Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (22 page)

His main emotion was one not of triumph but exhausted relief. He had survived and so had his closest loved ones. But there was a residue of anger too. ‘I didn’t only hate the Nazis,’ he told Margaret Hinxman of the
Daily Mail
in 1979. ‘I hated Neville Chamberlain and his lot because they and Hitler had robbed me of six years of my life and many of my dearest friends.’ On a country road near Brunswick he came across an unarmed German general who was trying to make his way home disguised as a farmer. He had almost made it and had just one more kilometre to go. ‘I had never seen such utter weariness, such blank despair on a human face before,’ Niv wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon
, and he could not bring himself to take him prisoner and consign him to months of captivity and interrogation. He let him go.

It was time for him, too, to go home.

Seven

The Widower and the Model
1945–1949

N
iv returned from Germany on 31 May 1945, whisked Primmie and two-year-old David off for an idyllic holiday in Cornwall at the Ferryboat Inn at Frenchman’s Creek, and was hugely relieved when Goldwyn offered him a generous new five-year, $3000-a-week contract and told him that he wanted him to star immediately in
A Matter of Life and Death
, which was about to be shot in England by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The Rank Organisation wanted him to stay in England and make films at their Pinewood studios, but he hankered after Hollywood, accepted Goldwyn’s offer, and wrote to say that ‘so long as I am in your employment you will have my complete loyalty in all things and that I shall bend every effort to give you full value for your money and I hope you will never regret suggesting our new association together. I know that the last six years have changed me a great deal. I have had a fairly stormy passage at many points and none of it has been fun [
but
] I have been
terribly
lucky and if I seem to have lost a bit of the carefree attitude that I had towards life before 1939 I hope I shall make up for it by having been up to my eyebrows in worldly experience.’ He added, ‘For the past six years I have dreamed of nothing else but getting back to Hollywood … Everybody knows that you are the greatest producer in the business [
and
] it will be
grand
to get back again.’

Churchill called a general election for 5 July and was devastated to lose to the Labour Party in a political earthquake that gave Labour 393 seats against the Conservatives’ 213.
Even Niv voted Labour and against Churchill, much as he greatly admired the man himself, because like millions of others he believed that Britain needed a change of political philosophy and maybe a stiff dose of socialism. ‘He didn’t have strong political views and he said it was the only time he ever voted,’ his son Jamie told me. ‘Later he regretted voting Labour: they went after him for back taxes.’

Niv was incensed that the British taxman should be hounding him to pay back taxes for the years he had worked in Hollywood. The Revenue claimed that because he had returned to England in 1939 he had become a British resident again and so was liable to pay tax for the years he had been away, back as far as 1934. The fact that he had returned only to fight for his country left them unmoved. They demanded several thousand pounds, gave him three years to pay and he swore he would never live in Britain again.

In the meantime he and Primmie made the most of that English summer, enjoying parties with their actor friends and neighbours, especially at nearby Notley Abbey with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, where they always played after-dinner games in the library, especially word games, paper-and-pencil games, charades and a game similar to ‘Give Us a Clue’. David loved playing games and was soon badgering his guests too to join in when they came to his house. He was still, however, infected by a deep bitterness against actors such as Rex Harrison and James Mason whom he accused of cowardice because they had dodged their duty to fight for their country. ‘I have come out of the war with one or two complexes,’ he wrote to Goldwyn.

In August the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the war in the Far East was over at last. That Victory over Japan Day, 14 August, Niv celebrated by playing at the Berkshire Golf Club with three legendary RAF fighter pilots: Max Aitken, Laddie Lucas and Douglas Bader, who played off a handicap of 8 even though he had no legs. The next day Niv was given release leave to make
A Matter of Life and Death
and presented with the customary worsted army demob suit, hat, tie, shoes and two shirts, ‘poplin, with collars’. In due course he was awarded his four service medals, none of which he bothered to collect, and in November General Ray Barker presented him with an American decoration, the fourth-class medal of the Legion of Merit, for his liaison work. Niv was out of uniform at last though his name remained on the list of British army reserves for another nine years until he was finally freed of any military obligation in 1954 and granted the honorary rank of lieutenant-colonel. He had done his duty to the utmost.

