Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (43 page)

To be fair to Hjördis I asked Kristina to list her mother’s good points. ‘She had a sense of humour,’ she said, ‘and was very patient, and had good taste in clothes as well as decoration. We played Canasta very often, or gin rummy, and backgammon, just the two of us, and she’d have a beaker, but it was a pity that she never wanted to go out of the house. I think maybe her health scared her so she didn’t feel too secure if she went out even though when I was older I offered hundreds of times to take her out for lunch. I think she might have had a very sad childhood herself, so that part of the shadows of her childhood came out on us. I never knew about her childhood and I’ve no idea even what her father did.’

Fiona, who was five in 1968, was not fond of Hjördis at all. ‘She was an alcoholic and when I was five or six she fell down the stairs,’ she told me, ‘so she was already out of control. And she was terribly vain. She had five passports, all English but with different dates of birth, and I found one in which she had
forged
her age by changing the date of birth. She was twenty-nine for most of my life!’ Kristina told me that Hjördis pretended to have been born in 1924 but had in fact been born in 1919: ‘She wasn’t a great believer in telling the truth.’ Niv, on the other hand, ‘was a great father’, Fiona said, ‘and I spent more time with him while Kristina spent more time with Mummy. He adored Kristina and me, and he’d try to be there for us as much as he could. I used to go walking and sailing with him, and I had a great childhood. He didn’t need to be strict because all he had to do was look at us and that was enough said. He never had to raise his voice. He spoilt us with affection and love but not with money though he was very generous at Christmas and birthdays.’

‘They were very nice kids, pretty and fun,’ Jamie told me, ‘and my father did the best he could to give them a happy
life, but Hjördis ruined their upbringing: when you have a drunk staggering around the house, what kind of advice are you going to have? He tried to shield these kids from all this and he was around a lot for them, much more than he was for us, and that was great.’ Betty Bacall said that ‘he was a wonderful dad’ and the American actress Jane Del Amo, whose screen name was Jane Randolph and who lived near the Nivens both in Switzerland and Cap Ferrat, agreed. ‘He was an exceptionally good father to the girls,’ she told me.

In March 1969 Hjördis fell over and broke her leg again. Niv flew with her to London and decided to take an extended break and make a serious effort to write the book.
The Moon’s a Balloon
was about to fly.

Twelve

The Moon’s a Balloon
1969–1972

A
t first Niv called the book
Five Sides of a Square
and began to dictate it into a tape recorder but was put off by the monotonous drone of his voice when he played it back. He tried to dictate it to ‘a sour-faced lady from Nice’ but she disapproved of his four-letter words and risqué anecdotes, so in the end he wrote in longhand in Kristina’s school exercise books.

He began with a bang. ‘Nessie, when I first saw her, was seventeen years old,’ he wrote, ‘honey-blonde, pretty rather than beautiful, the owner of a voluptuous but somehow innocent body and a pair of legs that went on for ever. She was a Piccadilly whore. I was a fourteen-year-old heterosexual schoolboy and I met her thanks to my stepfather.’ He wrote first about his childhood and although some of his stories were untrue and some inaccurate because he could not be bothered to check the facts, at his best he was wonderfully entertaining and hilarious. For three weeks he scribbled away and by mid-April had finished the first two chapters, gave them to Roddy Mann to take back to London to be typed by the Connaught manager’s secretary, Mrs Faulkner, and then sent them off to Jamie Hamilton. ‘I would love you to wade through these first 50 pages and see if you think there could be anything in this thing,’ Niv wrote to him modestly. ‘I feel that the style is pretty schoolboy, but I believe I can improve that quite a bit.’ Four days later Hamilton cabled to say he was delighted with what he had read and sent an ecstatic letter that began: ‘Those first two chapters are hilarious. Not
only did I laugh aloud, but later heard my secretary splitting her sides. I shall jump in the Thames if you find you are still committed to Cresset … You are a bloody marvel.’

