Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (45 page)

In November he returned to Munich to finish filming
King,
Queen, Knave
, a black comedy in which he and Gina Lollobrigida played a rich Anglo-Italian couple whose nineteen-year-old nephew becomes her lover and plots with her to murder him. Niv would quite happily have murdered Lollobrigida if he had had a chance. He was infuriated by her rudeness, temperamental outbursts and unpunctuality, and took great pleasure in one scene in which he had to smack her playfully on the bottom with a tennis racket. He whacked her as hard as he could and said, ‘I’ve been longing to do that all through this picture.’

Jamie Hamilton was already urging him to write another book and suggested a comic biography of Trubshawe, a novel, or a second volume of autobiography, and begged David to let him republish
Round the Rugged Rocks
, but he was determined to suppress his embarrassing old novel.

Boxing Day was sadly muted that year. Noël Coward, Cole Lesley and Graham Payn came to Château d’Oex as usual but Coward was subdued and suddenly announced, ‘I will not be here next Christmas.’ He was only seventy-two and not particularly ill but he took to his bed and died three months later to the day.

In January 1972 David flew to New York for his granddaughter Fernanda’s christening and a triumphant tour of the States to promote the American edition of
The Moon’s a Balloon
. He travelled proudly for the first time with a passport that gave his occupation as ‘Writer’ rather than ‘Actor’. Most of the American reviewers were genial except for a sarky critic in the
New York Times
who wondered whether Niv saw anything at all when he looked into the mirror each morning, but the book still shot into the paper’s bestseller list and stayed there for three months. The tour was a huge success and ‘he got a great kick out of it’, said Jamie Niven. He appeared on the top TV talk shows, Putnam’s sold nearly 200,000 copies in hardback, the book became a Literary Guild book club choice, and Dell paid $350,000 (£1,140,000 today) for the US paperback rights. In the end he made about
$750,000 from the American editions of the book, the equivalent of about £2∙5 million today.

At the end of February the Nivens flew to Budapest for the weekend to join Princess Grace, Fred Astaire, Marlon Brando and 200 other guests for Elizabeth Taylor’s lavish fortieth birthday party at the Duna Hotel, which cost the Burtons an estimated £50,000 – about £400,000 today – and Niv returned to Château d’Oex to revel in his own cascading new wealth. ‘It’s the first time in my life that I’m making a lot of money,’ he told Hedi Donizetti, and Ken Galbraith told me that he, Niv and Buckley ‘used to stare in the bookshop window in Gstaad to see which of us had the most books on display’ – a foregone result since Galbraith’s had solemnly unsexy titles such as
American Capitalism, The Affluent Society
and
The New Industrial State
. Niv was so chuffed by his huge unexpected success as an author, said Kitty Galbraith, that when a pretty girl in chartreuse ski pants passed them on the snow he goosed her with his ski stick.

Life at home with Hjördis, however, was becoming increasingly unpleasant, and unusually for Niv he confided in a thirty-one-year-old Welsh divorcée, Sue Bongard, an ex-model who lived in Gstaad and whose three daughters went to the same small school as Kristina and Fiona, the Marie-José, where she and David dropped their children off each morning and picked them up in the afternoon. ‘I never saw Hjördis do it,’ Mrs Bongard told me, and they began to meet regularly for an 8.30 a.m. coffee at the Rialto Café. ‘I was very flattered by his attention,’ she said, ‘but I was fairly young and innocent and it was never a flirtatious relationship, just a friendship. A love affair never occurred to me. He was thirty years older than me, the same as my father. He seemed to like me for my mind! We’d laugh and giggle and tell each other the latest jokes, but now that I know how many girlfriends he had I feel a bit upset that he
didn’t
make a pass at me! What was wrong with me?!’ Niv confided in her only once, but what he said devastated her: ‘I said to him one day,
“You really are universally adored,” and he laughed rather ruefully and said, “Except by my wife.” I said, “What do you mean?” and he said, “Well, my wife has a lover. She’s had a boyfriend for years.” I was stunned. He never dwelt on it, but although he was the best company imaginable there was always a bit of sadness, and I think that was the reason.’