At the end of August he signed his new contract with Goldwyn, who even gave him a generous indemnity promising that he would pay any tax the British Inland Revenue might levy on Niv’s earnings, and wrote to ask which of his friends David would like him and Frances to invite to a welcome home party when he returned to Hollywood. ‘You both know my tastes by now,’ replied Niv, ‘blondes, brunettes, red-heads – anything that moves and talks with a female voice!’

He began shooting
A Matter of Life and Death
at Denham Studios, in Devon and on Lundy Island. The film is a weird, surrealistic fantasy about the afterlife but was made with such passion that it has become a classic and a cult picture. Some consider it the best film David ever made and it is certainly memorably bold and powerful. He played a doomed RAF bomber pilot, Peter Carter, whose burning plane is about to crash on the English coast but who cannot bail out because his parachute has been shot to ribbons. As his aircraft loses height he speaks with brisk courage on his radio to a young American woman operator, June – played by Kim Hunter – who falls in love with his bravery and panache. The plane crashes and Carter is rushed away to have brain surgery. He should be dead, and maybe he is, but when an angel comes to claim him Carter demands to be allowed to live because he has kindled real love in June’s heart and surely love should conquer death. Most of the rest of the film depicts a court case in heaven as to whether he should be allowed to live, and against all expectations the result is an extraordinary movie, gripping and fresh as well as touching. Most of the cast are excellent – Marius Goring as the angel, Raymond Massey as the anti-British American prosecutor, Robert Coote as Carter’s dead radio engineer – and among the dead in heaven’s arrivals hall is a Flying Officer Trubshawe.

During filming ‘David had so many stories that were terribly funny that we began to think he was making them up’, Kim Hunter told the BBC for its 2003 television documentary
Living Famously: David Niven
. ‘The rest of the cast used to joke about it.’ Niv had high hopes for the film, which took two months to shoot, was released in Britain amazingly quickly, in November, and was chosen to be the first Royal Command Film Performance, much to the fury of most of the British critics, who were almost unanimously condescending, though the
Daily Telegraph
said quite rightly that ‘David Niven has done nothing quite so good as his airman trembling on the brink of a nervous breakdown without ever
lapsing into hysteria’. In America, where it was released under the title
Stairway to Heaven
, the reviewers were much kinder: the
New York Post
said that it was one of the three or four best films of the year and according to the
Journal American
it was ‘beautifully written, beautifully acted, beautifully executed’. The film’s director, Michael Powell, was delighted by Niv’s performance. ‘I had always admired his work,’ he said. ‘He seemed so often so much better than the material which he was in. I thought he would be marvellous as Peter Carter, because despite all that surface gallantry there is a sense of underlying strain which is only really perceived by the keen onlooker. It’s what always gives his performances that extra dimension of reality. Whatever you think about the film now, I think
he
was quite exceptional.’

While making the film Niv became good friends with the film critic Tom Hutchinson, who was writing for
Picturegoer
magazine. ‘Whenever he was in London after that we’d meet and have a drink and he was a great gossip – he loved gossip – and I remember some very bitchy stories that he told about Darryl Zanuck, like the one about how his teeth protruded so much that he could eat an apple through a tennis racket!’

David and Primmie, whose parents had now divorced, spent the last few days of her pregnancy staying in Mayfair with her father at 8 Farm Street, just off Berkeley Square, and a week before
A Matter of Life and Death
opened in Britain she gave birth in London to their second son on 6 November. They named him James Graham – he was always to be known as Jamie – and hired a thirty-two-year-old nanny, Beryl Rogers, who had until the previous month been an army private on an anti-aircraft gun-site in Belgium. ‘David was a wonderful man to work for,’ I was told in 2002 by eighty-eight-year-old Miss Rogers, who was known to the Nivens as Pinkie because of her pink nanny’s uniform. ‘He was very nice, always a gentleman, and Primmie was very pretty, very posh, and they adored each other. They held hands and kissed a lot.’

More than 2 million American and Canadian soldiers were trying to return home, every ship sailing to North America was packed, and Niv could find no berths for Primmie, Pinkie and the boys until April, but thanks to General Barker’s influence he managed to wangle a single ticket for himself to New York on the
Queen Mary
in the second week of December. Before he left London he threw a farewell party at Claridge’s for 200 people, from every stratum of society, who he felt had been especially nice to him and Primmie over the previous six years – generals, titled nobs, actors, nurses, taxi drivers – and he showed a rare streak of ruthlessness when he stood at the door and personally turned gatecrashers away. ‘Go away,’ he said to one, ‘you’ve never been nice to me in your life.’

He sailed for New York on 10 December, leaving his little family in Farm Street until they could follow him four months later. The ship was jammed with 15,000 soldiers, but Niv was euphoric: he was going back to sunny Hollywood again, away from mean little England with its rationing, low grey drizzle and thin-lipped tax inspectors. In New York he was fêted as a hero at a big cocktail party at his old haunt the 21, and Bill Mooring reported in
Picturegoer
that ‘the American Press is all steamed up about his return because, truth is, the American public holds him in higher esteem than any other British actor (with the possible exception of Ronnie Colman) who ever came to Hollywood’. He had not been forgotten. His fears that he might already have been superseded by younger actors were unfounded.

He took a sleeper train across the continent to California, arriving in Pasadena two days before Christmas, the day that Doug Fairbanks also arrived back from the war, and was greeted at Goldwyn’s studio by a huge banner that said ‘WELCOME HOME, DAVID!’ and a lunch for the Press and hundreds of Goldwyn’s employees where Goldwyn, Hedda Hopper and others made speeches extolling his courage and character. In his own speech he explained why he was never going to talk about the war. On his way through Belgium the
previous year he had found the grave of the son of some American friends who had asked him to look for it. ‘It was in the middle of 27,000 others,’ he said, ‘and I said to myself “here, Niven, are 27,000 reasons why you should keep your mouth shut”.’

He was due to attend a stag party that night for a hundred men that Eddie Goulding had arranged for him at Romanoff’s nightclub, but during the lunch he felt so ill that he took to his bed with a temperature of 104 degrees and bronchial pneumonia. The dinner went ahead, attended by many of Hollywood’s moguls as well as most of his friends – Cooper, Fairbanks, Flynn, Gable, Tyrone Power – and Goulding arranged for a telephone link to his bedside and an amplifier so that Niv could hear all the speeches and listen to the Scottish pipe band. After Christmas he convalesced at Goulding’s home at Palm Springs and lived for a few weeks in the Fairbanks’ beach house while he looked for somewhere to buy.

Goldwyn decided that the best way to rebuild his career would be to yoke him in his next few films to some big female stars – to tie him to their apron strings, as Niv put it in a disillusioned letter a few months later – and for the first,
A Perfect Marriage
, he was cast with his old chum Loretta Young in a rubbishy movie, about a couple suffering from a ten-year itch and contemplating divorce, that Niv himself called ‘a stinker’.

Niv was a stinker himself when it came to his own perfect marriage. His infidelity was constant and compulsive, even though he loved Primmie so much. ‘It was innate in him,’ I was told by Patricia Medina, who was by now unhappily married to Richard Greene. ‘Before she arrived in Hollywood Niv was quite busy with the ladies! He wasn’t anybody’s angel. He would have been a Romeo whoever he was married to. It was just in him to be unfaithful.’ When not in pursuit of crumpet he went after fish with Clark Gable and played a lot of golf, once with Douglas Bader, who liked to put an
opponent off his stroke at critical moments by knocking his pipe against his artificial leg. Less fun was Errol Flynn, who was now surrounded by hangers-on and drinking so much vodka that he was starting the day with huge slugs at 7 a.m. even when he was working.

During the eight weeks of filming
A Perfect Marriage
he found the home that Primmie had dreamed of, the first he ever owned: the Pink House in North Amalfi Drive, a rambling old building on a hillside high above Sunset Boulevard in a quiet, stylish, leafy suburb at Pacific Pallisades, next door to the Fairbankses, that he was able to buy thanks to the generosity of Goldwyn, who lent him enough for the deposit. It had been built forty years previously by Vicki Baum, the author of
Grand Hotel
, and had everything that Primmie wanted: plenty of scope for improvement, a big garden and a view of the mountains as well as the sea. Even its colour was the same pink as that of her childhood home in England, Cold Blow, and David paid much less than he expected because the basement was three feet deep in water. Meanwhile, as he waited for Primmie to arrive from England and start doing the place up, he rented a big Spanish house nearby in Beverly Hills at 1721 Chevy Chase Drive.