Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (56 page)

‘David chose a beautiful morning to die,’ Bolton told me, ‘one of those lovely Swiss Alp mornings: blue sky, very quiet, birds singing. Katherine rang me and I went straight over, and there beside his bed was a photo of Hjördis. Half an hour before he died he was still pondering why she was like she was. He was still so devoted to her and he’d never have left her. He thought, “Maybe if I love her a bit more, maybe if I try a bit harder, maybe I’ll get the love that I want, and maybe tomorrow it’ll be different.” I think he was very much like that till his last breath. I think David was an old soul, a deep man tapped into something. I felt very sad. I had never seen the death of someone I loved so close before, and his body was still warm.’

Roger Moore and his daughter Deborah drove up immediately from St Paul de Vence and helped Fiona, Bolton, Alastair Forbes and a local Scots-born Swiss Reformed Church pastor, the Rev. Arnot Morrison, to organise the funeral for the Tuesday. Hjördis did not arrive until thirty-six hours later, on the Saturday afternoon, drunk, driven up from Cap Ferrat by Rainier’s chauffeur. ‘When she got out of the car,’ said Moore, ‘her wig was askew and she looked at me and said, slurring, “Are you here for the publicity?” I just left. His was the first death of a friend that really affected me, and I’ve not been able to watch any of his films since, but I couldn’t stay for the funeral because I thought I’d probably end up killing her. Some of us were convinced that had he lived another month they would have been legally separated.’ Robert Wagner also missed the funeral even though he was in London on his way to see Niv when he died. ‘I didn’t go because I was afraid that I’d really have lost it with her,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have handled it. I left flowers later at his resting place and never saw her again.’

David Jr and Jamie and his family arrived from America on the Saturday night. ‘My father had told me that when he died he wanted me to go into his office and take out certain documents and destroy chequebooks,’ Jamie told me. ‘I had
helped him with his will and was extremely familiar with the money that was in his bank accounts and stocks, and what was in safe deposit boxes, and I had all the keys. So I was in his office doing exactly what he had asked me to do – I was actually cutting up his Coutts & Co. cheques because I didn’t want anyone to get their hands on them if the house was going to be full of people – and Hjördis came in drunk and said, “Counting the money already, Jamie?” I said, “Get out”.’

Hjördis nearly did not bother to go to the funeral at all. ‘Rainier told me that she wouldn’t have come if he hadn’t forced her,’ said Alastair Forbes. Bolton, Fiona and Katherine had already chosen the suit in which Niv would be buried. ‘It was his favourite colour, dark bottle green,’ said Bolton, ‘and we took it up to the hospital, and lying in the mortuary next to him was his butler, Monsieur Andrey, who had died three days earlier.’

The obituaries that weekend were long and warm. ‘Last of the English Gentlemen,’ the
Daily Mail
called him. ‘The Perfect Gent,’ said the
Daily Star
. ‘A man of style,’ said the
Sunday Telegraph
. The funeral was at 2.30 p.m. on 2 August in the little Anglican church, St Peter’s, in the main street of Château d’Oex, where Kristina and Fiona had been baptised. Prince Rainier came, and Audrey Hepburn, who wept throughout the service, and Capucine, and hundreds of Press photographers, strangers, and almost every villager of Château d’Oex, where the shops were closed for the day in respect. And Kristina was convinced that her real mother was there too, heavily veiled to avoid recognition.

‘It was a lovely service, very moving,’ said Bolton, but ‘Hjördis was a nightmare,’ said Jamie. ‘She refused to have my brother and myself sit at the same pew as her. Seriously! She was in the front with Rainier and my father’s lawyer and her two children, and David, my wife, my girls and I were in another pew.’ Willie Feilding was an usher and told me: ‘David Jr rang me in a panic and said, “Get over here, the church is filling up with hoi-polloi,” so I did and it was. I
asked one woman to move and said, “You’re in a seat reserved for Richard Attenborough, so please go up into the public gallery,” and she said, “I’m not going up there. It’s full of winos!” David would have loved that!’ The most obvious wino was the widow, who was so drunk that she could barely stand and hung grimly onto Prince Rainier’s arm throughout. She was ‘pale and shaky’, reported Ann Leslie pointedly in the
Daily Mail
the next day, ‘smiling with a kind of feverish courage at the congregation.’ Another witness told me: ‘It was terrible. She had no right to be in a church in that condition.’

