Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (17 page)

He added, ‘It would amuse you to know the number of Stoics past and present who write to me to find out what they have to do to become a film star! … I hope I have not disgraced the school by becoming a movie actor!’ Under the bold flourish of his signature he drew an arrow downwards towards the words ‘Movie stars signature!!!’.

Sadly there is no record as to whether Roxburgh ever saw any of David’s movies or what he thought of them, though somebody at Stowe kept on file numerous newspaper articles about his career and films. He was now so famous that when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth made a state visit to President Roosevelt in August it was he who was chosen to act as the master of ceremonies on a radio programme that the British of Hollywood – Aherne, Colman, Flynn, Grant, Vivien Leigh and Olivier among them – put together as a loyal tribute to the royal couple.

Niv loved filming
Raffles
. His co-star was the beautiful twenty-two-year-old Olivia de Havilland, who had appeared with him in
The Charge of the Light Brigade
and had just played
Melanie Hamilton in
Gone With the Wind
. He was pampered constantly in his big star suite, allowed to recommend old friends as extras, and even when the director fell ill and was replaced by Willie Wyler – the ogre turned out this time to be gentle and helpful. The film itself was slow, unbelievable and just seventy-two minutes long, with a startlingly abrupt end, and the reviews were less than lukewarm, but David’s charm was as dazzling as his smile, and Goldwyn was delighted with the film and planned to make him an even bigger star in several big films during the months ahead, including a Raffles sequel.

But Adolf Hitler was about to devastate Niv’s Hollywood dream just as he was on the brink of a glittering career. The German army marched into Poland at 4.45 a.m. on Friday, 1 September, Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later and Niv decided bravely that his duty was to return to England to fight for his country. He was aboard a yacht that weekend on a trip to Catalina Island with Doug Fairbanks Jr and his wife Mary Lee, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Robert Coote, with whom Niv had spent the Saturday night drinking far too much rum at a party at the Balboa Yacht Club. When they heard that war had been declared they started drinking gin, even though it was only 6 a.m. ‘We began to drink – lightly,’ wrote Fairbanks in his autobiography. ‘Then more. A very stupid way to cope. But we were fairly young – and probably stupid too. Within a couple of hours we were hiding our utter despondency behind brave talk. Larry, however, was the only one who got really and truly drunk. More than that, he was plainly
pissed
! No longer mixing with the rest of us, he lowered himself over the side into our dinghy and began to row under the bows of the larger and grander yachts anchored in the Yacht Club basin where we were only weekend guests. All had passengers sitting on their boats’ afterdecks, presumably as stunned as we. Larry had now cast himself as Cassandra crossed with Henry V. He stood up, a bit wobbly, in his little cockleshell
and shouted up, “You’re all finished! Done! Drink up! You’ve had it!
This is the end
!” ’ Olivier rowed on to several other yachts, giving each his message of doom, and because his little black moustache made him look like Ronald Colman the yacht club’s commodore demanded that the quiet, inoffensive Colman should apologise publicly.

Niv told Goldwyn that because he was on the British army reserve he had been called up and had to return to England immediately, but
Raffles
was not yet finished, Goldwyn checked with the British embassy in Washington, was told that nobody outside Britain had yet been called up and that all Britons in the United States should stay put for the time being, and he insisted that Niv should finish the film first. Many British men in Hollywood – Flynn, Grant, Hitchcock – took the embassy’s advice and stayed in America, but Niv’s patriotic military blood and training told him that it was his duty to return to England even though he would probably never be called up from so far away. He was fatalistic about going to war and told the American actor Tony Randall eighteen years later that he was convinced he would be killed. ‘He said that his great-grandfather had been killed in the Crimean War,’ Randall told me, ‘his grandfather in the Boer War, and his father in World War One, so he was absolutely certain he was going to be killed in World War Two.’ Niv got Max, who was now in London, to send him an ‘official’ telegram ordering him to report to the HLI’s regimental barracks immediately, and as soon as
Raffles
was finished Goldwyn released him from his contract until the end of the war and growled that he was going to ‘tell that bum Hitler to shoot around you’. He also gave Niv a generous farewell bonus that came to the strange total of $5687.50, for which David wrote to thank him:

Goldwyn was deeply moved, called Niv into his office, and said ‘this is a very touching note. This letter is so private and personal that I want it to leak out to the Press,’ and of course it did, but despite his generous bonus Niv complained nearly forty years later that just before the war he had paid the first premium for a $10,000 life insurance policy, found he could not afford the premiums on a soldier’s pay, asked Goldwyn to pay the premiums for him, and Goldwyn had refused. It was a churlish complaint considering that the bonus would easily have covered his premiums for years. Although he was already earning a great deal in Hollywood at the age of twenty-nine, Niv was always to complain that he was short of money, even when he became a multi-millionaire.

