Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (46 page)

It was a movie many believe was his last decent one, in which he played a character similar to the bogus major in
Separate Tables
, this time an elderly English teacher and apparently gallant ex-soldier who becomes the tutor to an eleven-year-old Japanese boy on a Pacific island and turns out to be a liar, fraud and coward when they are kidnapped by guerrillas but finally finds strength through the boy’s own bravery. He much enjoyed the role and told the
Daily Express
: ‘We’ve all got phoney chunks in us. He tells lovely lies.’ Asked what were his own phoney chunks, he replied, ‘Well, perhaps the word is not phoney but fantasy.’

The film was shot in Kuala Lumpur, Malacca and the Genting Highlands of Malaysia. ‘He came First Class to Kuala Lumpur,’ the film’s producer, Euan Lloyd, told me, ‘and during the flight some smartarse had a few drinks too many and got fresh with the gorgeous Swedish stewardess and started groping her from his aisle seat, and David in one of his rare moments of anger knocked this feller back in his seat. The idea of David actually
hitting
someone! In KL he booked her into the room next to his suite in the Hilton and introduced me to her. I said, “Could we have breakfast around eight?” and he said, “Make it ten, dear boy. I need a good night’s rest!” He was like that throughout the film. He’d be talking to you about something serious but he’d be looking at some gorgeous creature sitting nearby, and pretty soon you’d find him wandering off and talking to her, “Good afternoon, my dear,” and he was off again.’

The movie’s director, Ken Annakin, and his wife Pauline chuckled to remember Niv’s rampant promiscuity in Malaysia. ‘He was a very sexy feller,’ said Annakin. ‘Every woman he met practically fell to her knees in front of him,’ and Pauline Annakin told me: ‘He was very very sexy and I’d say he had hundreds of girlfriends in his life. He had a minor crack at me, and if it had been more serious I might have said yes! The ladies in Malaysia adored him and I know he had at least two of the local British wives.’

‘He also spent a lot of time with two Australian air hostesses, twins,’ said Annakin. ‘In the last couple of days his back went, he collapsed suddenly, couldn’t walk, and had to be flown home flat on the floor of the plane. He told Hjördis that I had made him climb some mountains and this was the result. Well, we know damned well his back didn’t go because of
that
because we never made him climb anything much. His back went from indoor exercise. Maybe he’d had both of the twins at the same time!’

Annakin was impressed not only by Niv’s rampant libido – at least five women, and maybe more, in ten weeks at the age of sixty-four – but also by his professionalism. ‘At seven o’clock every night he’d spend an hour with the Japanese boy, Ando, who couldn’t speak a word of English at first, and taught him billiards and played games with him, anything to make him feel at home, and that shows tremendously in the picture. I don’t know of many actors who would have done that, and the boy became absolutely devoted to him.’

David’s version of events in Malaysia was typically dramatic and he claimed to have been threatened by terrorists. ‘The chief of police in Kuala Lumpur said it was so dangerous there that he was going to put a twenty-four-hour guard on the actors,’ he told Parkinson on TV the following year, ‘but the day we arrived they killed the chief of police! It was 137 degrees and ninety-seven per cent humidity. One fellow in the crew came from Battersea and he’d never been out of England before, and he appeared in this terrific heat with a
sweater on and a cap and looked round and said to me, “Turned mild, ’asn’t it, David?” The heat finally got to this feller and one day he said, “I think I’ll take a little zizz in the jungle, David. There’s quite a nice little ‘ole behind that tree. Keep an eye on things,” and he came out of his hole about two hours later and he’d aged fifty years. “Oh my God!” he said, “there’s been a dreadful incident, David. I woke up with a dreadful weight on my chest. There was an anaconda right across me,” – that’s the snake that eats the
pythons
, you know – and he said, “It took 25 minutes to go past”!’