Instead of being encouraged to get on with the book as quickly as possible, Niv relaxed, flew to New York and Los Angeles for two weeks in May, and then went into neutral for most of that lovely Côte d’Azur summer, writing only when the weather was bad, which was extremely rare that year. Hamilton wrote more encouraging letters. Niv replied, ‘Have finished CHAP. 3 –
ghastly
! … It’s a slow game as I have no discipline, am easily distracted by a robin and am not broke thank God … but it
will
get done.’ The old Cresset contract of 25 September 1950 was finally unearthed and found to have granted Cresset first refusal on Niv’s next
two
books, so he suggested yet again that he could cheat Cresset – and his previous American publisher, Prentice Hall – if ‘one of those strange Swiss companies that we know so well could offer an enormous sum as an
advance
against this second book and you could then ask Cresset and Prentice Hall … if they would care to match it!!’

The problem was that Niv was lazy, relished playing with his pretty young daughters, and was easily led astray by the hordes of guests and visitors who turned up at Lo Scoglietto, among them Noël Coward, who came for two weeks. Not that Niv stayed up late at night: when Coward wanted to go to the casino he went with Jamie because Niv liked to rise early and be in bed by eleven at the latest. Other friends who dropped by and distracted him that summer included Lord Hanson and his wife Geraldine, whom Niv teasingly nicknamed ‘Ugly’ as he did almost every good-looking woman he was fond of, including beauties like Bryan Forbes’s wife Nanette Newman and their daughter Emma. ‘God, you’ve got some ugly women!’ Niv told Forbes, and he called other favourite women and girls ‘Double Ugly’, ‘Beast’ or ‘Beastly’.

By the middle of October, nearly six months after he had finished the first two chapters, he had written little more and
the book was delayed even further when he flew to England in November to make an epic picture with Peter Finch, Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow for MGM,
Man’s Fate
, but after three weeks’ rehearsal the film was cancelled because of industrial unrest at the studio. He flew back to Nice, furious, and he, Finch and von Sydow sued MGM for more than £500,000, a claim that took nearly four years to settle. He feared that this was the end of his career and that he might never be offered another film, so after a gala tribute to Noël Coward in London on his seventieth birthday, Niv sat down seriously to write that winter at Château d’Oex in his first-floor study overlooking the valley and facing the vast mountains opposite. He produced two more chapters in six weeks, but was finding it so difficult that ‘I’m just shoving
everything
down’, he wrote to Hamilton. ‘It’s pretty bad and you
must
be truthful.’ He was so disheartened that he thought of abandoning the book altogether, and his mood was not improved when he turned sixty in March – a glum day for anyone, let alone a vain actor.

In April he took a break from the book and flew to Rome to make one of the very worst films of his career,
The Statue
, in which he played a professor whose sculptress wife produces a huge nude statue with genitals that are obviously not based on his. The critics were appalled. The film was ‘a sniggering comedy carried to such extremes that it becomes difficult to tell which is more offensive: its prissy hypocrisy, its blatant banality, or the clumsily-fashioned “double entendres” that sit in the script like flies in the soup’, reported Anita Seales in the
San Francisco Chronicle
.

By the end of May Jamie Hamilton was seriously worried that he was never going to finish the book and Niv replied that he was still bogged down on chapter 5. ‘I am bitterly ashamed of myself,’ he wrote. ‘Dammit! I find so many excuses
NOT
to sit down and write!’ Yet even now he flew off to New York for a week of carousing with friends that upset his son Jamie as much as it would have annoyed Hamilton.
Jamie and Fernanda were living in New York and kept reading in the society columns of the newspapers about the fun he was having with his chums, and it was not until Niv’s last day in town that he rang Jamie and asked to meet for lunch at Le Mistral. Jamie, now twenty-four, was incensed. At the restaurant he ordered his meal, told David how hurt and upset he was, and when his father took exception to being criticised Jamie threw his napkin down, stood up, said loudly, ‘I think you’ll need both plates of food – one for you and one for your ego,’ and stormed out of the restaurant. It was a vital turning point in their relationship. ‘From then on we were friends,’ he told me, ‘and became really close. For the last twelve years of his life I was his best friend and he relied on me for lots of things, financial advice and so on, and I don’t think I let him down.’

