Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (8 page)

‘What happens to your batman when he wakes you up in the morning?’ asked the prosecuting officer smugly.

‘Nothing,’ said Royal. ‘I have issued him with a fencing mask.’

Sadly he was in Malta for only a few weeks before moving on to join the 2nd Battalion in India.

To spice things up, Niv and Trubshawe got seriously drunk one night and went to a smart fancy dress ball at the opera house in Valetta dressed as goats. They crawled through the fashionable throng on hands and knees with rugs over their heads and backs, football bladders and the teats of rubber gloves swinging obscenely from their crotches, and leaving a
trail of little black olives on the dance floor behind them. The snootier guests were appalled, but not as incensed as a gang of Maltese students for whom the goat was a sacred animal. Niv and Trubshawe were jeered, jostled and eventually had to escape from the opera house at a drunken trot, pursued by enraged Maltese. Their superiors were unimpressed by this performance and confined them to barracks. Another day of riotous pleasure occurred when they discovered that Max, passing through Malta on his way back to the Pacific on the liner
Empress of India
, was working his passage below decks as a sweaty, grime-smeared stoker, and the three plunged into a twenty-four-hour drinking orgy.

Such lively times, however, were rare and by now Niv realised that he had made a huge mistake by joining the army. Bored beyond belief, he was heading towards the parade ground in full uniform one day when he came across a dummy that was used for bayonet practice and decided to run it through with his sword, which snapped in two, leaving just six inches of blade in his hand. With no time to find another weapon, he went on parade with the amputated blade. ‘Officers, draw your swords!’ cried the adjutant. Niv flourished his short, jagged dagger. ‘Stick an olive on that, Niven,’ said the adjutant, ‘and I’ll send for a martini.’

He asked to be seconded to the West Africa Frontier Force, which would pay him better and should be much more exciting, perhaps even dangerous, but was turned down. He became transport officer, which gave him the added interest of working with horses and mules, but the novelty soon wore off. What he really needed was the buzz of the theatre: the smell of the greasepaint, an audience, cheers, laughter and applause. During the day he seemed to be the perfect officer, liked and respected by his men and fellow officers, though he must have wondered what the hell he was doing commanding a platoon of Jocks who were so unappreciative of the finer things of life that when he managed to liberate a rare cache of caviar from the impounded cargo of a Russian
ship, and had it served to the men, one of them complained: ‘This fookin’ jam tastes of fish!’

Trubshawe believed that Niv could have had a distinguished military career had he gone to the Argylls or another regiment, but at night in Malta David would sit forlornly in his room reading
The Tatler
and old theatre magazines. He and Trubshawe tried to join the Malta Amateur Dramatic Society but were rejected, and in desperation they put on a show of their own for three nights in a canteen down at the docks. This consisted of a programme of Highland dancing and humorous sketches such as one about a skater who had no ice, which David perfected so well that when he returned to London the Prince of Wales insisted that he should perform it for him at Quaglino’s nightclub. The show was hugely successful and gave Niv a wonderful boost, but its main effect was to remind him just how much he missed performing. Already he was gaining a reputation as a raconteur and collecting and burnishing his huge stock of funny anecdotes. ‘He was really best, even then, at just telling stories,’ Trubshawe told Morley. ‘I’d seen him, at some pompous dinner party given by the C-in-C on board ship in Malta, with perhaps twenty-four other guests, gradually manipulate the conversation around until in time everybody was listening to this young man with just one pip on his shoulder. He had this astonishing capacity for anecdote.’

