Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (50 page)

Fourteen

‘Wodehouse With Tears’
1977–1983

A
t sixteen Kristina was too young to drive but had persuaded her law student boyfriend to let her try out his BMW as they returned to Château d’Oex on an icy mountain road and crashed into a tree that saved them from plunging 700 feet into a reservoir. The boy was barely scratched but Kristina had smashed her skull, eye socket, sinus and cheekbone, and had broken a leg and punctured a lung. She was helicoptered to Lausanne General Hospital but her kidneys stopped working, marrow from the broken thigh bone seeped into the bloodstream and headed towards her brain, and she nearly died. She was in a coma for eight days and had an operation to relieve the pressure on her brain followed by twenty-two more ops over the next few years to reconstruct her face.

Niv was devastated – ‘a broken man,’ said Sue Bongard. For weeks he did not know whether she would survive or be crippled, and the accident ‘made him for the first time seem very frail’, Ustinov told me. Patrick Macnee reckoned that the trauma suddenly turned him into an old man, and Jamie agreed: ‘It affected him dramatically, and from then on he always treated her like she was damaged.’

‘After the operations,’ said Kristina, ‘I used to repeat myself a lot, and Daddy used to come every weekend from wherever he was working to see me in hospital, and he helped by speaking to me, being by my side and listening to me. I know I was ever so difficult to deal with and I’d become very impatient.’ Even after she returned to school nearly a year
later Niv was terrified that she might have an epileptic fit at any time and did everything he could to avoid upsetting her. Hjördis, however, seemed hardly affected even though Kristina was her favourite daughter. ‘We spoke to them in the lobby of the Beau Rivage Hotel in Lausanne the night after the accident,’ said Valerie Youmans, ‘and he looked drawn but she was drunk, of course,’ and Bill Buckley told me: ‘When we saw him again in February he looked a lot older, but I didn’t see any change at all in Hjördis: she was very painted up.’ To add to the stress, said Buckley, Niv was bitter that Kristina’s boyfriend’s father refused to accept any responsibility for the crash or to contribute to Kristina’s expensive medical treatment, which was not covered by insurance because she had been driving illegally.

The accident had another tragic impact on David’s life, according to Robert Wagner, because ‘just before that I was sure he was going to leave Hjördis for a lovely lady of about thirty-five and was hoping he would. This woman was so in love with him and sat at his feet and listened to his stories, and laughed, and had a joyous time with him. She was
wonderful
for him, and I think he was ready to make the move and would have gone with her when Kristina had the accident and now he could not do it. It would have changed his life.’ Jamie’s wife Fernanda agreed: ‘I knew the woman and he should have gone and lived with her at the end of his life. I can’t tell you who she is: she’s happily married now.’ The woman was English, Jamie told me, ‘and I would have been very happy had he left Hjördis for her. By the 1970s he was extremely unhappy with Hjördis. He
hated
her.’ One night Niv and Evan Galbraith returned to the chalet to find her slumped, drunk, in the bathtub. ‘She was groaning and practically comatose and he was afraid she was going to drown,’ said Galbraith, ‘and I had to help him get her out and put her to bed, which was embarrassing for him. God knows he tried to have a decent relationship with her but she was very selfish and unhappy with her lot.’

Niv returned to Egypt to finish filming
Death on the Nile
but flew back regularly to Lausanne to see Kristina in hospital and in December he flew her to the London Clinic and wrote to Phil Evans that although she was still very confused and her memory ‘
very
peculiar indeed … she is getting rather chippy and rude now which they manfully say is a good sign! (To Matron of starched black … “I don’t want to watch you taking a shit – why do you watch me?”)’ In February she returned home to Château d’Oex although Niv wrote to Evans that ‘it obviously will be a long time before her little grey cells have sorted themselves out into their proper positions’. He added, ‘You are the classic example of guts and I have often talked about you to her. In her own way she is pretty courageous too.’