Back at Lo Scoglietto that summer Niv tried to force himself to write for at least an hour a day ‘but it’s
AGONY
!’ he wrote to Hamilton. ‘Oh this dreary little piddle of output! I’m so sorry but … the children came home for the holidays and that was that … I have too much fun with them … I
cant
work!’ He also took Hjördis to Sweden on holiday in August and was constantly distracted by the usual summer stream of friends and guests. ‘
God
its dull,’ he wrote to Hamilton. ‘I’ve just read it through.’ Hamilton battled valiantly to bolster his confidence. ‘Everyone who has read the samples so far has found it hilariously entertaining, so you simply must press on,’ he wrote, and Niv was sufficiently encouraged to take on Roddy Mann’s literary agent, George Greenfield of the John Farquharson agency, as his own. Greenfield promptly came up with another possible obstacle to publication of the book by Hamish Hamilton: he discovered that the Cresset Press not only had a legal right to first sight of the book but might also sue Niv for plagiarism of his own earlier book because the new book contained many of the same anecdotes as
Round the Rugged Rocks
. But he soon extricated him from his Cresset option clause. ‘Niv, Greenfield, Hamilton and I,’ said
Roddy Mann, ‘concocted a letter from Greenfield to Cresset that went something like this: “I have received a very long manuscript from the veteran actor David Niven full of rambling reminiscences. It is written by hand” – which it wasn’t – “and I understand that you published his first book and are obviously entitled to have a look at this one. Shall I box the pages up and send them to you?” It was hysterical! Cresset said “No way!” so Hamilton became his publisher.’ Niv celebrated his freedom by sending huge cheques to Joyce and Grizel for Christmas, the modern equivalent of £52,000 between them.

He finally finished the book at the end of February, nearly two years after he had started it. Hamilton was delighted and drafted a telegram ‘
TO CONGRATULATE YOU ON FUNNIEST WITTIEST MOST OUTSPOKEN MODEST WARM HEARTED TOUCHING MEMOIRS FOR AGES
’. In an internal memo to his senior editors Roger Machell and Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson he reported that the book was ‘excruciatingly funny and chock full of libel … and extremely vulgar with a great many 4-letter words thrown in’. Greenfield negotiated an advance of £7500 – about £77,000 in 2003, much less than a ‘celebrity’ author would be offered today – and the typescript was handed to Machell for some serious editing. Sinclair-Stevenson took to Niv immediately, ‘and he had abundant charm,’ he told me,

Surprisingly for an author who admitted openly that he was an amateur, David hated accepting editorial suggestions to improve the book. ‘Roger was an extremely good editor,’ said Sinclair-Stevenson, ‘and he would say, “I think we should take this story out because it doesn’t really fit,” and Niven would grumble away. He was very bad indeed at being edited, very tetchy and very difficult, and he’d say, “No, no, absolutely not,” and get rather sulky, but Roger knew how to deal with people like that and Niven eventually, grumbling, agreed to the cuts.’ Niv did, however, eventually give Machell ‘tremendous credit’ for the changes that he suggested and told Patrick Macnee that ‘without a good editor he wouldn’t have had a success at all’.

The book’s original title,
Five Sides of a Square
, was soon dumped ‘because it was ludicrous and boring’, said Sinclair-Stevenson, and when Niv came up with an alternative,
The Moon’s a Balloon
, a quote from an E. E. Cummings ‘poem’, nobody liked that either. Buckley and Galbraith both told him it was a dreadful title and tried to persuade him to change it, in vain. ‘We all look back and think “what a wonderful title” because it was a big success,’ said Sinclair-Stevenson, ‘but it didn’t mean anything. But he had very strong views over the title and the cover, and we had to produce
enormous
numbers of roughs of the jacket because he didn’t like them. When it came to doing the jacket his prima donna side was really beginning to show, which is why I think Roger didn’t like him very much. David could be quite brusque and was not very good with people like waiters, and I could imagine he could be quite unpleasant. Incidentally, I never saw him
pick up the bill in a restaurant even though
The Moon’s a Balloon
eventually sold about 4 million and he made millions out of it.’

