Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (3 page)

After the infected boil David was sent to Heatherdown, an expensive prep school at Ascot that he came to love. Etta can hardly have been as poor as Niv always claimed if she could afford to send Max to Dartmouth, Grizel and David to
boarding schools, and to put David’s name on the waiting list for Eton. In
The Moon’s a Balloon
he claimed that ‘only a token subscription to the family coffers was being made by Uncle Tommy and she still had her thumb in the dyke of my father’s debts’, but that same year, 1919, she bought a house at Bembridge in the Isle of Wight, Rose Cottage, and to pay for all that she must have had a great deal of financial help from Comyn-Platt. It was a rose-covered Regency house, in the middle of the village, of which David was thoroughly ashamed because it was so much smaller than his posh school friends’ houses. ‘That place was awful,’ he told Lionel Crane of the
Sunday Pictorial
in 1957. ‘When the east wind blew the back door wouldn’t open, and when the west wind blew the front door wouldn’t shut.’ Nevertheless, the family spent the summer there and David came to love Bembridge because he could go sailing and, best of all, because Uncle Tommy rarely joined them during the holidays but stayed in London, where in 1920 he bought 47 Cadogan Place, an elegant, five-storey terraced town house in a quiet Chelsea street that was cossetted by several acres of quiet, leafy private gardens and had as its neighbours Sir Felix Schuster in number 48, the Honourable Edwin Portman in number 46, as well as a baroness and six other titled knights and ladies. Despite her comparatively meagre inheritance, Etta and her children never had to slum it; Comyn-Platt must have been much more generous than David claimed.

David, now nine, reckoned that Heatherdown was ‘schoolboy heaven’: the masters were kind, the matrons motherly, the food delicious and there were big green playing fields, a lake and a swimming pool. The forty-one-year-old headmaster, Sammy Day, had captained Cambridge University at cricket and played for Kent, and the boys were from a much better class than those at Worthing: they were the sons of dukes and marquesses, he said, ‘very carriage-trade … very snobbish. Everybody went from there to Eton.’ He realised that after years of feeling unloved he could make himself
popular by playing the clown. ‘It was total insecurity,’ he confessed to the
Telegraph Sunday Magazine
in 1977. ‘The other boys were frightful, but I developed a dreadful urge to please them. They had all the unimaginable snobbery that went with money and large houses in the England of those days.’ He told Michael Parkinson: ‘I ate chocolate all the time and got very fat and obnoxious … Everybody who becomes an actor probably becomes an actor because he wants to be liked.’ So he clowned in chapel when he was singing a solo and his voice broke, and was caned by the Head. He was made responsible for the bellows that controlled the air for the organ and succeeded in making it emit a loud fart during a sermon by the Bishop of Ripon, which led to another painful visit to the Head’s study. On a school walk through Ascot he deliberately split the seat of his trousers and displayed his buttocks to the public gaze. He was caught trying to slip into Ascot racecourse. He posted to his Bembridge friend Brian Franks, who was sick in the sanatorium at another school, a parcel that contained a ripe dog dropping, a gift that did not amuse the matron who opened the parcel. Finally, in a vain attempt to win a prize in the school’s annual Speech Day flower show, David stole a giant marrow from the girls’ school next door, Heathfield, and lied that he had grown it himself. That was it. After eighteen months Heatherdown had had enough of him. He was caned again, expelled, and Eton removed him from its waiting list. Etta and Uncle Tommy were at their wits’ end to know what to do with the boy: he was only ten but already he seemed to be quite impossible.

It did not help that Etta was so vague and incapable of exercising any discipline. She did promise to give him £50 if he refrained from smoking until he was eighteen and he never did smoke, but otherwise during that summer of 1920 he was ‘up to every prank you could think of’, his Bembridge friends John Cockburn and Alec Mellor told Sheridan Morley for his biography
The Other Side of the Moon
. ‘There wasn’t
much discipline and every night he’d be off to the local Garland Club, which was the centre of adult activity.’ He stole apples and was clipped round the ear by the local bobby, PC Summers, and when he climbed over an iron fence he impaled his thigh on a spiked railing and had to be helped home, soaked in blood. His mother was out that night yet again – at a fancy dress party, dressed as a nun.

