Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (47 page)

In March at last he finished
Bring on the Empty Horses
– the order that Michael Curtiz had barked while filming
The Charge of the Light Brigade
. ‘I was going to London,’ said Evan Galbraith, ‘and David asked me to take the book to his publisher, and Hjördis said, “That’s another pack of lies”. She wouldn’t give him any credit for it and she had nothing but contempt for it.’ Niv wrote to Jamie Hamilton: ‘I am only too well aware that your original doubts may yet turn out to be very right indeed but lets pray that we are both wrong.’ As soon as he had read the script Hamilton realised that he had another bestseller on his hands and ordered a huge hardback first print run of 120,000 copies, but pre-publication orders for the new book were so vast that even that was not enough and it had to be reprinted two months before publication.

Despite Hamilton’s initial reluctance,
Bring on the Empty Horses
was not just another book about Hollywood but one by a brilliant raconteur who had known the place as an insider for forty years, and it was packed with anecdotes, insights and pen portraits of old friends such as Bogart, Colman, the Fairbankses, Flynn and Gable as well as four fictionalised chapters. In it he called Goldwyn ‘the greatest independent producer the world has ever seen’. He reported that when Greta Garbo came for lunch at Lo Scoglietto and
he asked her why she had retired from movies so young she replied, ‘I had made enough faces.’ He described Cary Grant spaced out on LSD, and a suicidal Errol Flynn sitting up all night with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a loaded revolver in another and ending up as a ‘boozing bum … puffy and blotchy’. Above all he depicted Hollywood as a brutal, meretricious place full of shallow, selfish, snobbish people and alcoholics, addicts, attempted suicides and nervous breakdowns. He quoted Wilson Mizner as saying that working for Warner Brothers was ‘like fucking a porcupine – it’s a hundred pricks against one’, and despite all the fun that Niv had had there himself he wrote of it now with shame and sometimes dislike, and lamented the deep unhappiness of many of its biggest names, from Gable to Scott Fitzgerald.

The book was edited again by Roger Machell and needed so much work on it that four years later Niv told Patrick Macnee that half of it ‘wasn’t his at all, it was written by the editor’. Yet this time Niv was even less keen to accept changes. ‘All the stories that Roger had taken out of
The Moon’s a Balloon
were there again,’ said Sinclair-Stevenson, ‘and Niven became quite difficult on the basis that if we told him what to do George Greenfield could easily find him another publisher.’ One casualty of the editing process was a section about Marilyn Monroe that accused her of being unprofessional, ungrateful, exhibitionist, ‘short on humour about herself’, and described her ‘bad temper, hysterics, thoughtlessness and dedicated love of self. When she was at the top, she thought nothing of keeping huge casts waiting for hours till she was ready to work. “Go fuck yourself!” she screamed at a quivering young assistant director who had been dispatched to enquire when her presence could be expected on the set.’ Niv even wrote that she was ‘not beautiful unless her mouth was slightly open’ – one of the few occasions that he was ungallant about a woman with whom he had had a fling. The deleted section also included a revealing paragraph admitting that
‘actors are notoriously insecure; many have feelings of guilt because they enjoy their work too much. Some keep their feet on the ground by reminding themselves that at best they are playing children’s games and are being wonderfully overpaid for getting up in the morning, dressing up and showing off in front of the grownups. They realise that they are not building irrigation dams, researching incurable diseases or improving the standard of living and that nobody is going to put up a monument to them when they die, so they laugh at themselves and through their laughter, provide their own therapy when things get tough.’ It was an eloquent statement of his own philosophy.

Coronet snapped up the paperback rights for £15,000 (£80,000 today) but David’s thirty-two-year-old benefactor there, the editorial director Phil Evans, had a terrible car crash on 14 February that left him in a coma for four months, crippled and barely able to speak for the rest of his life, and although he was mentally alert he had to be replaced by Alan Gordon Walker. ‘David came to see me in hospital,’ Evans told me, ‘and then again in this house when he was in England, which was wonderful of him,’ and Niv wrote him numerous affectionate letters over the next eight years.