On 30 September Doug Fairbanks Jr gave him a lavish farewell party at which David was serenaded by a band of Scots pipes and drums, a stripper, conjuror, numerous sentimental toasts, and copious amounts of alcohol – the guests included Aherne, Bruce, Colman, Coote, Grant, Olivier, and George Sanders – and at the end of October he flew to New York to catch the Italian liner
Rex
and sail to Naples. He hated the thought of rejoining the HLI, and the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, urged him to stay in Hollywood ‘and represent your country on the screen’, but Niv’s pride and patriotism would not let him sit in luxury in the Californian sun while millions of Britons faced misery and death to save the world from the brutal tyranny of the Nazis. Even so, in later years he often wondered why he had thrown up such a wonderfully promising career in Hollywood so quickly to join an army that at first did not seem to want him at all, and many years later he admitted that part of his motive was to show off and look courageous. Deep down he also felt that he was in danger of becoming insufferably arrogant and pompous now that he was a star, and that some self-sacrifice might be good for the soul. ‘I had this sudden, enormous success,’ he told the
Telegraph Sunday Magazine
in 1977. ‘I believed my studio’s ludicrous publicity about me. I think I was saved from being a total shit by the war. Going to war was the only unselfish thing I have ever done for humanity.’

Six

The WAAF, Phantom and SHAEF
1939–1945

W
hen Niv landed in Naples in November 1939 he was met by his Austrian Nazi friend Felix Schaffcotsh, who had founded the Sun Valley ski resort in Idaho and was on his way to Germany to join Hitler’s army. They celebrated their new enmity by spending a week in Rome playing golf with Schaffcotsh’s friend Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister, and drinking each other goodbye. On their last night together they drank gallons, took two girls to St Peter’s Square in the Vatican so that all four could kiss a Swiss Guard, embraced, wept and parted, never to see each other again, for Schaffcotsh was to be killed on the Russian front.

From Rome Niv caught a train to Paris, a journey that took four cold, hungry days and blacked-out nights, and there he treated himself to three days in a hotel and a quick fling with a beautiful French model with whom he had gallivanted briefly in Hollywood. Thanks to Noël Coward, who was working in Paris for British naval intelligence, an RAF group captain and the air attaché at the British embassy, he hitched a lift to England in an RAF bomber and arrived at Hendon airfield atop a pile of mailbags on 28 November. He found his way through the London blackout to Grizel’s small flat in Chelsea, where she told him that she had joined the Chelsea Fire Service, Joyce was a driver for the Women’s Volunteer Service, and Max had joined their father’s old regiment, the Berkshire Yeomanry. Max lent him his little flat in Queen Street in Mayfair, and since
Bachelor Mother
was showing in
London and David’s face was plastered on huge advertisements all over town, Goldwyn’s London representative arranged for him to give a press conference for dozens of reporters and photographers at the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square, where he said he would rather join the RAF than the army. ‘
NIVEN WANTS TO JOIN REAL DAWN PATROL
’ said the
Daily Mail
headline the next day over a story repeating the old fib that his father had been a general, and he told the
Observer
, ‘I’m no hero, and shall probably duck into the first hole when a shell comes along,’ so he was horrified to see that Goldwyn’s man had had all the
Bachelor Mother
posters plastered with red stickers that shrieked ‘
THE STAR WHO CAME HOME TO JOIN THE RAF
’.

The RAF, however, was not at all keen. He was interviewed by a group captain who made it plain that he thought Niv’s application was just a publicity stunt, and he was rejected, officially because at twenty-nine he was too old. He was obviously not qualified to become an officer in the navy and realised that he would have to join the army after all, but he was determined not to go crawling back to the Highland Light Infantry, even if they would have him, and tried to pull strings to join the Scots Guards. In vain. They didn’t want a film star, either, and he was further depressed when his old mentor Doug Fairbanks Sr died of a heart attack in Santa Monica on 12 December aged only fifty-six.

Not everyone approved of David’s selflessness in returning to England to fight and the English film critic C. A. (Caroline) Lejeune wrote that

Depressed and confused, Niv went one night to the Café de Paris in London for dinner and glimpsed among the throng of dancing people the girl he was to marry nine months later, a tall, blonde twenty-one-year-old in the blue uniform of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the WAAF. ‘I found myself gazing into a face of such beauty and such sweetness that I just stared blankly back,’ he wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon
. ‘Her complexion was so perfect that the inevitable description, “English Rose”, would have been an insult. Her eyes were the merriest and the bluest I had ever seen.’ She disappeared into the crowd and he did not see her again for months.

