Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (54 page)

Also in both films was thirty-six-year-old Joanna Lumley, who wrote later in her autobiography: ‘I think many people fell in love with Niven at first sight, and I was no exception … he was as charming and funny as could be, although he was filled with drugs and feeling ghastly [
and told me
] “The thing about this damn disease is that it makes me do everything in extremes. I can’t smile, I have hysterics, I can’t feel glum without howling.” He then proceeded to tell a wildly funny story about the clinic in America where he underwent tests and had to travel about the hospital holding glass pots of unmentionable lavatorial substances. We clutched each other and yowled with laughter. He tired easily, and was horribly conscious of losing his ability to enunciate clearly. “GOR – ILL – A,” he would practise before the take … but when he said, “Golilla,” and everyone said, “Doesn’t matter,” it did matter, most dreadfully, to him.’ When filming ended in mid-July she wrote him a deeply affectionate six-page letter that began ‘My dear Niv, my dear, dear Niv’ and said, ‘I don’t think there is an actor living who inspires so much love and loyalty.’

Niv began in desperation to try every form of treatment that was suggested to him to stave off his muscle decay: physiotherapy, exercises, massive injections, squeezing big balls of putty. In London the Bricusses asked him to watch
the Wimbledon tennis final between Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe with them at their flat in Eaton Square and he told them about the disease. ‘It was the first time I saw him cry,’ said Evie Bricusse. ‘I remember him saying, “It’s very serious. I can ski, darling, I can do anything you want, but I can’t fucking walk!” and we held on to each other.’

To Phil Evans he wrote with a marking ink pen because he was losing his grip: ‘You have been so
incredibly
brave with
your
problem,
mine
is mini in comparison, but I am copying you and am
determined
to beat the rap, but it is a fucker when some of the machinery begins to wear out! – I always thought that was reserved for
old
farts like Winston Churchill but I sense that young farts of 72 are coming into the firing line now and I
do
so resent it!!’ In August newspapers reported for the first time that he was unwell and he was furious when Princess Grace said that he had suffered a mild stroke. Strangers wrote with messages of sympathy and suggested treatments, one lady recommending Super Kelp seaweed tablets and Super Gev-e-tabs, ‘both a favourite of Barbara Cartland’s’.

He enjoyed one moment of happiness that summer when Fiona, now nearly nineteen, left Le Rosey with an excellent final report – ‘Fiona is a pleasure to have around and ALWAYS very helpful and co-operative’ – and was offered a place at Geneva University. But his misery must have been deepened unbearably by an adoring love letter that he received early in August from a woman who was possibly the one for whom he was about to leave Hjördis just before Kristina’s accident. It was written on the headed notepaper of a company called Hollywood Productions of 20 Canning Place, London W8, and addressed in code to ‘Mr McKenzie’:

I have failed to identify the woman or find Hollywood Productions or any of its five directors, but ‘UG’ was probably short for Ugly – the nickname Niv often gave to women of whom he was especially fond.

Another adoring letter arrived from Joanna Lumley, who said she was ‘sick with fear’ because he had written to say that despite his weakness he was still snorkelling. ‘For God’s sake take care,’ she said. ‘It would be too frightful to read that you had met a watery end partially overwhelmed by rubber equipment. You know what the
Sun
would make of that.’ But for all the jollity and joshing his life now was one tragedy after another. On 14 September his darling Princess Grace was killed when her car plunged off the Grande Corniche high above Monte Carlo. Niv was so shocked that he could not go to her funeral because his emotions now were so fragile that he feared he would break down and cause a scene – or, even worse, he might roar with laughter. It did not help that after Grace’s funeral Cary Grant came to see him and
then, like Grace, told the Press that he had had a stroke. Furiously he denied it, only to be struck another heavy blow when Bob Coote died on 26 November in New York, aged seventy-three. The darkness was closing in.

While Niv was in London for some hospital treatment he hired through an agency a pretty, twenty-eight-year-old, full-time Irish nurse, Katherine Matthewson, who was to look after him throughout his last eight months, became a close friend and tried to brighten his final days. ‘She was great and he adored her,’ said Fiona, and Jamie told me: ‘She was just wonderful and made the end of his life fantastic. At one stage we had nurses for him around the clock but she said she’d take care of him by herself because he became upset with other people.’