The title was bewilderingly fey and came from a piece of doggerel by the pretentious E. E. Cummings, who avoided capital letters or even spaces after punctuation and called himself ‘e.e.cummings’. Why did Niv choose the title? Search me:

The significance of this twee drivel eludes me, but Niv liked it so much that when he came to write his fourth book he wanted to take the title for that from the final line and call it
Flowers Pick Themselves
. His dedication in
The Moon’s a Balloon
was equally bizarre: ‘for Kira Triandpyllapopulous’. Kira was
the Greek name of one of Hjördis’s Afghan hounds, and Niv explained bafflingly in
Smith’s Trade News
two years later that ‘Kira piddles on everything so I invented a Greek sounding challenge to her – KIRA TRI AND PYLL A POPULOUS. (I don’t know what a “populous” is but she has filled everything else in my house.)’ Perhaps ‘pyll’ was a misprint and should have been ‘fill’, but it was in any case pretty silly. He may not have wanted to dedicate another book to Hjördis, but why not to his sons or Roddy Mann, who had nagged him to write it?

In retrospect, knowing how hugely successful
The Moon’s a Balloon
was to be, it is astonishing how much trouble Greenfield and Machell had selling the American rights and finding a company to publish the British paperback edition. In Britain the editorial director of Pan Books, Clarence Paget, said dismissively that the first third of the book, about David’s childhood, schooldays and army experiences, was ‘quite interesting’ and he was prepared to pay a paltry £500 advance for that, but the stuff about Hollywood was ‘terribly boring’ and ought to be junked. In the end British paperback rights were sold to Coronet, but they refused to pay an advance of more than £800 – about £7000 in modern terms – or subsequent royalties of more than seven and a half per cent. Niv, who was used to earning $150,000 for a film that might take just a few weeks to shoot – £610,000 today – could hardly believe such a derisory offer. In New York it was just as bad. In his autobiography Greenfield claimed that the editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster, Michael Korda, the nephew of Sir Alexander Korda, refused to read even the first few pages, telling Greenfield that Niv was a boring old British ham actor who had never been a major star and had not made a decent film for years, but Korda told me that this was quite untrue. ‘I always admired and liked Niven and did not think he was a has-been,’ said Korda. ‘In fact I loved the book and tried to buy it, but it went for more money than Simon and Schuster was willing to let me pay.’ Even so, Greenfield was horrified
that only four publishers were prepared to make an offer for the book and that the highest, from G. P. Putnam’s Sons, was for only $17,500. He had made the mistake of assuring Niv that he would be able to sell the US rights for an advance of at least $35,000 and had flown to New York especially to do it, and although he managed to push Putnam’s up to $22,500 (£83,000 today) ‘he was pretty nervous of telephoning Niven to tell him because Niven was pretty tough,’ recalled Greenfield’s assistant, Vivienne Schuster, who went to New York with him. David was incensed at such a ‘piddling’ bid – ‘His screams of rage penetrated my skull,’ said Greenfield – and although Greenfield eventually persuaded him that that was simply the best offer there was, Niv threatened to sack him if ever he fouled up again. This was a very different Niven from his screen image. The British newspaper serial rights were bought by the
People
for another £10,000 – £97,000 today – but even then he was annoyed because he had been expecting a much bigger bid from Roddy Mann’s paper, the
Sunday Express
, but its editor, John Junor, understandably refused to buy yet again a bunch of anecdotes for which he had already paid handsomely when he had published Niv’s ghosted autobiographical series in the paper thirteen years previously. To avoid tax all these literary contracts, like those for his films, were signed by his Swiss business manager in Zurich, Dr Bill Staehelin, who was now collaborating on Niv’s financial affairs with Jess Morgan in Los Angeles, on behalf of Niv’s Swiss company Marulto AG, which was described inventively as ‘the author’.