Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (14 page)

For some odd reason most of the film depicted military life on the North West Frontier of India rather than in the Crimea.
Opening with a wet love story and prissy, affected characters, it struggled on through a barrage of cannon fire and raucous music that doubtless sounded perfect to the wild Hungarian ear. Niv was charming as Captain James Randall and
Variety
said his performance was ‘distinguished’ but it was a small part and ended halfway through the film when Randall is shot and dies before the cavalry even reaches the Crimea. Even so, for all its stilted hokum, the movie was hailed as a major epic, attracted a huge amount of publicity and gave David his first hint of fame. Before
The Charge of the Light Brigade
, despite
Thank You, Jeeves
, he had been just a bit-part player – ‘we were all whores, really,’ he told Michael Parkinson on television in 1975 – but after it he began to look like a possible star.

By now Merle Oberon was so keen to marry him that in May newspapers reported they were engaged, but Niv was reluctant to tie himself down to one woman and both issued statements denying the rumour. Thirty years later Merle still regretted that they never married. Niv’s son Jamie was to meet her in the 1960s and he told me: ‘Every time I ran into her she’d always say “you are the son I should have had”. She was a very nice woman.’

She and Niv were still, however, very much an item, and a week later they threw a lavish party for Doug Fairbanks Sr and his new bride, Lady Sylvia Ashley, to which they invited a crowd of stars and Marion Davies, who was herself renowned for throwing the most sumptuous parties of all. She was a beautiful, thirty-nine-year-old comic actress, blue-eyed and blonde, who was about to retire after making fifty films, but more important, she was the beloved mistress of the seventy-three-year-old billionaire media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, whose awesomely wealthy, powerful life was to inspire the 1941 Orson Welles film
Citizen Kane
. David had become friendly with Hearst’s four sons, and Marion often invited him and Merle to her fabulously luxurious weekend house parties at Hearst’s fairy-tale castle, San
Simeon, nearly 300 miles north of Los Angeles, overlooking the Pacific. San Simeon was a palace that had cost him millions of dollars to build, with 165 rooms, including forty-two bedrooms, nineteen sitting rooms, sixty-one bathrooms, a dining hall like a cathedral, two ornate libraries with 5000 books, a billiard room, a cinema, huge indoor and outdoor swimming pools, towers, marble colonnades, cloisters, esplanades and rooms stuffed with antiques and priceless works of art, sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries, antique silver, statues and marble sculptures. There were 127 acres of gardens, terraces, pools and walkways, fifty miles of private beach, a zoo with even lions and elephants, a game reserve sheltering camels, giraffe and kangaroo. There were dairy and poultry farms and a private airfield, all protected by 275,000 acres of surrounding land. Today the house seems hideously garish, vulgar wealth run riot, but the sheer scale and magnitude of the place are breathtaking, and when George Bernard Shaw visited San Simeon in the 1930s he remarked, ‘This is probably the way God would have done it if He had had the money.’

Hearst’s guests included presidents, politicians, Hollywood moguls and stars, celebrity sportsmen and foreign dignitaries. Some would be flown up to San Simeon on his private plane but most would travel from Los Angeles on the Friday night on Hearst’s private train, be dined and wined sumptuously on board and entertained by musicians, and would arrive at San Luis Obispo at midnight and be whisked by limousine up the five-mile drive to the oasis blaze of lights that was San Simeon at night. The weekends were always devotedly casual but with plenty to do: swimming parties, elaborate picnics or barbecues out in the countryside, hiking and horse-riding expeditions, tennis and croquet tournaments. Vintage wines would be served with fabulous dinners and afterwards the guests would watch the latest pre-release film in the private fifty-seat cinema.

Because San Simeon was so far from Hollywood, Hearst
built another palace much nearer, on the beach at Santa Monica. He called it ‘the beach house’ but it was nearly as palatial as San Simeon with more than a hundred rooms, fifty-five bathrooms, an oak-panelled library and thirty-two servants. The thirty-seven fireplace mantelpieces were shipped in from England, the walls were hung with paintings by Hals, Rembrandt, Reynolds and Rubens, and the hundred-foot swimming pool was crossed by a Venetian marble bridge. Almost every weekend Hearst threw parties for fifty or sixty people at the beach house, where his guests would join in the numerous fancy dress parties that Marion loved to organise, and always the guest list included the richest and most famous people in America. Niv, whose charm and popularity made him a regular guest throughout the late 1930s, said later that he spent some of the happiest times of his life at San Simeon and the beach house.

In May 1936 he played a smooth young English seducer in
Dodsworth
, which was directed by the brilliant but infuriating William Wyler. Niv had worked very briefly with Wyler on
Barbary Coast
but Merle warned him that although Wyler was only thirty-four he was a nightmare director, and so it proved. ‘I became a gibbering wreck,’ he said later. One of Wyler’s favourite ploys was to destroy an actor’s self-confidence, and he made Niv go through the same scene over and over again while he sat ignoring the performance and reading the
Hollywood Reporter
. ‘What do you want me to do?’ Niv asked in despair.

‘Just do it again,’ Wyler would reply, turning the page.

Niv was ‘a nice young Englishman who seemed to be in an agony of nerves,’ wrote Mary Astor, who was also in the film, in her autobiography.

‘I never did get it sorted out,’ she said. ‘It sounded as though he’d been kidnapped and brought directly to the studio!’

Despite Niv’s nerves, the
New York Times
said that he was excellent in the film, but he was savaged by the reviewer for the
Detroit Free Press
who sneered: ‘In this picture we were privileged to see the great Samuel Goldwyn’s latest discovery – all we can say about this actor (?) is that he is tall, dark and not the slightest bit handsome.’ David framed the review and hung it on his lavatory wall.

