Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (34 page)

‘Why have you told so many
awful
lies?’ Deborah Kerr’s mousy little spinster asks the ‘major’ in the film.

‘Because I don’t like myself the way I am, I suppose,’ he replies. ‘I’ve had to invent somebody else. It’s not too hard, really. We all have our daydreams. Mine have just gone a step further than most people’s. Sometimes I’ve even managed to believe in the major myself’ – just as Niv himself came to believe in the fibs he had told so often about himself. ‘David knew all about the weak character of the major keeping up a front,’ said Alexander Walker, ‘because he had to keep up a front himself in life, so he was excellent in the part and deserved the Oscar for that very reason.’ Like the ‘major’, too, Niv feared all his life that one day he would be exposed as a fraud. ‘He always used to say he was scared of being found out,’ his son Jamie told me, ‘that he’d wake up one morning and someone would tap him on the shoulder and say “you know you’re not any good”.’

He was in fact superb in
Separate Tables
. ‘
NIVEN’S MASTERPIECE
’ ran the
Daily Herald
headline. ‘The finest role of his career,’ said the
Daily Sketch
. ‘Excellent,’ said
Time
. ‘A shining performance,’ said the
Evening News
. ‘Beautifully characterised,’ said the
Sunday Times
. It was a powerful and deeply poignant performance, the best of his career, that proved that he was not just a lightweight comic actor. ‘He won the Oscar deservedly,’ Bryan Forbes told me. ‘Lesser people have won it for much less.’

Yet he was still so insecure that just before the film was released he told his agent, Phil Gersh, ‘Nobody wants me. I guess I’m finished and perhaps I should return to London where I feel there is employment,’ and instead of waiting for just the right film to follow it he grabbed the first two that came his way. As soon as
Separate Tables
was released, he told Tom Hutchinson: ‘I got some wonderful films offered to me but I couldn’t take them. I had already contracted to do two more of the usual crap.’ Michael Parkinson asked him on his TV show in 1981 why he had not had much better roles after winning the Oscar. ‘I suppose I dropped the ball,’ he replied. ‘You do the next film for the scratch. I never expected to get the Oscar and I was booked for two more films after that.’

Shooting of
Separate Tables
was finished by the first week of January 1958 and briefly there was a chance that he might be cast as James Bond in the first of the films about the British secret agent 007. Bond’s creator, Niv’s old friend Ian Fleming, was keen that he should have the part but eventually it went to Sean Connery.

In the middle of March the Nivens spent a jolly weekend at Palm Springs with Mike Todd and his twenty-six-year-old wife of just a year, Elizabeth Taylor, and they got on so well that Todd invited them again for the following weekend, but tragedy was only days away. On 22 March his plane crashed in New Mexico and he was killed. He was only forty-eight, the same age as David, and two months later one of Niv’s oldest friends, Ronnie Colman, died in Santa Barbara of a
lung infection at the age of sixty-seven. He had a third shock just a few months after Todd’s death when Liz Taylor embarked on a scandalous affair with the singer Eddie Fisher, who was married to Debbie Reynolds, and married him the following year. David was appalled, and though he and Liz ‘had been fast friends, he cut E. dead for seven months’, wrote her next husband, Richard Burton, in his diary nine years later. ‘Though we were still friendly it could never be the same again.’ Niv’s disapproval of Taylor and Fisher was decidedly hypocritical considering his own sexual rampage after Primmie’s death.

At the end of March he and Hjördis tried to repair their battered marriage by going around the world in a hundred and eighty days – six months – during which they visited Japan and Hong Kong with Shirley MacLaine and her husband Steve Parker and Thailand, India, Turkey and Venice on their own. When they reached Greece David Jr and Jamie, now fifteen and twelve, flew out to sail with them around the Greek islands on a chartered ketch. They flew home via Sweden, to see Hjördis’s family, and back to the Pink House in August. Niv treasured his memories of that long trip: the beauty of Jaipur, where everything was painted a shocking pink, even the elephants’ accoutrements; the tiny, dainty, lemon-coloured women of Bangkok, whom he called ‘the loveliest people in the world’; the jewel-like little Italian
palazzi
of Venice; the glittering sparkle of the Aegean Sea. But the long break did nothing for his marriage. Hjördis was as unappreciative as ever and increasingly irritated and jealous to find that David was recognised everywhere, even in the backwaters of Third World countries. ‘He gets all the attention,’ she complained in her series in
Woman
six years later and added, ‘Then there is the question of other women. It would be terrible if they didn’t flirt with David for it would mean he had lost his charm. But I think they make fools of themselves when they overdo it. I used to get mad when they overdid it.’ The storm clouds over their marriage were
growing darker, and Hjördis’s own behaviour with other men was just as outrageous as that of her husband’s women admirers.

‘We first met her and David in 1958 in La Jolla, California, when we went to dinner at a friend’s house,’ I was told by Valerie Youmans, who later became friendly with David when they lived in Switzerland.

That summer of 1958 Niv assessed his life so far in the series he contributed to the
Sunday Express
and said he thought that maybe he was growing up at last – and about time too at forty-eight. He had been ‘a man strolling rather casually through life, and not taking any of it very seriously’, he said. ‘I find nothing dynamic or sensational in my character, and that is a pity. But if I find a man who so far has not accomplished anything very startling, I also see a man who hasn’t really done much harm. It is not an electrifying portrait.’ Nor
was it a fair one, for he had made a few excellent movies as well as many dreadful ones, had brightened millions of lives and whenever he walked into a room he cheered people up, all of which is a great deal more than most of us achieve.

Separate Tables
had yet to be released but word of Niv’s performance reached one of Hollywood’s most powerful agents, fifty-nine-year-old Bert Allenberg, who approached him at a party one night towards the end of November and said he would like to handle him and had several ideas for giving his career a major boost. David’s current hard-working agent, Phil Gersh, had become a good friend but Allenberg was in a different league and Niv’s contract with Gersh was about to run out. He ‘carefully weighed his ambition and greed against his integrity’, he wrote in
Bring on the Empty Horses
, decided to tell Gersh he would not be renewing their contract and ‘was surprised at how easy it must have been for Judas Iscariot’. Gersh was deeply hurt to be dumped. ‘You were the first actor I ever
really
liked,’ he told him. ‘Now I know you are just the same as all the rest.’ David felt bad about it but on the Monday morning told Allenberg he had done the dirty deed and Allenberg promised that he would be seeing two major movie moguls the next day and would have good news for him on the Wednesday. Tuesday dragged by and with mounting excitement Niv called Allenberg’s office first thing on the Wednesday morning. ‘Mr Allenberg died last night,’ said his secretary.

Separate Tables
opened in December and was showered with sparkling reviews. ‘One of the year’s finest achievements,’ said the
New York Herald Tribune
. The New York critics circle gave David their award for best actor and in due course he was nominated too for the Oscar. One of the New York critics, however, announced belligerently that he had voted against him, and David was so curious to find out why that he took him out for lunch and asked him. ‘Because,’ said the critic aggressively, ‘some British army ex-lieutenant fucked my wife in Bermuda, that’s why!’

‘Say no more!’ said Niv.

He earned more excellent reviews for another romantic comedy,
Ask Any Girl
, this time with Shirley MacLaine, in which he played the prissy boss of a research agency who tries to play Cupid for his brother and a naïve young country girl but ends up winning her himself. The reviewers loved both him and the film, which ‘seems to confirm him as a captain and
chef du protocol
of Hollywood’s British colony for the next twenty years or so’, said the
Daily Mail
. The critics were much less enthusiastic about
Happy Anniversary
, a risqué little domestic comedy about premarital sex which he made in New York with Mitzi Gaynor after Doris Day backed out because she thought it might damage her pure, virginal screen image, and the film did cause a stir in America because although the main characters have been married for thirteen years, it was considered scandalous that they should admit that they had been lovers long before their wedding. ‘David said he slept with unmarried people all the time!’ the film’s producer, Ralph Fields, told me.

So did Hjördis. ‘She started to look around for men,’ Betty Bacall told me. ‘Getting older did not agree with her and she had several affairs and that was bad news. She should never have done that.’ Not even when Niv was himself so often unfaithful? ‘No, I don’t think you can blame him for that. I think she brought it all on herself. I’m sure he was not always easy to live with but
nobody
’s easy to live with.’

In February 1959 the Nivens were due to go to the Berlin Film Festival and then visit Hjördis’s family in Sweden again, but they had grown so far apart that she changed her mind at the last minute, preferring to stay in California, perhaps because of a boyfriend, and David went on his own. Peter Ustinov, who was also suffering an unhappy marriage, was living mostly in Paris at the time and ‘occasionally Niv would ring up and we’d go out to some small restaurant where nobody knew us’, he told me, ‘largely because we knew that neither of us was very happy because of our unhappy
marriages. I remember him saying, “I told Hjördis that in order to be loved you should try to be lovable.” I don’t think he was to blame for her behaviour. I think she was intrinsically flawed in some way. She was very Scandinavian, very doomy and gloomy, and under the pressure of his second marriage he became a melancholy, introspective man. He found out what it’s like to be unloved, and to be making the effort but no effort is visible on the other side, so is it worth it? I’m sure he never really recovered from Primmie’s death and I think he had quite an unhappy life.’

As the night of the Oscars approached, Niv became increasingly nervous. He was up against Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier for their performances in
The Defiant Ones
, Paul Newman in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and Spencer Tracy in
The Old Man and the Sea
, and he thought he had no chance against such distinguished actors. To reinforce his pessimism the
Hollywood Reporter
quoted one producer as saying that he would not vote for Niv because he had merely copied Eric Portman’s stage performance, which he claimed Niv had seen forty times. David made the paper print an apology, insisting that he had seen the play only once, but he was convinced that now his chance of winning was zero, even though he received an encouragingly naughty letter from Bing Crosby two days before the Oscars ceremony. ‘Dear David,’ wrote Crosby. ‘I have committed a heinous breach of Academy discipline. I voted for you without ever having seen the picture “Separate Tables”. I’m glad I did though, because last night I got a chance to see the movie. Your performance is the most delicate, sensitive portrayal I’ve ever seen on the screen – a truly accurate delineation of a pitiable phony. Congratulations, David – win, lose or draw, Monday night.’

To add to the tension Niv was not only a nominee but also one of the three compères at the Oscar ceremony at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood on 6 April 1959, and for nearly an hour, in front of an estimated television audience of 80 million, he went through the motions, self-conscious
in his white tie and tails, sweating, loosening his collar, tugging at his ear, only too aware of the TV cameras perched on the walls like vultures watching for the slightest weakness, as the speeches and awards went on and on. Wendy Hiller won the Oscar for best supporting actress for
Separate Tables
, so surely he could not win as well. Burl Ives was best supporting actor for
The Big Country
, Susan Hayward best actress for
I Want to Live
, and then it was the Oscar for the best actor. Irene Dunne opened the big white envelope, hesitated a moment and read out his name. Astonished, euphoric, he kissed Hjördis, jumped up and blundered through the applause towards the stage, running down the aisle, tripping on the steps, falling on his hands and knees. Irene Dunne gave him the golden Oscar statuette and a kiss, and flushed with pride he approached the microphone. ‘The reason I just fell down,’ he said, ‘was because I was so loaded …’ He meant to say ‘loaded down with good luck charms’ but the audience roared with delight, assuming he meant that he was drunk.