David’s keenest interest was the sea. His mother had become a member of Bembridge Sailing Club and he started to learn to sail, and loved messing about in boats and dinghies. A friend’s father taught him to fish with hand line, net or spinner, to pick up crab pots at dawn, to catch lobsters by hand among the rocks, to spear giant conger eels. He was even allowed to lend a hand with the ropes when the lifeboat crew returned at night from a mission of mercy. Because of this his mother and Uncle Tommy decided that he should follow Max into the navy, and they sent him to a school in Southsea that specialised in handling difficult boys and was run on strict lines by an ex-Royal Navy officer, Lieutenant Commander Bollard, and his wife. According to
The Moon’s a Balloon
the establishment was a small, grimy terraced house with a dozen pupils with criminal tendencies, little better than a reformatory, and Bollard was a vicious, drunken brute, ‘a gigantic man … with a magenta coloured face and tufts of hair sprouting on his cheek bones’ who thrashed the boys regularly ‘for nothing’ and punished David by locking him in a dark cellar full of rats. As for Mrs Bollard, she was apparently a ‘thin-lipped, blue-veined’ alcoholic who starved the boys. ‘Every day was torture for me,’ wrote Niv. Feeling neglected and rejected yet again, he joined a gang of boys who went shoplifting on Saturday afternoons and sold their booty to a fence in Southampton. If this all sounds just a little too Dickensian to be true, Niv did admit in a letter to his publisher Jamie Hamilton in 1966 that he was ‘undoubtedly the most poisonous little bastard that God ever put breath into’. And the experience lasted only a month, after
which he went back home to Bembridge – with a stick of rock given to him by Commander Bollard, which suggests that the man was not always a monster.

To pass the entrance exams for Dartmouth naval college Niv was sent to yet another expensive establishment, this time a crammer in a vicarage at Penn Street in Buckinghamshire that was run by the Reverend Arthur Browning, a grandson of the poet Robert Browning. According to Niv, Browning was another ‘evil-tempered, vain old tyrant’ and the dozen or so boys ‘without exception loathed him’, but Mrs Browning’s food was good, a couple of the masters were unexpectedly nice, and his two years there turned out to be so enjoyable that he tried at last to do some serious work and was not especially upset when a large Old Etonian plied him with ice-cream cornets, lured him into some woods and interfered with him.

Despite every effort David failed to get into Dartmouth. His English, French, history and geography were adequate but in 1923 he failed the vital maths exam. Once again he had been rejected and once again his self-esteem had been battered. At the age of thirteen he seemed to be on the scrapheap already. But then just in time a new public school, Stowe, was founded and Uncle Tommy managed to get him a place. It was to give him the polished personality, manners and wit that were to make him a classic 1920s English gentleman, a film star, and deeply loved all over the world.

Two

The Making of an English Gentleman
1923–1928

S
towe School opened in May 1923 at Stowe House, a few miles southwest of Buckingham, a vast, magnificent, classically eighteenth-century mansion that had for more than 200 years been the country seat of the Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos and their heirs. It was a breathtaking setting for a public school with its massive grandeur, elegant colonnades, the north portico built by Vanbrugh, the sweeping Corinthian south loggia designed by Robert Adam. It had sumptuous state rooms, a domed oval marble saloon with pink marble pillars, a huge dining room, a chapel, and scores of stupendous paintings, and it was set in 280 acres of wooded grounds, lawns and landscaped parkland where Capability Brown had begun his career as an under-gardener. There were streams, lakes, waterfalls, avenues, numerous little follies, statues,
temples d’amour
, a triumphal arch and everywhere glorious views. Stowe even had its own zoo where the boys were allowed to keep pets. For an Old Boy of Commander Bollard’s Southsea reformatory to be sent to Stowe was akin to being wafted suddenly to Paradise. This was just what thirteen-year-old David needed: style, elegance, space to grow and compensation at last for all that he and his family had lost when his father was killed. Yet never in his memoirs did he mutter even a grudging word of gratitude for Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt, who must have been paying his fees since Etta never worked. ‘I was brought up under an umbrella of miserable crushing debt,’ he complained to the
Daily Express
in 1960. Not at Stowe, he wasn’t. There he lived like a prince.

