Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (26 page)

Niv’s own chosen highlight from all those months of filming came when he was chasing some redcoats across a glen, tripped, and sank his claymore deep into the leg of one of the enemy extras, Bob Head. ‘Cut!’ shouted the director, but he was wrong: the leg was false; the original had been lost during the war at the real Battle of El Alamein. The only consolation of the entire movie was that Jack Hawkins became a close friend and asked Niv to be his first son’s godfather. ‘They had the same boyish sense of humour and both were great raconteurs,’ Doreen Hawkins told me. ‘If you got them at a table together nobody else got a word in!’

Several of Niv’s friends believe that about now he had a fling with Princess Marina, the widowed, forty-year-old Duchess of Kent who had affairs with several actors, most notably Danny Kaye, Doug Fairbanks Jr and the band leader Edmundo Ros. Some of them also believe that at some time he had an affair with another royal lady, Princess Margaret. ‘It’s highly possible,’ said the song writer Leslie Bricusse. ‘They were very fond of each other and, like Princess Marina, Margaret put it about.’

Princess Margaret and her mother, the Queen, both attended the Royal Command Film Performance of
The Bishop’s Wife
on 25 November at the Odeon Theatre in Leicester Square. ‘The audience loved every second of it,’ Niv reported to Goldwyn, ‘and the Queen and Princess Margaret told me afterwards and at great length how much they had enjoyed it. So once more many congratulations on a great achievement and enormous personal courage in the early stages of the production.’

Goldwyn’s affection for David was such that he sent him a remarkably handsome Christmas present: a cheque for $25,000, which in modern terms would be worth about £135,000. ‘As you know,’ he wrote, ‘conditions are worse now than ever before in the business, but nevertheless I feel that you have worked hard and well this past year. So I want to express my feeling concretely instead of just in words.’

Astonishingly it was while Niv was dressed in his Bonnie Prince Charlie get-up and make-up – looking, according to the
Sunday Graphic
critic, about as comfortable as ‘a goldfish in a haggis’ – that he met and won the heart of the woman who was to become his second wife, Hjördis Tersmeden. A tall, stunningly good-looking twenty-eight-year-old divorced model from Stockholm, with shoulder-length red-gold hair, she was enjoying a few weeks’ holiday in England with friends who knew Anthony Kimming, the director of
Bonnie Prince Charlie
, and had been invited onto the set at the beginning of December. She was sitting in Niv’s personal canvas chair when he stalked back after yet another late retake on yet another day of chaos and humiliation in front of the cameras, looking absurd in a white wig. ‘Get her out of it!’ he snapped at a props man.

‘Take a look first,’ murmured Hawkins, who had been married himself to Doreen, his second wife, for only a few weeks. ‘Take a look.’

Niv did, and was instantly besotted. ‘The French have the right word –
coup de foudre
,’ he wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon
. ‘I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life – tall, slim, auburn hair, uptilted nose, lovely mouth and the most enormous grey eyes I had ever seen. It really happened the way it does when written by the worst lady novelists … I goggled. I had difficulty swallowing and I had champagne in my knees. Ten days later, we were married.’

Well, not quite: it was six weeks later, but that was still incredibly fast. Hjördis – whose name was pronounced Yerdiss but always incorrectly by Niv and his friends as Yawdiss – spoke little English but enough to tell him that she designed and modelled clothes, and had her own fashion page in a weekly magazine. She had been born Hjördis Paulina Genberg, had been raised in the extreme north of Sweden at Kiruna, inside the icy Arctic Circle, and had married an immensely rich yacht-owning Swedish businessman, Carl Tersmeden, at the end of the war but had divorced him after
eighteen months, though they remained friends. ‘David has a wonderful way of making every woman he talks to feel important and attractive,’ she wrote in a ghosted autobiographical series in
Woman
magazine in 1964. ‘Among his many virtues he is a fabulous listener. In fact he has cultivated it as an art … I was charmed, captivated, enslaved by this man. The funny thing was that I didn’t really know anything at all about him. I had never actually seen any of his films and had only rather vaguely heard his name.’

He took her to a riverside pub, plied her with Black Velvet, taught her to play darts, pretending to be good at it, ‘and, young as I was,’ she said, ‘I became conscious that he was showing off in front of me, just like a young lad with his first girlfriend. I cannot deny that I loved him for it.’ The next day he took her to Buck’s for lunch and was ‘so sweet, so gay, so charming’ that although both were due to spend the weekend with friends they met for dinner on the Monday and every day that week. One afternoon she met five-year-old David and two-year-old Jamie in Niv’s dressing room. ‘They were sweet,’ she told
Woman
. ‘We played all sorts of silly games together, dressing up in fancy hats and clothes we found about the set … Yet somehow it never really sank into my consciousness that these were David’s children. He was the only person in focus for me at that moment.’ The following weekend they stayed with a friend of his in the country, sat up until after midnight listening to jazz records, and he told her that he would have to return to Hollywood in a few days. ‘And then, terribly awkwardly and terribly shyly, almost off-hand and detached, like the so-typical Briton he is, he said: “I don’t want to leave you behind.” Then it all came out in a rush. “Darling, will you marry me?” It was exactly eight days from the time we had first met. I said: “Yes, of course,” and … I was immensely thrilled and excited, … never realizing for a moment what I was taking on.’

Sweetly he introduced her to Primmie’s father, Bill Rollo –
‘David was very fond of Father,’ said Andrew Rollo – almost as though he were seeking the approval of Primmie herself. Rollo gave them his blessing and they were married at South Kensington register office (not Chelsea, as he said in
The Moon’s a Balloon
) on Wednesday, 14 January 1948. They told several newspapers that they had known each other for six weeks and that it had been after a month, not eight days, that they had decided to marry, and Hjördis told the
Daily Mirror
that she had recently been to the cinema to see
The Bishop’s Wife
‘and I thought he was wonderful’. Niv was thirty-seven, Hjördis twenty-eight, and Trubshawe was again the best man, though he had serious doubts about Niv’s choice of bride. So did Grizel, who told me: ‘I didn’t think much of Hjördis.’ On the night before the wedding his friend Audrey Pleydell-Bouverie gave a party for them where Trubshawe met Hjördis for the first time and warned her that she was mistaken if she thought that marrying David would give her an immediate career in films. She was furious and he told Morley that she did not speak to him again for fifteen years, but this is not true: a photograph taken two years later shows her smiling happily while he gave her a big, hairy kiss on her forehead. But his instinct was right. ‘She thought that she could be Garbo,’ Lauren Bacall told Guy Evans of October Films for his 2003 TV documentary
Brits in Hollywood
. ‘She certainly was not an actress, but I think she thought that maybe something wonderful would happen to her and she’d have a movie career. Well of course that was never going to happen.’

By now Niv was having second thoughts himself. ‘Tomorrow, Trubshawe,’ he said, ‘I am going to get married again, thereby quite possibly making the greatest mistake of my life.’ His words were horribly prophetic. ‘David was now going through an agony of indecision,’ Trubshawe told Morley. ‘I was with him late that night when he suddenly decided it had all been too fast and that he was making the most terrible mistake [
and
] it was all going to be a disaster. So I told him
that it still wasn’t too late, the wedding could still be called off; but he said no, he’d started and he’d go through with it and just see what happened afterwards. As you can imagine, it wasn’t the easiest of weddings.’

Niv’s sons and friends believe that he married Hjördis on the rebound. ‘He didn’t want to get involved with the actresses he had affairs with,’ Pinkie told me. ‘He got too involved with Rita Hayworth and I think he married Hjördis on the rebound from her.’ Doreen Hawkins agreed and told me that Bob Coote said that after Primmie’s death Niv ‘was being so chased by women Hollywood stars, with Rita Hayworth heading the chase, that he was terrified he might have to marry one of them, which was part of the reason he was so attracted to Hjördis’. Robert Wagner told me that the only explanation was that ‘Hjördis was a
beautiful
woman, very attractive and fun, and David was alone and had the two boys.’ Doug Fairbanks agreed: Niv unmarried, he said, ‘was a fish out of water; he was lonesome’. David Jr told me that ‘she was really pretty and the sex was probably good’ and Jamie told me: ‘I can’t imagine the
verbal
communication was anything that great. She never learned to speak English that well and she always had a heavy accent, and her ability to speak any language other than Swedish was appalling.’ After all the affairs that Niv had had since Primmie’s death it does seem odd that he should have married Hjördis so quickly instead of simply having an affair with her. ‘From the moment I was an adult until the moment he died I asked him about that,’ said Jamie, ‘and I never got an answer worth repeating.’ Roddy Mann was equally baffled. ‘I don’t know why he did,’ he told me, ‘I never could figure it out,’ even though Niv told him somewhat unconvincingly for his
Sunday Express
column in 1964: ‘I was in love, but I
do
believe in quick proposals. I think you should discover each other’s faults as you go along. If you’re really in love you’ll change. Whereas if you stay single, you won’t. And by the time you get around to thinking of marriage you’ve both got a list as
long as your arm of things you hate in each other.’