In July David flew to Hollywood to make a film for Walt Disney ‘about two children and a skunk’, he wrote to Ken Galbraith. ‘I have a nasty suspicion that I am the skunk, but I have no alternative as the French tax authorities have just nailed me for five years back taxes!!’ He told Leslie Bricusse a different story: ‘He said he got a letter from the French tax authorities which said, “It’s come to our attention that you are a Swiss resident but we have noticed that you have been in St Jean Cap Ferrat seven or eight months in each one of the last four or five years. Would you please care to explain the situation?” David said he went back up to Château d’Oex and had his lawyers there send a closely typed six-page letter in Switzer-Deutsch, which is the most impenetrable language on the planet, and he never heard from the taxman again!’

The Disney film,
No Deposit, No Return
, was a comedy thriller in which he played an elderly millionaire whose eleven- and nine-year-old grandchildren are dumped on him for the holidays and pretend to be kidnapped and held to ransom, but he refuses to fall for their ploy and they nearly die. Niv’s main memory of the movie was that every time he suggested even a small change in the script the director would say ‘Walt wouldn’t have liked that’ even though Walt had been dead for nine years. The reviewers did not care for the picture much but it did well at the box office, and while he was in Hollywood he made a sentimental journey back to the now-computerised offices of Central Casting, where he found on the wall photographs of the only three of their extras who ever made it to the big time: Clark Gable, Alice Faye and himself. ‘I’ve been bloody lucky,’ he said.

Fiona joined Kristina at Le Rosey in September and Niv returned to England to publicise
Bring on the Empty Horses
when it was published on 24 September 1975. It was about to be reprinted yet again and he made another TV appearance on the
Michael Parkinson Show
, where he was as modest and self-deprecating as ever, telling Parkinson: ‘I’m an actor, not a writer,’ though he had yet another unkind crack at Trubshawe when he said, ‘the trick is not to live in one cocoon of friends who get older and bored together.’ At the end of the interview he reduced Parkinson and the audience to hysterics when he told a shaggy dog story about a prawn and a crab: ‘A prawn fell in love with a crab and it went back to its family and it said, “Look, I’m mad about that crab that lives behind that big rock at the end,” and the prawn’s father was furious: “You’re not going to be seen with a crab. Ridiculous animals. They go sideways. No way! Go to the crab and say it’s all off. Tell the crab it’s finished.” So the prawn went back to the crab and said, “Crab, I’m terribly sorry. It’s off, because my father says you look rather stupid because you go sideways.” The crab was furious and said, “That does it! I’ll be down this evening and I’ll have seaweed and soda with your father,”
and went off. At six o’clock in the evening the prawns are all sitting around their rock and the seaweed opened and in came the crab, but he came straight, and the prawn said, “Crab! Crab, you’re wonderful! Crab, you’re going
straight
!” and the crab said, “Shut up, I’m pissed!” ’

This time the British reviewers were dismissive. The book was no more than a ‘hodge-podge of material’, said
The Critic
, ‘mostly second-rate – leftovers from the first book, perhaps’, and I described it in my
Sunday Express
column as ‘something of a disappointment’. Niv was furious and railed that the British critics were ‘patronising bastards’. The reviews were kinder in America when he flew to Hollywood at the end of September to make
Murder by Death
, a poor spoof that took the mickey out of great fictional detectives like Philip Marlowe, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, five of whom have been invited to an eerie mansion by a cringingly camp American multi-millionaire (Truman Capote) to solve a murder that has not yet been committed. The cast list was impressive – Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Maggie Smith, Peter O’Toole – and many critics were amused but I found the picture utterly unfunny except for the fact that Jamie Niven invested a great deal of money in it for a company that wanted to show a tax loss, expecting it to flop, only to find it becoming a huge success and making a profit of $27 million. Less amusing was the fact that this was the first of Niv’s films in which he suddenly appeared to be old, thin and drawn. He was only sixty-five but he looked exhausted. On top of finishing the book, worrying about Hjördis and the girls, and travelling a great deal, he had also made two TV series that year, a travelogue called
Around the World
and a wildlife
Survival
series, which had taken him to Africa, Mexico and Nepal. Was it all too much? ‘I have had a sinister letter from my doctor insisting that I take it more easily this year,’ he wrote to Ron Read, the sales director of Coronet, and although he was not to fall seriously ill for another five years, in retrospect it seems like an evil omen.

From Los Angeles Niv wrote to Sinclair-Stevenson to report that ‘here the reviewers, with one exception, have been
fabulous
’, and asking, ‘What the hell do I do next?’ Sinclair-Stevenson replied that both he and Machell felt his next book should be the novel.

Bring on the Empty Horses
stayed at the top of the
New York Times
bestseller list for an astonishing eighteen weeks and sold a huge number of copies all over the world, though once again six German firms turned the book down and his Italian publishers rejected it because they had done so badly with
The Moon’s a Balloon
. Mischievously Niv thought of sending Christmas cards that year which reproduced Jamie Hamilton’s two old letters begging him not to write an autobiography or a book about Hollywood followed by the mammoth sales figures for both books, but was persuaded that that would be cruel.

On 3 January he started again on the novel
Make It Smaller and Move It to the Left
and wrote a new first line: ‘Charlie Ammidown had an erection – and it hurt.’ So, still, did his bad reviews and he wrote to Sinclair-Stevenson that the book had received ‘uniformly
ecstatic
reviews in the US as opposed to the patronising and dismissive shit the dear British accorded us!’ One ecstatic review, in the
New York Times
, was by Bill Buckley, who wrote: ‘This might easily be the best book ever written about Hollywood.’ Buckley’s own spy novel
Saving the Queen
was due to be published in Britain a few months later and he asked Niv to endorse it. David replied cheekily, ‘How about this? “The best book ever written this year.” Change this in any way you want.’ Buckley took his revenge when they met in London a few weeks later and he said, ‘I changed that quote because you said I could. I’ve made it “this is the best book about fucking the Queen written this year”.’ Niv looked horrified, and then realised it was a joke.

‘He liked acting,’ Buckley told me, ‘but he was never so happy as he was when he had written his two books. He was
blissfully
happy at having accomplished that.’ It was possibly now that Niv wrote a one-page first-person short story about a businessman whose wife and children seem to have forgotten his birthday but his secretary Liz has remembered, invites him out to lunch, asks him back to her apartment for another drink and tells him she is going to go to slip into something more comfortable. ‘She went into her bedroom and in about five minutes she came out of the bedroom carrying a big birthday cake, followed by my wife and children, all of them singing “Happy Birthday”, and there was me sitting there with nothing on but my socks.’ He called the story ‘Why I Fired My Secretary’.

Fiona, who was now twelve, bright, and much more academic than Kristina, started to do very well at Le Rosey, where she was to earn a string of good reports over the next seven years. Niv was very popular with the girls’ friends ‘and the minute we sat down in a café in Gstaad the table would fill up with young people and he’d tell stories’, said Fiona. ‘Some would actually sit on his knee! He liked having young people around, and he was fun, and they loved him. He was such a loving person, and wanted to be loved too, and he got a lot of pleasure out of people coming up in the street and saying, “Your book is wonderful, thank you for giving us so much pleasure.” ’ The British reviews for
Bring on the Empty Horses
, however, still rankled, and he wrote to Coronet when they were choosing critics’ quotes for the cover of the paperback: ‘Remember what B. Behan said about British critics! “They are like eunuchs in a harem … they know
how
its done, they see it being done every night, but they
cant
do it themselves.” ’

‘He was
tremendously
insecure,’ said Sinclair-Stevenson, who lunched with him at the Eagle Club two weeks later. ‘He said, “Would you consider that our little book has been a success?” and I said, “Yes, it’s been number one in the
Bookseller
bestseller list for the last eight weeks and the sales are huge,” and he said, “Ah, but you haven’t seen the new
Bookseller
. It’s no longer number one, it’s sunk to number
two, so it must be a failure.” You could tell from that how
deeply
insecure he was, and I think it was because his acting career had stopped and suddenly nobody wanted him or romantic light comedy leads any more.’ When Sinclair-Stevenson returned to London he tried to bolster Niv’s confidence by telling him that he was ordering yet another reprint of 15,000 copies of
Bring on the Empty Horses
and that the book club edition had now sold nearly 180,000 – ‘
THIS IS A RECORD
’.