Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (52 page)

At the end of April, knowing that his movie career was all but over, he sent Sam Vaughan parts of the novel over which he had sweated for four years and for which he had eventually hired an assistant to help with research. ‘It wasn’t a good novel and he wasn’t a good novelist,’ Vaughan admitted in 2002. ‘It wasn’t his metier. He told good anecdotes but it’s hard to make a novel out of anecdotes.’ Phil Evans, to whom Niv sent a copy of the typescript when it was finished, agreed. ‘He wasn’t really a novelist,’ he said, and Alan Gordon Walker admitted that the book was very bad. Still, Vaughan reckoned that it could be improved by his editors and it would be a coup for Doubleday to have Niv as one of its authors, so he was prepared to pay much more for the book than it was worth. ‘You’re off to a
splendid
start,’ he fibbed in a letter to David on 14 May. ‘Don’t worry. Whatever problems we might have in the manuscript are fixable. What is irreplaceable is your own gift for story, your soaring sense of humor, and the very real atmospherics of this novel.’ Greenfield flew to New York to negotiate the contract and told Vaughan that Niv was insisting on an advance of $1,000,001 for the two books. ‘Why the extra dollar?’ asked Vaughan. So that Niv could tell everyone that the deal was for more than a million, said Greenfield. It was an absurdly extravagant sum to pay for a bad novel by an author who was quite obviously not a novelist, even though it was to be split into five payments, and Doubleday were never to earn even a fraction back, but all those noughts galvanised Niv into finishing it by the end of the year.

He was now so worried about Hjördis’s drinking that he wrote to Belinda Willis, the wife of an old army comrade in Dorset who had beaten her own addiction, to ask her advice, but Hjördis refused to admit that she had a problem or to go for treatment.

At the end of July Peter Sellers died of a heart attack, aged only fifty-four, and his widow Lynne Frederick asked Niv to deliver the eulogy at the memorial service in London at St Martin-in-the-Fields in September. By now he was looking dreadfully old and strained, and when he spoke from the pulpit he was referring as much to himself as to Sellers. ‘This brilliant man suffered genuinely, dreadfully, and increasingly, from the classic actors’ ailment – insecurity,’ he said. ‘It was only when Peter was well on his way to becoming what he had set his heart on – a big international success – that he looked down from halfway up the mountain and discovered that he had a very bad case of vertigo. Then he began to question himself, to worry, and truly he suffered. People outside our profession have no conception of the blind fear an actor has of being a failure in public.’

Kristina, now nineteen, left school that summer and Niv settled her into a year-long fine-arts course at Sotheby’s in London and a flat at 23 Bruton Street before flying back to the Côte d’Azur. Even though his film career was all but over, he was still able to sign lucrative contracts for doing very little and earned approximately £60,000 for two days’ work making a chocolate commercial for Rowntree Mackintosh, but when he flew to New York to see Sam Vaughan and his Doubleday editors about the novel he was suddenly felled by a violent pain in his leg as he walked down Fifth Avenue. ‘I thought someone had hit me in the right calf with a plank,’ he wrote to a London osteopath, Dr Guy Beauchamp. ‘I could only go about 10 yards, then the pain was so bad I had to stop.’ Back in England various tests found nothing obviously wrong but the attack was another early symptom of motor neurone disease, and when he returned to Switzerland he found that although he could ski he could not raise his right heel and could walk only flat-footed.

For Christmas he sent Gump and Joyce the modern equivalent of £26,000, but once again money was cascading into his coffers when he settled his legal suit against David Merrick
for some £70,000, Hamish Hamilton agreed to pay him an advance of £42,500 for the new novel, and Hodder another £82,500 for the British paperback rights, though he was still struggling to find the right title because, he said,
Make It Smaller and Move It to the Left
‘does not fit the book at all’. He was still for some reason obsessed by the fey bit of E. E. Cummings doggerel from which he had taken the title for
The Moon’s a Balloon
and now suggested the last line of the same verse as the title for the novel,
Flowers Pick Themselves
. ‘
HATE YOUR TITLE
’, cabled Sam Vaughan and he had to think again.

At the end of January he flew to Los Angeles to compère an American Film Institute ceremony in Beverly Hills at which a Life Achievement Award was presented to his old friend Fred Astaire, but already the disease was beginning to affect his voice and at the start of his speech he apologised and said that he knew he sounded like a parrot. He had lost so much weight that his dinner jacket and trousers hung loose from his scrawny frame and he realised that something was seriously wrong with him. The doctors still had no idea what it was though one, a Dr Williams, said it could be nervous depression.

