Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (21 page)

Despite his new job and rank Niv was keen to persuade the army to release him early so that he could return to Hollywood to star in
Coming Home
, a rousing film about soldiers returning to their loved ones at the end of the war that Goldwyn wanted to make before it was over. In a document dated January 1944 one British official reported that Niv had ‘said he felt he might give better service to the general cause by returning to Hollywood’ and some civil servants supported his argument, insisting that he was not simply trying to dodge his duty so that he could return to ‘the fleshpots of Hollywood’. They were still considering his request a year later, but in the end it was refused because they felt that to grant it would create a precedent.

In February he added yet another London gentlemen’s club to the four of which he was already a member. This time he
joined the Garrick, a notably sociable and unstuffy club whose members tended to be actors, authors, journalists and the jollier lawyers and politicians, some of them verging on the louche. Among the members who signed Niv’s nomination page were Laurence Olivier and Jamie Hamilton, who was to become his publisher nearly thirty years later. But it was when Niv lunched in April at his favourite club, Boodle’s, that he was nobbled by another old friend, Stephen Watts, and inveigled into playing a part in one of the most bizarre operations of the war. Watts, once the theatre critic of the
Sunday Express
and now a captain in Intelligence, MI5, wanted Niv to impersonate General Montgomery and fool the Germans into thinking that he was in North Africa rather than England and so keep them guessing as to whence the imminent Allied invasion of Europe might come. Niv pointed out that he was far too tall and had the wrong voice, but Watts then found just the man for the job – Lieutenant Meyrick Clifton James, an actor who looked astonishingly like Monty and was serving in the Royal Army Pay Corps at Leicester. It was important to approach James secretly, without telling his superiors, and Niv agreed to inveigle him down to London by pretending that he needed him to appear in his next propaganda film. A few weeks later, just before D-Day, James was flown to Gibraltar and North Africa, and did indeed confuse the Germans. ‘Several captured German generals told their interrogators that they had heard of Montgomery’s “secret” arrival in the Mediterranean,’ wrote Watts in his book
Moonlight on a Lake in Bond Street
. ‘One said he never doubted it was a feint – but he never doubted either that it was Montgomery.’ Clifton James eventually starred in a film about his exploit,
I Was Monty’s Double
.

Niv’s own version of this story was wildly exaggerated. ‘All his stories were embellished,’ said Roger Moore, ‘but he said that when James realised that they didn’t want him to make a film after all, he burst into tears because he was a bigamist and he was drawing two pay cheques and thought the game
was up!’ True or not, Niv used to tell another splendid story about British Intelligence. He said he was summoned to a secret meeting, hailed a taxi and gave the hush-hush address. ‘Ah, yes,’ said the cabbie, ‘that’ll be MI5.’

In April he wrote again to Bill Hebert: ‘Well, here we are, all teed up and waiting for Monty to blow the whistle. I must confess that I am not straining at the leash. But four and a half years of war has long since removed any glamour from the proceedings as far as I am concerned. Nevertheless the boys are all in splendid shape and are all as anxious as I am to get it over with once and for all.’ He was impressed that millions of American soldiers were now in England yet ‘everything has gone so smoothly between us … What wonderful sightseers your people are! I have been dragged off by Americans countless times and literally had my nose rubbed in the Tower of London and Anne Hathaway’s cottage. Things that because they always seemed to be around I am ashamed to say I had never bothered to give the once over to before.’ He concluded, ‘My love to the Swiss Family Goldwyn – and to all my old chums and chumesses.’

Among Niv’s friends from America who were now dropping in to see him and Primmie were Bob Coote, John Ford, John Huston, William Wyler and Colonel James Stewart, who spent a weekend leave at Dorney at the end of April, mowed the lawn and posed for photographs with David Jr without telling them that he had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross two days previously. Another frequent visitor was American air force Major Clark Gable, who was glad to see Niv so happy as a husband and father, and adored Primmie and the baby even though his own happiness had been destroyed when his beloved wife, Carole Lombard, had been killed in an air crash more than two years previously. One evening Primmie found Gable sitting in the garden on an upturned wheelbarrow, sobbing helplessly.

