Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (42 page)

In October David flew to New York and lunched with Jamie, who was now nearly twenty, and the nineteen-year-old girl he wanted to marry, Fernanda Wanamaker Wetherill, the daughter of a very rich Philadelphia department store owner, a lively young woman whose ‘coming out’ party on Long Island in 1963 had been such a riot that eighteen guests were arrested for trashing the house and causing the modern equivalent of £15,000-worth of damage. ‘I was very nervous meeting him,’ she told me, ‘but he put me at ease immediately.’

The following year, 1968, Niv made yet another dreadful film, this time in Hollywood, about the generation gap,
The Impossible Years
, in which he was a psychiatrist who specialises in teenagers but cannot control his own seventeen-year-old daughter. The
People
called it ‘his worst ever film’ and John Mills told me that Niv ‘was in a lot of very bad films, but we all were. We had to go on earning a living and they couldn’t all be good. I made several and burnt the negatives when I could get them!’ Yet Niv’s next film, which he made the following year, was to be one of his best and showed what an excellent actor he could be when he chose the right script. It was a serious movie about wartime duty,
loyalty and betrayal,
Before Winter Comes
, in which he played yet another British officer, this time a tough but fair major who is running a refugee camp in the spring of 1945 in occupied Austria on the edge of the Soviet-occupied zone and has to decide which refugees are sent to the American zone and which returned to the Russians and certain death. He appoints one of the refugees, played with wonderful exuberance by Chaim Topol, as his official interpreter, but when they both fall for the same girl and the Soviets insist that the interpreter is a deserter from the Red Army, the major sends him back to them to face a firing squad.

The picture was shot in Austria and included several excellent performances, among them one by twenty-eight-year-old John Hurt, who was superb as a naïve lieutenant with a conscience. ‘It was one of my first movies,’ Hurt told me, ‘and David was very helpful because Chaim was being quite difficult and tricksy. We got on enormously well and became lifelong friends and we’d often meet in Soho in the 1970s. He was incredibly generous – with his spirit and his spondulicks – and funny funny funny. We were stuck in a little village up in the hills, but we went out and ate together. He liked his wine – he probably drank a couple of bottles a day – and the odd scotch, but he wasn’t a boozer. He loved being naughty and was very flirtatious. When I said, “What do you miss about Hollywood?” he said, “The girls cos they were all so pretty and all wanted to play. In modern Hollywood they’re all twisted and neurotic.” But he was a total gentleman and never played at home: if his wife were to catch him in bed with a girl he would deny it; to do anything else would be rude!’ Hurt met Hjördis but ‘didn’t take to her at all. She was tall and monumental and pretty difficult, but he was very romantic with her. I remember him booking a private room when she arrived, with candles and so on, for a romantic dinner for two. He made it his business to adore her because he was a gentleman, but the love of his life was Primmie. Behind that mask he was quite melancholy.’ Hurt was
surprised at how big Niv was, ‘much bigger than you’d think, with very thick legs and extremely well endowed’. As for his acting, ‘he was pretty good, but he said, “I know exactly what my position is, old cock: I’m a second-rate star,” and he was right. He wasn’t the greatest actor but he was more than adequate, a very good light comedian – so long as the writer wasn’t on the set. He couldn’t work at all if the writer was anywhere near it. He was very self-conscious and got quite nervous.’

Natalie Wood came to stay at Lo Scoglietto that summer with her latest lover, the British agent Richard Gregson, whom she was to marry a year later, and he introduced them to the songwriter Leslie Bricusse and his wife Evie, who spent every summer nearby at St Paul de Vence. ‘We hit it off right away,’ Bricusse told me, ‘and for the rest of David’s life we had lunch with him, Hjördis and the girls a minimum of twice a week all summer long. We’d sail our little wooden speedboat into his dock’ and Niv ‘always used to stand there with a bottle of champagne in one hand and a glass in the other’, said Evie Bricusse. They took to Hjördis as well: ‘She would come down to lunch with a big towelling turban round her head,’ said Bricusse. ‘That was her trademark. I know a lot of Swedish people don’t get jokes at all, but she could laugh and was fun. If you’d known her before she got into the vodka bottle she was a devastatingly attractive woman, and we had a lot of fun in the late Sixties and early Seventies.’ So, now and then, did David Jr, who was twenty-five. ‘They used to play cards and swear like fiends and have a good time,’ Fiona told me. ‘Oh, God, the swearing that went on in that house! Ohhhh! Even Daddy sometimes: “oh shit!” and the c word. Mother and David didn’t have any problem using the c word and he would call her “you bitch!” but it was just fun, not being nasty.’ But during the 1970s, ‘as Hjördis got deeper into the vodka bottle, she retreated more and more until towards the end we hardly ever saw her,’ said Bricusse. ‘There was a dark side to her that we never saw in the early
days. Niv’s goodness was shown best for me in his protection of her.’