At the end of November he went to Château d’Oex for his last winter and wrote to Laurence Olivier: ‘I work (no skiing) and sleep and try to write my book – very unsocial I’m afraid because I have a problem swallowing which means I have to eat alone because if anybody speaks to me at the wrong moment they become encrusted with a fine spray of vegetable and saucisse de Vaud! Wine is difficult to keep down too. So I avoid it which makes everyone say how well I look, which is at least encouraging.’ He had not lost his sense of humour, and added in a PPS: ‘A friend of mine saw
Hamlet
in Johannesburg in Afrikaans – “Omlette, Omlette, ich bin dein Poppa’s Spuki”!’

That last Christmas he sent Grizel a final present, yet another huge cheque, this time for £3000 (£6500 today) but he baulked at paying the Swiss fr. 230,000 he was told it would cost him in French export and Swiss import taxes if he shipped his biggest pictures from Lo Scoglietto to Château d’Oex, as he wanted, and he wrote to Sotheby’s in London to ask discreetly whether there were any way of smuggling them over the border. With startling indiscretion a Sotheby’s official replied on headed notepaper to give him the name and address of a man in London who was ‘extremely experienced
and reliable in handling jobs of this sort’ and would do it for just under £1000. She added with understandable nervousness that ‘he wishes to know as little as possible about the property’ and ‘for obvious reasons I think no correspondence on the subject should pass between you and Sotheby’s’. When I mentioned the letter to Jamie Niven in 2002, by which time he was Vice-Chairman of Sotheby’s in New York, he said with mock alarm, ‘Oh, Jesus! No!’

‘When David got really sick Hjördis simply couldn’t handle it,’ said Evie Bricusse. ‘Everybody handles things in different ways but I didn’t like her for it. Here was this lovely man in his hour of need and she should have been there for him, but her way was to hit the Fernet Branca. He had no one at the end except the nurse, whom he loved. At the very end, even though he could hardly talk, he used to make me laugh because he’d say this was a good night because she was going to bath him!’ Hjördis was in denial, David Bolton told me: ‘In that situation people can even be cross and think “How
dare
you die on me? I want a nice, fit man who’s normal. How dare you expose me to all this pain and grief?” ’ She drank more than ever, which drove Niv to the brink of utter despair and he wrote again to his friend Major-General John Willis, whose wife Belinda had written to him in 1980 about how she had beaten her own addiction, but Willis replied glumly that ‘chaps like you and I are going to do nothing to either start or stop things happening ourselves – that can only be the choice or decision of the other person’. Niv could not bear it any longer and decided at last that he had to divorce Hjördis. ‘He showed me this letter he was writing to her,’ said Fiona, ‘saying he wanted to divorce her and take us with him, but it was also a love letter saying how much he loved her and always had and always would. The guy was crazy about her and I said, “You can’t tell a woman you love her so much but you want a divorce!” I think he hoped it would stop her drinking but in the end he never gave it to her. After all, where was he going to take us? He was dying.
But he refused to believe he was dying and kept holding on to the hope that he would live.’

To cling to life he tried anything. ‘I have just switched doctors to a maniac in Paris,’ he wrote to General Willis in January, ‘who has got me on a horrendous regime which starts at 6 o’clock in the morning sitting for 10 minutes in an ice-cold tub! He squirts me full of all sorts of injections and I am hoping for the best! The leg and hand I can cope with pretty well but the throat is a real hazard.’ Gregory Peck suggested that he should try a special sort of ginseng root, to which he replied wittily: ‘
Caro Fagiolo Vecchio
[Dear Old Bean], Apart from all the great specialists, I have made the rounds of faith healers and quacks, the last being a vineyard worker near Sion with hands like bunches of bananas. He ripped up my records from the Mayo Clinic with a happy laugh and told me that all would be well if I bathed three times a day in olive oil and brandy! Anyway, I’m pressing on, and let’s face it, millions of people have worse things than mine.’ He drank Guinness, even though he did not like it, because he was told it was good for him, and started kneeling to say his prayers every night, even though he had never been especially religious, and for one specialist he compiled two handwritten pages of heart-rending questions: ‘What is the end of the line? Paralysis of legs, arms and tongue? How will I eat if I cant swallow? Will there be great pain?’ And finally the question that must have haunted him ever since he had been suddenly overwhelmed by the multiple blows of Hjördis’s drinking, infidelity and coldness as well as Kristina’s accident. ‘Is there
any
chance,’ he asked, ‘that stress was the cause of the whole thing? Is the emotional over reaction (tearful feeling) anything to do with the original diagnosis of Dr Williams – Nervous Depression?’ Deep in his heart he suspected that he had somehow brought all this on himself, like flowers pick themselves.