David Jr was now producing films as a freelance – his first was
The Eagle Has Landed
– and Roger Moore told him to ‘stop being such a ponce and give your father and me a job’. From then on Niv and Moore both called him ‘Poncey’ and he gave them parts in his second film,
Escape to Athena
, a comedy action thriller about a Nazi prison camp in German-occupied Greece in 1944. Moore played the camp’s Austrian commandant and Niv a professor of archaeology who is keen to investigate some art treasures in a local monastery. Shooting began on the island of Rhodes at the end of February and the harrowing effect of Kristina’s illness is etched in every line of Niv’s face, which is suddenly dreadfully gaunt and old.

During Kristina’s crisis David could not bring himself to work on the novel at all, despite already having written about 30,000 words of it, though he seriously considered a suggestion by the British publishers Mitchell Beazley that he should write the text for an illustrated coffee-table book about Hollywood while they provided researchers to do all the hard work. He was still determined to escape Putnam’s, and went twice to New York to meet executives of the publishers Doubleday with Jamie to discuss how he could escape his
next-book option with Putnam’s and what he might write for Doubleday instead. ‘We all got absolutely shit-faced and had the most extraordinary lunch,’ said Jamie. Doubleday’s Publisher, Sam Vaughan, told me: ‘We all liked him and felt that we ought to publish him even if he didn’t make us a lot of money.’

Fernanda Jr and Eugenie were now six and four, and Niv was ‘the best grandfather you could ever ask for’, their mother told me. ‘He would arrive with about ten presents for each of them and he’d get on the floor and play with them, totally involved.’ Jamie was astonished to see how popular his father still was in New York. ‘People would get out of their cars to shake his hand and doormen would come out to talk to him,’ he told me. ‘You couldn’t just walk with him in this city. I told my eldest daughter to go with Grandad and buy some English papers and when she came back she said, “I’m never going to walk with Grandad again, Daddy. It takes too long. Everyone kept coming up and pinching my cheek and saying, ‘What a cute granddaughter.’ ” It was the same in London: cab drivers would lower their windows and give him a thumbs-up. It was amazing.’

Back at Lo Scoglietto in June the Nivens gave a fabulous lunch for fifty people in honour of twenty-one-year-old Princess Caroline of Monaco the day before she married a thirty-eight-year-old playboy, Philippe Junot, much to the distress of her parents. Caroline was sulky because she felt she was being upstaged by Niv’s Hollywood friends, who included Ava Gardner, Cary Grant, Gregory Peck and Frank Sinatra, but it was a beautiful day and ‘they gave a wonderful garden party’, recalled Leslie Bricusse. ‘The views were lovely, the sea went all the way round this two-acre garden, it was
beautifully
planted with wonderful old olive trees with carnations and roses growing out of them, and at the end was the swimming pool and the gazebo and the changing rooms underneath it. There were all these stars, and servants in white jackets, and I was wandering down to the far end of the garden
where there was a bronze head of Hjördis and I heard her say to Cary Grant: “So you see, darling, I don’t suppose I shall ever have what I really want.” I thought: “Fuck you, mate!” ’

That evening the Nivens attended a ball for 600 guests at the palace in Monaco and then the next day the wedding in the palace courtyard, and afterwards Niv wrote a warm, sympathetic letter to Grace and Rainier, knowing how upset they were about the wedding. But his relationship with Rainier was not always perfect and there was one occasion when a row in a Chinese restaurant in Monaco nearly ended the friendship. ‘They both got rather pissed,’ said Roger Moore, ‘and Rainier said there was so much crime and unrest in the world that we really needed another war, and Niv said, “How dare you? During the war you sat here in your ‘reserved occupation’ while the rest of us were putting our lives on the line,” and he got up and staggered off into the night. When he woke in the morning he thought, “What the
fuck
did I do? I’ve insulted the prince in his own principality. How am I ever going to get out of this?” But a despatch rider arrived with a letter from Rainier which said, “Niv, we’ve been friends far too long to let a stupid little argument upset our relationship.” ’

