Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (41 page)

In May Niv gave another interview, to Peter Evans of the
Daily Express
, in which he was unnecessarily cruel about Trubshawe. ‘I hate having the same bunch of chums and never changing them,’ he said. ‘It must be awful, all getting old together, decrepit together, and finally dying together. We have tons of changing chums.’ Trubshawe was deeply hurt, framed the article, and hung it in his bathroom to remind himself of what he called Niv’s ‘heartlessness and thoughtlessness’. R. J. Wagner believed that Niv became fed up with Trubshawe because he kept nagging him to help him get parts in his films, and Niv told Roddy Mann that Trubshawe had just become boring: ‘He kept reminiscing and saying “remember when” and Niven was doing his own remember when. You outgrow people, and he became tiresome.’ Trubshawe tried to revive their mutual running joke when he appeared that year in the film
Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
as a character called Niven, but the friendship had gone cold.

At the end of July Niv embarked on
The Eye of the Devil
, a horror movie about witchcraft and Satanism in a French château that was filmed in Bordeaux country near Limoges and in which there was a maid with magical powers, cowled monks, and he played the aristocratic owner of a vineyard who has by ancient custom to be sacrificed for the failure of the grape harvest. In due course the
Sunday Times
reported that the film was ‘hilariously bad’ and it seemed to be cursed from the start when it was initially entitled
13
; Niv’s co-star Kim Novak – ‘a horrid lady,’ he wrote to Jamie Hamilton – had a riding accident after eight weeks of shooting and had to be replaced by Deborah Kerr, which meant that the first eight weeks had to be filmed all over again, and a low-flying jet upset Niv’s horse and he was thrown off. Much worse was to come: Sharon Tate, who played a sinister witch, was to be murdered horribly by the Charles Manson ritual witchcraft gang four years later.

Niv was earning so much now that he started being
incredibly generous to both his sisters. In October 1965 he sent Grizel a cheque for £1000, which would be worth about £12,000 today, followed by another for £500 just before Christmas and another £1000 in April – a total in modern values of £30,000 in just over five months. In April he gave Joyce £1000 as well, and from now on he was to send them both huge cheques every year and sometimes twice a year. In November 1966 he sent Grizel £1000 and another £1500 a month later – another £30,000 in modern values in just a month. At the end of 1967 she got £2000 (about £23,000) and Joyce £1000 (£11,500), and so it went on: in 1968 he sent Joyce £2000 and Grizel an astonishing £4000 (about £65,000 today); in 1969 he gave Grizel £5000, which would be worth more than £50,000 in 2003. It was an amazing demonstration of fraternal affection that went on every year for nearly twenty years. ‘David was always very, very generous to me,’ said Grizel. ‘We didn’t see a lot of each other when we were grown up but we always remained very good friends and I stayed with him sometimes in France and Switzerland.’

In December he had another close encounter with death: he was driving with Hjördis along a Swiss mountain road when his Mercedes sports car skidded on ice and crashed into a post that stopped it plunging into a deep ravine. Death was sniffing too that month around Jack Hawkins, who had contracted cancer of the larynx and underwent a laryngectomy in January 1966 in London. ‘David was wonderful all through Jack’s illness,’ Doreen Hawkins told me, and in his autobiography Hawkins wrote that Niv had ‘an infectious gaiety, and an extremely colourful sense of humour, both of which buoyed me up immensely’. Hawkins was to have a device implanted in his throat to help him to speak in a ‘strange Dalek voice’, as his wife put it, but the operation gave him another seven years of life.

In March, a year after Niv had first suggested writing a book for Jamie Hamilton, the publisher wrote again to ask if he would dig out his old contract with the Cresset Press ‘to verify
whether you are under option to them for your stories. If not, we would love to publish them.’ He was to have to keep nagging David about it for five more years before the situation was sorted out. As Niv looked back over his life for incidents to turn into stories he was reminded of how lucky he had been to break into Hollywood and wrote a long letter to Sam Goldwyn to thank him for taking him on more than thirty-one years previously. ‘My dear Sam,’ he wrote. ‘I start a new picture next week (they still seem to invite me to make those same six expressions!). Each time I start a new one – I think with so much gratitude of
you
… So, after thirty years of incredible good fortune … I just had to sit down in my Swiss cuckoo clock after a good days skiing and thank you once again from the bottom of my heart for all you did for me when it
really
counted … Best love and
endless
gratitude.
David
(Niven).’

Goldwyn replied, ‘Thank you for that warm and charming letter. To me you are still tops and I have been pleased to watch your career over the years and see the great success you have made. If you didn’t have it, you couldn’t give it.’ He ended the letter ‘Your devoted fan, Sam’. The days of animosity were over. Or were they? ‘Niv didn’t like Goldwyn at the end,’ said Roddy Mann. ‘I remember him being quite bitchy about him.’

The movie that Niv was about to make was the lavish slapstick farce
Casino Royale
, which let him play James Bond at last – an elderly, retired
Sir
James Bond – a spoof that took the mickey out of 007 and spy films in general. It was a frenetic, plotless shambles involving six scriptwriters, seven directors (John Huston, Kenneth Hughes, Val Guest, Robert Parrish, Joseph McGrath, Richard Talmadge and Anthony Squire), three far-flung studios and no fewer than five Bonds apart from Niv: Woody Allen, Peter Sellers, Terence Cooper, and even Ursula Andress and Daliah Lavi as female 007s. The public adored it, but despite an extraordinarily starry cast that included Orson Welles, Deborah Kerr, William Holden
and Peter O’Toole, it was savaged by the critics, though many singled out David’s wry, amused, twinkly performance yet again as being the only one worth watching. ‘He was like a fox in a hen house, surrounded by pretty girls,’ grinned David Jr, but the picture was plagued by problems. It was shot at Mereworth Castle in Kent, Killeen Castle in Eire, and Shepperton Studios, but after four weeks of filming there was still no proper script, the paranoid Sellers had a punch-up in his caravan with one of the seven directors, Joe McGrath, and accused Orson Welles of casting an evil spell on him and despising him for being fat – a case of pot and kettle if ever there was one. It was a welcome diversion when the soccer World Cup was played in England that summer and Niv bought thirty tickets to give to the film crew. ‘The crews
loved
him,’ said Jamie. ‘Almost everyone got to see the World Cup and he and I saw the England against Germany final.’