His performance was good enough for Merle to persuade Goldwyn to cast him with her and Brian Aherne in her next film,
Beloved Enemy
, a story about an unlikely romance between an upper-class English girl and an Irish rebel leader in Dublin during the anti-British revolt of 1921 that was obviously loosely based on the life and death of the IRA leader Michael Collins. By now Merle was thoroughly fed up with David’s philandering and she had a tit-for-tat fling with Aherne during filming.

Niv was gawky and wooden in his role as an English civil servant but he had plenty of lines and won good reviews from
The Times
, the
New York Times
and
Variety
, and Goldwyn
was so impressed by his progress that he increased his salary from $150 a week to $250 and rewrote his contract so that during the next five years he would be paid much more each year, until by 1941 he would be on $1000 a week instead of the $600 stipulated in his current contract. Niv wrote him a delighted letter of thanks for the money and encouragement and said in it, ‘I hope I may be associated with you for many years and that soon you will be really proud of me.’

While filming
Beloved Enemy
David and Merle were shocked by the sudden death of Irving Thalberg, who caught a chill, developed pneumonia, and died on 14 September 1936 aged only thirty-seven. His widow, Norma Shearer, asked Niv to be an usher at the funeral and was so devastated by his death that she became a recluse for several months.

David made one more film in 1936,
We Have Our Moments
, an undistinguished little movie in which he played a smooth English conman. As a lover, however, he seemed to be as distinguished as ever and Merle told a news agency in October that they were definitely going to get married. He flew to New York to see her off when she sailed for England to spend six months making her next film,
I, Claudius
, for Alexander Korda, and she was so desperate to spend more time with him that she postponed her passage for a week so that they could go to Philadelphia to see Leslie Howard on stage in
Hamlet
and then to Boston to see her old friend Noël Coward, who would soon become a friend of Niv’s too.

With Merle away for six months, Niv decided to share a house with Errol Flynn, who had recently separated from his wife, and they rented 601 North Linden Drive, just off Sunset Boulevard, on the edge of Beverly Hills. Today the house, with a black-and-white mock-Tudor first floor, stands in a wide, tree-lined boulevard in a quiet, manicured suburb, but with Flynn and Niven there in 1936 it was the rowdiest place in town and rampant with randy young bachelors, pretty girls, booze, marijuana, mischief and bad behaviour. In later years David admitted that Flynn was mean with money and
unkind to his friends, both men and women, but he was fun to be with in those carefree days of their youth. ‘You always knew where you stood with him,’ Niv told the
Sunday Mirror
in 1973. ‘He would always let you down. He really was a shit. It didn’t matter at all, once you knew that. You must love people with their faults.’ He was less forgiving three years later when he told Clive Hirschhorn of the
Sunday Express
: ‘One of the most important things I learned in Hollywood all those years ago, was that only the second-raters allowed success to go to their heads. The giants of the industry – men like Gable and Jimmy Stewart, Bogart, the incomparable Fred Astaire, Ronnie Colman and Spencer Tracy – all remained level-headed about their careers. Only Errol Flynn … allowed his fame to go to his head with the result that he became thoroughly disliked in the business.’ Five years later Niv was understanding again: ‘I really regret saying that Errol always let you down,’ he told Michael Parkinson in 1981. ‘What I meant was that he’d always discomfort you: if you asked him not to tell someone something he’d tell them as soon as he saw them.’

At the time, though, they had great fun. Flynn bought a 65ft ketch called the
Sirocco
and was later to buy another boat, the
Zaca
, that had a prow proudly decorated with a rampant flying penis. They went sailing every weekend with a crew of floozies and Niv claimed that they introduced water-skiing to California. One water-skiing afternoon, he said, nearly ended in disaster when Flynn mischievously untied the tow rope and abandoned him miles from land while he sailed away to pleasure his latest doxy below deck. As David swam for the distant shore, he said, a big shark appeared beside him and followed him until he reached Ronald Colman’s yacht and Colman and one of his crew drove the beast away. When Flynn heard the story he hooted with laughter and bellowed, ‘Jesus! I wish I’d seen
that
!’

Sex was a constant pursuit and number 601 echoed with girlish shrieks and giggles, and to add a kick to the proceedings
Flynn would sometimes dab some cocaine on the end of his penis as an aphrodisiac. The actor Mickey Rooney recalled in his memoirs one Flynn dinner party that he attended with Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Robert Taylor and Wallace Beery: ‘When we knocked on the door it was opened by a pair of exquisitely beautiful twins, and they were absolutely nude!’ Penises were a constant Flynn/Niven preoccupation, and Joan Collins reported in her autobiography that one wizened little extra, ‘OK Freddie’, was blessed with such an enormous cock that they often urged him to show it to newcomers, upon which he would grin ‘OK’ and unveil his massive organ. On one occasion, said Miss Collins, Flynn and Niv persuaded Freddie to dress as a waiter at an elegant garden party and to serve, held low, a silver tray of snacks piled with smoked salmon, quails’ eggs, caviar on biscuits, and in the middle a large sausage decorated with thin slices of raw beef and tiny prawns, which turned out – when one of the lady guests stabbed it with a fork – to be Freddie’s penis. Freddie howled with pain, dropped the tray and fled, and Flynn and Niv could barely stand up with hysterical laughter.

Flynn’s third-favourite hobby, after sex and drinking, was fighting and he kept himself in trim by having regular punch-ups with professional boxers in the garden of number 601. Niv preferred to keep his good looks and fists to himself. He mentioned none of this unseemly behaviour, of course, when he wrote in November an affectionate eight-page letter to J. F. Roxburgh that is so revealing that some of it deserves to be quoted at length: