Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (29 page)

In London Niv had mentioned nervously to Jamie Hamilton that he had almost finished writing a novel, but when he heard no more, his American theatrical agent showed it to a small but reputable British publisher, the Cresset Press, whose editor John Howard, married to the critic Marghanita Laski, took David to lunch and offered him a contract. Hearing this, Jamie Hamilton asked in July if he could see the manuscript too. Niv replied that it was ‘appallingly bad’ but
because Howard had bought him lunch he felt he should let Cresset publish it.

For a few weeks that summer the Nivens rented Winston Churchill’s son Randolph’s house nearby, in Hobart Place, and the fact that Niv could afford to rent houses in such expensive areas of London, as well as owning a mansion in the country, suggests that all his claims of poverty were as usual highly exaggerated. Even though he was still without any really lucrative work he was living extravagantly, and in September he even bought a young greyhound bitch, Rally Call, which won her first race for him at White City on 7 September. ‘I’m a keen White City man,’ he told the
Evening Standard
, ‘and my wife is crazy about greyhound racing. But I am not a betting man. It’s a mug’s game.’

The Cresset Press paid him for
Round the Rugged Rocks
a modest advance against royalties of $500 (about £2000 today) with another $500 to come when the book was published. ‘My dear Chum,’ he wrote to Jamie Hamilton, ‘I do not know how to apologise … Dear boy, I cannot tell you how miserable I am about it, and I feel that I have let an old chum down, which is not my form, believe me. Probably the novel will be a ghastly flop anyway, and you will feel well out of it … So sorry chum. Fondest love, David.’ The penultimate clause of the Cresset contract was to cause a major problem when Jamie Hamilton wanted to publish
The Moon’s a Balloon
twenty years later, for it gave Cresset an option of first refusal on the next two books that Niv might write. He spotted it himself at the time, remarking glumly in his letter to Hamilton that it looked as if he would be involved for ever with Cresset.

Niv was never going to make a fortune as a novelist but luckily that summer he was offered a part in another MGM movie to be filmed in Hollywood with Stewart Granger and Walter Pidgeon,
Soldiers Three
, and in October he took the family back to California and the Pink House.
Soldiers Three
was set in India in the 1890s and was meant to be an exciting military adventure based on a Kipling story, but it was so
shambolic that most audiences thought it was a comedy. Niv had to accept third billing after thirty-six-year-old Granger, a London-born newcomer to Hollywood who was only four years younger than he but had just made his name with
King Solomon’s Mines
and was about to make
Scaramouche
. Granger called
Soldiers Three
‘a horror’ and wrote in his autobiography: ‘what the hell David Niven … was doing, I can’t imagine. He must have been very hard up.’ Granger told Morley that he was astonished by how cheerful Niv remained during filming. ‘Well, it may be shit and not very good shit,’ Niv shrugged, ‘but we have to go through it, so let’s just be cheerful about it.’ That was typical of his entire character, said Granger: ‘He’d describe somebody on the set to me as an utter arsehole, and a moment later the man would be standing there and in almost the same breath David would be saying, “My dear old fellow, how are you?” without turning a hair, and I’d be left with my mouth hanging open, not knowing how he could do it.’ Granger added, ‘I was always rather jealous about the way that everybody seemed to love David, and the way that he managed to give the impression that he was loving every single minute of every single day. I don’t think he was, I don’t think anybody could, but he had an enviable knack of seeming to be happy and people liked that.’

Niv grabbed the next film offer too, which turned into one of the worst movies he ever made:
The Lady Says No!
, in which he played a magazine photographer who snaps a feisty bestselling feminist authoress and persuades her to succumb to his male chauvinist charms. The reviews were dreadful, but it paid a few more bills, and at the end of 1950 he landed another film deal, to star in another movie to be made in Britain,
Appointment With Venus
. He sent Hjördis, the children and the nanny ahead of him in February to stay at Wilcot Manor with Grizel, and when he arrived at Southampton a month later on the
Queen Elizabeth
they left the boys with Grizel and the nanny, and went off on a motoring holiday through France, Northern Italy and Switzerland. With
Round
the Rugged Rocks
about to be published, he started to write a second more serious novel,
Murgatroyd
, but it did not progress very far after he went off for three extremely boozy weeks on the tiny Channel Island of Sark with the twenty-seven-year-old South African actress Glynis Johns and thirty-six-year-old Kenneth More to shoot the location scenes for
Appointment With Venus
. It was a frothy little black-and-white comedy in which he played yet another dashing young British World War Two major who is landed secretly by submarine at night on a tiny Nazi-occupied Channel Island to kidnap an immensely valuable, pregnant, pedigree cow called Venus. It was a silly little story and Niv’s performance was not much better, but he took the part seriously enough to scent some unwelcome competition in the performance of Kenneth More, a comparative newcomer to movies who was playing a young pacifist painter living on the island.