English friends who visited them in Dorney included Guy Gibson, the bomber pilot who had won the Victoria Cross
for blowing up the Eder and Mohne dams, and for David Jr’s long delayed christening the guests included his godfather Noël Coward, his godmother Vivien Leigh, and Laurence Olivier. The christening presents were firmly alcoholic. The Oliviers gave the baby a Jacobean drinking mug and Coward had brought a silver cocktail shaker with the inscription:

On 6 June 1944, D-Day itself,
The Way Ahead
was released in London to a chorus of rave reviews from the British critics, Monty ‘blew the whistle’ at last, and Operation Overlord – the invasion of Europe – began. Before dawn a huge armada headed across the English Channel towards France and the first of 156,000 British, American and Canadian troops landed on five beaches in Normandy. To deliver them there went 2000 ships, 10,000 planes, more than 4000 landing craft and hundreds of tanks. The fighting was fierce and bloody, especially on Omaha Beach, but by the end of the day the Allies had established a bridgehead that marked the beginning of the end of the war at last even though the Germans were to resist for eleven more months.

In
The Moon’s a Balloon
Niv said he joined the invasion a few days later: ‘I lied to Primmie about leaving after breakfast and at dawn, when she had finally fallen asleep, I slipped out of bed, dressed, looked down at her with the little boy asleep in his cot beside her, and tiptoed out of the house.’ He said that he boarded a Liberty ship, the
Empire Battleaxe
, at Southampton, and was landed under fire on Omaha Beach, ‘fumble-fingered with fear’ as he put it in
Bring on the Empty Horses
, and for weeks, he said, he and his comrades were shelled by the Germans as the Allies pushed inland and vicious battles raged around Cherbourg and Caen. ‘Come on, chaps,’ he yelled at some soldiers during yet another bombardment. ‘It’s all right for you. I’ll have to do all this
again later with Errol Flynn!’ The London
Evening News
, however, told a different story a few weeks later when it reported on 18 July 1944 that Niv had in fact landed in Normandy, probably by aeroplane, along with Franklyn Engelmann of the BBC, ‘to investigate the BBC programme for the invading forces – what the troops thought of it, what reception was like, whether it could be improved in any way – and that both men were already back in London. During the next few months, as the Allied armies thrust the Germans back, crossed the Seine, liberated Paris, Brussels and Antwerp, and pressed on towards the German border, Niv nipped back and forth to England time and again by plane, almost like a commuter.

At the end of July Goldwyn wrote: ‘I can’t tell you how anxious I am to have you come back here, as we all have great admiration for you … I want you to know that we are still loyal to you, and love you.’ It is possible that he also sent him some money because Niv wrote to thank him for his ‘wonderfully generous gift’. In August Niv escaped back to England again, had lunch with Noël Coward and Fred Astaire, and spent a weekend with the Astors at Cliveden, and in September, back in France and following in the wake of the army to Paris, he received another affectionate letter from Goldwyn that said, ‘You have served your country well, and I will always be proud of the way you acted when war broke out. I know that it will always give you great satisfaction to look back on your action. Your child will be proud of you, and your friends are proud of you. A great welcome is in store for you when you get back here, and I shall be at the head of the line.’

In northern France, Niv told his friend David Bolton many years later, some of his soldiers found a building that stank so much they assumed it must be full of dead bodies and blew it up rather than have to bury a lot of rotting corpses, only to discover that the place was a Camembert cheese factory.

In Paris, despite his love for Primmie, Niv began an affair with the leading French film star Yvette Le Bon, I was told by Martine Fields, who was then an eighteen-year-old French girl and was picked up by Niv in a Paris nightclub in September 1944. ‘We nice, pretty-pretty young girls of good family were part of something called the Rainbow Corner, where our object was to take out Allied officers,’ she said, ‘and one day I was assigned to take out a boring Canadian and we went to the ’44, a very nice officers’ nightclub. It was about ten o’clock at night and the Canadian went to the men’s room and somebody came to my table and said “come on, let’s get out of here” and it was David Niven. I knew immediately who he was. I was a very, very proper young girl and I’m still astonished that I went with him but he was very attractive and very charming. We went to another nightclub, and we went out several times together after that, and he would take me for lunch or a drink at the Ritz, but he wasn’t trying to seduce me and he never tried anything. He was a perfect gentleman. It wasn’t even a flirtation: it was a charming friendship.’