In December 1931 the 1st Battalion returned at last by troopship to England and was stationed at the Citadel barracks in a fort high above the English Channel town of Dover. Most of the officers and men were sent home for Christmas but Trubshawe and Niven were still in disgrace and ordered to stay and guard the fort. Had he known that this was his mother’s last Christmas, Niv would have been granted compassionate leave, but he was still a selfish, thoughtless twenty-one-year-old who was bent on having fun rather than worrying about his sick old mother. And there was plenty of fun to be had now that they were back in England. He and
Trubshawe would often roar up to London by car, seventy-nine miles, to take a couple of girls to dinner, the theatre or a party, and in March they were in town on the night of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race and with a party of drunken friends became so boisterous at the London Palladium that they had to give their names before they were thrown out. Niv said that he was the headmaster of Eton. Nor did he always have to rely on Trubshawe for wheels: that spring he was able at last to buy his own car, a little Morris Cowley, when his grandmother died in Bournemouth and left him £200, a sum that would be worth nearly £7000 today. Trubshawe was by now engaged to a beautiful blonde whom he had met in Malta, Margie Macdougall, but a young man as handsome, charming and funny as David had no trouble at all in finding girlfriends, and he and Trubshawe were both invited to plenty of parties and debutante dinners in London and to weekends in country houses. He began to enjoy such a busy high society social life, and all of it for free, that he admitted later that he became for some time a terrible snob about money and titles. The only snag was that unless he and Trubshawe had weekend passes they always had to be back at the barracks in Dover for the daily parade at 7 a.m., so one night when they knew that a party at the Coconut Grove nightclub would probably go on until dawn they hired a fast ambulance, equipped it with their uniforms and their two batmen, and after the party zoomed down to Dover at the last minute to arrive just in time for the parade. On the way down the ambulance had a puncture and when eventually they arrived at the barracks the battalion’s 800 men were already standing on parade, but the two impeccably dressed renegades simply pretended that nothing was amiss and marched smartly out of the ambulance, carrying their swords, to join their fellow officers. Once again they were given a stern dressing down and a month’s detention.

In one major engagement that summer of 1932 the officers of the HLI attended a royal levee to meet King George V at
St James’s Palace, wearing full regimental dress and regalia with their scarlet tunics, odd squared tartan trews and capes with fringes like old women’s shawls, caps with ridiculous little plumes on the top, gloves and swords – and looking, according to Trubshawe, just like a gaggle of Highland postmen. As they queued on a huge staircase leading up to the throne room to meet the king, the Prince of Wales and the Dukes of York, Gloucester and Kent, they passed a line of Gentlemen at Arms, a collection of elderly, very senior, distinguished officers resplendent in Ruritanian fancy dress uniforms and plumed helmets, Niv could not resist prodding one of them. ‘Christ, Trubshawe!’ he said. ‘He’s alive!’

The most important party that summer for Niv was a dance in London where he met the vivacious nineteen-year-old American Woolworths heiress Barbara Hutton, who was said to be the richest girl in the world and about to inherit more than £10 million the following year. She was already engaged to a Georgian prince, Alex Mdivani, who became her first husband, but she and David kept meeting at parties over the next few weeks and became such good friends that when she returned to the United States she invited him to join her in New York for Christmas. Niv thought nothing of it at the time but a few months later he was to accept her invitation and take his first hesitant step towards Hollywood.

It was his mother’s death that changed the course of his life. In November 1932 he was in Aldershot on a physical training course when Uncle Tommy telephoned to say that Etta was dying in a nursing home in South Kensington. He rushed up to London and was stunned to see how wasted she was by her cancer, but it was too late to say goodbye. Following an operation, peritonitis complications set in, she did not recognise him and she died on 12 November at 5 Collingham Gardens with her beloved husband at her bedside. She was only fifty-two.

She left an astonishingly large estate of £14,169 3s 9d net, the equivalent in modern terms of about £500,000, and to
that should be added the £3000 that she had lent to Max, so that her net worth when she died was about £600,000 in modern terms – three times as much as she had inherited from William Niven only sixteen years previously. This huge increase in her wealth was not caused by inflation, which was nil between 1916 and 1932, nor probably by clever investment, since the British stock market index fell by fifty-five per cent between 1919 and 1931 as it was battered by the Great Depression. The only explanation is that Etta left her inheritance from William Niven untouched to grow for sixteen years in some high-earning account, with Comyn-Platt paying all the massive school fees and living expenses – which would be less surprising if he really was Grizel’s and David’s father.

