Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (24 page)
Read Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven Online
Authors: Graham Lord
Niv (right) back in England and the army in 1940, reunited with his joky old Highland Light Infantry chum Trubshawe, and ‘playing the bagpipes’.
Major David Niven
(second from the left)
and the Duke of Kent inspecting Niven’s Phantom Reconnaissance Regiment squadron in 1942.
David with his beloved first wife, Primula (‘Primmie’) Rollo, whom he married in 1940 a couple of weeks after meeting her.
Primmie, Niv and their sons David
(right, aged three)
and Jamie at Jamie’s christening in December 1945.
Primmie and Niv at the Stork Club in New York in 1946. Six weeks later, after a stupid accident during a party game in Hollywood, she was dead.
David and his glamorous second wife, twenty-eight-year-old Swedish model Hjördis Tersmeden, after their wedding at South Kensington registry office in London on 14 January 1948.
Hjördis and David on honeymoon: a portrait in the society magazine
Sketch
a fortnight after their wedding. Hjördis was often photographed for glossy magazines and appeared on the cover of
Life
three months later.
Niv and Jack Hawkins in yet another ridiculous costume epic,
The Elusive Pimpernel
, in 1949. Niven ‘makes his first embarrassed entrance like the dame in some nightmare pantomime’, said
The Times
and Sam Goldwyn told the producer Alexander Korda, ‘It’s the worst picture I have ever seen in my life.’
Niven with Vera-Ellen and Cesar Romero in the 1950 movie
Happy Go Lovely
, in one of the many elegant roles that gave him his smooth Hollywood image. It was Romero who had suggested four years earlier the party game ‘Sardines’ during which Primmie Niven suffered the accident that killed her.
Niv had another reason for not coming home. ‘He said that he had an incredible, peculiar way of grieving for her,’ Tom Hutchinson told me. ‘He said that he had an erection all the time and couldn’t be satisfied, and it became quite difficult to walk around. “I was insatiable,” he told me. “No woman was safe. It was no disrespect or lack of love for Primmie – I was just trying to get something out of my system that was better out than in. I believe I was very ill in a sexual kind of way.” And because he was David Niven he could have any woman he wanted. He went to one party where he drank a huge amount and woke up the next morning with a terrible hangover and in bed with a girl: Marilyn Monroe!’ Monroe was still an unknown twenty-year-old, recently divorced from her first husband, James Dougherty, and about to make her first film,
Dangerous Years
. ‘Niven became quite worried about his condition,’ said Hutchinson, ‘and went to see a psychiatrist who said he’d get over it.’
He took a long time to get over it. ‘He became a womaniser out of desperation,’ Lauren Bacall told me. ‘He had lots of women. He was in such a state.’ Pat Medina became so appalled by his compulsive shagging that she took him for a long walk on the beach near her house at Malibu and gave him a lecture about all ‘the prominent young starlets that he
was running around with’. She said, ‘It’s time I talked to you. You’re behaving very badly. What are you doing? Everybody’s talking about it.’ Niv replied, ‘I’m anaesthetising myself through certain parts of my anatomy.’ One of his lovers was the deliciously merry, light-hearted, twenty-three-year-old Ava Gardner, who had just emerged from an affair with Howard Hughes, and Niv became such a sexual reprobate that he had a one-way mirror installed between the men’s and women’s changing rooms in the swimming pool cabin at the Pink House. ‘You could see through into the ladies’ changing room,’ chuckled John Mills, ‘so the men’s changing room was always crowded!’