In September Kristina was well enough to return to school and Niv flew to London to spend two months filming a six-hour, three-episode TV film that was also released as a much shorter cinema movie,
A Man Called Intrepid
, about Sir William Stephenson, the Canadian who had headed the joint Anglo-American intelligence agency British Security Coordination (BSC) in New York during the Second World War and had been given the code name Intrepid. Niv played Stephenson, who had run a small team of incredibly brave amateur spies in Nazi-occupied Europe and whose greatest coup had been the capture of a vital German Enigma cipher machine. It was a serious role for a change, one on which he worked thirteen hours a day and found so exhausting that
he started drinking spirits again and reached every night for a ‘big brown umbrella-stand of scotch’ to help him sleep. Each Friday he dashed to catch the last plane for Geneva to spend the weekend with Kristina and he was soon to fly to Canada to finish shooting the series there. The strain showed and in the film he looked very old, exhausted, nervous and unhappy. He was sixty-eight and the debonair jester of yesteryear had all at once become a fragile, worried old man with a frightened look in his eyes. ‘Suddenly I find I’ve reached a certain age and you begin to think about the end,’ he told Ian Woodward of
Woman’s Weekly
. ‘What the dickens happens next? Does
anything
happen next?’

He was still surprisingly nervous in front of a camera considering he had made more than eighty films, and was plagued by tense, sweaty hands and lips that stuck to his gums through fear.

A Man Called Intrepid
was by no means one of Niv’s worst films although the critics thought it was dull and it angered several of Stephenson’s old colleagues who felt that it was a sensationalised, romanticised abuse of the truth. When the TV series was transmitted in Britain the wartime head of SOE, the Special Operations Executive, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, called it ‘a travesty of fictionalised espionage activity’ and complaints were made to the Independent Broadcasting Authority.

In January 1979 Niv was delighted to hear that Walter Minton had left Putnam’s and been replaced by Peter Israel, but he was still determined to move to Doubleday if ever he managed to finish another book. By now he had gone off the idea of the big Hollywood coffee-table book because it would mean too much hard work and was thinking instead of writing a book about backache, he told Greenfield, ‘as you and I, and practically everybody else in the world, suffers from it’.

He was also having continual cramps in his right calf and consulted a twenty-nine-year-old English physiotherapist,
David Bolton, who was practising in Gstaad and had treated Kristina after her accident. ‘He was beginning to suffer the first signs of motor neurone disease though we didn’t know that at the time,’ Bolton told me at his surgery in London. ‘He did half an hour of strict exercises every day and kept himself very fit, and he’d often walk from Château d’Oex to Gstaad, a good forty minutes, and he strode out. We became good friends. As a physiotherapist I embrace very much the body
and
the soul, and you almost become your patient’s confessor, and he told me that Hjördis made him very unhappy and depressed, and he never came to understand why she was like that.’

Hjördis consulted Bolton too.

I asked Bolton whether Niv’s motor neurone disease, which was soon to become increasingly apparent, could have been caused by his deep unhappiness. ‘We don’t know,’ he said, ‘but maybe sadness can make our own immunity systems turn against us. Maybe somehow we can give a disease to ourselves through our own depression.’ Or as Sam Vaughan put it: ‘Maybe the shock of Kristina’s accident brought on the disease. After a certain point in a hard-running life you become vulnerable to everything. I think you become eligible for death.’

Niv was also worrying as usual that January about money. Despite all his efforts to avoid tax by living in Switzerland – even his two houses were for tax reasons ‘owned’ by a company registered in Liechtenstein, Dajani Establishments – he had just had more demands for back taxes both there and in France, and his Zurich lawyers, Staehelin Hafter and Partners, had just sent him a bill for Swiss fr. 200,000 which he queried in a letter to the senior partner, Bill Staehelin, a personal friend, pointing out that ‘this year I will be paying in the neighbourhood of $170,000 for the administration and safeguarding of my capital. But I have a nasty feeling that my capital does not generate this sum in interest!’ The problem was that he had handed over to Staehelin even the simplest day-to-day household matters and bills, though ‘I could easily do it myself if I wasn’t so lazy or Hjördis could do it if she had any brain!’ as he told his New York lawyer Lee Steiner. Jess Morgan laughed when I told him about this letter. ‘David always watched the fees he paid people even though he could well afford them at that point,’ he said. ‘He watched our fees closely and he used to complain to me about Lee Steiner’s fees!’ And he was worrying increasingly about what would happen after his death.