Best of all, the first headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh, was a man of such liberal elegance and good breeding that he was to provide young David at last with the male role model that he needed so desperately. Roxburgh was a father figure whom David was to idolise and emulate for the rest of his days. Without J. F. Roxburgh and Stowe there would have been no witty, elegant film star called David Niven.

John Fergusson Roxburgh, who was always known as J. F., was thirty-five when Stowe opened with its ten assistant masters and ninety-nine boys aged thirteen to fifteen, one of them a future British Cabinet minister, John Boyd-Carpenter, who was to describe Roxburgh in his memoirs as ‘the greatest schoolmaster of his generation … he had the rarest of all qualities in his profession, the power to arouse interest and curiosity, and to inspire by example. It was impossible not to admire him, and not to do one’s best not to disappoint him.’ Previously an assistant master at Lancing in Sussex, he was tall, thin, beautifully dressed and renowned for his stylish suits, coloured silk handkerchiefs, tumbling ties, and his habit of calling even the youngest boy ‘my dear fellow’. His vision was to start a happy public school very different from the old-fashioned, regimented ones that existed already. He treated the boys as adults, respected each for his individual abilities, no matter how unusual, and gave them much more freedom and leisure than was normal in public schools so that they might have time to develop their own interests. ‘There was an exhilarating sense of freedom,’ wrote Boyd-Carpenter. ‘There were no bounds; bicycles were encouraged; and there were few rules … But a high standard of good manners was insisted on.’ Roxburgh knew the dates of each boy’s birthday and each came to believe that J. F. actually cared about him individually. Above all, he tried to instil in them an elitist delight in art, architecture and literature. As he said in his first speech as headmaster, ‘Every boy who goes out from Stowe will know beauty when he sees it all the rest of his life.’

Noel (later Lord) Annan, who joined Stowe as a pupil in 1930, wrote in the
Daily Telegraph
in 1988 that J. F. ‘accepted the public school system – houses, prefects, fagging and the rest. But he wanted to make the schools more humane, less regimented, less dominated by the worship of games, and, above all, less philistine. Roxburgh civilised their outlook and enlarged their substance.’ Annan added – and this would be particularly important for David Niven – that Roxburgh ‘tried to make the lot of the ill-adjusted, the lonely and the scruffy, happier. Boys who pottered, boys who preferred country pursuits to team games, boys who had not found themselves were to be encouraged.’ And he had a nice, dry sense of humour. To one small boy who was sitting in class with untidy hair, J. F. asked genially, ‘My dear fellow, what is the French for a hairbrush?’ As for punishment, he did occasionally use the cane as a last resort for offences such as drinking, smoking or cheating, but generally, said Annan, ‘he tried to make boys feel it was childish or inelegant to behave badly [
and
] he made boys more generous-minded and more honourable. He taught them to hope – and put their trust in life.’ One of David’s contemporaries, Peter Sherwood, told Sheridan Morley that although Niv ‘was always getting into scrapes … he found in Roxburgh a wonderful and clever mentor who knew exactly how to handle him. He would only have to say, “My dear David, I don’t think that is very helpful,” and David would say, “I suppose not, sir, I’m awfully sorry.” ’

Some felt that Stowe was not sufficiently intellectual and Roxburgh was said to be snobbish, racist and much better with the boys than he was with his staff, but David was to blossom under his otherwise liberal, tolerant, graceful regime. In five years he grew up and was transformed from a lively but insecure, rebellious problem child into the charming, well-spoken, life-enhancing English gentleman – bubbling with
joie de vivre
, beautifully dressed and gleaming with good manners – that he was to be for the rest of his life. Niv always
knew how much he owed to Roxburgh. ‘I worshipped the man,’ he said.