‘He was particularly nice to me,’ wrote More in his autobiography, ‘and indeed to everyone else in the film [
and
] as far as I was concerned he was Number One … a man I admired, almost idolised.’ But Niv insisted that More’s most important scene was cut altogether because as the star of the movie he had the right to veto anything he did not like. ‘Everyone says how wonderful David was, and he
was
to his friends,’ More’s ex-wife Billie told me at her home in the South of France, on Cap Ferrat. ‘He was a most amusing man and a wonderful friend to the people he liked, and at first he and Kenny were bosom friends, but my husband was a beautiful comedy actor, as good as David was, and although he was just beginning his career, he was competition. The director, Ralph Thomas, told Kenny: “I’m afraid David has been watching too many rushes and you’re coming over too well.” That film mattered to Kenny.’ Beneath Niv’s suave façade there was still a deep well of insecurity that was deepened by the hiccup in his career.

After Sark they shot most of the film at Pinewood Studios and Niv invited More to Wilcot Manor for the weekend,
where he introduced him to Hjördis on the Friday night and kept genially calling him ‘dear boy’, ‘dear bird’ or ‘dear old thing’. Niv sat him down in front of a lovely log fire in the chintzy sitting room, plied him with numerous Camparis before dinner, glass after glass of wine with the meal, and brandies after Hjördis had gone to bed, and when More was thoroughly drunk, he said, David persuaded him that a chair in the hall was so ugly and vulgar that he should rip its legs and the seat off and throw them on the fire. ‘As it began to burn,’ said More, ‘David did an Indian war dance around me, whooping and shouting “Aah! Aah! Aah!” For some reason, he seemed deliriously happy.’ When the chair was reduced to a small pile of charred wood More staggered off to bed but in the morning he came down for breakfast to find Hjördis asking Niv where was her favourite chair. ‘Kenny burned it, darling,’ said Niv jovially. ‘He got high and burned it.’

‘You burned
my
chair?’ shrieked Hjördis. More had to admit that he had and she refused to speak to him for the rest of the weekend as he crept guiltily around the house. ‘David, of course, had never liked the chair,’ he said, ‘and this had been one way of getting rid of it.’

Appointment With Venus
, which was retitled
Island Rescue
in America, was an uneasy mixture of wartime adventure and farce, and did nothing to excite the critics or improve Niv’s reputation, and it was to be more than a year before he made another movie. In the meantime he made the most of the English summer and took up painting again so seriously that in June one of his oils,
Fishing Boats
, was put on show at a London exhibition of work by famous amateurs at the Trafford Gallery in Mount Street – along with pictures by Doug Fairbanks, their old girlfriend Princess Marina, Noël Coward, the Duke of Marlborough, the Duchess of Gloucester and Field Marshal Viscount Alexander of Tunis. Niv’s painting was described by the
Daily Telegraph
art critic T. W. Earp as ‘sensitive and diaphanous’ and was auctioned for charity along with all the other paintings.

Noël Coward realised how little work Niv was finding and persuaded his producer friend John Wilson to offer him a part in a stage play that was to open in Hartford, Connecticut, in November and go on to Boston, Philadelphia and Broadway. David had not appeared on stage since the
Wedding
fiasco at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1935 and he was terrified, but he needed the work, thought it might be good for his career to appear in the theatre, and returned to New York with Hjördis in September on the
Queen Mary
. They left eight-year-old David Jr at boarding school in England and five-year-old Jamie at Wilcot Manor with Evelyn the nanny, though by now Niv and Hjördis had decided that the English weather was so awful that they did not want to live there permanently and he resigned from two of his London clubs, Boodle’s and the Garrick.