There were, however, times when Niv was in real danger. Major Hugh Carey of the 104th Division of the US First Army, who was later Governor of New York from 1975 to 1982, bumped into him at Orly airport and hitched a lift with him to Brussels in a tiny plane that had to be flown over enemy territory by a pilot who ‘was a kid who didn’t even shave yet’, Governor Carey told me. ‘Niven said he was on an undercover mission of liaison between Montgomery, Eisenhower and the First Army, and was arranging a face-to-face meeting because there was great disagreement and Montgomery wanted to encircle the Germans and needed more troops. The flight took one and a half hours. He was a real soldier.’ Niv also had to try to smoothe over regular rows between Monty and American General Patton that became so personal that when Patton was finally the first to cross the Rhine the following March he telephoned General Bradley and said, ‘I want the
world to know that the Third Army made it across before Monty.’ Niv’s job as a peacemaker was not an enviable one.

In Belgium he was wounded when his jeep was blown up and he suffered a whiplash injury to his neck, a damaged right foot, a broken shoulder, and was left with lifelong pain in his lower back that had to be treated for many years by osteopaths in Britain and America. Sometimes his back would become locked if he bent the wrong way, and in later years he had to wear a brace for skiing, and the pain could be so bad that he would have to take to his bed for days at a time. Years later Niv told his daughter Fiona that the explosion had killed ‘a lot of his friends’ but he made no mention of it in
The Moon’s a Balloon
and was soon back in action in November, and even enjoying a spot of duck shooting and wild boar hunting near Bruges, where Roger Moore reported that Niv had a typically Nivenesque adventure. ‘He said that he and some friends were ten miles from Bruges and Bruges had fallen,’ Moore told me, ‘and they decided to go into the town because he remembered there was a rather good restaurant by a canal. The owner of this restaurant was so honoured that he got out his Book of Honour and opened some wonderful vintage wine that he’d kept away from the evil Boche, and then, half-pissed, they got into their jeep on their way back to brigade HQ and were stopped on the road by a Canadian military police patrol who said, “Where have you come from?” They said Bruges. “But Bruges is in German hands.”

‘ “Oh no,” said Niv. “It fell two days ago.”

‘ “Well, they retook it!” said the MP.’

In December, while the Battle of the Bulge was raging in Belgium, Niv was back again on leave in England, where Primmie and David had left Flaxford because Mrs Ames wanted the house back and were now living in a lovely rented fifteenth-century cottage, Wheat Butts, at Eton Wick, near Windsor. Flaxford had obviously seen some wild action during parties while they had been living there. ‘When they left there was an enormous hole in the carpet in the middle
of the sitting room,’ Mrs Ames told me, ‘and we decided that he’d been practising his dancing steps! I was so thrilled to get the house back that I didn’t ask them to replace the carpet. Otherwise they left the house in an excellent condition and they’d kept up the garden.’

Niv spent Christmas with Primmie, the baby and the Trees at Ditchley Park, but despite all his leaves, privileges and comparatively relaxed lifestyle, the war had scarred him. ‘Once this thing is over and I have been demobilized,’ he wrote to Nigel Bruce in November, ‘I hope I shall never have to mention it again … I have seen too much misery, horror and suffering ever to want to brag about being even a small part of it all.’ He was bitter about having wasted five of the best years of his life while other ‘young and healthy men’ had evaded their duty. ‘They may have made themselves famous and wealthy during the last few years,’ he told Bruce, ‘but their insides will still be rotten at the end of it. We pity them. I met one the other day in London, an English actor who took out American citizenship papers in 1940 to avoid the war over here. He was now in the uniform of one of Uncle Sam’s GIs. I laughed a lot.’

In January he returned to Paris and headed into Germany, where he found among the effects of a German SS Battalion Commander in Stolberg a book containing photographs of beaches in Britain that were said to be just right for a German invasion, including a beach at Bembridge. He posted it to the secretary of the Bembridge Sailing Club with a note saying, ‘The enclosed might amuse you and the members … It made me quite homesick.’ In March he returned to England on leave, Primmie became pregnant again, and back in Germany he crossed the Rhine at Wesel and drove on to Munster, Hanover and Osnabrück. The end of the war was only days away. On 30 April Hitler shot himself in his underground bunker in Berlin as the Allies closed in remorselessly on all sides, and in the first few days of May Niv swept on through Bremen, Nienburg, Hamburg and Liebenau before Germany
surrendered on 8 May and the war was over at last after six terrible years.