Towards the end of February he delivered the last chapter of the novel to all his publishers and suggested yet another dreadful title,
Go Slowly, Come Back Quickly
, a remark that a little black girl had once made to him as he left the West Indies. ‘I cannot pretend that David’s novel is a masterpiece,’ wrote Sinclair-Stevenson in a memo to Roger Machell, ‘it is far too rambling and self-indulgent for that. On the other hand, it rattles along amusingly enough, there is a good picture of the perils of Hollywood – and it will sell,’ and he told me: ‘It wasn’t very good and we were reluctant to publish it but we were going to make money out of it. Of course all the stories that Roger had cut from
The Moon’s a Balloon
and
Bring on the Empty Horses
were recycled again!’ Sam Vaughan realised that the book needed a great deal of cutting and
rewriting, and sent his editor Kate Medina to London to help him do it. ‘What the novel lacked was a central glue,’ Ms Medina told me. ‘There were the trees but we never made it into a forest. He did not have a lot of self-confidence about himself as a writer, and he had an inability to concentrate and wouldn’t sit still for it, and there was a certain frenetic quality about him. I remember being at the Connaught Hotel and running around a lot and up and down stairs.’

Even after a great deal of professional advice and some extensive rewriting
Go Slowly, Come Back Quickly
was still a very bad novel: slow, pedestrian and embarrassingly amateurish. Even Niv’s closest friends thought it was dreadful. ‘He couldn’t write fiction,’ said Roddy Mann. ‘His novels were
awful
. Greenfield and I both told him not to write another but he insisted.’ Bizarrely the book was dedicated to his old regiment, Phantom, and it told the wartime story of a sexy young Polish American, Stani, who starts off with ‘an erection and it hurt’, joins the RAF, goes to Hollywood with a beautiful girl who becomes a film star, dislikes the place, and loses her before they get back together again. There are surging loins, thrusting loins, ‘perfectly shaped breasts’, ‘the glorious globes of Pandora’s behind’, a girl who has ‘seen more stiff pricks than she ’as hot dinners’ and a sergeant major who is stung by a wasp on the testicles. It is all a pointless, disjointed mess, part hairy-chested adventure, part bosom-heaving romance, interspersed with bits of irrelevant travelogue and absurd coincidence, and all utterly unbelievable. Had it been written by an unknown author it would never have been published, but because Niv had written it the publishers’ hype machines went quickly into action.
Go Slowly, Come Back Quickly
was ‘a story brilliantly blending love, the excitements of war, the glamour and the off-screen dramas of Hollywood’, burbled Hamish Hamilton’s early publicity sheet.

Niv flew to New York in May to consult an orthopaedic surgeon, Dr J. A. Nicholas, who told him that his muscle problem might be caused by a pinched nerve as a result of
his back injury during the war and gave him a series of exercises to do to build up the calf muscles. But the exercises – and a course of physiotherapy in England – had little effect. ‘We were having dinner with him in a Chelsea restaurant,’ John Mortimer told me, ‘and Penny, who was not yet thirty, said, “Oh God, I’ve got these terrible wrinkles on my face,” and he said, “Even if I took every pill there is in the world I’ll still be dead in five years.” ’ Even so, his energy and will-power were phenomenal. In July he flew to Atlanta to publicise the novel by addressing a convention of booksellers, and he agreed to return for a full exhausting promotion tour of the States at the end of October after Vaughan promised that ‘there will be no “signing sessions in public libraries or lavatories” and you will not be given the Edna O’Brien treatment, including the fact that none of us will try to get you in bed. At least none of the guys.’