The church and coffin were piled with sunflowers and blooms of blue and gold, the colours of Stowe School. The biggest wreath, worthy of a Mafia godfather’s funeral, came from the porters at Heathrow Airport with a card that read: ‘To the finest gentleman who ever walked through these halls. He made a porter feel like a king.’ They sang Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’, and ‘To Be a Pilgrim’, and listened to readings from St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians and the Book of Revelation, and the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin and seven students from his music school in Gstaad played the
Andante
from Mendelssohn’s ‘Octet for Strings in F’. And Niv would have chuckled to know that there were five misprints in the three small pages of the funeral programme. Once again, for the last time, no one had bothered to correct the proofs.

Afterwards the cortège made its way to the little cemetery in the sunny valley just outside the village, surrounded by towering wooded mountains, just off the main road to Bulle, where so many onlookers jostled and hung over the wall that the Rev. Morrison bellowed at them to ‘fuck off’. ‘I got into trouble over that,’ he said, ‘but I think Niven would have been proud of me.’ They buried him in a double plot, with space for Hjördis to join him one day.

Three months later, in October, there was a memorial service in Beverly Hills where Cary Grant, Gregory Peck and
Peter Ustinov were among the mourners, and Fred Astaire, despite being eighty-four, unwell and unsteady, sat between David Jr and Jamie. ‘I know that your father would have wanted me to sit here,’ he told them. ‘The only sad thing is that the roles should really have been reversed.’ After the service ‘Swifty’ Lazar gave a lunch at which Lord Hanson was a guest. ‘There were howls of laughter coming from one of the two tables,’ Hanson recalled, ‘where Cary Grant and all the usual suspects were sitting. They were remembering all his funny stories.’

In London on 27 October a thanksgiving service was held at the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, where Niv had himself given the address at Peter Sellers’s memorial service three years earlier. Trubshawe, now seventy-seven, was an usher and the congregation of 1200 included Prince Michael of Kent, the Duke of Marlborough, Margaret Duchess of Argyll, the Earl and Countess of Snowdon, Sir John Mills, Sir Richard Attenborough, Trevor Howard, David Frost, Joanna Lumley, and seventy-three-year-old Douglas Fairbanks, who had recently been knighted despite not being British. Graham Payn was there too, even though Niv had snubbed him so cruelly after Noël Coward’s death, and the church was stuffed with stunningly beautiful flowers, and they sang Psalm 23 again as well as the gloriously rousing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers!’ and ‘Jerusalem’ – ‘I will not cease from mental fight … till we have built Jerusalem.’ Once again they heard the Alpha and Omega passage from the Book of Revelation, read this time by a frail, seventy-six-year-old Lord Olivier, and one of the prayers, by St Francis of Assisi, was especially appropriate because it encapsulated what Niv had striven to do for so long in his life, friendships and marriage:

He had followed its precepts right to the very end. John Mortimer, who once described Niv’s life brilliantly as ‘Wodehouse with tears’, gave the address, spoke of ‘our joy in knowing a man who gave us so much happiness’, and quoted Ernst Lubitsch’s remark to Niv that ‘nobody should try and play comedy unless they have a circus going on inside. Perhaps that was the secret of David’s style. He seemed so elegant and cool, he was so handsome and well dressed, but inside the band was forever striking up, the children were clapping with delight and the clowns were always about to be brought on.’ That was just what Niv had striven to do all his life – to make other people happier – and because of it he was deeply loved and widely mourned. In his own way, in the hearts of others, he had built Jerusalem.

Postscript
1983–2003

N
iv had always told his sons he would leave them nothing in his will. On their twenty-first birthdays he gave them $21,000 each – ‘$1000 for each year you’ve been a pain in the ass’ – but after that, he warned them, they would get nothing. ‘Nobody left me anything,’ he told the
Daily Express
in 1960, and ‘one day I realised that the saddest people I knew were my friends with money they’d inherited. They had no drive, no ambition, no reason. All they had was money that some rich daddy had been idiot enough to leave behind. So I decided to spend every penny I earn. I don’t want to be the richest man in the graveyard.’