He joined the school at the start of its second term, in September 1923, along with 207 other new boys, and was put into Chandos House where he found a second important role model in his housemaster, Major Richard Haworth, a regular soldier who had won the Distinguished Service Order and had been a senior instructor at Sandhurst. ‘Haworth was a gentleman of the old school and the reverse of a martinet,’ wrote Annan in his biography of Roxburgh, and an added attraction for David was that Haworth was to found the school’s sailing club. ‘The thing about Stowe was the amount of friendship on equal terms,’ wrote one of its first teachers, twenty-seven-year-old Hugh Heckstall-Smith, in his autobiography. ‘Every day almost everyone was seeing a number of people it was a joy to see … The feeling of the place was like the feeling at the beginning of some of the earlier Dialogues of Plato, of friends meeting casually at some rather delightful spot.’

Dudley Steynor, a sprightly ninety-three-year-old contemporary of Niven’s who was in the same class, Remove B, told me in 2002: ‘I cannot convey the admiration we had for Roxburgh. One winter he put up on the board a rule that when the Octagon Lake was frozen over no one should skate on it until he had tested it. The next day someone had carved his initials – JFR – with skates right across the ice. At breakfast he said he wanted to see the boys who had done it. Four of them had no hesitation in owning up straight away and he gave them each four strokes of the cane.’

With David safely out of the way at boarding school for three months, Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt stood again for Parliament in the snap general election that the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, called in November 1923, this time for the northern seaside constituency of Southport in Lancashire – ‘Vote for COMYN-PLATT, AND KEEP HOME FIRES BURNING’ exhorted his leaflet – but even though he was
defending a Conservative seat he was beaten by his Liberal opponent by 928 votes. He was not alone: Tories were losing their seats all over the country, Baldwin lost his majority, his government fell, and Ramsay MacDonald became Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister.

At Stowe David was no doubt jubilant at Uncle Tommy’s defeat, but otherwise he kept a low profile that first year. He was still addicted to milk chocolate and became so fat that his schoolfellows called him Podger or Binge. ‘I had this great round face and I couldn’t run very fast,’ he told the
Sunday Express
columnist Roderick Mann, who was to become one of his closest friends, in 1966. ‘I and another fat boy hated having to shower after football because we both turned pink under the hot water. We were both so gross that eventually we sent off for some tubes of stuff we’d seen advertised as fat dissolvents. Fearful smelling stuff and every night we’d rub it on our stomachs. As we kept hacking away at the chocolate whirls during the day it was hardly likely to have any effect. I just stayed fat. But I do remember I entered for the half-mile, and as I thundered round 150 yards behind the field everyone roared with laughter and I started clowning and I realized then and there that I didn’t mind being last as long as people laughed at me.’ He was never going to be an intellectual – Roxburgh himself said that David was ‘not clever, but useful to have around’ – and although he was not stupid he was lazy, but he soon became fitter and lost weight and by March 1924 he was playing rugby for the Chandos House 2nd XV. Like many rugby players he developed a taste for alcohol and told the
People
in 1969 that ‘soon after my fourteenth birthday I was found face down in a rhododendron bush after finishing off half a bottle of brandy. But thereafter I learned to drink and to hold my drink like a gentleman.’

In 1924 the Comyn-Platts moved into another large Chelsea house nearby where they were to settle for nine years. It was at 110 Sloane Street, again a five-storey terrace. It had
to house not only Sir Thomas and Etta but also Joyce (who was twenty-four), Grizel (sixteen), David (fourteen) and at least one maid, if not two. Max, who was now a zany, restless twenty-two, had left the navy, joined the army, served in India, and resigned his commission by sending his commanding officer a telegram that read: ‘
DEAR COLONEL REQUEST PERMISSION RESIGN COMMISSION LOVE NIVEN
.’ David was so amused by this that he pinched the story and claimed in
The Moon’s a Balloon
that it was he who sent that telegram himself when he came to resign from the army in 1933. After leaving the army Max had then become the Starter at Bombay racecourse and was now working as a jackaroo on a cattle ranch in Australia. Even so the house was simply not big enough for the whole family, and David was sent away each night during the Easter holidays to sleep a mile and a half away, in St James’s Place, off Piccadilly, in what he called ‘a minute cubicle in a boarding-house [
with an
] iron bed, wooden floor [
and
] stained jug’.