Another new friend that summer was the Hon. William Feilding, a twenty-eight-year-old English painter who was cousin and heir to the Earl of Denbigh. Niv commissioned him to paint a vast mural on canvas, a 4ft high, 15ft wide acrylic view of Cap Ferrat and the coastline, which took him a month to complete in the garage at Lo Scoglietto and was then erected beside a little classical rotunda in the garden. ‘David was a very enthusiastic painter himself,’ Feilding told me. ‘His pictures were quite rough and primitive but he had a real pictorial sense. He always drank wine at lunchtime and lots of it, at least two bottles a day, and was always offering you “a beaker” – “a beaker of shampoo, old boy”. He had a huge tolerance for alcohol and after drinking with him at lunchtime one day I fell asleep on the top of a ladder while I was painting and woke when he came in with some people to hear him saying, “Ssh! Drunken painter!” ’

‘We all drank a lot in the South of France in those days,’ Doreen Hawkins told me. ‘We were always getting a bottle out of the fridge. It was difficult to draw the line.’ Feilding recalled one memorably boozy lunch when Princess Grace came over from Monaco on her own and she, Feilding and the Nivens had lunch at the African Queen in Beaulieu. ‘We got a bit pissed,’ said Feilding, ‘and afterwards we were all walking arm-in-arm around the marina and singing, like children, when we came to a yacht that was owned by some millionaire whom Grace and Hjördis hated because whenever he was talking to them he would play with himself through a hole in his trouser pocket. So Grace and Hjördis got hold of one of the boat’s ropes, and David got hold of the other, and they pulled it in, and I pissed all over the back deck! He once said to me “a day without a laugh is a day wasted”.’ Niv could make a joke out of almost any situation. One day when he and Feilding were naked in the swimming pool changing room Feilding noticed that Niv ‘had a pretty big tonk. The
girls were aged about six and seven and they ran into the room and one of them grabbed his cock and swung on it, and he said, “better get them used to a decent size at an early age!” ’

They used to have lunch at Lo Scoglietto at the end of the garden, and one day when they saw an enormous yacht in the bay with people on the bridge looking at them through binoculars David said, ‘Quick, under the table!’ and ‘we all dived under the table,’ said Feilding, ‘along with the nanny and the children, and he said, “That’s Richard Burton and Liz Taylor,” and sure enough the Burtons sailed over in a speedboat and we could hear them talking to the butler, whom David had told to say we were out. They went back to their boat and we continued our lunch and could see that they were still looking at us through their binoculars. “Don’t you like them, then?” I said, and David said, “Yes, if they telephone first”!’

Feilding was one of the 600 guests at Jamie’s marriage, which some American newspapers inevitably called ‘the wedding of the year’ and took place in July 1968 at the First Presbyterian Church at Southampton on Long Island. David Jr, who had now moved to the William Morris London office, was best man, and Kristina and Fiona were bridesmaids. Niv wore an extraordinary outfit: a pearl-grey Edwardian morning suit with a flared, knee-length jacket and a top hat. ‘What the
fuck
has the old man got on?’ asked David Jr, and Jamie was extremely irritated because he felt that his father was trying to upstage everyone. The young couple flew off to Jamaica on honeymoon and when they returned to New York Jamie went to work on Wall Street for the investment bankers Lehman Brothers. ‘I didn’t go to Harvard Business School because my father told me that he’d spent enough money on my education and he wasn’t going to pay any more,’ Jamie told me. At times Niv could give his sons the impression that he resented how much they had cost him. Once when they were skiing in Switzerland Jamie did four right turns and said
proudly, ‘Isn’t it amazing, Father, that I can still turn like that after all these years?’ Niv gave him one of his old-fashioned looks. ‘You bloody well should be able to,’ he said. ‘Each one of those turns set me back $50,000.’

Niv flew to Paris to make a French comedy,
Le Cerveau
, which was released in Britain and America as
The Brain
, in which he was yet again a British officer, this time a colonel, a sort of military Raffles, a gentleman crook who has masterminded the Great Train Robbery in Britain and now plans to steal $12 million from NATO. He had to play each scene twice, in English and French, and again the critics reported that except for him the picture was a mess.

In September Jamie Hamilton wrote yet again to ask whether Niv had discovered if he was legally bound to offer his next book – which he was still calling a ‘novel’ – to the Cresset Press, and Niv replied ingenuously to say that Cresset could not possibly insist on publishing his next book, despite his contractual agreement to give them first refusal, since ‘I am under contract for
everything
to a Swiss Company (I wonder who could control
that
!!) so any Publisher would have to deal with the Swiss Company and Cresset would have to be able to match the Swiss Company’s offer … get it?!!’ This devious ploy would have been decidedly underhand since the Swiss company, Marulto AG, was his own, which he had set up to avoid tax, so that any offer it made to publish his book would be a spurious one designed to cheat Cresset out of it. He apologised for having written so little of the book, explaining that he was always working or having fun, but ‘it will get done tho’ – I promise’. He added, ‘I said to Noël the other day … “Christ! I’m now at the age when all my chums are dying like flies.” To which he replied – “Personally I am delighted if
mine
last through luncheon”!’ It was to be another year before he finally got down to work on the book in earnest.

Another new friend in Switzerland was Evan Galbraith, a Wall Street investment banker who had a holiday home
near Château d’Oex, in Saanen, and was to become Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to France from 1981 to 1985. ‘He wasn’t a very good skier,’ Galbraith told me,

Niv told Sally Chrichton-Stuart that he was still thinking of divorcing Hjördis, but was worried about what would happen to his two adopted daughters. ‘He said that Hjördis was very fragile.’ Another friend in Switzerland was Valerie Youmans, who had met the Nivens in California ten years earlier when Hjördis had been reprimanded for fondling her husband at a dinner party. ‘He was adored by everyone but was clearly lonely and unhappy,’ said Mrs Youmans, ‘but he would never say anything against her. He was too much of a gentleman.’

Kristina, Hjördis’s favourite daughter, who was seven, told me: