Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (25 page)

‘When a man is deeply unhappy,’ Niv wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon
,

Through frenetic sex, hard work and the constant support of those friends whom he did not reject, Niv slowly surfaced from the dark pool of his bottomless grief. At the end of August Goldwyn lent him out again, this time to United Artists to make
The Other Love
, a sentimental romantic tear jerker with Barbara Stanwyck, who played a brilliant concert
pianist who has tuberculosis and is sent to a private sanatorium in the Swiss Alps that is run by a doctor, played by Niv, whom she marries before she dies. The reviewers were incredibly unkind in view of Niv’s bereavement – the
New Yorker
remarked with stunning insensitivity that ‘Niven has a rather mortuary air’ – and when I saw the film I found myself on the brim of tears not because of the movie itself but because of his raw courage in playing a man whose beloved wife is dying, just three months after his own had died. At times during the film he seems about to burst into tears and the final love scene, as his wife lies dying, must have been terrible for him.

Yet Niv could be astonishingly insensitive himself. The editor of the
Daily Express
in London, Arthur Christiansen, asked him to write a chatty occasional column from Hollywood in the form of a letter to Trubshawe, who was now running a pub in Sussex, the Lamb Inn at Hoe, near Battle. The first letter, published on 17 September, was a genial series of harmless plugs for forthcoming films starring old friends such as Cary Grant, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Tyrone Power and James Stewart – and even the detested Rex Harrison – but in the second, unbelievably, he reported that ‘Hollywood is still playing games after dinner and the one that I enjoy most is known as “the drawing game” ’ and then devoted the entire column – about 1300 words – to a dreary account of a recent evening playing the game at the Fairbanks’s house with Annabella, Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Jennifer Jones, David Selznick, Lilli Palmer and the despicable coward Rex Harrison. At least he did not recommend Sardines. Very sensibly he was not prepared to be bitchy or indiscreet about his friends and colleagues, so the
Daily Express
‘letters’ were dull and when the third included a shameless plug about the despised Rex Harrison’s future film plans the paper cancelled the deal.

Goldwyn had made $15,000 a week out of Niv when he lent him out to make
The Other Love
and since he was paying
him only $3000 a week he sent him voluntarily what Niv called ‘a large number of dollars’. ‘You have been extremely generous to me this year and I am deeply grateful,’ said Niv in a letter of thanks. ‘I have had a horrible year in my private life and it has been a wonderful feeling to know that you have been behind me through all my troubles … I am really grateful to you for your great kindness … and hope that in the many more years we shall have together I shall fully justify your faith in me … I don’t want to alarm you, but you have a happy actor on your hands.’

Not for much longer. His next film was one of Goldwyn’s own productions, a jolly comedy called
The Bishop’s Wife
, in which at first he was cast to play an angel who comes down to earth to help a Protestant bishop and his wife – Cary Grant and Loretta Young – to raise enough money to build a cathedral and save their arid marriage. Niv had told Goldwyn that he thought it was one of the most charming stories he had ever read and that the angel was a marvellous part, but Grant was a bigger box-office star and insisted on playing the better part himself. Niv was furious, even though he was excellent as the bishop; the role forced him actually to act rather than to play himself yet again, and the film was amusing and delightful, a sweet, warm-hearted, touching and old-fashioned piece of charming entertainment and rare proof that he could actually act. And among the bishop’s congregation, of course, is a couple called Trubshawe.

Despite its lightness of touch the film was plagued by problems and setbacks. Grant was sulky after Goldwyn complained that he was not sufficiently masculine as the angel. Loretta Young was upset when Goldwyn told her she looked too glamorous for a bishop’s wife and kept calling her Laurette Taylor. When told that Laurette Taylor had been dead for months he replied, ‘That’s funny. I was talking to her only a few moments ago.’ After two weeks of shooting Goldwyn hated the early rushes, sacked the director, hired another, scrapped the script, ordered the sets to be completely altered
and started all over again at a cost said to be $900,000. After all that it was a picture that had most of the critics sneering, yet when it was released in time for Christmas 1947 the public loved it. It was nominated for an Oscar as the best film of 1947, and in Britain was selected for that year’s Royal Command Film Performance, the second time a movie of Niv’s had been chosen. It also put him firmly back on the map in America and he was signed up to appear in a series of full-page magazine advertisements extolling the power of General Electric television sets and the joys of Friskies Dog Food. Despite six years away from Hollywood he was once again a star.

The Bishop’s Wife
was the only movie that the two light-comedy English exiles Grant and Niven made together. ‘We got on very well,’ Grant told Morley,

One marvellous rearrangement of the truth was when Niv told the
Daily Mirror
in February that he had just bought his body back after having sold it in 1933 to no fewer than four hospitals for £4 each. In truth he had pawned it to just one
hospital and it had already been redeemed and returned to him eleven years earlier by Max, who had just emigrated to South Africa with his wife to try his hand at yet another job, this time as a stockbroker near Durban. Perhaps Niv told newspapers these fibs and rehashed stories to generate publicity, but he hardly needed to do so. In March he began an affair that lasted longer and seemed more serious than most of his flings – with Rita Hayworth, whom he called ‘the super love goddess’, and who was very keen to marry him. She was about to divorce her husband, Orson Welles, after only eighteen months of marriage and when the Press heard about her romance with Niv they reported that they were about to marry. Both issued denials. ‘All the blather that’s being printed about my marrying or being engaged to Rita Hayworth is utter rubbish,’ Niv told the
News of the World
in London. ‘I’m furious and unhappy about it. Please refute the story and tell the man who first put it around to confine his activities in the future to writing on walls.’ He told another newspaper: ‘Rita is a darling and probably the only really sweet girl out here, but neither of us want to marry and she will never become Primmie II: I doubt that anyone could.’

Slowly he started to come to terms with his grief and enjoy the Pink House with Pinkie, the boys and his many friends, but then Goldwyn dropped a grenade into his fragile new life: he lent him to Korda to star in an historical epic,
Bonnie Prince Charlie
, which was to be filmed in Britain in the autumn and would take months to make. Niv was appalled. He had just begun to rebuild his life, his children were settled, and the last thing he wanted was to go all the way back to Britain for several months, especially since his earnings would again become liable for British tax if he were there for so long. He begged Goldwyn not to make him go, but Goldwyn was adamant. Korda had agreed to pay him $15,000 a week for David’s services for a minimum of ten weeks, and the same for any further weeks that might be necessary, while Goldwyn was paying David $3000 a week, leaving him with a neat
profit of $12,000 a week. David refused to go. Goldwyn immediately put him on suspension, which meant that he paid him nothing at all for several weeks, knowing that now that Niv had fat mortgage payments to make he would not be able to hold out for long. To be fair to Goldwyn, it was Niv himself who had first suggested more than a year previously that he should star in a film about Charles Stuart, the Jacobite Young Pretender to the throne of Britain who raised a Scots army in 1745 to try to overthrow the Hanoverian king. In October 1945 David had written to Goldwyn: ‘It is the most colourful and romantic story ever told and I have always … had my heart set on playing it.’ He had even shot a colour test of one of the key scenes in the film and had given it to Goldwyn to see what he looked like in the part, so Goldwyn was entitled to insist that he should play it.

Niv had long wanted to learn how to paint, so while he was suspended he went to an art school run by a Mr Finch. ‘There was a dilapidated ballerina who was going to hold this pose for five weeks,’ Niv told Michael Parkinson on his TV show in 1981. ‘I bought a canvas the size of this wall and I started at nine o’clock and by 11.15 I’d finished. So I said to Mr Finch “have you any suggestions?” and he said “make it smaller and move it to the left”.’ Many years later Niv was to write a novel that at first he called
Make It Smaller and Move It to the Left
.

