, do nothing,” but then it happened again and I thought “he’s gone too far now!” and I turned round and there was David having hysterics. “You thought it was
him
, didn’t you?” he said.’

The one big flaw in Niv’s idyllic life was Hjördis, who was becoming increasingly alcoholic, remote and unloving. By the end of 1963, David Jr and Jamie told me, she was quite impossible in private at home though for most of the Sixties she could keep up a public façade of cheerful normality when she chose. ‘It was pretty terrible,’ said Jamie. ‘You were an unwelcome guest in your own home. My father would be making a movie somewhere in Europe so he’d go away on Sunday night and come back on Friday night. She would be perfectly OK to me from Monday morning till about Friday noon, but then she’d pick a fight so by the time he arrived, exhausted having flown from wherever he was, there’d be a full-scale war going on. And she’d do that on purpose, every time, to wind him up.’

David Jr, who was now twenty-one, had left the London School of Economics and was working as an agent with the William Morris agency in Los Angeles, got on better with her but told me that Hjördis was drinking so much that she started to have blackouts ‘so she couldn’t drive. She was
always drinking: vodka, then she went on to Fernet Branca, and Daddy hated the smell of it. Often they had lunch parties at the house and she would decide that she wouldn’t even come down. And he’d find any excuse to get out of the house: he’d go out to get the newspaper and that might be a three-hour excursion! She was such a pain in the ass and so
moody
. I once went to the South of France to see her and she said, “I’m not feeling very well, I’ll see you later,” and she didn’t appear for another day, she just stayed in her room. Things like that.’

Hjördis used to lock Jamie out of the house and he would have to break a window to get in. He said ‘She was moody and volatile, but I never saw her throw something at him. I don’t think she would have tried that. You don’t ever want to get that kind of man angry at you. He was powerful, and an intimidating personality.’ Yet it was Niv who had to run the household with the help of the servants. ‘She couldn’t cook even an egg. She’d have starved to death if she’d had to cook anything. She was on the telephone all the time, and she arranged flowers beautifully, and she drank: Fernet Branca and vodka, half and half. Fernet Branca is an almost medicinal aperitivo and it tastes horrible.’

When Jack and Doreen Hawkins once stayed at Château d’Oex, Niv wanted to take them to Lausanne to see Jamie playing hockey but Hjördis stopped them because she insisted they would be bored even though they were keen to go. ‘David had on his Mouse Face, as Deborah Kerr used to call it,’ Mrs Hawkins told me. ‘It was something to do with the mouth, sort of hurt, but he wouldn’t go with us on his own because he never wanted to hurt her. He really loved her and was determined to make a go of his marriage. Jack said to me, “I don’t know why David puts up with it.” ’

Jamie escaped the horrible atmosphere at home by leaving the Lycée Jacard in Lausanne – where he rowed on Lake Geneva to help the school win the Swiss Junior Championship Crew race – with a couple of A-level exam passes,
and he went to a crammer in London to pass a third subject so that he could go to Trinity College, Cambridge, where generations of Primmie’s family had been. ‘Jamie was much brighter than Daddy and me,’ David Jr told me. Jamie was now sixteen and growing up so quickly that in London he lived alone in a little basement flat in Mayfair. His Aunt Joyce, who was living in Onslow Square in South Kensington, was supposed to be keeping an eye on him, but he avoided her because he was not keen on her husband. Just a few streets away, too, in Chelsea, was his Aunt Grizel, now a highly praised but hard-up sculptress, who had a long-term girlfriend but lived alone in a cheap council flat in Jubilee Place even though Niv had generously bought her a house in the Fulham Road that she did not like.

In public Hjördis could sometimes still be outgoing and fun, and Princess Grace was particularly fond of her. ‘I never used to understand it,’ said Roddy Mann, ‘because Hjördis was boring and totally stupid. She would say the most stupid things and didn’t know anything about anything. But I think Grace was lonely for friendship in Monaco, and Rainier was a dull man.’ Betty Bacall told me that she thought Grace’s friendship with Hjördis ‘was all to do with men because Grace Kelly was very active with men and I think that’s what Hjördis wanted’. Pat Medina agreed: ‘I’m not sure that Grace didn’t catch a little of Hjördis’s infidelity,’ she said.

The Nivens and Rainiers often made up a foursome. ‘David enjoyed the pomp and ceremony of Monaco, which I thought was the biggest joke I’d ever seen,’ said Betty Bacall. ‘I couldn’t believe it, all these trumpets blaring, “the Prince and the Princess!”,
dum-da-dum-da-dum, da-da-da-da-da-da
.’ Grace introduced the Nivens to the film director Ken Annakin and his wife Pauline, who lived nearby at Vence, and although Annakin never liked Hjördis they would often be invited to Lo Scoglietto to play the charades and word games that Niv enjoyed so much. ‘The moment he opened the door he’d say “shampoo?” because he loved champagne,’ Annakin told me
in Los Angeles. Another of Hjördis’s friends was the novelist James Clavell’s wife, April. The Clavells lived in Antibes in the early 1970s and bought a house later on Cap Ferrat, where Mrs Clavell told me: ‘Hjördis was very wrapped up in herself, and even when she was young in Sweden I believe she had a very bad reputation for alcoholism before she ever married Niv. I don’t think it was Niv who drove her to drink. She got pretty bitter with everybody and I don’t think she had many friends, but before that she was always extremely pleasant and my kids
loved
her. She’d have them over and chat and they’d dance, and they thought she was super.’

Yet almost all of the Nivens’ friends and acquaintances told me that Hjördis was a cold, unpleasant woman. ‘You couldn’t get to know her very well,’ Bryan Forbes told me. ‘If you went to lunch there she would very often leave the table and disappear. She was a very cold Scandinavian who didn’t exude any warmth and was always immaculately turned out and made up, almost like one of the women in my film
The Stepford Wives
.’ Roger Moore said that Hjördis resented Niv ‘and would act very bored and raise her eyebrows when he was going to tell a story which she’d obviously heard a hundred times’ – an understandable reaction, though every one of David’s friends told me that his anecdotes were still hilarious even if they had heard them a dozen times before because he would change them slightly every time. Forbes said Niv’s anecdotes often were very funny and ‘usually had a particular point to them, like the one about the King of Siam who came to visit Hollywood, and Jack Warner, who fancied himself as a tennis player, played against the king in a doubles match and when the ball came over the net towards Warner he missed it and screamed at the top of his voice, “Slam it into the Chink!” You couldn’t be bored by stories like that.’ It was Jack Warner, too, who once stunned a formal dinner in honour of the wife of the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek by concluding his speech: ‘So, folks, if you have any laundry you know where to take it!’

Doreen Hawkins remembered that ‘Hjördis used to have a late breakfast upstairs in bed, but only when she rang the bell, and she was
hopeless
domestically. She couldn’t cook anything and didn’t want to. She used to say to me, “What are you doing all that cooking for?” and I said, “You have to if you’re married,” and she said, “You’re a fool to do it.” So they had a butler, a cook, an upstairs maid who did all Hjördis’s clothes and things, a cleaner, a washing woman, a gardener who also did the pool, and an assistant gardener.’ Pampered by all these servants, Hjördis ‘was always on the phone’, said Mrs Hawkins.

‘Hjördis used to lie by the pool making endless telephone calls,’ John Mortimer said, ‘and she’d say, “I’m so tired. Telephoning is so exhausting. I must have a holiday. My fingers are too tired.” ’ He once asked her if he could see the kitchen at Lo Scoglietto. ‘With some difficulty Hjördis found the number of the kitchen – a place, it seemed, with which she was not familiar – rang it up and announced that a visit would not be possible,’ he wrote in his autobiography
Murderers and Other Friends
. ‘Niven took us out for drives and to small restaurants. Hjördis stayed at home, a martyr to the telephone.’

‘She used to do the flowers so beautifully but then she did nothing all day,’ said Mrs Hawkins. ‘David was willing to do anything to get her doing things, and when she got this thing about painting he built a studio in the garden where she could paint, but she only did a couple.’