It was David Jr who gave him his last starring part in a movie he was producing,
Ménage à Trois
, a charming, light-hearted comedy which was later retitled
Better Late Than Never
. Poignantly Niv played an elderly, has-been cabaret entertainer who is trying to scrape a living in a strip club in the South of France where he is booed and hissed by the tourists. He earned $150,000 for seven weeks’ work and insisted that his son should pay him a living allowance even though he was living just up the road at Lo Scoglietto. He enjoyed having Bryan Forbes directing and even sang on screen for the first time in his career, Noël Coward’s ‘I Went to a Marvellous Party’, but he looked dreadfully old and skinny, and his voice was so weak and slurred that the studio asked Forbes to dub it. He refused. ‘I couldn’t do it to him,’ said Forbes. ‘It would be too humiliating. One night we had dinner on our own at Nice airport and he asked if my marriage was happy and said he didn’t have much joy at home. He was a lovely man, very easy to direct and a gent. He’d come on set every day and shake every member of the French crew’s hand and say “good morning” and was treated with great love
and affection. He was an enchanting character and would still say if he saw a pretty girl, “Forbesie, that’s fanciable”.’ One extremely fanciable girl for him to ogle was David Jr’s latest girlfriend, Jaclyn Smith, one of Charlie’s Angels. Young David was now thirty-eight and still a bachelor but renowned for his affairs with several beautiful women.

Niv flew to London in the first week of October for the publication of
Go Slowly, Come Back Quickly
. Editing and printing the book had been fraught with problems right until the last minute because he kept changing his mind and demanding alterations to the text as well as the jacket, and a few weeks before publication Roger Machell wrote exhaustedly to Kate Medina: ‘Greetings from your fellow-survivor!’ She replied, ‘I hope and trust you are bearing up under the onslaught.’ Just three weeks before publication David rang Hamish Hamilton to say that he approved of the jacket at last. ‘Words fail me!’ wrote one executive on an internal memo. ‘Phew!’ scribbled another.

Two nights before the book was published in Britain he appeared on TV on the
Michael Parkinson Show
looking weak, emaciated and uncomfortable. His bright blue eyes were pale and tired, his voice shaky and slurred, and he stumbled over words and looked extremely uneasy. ‘Let’s face it, my group’s being called up,’ he told Parkinson. ‘I don’t view the future with any great longing.’ But he added, ‘It’s been such fun. I’ve been so lucky. How many people can say “I’m doing a job I love”?’

‘In the green room afterwards everyone was saying, “He’s pissed,” ’ Parkinson told me, ‘but there was a nurse who said, “No, I think he’s had a stroke.” I
knew
he wasn’t drunk and that there was something seriously wrong, and he knew himself. He was terribly upset and apologetic afterwards and aware that he was slurring his words. “They’ll all say I was pissed,” he said, but he wasn’t.’ Sinclair-Stevenson took Niv back to the Connaught ‘and he said, “That was a disaster, awful!” and I said, “No, no, you were wonderful,” but the
following morning he looked absolutely ghastly and said, “I’ve had rather a shock. When I got back to my room last night there was a message from my Harley Street specialist’s nurse, which had been hand-delivered, who said, ‘It was such a pleasure to see you on the television but I was so distressed to see that you’re obviously very ill’.” ’ Another viewer wrote urging him to contact her doctor father, and in New York Jamie watched a tape of the interview, guessed that his father was seriously ill and urged him to go to the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis for a major examination.

Niv realised Jamie was right and flew to Minneapolis, where he spent several days having tests. The results were grim. He phoned Jamie in New York. ‘The good news is that I didn’t have a stroke,’ he said. ‘The bad news is that I have a form of motor neurone disease and only eighteen months to live.’ He returned to New York and Jamie picked him up at the airport, where he found him in amazingly high spirits. ‘He had sat next to Tom Brokaw, the NBC anchorman, on the plane,’ Jamie wrote in
You
seven years afterwards, ‘and I later learned that he had regaled him with stories all during the trip. It is hard to imagine that a man could receive a death sentence and hours later amuse a fellow passenger with anecdotes. But then, that was David Niven. He always gave more to life than he got back from it, and he expected everyone else to do the same. In the car going into town he said, “You know, I have been very lucky, really. Your mother’s death has been the only great tragedy in our family. I am fortunate to have gotten this far; I probably should have died in Normandy, and, hell, that was forty years ago. There is absolutely no sense in trying to fool ourselves about the fact that this thing is going to kill me. The secret is to live as best one can, given the circumstances, and get on with it.” … And with that we went to dinner.’

Equally astonishing, Niv told Brokaw during the flight that he had just been given a death sentence and Brokaw kept the secret instead of publishing his scoop, so it was another year
before the story broke. Before leaving New York, Niv phoned Betty Bacall. ‘Don’t go to the Mayo Clinic!’ he said. ‘They tell you you’re going to die!’