When Etta died she left a further mystery: in the document granting probate she is described oddly as ‘Dame’ Henriette Comyn-Platt when her correct title was ‘Lady’. After a few small personal legacies she left the bulk of her estate to her trustees to be used for Sir Thomas’s benefit so that he could continue to live in their houses for as long as he wished and be paid the entire income from the estate for the rest of his life, after which it would go to her four children. She also appointed him her children’s guardian should any of them still be under age when she died – another indication that she loved and trusted him. Among the specific bequests she gave Max some jewellery and most of her family silver, David half of the silver with the Niven crest and a large diamond butterfly brooch, and numerous diamond, sapphire, pearl and platinum rings, brooches and earrings to Joyce and Grizel. Niv’s constant claims that she was desperately poor were quite untrue.

He suffered deep guilt about his mother’s death. ‘I went back to Aldershot,’ he wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon
, and ‘endlessly chastised myself for always taking her presence for granted, for not doing much, much more to make her happy and for not spending more time with her when I could so
easily have done so’. At the age of twenty-two he had become an orphan. His commanding officer told him to take a month’s leave and go somewhere completely new. He cabled Barbara Hutton in New York, she told him to come immediately, and he sold his car, borrowed some money from Grizel and the bank, bought the cheapest possible ticket to New York on the liner
Georgic
, and sailed on 14 December in a noisy cabin right above the propellers that he shared with a middle-aged American bootlegger who went ashore when they arrived in New York, where Prohibition still ruled the land and alcohol was illegal, in a baggy suit with huge secret pockets stuffed with bottles of whisky.

He arrived on Christmas Eve and was met by Barbara and a gang of her friends who made him welcome immediately even though they could barely understand his posh English accent. Their openness and friendliness provided the tonic that he needed and he quickly came to love America and Americans for their kindness and generosity, and he was awed by the massive power and beauty of the city, the towering buildings, endless avenues, seething crowds, the glittering Christmas lights and decorations, the sheer vast Americanness of it all. Barbara booked him into the elegant Pierre Hotel, where her family lived in several suites, and for nearly a week he lived like a millionaire and was not allowed to pay for anything.

They attended the Central Park Casino where despite Prohibition everyone was drinking almost as much as Trubshawe, and spent Christmas Day with Barbara’s family, who gave David some wonderfully generous presents. They went to Princeton with a party of her friends, including some stunningly beautiful girls, to watch the university play Yale at American football, a game that he came to enjoy immensely. Back in New York, with more of Barbara’s friends, among them a tall, shy, quiet millionaire called Howard Hughes, they enjoyed a blur of parties, nightclubs, dives, Harlem joints and the famous ‘21 Club’ speakeasy, where
should the police suddenly carry out a raid every glass and bottle of booze would slide down a chute into the cellar and disappear within seconds behind an undetectable two-ton brick door that still guards the wine cellar there today. And they made in the bath their own illicit, dangerous gin with chemist’s alcohol, wood chips and juniper juice. Had they got it wrong it could have killed them.

One of Barbara’s friends, Phil Ammidown, was about to drive more than 1000 miles down the east coast to Palm Beach in his fast convertible and invited David to join him. On the way they took a 400-mile detour to the west of Florida for a party at Tallahassee, but on their way back south towards Palm Beach, near Jacksonville and driving fast at 5 a.m. they were suddenly blinded by the headlights of an oncoming car, collided in the dark with two black mules and crashed into a swamp. They came round from unconsciousness to find that they were pinned into their seats by the crumpled windshield, the front of their car had disappeared completely, they were covered in blood, and they could hear alligators splashing near them and grunting as they feasted on the bodies of the mules. Niv and Ammidown sat in the wrecked car for ages, paralysed, listening terrified to the dreadful sound of the alligators eating, until eventually at dawn they were able to escape from the wreck.

Ammidown bought a new car and they drove on south that afternoon, checked into an hotel in Palm Beach and soon forgot that nightmare as they revelled in the winter sunshine of Florida. For day after day they played golf or tennis, went sailing and fishing, and for night after night they ate in restaurants, flirted with pretty girls and went dancing. Niv became so hooked on the American way of life and so keen on one of the girls that he missed his return passage and cabled his CO: ‘
DEAR COLONEL MAGNIFICENT OPPORTUNITY BIG GAME HUNTING WHALE FISHING FLORIDA REQUEST ONE WEEK EXTENDED LEAVE
.’ The CO replied, ‘
NO WHALES OR BIG GAME WITHIN A THOUSAND MILES STOP TAKE TWO
.’