He spent much of his time at Boodle’s, asking fellow club members like his latest naval friend, Lieutenant-Commander Ian Fleming, if they could find him a berth somewhere in the forces. He renewed his friendship with Trubshawe, was invited to several country house weekends, and consoled himself with a granddaughter of the Duke of Abercorn, Ursula Kenyon-Slaney, a young Auxiliary Service nurse from Shropshire who was described as ‘a Society beauty’ when the English newspapers announced at the beginning of January that he and she were engaged – a report that she denied indignantly, though one of her friends told the
Daily Mirror
that it was true. ‘I have really lost count of the people who have been reputed at one time or other to be on the point of marrying David,’ sighed his sister Joyce. He was also still an enthusiastic ‘stage-door Johnny’. His Stowe contemporary Frith Banbury was appearing in a London show,
New Faces
, and told me: ‘there was a girl in it called Zoe Gail, and Niven used to come to the stage door and call for her and take her to supper afterwards.’

During his phoney war Niv wrote dozens of letters to his friends in Hollywood, ‘gems of hilarious exaggeration and occasional fabrications’, according to Doug Fairbanks Jr in his autobiography. ‘He would often make wickedly funny jokes at the expense of his “boss”, Sam Goldwyn, adding that Sam was so angry with him for leaving that he cut off his salary completely. Actually, few believed this because Sam, infuriating monster that he so often was, was really very fond of Niv and kept him on a retainer “for the duration”.’

Thanks to a lieutenant-colonel in the Rifle Brigade, the ‘Green Jackets’, Niv finally became after nearly three months a second lieutenant in the 2nd Motor Training Battalion at the end of February 1940 and was sent to their barracks at Tidworth on Salisbury Plain to teach the men, most of them cockney conscripts from the East End of London, how to march, drive trucks and do exercises. They grumbled constantly, muttering that it was all right for him, he was a movie star, until eventually he bellowed, ‘Right! Now listen to me! You lot have only left your butchers’ shops and factories:
I
could be with
Ginger Rogers
, right now!’ They got on much better after that, and to escape the boredom and drudgery he drove up to London as often as possible, found himself a tall, blonde Danish model who turned out most conveniently to be an enthusiastic nymphomaniac, and set her up in a cottage in the village.

Often he spent his weekend leaves with Norah Flynn’s cousin Nancy Tree and her husband Ronnie, a Tory Member of Parliament, at Ditchley Park, their beautiful country house near Charlbury in Oxfordshire, fifty miles north of Tidworth. Tree was a friend of Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, who was soon to become Prime Minister and regularly to use a wing of the house to escape the German bombs in London and at his official country retreat at Chequers. One weekend David arrived at Ditchley in uniform to discover that Churchill, his wife and the Cabinet minister Anthony Eden were about to sit down to dinner with a dozen
other guests. Churchill loved movies, recognised Niv and stumped the length of the table to shake his hand. ‘Young man,’ he rumbled, ‘you did a very fine thing to give up a most promising career to fight for your country.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ stammered Niv.

‘Mark you,’ growled Churchill with a twinkle in his eye, ‘had you not done so it would have been despicable!’

After dinner Niv listened agog to Churchill’s and Eden’s discussions and after church on the Sunday Churchill asked him to walk with him in the walled garden, the first of many walks and chats that they were to share there during the war, and Churchill spoke of how he loved Deanna Durbin, and growing vegetables, and hated Hitler, and asked about the problems of a junior officer nowadays.

In later years Niv was always reluctant to talk about what he had done in the war, and more than sixty years afterwards none of his children or closest friends had any idea about his military activities. His younger son, Jamie, was wrongly convinced that he had been part of the initial British Expeditionary Force that had to be evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940, and some believed that he became a spy behind German lines who infiltrated a
Luftwaffe
air base and inspected German troops. ‘Behind enemy lines his job was to distract air base personnel while other agents sabotaged planes,’ claimed one of his wartime comrades, Ben Talbot, in the
Daily Mirror
in 1983. ‘David took part in many dangerous missions.’ But that seems extremely unlikely, if only because his famous face would have been recognised instantly, and had he been outstandingly brave he would have been given a major medal after the war instead of the four ordinary campaign medals he did receive: the 1939–45 Star, the France and Germany Star, the Defence Medal and the War Medal 1939–45. ‘I don’t think he did anything particularly brave in Europe,’ his brother-in-law, Andrew Rollo, told me ‘or I would have heard’, and Sir Peter Ustinov, who knew him well during the war, told me: ‘I don’t think there was much derring-do.’ Niv’s
great friend Deborah Kerr’s husband, Peter Viertel, also told me: ‘I think the British army was very happy to keep him somewhere out of danger.’

