Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (35 page)

Sam Goldwyn was unwell and watching at home on TV, but as Niv left the stage he saw Goldwyn’s son sitting at one of the tables and went over to him. ‘Sammy,’ he said, ‘I want Sam and Frances to know how much a part of this they are. I wouldn’t have had this if it hadn’t been for them.’ That night was the unforgettable peak of his career and he kept every one of the 230 telegrams of congratulation that arrived the next day, including one from Sam and Frances Goldwyn, who finally ended their ten-year estrangement by inviting him to dinner a few days later. When he reached their house Goldwyn hugged him and in the drawing room Niv saw his own framed photograph standing on the piano. ‘Sam never took it down,’ said Frances fondly.

And then, at the moment of his greatest triumph, Hjördis left him.

Ten

Château d’Oex and the Côte d’Azur
1959–1962

H
jördis left him to find herself. She had just turned forty, was terrified of old age and losing her looks, deeply depressed after several miscarriages and a hysterectomy, and now that Niv had won the Oscar she was more jealous than ever, desperate to rediscover her own identity and assert her independence. She was still having an affair with her doctor and drinking far too much, and for more than a year had been telling Niv that she was going to leave him. When finally she went in the summer of 1959 he looked ‘like a pathetic and bewildered small boy’, she told
Woman
. ‘We said goodbye and parted, in a terribly adult and matter-of-fact way, and I moved into a house I had taken not far away.’

Niv was as gentlemanly as ever, blaming himself publicly and later admitting that after the Oscar he became big-headed and took Hjördis for granted, but Peter Viertel, who was then a scriptwriter and living nearby with Deborah Kerr, told me that Hjördis was ‘a very neurotic, mixed-up woman’. Even so, he said, Niv wanted to save the marriage, mainly for the sake of the boys, who were now sixteen and thirteen, and both at fashionable St Paul’s boarding school in New Hampshire. Niv told Viertel that Hjördis had not let him sleep with her for a long time and ‘was flirting with someone else, so I said, “If you want to
keep
her take the boys to Hawaii or some place where she’ll know there are other pretty ladies,” and he said, “You may be right.” Frank Sinatra had a house in Hawaii and he went there.’

In Honolulu Niv and the boys ‘had a terrific time’, David
Jr told me. ‘He went through the girls of Honolulu like a machete through a pineapple!’ Neither of the boys could understand later why he did not grab his chance then to get divorced. ‘When she moved out and was having a relationship with this doctor,’ Jamie told me, ‘he tried to get a divorce and I never could understand why he didn’t go ahead and do it. Everyone has stories about bad stepmothers but she has to rank right up there with the worst. I can’t imagine how she could behave the way she did toward my brother and myself. When you’re a young kid and you’ve lost your mother you crave affection and warmth from the woman in the house. To go out of her way to deny us that on purpose and to make us feel so rejected was almost inhuman.’

What Niv really thought of Hjördis may well have been indicated in a revealing interview that he gave to the
Evening Standard
a year later when he said, ‘Beautiful faces are often the dullest ones of them all because there’s nothing behind the eyes,’ and as for make-up, ‘I don’t care how much a woman uses so long as I don’t know … But I do hate loads of that pale blue eyeshadow or those graveyard lipsticks.’ Hjördis was notorious for caking her face so that it looked like a mask, and one of the actors in Niv’s next film, Richard Haydn, told Sheridan Morley that ‘she was wonderfully decorative and always smelt gorgeous, but there was something odd about her. She always looked like a perfectly decorated house in which nobody ever actually lived, and David treated her rather like a precious toy that might get broken if you were too rough with it.’

Pat Medina was appalled when she visited Hjördis at her new house and discovered the sort of people she was entertaining there. ‘She had a few people to lunch and they were drinking an awful lot, and I didn’t like any of them,’ she told me. ‘ “Where did you find this lot?” I asked her, and she said one of them was very fond of her, and I said, “Let me get out of here, I can’t take this.” She was a friend of mine but that upheaval was entirely her own fault.’

Niv was not the sort of man to sit at home and mope because his wife had left him, and he soon found other women to amuse him. ‘One was a lovely friend of mine called Caroline Kirkwood,’ Fiona Thyssen-Bornemisza told me. ‘She was a sort of model, about twenty-seven, and came from a good English family, and she was small, blonde and very pretty – not a spectacular beauty but very sweet and enchanting. He was madly in love with her and we all knew about it.’