In between filming and fornicating Niv was scribbling frantically to try to finish
Bring on the Empty Horses
in time for the book to be published before Christmas the following year. It was not going well. Malaysia was ‘this
FOUL
part of the world’, he wrote to Sinclair-Stevenson. ‘Nice people – Malays, Chinese, Indians – all hating each other and some really ghastly relics of our Imperial Past,
and
a climate of undiluted steamy horror, plus raging epidemics of cholera and Dengue Fever topped off by cobras, pythons, voracious ants and mosquitos! … The new book is
DISASTER
! I am now reading through the 110,000 words I have written and, at a rough estimate, 105,000 are useless senseless and shaming. Is Roger M. still with you? (he will be
horrified
at how bad it is).’ Worse was to come. While they were filming in the jungle of the Genting Highlands the film unit’s production office burned down in the Holiday Inn in Kuala Lumpur and he lost a lot of his diaries and notes for the book. ‘He was distraught,’ said Lloyd. ‘It was in such a moment that he would turn to the bottle. He drank a lot, usually when he had a bit of pressure, but he never got drunk though I saw him tipsy.’ In September Niv flew back to Lo Scoglietto and wrote the next day to a friend in London: ‘I just got back last night from the most miserable two months in the Far East,’ and to John Mortimer that he was hugely relieved to have returned from ‘the foul Far East full of raging epidemics and rampant terrorists, one of whom shot the chief of police,
some others slaughtered twenty soldiers very near us and a third group, in a burst of good taste, put a match to the Holiday Inn!’ When I told Annakin about this letter he laughed. ‘It wasn’t terrorists,’ he said. ‘It was somebody smoking in bed. We had no contact with any terrorists.’

In October Niv and Hjördis attended a charity ball in Leeds, organised by Roger Moore, where the MC said how grateful they were to him for coming all that way when he was so busy and Hjördis called out drunkenly, ‘What about me? I’ve come as well.’ By now she was wearing around her neck a gold disc engraved with the words ‘I am always allergic to penicillin and sometimes also to my husband’. Then he flew back to Malaysia where he gave another interview, to Bart Mills of the
Guardian
, and told him that ‘an actor always has a huge inferiority complex. With good reason. It’s nine-to-one against a hit.’ Even so, ‘you press on, you do your best. Stomach in. Chest out. The best I can.’

Finally he went to Bavaria to shoot some wartime scenes for
Paper Tiger
. Although I found the film silly and pedestrian, with dreadfully intrusive music, and Niv’s acting wooden though his relationship with the boy is touching at times, several critics thought differently and most were impressed by his performance. ‘David Niven plays with his unfailing elegance and that touch of pathos which is his especial gift,’ Dilys Powell reported in the
Sunday Times
, but ‘I wish only that someone could find the perfect role for Mr Niven. A Dickens character, perhaps? Something out of Thackeray or Meredith? I don’t know. I know only that I long to see him recapturing and enlarging the qualities I saw in his tiny role in
Lady L
. He is an actor far more delicate, far more easily damaged by wrong treatment in the medium, than his insouciant air might suggest. I can’t help feeling that, lying around somewhere, there is a small masterpiece for David Niven.’ He was never to find it.

That Christmas of 1974 he sent not only £3000 to Grizel and £1000 to Joyce but also £300 to a new friend of whom
he had become very fond, a twenty-seven-year-old English girl, Lesley Rowlatt, the daughter of a London police sergeant, who worked in PR and advertising, and was to remain a close friend until he died. ‘She was very beautiful,’ I was told by her first husband, Peter Watson, who was to marry her eight years later, in 1982. ‘
Spectacularly
beautiful: statuesque, tall, very prominent cheekbones, very deep-set eyes, wonderful eyelids, fantastic figure. I think she met him in Hollywood, where she hoped to become a star. Her friendship with Niven was a long one.’ Niv sent her another £300 in January, which made a total in modern terms of nearly £4000 that he had given her in less than a month.

At sixty-five Niv’s love of women was irrepressible. ‘I can’t have dinner with you tonight,’ he told Leslie Bricusse, ‘because Miss Rhodesia is in London!’ His marriage was by now a complete sham. ‘Hjördis was often whispering on the telephone,’ said Roddy Mann, ‘and she even told me once that there was somebody else in her life. We all urged him to leave her. It was an appalling marriage. She was just a lump and he was bored with her. What’s worse than being stuck with a woman who drinks and has nothing to say? Niven used to find bottles of Fernet Branca all through the house and she pooh-poohed all of his writing – “oh, boring book”, everything was “boring”.’

‘He loved having lunch or dinner with buddies,’ said Jamie, ‘but she used to say, “It’s so boring to chew. Do we have to have dinner tonight? Can’t we have nothing?” ’

‘Niv told me she was either pissed or on pills,’ said Mann. ‘He took a flat in London behind Peter Jones and came to London a lot by himself and misbehaved. The girls were always about twenty-five.’ April Clavell told me that Niv once propositioned a friend of hers in London – ‘she was rather taken aback’ – but he told Mann he would never leave Hjördis because if he did ‘she’d end up a drunk in the gutter’.