Because her eleven-year-old eldest daughter, Gaynor, was the same age as Kristina, Mrs Bongard and her girls were often invited to the Niven chalet:

Mrs Bongard’s daughter, Gaynor Mazzone, confirmed that the Niven chalet ‘wasn’t a happy house. It was a very dark house and although David was a sweet man – we called him Fishface because he would do fish faces for us – Hjördis wasn’t a happy Mummy and Kristina and Fiona weren’t happy little girls. At eleven and nine they were already reserved about something. Hjördis stayed very much in her own room and she was very weird with them. She was never
with
them. It was not a normal family.’

Even though
The Moon’s a Balloon
was now selling in huge numbers on both sides of the Atlantic and constantly being reprinted, David kept sending long letters to Jamie Hamilton to complain about ‘the meagre publicity’ for the book in Britain and to say that he was not spending enough on advertising and there were no copies in several bookshops he had visited. ‘He was always nagging and he got worse as time went on,’ said Sinclair-Stevenson. ‘He was not easy to please. Even if you sold five thousand in a week he thought it should have been ten.’

On 26 March Noël Coward had a stroke and died at his home in Jamaica. He left his estate mainly to Cole Lesley and Graham Payn but Niv inherited an oil-on-glass painting by Salvador Dali,
Pegasus
, and was one of twenty-seven of Coward’s friends – along with Sinatra, Gielgud, Dietrich and Liz Taylor – who Coward said should choose suitable mementoes. Niv picked one of Coward’s own paintings of a beach in Jamaica.

In April he flew to Jersey to open a new gorilla house at Gerald Durrell’s Jersey Zoo and to be the ‘best man’ at a ‘wedding’ of two gorillas that proceeded to consummate their ‘marriage’ prematurely behind his back while he made his best man’s speech. Back at Lo Scoglietto he started to write a
novel,
Make It Smaller and Move It to the Left
, the suggestion of his art teacher in Hollywood decades earlier, but it was even more difficult than
The Moon’s a Balloon
. ‘I’m on chapter three and already I have thirty-two people stuck in a lighthouse,’ he told the
Daily Express
. ‘Every time I sit down to write more, another three turn up in a boat. I just don’t know what to do!’ He thought of writing a biography instead, or a book about the Chinese Opium Wars, but told Jamie Hamilton at the end of May that both would need too much daunting research. He had actually written two chapters of the novel but Putnam’s were now offering him a huge advance if he would write about the golden age of Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1950s. ‘I don’t fancy this too much,’ he wrote to Hamilton, ‘in spite of the current spate of nostalgia, because I feel it has all been done too often and could only be a series of anecdotes. Advice please – I badly need it (and I don’t really need the advance). The second effort is almost bound to flop … which is the least risky?’

Hamilton replied immediately, ‘For God’s sake don’t let Putnam’s coax you into writing about the great days of the movies. The subject has been done over and over again … and as you say you don’t need the huge advance mentioned, I really must beg you to keep off the subject … I’m sure you trust me.’ It was a letter that Niv was to gloat over for the rest of his life, for he decided to ignore Hamilton’s advice, accepted Putnam’s cheque, and wrote the book – and it became an even bigger success than
The Moon’s a Balloon
. At first he gave it the uninspiring title
PS
, but later he was to call it
Bring on the Empty Horses
.

Thirteen

The Grumpy Bestseller
1972–1977

D
espite the huge success of
The Moon’s a Balloon
, which was still in the British bestseller lists an astonishing eight months after it was published, Niv was worried that he had not had a decent movie offer for ages and that his acting career might be over. ‘This is important,’ he wrote to Jamie Hamilton. ‘I
do
have another profession! and now more than ever it is the
story
that makes the film …
PLEASE
tip me off in the very early stages if you come across something that could make a different sort of picture.’ He still worried endlessly about money, and when he asked Hamilton to send eight autographed copies of
The Moon’s a Balloon
to Stowe and was charged £13 for them, about £100 today, he refused to pay and claimed they had been advertisements.