He was of course undoubtedly the richest man in the graveyard at Château d’Oex. Beside him lie his butler and cook, the Andreys, and all around are the poor of the valley: J. P. and Geneviève Exchaquet at his feet, Benjamin and Annesley Chance at his head. Swiss wills are not made public – a year before he died he was still insisting to the French taxman that he was a Swiss resident and Lo Scoglietto was only ‘rented for holidays’ – but his books had sold more than 10 million copies and had earned him maybe as much as £30 million in modern terms, and he left more than £20 million and maybe as much as £30 million, which would be worth more than twice as much today. In the end he loved his sons too much to cut them out. They had in any case proved that they could make their own way in the world – both were already rich in their own right – and they and the girls each inherited about £3 million at first. The properties and most of the rest of the
money were left in a trust to give Hjördis homes and an income until she died, but the trust was controlled by the boys and when Hjördis died in 1997 they and the girls inherited about another £5 million each. Niv also left Grizel £60,000 and Madame Andrey £12,500.

In October the family and friends set up a fund in his name to help research into MND, and a curly granite Scottish cross inscribed with his name and dates was erected on his grave, where the Bricusses had a stunning experience when they went to pay their respects that Christmas of 1983. ‘Let’s have one last picture of you with Niv,’ said Leslie, so Evie stood behind the cross with her arms on it. ‘I held up the camera,’ he told me, ‘and into the frame flew a multi-coloured hot-air balloon going down the valley: not only was it
The Moon’s a Balloon
, it was also
Around the World in Eighty Days
. It was a lovely photo. I told Niv Jr about it and he shivered.’

Under Swiss law Niv may lie in his grave only until 2047, fifty years after Hjördis’s death, when his body will be dug up and the space used for someone else unless the Nivens’ lawyers can find some way to let him rest in peace. If his spirit is eventually so rudely disturbed it should find a home in his old chalet just up the road. ‘I feel ghosts here,’ said Coco Wyers, who bought the house with her husband after Hjördis’s death. ‘When we first came to look around the chalet his Oscar was still here, and I have a strong feeling that he is happy we are Dutch and not German! We have changed the house a lot. Hjördis’s bedroom was very grubby and messy.’ Sue Bongard told me that after Hjördis’s death she was shown round the chalet ‘and in her bathroom there were eight or ten wigs on styrofoam heads. It was quite spooky.’

After Niv’s death Hjördis avoided the chalet at first, lived as a recluse at Lo Scoglietto and drank herself into a stupor every day, which caused numerous rows with Fiona and eventually a permanent rift. But more than a year later Hjördis finally admitted that she needed help and checked into a French clinic for alcoholics – encouraged, I am told, by the
doctor friend who ‘hung around for a while’, said Fiona, and was working in 2003 in London with a medical team called Company Health, though he declined to respond to my numerous requests for an interview. For a while Hjördis seemed miraculously cured, as though somehow she had been liberated by Niv’s death. She took up with a gay couple, helped with an AIDS foundation, and was coaxed out for dinners and parties by Andrew Vicari, who continued their affair for a couple of years until they had a row and never saw each other again. Vicari eventually became even richer than Niv after he was appointed the Saudi royal family’s and government’s official painter, claimed to be the world’s highest-paid living artist and was listed in the
Sunday Times
Rich List in 2002 as worth £40 million. ‘She was a hell of a nice woman,’ insisted Vicari when I met him. ‘We all loved her, and people who didn’t were just jealous. She loved art and painting and bought several of mine.’ His memories of her are irreconcilably different from those of almost everyone else, though I did find three women who became friends of hers after Niv died and who all said she was very pleasant and not drinking at all.