Hjördis became so unpleasant in the late 1970s that I could find hardly any of her former friends to say a good word
about her. ‘Daddy would leave Alcoholics Anonymous leaflets and subtle little messages from doctors lying around in the hope that she would see them,’ said Fiona, ‘but she never caught on,’ and Buckley told me that he thought Hjördis took drugs as well as drinking heavily. ‘She became darker and darker and eventually vicious,’ said Leslie Bricusse, and Taki Theodoracopulos told me that ‘slowly over about twenty years she went through a very strange metamorphosis and became a bore and an embarrassment. There was always tension and it got worse. She used to stare, and at the end we used to run away. Eventually she became a total recluse.’ Several of the Nivens’ friends mentioned that she refused to read any of his books. ‘That makes colossal sense,’ said Ustinov. ‘That would be part of her revenge.’

Even Hjördis’s women friends ran out of patience with her. ‘I used to invite them for dinner,’ said Kitty Galbraith, ‘but Hjördis would say they couldn’t come. She had to be somewhere that she could slip out and have a drink in secret.’ Jane Del Amo told me that ‘Hjördis became very difficult. Every time she was coming to dinner she’d say, “Oh, I can’t come because I’m going to the dentist.” I’d say, “Hjördis, dinner is not until nine,” but she wouldn’t come. He’d come on his own and she’d call at about 9.30, when we were all eating, and he’d have to get up and talk to her for about twenty minutes and he’d be very nice and soothe her – ‘yes, darling, yes, darling’ – because he cared and was worried about her. And there was one evening at the Olden when she got into a fight on the dance floor with an English woman and it came to shouting and then to blows.’ Martine Fields said that ‘she was horrible. Nobody liked her. He was very popular but always alone.’ On the rare occasions that Hjördis did go to the Olden Hotel, said Hedi Donizetti, ‘she came with somebody else, like the old Spanish prince Gonzalo Bourbon-Parma, who I think could have been her lover.’

At Cap Ferrat ‘David used to be in despair about Hjördis’s drinking’, Evie Bricusse told me. ‘More and more when we
were with him she was in her room. When we were all going out to dinner he would say, “Nej isn’t joining us tonight. She’s not feeling too well.” And she’d say, things like, “How
boring
sitting there eating. Oh God, all you can do is sit there and eat.” It was almost a relief when she wasn’t going to join us because we could let our hair down. She had a beautiful Saluki dog with long hair that looked like her, but it died and she went into
such
depression that it appeared that she loved the dog much more than she loved David.’

Doreen Hawkins told me that ‘David used to come over most evenings in St Jean when I was alone and we’d take a bottle of champagne down to the sea at the end of our garden and sit and talk, and he was very unhappy. I said, “Oh, David, why don’t you go off and have an affair?” and he just went silent. They were really unhappy for the last few years and Hjördis had a couple of lovers.’ Another woman friend who did not want to be named told me: ‘He never showed her up in front of people except once when he was in despair and we went over and you could see he’d been crying. When he opened the bathroom cupboard under the sink bottles fell out and he said, “Oh, darling, what am I going to do?” He was really, really distressed.’

Considering their home life it is not surprising that several of the Nivens’ friends told me that Kristina and Fiona were difficult children, ‘but then they got no love from their mother,’ said Mrs Donizetti. Evie Bricusse told me that Hjördis ‘was a distant mother and never warm or affectionate with them’, and another woman friend who did not want to be named said ‘they were strange little girls, not evil but naughty and a problem’, and Bryan Forbes remembered that when the Nivens came to dinner in England one of the girls set fire to a carpet with matches.

At Château d’Oex Niv escaped Hjördis by working on the new book, skiing, lunching and painting with Buckley. In his wine cellar den, which was stuffed with racks of champagne, he painted several vivid murals of bullfighters and bulls with
enormous testicles that were still there in 2002, when I was told by the present owner of the chalet, Coco Wyers: ‘When we first came into this house in 1997 I thought “I’m not going to live here” because it was such an unhappy house. I thought, “oh my God, what happened here?” I felt that something was really not OK. In the end we bought it only because they couldn’t sell it and let us have it very cheaply.’ Niv also began to see a lot of Roger Moore, who bought a chalet in Gstaad and told me that when his wife Luisa once put on a blonde wig and Hjördis opened the door, ‘Niv, who was coming down the stairs, did not recognise Luisa, thought “oh God, this is somebody I’ve had”, and went straight up the stairs again!’