In New York rehearsals for the play,
Nina
, a French bedroom farce that had been hugely successful in Paris for two years, began immediately. The play had only three characters: the fifty-two-year-old, four-times-divorced silent-movie star Gloria Swanson was Nina, Niv was her smoothie lover and Alan Webb her jealous husband. Swanson had just given a glorious autobiographical performance as a has-been silent-movie star in the film
Sunset Boulevard
, but the director was a wild Hungarian, Gregory Ratoff, and an English producer, Toby Rowland, who was there to observe rehearsals for an English theatrical company that had a slice of the action, told Morley that ‘it was immediately apparent that Ratoff was mad, that Gloria couldn’t do it all, that Alan was going to be extremely good, and that David might just about get by on a wry sort of charm.’ He was indeed surprisingly good when
Nina
opened in Hartford on 1 November – so good that the director Otto Preminger cast him for another play that he was to stage in San Francisco the following summer. But before the first night in New York there was an evil omen. The Nivens checked into the Blackstone Hotel where the twenty-two-year-old English actress Audrey Hepburn was in
the next suite and desperately nervous about her own forthcoming Broadway debut in
Gigi
. When one of the guests committed suicide by jumping from his window on the eighteenth floor and bounced off Hepburn’s windowsill as he fell, she freaked out and pounded on the Nivens’ door, terrified that she was hallucinating and going mad. She was to win rave reviews for
Gigi
but was lonely in New York and she and the Nivens saw a great deal of each other during the next few weeks, beginning a close friendship that was to last for the rest of David’s life.

For the first New York night of
Nina
the Royale Theatre on Broadway was thick with the cream of Manhattan theatre when Niv discovered with horror during the first scene that Gloria Swanson had sashayed on stage wearing an absurd new costume that he had never seen, a vast ‘black taffeta tent’. When she threw herself into his arms, nestled her head into his chest and he hugged her too hard, there was a crack, a twang, and eight inches of white whalebone shot out of her corset and up his nose. The audience roared with laughter and the show never recovered. The
New York Herald Tribune
critic, Walter Kerr, wrote the next day: ‘Miss Swanson has designed her own clothes [
and
] some of them came apart on stage. By that time, however, a similar fate had overtaken the play.’ Astonishingly
Nina
was to run until 12 January – for five weeks and forty-five performances – although Niv exaggerated as usual in
The Moon’s a Balloon
and claimed that it lasted for three months. He began to relax and enjoy himself so much that he and Alan Webb started to play practical jokes on poor Gloria while they were on stage. ‘He used to come in every night and say to Alan, “Well, what shall we do to her tonight?” and they used to devise these terrible practical jokes,’ Rowland told Morley.

December 1951 was a good month for Niv because it also marked the publication of
Round the Rugged Rocks
, which he dedicated to Hjördis, both in America and England, where it was praised in a mild two-paragraph review in the
Daily
Telegraph
by the future Poet Laureate John Betjeman, who wrote: ‘David Niven obviously wrote “
ROUND THE RUGGED ROCKS
” because he enjoyed doing it and not because he wanted to prove his versatility or literary skill. And he communicates his enjoyment … Mr Niven has an affection for real people, he sees the funny side of things, and he sees through shams like publicity. His book is rather too much on the same cheerful note to sustain the story, but it is livelier and therefore better than the journalistic novels which appear at the rate of about 25 a week to be swallowed by the twopenny libraries.’ When the book was serialised in a British women’s magazine just before publication it was illustrated by a drawing of the hero based on a pose by Roger Moore, who had become a photographic model for knitting patterns, toothpaste, Brylcreem and magazines.

In New York the book was published by thirty-year-old Ken Giniger, the editor-in-chief of Prentice Hall, who retitled it
Once Over Lightly
because ‘in America we don’t know that British nursery rhyme “round the rugged rocks the ragged rascal ran” ’, he told me. ‘I thought it was a charming picaresque novel and Niven was a well-known character, but I was disappointed because he did very little promotion for us, so we didn’t do very well with the book. The reviews were indifferent and we sold fewer than five thousand copies, which wasn’t bad for a first novel in those days, and we made a paperback sale too.’