One was forty-six-year-old Jill Hulton, who met Hjördis in 1986, later married the Duke of Hamilton and told me: ‘She was charming. Often I’d stay at Lo Scoglietto for the weekend and she’d always send the car to collect me, and when I left Angus [
the Duke
] she lent me her flat in Mayfair. She wasn’t drinking at all when I knew her, or if she was it was secretly. She was
nice
. She always spoke about David with great affection and respect, she talked about the first wife, and was very upset about the rift between her and the two sons.’ Another titled lady who met and took to Hjördis after Niv’s death, Lady Christopher Thynn, said, ‘I liked her very much. She was lonely and rather sad and obviously missed David and adored him, but she was charming and very friendly.’ Another of Jill Hamilton’s friends, Roxie Clayton, told me that Hjördis ‘was sweet and spoke fondly about David’.

Eventually, though, she lost her battle with alcoholism and became a heavy drinker again, strange and silent, glaring at people in shops. ‘When she went into a village shop she was often drunk and difficult and everybody left,’ said Sue Bongard. When the Buckleys and the Bricusses heard how she had treated Niv at the end they would have nothing more to do with her, and she tended to alienate most of her other old friends, even Doreen Hawkins, April Clavell and Betty Bacall, who said, ‘I saw her several times in London and about a year before she died she wanted me to stay at Cap Ferrat but she was
horrible
to me for those two days,
so
rude.’ She told Vicari, Sue Bongard and others that she was going to marry Prince Rainier and the story was splashed all over the newspapers. Jamie asked Rainier if this were true and the prince replied, ‘I don’t know where the
hell
that story came from.’

The relationship between Hjördis and the boys became worse than ever. ‘Because of the trust we had to have a family meeting in Switzerland every year,’ said Jamie, ‘and it became so cantankerous and acrimonious that my wife stopped coming with me and said, “I refuse to see that woman. She’s just a horrible person.” ’ Hjördis thought that the boys ‘were out to get her’, said Fiona, but then Hjördis also became paranoid because she thought that Kristina and Fiona were trying to kill her by putting oil around the swimming pool so that she would slip. Eventually she died of natural causes in hospital in Switzerland – a stroke – on Christmas Eve 1997, aged seventy-eight, an insult to all those doctors who insist that a woman should not drink more than two small glasses of wine a day. ‘This is not kind,’ said Billie More, ‘but when Hjördis died I can’t think of a single soul who was sorry.’ She left ninety per cent of her estate to Kristina, who had always been her favourite, and just ten per cent to Fiona, who had often made it plain she disapproved of her drinking and her treatment of Niv. Hjördis had forbidden the girls to bury her in the grave beside him, which still lies empty, the only
double grave at Château d’Oex with just one lonely occupant. ‘I want to be free,’ she told Kristina, and so she was cremated and her ashes scattered in the Mediterranean at Lo Scoglietto.

David Jr, Jamie, Doubleday and Hamish Hamilton considered whether to publish Niv’s unfinished novel about the writer with MND, or have someone else complete it, but decided against after asking Bill Buckley to read it as well. ‘He’d written more than 50,000 words,’ said Jamie, ‘but the manuscript wasn’t very good although some of it was rather poignant. It was very honourable and gracious of Nelson Doubleday not to publish it because they had paid my father a huge advance and could have insisted.’

David Jr gave up making movies, enjoyed a string of love affairs with beautiful women and finally married an actress, Barbara Alexander, when he was fifty, in 1993, but they divorced after five years. In 2000 he was married again, aged fifty-seven, to Beatrice Morrison, a rich thirty-nine-year-old divorcée, and still lives in Hollywood, where in 2002 his main occupation was working voluntarily with a road safety charity called See a Child, Save a Child. He has no children of his own – ‘I don’t have the patience for small children,’ he told Vicky Ward of the
Daily Mail
in 1998 – but he does have four step-children.

Jamie became the American boss of the scent and soap makers Floris, ran a company in Houston for five years in the 1990s, and then joined Sotheby’s in New York, where he is now a Vice-Chairman. He and Fernanda bought a farm on Long Island and a house in the Dominican Republic but separated in 1995, divorced, and in 2002 he was living alone in New York.