He found the new novel increasingly difficult to write, not only because it was hard to grip a pen but also because he
lacked inspiration, and he thought it was so bad that he might abandon it and return the unearned part of the advance to his publishers. ‘They gave me an
enormous
advance and I can’t write a fucking word,’ he told Roger Moore, ‘but I’ve had the money for two years now and I’ve invested it very well, so even if I give it back to them I’ve made a profit.’

By now writing took him so long that he was dictating his letters, and he wrote to Phil Evans: ‘We have lovely weather and gorgeous snow but no skiing for me unfortunately. Never mind. When I get depressed and think “Why me?” I so often think of you and I perk up immediately. You are a wonderful chum and I admire you very much.’

As usual he was worried about money and ‘shattered’ when Bill Staehelin sent him another huge bill, for Swiss fr. 169,086 for legal services during 1982, even though he was worth at least £20 million and Lo Scoglietto was stuffed with hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of expensive paintings and dozens of antiques, including six Louis XV fauteuils, a sixteenth-century Venetian cassone, a pair of eighteenth-century rosewood tables, a pair of George III giltwood mirrors, a pair of large eighteenth-century girandoles, several rare commodes and a nineteenth-century Aubusson carpet. He told Jamie that he could no longer afford to employ the nurse until Jamie reminded him that he was incredibly rich and still living on just the interest on his fortune. ‘He was even worried that he might not have enough to buy a wheelchair if he needed it!’ said Fiona. Despite Hjördis’s unending cruelty he worried that after his death she might after a few years not have enough to live on comfortably, and he instructed Staehelin to alter his will to give her a larger share should she somehow survive his children. ‘She nagged him all the time about his will,’ said Doreen Hawkins.

That last winter in Château d’Oex the Buckleys saw a lot of him even though they could barely decipher what he said. ‘He would come round and paint until the turpentine overcame him,’ Buckley told me. One of his last paintings
started life in February with fluffy pink and white clouds that by the end of March had become grey and black. Yet he still saw humour in all sorts of things. He thought it was hilarious when someone he had not seen for years spotted him in Gstaad, stopped his car, and shouted, ‘Niv, how the hell are you?’

‘W-well,’ he croaked, ‘I’ve g-got this m-motor neu …’

‘I’ve got a new motor too!’ yelled the friend. ‘A Mercedes!’

The trouble with stories like that, said Buckley, was that ‘now he had to guard against abandoned laughter because it convulsed him’.

Many of Niv’s friends and acquaintances realised that the end was near and urged Downing Street to give him a knighthood before it was too late. ‘He deserved one,’ said Alexander Walker, ‘because of his general popularity and the fact that he represented a popular aspect of the English character, but I just got a formal reply.’ One supplicant told me that he wrote to the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, pointing out that Niv had ‘had “a good war” and represented the essential values of Britishness in more films than anyone,’ and that she replied that as soon as Niv paid all the taxes he had dodged by living abroad since 1946 she would go to see him in hospital and present him personally with a knighthood. When I asked Lady Thatcher in 2003 if this were true her assistant Mark Worthington replied that she ‘does not recall having any discussion about an honour for Mr Niven’ and that ‘a number of non-residents received honours’, so the story is ‘highly unlikely’. Niv himself had been contemptuous of the British honours system when he had told the
Sunday Mirror
ten years previously that ‘titles for film actors really are a lot of balls’ because ‘actors are vagabonds, despite the fancy trappings’, but even so ‘he would have liked a knighthood,’ said Jamie, ‘but he
was
a tax exile and didn’t live in England.’ Several of Niv’s friends agreed, including two who were to be knighted themselves even though they had lived abroad for many years, and he would undoubtedly have been peeved
had he known that Rex Harrison would be knighted six years later.