Niv finished
Casino Royale
at the end of August and gave Roddy Mann yet another interview for his column before flying back to Cap Ferrat. ‘Something I’ve never been able to understand,’ he said, ‘is why one never gets credit for light comedy performances. They’re the most difficult things in the world to do, yet nobody ever got an award for them. Look at Cary! I won my Oscar for being highly dramatic in
Separate Tables
, which I found much easier to do than comedy. If you’re nervous while playing in drama it adds something to your performance. If you’re nervous in comedy you might as well shoot yourself.’

At the beginning of September 1966, when Kristina and Fiona went back to school after the summer holidays, Niv began at last to make a valiant effort to start writing the book that eventually became
The Moon’s a Balloon
. He found it so difficult that he wrote to Jamie Hamilton for advice: ‘The movie biz is now a complete shambles and like everyone else I am more or less on the shelf. When your readers come across a good potential movie story please for God’s sake tip me off … it really is do-it-yourself time with all the major
studios going or gone broke.’ He added, ‘My so called “book” is driving me mad. You do realize that dont you? There are so many characters bobbing up and they all seem suspiciously alike in the way I describe them,’ so obviously he was still writing the book as fiction. Later the same day he wrote again to Hamilton:

Jamie Hamilton, sniffing the birth of a big bestseller, replied immediately, ‘Autobiography every time! Yours could not possibly be “just another actor polishing his ego” – you have far too much sense of humour, and of proportion, for that.
Furthermore, as the book Cresset did was a novel, any option thereon might not apply to non-fiction,’ and he added long-sufferingly, ‘Did you ever unearth that contract?!’ Niv had not, but by the middle of November he had actually written two and a half chapters and wrote to Hamilton: ‘All that has emerged so far is the fact that I was undoubtedly the most poisonous little bastard that God ever put breath into.’

In April he flew to the wilds of Mexico to make
The Extraordinary Seaman
with twenty-six-year-old Faye Dunaway, Alan Alda and Mickey Rooney, an anti-war satire in which he played the ghost of a British Royal Navy lieutenant-commander who has been forced to return from the beyond to redeem himself after besmirching the family honour in battle. It was made around the tiny, poverty-stricken village of Coatzacoalcos, on the jungly northern Gulf of Mexico coast between Veracruz and Tabasco, where the temperature could reach 110°F in the shade and the interiors were filmed in a tin shed oven. ‘The cockroaches, which were huge – three inches long on average – would move in herds so thick that the ground would look like it was alive,’ wrote Faye Dunaway in her autobiography. ‘Being stuck in your room waiting out the nearly daily tropical downpours could drive anyone to the brink of madness … As soon as David was finished with his scenes each day, he would head to the nearest Mexican bar and start on the margaritas, ordering a pitcher of them, and then I would come and meet him there. He sort of took me under his wing platonically and we chatted on and on. He told me all these stories about his days in Hollywood [
and
] that each time he made a movie, when it was over, he always felt as if he would never work again. That staggered me.’

The margaritas were not always a good idea. ‘One night we were really pushing them down,’ Niv told Don Short seven years later,

Life was primitive. ‘Horses would wander riderless through the streets,’ wrote Ms Dunaway, ‘and chickens would squawk and scratch in front of the lean-tos made of scraps of tin, with palm leaves for roofs, that housed half the population. There was an oil refinery on the edge of Coatzacoalcos that belched soot into the air day and night … But the beach was still pristine …’ In one scene Niv had to fall from a mast into the ocean and was terrified when he splashed down and saw a dorsal fin heading towards him. ‘Sharks!’ he yelped. ‘Dolphins!’ shrieked the director, John Frankenheimer – but Niv refused to shoot another take. The critics tore the movie to pieces. It was ‘a disaster’, said Ms Dunaway. ‘The studio was livid at the results [
and it
] never had a real theatrical run.’

Niv’s next film,
Prudence and the Pill
, which was made in England at Pinewood Studios, was equally awful despite a cast that included Deborah Kerr, Robert Coote and Edith Evans. It was a tacky farce about adultery and contraception in which Niv has a mistress, his wife has a lover, and their eighteen-year-old niece is pinching her mother’s birth control pills and replacing them with aspirins, with the result that all the women become pregnant. It was ‘a leering, tasteless mess’, reported the
Saturday Review
and the
New York Times
considered it to be ‘nauseating’ and said in despair of Niven and Kerr: ‘Because their parts are unendurable they give the worst, worst performances of their lives.’ Considering Niv’s own disastrous marriage he deserved an award for the next performance he gave when he told the
News of the World
po-faced that by making the film ‘we’re striking a blow for freedom for married couples who hang on and on together and are too frightened to do anything about a dreadful situation. I am happily married; but how many couples are there hanging on and on in England alone?’ The picture was notable only because Niv normally got on well with everyone but this time was constantly at loggerheads with the director, Fielder Cook, who walked out after shooting more than half the movie and had to be replaced by Ronald Neame.