Niv also tried to forget his marital problems by going back to work. He teamed up with the wholesome Doris Day in a jolly family comedy,
Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
, for which he broke two basic actors’ rules – never to appear with children or animals – by taking on both: a wonderfully wacky infant with a huge, wicked grin, and a big, shaggy, cowardly dog that was terrified of cats and squirrels. Both threatened to steal the film and although the critics hated it Niv and Doris Day played their parts with genial panache, although his accent veered from English to American and back.

Hjördis’s declaration of independence lasted for three months. She returned to him so quickly, she told
Woman
, because Niv kept dropping by and bombarding her with red carnations and roses, and because the boys missed her so much and kept calling by too. ‘I could see they longed to have me back,’ she claimed, and added, ‘He finally broke me down when he started to bring along his lunch in a parcel from the studio when he visited me. This really touched my heart more than any words from him could have done … this human, small-boy gesture made me want to cry. It struck a maternal chord in me and made me worry about whether he was being properly fed, and, indeed, it brought home to me as nothing else could the loneliness of his life as a bachelor-husband.’ Since she told
Woman
that if she had nobody to cook for her she would open a tin of baked beans ‘and eat out of the tin’, and since she had never previously worried about Niv’s diet or loneliness it seems unlikely that she did
now, and Pat Medina gave me a very different reason for her return: ‘She knew he was making a lot of money from Four Star and thinking of going to live in Switzerland, and she wanted the money. That was another thing that she and I had a disagreement about, and towards the end we didn’t see much of each other.’ Her return was well timed, for Niv told Pat Medina: ‘Hjördis came back
just
in time because by then I was very nicely tucked in with someone else.’

Amazingly and foolishly he took her back and they flew down to Rio for him to be presented with a vast gold key to the city. ‘What about me?’ demanded Hjördis. ‘Can’t I have a little one too?’ A small replica was made for her that afternoon.

Back in Hollywood Niv met another president, Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, who was visiting Los Angeles, and sat next to the fat, homely Mrs Khrushchev at a big lunch packed with hundreds of stars where Frank Sinatra was the master of ceremonies and sat on the other side of the Russian First Lady, who was excited to see so many famous faces and proudly showed Niv and Sinatra photographs of her grandchildren. ‘She smelt of hot velvet,’ said David afterwards.

The 1950s ended with a double sadness: on 14 October Errol Flynn died in Vancouver of a heart attack at the age of only fifty, and on Christmas Eve Niv’s old mentor, the director Edmund Goulding, was so depressed at the collapse of his career and the lack of offers of work that he committed suicide at the age of sixty-eight. Goulding had asked for Niv to be one of his pallbearers, and his description of the funeral in
Bring on the Empty Horses
is so hilarious that the tears roll down my cheeks every time I read it. No one could possibly retell the story as well as he did, but it involves a grim Niven hangover, a very hot day, a very heavy mahogany coffin, a steep hill, and a gloriously bizarre team of pallbearers: a giant young body-builder, a midget, an ancient with only one leg, another with only one arm, and an extremely fat, wheezy businessman with a sweaty, purple face. The story is probably
hugely exaggerated – and Niv said it happened in August whereas it was in December – but who cares? It is very funny.

Now that Hjördis was back Niv made valiant efforts to heal their marriage and tried pathetically to buy her affection by showering her with gifts. ‘It’s the only recipe for a successful marriage,’ he told a journalist, Paul Grant, unconvincingly in 1977. He would tuck a piece of jewellery under her pillow, or pretend to have found a hidden locket, or smother her with vast bouquets. ‘It’s been the basis for our staying so much in love,’ Hjördis told Grant cynically. Niv also tried to make her happier by suggesting that they ought to adopt a baby and eventually, after encouragement from women friends like Betty Bacall, she was to agree so long as the child was a girl and Swedish. ‘Children are necessary to any marriage,’ he told the
Daily Express
five years later. ‘Without them it’s like eating an egg without salt.’ And finally he decided that the marriage had more chance of success if they left the shallow hothouse of Hollywood and returned to live in Europe.

‘I think he would have stayed in the Pink House much longer if Bogie and other friends of his hadn’t died,’ said Betty Bacall, ‘but his heart wasn’t there any more.’ He certainly felt that Hollywood was not nearly as much fun as it had been. ‘The old camaraderie … was gone,’ he wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon
. ‘The mystique had evaporated … the lovely joke was over.’ Los Angeles was increasingly polluted by smog and violence, and a neighbour’s teenage son was shot and killed when four junkies broke into his house. And although Niv was now earning about $200,000 per film – the equivalent of about £700,000 in 2003 – and Four Star was making good profits, he was paying a huge amount of US tax and had just been reassessed for the previous four years and forced to hand over such a big chunk of his savings that he told his sons that after years of playing starring roles he could not afford even to have the Pink House repainted. ‘He told me that he had to leave because he hadn’t got any money, which I thought
was extraordinary,’ said Roddy Mann. Deborah Kerr and her second husband Peter Viertel had already moved to Switzerland and persuaded him to join them and become a Swiss resident like several other friends: Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Noël Coward, Peter Ustinov. ‘In Switzerland he was able to keep ninety per cent of his earnings instead of giving ninety per cent to the government,’ said David Jr.