Painting pictures was not going to pay his huge bills and he surrendered to Goldwyn with a bad grace, and sulked. Korda agreed even to indemnify David for any extra British tax he might incur, but still he sulked. He rented the Pink House to the English actress Phyllis Calvert, sailed to England with Pinkie and the boys at the end of July, refused to move into the suite at Claridge’s Hotel that Korda had reserved for them and checked instead into a country hotel just outside London, at Egham, near Shepperton Studios, where the film was to be shot. ‘
Bonnie Prince Charlie
was one of those huge florid extravaganzas that reek of disaster from the start,’ he
wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon
. ‘There was never a completed screenplay and never at any time during the eight months we were shooting were the writers more than two days ahead of the actors. We suffered three changes of director with Korda himself, for a time, desperately taking over and at one point I cabled Goldwyn as follows:
I HAVE NOW WORKED EVERY DAY FOR FIVE MONTHS ON THIS PICTURE AND NOBODY CAN TELL ME HOW THE STORY ENDS
.’ In fact the film took only five months to shoot, but in a letter to Goldwyn three months after it began he wrote: ‘Chaos is reigning supreme at this studio. I started work with exactly 16 pages [
and
] THE SECOND HALF IS NOT YET WRITTEN.’ He pointed out that the first cameraman had been fired when Korda discovered that he had never shot a major picture before, let alone one in Technicolor, so that many scenes had to be filmed again and Niv was alarmed that he might still be shooting in England after 21 January, after which ‘somebody is horribly liable for an enormous chunk of taxation payable to the British Government!!’. He added, ‘Also please remember that I will have been in every shot, every day, bewigged, becloaked, besworded, and bewildered since the first day of the picture, and I am going to have to have a holiday this time, and a proper one, not like the one I had before this picture started. This holiday I would also like to have here in England because I have yet to see most of my friends, although I have been in the country for over three months.’

Goldwyn was unimpressed and made it plain that he thought that Niv was whingeing too much. ‘You should be pleased over the fact that when the picture is finished, you will have a picture in which you will be proud to have appeared,’ he replied, ‘instead of something that was just slapped together regardless of whether the director was right, the script was good enough and so on. I don’t have to tell you what Alex has done in the past and I imagine that he is aiming to outdo the past by making this picture one of real greatness. It may not be as pleasant over there as you would
like it but I assure you that you are probably having it much more pleasant there than I and other producers are having it back here.’ Goldwyn listed his own problems: a new British film tax that had all but destroyed his profits outside America; a twenty per cent collapse in the number of people going to the cinema; rocketing production costs. ‘This is really the time when a producer would be not only willing but anxious to swap what used to be his prospects for profit for the nice solid weekly check that some actors have their agents pick up for them every Thursday … I would gladly exchange my headaches for your problems right now.’ He softened his put-down by ending his letter: ‘You are still my favorite actor. Fondly, Sam.’

Unfortunately
Bonnie Prince Charlie
was not a film of ‘real greatness’. It cost £1 million to make – about £23 million in modern terms – and turned out to be a monstrous piece of historical hokum that is widely considered to be one of the worst films ever made. It was distinguished only by the crassness of the script, the staginess of the acting, the absurdity of many of the scenes and the ludicrous vision of Niv in a series of coloured wigs – blond, red and yellow – and curiously naked without his moustache. He also wore at various times breeches, stockings, a ponytail tied with a ribbon, a kilt, a sporran, a tartan sash, a velvet jabot, a tricorn hat and, not surprisingly, an uneasy fixed grin. ‘Jack,’ he asked thirty-seven-year-old Jack Hawkins, who was playing Lord George Murray, ‘tell me honestly. Do I look a prick?’ ‘Yes,’ said Hawkins, who looked equally penile with his bouffant prototype Teddy Boy hairstyle and a tartan rug draped over his shoulder. The ultimate delight of this ridiculous movie was the vision of Blind Jamie, a sightless seer staggering and crooning across the blasted heath, played to perfection by John Laurie with enough Highland ham to make even his gloriously over-the-top performance twenty-two years later as Private Frazer in the TV series
Dad’s Army
taste like prime beef.