Peter Ustinov told me that Hjördis ‘always had some absurd desire. She would suddenly say things like, “Vy don’t ve all run naked in ze garden?”. She was also uncanny rather than beautiful. She had greenish eyes which were flecked with all sorts of colours and they didn’t look quite human, and she had a huge
mane
of hair.’ The hair was in fact a wig, of which Hjördis had several. ‘She always had an enormous wig, like a lion,’ Hedi Donizetti told me, and Ustinov said, ‘I imagine Niv married her because she seemed extremely erotic, but she
wouldn’t turn me on. I’d run a mile. She wasn’t sexy to me at all: she just looked false, as if she was the creation of a make-up man. She wore an enormous amount of make-up, and she was
big
, and with all those Swedish complexes she worried me no end. She was always sulking about something. You always had the impression you had arrived in the middle of a row. Dancink naked in ze garden! What rubbish!’

Hjördis fought with the servants as well as Niv and the boys. ‘He came to collect me at Nice airport once,’ Pat Medina said, ‘and as we drove back to Cap Ferrat he said, “Oh God, Nej’s having a row with Evelyn,” – the children’s nurse – “and she wants to get rid of her because she told Kristina off and Nej got angry. Well, if it’s a question of Evelyn or Nej,” he said, “I’ll take Evelyn and Nej can go back to Sweden!” So I wasn’t joining a very happy couple.’ Every one of the Nivens’ women friends, as well as the men, blamed Hjördis for the marriage’s problems. ‘She was very difficult,’ said Virginia Gallico, ‘beautiful and cold, and she cared only about her looks, and was terrified of getting old’, and Billie More said, ‘Hjördis was the most difficult lady. If David was unfaithful I expect she drove him to it.’ Another woman friend, who asked not to be named, said, ‘Hjördis would lock him out of the bedroom to get her own way. It went on for years and made him deeply unhappy. He told my husband once that when she locked the bedroom door she wouldn’t let him in even to get a shirt.’

Six months after Hjördis’s brief encounter with President Kennedy on board the
Sequoia
he was assassinated, on 22 November 1963. Niv went to the funeral in Washington, kept the black-rimmed funeral photograph card among his papers for the rest of his life, and in later years Jackie visited the Nivens in Switzerland and France.

Now that Kristina was two and a half Niv and Hjördis decided that she needed a playmate and in December they adopted another little blue-eyed, blonde, Swedish girl, a four-month-old orphan whom they named Fiona, who told me
thirty-eight years later that she had no interest in tracking down her real parents because it was not important.

It was more than a year since Niv had finished making
Bedtime Story
but in 1964 he made up for lost time by working on two films simultaneously:
Where the Spies Are
at Elstree Studios in England and in the Lebanon, and
Lady L
at Castle Howard in Yorkshire and Paris. He had missed out on James Bond but in
Where the Spies Are
he played another British secret agent, Jason Love, who is sent to the Middle East to prevent the assassination of an Arab prince. The critics loved it. ‘Mr Niven’s sure-fire comedy instinct and perfectionist timing are a source of perpetual joy and delight,’ said the
Sunday Express
, and the
Sunday Times
reckoned that he ‘simply doesn’t give a performance which is less than excellent’.

His was easily the best performance in
Lady L
as well, even though he did not appear until halfway through. Written and directed by Peter Ustinov, it co-starred thirty-year-old Sophia Loren and thirty-nine-year-old Paul Newman, and told in flashback the story of an eighty-year-old English aristocrat, played by Loren, who has risen from being a Corsican laundress in a Paris brothel to a position of wealth and influence thanks to her marriage to an impotent old duke (Niv) and despite having several children by a French anarchist (Newman). The costumes and scenery for this frothy nonsense were gloriously colourful but the reviewers rightly felt that neither Loren as a crone nor Newman as a Frenchman came up to scratch and that Niv’s performance was as usual the best of the lot, and as soon as he came on the scene the whole picture perked up and became quite jolly. The atmosphere on the set, however, was sometimes unpleasant. ‘Loren and Newman couldn’t stand each other,’ Ustinov said. ‘It was like when a dog passes another in the street and ignores it, but suddenly sees another on the opposite pavement and goes mad. It was exactly that: they were snapping at each other. Eventually I said to them, “
Do
make an effort, for Christ’s sake, this is
so
childish. You’re supposed to be in
love
with each other.” ’ After that Loren did make a big effort to be sociable, said Ustinov, but when she enquired pleasantly one day, ‘Paul, how do you stick the moustache on your face?’ he glared at her and snarled, ‘With
sperm
!’