In June there was wonderful news from Hollywood: R. J. Wagner and Natalie Wood remarried after dumping their second spouses, and from now on would visit the Nivens whenever they were in Europe. ‘We had many wonderful times together and huge laughs,’ Wagner told me. On the financial front there was good news too when Niv earned £40,000 – nearly £350,000 in modern terms – making a series of TV commercials that summer for a Japanese deodorant called ‘Who’s Who’. In one of the ads he was chased along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice by a gaggle of Japanese girls shrieking ‘David! David!’, turned round, said, ‘Girls, girls, how did you recognise me?’ in dubbed Japanese, sniffed his armpit, and declared, ‘Of
course
.
Now
I understand. It’s “Who’s
Who”!’ In London soon afterwards he was mobbed by a crowd of Japanese tourists who recognised him, raised their arms, dabbed at their armpits and laughed hysterically.

In July he was nagging Jamie Hamilton yet again to spend more to advertise the book – ‘GOING ABROAD? TAKE A BALLOON’, he suggested – though he did have the good grace to thank Roger Machell at last for all his hard work on the book, nine months after publication. He did not do it himself but wrote to Hamilton: ‘I never really thanked Roger Machell for all the excellent suggestions he made about editing the original. May I do so now officially through you? A lot of the book’s success is thanks to his careful and most helpful guiding hand. Bless you dear friend. Love David.’ For Christmas he suggested headlines for yet more ads – ‘GIVE
PROVEN
PLEASURE FOR CHRISTMAS!’ – and Roger Machell forwarded his letter to Hamilton with a weary memo that said, ‘Niven again. No reply needed, I think.’ Niv was also constantly making suggestions for small changes to the book whenever it was reprinted. The saddest was when he asked that an eleven-year-old photograph of him and Hjördis sitting in front of a hotel in Malaga should be recaptioned ‘With Hjördis resting outside Spanish hotel with encouraging name’. It was called the Hotel Sexi.

In September
The Moon’s a Balloon
was still in the British Top Ten, had sold 50,000 hardbacks in Britain and 85,000 in the States, and he told ‘Atticus’ of the
Sunday Times
that it had given him more pleasure than all his eighty-five movies. It was also beginning to earn more than any of his films and inspired a new career as a public speaker, and in October he flew off to the States for the first of a series of lucrative lecture tours on which he crossed the continent to regale colleges and clubs with his anecdotes about movie stars and Hollywood. On one tour he gave twenty-seven talks in a month and made so much money that for Christmas he sent Grizel £3000 and David Jr £2000 – a total of £40,000 in modern values – even though young David was now thirty, an
extremely highly paid executive of Columbia Films in London and soon to become the head of Paramount for the world outside the US. Jamie, too, who was now twenty-seven and doing extremely well with a small investment company in New York, would open an envelope from his father and find $10,000 or $20,000 in banknotes. ‘ “Just a little folding money” he’d call it,’ said Jamie. ‘I was very successful and had a good living, but sometimes at Christmas I’d get a huge cheque, maybe $50,000 (£160,000 today),’ and Niv kept sending both of them bundles of cash for the rest of his life.

He was less charitable that Christmas towards Cole Lesley and Graham Payn, who had for so many years spent Boxing Day with Noël Coward and the Nivens at Château d’Oex. Now that Coward was dead Lesley rang Niv and asked, ‘Shall we see you on Boxing Day as usual?’ but he made an excuse and they never heard from him again. His own Yuletide was a merry one: for the second Christmas running
The Moon’s a Balloon
sailed to the top of the British bestseller lists, an unprecedented resurrection for a hardback.

That winter Niv persuaded another new friend, the eighty-five-year-old painter Marc Chagall, to stay at Château d’Oex. They had met when Niv had spotted an old tramp sitting on his private dock at Lo Scoglietto, told the butler to tell him to beat it and discovered that the old guy was the famous painter. When he arrived at Château d’Oex David told Bill Buckley that Chagall wanted to see his château but begged him not to show him any of his own dreadful paintings. Buckley promised, but as soon as Niv and Chagall arrived Buckley produced a canvas ‘covered in some catshit yellow excrescence’, Niv said later. Chagall gazed at the painting with a tragic expression. ‘Oh!’ he sighed. ‘Oh, ze
poor
paint!’

In March
The Moon’s a Balloon
was still in the top four British bestsellers and about to get another huge boost when Niv flew to London to promote the paperback edition in April and lunched with Michael Parkinson at the Savoy Grill. ‘It was like a one-man show,’ Parkinson told me. ‘He never
stopped talking and we had a hilarious lunch and drank a lot of marvellous wine. When we came out he said, “Have you ever seen Nelson holding his dick?” and showed me that if you stand in the Strand about halfway between the Savoy and Trafalgar Square and look up at Nelson’s Column it looks just as if he’s holding his dick in his hand! We were a bit pissed and howled with laughter, and eventually a crowd gathered round and looked as well. It was a wonderfully funny moment.’

Niv travelled all over Britain to promote the Coronet paperback, making speeches, giving interviews, signing books, and it worked wonders. ‘Paperbacks weren’t selling huge amounts yet in those days,’ Alan Gordon Walker of Coronet told me, ‘but David was probably the first author who was prepared to promote the paperback as well as the hardback and although he hated doing it he was the first to sell hundreds of thousands in paperback.’ During the campaign he nagged Jamie Hamilton yet again to buy more ads for the hardback, yet grumbled to George Greenfield that it was quite wrong that Hamish Hamilton should take a share of his paperback royalties when he had done all the work. ‘What have they done to earn it?’ he asked. Greenfield persuaded Hamilton to spend another £1000 on Christmas advertising but Hamilton pointed out to Niv that because of the paperback ‘our own hard-cover sales have inevitably dropped, for as a fellow Scot you will realise why people prefer paying 40p to £2.50’.

In the first week of May he returned to Lo Scoglietto and gave an interview to a reporter from the
Sunday Mirror
, lunched with him in Villefranche and was distressed to see in the harbour the rotting hulk of a boat that turned out to be the sad remains of Errol Flynn’s old yacht, the
Zaca
. They climbed aboard and David was visibly moved by this memory of his riproaring old chum. ‘It’s all gone,’ he said unhappily. ‘Even the famous old flying cock on the bow has dropped off! Flynn would have loved the irony of that!’ There were more sad memories a couple of weeks later when he returned
to London for Noël Coward’s memorial service, where more than a thousand friends and admirers crammed into the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields and the eulogy was delivered by the Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman.

June was much happier. The legal case that Niv, Peter Finch and Max von Sydow had brought against MGM four years earlier after the cancellation of
Man’s Fate
was settled out of court for £335,816. Equally welcome financially was an astonishingly generous gesture by the new editorial director of Coronet, Philip Evans, who was embarrassed to find that the paperback of
The Moon’s a Balloon
had sold 470,000 copies and was making a great deal of money yet Niv was still being paid a measly royalty of only seven and a half per cent per copy and under his contract would never earn any more, even if it went on to sell millions. Evans raised his royalty to twelve and a half per cent voluntarily – something quite unheard of in publishing – and even backdated the rise to the date when sales had reached 200,000. This amazing generosity gave Niv and Greenfield eventually an extra windfall of about £60,000 – more than £400,000 today – and earned David’s undying affection for Evans and Coronet for the rest of his days. But then he behaved remarkably meanly towards Jamie Hamilton, who had done so much to coax the book out of him and had given him so much help and advice. He made Greenfield write to Hamilton to insist that the increase in the Coronet royalties should not be shared with him, as per contract, but should go entirely to Niv ‘because of all the strenuous efforts he made to help publicise and promote the Coronet edition’. It was not the first time that he had tried to move the legal goalposts when money was involved: he had tried it with Goldwyn, and succeeded with the Cresset Press and Prentice Hall, but Jamie Hamilton was made of sterner Scots stuff and refused to agree. David was ‘very upset’, Greenfield wrote to Hamilton, even though it ‘may not be at all logical for an author whose publisher has sold over 70,000 copies of his book to adopt such an attitude’. Hamilton ‘hated
parting with money’, said Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, ‘and he would have suggested some compromise. He might have promised to pay him more for the next book.’ The rift did not last long: a month later Niv was once again sending Hamilton his love.

July brought the death of another good old chum, Jack Hawkins, who had been ill for some time. ‘David was marvellous,’ Doreen Hawkins told me. ‘He was filming in England and he’d ring me two or three times a day, and he came to the funeral. He was very good about anyone who was in trouble.’

The film that Niv had just started to make in England was
Vampira
, a spoof horror movie in which he played a stylish, witty Count Dracula who sips the blood of pretty girls from crystal glasses and grades them like vintage wine. Most of the critics sucked their teeth and the director, Clive Donner, got it in the neck, but David enjoyed himself immensely. To publicise the picture he gave a strikingly honest interview to Quentin Falk of
Cinema Today
and admitted that most of the films he made now were pretty poor. ‘I would love to be stretched,’ he said, ‘but … people do not offer one stretching parts … I get offered piles of scripts all the time, but it is usually muck.’ He gave another interview, about wine, to Maggie Burr of the
Evening News
, and confessed that he drank on average one and a half bottles of wine a day, ‘probably more, but then I don’t touch spirits’.

Kristina, now twelve, joined the fashionable Swiss boarding school Le Rosey, where Niv – who was now a grandfather again after the birth of Jamie’s daughter Eugenie – was delighted to find himself meeting two other parents who were old friends: Audrey Hepburn and Fiona Thyssen, both now divorced. ‘We became good old buddies again,’ Fiona Thyssen told me, ‘and although we never had an affair and he never tried to have one, he was very fond of me and I adored him and we had fun together. He was a good father but those kids were never happy campers. I suppose they
suffered from the burdens of having a drunken mother.’

That autumn he flew to the States for another lecture tour and returned to tell Sue Bongard at their first school-run coffee meeting in Gstaad that in one obscure Midwestern town he had met Nessie, the prostitute he had loved as a teenager. She had heard he was in town and arranged to meet secretly in a coffee shop out on the highway. ‘He sat there full of anticipation, he said, and in came this stout little middle-aged lady with a very tight grey perm and plonked herself down in front of him and said, “I’ve married an American who’s done extremely well and I’m head of the Women’s Institute.” But he knew it really was Nessie because he said “we relived what we had done. But she was a respectable grandmother, extremely boring, and there was no spark of friendship.” ’

That Christmas he took Hjördis and the girls for a holiday in Kenya and a month after their return another old friend and enemy died in Los Angeles: Sam Goldwyn, of heart failure, aged ninety-one. Niv’s father figures were all gone and at nearly sixty-four himself he began to feel the years closing in. ‘I can’t bear the thought of dying,’ he told Don Short. ‘I’d like to live another forty years [
but
] on the law of averages I haven’t got a lot of time to go.’

He was working seriously now on
Bring on the Empty Horses
but found time to fly to Hollywood in April to compère the Oscars, where he was about to introduce Liz Taylor, who was to present some of the prizes, when a thirty-three-year-old advertising agent, Robert Opel, appeared naked behind him and streaked across the stage and millions of TV screens. Niv glanced at his retreating buttocks and sniffed contemptuously: ‘The only laugh that man will ever get is by stripping off his clothes and showing his shortcomings.’

Niv was pouring some of his new wealth into paintings and in June had them valued. Those at Lo Scoglietto were valued at $851,000 (£2∙5 million in 2003) and included three oils by Max Ernst and pictures by Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee,
Edward Seago and Toulouse-Lautrec. At Château d’Oex the paintings were worth an estimated Swiss Fr. 147,000 and included a Miró, Braque and Chagall. To pay the huge annual insurance premiums he popped back to England for a week at the beginning of July to record Oscar Wilde’s play about a mischievous medieval phantom,
The Canterville Ghost
, with Flora Robson for Harlech Television in Bristol, and then flew off to Malaysia to earn $250,000 (£825,000 in 2003) in ten weeks making
Paper Tiger
.