Niv’s official service record shows that he spent most of the war training soldiers in Britain, or in administrative jobs, or making official morale-boosting films, and it made sense to keep the famous film star out of danger, since had he been killed or captured that would have given the Nazis a useful propaganda coup. Even so, merely being in London during the Blitz was extremely dangerous, and Niv was openly contemptuous of other British actors who avoided the war by staying in Hollywood. But he never condemned Cary Grant, who was only thirty-six and quite young enough to serve but stayed in California, since Grant did try to join the navy but was told again and again by the Admiralty, the Foreign Office and the British ambassador in Washington to stay where he was and to help Britain by promoting Britishness on the cinema screen. Even so, Grant and others were attacked by the Press, which demanded often that they should ‘come home like David Niven’, and in 1942
Picturegoer
suggested that all English actors still in Hollywood should be filmed only in black and white ‘since Technicolor would undoubtedly show up the yellow of their skin’. In later years Niv always claimed that he hated every minute of the war, though he told the
Telegraph Sunday Magazine
in 1977: ‘I must say I’m pleased about having passed the test of not behaving badly. But, believe me, that’s all I really did. I was apt to lie down and wait until it was all finished – but people were watching, and that made me behave a little less like a coward.’ Asked why he would not describe how brave he was, he said, ‘Because it’s not true. I did my best, but it was never better than what I was told to do.’

In April 1940 he was promoted lieutenant and acted as best man at the wedding in London of his thirty-seven-year-old brother Max to Doreen Platt, the beautiful twenty-eight-year-old daughter of a rich South African sugar planter whose
youngest daughter was to marry the great English cricketer Denis Compton after the war. Two months later David’s forty-year-old spinster sister Joyce was also married in London, to John Mellor, a divorced company director who was two years younger. It was to be a vintage year for Niven weddings and David was to follow them three months later even though he had still not met the girl who would become his wife.

Niv was so bored at Tidworth that he wrote a letter to the
Daily Telegraph
to say it was absurd that during air raids London taxis stopped so that their passengers could scurry into the nearest air raid shelter but the cabbies then left all their lights on and the traffic lights continued to blink. Life was so dull that when volunteers were sought for a secret new force, the Commandos, he put his name forward and was accepted – and the commandos accepted only men who were tough since their job was to undertake quick raids across the Channel, and they had to undergo an exhausting training course at the Irregular Warfare School at Inverailort Castle in the western highlands of Scotland. There, amid wild, demanding countryside and on the rugged nearby islands of Skye, Eigg and Rhum, for three weeks Niv undertook long endurance marches, ran with heavy loads, climbed cliffs, jumped, crawled and swam the loch in full kit under fire. He learned guerrilla tactics, seamanship, how to use landing craft and endure extreme heat, cold and fatigue, and how to shoot a playing card at twenty yards. After training all day he would return exhausted to the castle in the late afternoon only to be given a map and a reference point for some remote glen fifty miles away and told to find his way there by 5.30 a.m. He stalked red deer, slept on a hard wooden floor in a loft with dozens of others, became as fit as he had ever been, and a couple of seriously ugly ex-policemen from Shanghai, Fairbairn and Sykes, taught him unarmed combat and a dozen ways of killing someone silently, from knifing and garotting to breaking a neck. Niv’s other instructors included David Sterling, who was later to win three Distinguished Service
Orders for making daring clandestine raids behind enemy lines; Lord Lovat, who was to be in the forefront of the Dieppe Raid in 1942 and the Normandy landings in 1944; and Major Charles Newman, who was to win the Victoria Cross when he blew up the dock gates at the German submarine base at St Nazaire in France.

One of Niv’s fellow commandos on that course, David Sutherland, wrote in his memoirs that he was one of only two genuine life-enhancers, bubbling with
joie de vivre
, that he ever met. Sutherland was deeply envious when Niv received one day ‘a huge coloured postcard of a fantastic Californian palm-fringed beach, and the message: “David, what are you doing over there? Come back soon, love Ginger.” ’ A week later he received in the post a blue woollen ‘willie warmer’ to keep the chill out of his nether regions. ‘The funny thing is,’ chuckled Niv, ‘that these interesting things are knitted by an old spinster friend of mine in Memphis, Tennessee, and she doesn’t know what they are for!’ He reverted to his usual method of warming his willie when he was given a two-day leave, sent a telegram to the Danish nymphomaniac in London that read ‘
ARRIVING WEDNESDAY MORNING WILL COME STRAIGHT TO FLAT WITH SECRET WEAPON
’ and was met by MI5 agents who suspected him of sending a coded message to an enemy alien. On the last evening of the Inverailort course the new commandos had a farewell dinner at a local pub where the owner’s daughter kept peeping at Niv through the kitchen door. Eventually he marched into the kitchen and kissed her. She fainted. ‘Sir,’ said Niv to her father, ‘you will have to put some backbone into this pretty girl before I take her on as a leading lady!’