The boys stayed with Pinkie at the hotel in Egham during the wedding, for which Niv wore a dark suit with a flower in his buttonhole and Hjördis looked radiantly sexy in a brown, two-piece suit, feathered hat, ankle-strap sandals, gold brooch, and lush beaver fur coat with orchids on the lapel, and they were mobbed by fans, reporters, photographers and two TV vans.

It was nearly two weeks since the filming of
Bonnie Prince Charlie
had finished but David was still exhausted, partly because he was suffering from flu and partly because he was fighting yet another battle with the British taxman, who was demanding more back taxes because he had returned to Britain without being out of the country for three years. He told Goldwyn he was going to take a decent holiday, a honeymoon, before returning to Hollywood even though Goldwyn had told him he had to be back by 2 February to make another film. Goldwyn sent a sharp letter making it plain that he felt David was becoming arrogant, demanding and selfish, and needed to be cut down to size. The letter deserves to be quoted almost in full because it shows vividly that just a month after sending David a huge bonus Goldwyn had had enough of his increasingly prima donna attitude and was prepared to threaten him. He said he had already agreed to let Niv have a month off following the end of
Bonnie Prince Charlie
and was not prepared to let him have yet another fortnight:

Niv took the warning and three days after the wedding he, Hjördis, Pinkie and the boys sailed for New York on the
Queen Elizabeth
. But rebellion was festering in his breast because he felt that Goldwyn was exploiting him and mishandling his career by lending him out all the time to make bad films for other producers who paid Goldwyn much more than Goldwyn paid him. With resentment building on both sides, a showdown was fast approaching.

Hjördis was always to claim that it was not until they were aboard the
Queen Elizabeth
at Southampton that Niv told her
that David Jr and Jamie were his sons and that she had become a stepmother as well as a wife. ‘I woke up to reality,’ she told
Woman
, ‘when … the door of the adjoining cabin burst open. There were David and Jamie jumping around excitedly to greet their Daddy – with an unsmiling nanny behind them.’ The unsmiling Pinkie, shocked by Niv’s sudden remarriage, was soon to go. ‘Pinkie was terrific, just like a mother,’ David Jr told me, but Doreen Hawkins said, ‘one thing Hjördis did was to get rid of Primmie’s nanny,’ and Pinkie told me herself: ‘She didn’t have much to do with the boys for three months and left me to look after them, but the boys took to her – David Jr liked her because she let him do what he wanted and spoiled him a bit – and I left after five months because I thought I should get out and let her get on with it, and I became a nanny in San Francisco.’ Hjördis told Niv naïvely that she wanted to be the boys’ best friend or older sister rather than their stepmother, though they did start to call her Mummy. ‘It’s not easy for any young girl to marry a widower,’ she wrote, ‘especially if he is the father of two sons whose mother meant so much to him. David often talked to me about his first wife … “Primmie was a wonderful girl,” David told me. “And so are you, darling. Surely it is not given to many men to be so lucky twice.” ’ But she admitted: ‘I was jealous of David’s first wife, but it wasn’t anything one could fight. He never said to me that he considered her the perfect wife and mother, but I suspect he thought she was. Compared with her, I felt so inadequate. I couldn’t cook, I didn’t know anything about children, I wasn’t even very interested in dressing myself up smartly and I’m most untidy. I’m sure he couldn’t help contrasting her and all her wonderful gifts with me.’ As Doreen Hawkins put it, ‘The trouble with a dead wife is that it’s not like a divorce. You can’t compete.’