‘Every night after dinner,’ he told Michael Parkinson on television in 1972, ‘this creepy stepfather I had used to give me tuppence for the bus and I’d get off at the Ritz Hotel and go down to this ghastly burrow with a pot under the bed, and eventually I got more adventurous and walked down to Piccadilly.’ There he would cruise the bright, exciting, vibrant night streets around Piccadilly Circus and ogle the pretty young prostitutes in their cloche hats and short skirts who wiggled and winked under the benign supervision of the winged statue of Eros, the Greek god of love. For the rest of his life Niv delighted in telling the story of how he was mesmerised by a gorgeous, seventeen-year-old blonde tart with blue eyes, fabulous legs and a deliciously lively manner who used to solicit in Bond Street. Her name was Nessie and he became besotted instantly. From then on he searched for her in the wicked streets and followed her around. On the fourth night she stopped suddenly and asked him if he was looking for a good time. Niv’s story in
The Moon’s a Balloon
of how she initiated him into the joys of sex for free in her little flat in Cork Street, with a record of ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’ playing on the wind-up gramophone, is wonderfully vivid, funny and touching, and he said that after that they would meet regularly in the afternoons for tea, or go to the cinema or music hall together, before returning to Cork Street for more sex. ‘By the time the Easter holidays ended,’ Niv wrote, ‘Nessie had become the most important thing in my life … she gave me something that so far had been in rather short supply – call it love, understanding, warmth, female companionship or just “ingredient X” – whatever it was, it was all over me like a tent … there grew up between us a brother-sister relationship that was to last for many years.’ He claimed that she even visited him regularly at Stowe that summer, when he ravished her on a tartan rug in the school grounds, and that he introduced her to Roxburgh as they sat watching cricket one Saturday afternoon and she said to J. F. boldly, ‘Don’t look a bit like a schoolmaster dew yew, dear?’ Fifty years later he told Don Short of the
People
, in 1974, that when he left Stowe in 1928 and she broke off the relationship ‘I was heartbroken … I was really in love with her.’

Some of Niv’s closest friends are cynical about this classic old story of the Golden Hearted Whore. It is certainly likely that the teenage David consorted with young prostitutes in the West End of London and launched his enthusiastic lifelong pursuit of female flesh maybe as young as fourteen, but many of his friends reckon that Nessie never existed and was either a romantic invention or an idealised composite of several young tarts whom David enjoyed in those years. One of his contemporaries at Stowe, Frith Banbury, told me: ‘We all knew about this prostitute and he had this very exciting reputation, but I never saw her.’ Dudley Steynor remembered that Niv did once bring ‘an extraordinarily pretty girl with a huge, wide straw hat’ to a cricket match at Stowe and introduced her to Roxburgh, but Reg Gadney, the son of David’s
Stowe friend Bernard Gadney, who went on to captain England at rugby during the 1930s, told me that his father did not believe that Nessie existed. Nor did Roderick Mann, who told me: ‘It didn’t ring true.’ Tom Hutchinson agreed and said that Niv once confided that in fact he had lost his virginity to a school matron at Stowe, ‘a woman all the boys fancied’. The American writer William F. Buckley, who became a very close friend of Niv’s in the 1960s, told me that Niv had told him he had been seduced at the age of fifteen ‘by this woman who looked after him’, and Dudley Steynor said, ‘There
was
a young matron at Stowe – oh,
yes
! – in her late twenties or early thirties and there was a story that one of the prefects was sleeping with her.’ Niv himself told the
People
in 1969: ‘I certainly sowed bigger wild oats than most youngsters. Sex? I was at it as soon as I knew what it was all about. I’d certainly lost my virginity by the time I was sixteen. And seduction was a wonderful sport in those days, with half a dozen petticoats to fight your way through!’ And the girls loved him. Reg Gadney’s mother, whose brother was at Stowe, told her son that whenever she visited the school ‘David would wear an extravagant buttonhole, invite her to sample its scent, and then steal a kiss.’