Neither Kristina nor Fiona has married and both are shy, nervous, unsure of themselves, estranged from each other, and have not seen the boys for a long time, yet both could not have been nicer or more helpful to me. It seems a shame but perhaps inevitable that the family has not kept in touch with each other. Kristina, who is now forty-two, took up
singing, wrote some poems, had a son, Michael, by the Spanish butler at Lo Scoglietto in 1990, and in 2003 was living with Michael in Lausanne and planning to marry an Italian from Venice, Bernard di Matteo.

Fiona left Geneva University and went to Boston University in 1985, obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Professional Studies, a Master’s degree in Business Administration, and in 1994 went on to study for a Ph.D. on ‘the impact of electronic commerce on supply chain management’, but was often understandably sidetracked and still working on her thesis in 2003 in Boston where she was lecturing in statistics at the university and was a part-time administrator and student counsellor. ‘Dad was very proud of Fiona,’ said David Jr. ‘He would love her to get a Ph.D.’ Now forty, she too has had a son, Ryan, now five, by a black lover who left her when she told him she was pregnant. ‘My father would not have disapproved of that so long as Fiona is happy,’ said Jamie. ‘He was more liberal than conservative and his primary goal was that they would both be happy.’

Grizel created the bronze trophy of a woman, the Bessie, that is awarded annually in Britain to the winner of the £30,000 Orange Prize for women’s fiction, and was still alive in 2003, aged ninety-six and living in an old people’s home in London, where she was bright, perky, friendly and with a disconcerting resemblance to Niv but too vague to handle her own affairs, so that her lawyer has power of attorney.

Lo Scoglietto, where Hjördis lived on for many years although it was far too big for her on her own, was sold – asking price £15 million – to a New Zealand businessman in 1997, much against her wishes so that she tried to obstruct the estate agents at every turn. Eventually the Niven trustees bought her a smaller house nearby – ‘the only house on Cap Ferrat without a view of the ocean,’ chuckled David Jr – but she died before she could move. The new owner of Lo Scoglietto, Richard Chandler, has altered the house completely and renamed it La Fleur du Cap, but it is still painted
pink, and the pretty little tiled square on the crowded public footpath right outside the front door was renamed the Place David Niven in 1990, though a plaque claims incorrectly that Niv was born in 1909 not 1910. Even after his death he was stalked by misprints and inaccuracies. And across the bay in 2002 Niv’s favourite restaurant in Beaulieu, the African Queen, was still displaying an old poster advertising the film with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, the one in which he so nearly starred himself.

In California the Pink House is still pink too and owned by Whoopi Goldberg, but there are six other houses on what was Niv’s property, several of them between the Pink House and Douglas Fairbanks’s old mansion next door, which now belongs to Steven Spielberg.

In October 1985 Niv was given the rare accolade of having his face and signature printed on one of a set of postage stamps to mark British Film Year along with Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Vivien Leigh and Peter Sellers. But how good an actor was he really?

‘He was superb,’ enthused Patrick Macnee, ‘one of the great light comedians. I’d rate him with Cary Grant and Rex Harrison, and he didn’t despise acting at all: he had enormous respect for it.’

‘He was a wonderful actor,’ said Betty Bacall. ‘He wasn’t a lightweight at all.’

‘He was a very fine actor and a total professional,’ said Robert Wagner.

‘Niv was a damned good actor, a joy to play scenes with, and he listened and gave plenty in return,’ said Roger Moore.

John Mills admitted that Niv ‘couldn’t play Hamlet but he was perfect for light comedy and played it beautifully’, and David Jr admitted that ‘you wonder why on earth he did some of his movies but even in bad films he was very good.’

‘He wasn’t a great actor,’ said Bryan Forbes, ‘but he was a great screen personality, deeply loved, and he never gave a
bad
performance. He never really acted: he was a film star, and there’s nothing wrong with that.’

Roddy Mann felt that Niv ‘wasn’t really an actor at all in the normal sense. That’s what he said himself. He knew that he was not a major actor, and in all the hundreds of hours I spent with him he never talked about movies, certainly not his own. I don’t think he even liked movies a lot, and he never watched his own because he said he always thought of himself as a young, rather attractive man and yet there was this creepy old character up on the screen. But he was a real pro. He could be as drunk as a skunk the night before but he wouldn’t show it and he’d always be right on time.’