He sold the Pink House to a friend, the agent Phil Kellogg, early in 1960, sent the boys back to their boarding school and flew with Hjördis to Switzerland to look for a new home. They drove down through the Ardennes, visited Deborah and Peter Viertel in Klosters, celebrated Niv’s fiftieth birthday by having lunch with Noël Coward at his home at Les Avants, and started to look seriously for somewhere nearby in the French-speaking part of Switzerland because, Viertel told me, ‘he could get by in French although he spoke it with a thick accent.’

While Hjördis looked at properties Niv flew off to the Greek island of Rhodes to start work on
The Guns of Navarone
, Carl Foreman’s spectacular blockbuster of a wartime action thriller about a small group of Allied commandos who land secretly in 1943 on a tiny Greek island that has been heavily fortified by the Nazis, and blow up their two huge guns. The cast included several old friends: Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Quayle, Stanley Baker, Richard Harris and even Trubshawe, who had a small part as a pompous hairy soldier. This was ‘a lovely bonus for me’, wrote Niv in
The Moon’s a Balloon
but in fact their friendship had soured because, Trubshawe told Morley, Niv seemed embarrassed by him, resented having him in the same movie and avoided him.

Niv’s role in the picture was as one of the commandos, an explosives expert who would destroy the massive German guns, and he gave one of his very best performances, though once again his accent kept slipping. At first there was a lot of tense rivalry among the starry cast. Peck was suspicious that Quinn would try to upstage him, Quinn was wary of Niv
because of his Oscar, and Niv was wary of everyone else because they were all such good actors, but the tension evaporated when Quinn produced a portable chess set. ‘There was David Niven, the Errol Flynn of the chessboard, charging around with his queen, crying, “Idiotic move, what, eh? Well never mind, on we go. Charge!” ’ Quinn told Michael Munn for his biography of Gregory Peck, who said that Niv ‘was always so incredibly cheerful that when you asked why he was, he’d just say, “Well, old bean, life is really so bloody awful that I feel it’s my absolute duty to be chirpy and try and make everybody else happy too.” ’ His irrepressible cheerfulness, however, was not always appreciated. Quayle became a good chum of Niv’s but told Morley: ‘After a while it became almost unbearable to hear him telling the same stories time and time again.’ None of Niv’s other friends would ever admit to me that sometimes his stories became tedious because he had told them so often.

Niv hated Rhodes, where he said there was nothing to do and the food was terrible, but it did give him yet another anecdote when he picked up a copy of the
Hollywood Reporter
and was stunned to see on the front page a splash headline shrieking that Four Star had gone bust and that he, Boyer and Powell were bankrupt. In a rising panic he read the report, in which his partners attacked him bitterly for selfishly leaving them to bail the company out while he was lying on a Greek island beach. Then he looked at the date: April Fools’ Day. Powell and Boyer had bought the entire front page for an advertisement and had run the story as a practical joke.

Hjördis found a wooden chalet in Switzerland and David bought it – a house he always called his Swiss ‘cuckoo clock’ in a very English little Alpine valley village, Château d’Oex, near the skiing village of Gstaad and an hour’s drive from Geneva. Built in 1946, it was not especially pretty but it had a tennis court and from its three balconies a spectacular view of the mighty mountains across the valley – a view that some might find claustrophobic, even threatening. ‘The chalet was
awful,’ Roddy Mann told me. ‘It wasn’t comfortable and it didn’t have much land, just a dreary bit of ground in front of it,’ and the Dutch couple who bought it after Hjördis’s death in 1997, Jan and Coco Wyers, told me that the decor was very depressing and it was very dark and gloomy, with lots of poky little rooms. ‘They had separate bedrooms,’ said Mrs Wyers, ‘and the three little servants’ rooms at the top were amazingly small. The doors were very cheap plywood – what you’d pack your oranges in! – and the furniture very unstylish. Nothing matched. And in the basement, where he had a little cinema, a billiard room, a sauna and a wine cellar, all the walls and ceilings were dark grey!’